Homer & Langley

She had been to California and the Northwest, she had been to the Mojave Desert and to Chicago and Detroit, and to Appalachia, and now here she was with me on a park bench.

If I am a reporter, she said, it is to report on my own self, my own feelings for what I discover. I am trying to get this country — is that how you say it, to get something is to understand it? I have leave for a very impressionist Jacqueline Roux commentary for Le Monde—yes a newspaper, but my commentary is not to be where I’ve been or who I’ve talked to, but what I have learned of your secrets.

What secrets?

I am to write about what cannot be seen. It is difficult.

To take our measure.

All right, yes, that. When I found your address I looked at your house with its black shutters. In Europe we have shutters for the windows, not here so much I should have thought. In France, in Italy, in Germany, the shutters are because of our history. History makes it advisable to have heavy shutters on the windows, and to close them at night. In this country the homes are not hidden behind walls, within courtyards. You have not enough history for that. Your homes confront the street unafraid, for everyone to see. So why do you have black shutters on your windows, Homer Collyer? What does it mean for the Collyer family to have the shutters closed on a warm spring day?

I don’t know. Maybe there is enough history to go around.

With your views of the park, she said. Not to look out? Why?

I come out to the park. As now. Must I defend myself? We’ve lived here all our lives, my brother and I. We do not neglect the park.

Good. In fact your Central Park is what drew me to New York, you know.

Oh, I said, I thought it was me.

Yes, that is what I am doing here besides meeting with strange men. She laughed. Walking in Central Park.

At that moment I wanted to touch her face. Her voice was in the alto register — a smoker’s voice. When she had taken my arm, from the feel of her sleeve on my wrist — the material might have been corduroy — I had the impression of a woman in her late thirties, early forties. As we had walked across Fifth Avenue I thought her shoes might be what were called sensible, just from the sound of the heels hitting the ground, though I was no longer as confident of my deductions as I had once been.

I asked her what she hoped to find in the park. Parks are dull places, I said. Of course you can get murdered here at night, I said, but other than that it is very dull. Just the usual joggers, lovers, and nannies with baby carriages. In the winter everyone ice skates.

The nannies as well?

They are the best skaters.

So we had a rhythm going, making the kind of conversation that brings out one’s competitive intelligence — at least it did mine. Or was it simply flirtation? How refreshing this was. I had a certain class. As if I had been flipped to a different side of myself.

Jacqueline Roux could laugh without losing her train of thought. No, she said, despite what you say your Central Park is different from any other park I have walked through in my life. Why do I feel that? Because it is so organized, so planned? A geometrical construction with such rigid borders — a cathedral of nature. No, I’m not sure. Do you know there are places in the park where I have had an awful feeling? Just for a moment or two yesterday in the late afternoon with its shadows, and the tall buildings surrounding on every side — nearby, and in the distance — I had the illusion that the park was too low!

Too low?

Yes, right where I was standing and everywhere I looked! It had rained and the grass was wet after the rain, and I for a moment recognized what I had not before seen, that the Central Park was sunken at the bottom of the city. And with its ponds and pools and lakes as if, you know, it is slowly sinking? That was my awful feeling. As if this is a sunken park, a sunken cathedral of nature inside a risen city.

How she could go on! Yet I was enchanted by the intensity of her conversation — so poetic, so philosophical, so French, for all I knew. But at the same time it was all too fanciful for me. Good Lord — to look for the meaning of Central Park? It was always across the street when I opened my door — something there, something fixed and unchanging and requiring no interpretation. I told her that. But in reacting to her idea I was yoked into an opinion of my own that was certainly a degree up from my nonthinking life.

I am relieved you know you suffered an illusion, I said.

It is too crazy, I grant you. I go back to my first impression — the design, made by artisans with picks and shovels, and so my thought is everyone’s first thought — it is simply a work of art constructed from nature. Well that may have been only the intention of the designers.

Only the intention? I said. Is that not enough?

But to me it suggests what they may not have intended — a foretelling — this sequestered square of nature created for the time coming of the end of nature.