Homer & Langley

WHEN HE WAS GOING off to war, my parents had a dinner for him, just the family at table — a good roast of beef, and the smell of candle wax and my mother weeping and apologizing for weeping and my father clearing his throat as he proposed a toast. Langley was to embark that night. Our soldier in the family was going over there to take the place of a dead Allied soldier, just according to his theory. At the front door I felt his face to memorize it at that moment, a long straight nose, a mouth set grimly, a pointed chin, much like my own, and then the overseas cap in his hand, and the rough cloth of his uniform, and the puttees on his legs. He had skinny legs, Langley. He stood straight and tall, taller and straighter than he would ever be again.So there I was — without my brother for the first time in my life. I found myself as if vaulted into my own young independent manhood. That would be tested soon enough because of the Spanish flu pandemic that hit the city in 1918 and like some great predatory bird swooped down and took off both our parents. My father died first because he was associated with the Bellevue Hospital and that’s where he came down with it. Naturally, my mother soon followed. I call them my father and mother when I think of them dying so suddenly and painfully, choking to death in a matter of hours, which is the way the Spanish flu did people in.To this day I don’t like to think about their deaths. It is true that with the onset of my blindness there had been a kind of a retrenchment of whatever feelings they had for me, as if an investment they had made had not paid off and they were cutting their losses. Nevertheless, nevertheless, this was the final abandonment, a trip from which they were not to return, and I was shaken.It was said that the Spanish flu was taking mostly young people though in our case it was the opposite. I was spared though I did feel poorly for a while. I had to handle the arrangements for Mother as she had handled them for her husband before she too went and died, as if she couldn’t bear to be away from him for a moment. I went to the same mortician she had used. Burying people was a roaring business at this time, the usual unctuous formalities were dispensed with and corpses were transported speedily to their graves by men whose muffled voices led me to understand they were wearing gauze masks. Prices had risen too: by the time Mother died the exact same arrangements she had made for Father cost double. They had had many friends, a large social circle, but only one or two distant cousins turned up for the obsequies, everyone else sitting home behind locked doors or going on to their own funerals. My parents are together for eternity at the Woodlawn Cemetery up past what was the village of Fordham, though it is all the Bronx now, and of course unless there’s an earthquake.At this time of the flu, Langley, gone to war in Europe with the AEF, was reported missing. An army officer had come to the door to deliver the news. Are you sure? I said. How do you know? Is this your way of saying he’s been killed? No? Then you are not saying anything more than that you don’t know anything. So why are you here?Of course I had acted badly. I remember I had to calm myself by going to my father’s whiskey cabinet and taking a slug of something right from the bottle. I asked myself if it was possible for my entire family to be wiped out in the space of a month or two. I decided it was not possible. It was not like my brother to desert me. There was something about Langley’s worldview, firmly in place at his birth, though perhaps polished to a shine at Columbia College, that would confer godlike immunity to such an ordinary fate as death in a war: it was innocents who died, not those born with the strength of no illusions.So once I persuaded myself of that, whatever state I was in, it was nothing like a mourning state. I was not grieving, I was waiting.And then of course, through the slot in the front door, a letter from my brother from a hospital in Paris dated a week after I had received the official visit telling me he was missing in action. I had Siobhan our maid read the letter to me. Langely had been gassed on the western front. Nothing fatal, he said, and with certain compensations from attentive army nurses. When they tired of him, he said, he would be sent home.Siobhan, a pious Irishwoman of a certain age, did not like to read of the attentions of army nurses, but I was laughing with relief and so she relented and had to admit how happy she was that Mr. Langley was alive and sounding just like himself.