Lissy’s experiments in sightlessness brought us closer. She would feel my features, touching my forehead, nose, my mouth with her small hands, at the same time I ran my fingers over her face. She was so charming, her eyes closed, and her head averted in the manner of someone thinking of the image her hands created. Supposing this is what people did instead of kissing, I said to her. Like we were some isolated island people apart from the rest of the world. And at that I felt her lips on mine. She was standing on tiptoe to reach me and I held her waist and ran my hands down her back and felt her flesh under the thin shift she wore.

I won’t pretend I was instantly and passionately in love with young Lissy. Yes, it was as if my age fell from me, but there was always in my mind an awareness of transgression—as if I was taking advantage not of this girl’s generosity, but of the culture she had come out of, because she was not at all virginal, she was clearly experienced and quite comfortable climbing all over me, like some cat looking for a place to nestle down.

It doesn’t make any sense at this point to gloss over things. I quote from one of our poets: “Why not say what happened?” If anyone ever reads this and thinks poorly of me—Jacqueline, if you read this you will understand, I know—but if anyone else is put out, what is that to me? I am headed in any event to a superseding namelessness.

THE ONLY SUSPENSE for me was in how much of Lissy’s prattle I had to listen to on the way to the inevitable. She believed that trees were sentient. She thought people could find the answers to their problems or even know their fate by consulting a Chinese book of wisdom that she carried in her rucksack. You threw some sticks down and their arrangement told you what page to turn to. But it’s just the same for you, Homer, if you open the book to any page and point your finger, she said. So I did that and she read the passage I had pointed to: Jesus, she said, I’m sorry Homer, there’s “trouble ahead.” Nothing I didn’t know, I told her. And then she read to me from a novel in which a Buddha-inflamed German wandered about seeking enlightenment. I didn’t tell her how funny I thought that was. Lissy was herself a Buddhist only insofar as she had a romantic wistful admiration for anyone who was. It was more a generalized susceptibility she had to anything Eastern. I was entranced by her sweetly cracked voice. You could almost see the little packets of sound trooping along her vocal cords one after another, some of the squeaking kind, others tumbling into the alto range.

She took it upon herself to wash my feet before I retired, saying it was an ancient custom of the desert peoples of the Near East—Jews, Christians, or Whoever. She wanted to do this and so I let her, though it was embarrassing to me. I knew my feet were far from my best feature, and having always found it difficult to trim my toenails, an arduous process, and sometimes painful, I had done that less frequently than I should have. But this Lissy didn’t seem to care, she had found one of Grandmamma Robileaux’s steel mixing bowls and filled it with warm water, and lay a hand towel in the water and then over my feet, and then under, lifting each foot by the heel, and washing the soles, and I had to admit it was not unpleasant. It was clearly a ceremonial washing rather than anything of practical use. These youngsters had various ceremonies of their eclectic taste, the ceremony of smoking, of drinking, of listening to music, of having sex. Their lives were one ceremony after another, and to a person who had drifted through time lacking any capacity to step out of its stream, I was prepared to learn this art with which they seemed to have been born.

One evening after washing my feet she stayed in the room with me. Her suggestion that we meditate together is what led us to lovemaking. There was really no right place to sit in the lotus position in this house. No alcove that wasn’t piled high with things. My bedroom—really not even my bedroom in which the inevitable stacks of newspapers and piles of books and bric-a-brac lay about, leaving the narrowest of aisles, but my bed, a double bed which I had managed to keep sacrosanct, was the only proper platform for thinking about nothing. For that was what we were supposed to do, according to Lissy. I can’t think about nothing, I said to her. The best I can do is think about myself thinking. Shhh, Homer, she said. Shhh. And when she whispered my name, God help me, the love broke over me like the hot tears of a soul that has found salvation.

Holding her arms straight up so I could lift her dress away, she emerged from her chrysalis, this tremulant wisp of a girl. Her narrow shoulders, nipples like seeds on her thin chest. And the long waist, and a pear-shaped little backside in my palms. Giving her small gift to the world, Lissy, with her childlike faith in ideas mysterious to her. Leading me through it.

Afterward, I held her in my arms and then there was a moment of mental confusion, some weird misstep of time itself, because I was briefly under the illusion that it was Sister Mary Elizabeth Riordan I was holding.

I DON’T KNOW WHY I couldn’t simply enjoy the blessing of this charmingly loopy creature, the experience of her, so unsummoned, and let it go at that. Instead, I decided to torture myself by thinking about that momentary illusion while in her arms of having had my piano student. I needed to talk to Langley about it. I thought I had purged myself of any lingering feelings for Mary Elizabeth Riordan—after all she was transmogrified, a certified fifty-year-old sister. So I had debased two dear souls simultaneously, violating one in spirit and using the other for the purpose. It was no consolation to me that Lissy didn’t seem to feel that anything of consequence had occurred between us. She was, at her age, in the exploratory mode characteristic of her culture. But I was deep in the doldrums now, for of course I had mostly debased myself. I knew Langley too had at that long ago time fallen in love with our piano student. I wanted to know his thinking. We had never talked about things of this sort. I was in a confessional mood. Did anybody know what love was? Could unconsummated love exist without carnal fantasy, could it survive as love without recompense, without reward? No question that I had enjoyed Lissy’s giving of her body. So what did anybody love other than the genus, where one adorable creature could stand in for another?

But there didn’t seem to be a right time to have this conversation with my brother. Too much was going on. As I’ve said, besides the original group we’d met in the park, friends of theirs, fellow squatters, had been in and out, and there were instances when I tripped over someone of whose presence I had not been aware. Or I’d hear laughter or chattering in another room and feel myself to be a guest in somebody else’s house. Langley had surprised me by welcoming these people and acting toward them with uncharacteristic generosity. And they responded, taking up his daily way of life, acolytes in his Ministry. Even the thick-lensed cartoonist, Connor, liked to bring back from the street something he thought Langley would want. They all seemed to understand his acquisitiveness as an ethos. I was fairly sure that he wasn’t involved with any of the girls—running these people seemed to be how he was relating to them, they could have been kid pickpockets in London and he Fagin. The only audience he’d had in all these years was me. Now he was an adopted guru. How they cheered when he kicked the water-meter reader out of the basement!

At times things got noisy as something clanging would be brought in through the front door. Langley himself had discovered the neighborhood down at the Bowery where secondhand restaurant supplies were out on the sidewalk, and so to end our indebtedness to the gas company he bought a portable, two-burner kerosene stove, thus retiring the massive old eight-burner gas stove on which Grandmamma Robileaux had done her cooking. Langley would risk death by asphyxiation to defeat the gas company. Also sets of crockery and dishes, bowls, and implements like spatulas—this was to give our guests whatever they needed to prepare our community meals. And that electric guitar of JoJo’s had inspired further acquisitions—speakers, microphones, and recording consoles, Langley saying to me, knowing I was not the biggest fan of the electronic sound, that these were things we could rent out, the number of aspiring musicians who wanted to play electric guitars increasing exponentially day by day, as he could tell by reading the entertainment sections of the newspapers. It’s no more Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye, he told me. No more Horace Heidt and His Musical Knights. It’s electrified musicians who give themselves existential names and command huge audiences of slightly younger people who want themselves to go out and pump their pelvis and scream and twang their earsplitting music to stadiums full of idiots.

