Homer & Langley

Fairly regularly we received unsigned letters of vilification. I remember a day when the envelopes slid through the mail slot and fell on the floor in a way to make me think of fish flopping out of a net. We were threatened, we were cursed, and one day an envelope we opened had for its message a dead cockroach. Was that a little hieroglyph to represent us in the view of the correspondent? Or did that mean we were held responsible for infesting the neighborhood with vermin? It is true that we had cockroaches — had had them for as long as I could remember. They never bothered me, I would feel something crawling on my ankle and brush it away as I would a fly or a mosquito. Langley respected cockroaches as having a kind of intelligence, or even personality, with their cunning evasiveness, and their bravery, as when under attack they would leap off a counter into the unknown. And they could indicate their displeasure with a hiss or a squeak. Nevertheless we did have traps set out for them and of course it was nonsense to blame us for the infestation of other houses. People in this neighborhood were embarrassed to admit their own distinguished homes were pest-ridden. But cockroaches had been city residents since the days of Peter Stuyvesant.

Langley had set aside his newspapers, stacking the dailies for future reading, because his legal studies with the mail-order law school now took most of his time. This was not a mere academic exercise. He was attempting to hold off not only the utilities and other creditors, but also the Health and Fire Departments, both of whom were demanding entry, in order to find things to alarm them. He was able to find a city statute that complicated things for them when they threatened to get court orders. He had also gone out and secured a Legal Aid Society lawyer, who, for no fee, was prepared at Langley’s instruction to make various legal motions, as impediments, when and if things progressed to the next stage, as we assumed they would. Overall we would take the position that a mere cursory examination by that Fire Department inspector after the backyard fire — which is what had set off all this hullabaloo — was not sufficient cause to violate the constitutional sanctity of a man’s home.

It was clear to me that Langley relished all this, and I was glad to see that he was engaged in a practical enterprise for a change. It brought a here-and-now component to his life, an immediacy, and the promise, good or bad, of an outcome, which was not the case with his eternal, never-to-be-achieved, Platonic newspaper. My only contribution was to listen every now and then to an example he had found of legal reasoning that seemed to him to have come out of an insane asylum.

It certainly didn’t help us in our relations with the neighbors and contretemps with the city bureaucracies that all of New York at this time was experiencing a deterioration in the civil order: municipal services breaking down — uncollected garbage, graffitied subway cars — street crimes rising, drug addicts abounding. I understood too that our professional sports teams were doing badly in the standings.

Under these circumstances, our closed shutters and the two-by-four bolt on our front door seemed to make sense. My life now was entirely in the house.

IT WAS AROUND this time that I noticed my precious Aeolian was off by a half tone in the middle octaves. The bass notes and the treble notes seemed all right, and this is what I found strange, that the piano would have gone out of tune in that discretionary manner. I thought, well of course, since the shutters had been closed, the house had become noticeably musty, and with everything gathering dust in every room, everything you could imagine piled almost to the ceiling, as well as the newspaper bales that served as walls for our mazelike pathways, it was no wonder that a delicate instrument would be affected. On a rainy day the dampness was palpable and the odor of the basement mildew seemed to come up through the floor.