Homer & Langley

WHILE THE WAR WAS on I had come to feel my life was purposeful, if only in its expectations for the future. But with peace I found there was no future, certainly not in any way to distinguish it from the past. In the light of naked truth I was a severely disabled man who could not expect for himself even the most normal and modest of lives — for instance, as a working man, a husband, and a father. This was a bad time in the midst of everyone’s joy. Even my music had lost its appeal. I was restless, slept poorly, and in fact was often afraid to go to sleep, as if to sleep was to put on one of the gas masks Langley had brought home in which I could not hope to breathe.Have I not mentioned the gas masks? During the war he’d acquired a crateful. He saw to it that two were hung on nails in every room of the house so that wherever we happened to be, if the Axis powers did attack New York, and gas bombs were dropped, we were prepared. Given his lifelong cough and shredded vocal cords, his company having been without masks in 1918 when the fog rolled in, I did not demur. But he insisted that I practice putting on a mask so that when and if the time came I would not die fumbling around. To have my nose and mouth covered in addition to being in the dark was frightening. It was as if the sense of smell and taste, too, were being taken from me. I found it hard to breathe through the canister, which meant I could avoid dying of poison gas only by dying of suffocation. But I made the best of it and did not complain, even though I thought a German gas attack on Fifth Avenue highly unlikely.By the time of war’s end, the productive might of the American economy having overproduced everything a soldier would need, we’d collected, besides the gas masks, enough military surplus to outfit an army of our own. Langley said G.I. stuff was so cheap in the flea markets that it presented a business opportunity. We had ammunition belts, boots, helmets, canteens, tin food containers with tin utensils, telegraph keys, or “bugs,” developed for the Army Signal Corps, a table-top full of olive drab trousers and Ike jackets, uniform fatigues, hard wool blankets, pocketknives, binoculars, boxes of service ribbons, and so on. It was as if the times blew through our house like a wind, and these were the things deposited here by the winds of war. Langley never did work out the details of any business opportunity. So along with everything else, all these helmets, boots, etc. ended up now where they had been deposited, artifacts of some enthusiasms of the past, almost as if we were a museum, though with our riches as yet uncataloged, the curating still to come.Not everything would go to waste — when our clothes wore out we would take to wearing fatigues, both trousers and shirts. And boots too, when our shoes fell apart.Oh, and the oiled M1 rifle that had never been fired. This was one of my brother’s prize acquisitions. Fortunately he hadn’t found the cartridges to go with it. He drilled a heavy nail into the marble mantel and we hung up the M1 by its shoulder strap. He fancied his work so well that he did the same for the Springfield rifle that had been sitting there for almost thirty years. They dangled over the fireplace, the two rifles, like Christmas stockings. We never touched them again and though at this point I cannot get anywhere near the mantel, so far as I know they are still there.