So as I say, somehow I could never find the opportunity to sit Langley down and have him consider my despondent contribution to his Theory of Replacements. He assumed the passage of generations, you see, but my idea was lateral. If what mattered was the universal form of Dear Girl, and if each dear girl was only a particular expression of the universal, any one of them might serve equally well, and could replace another as our morally insufficient nature demanded. And if that were the case how could I ever be educated to love anyone for a lifetime?

Lissy, I reiterate, did in no way suffer my duplicity. She asked no questions, was quite incurious about my past life except for the novelty of my sightlessness. We did make love another time or two and then it became apparent to me that my bed, one of the more desirable accommodations in our house, was of more interest to her as a place to sleep. For a while we continued to meditate or, as I understood it, to sit quietly together, and she one day brought in from her wanderings some homeopathic remedies in anticipation of the coming flu season, she said, and pressed these vials into my hands and kissed me on the cheek. We were friends and if she had slept with me, well, that’s what friends did.

——

AND IT WAS GETTING colder now, was it November by this time? I don’t recall. But none of these people could accept winter. For one thing they hadn’t the stamina for it, their marginal existence demanded a beneficent climate, some steady changeless warmth in which they could survive with the least effort. They availed themselves of some of the army issue still lying around—Lissy’s found field jacket coming to her knees—so I knew they would soon, like any other flock of migratory birds, lift their wings and be off.

I assumed it was in anticipation of their departure that they prepared a big dinner for us all to have at the same time. For some reason the front hall was less filled with things than any of the rooms, and so our hippies dug up our candelabra, and candlesticks, and availed themselves of our supply of candles, of which we had many and of different kinds, including candle wax in glass tumblers that Langley had found in a shop down on the Lower East Side, and these were put on the floor in a manner to suggest a dining table, and cushions gathered from all over the house were placed about for our bottoms, and so Langley and I were invited to seat ourselves, which we did laboriously in the cross-legged position, like pashas, while our boarders trooped in with the food and wine. Apparently all of them had worked at this, each contributing a specialty, sautéed mushrooms, bowls of salad and vegetable soup, fondue with toasted points of bread, and steamed artichokes, and oysters, and clams boiled in beer—I assumed that was JoJo’s contribution—and hard cheese and red table wine, and pastries and marijuana cigarettes for dessert. They had paid for everything and it was all by way of thanks, and it was very moving. Langley and I for the first and last time in our lives smoked joints, and my memory of the rest of the evening is a little blurry, except that both Dawn and Sundown seemed to have discovered me at this late date, and they came over and sat beside me and gave me hugs and we all laughed together, finding it funny for some reason as I pressed their ample bosoms to my chest and nuzzled their necks. Toasts were given, and if I’m not mistaken a solemn moment of remembrance for the three great men who’d been assassinated in the course of a decade. I like to think, too, that Lissy may have moved to repossess me for herself during the course of the evening for it was she who led me up to my room afterward, navigating the stairs for me—I was thoroughly stoned, they had moved on from the marijuana to hash, a somewhat more potent drug—and she lay down beside me on my bed, where I had a vision: it was of sailing ships and they were as if etched on a salver of pewter. I said, Lissy, do you see the ships? And she touched her temple to mine and at that moment the ships were as if hammered on a sheet of gold, and she said, Oh wow, they’re so beautiful, oh wow.

I do remember these moments so clearly, my mind as out of control as it was. I have never since taken, or done, any such drugs, not wanting to tamper with what consciousness I have. But it’s undeniable that those moments had their uncanny clarity. I must have dozed off but came awake to find Lissy holding me, and my shirt wet from her tears. I asked her why she was crying but she wouldn’t answer, only shaking her head. Was it because I was an old man and she was overwhelmed with pity? Had she realized, finally, the ruinous state of this house? I didn’t know what it was about—and concluded it was nothing more than the emotional overload of a stoned mind. I held her and we fell asleep that way.

BUT A FEW MORE DAYS were to pass before the exodus. I was at my piano—this was in the evening, I believe I was doing the elegiac slow movement of Mozart’s Twentieth—when other sounds began to intrude and these gradually defined themselves as shouts, and they were coming from all over the house. Apparently the lights had gone out. I at first thought Langley had blown something—one of his most sacred long-term missions being to defeat the Consolidated Edison Company—but in fact it was the whole city’s power failure, and it was as if a time of pre-civilization had come around again to deliver the meaning of night. Oddly enough, once people looked out the window and understood the extent of the blackout, everyone wanted to see it—all our squatters clamoring to get out there and be amazed by the moonlit city. I considered the possibility that this municipal blown fuse was, after all, something for which Langley’s tinkering was responsible, and it made me laugh. Langley! I called to him. What have you done!

He was upstairs in his room and was having as much trouble as the rest of them trying to get to the front door. It was the blind brother who got everyone organized, telling them not to move, but to stay where they were until I came and got them. Nobody could have found a candle—where any candles or candle glasses were nobody knew by now, the chances of finding even one in the blackness of the house was nil, the candles had consigned themselves to our kingdom of rubble as had everything else.

The house by this time of our lives was a labyrinth of hazardous pathways, full of obstructions and many dead ends. With enough light someone could make his way through the zigzagging corridors of newspaper bales, or find passage by slipping sideways between piles of equipment of one kind or another—the guts of pianos, motors wrapped in their power cords, boxes of tools, paintings, car body parts, tires, stacked chairs, tables on tables, headboards, barrels, collapsed stacks of books, antique lamps, dislodged pieces of our parents’ furniture, rolled-up carpet, piles of clothing, bicycles—but it needed the native gifts of a blind man who sensed where things were by the air they displaced to get from one room to another without killing himself in the process. As it was, I tripped several times, and fell down once and hurt my elbow, in the meantime finding people from the top of the house down, as I asked them to call out, one by one, and telling them to attach themselves to me, like boxcars to an engine. And it turned out to be a good time I was having actually as the deviser of this human train that wound its way through the Collyer residence, everyone laughing or yelping in pain as they banged their knees or tripped. And the train got heavier to pull along with each new person who hooked on—clearly there were more of our hippie friends in residence than I had known about. Of course Lissy was the first one I had managed to find and I felt her hands on my waist as she giggled. This is so cool! she said. Then she decided we all had the makings of a conga line—how she had known about a dance that went out of fashion before she was ever born, I don’t know. But there she was, trying to instruct me and everyone behind her in that hip-shifting one-two-three followed by the leg-out BAM! which of course created even more chaos as the others tried to do it. I heard Langley at the very end of the line, and he was having a good time too, it was remarkable hearing my brother’s wheezing laugh, truly remarkable. And it was the darkness that made all of this possible—their darkness, not mine—and when I reached the front hall and lifted off the two-by-four dead bolt and opened the door, they all flew past me like birds from the cage, and I think it was Lissy’s kiss I felt on my cheek, though it may have been Dawn or Sundown’s, and I felt the brisk night air and stood at the top of the stoop and inhaled the earthy fragrance of the park, edged with the metallic taste of moonlight, and I heard their laughter as they fled across the street and into the park, all of them, including my brother, though he would come back, but the others, never, their laughter diminishing through the trees, for that was the last of them, they were gone.

