Homer & Langley

NATURALLY I WAS NOT able to hide my hearing problem from Langley — he had picked up on it almost immediately. I didn’t say anything about it, I did not complain or even mention it, nor did he. It just became an unspoken understanding, an issue too fraught with anguish to speak about. If Langley had any instinct to attend to this matter it was not going to be as one of his cockamamie medical inspirations. I had been blind so long that his orange regimen and his theory of replenished cones and rods from vitamins and tactile training — well it was all in the nature of his self-expression and I wonder now if he ever meant it as anything more than a what-have-we-got-to-lose sort of impulse, or if it was more a manifestation of love for his brother than any conviction that some good would come of it. But maybe I misjudge him. With my hearing beginning to go, he of course didn’t suggest that we see a doctor and I for myself knew that it would do no good, no more than a visit to the ophthalmologist had done years before. I had my own medical theories, perhaps this was a disposition given to the progeny of a doctor, but I believed my eyes and ears were in some intimate nervous association, they were analogous parts of a sensory system in which everything connected with everything else, and so I knew what had been the fate of my vision would be the same for my hearing. With no sense of self-contradiction I also persuaded myself that the hearing loss would stabilize long before it was gone completely. I resolved to be hopeful and of good cheer and in this frame of mind waited for the return of Jacqueline Roux. I practiced some of my best pieces with the vague idea that I would somehow get to play for her. Langley quietly studied the books in our father’s medical library — books probably outmoded in many ways given their age — but he did one day hold a small piece of metal against my head just behind the ear to see my reaction when he asked if there was any difference — pressing it to the bone behind the ear and then releasing it, and then holding it there again. I said no and that was the end of that modest experiment.

WHEN MONTHS WENT by and I did not hear from Jacqueline Roux, I began to think of her as an exotic accident, in the same sense that bird-watchers whom in past years I’ve chatted with in the park have informed me that birds discovered out of their normal range — a tropical specie for instance ending up, say, on a beach in North America — are called “accidentals.” So perhaps Jacqueline Roux was a French accidental who happened to land on the sidewalk in front of our house for a rare one-time-only sighting.

I couldn’t avoid feeling let down. I went over our conversation that day in the park and wondered if, in some cunning professional writer’s way, she had led me on, and that I would be portrayed in her French newspaper as a total idiot. Perhaps I had been so grateful to be treated like a normal person that I had been overly enthralled with her. As time passed, and Langley and I became increasingly occupied with the war being waged against us by just about everyone, she, Jacqueline, began to figure in my mind as someone with flighty foreign ideas who had no place in our embattled world. The haircuts I got and the new suit of clothes I had bought in anticipation of her return were like any other played-out fantasies of mine. How pathetic — that I would think there was any possibility in my disabled life for a normal relationship outside of the Collyer house.

I was so hurt with disappointment that I could no longer think happily of Jacqueline Roux. There were mental shutters too and mine were closed tight as I turned back to what I could rely on, the filial bond.

AT THIS TIME MY brother was also down in the dumps. Only something as decisive as paying off a mortgage could have put him there. Whereas I was relieved that we no longer had to worry about losing our home, he felt amortization, militarily, as a defeat. I had thought his aplomb in dealing with the bank was praiseworthy, but he could think only of the end result: the money was gone. And so he was depressed and not very good company. The daily papers went unread. He would come back from his nighttime salvage operations empty-handed.

I didn’t know what to do about this turn of events. I claimed, by way of cheering him up, that I thought my hearing was better — a lie. The portable radio by my bedside had stopped working, as well it might have at its advanced age — it was one of those heavy early portables with a handle for carrying that had been a great technical advance in radios fifty years before when it was imagined that a beach or a lawn were ideal places to hear the news. Can you replace this? I asked, thinking it might get him out of the house on one of his expeditions. Nothing.