Homer & Langley

I HAD THE IDEA of ranking our problems as a means of solving them and the mortgage seemed to me the first order of business. It was a struggle to get Langley to sit down and go over our finances. He felt attention to these matters rendered one subservient. But I realized from his reading of the account books that we had sufficient funds to pay off the mortgage altogether. Let’s do that and get these people off our backs, I said, and never again will we have to worry about it.

We lose the deduction on our federal taxes if we pay off the damn thing, Langley said.

But we’re not getting the deduction if we’re not meeting the payments, I told him. All we’re getting is penalties that offset the deduction. And why are we talking about taxes since we don’t pay them.

He had an answer for that having to do with the war, though it went on from there and I’m not sure I can render it accurately. Something about primitive societies that function brilliantly without money, and then a discourse on corporate usury, and then he burst into song: “Oh the banks are made of marble / With a guard at every door / And the vaults are stuffed with silver / That the miner sweated for.” Langley’s tone-deaf, hoarse baritone was an instrument of undeniable power. I did not laugh or speak of the genetic caprices in life whereby a musical gift could be designated in its entirety to one brother, namely me. I did wonder what miners had to do with anything. Homer, he said, I remind you of the derivation of our name. Were not our paternal ancestors diggers in the bowels of the earth? Were they not coal miners? Is a collier not a coal miner?

Soon we were discussing other trade names — Baker, Cooper, Farmer, Miller — and mulling over of the turnings of history in such names, and that was the end of our financial conference.

Langley would eventually agree with me and pay off the mortgage but by that time we were famous throughout the city and he was followed to the bank by newspaper reporters, and a photographer for the Daily News, who would win a Pulitzer Prize for his portrait of Langley shuffling down Fifth Avenue in a porkpie hat, a ragged coat down to his ankles, a shawl he’d made from a burlap sack, and house slippers.

I WILL SAY IN MY brother’s defense that he had a lot on his mind. It was a period of appalling human behavior — for instance the bombing of the Baptist church down south in which four little black girls were killed while at Sunday school. The news left him distraught — there were occasions, you see, when his cynicism broke down and the heart was made visible. But the monstrousness of what had happened revealed to him yet another category of seminal events for his ultimate newspaper — the murder of innocents, not only for those little girls, but for the shooting down of college students, and for the slaying of young men registering people to vote, in that same appalling period. And then of course he had to open a file for political assassinations — we had had three or four of those — and perhaps a file for the mass detention of hundreds of street demonstrators in an outside pen in Washington. He couldn’t decide if that event should be incorporated into the category of club-on-the-head police conduct as applied to antiwar demonstrators in other cities, or whether it was something different.

Langley’s dream newspaper could not be mere reportage, its single edition for all time demanded a painfully categorical account of what we are given to habitually as a specie. So it was a big organizational problem for him to cull from years of daily newspapers the signal episodes and kinds of activities that are timeless.

He would be tested in the years following: he told me one day about the mass suicide of nine hundred people living in a small South American country I had never heard of before. They were Americans who had fled there to live in rows of shacks which their leader proposed to them as an idealistic Communist paradise. They had practiced suicide by drinking a harmless red liquid in lieu of poison, but when it came time that their leader said they could no longer tolerate the repression of the outside world, they did not hesitate to swallow the real thing. All nine hundred of them. I asked Langley, Where do you put this event? He said he thought at first to file it under Fashion, as when everybody is all at once wearing the new color. Or when the same slang word is suddenly on everybody’s lips. But finally, he said, I’ve put it in a pending file of one-of-a-kind headline events. There it must stay awaiting another episode of insane lemminglike behavior to pop up again. As I suspect it will, he added.

Presidential malfeasance in these years was another entry for his conditional file. Until another president subverted the Constitution he was sworn to uphold, it couldn’t be considered as seminal. But I’m waiting, he said.