OF COURSE I MISSED them, I missed their appreciation of us, if that is the word. I envied their unsafe lives. Whether their vagrancy was the heedlessness of youth or had at its basis some principled if inarticulate dissent was hard to know. It was a cultural wave that had lifted them, certainly, the war in Vietnam could not completely account for it, and any one of them might have had no more initiative than to be swept up into the wave. Still, in this house, now so terribly quiet, I felt my true age reclaiming me. Having all those people around had led me to understand that our habitual reclusion was needful. When they were gone and once again it was just my brother and me, my spirits slumped. We were our bothered selves once again with the world outside contesting with us as if it had withdrawn its ambassadors.

OUR TROUBLES BEGAN with that kerosene stove Langley had brought in. It caught fire one morning as he was cooking our omelets. I was sitting at the kitchen table and I heard this small pufflike explosion. Of course we had accumulated several fire extinguishers of different kinds and makes over the years, but whichever of them was in the kitchen was of small use—I suppose their potency evaporates over time. He gave me a running account of what was happening in a voice of controlled urgency, Langley—that the foam from the extinguisher was just enough to leave the stove temporarily fireless but smoking. I could smell it. He wrapped it in dish towels and threw the whole thing out the kitchen door into the backyard.

That seemed to have solved the problem. I knew my brother was embarrassed by the quiet way he closed the kitchen door, and I said nothing as we ate a cold breakfast.

It wasn’t more than an hour later when I heard sirens. I was at the Aeolian and thinking nothing about it—you heard fire engines and ambulances day and night in this city. I found the siren’s notes on the piano—A’s sliding into B-flats and back to A’s—but then the sound got closer and died into a low growl seemingly right in front of the house. Poundings on the door, shouts of Where is it, where is it? as this herd of firemen clambered in, pushing me aside, cursing as they tried to find their way to the kitchen, and dragging hose behind them, which I tripped over, Langley shouting What are you doing in this house, get out get out! They had been called by the people in the brownstone next door, whose garden abutted our backyard. In all these years we’d never met these neighbors or spoken to them, we didn’t know who they were except as the likely culprits who’d left an unsigned letter in our mail protesting our tea dances of so many years before. And now they had reported that our backyard was on fire, which happened to have been the case. Why can’t these people ever mind their own business, Langley muttered as the fire hose, connected now to the hydrant at the curb in front of the house, pulsed through the labyrinth of baled newspapers and slapped this way and that into folded chairs and bridge tables, knocking down standing lamps, stacks of canvases, as the firemen aimed their nozzle through the back door down to the smoking racks of lumber, the used tires, and odd pieces of furniture, a legless bureau, a bedspring, two Adirondack chairs, and other items stored there in the expectation that someday we would find use for them.

Langley would insist afterward that the firemen had overreacted, though the smell of smoke would linger for weeks. When an inspector from the Fire Department arrived he looked over the smoking rubble and said we would be issued a summons and most likely fined for illegal storing of flammable materials in a residential neighborhood. Langley said if that were the case we would sue the Fire Department for the destruction of property. Your men’s boots have left a trail of mud on our floors, he said, the back door of the kitchen is off its hinges, they have stormed through here like vandals as you can see from these broken vases, these lamps here, and look at these valuable books soggy and bloated from the damn leaks in their hose.

Well, Mr. Collyer, is it? I should think it’s a small price to pay for having still an abode to live in.

The fire inspector, whom I took for an intelligent man of some years—he had used the word abode, a word you did not often hear in ordinary conversation—surely had looked around, taking it all in, and though he didn’t say anything, he must have passed on what he had seen of our rooms for within a week or so we received a certified letter from the Health Department requesting an appointment for the purpose of assessing the interior condition of—and here they indicated our home by its address.

We of course ignored the letter but our sense of a diminished freedom was palpable. All it took was for people with official credentials to have intentions regarding us. I think it was at this time that Langley ordered a complete course of law books from some college in the Midwest that offered a law degree by mail. By the time the books arrived—in a crate—we were in the sights not only of the Health Department, but of a collection agency acting on behalf of the New York Telephone Company, of lawyers from Consolidated Edison for having damaged their property—I assume they meant the electric meter in the basement, an irritating buzzing thingamajig which we had silenced with a hammer—and of the Dime Savings Bank, which had inherited our mortgage and claimed that in failing to meet our payments we were facing foreclosure, and the Woodlawn Cemetery had drawn a bead because we had somehow forgotten to pay the bills for the care of our parents’ grave site. That wasn’t all of it—there were other letters popping through the mail slot in the front door whose contents I can’t recall just now. But for some reason it was the cemetery bill that most engaged my brother’s attention. Homer, he said, can you think of anyone as depraved as these people who live on death even to the point of charging good money for snipping some leaves of grass around a headstone? After all who cares what graves look like? Certainly not their occupants. What a fraud, this is sheer irreverence, the professional care of the dead. Let the whole cemetery go back to its wild state I say. Just as it was in the days of the Manhattan Indians—let there be a necropolis of tilted stones and fallen angels lying half hidden in the North American forest. And that to me would show true respect for the dead, that would be a sacred acknowledgment, in beauty, of the awful system of life and death.

——

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.

ONE DAY MY BROTHER came in with his morning papers and without saying a word he went to the windows and began pulling the shutters together and locking them. I heard the banging of the shutters slamming in place like heavy doors and watched the patina of lighter darkness receding from my eyes. The house air became cooler. A strange strangled sound came from my brother’s throat that I only slowly realized was his effort not to break down.

An awful feeling, a constriction of the heart, caused me to rise from my piano bench. What is it? I said.

He read to me: The bodies of four American nuns in a remote Central American village had been found in shallow graves. They had been raped and shot to death. Their names had not yet been released.

I didn’t want to believe what I knew. I insisted that without the names we couldn’t be sure that Mary Elizabeth Riordan was one of the nuns.

Langley climbed upstairs and found the little tin box where we kept her letters. She had written us from time to time as her order moved her about the world: she had gone from one African country to another, and then to South Asian countries and, after some years, to villages in Central America. The letters were always the same wherever she was, as if she was on a world tour of destitution and death. Dear friends, she had written in her last letter, I am here in this bereft little country torn by civil war. Just last week soldiers came through and took away several men of the village and killed them for being with the insurgency. They were only poor farmers trying to feed their families. It is only old men, women, and children now. They cry out in their sleep. Three of my sisters are here with me. We provide what solace we can.

The letter had been written a few months before from the same village named in the newspaper.

