Homer & Langley

UNTIL MY BROTHER got home, there I was alone in the house but for the staff, a butler, a cook, and two maids, all of whom had rooms and one bath on the top floor. You will ask how a blind man handles his business affairs with servants in the house who might think how easy it would be to steal something. It was the butler I worried about, not that he had actually done anything. But he was too slyly solicitous of me, now that I was in charge and no longer the son. So I fired him and kept the cook and the two maids, Siobhan and the younger Hungarian girl Julia, who smelled of almonds and whom I eventually took to bed. Actually he was not just a butler, Wolf, but a butler-chauffeur and sometime handyman. And when we still had a carriage he would bring it around from the stable on Ninety-third street and drive my father to the hospital at the crack of dawn. My father had been very fond of him. But he was a German, this Wolf, and while his accent was slight he could not put his verbs anywhere but at the end of the sentence. I had never forgiven him for the way he whipped our carriage horse, Jack, than whom no finer or more gallant a steed has ever lived, and though he had been in the family’s employ since I could remember, Wolf, I mean, and while I could tell from his footsteps that he was no longer the youngest of men, we were, after all, at war with the Germans and so I fired him. He told me he knew that was the reason though I of course denied it. I said to him, What is Wolf short for? Wolfgang, he said. Yes, I said, and that is why I’m firing you because you have no right to the name of the greatest genius in the history of music.Even though I was giving him a nice packet of send-off money, he had the ill grace to curse me and leave by the front door, which he slammed for good measure.But as I say it took some working out to settle my father’s estate with his lawyers and to arrange some means of dealing with boring household management. I enlisted one of the junior clerks at the family bank to do the bookkeeping and once a week I put on a suit and slapped a derby on my head and set off down Fifth Avenue to the Corn Exchange. It was a good walk. I used a stick but really didn’t need it having made a practice as soon as I knew my eyes were fading of surveying and storing in my memory everything for twenty blocks south and north, and as far east as First Avenue and to the paths in the park across the street all the way to Central Park West. I knew the length of the blocks by the number of steps it took from curb to curb. I was just as happy not to have to see the embarrassing Renaissance mansions of the robber barons to the south of us. I was a vigorous walker and gauged the progress of our times by the changing sounds and smells of the streets. In the past the carriages and the equipages hissed or squeaked or groaned, the drays rattled, the beer wagons pulled by teams passed thunderously, and the beat behind all this music was the clopping of the hooves. Then the combustive put-put of the motorcars was added to the mix and gradually the air lost its organic smell of hide and leather, the odor of horse manure on hot days did not hang like a miasma over the street nor did one now often hear that wide-pan shovel of the street cleaners shlushing it up, and eventually, at this particular time I am describing, it was all mechanical, the noise, as fleets of cars sailed past in both directions, horns tooting and policemen blowing their whistles.I liked the nice sharp sound of my stick on the granite steps of the bank. And inside I sensed the architecture of high ceilings and marble walls and pillars from the hollowed-out murmur of voices and the chill on my ears. These were the days I thought I was acting responsibly, carrying on as a replacement of the previous Collyers as if I was hoping for their posthumous approval. And then Langley came home from the World War and I realized how foolish I had been.