I AM NOT A religious person. I prayed to be forgiven for having been jealous of her calling, for having longed for her, for having despoiled her in my dreams. But in truth I have to admit that I was numbed enough by this awful fate of the sister to be not quite able to connect it with my piano student Mary Elizabeth Riordan. Even now, I have the clean scent of her as we sit together on the piano bench. I can summon that up at will. She speaks softly in my ear as, night after night, the moving pictures roll by: Here it’s a funny chase with people hanging out of cars … here the hero is riding a horse at a gallop … here firemen are sliding down a pole … and here (I feel her hand on my shoulder) the lovers embrace, they’re looking into each other’s eyes, and now the card says … “I love you.”

——

AFTER SOME DAYS of silence in our house I said to Langley: This is martyrdom, this is what martyrdom is.

Why, said Langley, because they were nuns? Martyrdom is a religious invention. If it isn’t, why do you not say the four little girls murdered in their Sunday school in Birmingham are martyrs?

I thought about this. I could see the possibility that the sister would have forgiven her abuser and touched his face with two fingers as he brought his gun up to her temple.

There is a difference, I said. The nuns’ religious beliefs put them in harm’s way. They knew there was a civil war, that armed savages roamed the land.

You idiot! Langley shouted. Who do you think armed them! They’re our savages!

But now I am not sure when all of this happened. Either my mind is turning in on itself and its memories are eliding, or I have finally understood the prophecy of Langley’s timeless newspaper.

OUR SHUTTERS WERE never again to be opened. Langley made arrangements with the newsstand where he got his papers to have them delivered to our front door. The early editions of the morning papers arrived usually at about eleven at night. The evening papers were left at our door by three in the afternoon. When Langley did go out, it was always at night. He did our marketing at a small grocery store that had opened just a few blocks north of us and that sold day-old bread. He made a point of patronizing this store, of buying more than we needed, actually, because a local free newspaper that covered embassy receptions, and fashion shows, and ran interviews with interior decorators reported that the store owner was Hispanic. My heavens, Langley shouted, run for your lives, they’re here!

In truth that was one sign of a changing city—a slow, almost imperceptible lapping of a tide from the north—but something like a little grocery store, or a couple of Negro faces seen on the street, was enough for our neighbors to throw up their hands. And, of course, inevitably, my brother and I were deemed the First Cause—it was the Collyers, to the manner born, who had fomented this disaster. Whatever animosity had been directed at us since the fire in our backyard—no: that had been building since the time of our tea dances—was now in full cry.

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.

There were other pianos of course, or piano innards. Some were definitely out of tune in the usual way, as why would they not be—but I began to be alarmed when I turned on the player piano, which I had kept covered with a plastic sheet, and heard that same sharpness in the middle octaves. Then I groped around till I found the little portable electric piano, a computer actually—with different settings it would sound like a flute or a violin or an accordion, and so on—that Langley had recently brought into the house. I remember being grateful that it could sit comfortably on a table. Because Langley’s first computer was the size of a refrigerator, a huge bulky thing with vacuum tubes that he had been able to buy—for a song, he said—only because it was an obsolete model. He was not able to put it to the test and see if it did whatever computers did—something in the nature of calculations, he said, and when I asked calculations of what, he said of anything—because by the time he would figure out what to do with it we would have no electricity. So I didn’t understand how this little computer that looked like a keyboard and that worked on batteries did whatever calculations it had to do to play music, except that it did. And when I flicked on the switch, and played a scale, this instrument, with nothing like strings to go out of tune, was out of tune in the middle register, just like my Aeolian.

At that moment I understood it was not any piano but my hearing that was off-key. I was hearing a C as a C-sharp. That was the beginning. I shrugged and persuaded myself that I could live with it. The pieces in my repertoire I could hear by memory as if nothing was wrong. But over time it would become not just a matter of pitch, of an off-key sound, but of no sound at all. I didn’t want to believe that was happening even as I understood that it was, slowly but surely. Months were to go by before, decibel by decibel, the world would grow muffled and I would lose my prideful hearing entirely and so be worse off than Beethoven, who could at least see.

If it had happened all of a sudden that I was to lose the last sense that connected me to the world, I would have screamed in terror and found some way as quickly as possible to end my life. But it came upon me gradually, allowing me progressive degrees of acceptance, with hope that every degree of loss would be the last, until, in the growing quiet of my despair, I resolved to accept my fate, having been taken by an odd impulse to find out what life would be like when my hearing was completely gone and, without sight or sound, I had only my own consciousness to amuse me.

I did not tell Langley about any of this. I don’t know why. Perhaps I thought that he would instantly add ears to his medical practice. It had reached the point where for the recovery of my eyesight he had prescribed for breakfast every morning seven peeled oranges and with lunch two eight-ounce glasses of orange juice and with dinner an orange cordial instead of my preferred glass of Almaden wine. If I had told him my hearing was awry he would have surely found some Langleyan cure for that. Under the circumstances I kept my own counsel and distracted myself with the problems we were having with the outside world.

I’M NOT SURE WHEN our battles with the Health and Fire Departments, the bank, the utilities, and everyone else who was demanding some kind of satisfaction attracted the notice of the press. I will not pretend to a precision of remembrance as I try to tell of our life in this house in these last few years. Time seems to me a drift, a shifting of sand. And my mind is shifting with it. I am wearing away. I feel I have not the leisure to tax myself for the right date, the right word. The best I can do is put things down as they occur to me and hope for the best. Which is a shame for as I’ve kept to this task I’ve developed a taste for an exact rendering of our lives, seeing and hearing with words if with nothing else.

The first reporter who rang our bell—a really stupid young man who expected to be invited in, and when we wouldn’t permit that, stood there asking offensive questions, even shouting them out after we had slammed the door—made me realize it was a class of disgustingly fallible human beings who turned themselves into infallible print every day, compounding the historical record that stood in our house like bales of cotton. If you talk to these people you are at their mercy, and if you don’t talk to them you are at their mercy. Langley said to me, We are a story, Homer. Listen to this—and he read this supposedly factual account about these weird eccentrics who had shuttered their windows and bolted their doors and run up thousands of dollars in unpaid bills though they were worth millions. It had our ages wrong, Langley was called Larry, and a neighbor, unnamed, thought we kept women against their will. That our house was a blight on the neighborhood was never in question. Even the abandoned peregrine nest up under the roof ledge was held against us.

I said to my brother: How would you run this in Collyer’s forever up-to-date newspaper?

We are sui generis, Homer, he said. Unless someone comes along as remarkably prophetic as we are, I’m obliged to ignore our existence.

THE ATTENTION FROM the press was not continuous, but we had become a stop on the beat, as it were, a reliable source of wonder for the reading public. We could laugh about this, at least at the beginning, but it became less funny and more alarming as time went on. Some of these reporters published the details of our parents’ lives—when they bought the house and how much they paid for it—all matters of public record if you had nothing better to do than go downtown and dig through city archives. And they found out from old census reports and ship manifests when our ancestors arrived on these shores—it was early in the nineteenth century—and where they lived, their generations, artisans risen to the professions, the marriages made, the children begotten, and so forth. So now all of that was public knowledge but what was the point except to indicate the decline of a House, the Fall of a reputable family, the shame of all that history in that it had led to us, the without-issue Collyer brothers lurking behind closed doors and coming out only at night.

I admit to feeling at secret times, usually just before falling asleep, that if one held to conventional bourgeois values he could read the Collyer brothers as end-of-the-line. Then I would get angry with myself. After all, we were living original self-directed lives unintimidated by convention—could we not be a supreming of the line, a flowering of the family tree?

Langley said: Who cares who our distinguished ancestors were? What balderdash. All those census records, all those archives, attest only to the self-importance of the human being who gives himself a name and a pat on the back and doesn’t admit how irrelevant he is to the turnings of the planet.

I wasn’t prepared to go that far, for if you felt that way what was the use of living in the world, of believing in yourself as an identifiable person with an intellect and desires and the ability to learn and to affect outcomes? But of course Langley liked to say these things, he had been saying them all our adult lives, and for someone who had no regard for his own distinctiveness, he was certainly putting up a struggle, holding off the city agencies, the creditors, the neighbors, the press and relishing the battle. Oh and then one night he thought he had heard something scurrying about the house. I could hear it too when he brought it to my attention. We stood in the living room and listened. A clicking sound that I thought was above our heads. He thought it was inside the wall. Was it one creature or more than one? We couldn’t tell but whatever it was, it was weirdly busy, busier than we were. Langley decided we had mice. I didn’t tell him I thought it might be something larger. By this time I wouldn’t have heard mice. The sound was not that of something small, and not of a timid interloper, but of something living in our house impertinently, without our leave. This was a creature with clear intentions. Listening to its busy click click click I imagined it as arranging things to its satisfaction. It was unnerving, how presumptive the sound was, almost as to make me think I was the interloper. And if it was inside the walls or between the floors, how could we hope it would stay there without venturing into the house proper?

Langley went out that night and came back with two stray cats, and set them out to catch whatever it was, and when that didn’t bring immediate results he added another three or four, all of them strays—tough street cats with loud voices—until we had a half dozen roaming among our crowded rooms like sentries, cats that had to be fed and spoken to and with litter boxes that had to be emptied. My brother, who had no regard for the pretensions of the human race, turned out to have the feelings of a fond father for these feral cats. They climbed upon the jumbles or piles or stacks of things and liked to leap down onto our shoulders. I would sometimes trip over one, for they had lengthy rest periods and lay about, upstairs and down, and if I stepped on a tail and produced a hissing protest Langley would say, Homer, try to be more careful.

So now we had cats on patrol, slinking everywhere around and under everything, and I still heard the toenail clicks in the ceiling at night as I lay in bed, and sometime a scratching at the walls. But this was not an exclusively nocturnal animal—I could hear it running about in the daytime as well, particularly when I stood in the dining room. I don’t think I have mentioned the elaborate crystal chandelier that hung in the dining room. Apparently the mysterious creature or family of creatures—for I was coming to believe that more than one was involved—had so befouled their residence over the dining room that the sodden ceiling buckled, looking, said Langley, like the bottom of the moon, and down came the chandelier—like some sort of parachute on a cable—shattering against the Model T, the pendant crystals flying off in every direction and scattering the yowling cats.

I remembered seeing, as a child, one of my mother’s maids standing on a ladder under that chandelier and removing each crystal, cleaning it with a cloth, and hanging it back on its hook. She had let me hold one. I was surprised at how heavy it was—it was shaped like two slender pyramids with their bases stuck together and when I told her that she had smiled and said what a smart boy I was.

OUR DIFFICULTIES WITH the bank that held our mortgage—by now the Dime Savings Bank, for these things are traded about, just as the banks themselves undergo metamorphoses, the original Corn Exchange of which I was so fond having become the Chemical Corn Exchange, with maybe the seeds of a potent hybrid crop secreted within its vaults, and then the Corn disappeared, perhaps burned away by its chemical components, and lo, it was the Chase Chemical and then the chemistry was gone and it was the rock-hard Chase Manhattan, and so on, in the endless process of corporate mutations in which nothing changes or is improved, according to Langley—but anyway, our difficulties with the Dime Savings culminated in a contretemps at the top of our front steps, with an actual banker—accompanied by a city marshal to suggest what an eviction would feel like—standing there and waving a summons in my face and, presumably, Langley’s as well.

We were, the four of us, standing at the top of the steps, the brothers confronting the two unwelcome guests, who, with their backs to the street, were, militarily speaking, in an indefensible position. I listened to the banker intone our dire fate—he was a baritone with a supercilious Park Avenue diction—and thought, If he breezes those papers in front of my nose one more time I shall give him a shove and listen to the fracturings of his skull as he goes down backward on our granite stoop. It was unlike me to contemplate violence—I was surprised by it myself and not entirely displeased—but Langley, from whom one would expect something that radical, said, Just wait a moment, and withdrew inside to emerge a minute later with one of his mail-order law books in hand. I heard the shuffle of the pages. Ah yes, he said, all right then, I accept your summons—give it here—and will see you at court—let’s see—the hearing should be in about six to eight weeks, as I understand these matters.

All you need do to avoid foreclosure, said the banker, somewhat disconcerted—for he had not expected any legal knowledge of us and a court hearing meant lawyers for the bank and endless protraction of the dispute before any eviction could occur—all you need do, sir, is retire the months in arrears and the bank will consider our customer relationship as in the past and there will be no need for a court hearing. We have had a long and amenable relationship with the Collyer family and have no wish to have it end badly.

Langley: No that’s all right. Even if a judge rules in your favor, which is not at all certain given your usurious four-point-five percent interest rate, he will issue a lis pendens, which as you know is a redemption period of another three months. Let’s see, on top of the two months until we appear in court that’s almost a half year before we have to do anything, or retire anything. And who knows, we might before the final bell decide to pay off the whole damn mortgage, or maybe not. Who can tell? Good day to you, sir. We do appreciate your taking time out of your busy banker’s day to personally call on us but now, if you don’t mind, take your marshal with you and get the hell off our property.

BY THE FOLLOWING spring we did pay off the mortgage. As I believe I’ve mentioned, Langley decided to do that in person. After having advised the bank by mail when he would appear, he walked from our house on upper Fifth Avenue to the Dime Savings on Worth Street in the Financial District, a distance nearly half the length of Manhattan.

Typically, the press got it wrong: my brother wasn’t trying merely to save carfare—that was a secondary consideration. Really he wanted to keep the officers of the Dime Savings in a state of suspense.

WITH LANGLEY ON his way that morning, I decided to get some air. I put on a clean shirt, an old but very comfortable cashmere sweater, my tweed jacket, and a reasonably unworn pair of trousers. If any reporters were hanging about I assumed that Langley would have drawn them off and I could get across to the park without incident. Also, it was fairly early in the day when the curiosity seekers were less likely to be found lingering in front of the house. That is what the newspaper stories had done for us, you see, made our home something to stare at, and there were times, usually on the weekends, when a small crowd would have gathered to look at our boarded-up windows, hoping for one of the maniac brothers to step outside and shake his fist at them. Or they would point at the gap in the cornice where the marble corbel had fallen to the sidewalk—have I mentioned that?—almost hitting someone walking past at that moment, except that it hadn’t and he had to be content with a suit claiming a small chip of the marble had flown up and damaged his eye. But with all these people coming around—if two or three were standing there and a passerby wondered what was going on, he would stop as well—they would engage in conversation, some of which I could hear when I stood behind the shutter of a window that was open a crack. It amazed me how proprietary some of these people felt—you’d think it was their house falling to pieces.

But at this time everything sounded quiet enough. I walked out into a warm spring morning and stood at the curb waiting for a lull in the traffic. My hearing at this point having lost a degree of its brilliance I thought the moment had come, and I’d already stepped off the curb when a woman called out No!—or Non!—for this was Jacqueline Roux, the about-to-be dear friend of my end of life—even at the same time as I heard tires screech and horns blow, perhaps even fenders creasing, but in any case I stood transfixed, having stopped traffic. Through all of this, footsteps approaching, and the same confident voice behind me saying, All right, now we may go, and her arm through my arm and her hand gripping my hand as, despite the shouts and curses, we walked unhurriedly across Fifth Avenue like old friends out for a stroll. And in this way, and not the only time, did Jacqueline Roux save my life.

I AM IN THE DARKNESS and silence deeper than the poet’s sea-dingle but I see that morning in the park and hear her voice and remember her words as if I was back outside of myself and the world was before me. She found us a bench in the sun, asked me my name and told me hers. I thought she must be remarkably self-assured to take charge of a blind man and then, having done the good deed, to sit down to talk with him. People who help you usually make a quick exit.

This is so perfect, she said.

A match was struck. I smelled the acrid smoke of one of her European cigarettes. I heard her inhale to get the smoke as far into herself as she could.

Because you are just the man I was coming to see, she said.

Me? You know who I am?

Oh yes, Homer Collyer, you and your brother are famous now in France.

Good God. Don’t tell me you’re a reporter.

Well, it’s true, I write sometime for the papers.

Look, I know you’ve just saved my life—

Oh, poof—

—and I should really be more gracious, but the fact is my brother and I don’t talk to reporters.

She didn’t seem to hear me. You have a good face, she said, good features, and your eyes, even so, are rather attractive. But too thin, you are too thin, and a barber would be advisable.

She inhaled, she exhaled: I am not here to interview you. I am to write about your country. I have been everywhere because I don’t know what I am looking for.

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.

They built this park in the nineteenth century, I said. Before the city was there to surround it. Nature was everywhere, who would have thought about it coming to an end?

Nobody, she said. I have been shown the underground silos in South Dakota where the missiles wait and twenty-four hours a day the military sit at their consoles ready to turn the key in the box. The people who made this park didn’t think about that either.

AND SO WE CHATTED away at what I realized was a level normal to her. How remarkable to be sitting there, as if at a sidewalk café in Paris, in conversation with a Frenchwoman with an alluring smoky voice. It was no small matter to me that she deemed me worthy of her thoughts. I said: You are looking for the secret. I don’t think you have it yet.

Maybe not, she said.

I was glad she wasn’t trying out her ideas on Langley—he wouldn’t have had the patience, he might even have been rude. But I loved hearing her talk, never mind that she had bizarre theories—Central Park was sinking, shutters were un-American—her passionate engagement with her ideas was a revelation to me. Jacqueline Roux had been all over the world. She was a published writer. I imagined how thrilling it must be living such a life, going around the world and making up things about it.

AND THEN IT was time to go.

Are you walking back? she said. I will walk with you.

We left the park and crossed Fifth Avenue, her arm in mine. In front of the house, I felt emboldened. Would you like to see the inside? I said. It is an attraction greater even than the Empire State Building.

Ah no, merci, I have appointments. But sometime, yes.

I said, Just let me get an idea of you. May I?

She had thick wavy hair cut short. A broad forehead, rounded cheekbones, a straight nose. A slight fullness under the chin. She wore glasses with wire frames. She wore no makeup. I did not think I should touch the lips.

I asked her if she was married.

No more, she said. It made no sense.

Children?

I have a son in Paris. In secondary school. So now you are interviewing me? She laughed.

She would be back in New York in a few weeks. We will have a coffee, she said.

I have no phone, I said. If I’m not in the park please knock on the door. I’m usually home. If I don’t hear from you I’ll try to get run over and there you will be.

I felt her looking at me. I hoped she was smiling.

Okay, Mr. Homer, she said, shaking my hand. Until we meet again.

WHEN LANGLEY RETURNED I told him about Jacqueline Roux. Another damn reporter, he said.

Not exactly a reporter, I said. A writer. A French lady writer.

I didn’t know it had got as far as the European papers. What were you, her man-in-the-street interview?

It wasn’t like that. We had some serious conversation. I invited her in and she refused. What reporter would do that?

It was hard trying to explain to Langley: this was another mind—not his, not mine.

She is a woman out in the world, I said. I was very impressed.

Apparently so.

She is divorced. Doesn’t believe in marriage. A son in school.

Homer, you have always been susceptible to the ladies, do you know that?

I want to get a haircut. And maybe a new suit in one of those discount places. And I need to eat more. I don’t like being this thin, I said.

HOURS LATER LANGLEY found me at the piano. She helped you across the street? he said.

Yes, and a lucky thing, I said.

Are you all right? It’s not like you to misread traffic.

Ever since they made Fifth Avenue one-way is the problem, I said. It’s a heavier, more congested sound with fewer gaps and I just have to get used to it.

Not like you at all, my brother said and left the room.

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.

By a perverse bit of good fortune, though, a registered letter was delivered one morning from a law firm representing “Con Edison”—the new slick name of the Consolidated Edison Company that we thought appropriately confessional and self-defining. I wanted to express my gratitude to these people: as Langley read aloud this egregiously rude and menacing letter, I could sense him rising like a lion from its slumber. Can you believe this, Homer? Some wretched legal clerk daring to address the Collyers in this manner?

Our struggle with the utility had gone on for years given our practice of paying bills in a desultory way as a matter of principle, and now, with Langley’s foglike gloom suddenly lifting I felt everything returning to normal. Pacing about and swearing his undying hatred for this electromonopoly, as he called it, he proceeded to mail back the letter with his grammatical corrections in a nice neat packet of several years’ of unpaid bills, altogether weighing, he claimed, a good quarter of a pound. Homer, he would later tell me, I felt privileged to pay the postage.

Never again would we be subject to Con Edison’s intimidation because quite abruptly the lights went out. I knew this because I was waiting for the electric coffeemaker to finish its ritual when it gurgled, spat a blot of hot water in my face, and died. We were liberated, though without light. Apparently some dim rays came through the louvered shutters, but not enough for Langley to find any candles. We had a goodly supply of candles of every shape and kind, from dinner-table candles to sacramental candles in glasses, but of course they were under something, somewhere in the house, and though I could blunder about more easily than Langley neither of us could remember where to even begin looking, and so an investment was required. He went out and bought marine lamps, wilderness lamps, long-handled searchlights, propane lamps, mercury lamps, hurricane lamps, pocket flashlights, high-intensity beam lamps on poles, and for the upstairs hall with its clerestory window, a battery-powered sodium lamp which went on automatically as daylight faded. He even dug up an old buzzing sunlamp meant to tan the skin that we had once used to keep our mother’s plants alive, burning them to death in the process, so all that remained of her beloved nursery were stacks of clay pots and the soil they held.

When these lights were turned on all over the house, I imagined great looming shadows angled off in different directions, some streaming along the floor and bouncing up against the bales of newspapers, others shooting upward at the ceiling to illuminate each drop of a particular leak. Not much had changed as far as I was concerned, and I was diplomatic enough not to ask Langley the initial cost of our investment in independent power—to say nothing of the ongoing expense of battery replacements. The key thing here was our self-reliance and I was just as happy that we hadn’t found the candles, which, what with one thing or another in our congested rooms, would no doubt have set something on fire—the piles of mattresses, the bundles of newsprint, the stacks of wooden crates my oranges came in, the old hanging tapestries, spillages of books, dust bunnies, the congealed puddle of oil under the Model T, God knows what—and brought us a return visit of the firemen with their rampant hoses.

THEN, AS IF INSPIRED by the malevolent electric company, the city turned off our water. Langley greeted this setback with relish. And I found myself participating with a kind of grim joy in the system we set up to provide ourselves with water. The hydrant at the curb was of no use—you could not circumspectly wrestle with a hydrant. What a psychological boost for me, then, to be working with my brother, a co-conspirator, as just before dawn every other morning or so we set out with two baby carriages in tandem, his with a ten-gallon milk can long since acquired with the idea that it might someday prove useful, and I with a couple of segmented crates filled with empty milk bottles gathered from our stoop when milk was delivered each morning to one’s door with two or three inches of cream in the neck of the bottle.

A few blocks north of us there was an old water post from the days when water was made available for horses. The water post, a heavy-gauge faucet built into a low concave stone wall whose base was a cement trough, stood at the curb. Langley jammed the carriage up against the trough and positioned the milk can at a tilt under the faucet so that he wouldn’t have to lift it out of the carriage. When the can was full, we filled each of the bottles and capped it with aluminum foil. The trip back was the difficult part, water weighing a lot more than I would have thought. To avoid the curbs at the ends of each block we went along in the street. There were no cars at this hour. I brought up the rear of our procession by keeping the folded carriage hood in touch with Langley’s back. I think we both enjoyed a kind of boyish excitement there in the first light of morning, when nobody was abroad in the land except us and the freshness of the air was carried on a soft breeze redolent of a countryside, as if we were not pushing our carriages down Fifth Avenue, but along a back road.

We brought home our contraband through the basement door under the front steps. We would have enough water for drinking, and all our meals thenceforth would be on paper plates and with throwaway plastic utensils, though we didn’t exactly throw them away, but water for commode flushing and for bathing was another matter. It was the ground-floor guest bathroom that we would try to keep functioning, which was just as well, as the upstairs bathrooms had long since served also as storage areas. But sponge baths were the order of the day and after a couple of weeks of turning ourselves into water carriers, the sense of triumph, of having put one over on the city, had given way to the hard realities of our situation. Of course there was an ordinary drinking fountain not far into the park across from our house and we used that to fill our thermoses and army canteens, though sometimes as the weather grew warmer we had to wait our turn as flocks of children with a perverse interest in water fountains pretended to be thirsty.

I DON’T KNOW IF any of the children who took to throwing stones at our shuttered windows were the same who had seen us come for water in the park. Most likely the word had spread. Children are the carriers of unholy superstition, and in the minds of the juvenile delinquents who’d begun to pelt our house Langley and I were not the eccentric recluses of a once well-to-do family as described in the press: we had metamorphosed, we were the ghosts who haunted the house we had once lived in. Not able to see myself or hear my own footsteps, I was coming around to the same idea.

At unpredictable times through the summer the assault would begin, the operation planned and the ordnance collected beforehand, because the clunks and thwacks and thuds came as a barrage. I could feel them. Sometimes I could hear the bel canto cries. I figured their ages to be from six to twelve. The first few times, Langley made the mistake of going out on the stoop and shaking his fist. The children scattered with screams of delight. So of course the next time there were even more of them and more rocks flew.

We had no thought of calling the police, nor did they of their own volition ever appear. We settled back and endured these sorties as one would wait out summer showers. So now, it’s even their children, Langley said, having assumed the little beasts lived in the surrounding houses and might have been inspired by their parents’ opinion of us. I said my understanding of people of the class of our nearest neighbors was that they were not given to breeding. I said I thought it was a wider recruitment and the children’s staging area was probably the park. When one day the rocks seemed to have a heftier impact, and I heard a shout in a deeper post-pubescent register, Langley lifted one of the shutter slats, peered out, and informed me that some of them were easily teenagers. So you are right, Homer, this may be citywide, and we have the rare privilege of an advanced look at the replacement citizenry for the millennium.

Langley began to think of a military action in response. He had collected a few pistols over the years and decided to take one and stand on the steps and wave it at the hoodlums to see what would happen. Of course it is not loaded, he said. I said he could do that—menace children with a deadly weapon—and that I would be happy to visit him in prison if I could find a way to get there. I was not inclined to fret over these stone throwers. The shutters had been well pocked and some of the brownstone frontage had been chipped but I knew the children would vanish when the weather grew cold, as they did, it was strictly a summer sport, and soon enough the thuds of rocks against the shutters were replaced by autumnal winds blowing through them and shaking our windows.

——

BUT ONE NIGHT SOMETHING Langley had said came back to me as I tried to sleep. He said everything alive was at war. I wondered if the diminution of my senses, even as I was terrified of an enlarging consciousness slowly displacing the world outside my mind—if it was possible that I was becoming progressively unaware of the truth of our situation, the magnitude of it, protected in my insensitivity from the worst of its sights and sounds. As I reflected, the stoning of our house by children, rather than being an episode incidental to our major concerns—our increasing isolation, losing by our own doing or the doing of others the ordinary services of an urban civilization, no running water, I mean, no gas, no electricity—and finding ourselves in a circle of animosity rippling outward from our neighbors to creditors, to the press, to the municipality, and, finally, to the future—for that was what these children were—rather than being of minor significance, well, that was the most devastating blow of all. For what could be more terrible than being turned into a mythic joke? How could we cope, once dead and gone, with no one available to reclaim our history? My brother and I were going down and he, lung-shot and half insane, knew that better than I. Our every act of opposition and assertion of our self-reliance, every instance of our creativity and resolute expression of our principles was in service of our ruination. And he, apart from all that, had as his burden the care of an increasingly disabled brother. I will not criticize him then for the paranoia of that winter when he began to devise from the hoarded materials of our life in this house—as if everything here had been amassed in response to a prophetic intelligence—the means of our last stand.

In the old days there was another poet he liked to quote: “I’m me, and what the hell can I do about it! … I, the solemn investigator of useless things.”

MY OWN RESPONSE has been to press on with my daily writing. I am Homer Collyer and Jacqueline Roux is my muse. Though in my weakened state I am not sure if she ever returned as she said she would, or if I only needed the thought of her to begin this writing, a project comparable in its overreaching to Langley’s newspaper. At this point I can’t be sure of anything—what I imagine, what I recall—but she did come back, I’m almost sure of that, or let us say she did, and that I met her at the front door, having been groomed and turned out in some reasonable state by my understanding brother. Sitting in the chill of this house, I feel the warmth of a hotel lounge. Jacqueline and I have had dinner. There is a fireplace, arrangements of upholstered armchairs, small low tables for drinks, and a pianist playing standards. I remember this one from the time of our tea dances: “Strangers in the Night.” I can tell from the stiffness of the playing that this is a classically trained pianist trying to make a living. Jacqueline and I laugh at the chosen song—the lyrics describing strangers exchanging glances, which is not possible between us, and ending up as lovers for life. That too is funny though in a way to stifle the laughter in my throat.

Then, on my second glass of the best wine I have ever tasted, I am impelled to sit at the piano after the hired help has withdrawn. I play Chopin, the Prelude in C-sharp Minor, because it is a slow chord-heavy piece that I can be reasonably sure of, not being able to hear it very well. Then I make the mistake of going into “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” which requires a digitally meandering right hand: a mistake, because I understand from the touch on my shoulder—this is the lounge pianist stopping me—that I’m doing the sequence as Bach wrote it but I have started off on the wrong piano key. It is like a mockery of Bach. I am corrected and finish capably enough, but am led back to Jacqueline in total humiliation that I try to dissemble by laughing. What wine will do!

In her room I confess to my misery, a blind man going deaf.

A generous conversation ensues—practical, as if this is a problem to be solved. Why not write, then, she says. There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.

I am not persuaded.

You understand, Mr. Homer? You think a word and you can hear its sound. I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.

The thought of life without my music is intolerable to me. I stand and pace. I blunder about and something goes over, a standing lamp. A bulb bursts. Jacqueline has my arm and sits me down on the bed. She sits beside me and takes my hand.

I say to her, Perhaps your French has music and so you think all language is musical. I do not hear music in my speech.

No, you are wrong.

And I have nothing to say. Given who I am what is there to write about?

Of course, your life, she says. Exactly who you are. Your life across from the park. Your history deserving of the black shutters. Your house that is a greater attraction than the Empire State Building.

And that is so sweetly and intimately funny that I cannot maintain my despair. It is overrun and we are laughing.

She allowed me to remove her glasses. And then the shivers of recognition as we lay together. This woman whom I barely knew. Who were we? Blindness and deafness was the world, there being nothing outside us. I don’t remember the sex. I felt her heart beating. I remember her tears under our kisses. I remember holding her in my arms and absolving God of meaninglessness.

I AM GRATEFUL THAT Langley from the very beginning encouraged me to write in lieu of my music. Did he receive his instructions from Jacqueline Roux? Or do I only imagine a conversation in which he was uncharacteristically respectful and submissive as she outlined the new plan for my life? The fact is, Langley has made it his mission to keep me going. At one point my typewriter broke down and he took it to a repair shop on Fulton Street. But then I had to wait two weeks for the repair to be done, so he saw to it that I would have another Braille machine—two, in fact: a Hammond and an Underwood and thus I have been able to continue. With the three machines set up on this table, and reams of paper in a crate on the floor beside me, I am endowed. It is she for whom I write. My muse. If she does not come back, if I never see her again, I have her in my contemplation. But she has promised to read what I’ve written. She will have to forgive the misspellings and the grammatical errors and the typing errors. I write in Braille and it is supposed to come out in English.

I have been at it for some time now. I have no clear sense of how long. I sense the passage of time as a spatial thing, as Langley’s voice has become fainter and fainter, as if he has walked off down a long road, or is falling away in space, or as if some other sound that I can’t hear, a waterfall, has washed away his words. For a while I could still hear my brother as he shouted in my ear. At that time he devised a set of signals: he touches me once, twice, three times on the arm to mean he’s brought me something to eat, or that it is time to go to bed, or other such basic matters of daily life. But more complicated messages are communicated by his putting my index finger on the Braille keys and spelling out the words. To do this, he had to learn Braille himself, which he did quite efficiently. In this way I get what news there is, briefly, as in a headline.

But for a while now, I have lived in total silence, and so when he approaches and taps me on the arm I sometimes start, for I think of him always at a distance, someone small and far away, when suddenly he is standing here, loomed up like an apparition. It is almost as if the reality is his distance from me and the illusion is his presence.

Writing happens to coincide with my compensatory desire to stay alive. So I have kept busy in my own way while my brother goes about reconstructing the found materials of the house into an infernal machine. I have used the word paranoia to describe what he has done with the accumulations of decades. But in fact, almost with the first easing of the weather, he tells me a prowler did try to get through the back door at night. On another occasion he signaled that he heard someone moving about on the roof. I supposed we could anticipate more of the same: several of the newspapers from the very beginning of their stories about us had suggested that the Collyers, distrustful of banks, keep enormous amounts of cash stashed away. And for those street people and squatters who don’t read the papers, our dark and decaying building is an open invitation.

A COMPLICATION HAS arisen. Langley’s defensive strategy has made it unwise if not impossible for me to try to get around the house. For all practical purposes I am imprisoned. I am situated now just inside the doors of the drawing room with a single path to the bath under the stairs. Langley is also constrained. He has established himself in the kitchen with access in and out of the house through the back door to the garden. The front hall is completely blocked with boxes of books stacked to the ceiling. A narrow passageway between bales of newspaper and overhanging garden tools—shovels, rakes, a power drill, a wheelbarrow, all strung overhead by wire and rope from spikes he’s hammered into the walls—leads from his kitchen outpost to my enclave. He brings me my meals down this tunneled passageway. He tells me he navigates by flashlight over the trapwires strung at ankle level from wall to wall.

My bed is a mattress on the floor beside my typing table. I also have a small transistor radio that I hold up to my ear in hopes of hearing something sometime. I know it is spring only from the mildness of the atmosphere and because I no longer have to wear the heavy sweaters of winter or cower under the bedclothes at night. Langley’s bedroom is the kitchen and he sleeps, when he does, on the big table that once received our gangster friend Vincent.

My brother has taken pains to describe the snares and traps in the other rooms of the house. He is very proud of what he has done. Sometimes he puts my finger on the Braille keys for hours it seems like. Upstairs, he has so piled things up in pyramidal fashion that the least nudge of any one thing—rubber tires, an iron pressure cooker, dressmaker’s dummies, empty bureau drawers, beer kegs, flowerpots—I almost take pleasure from visualizing the possibilities—and the whole assemblage will fall on the interloper, the mythical trespasser, the object of Langley’s stratagems. Each room has its own punishing design of our things. Washboards greased with soap are laid on the floor for the unwary to step on. He is constantly busy working to improve the balance of the weights, and the snares and traps until he is sure they are perfect. One of his problems is the rats that have now come out of the walls. They pass through here at my feet regularly. He is at war with them. He bashes them with a shovel or takes up his old army rifle from the mantel and clubs them. I sometimes think I can hear something of what’s going on. Once or twice a rat has fallen prey to his traps. For every dead rat he draws an invisible notch on my arm.

WITHAL, MY SENSE is of an end to this life. I remember our house as it was in our childhood: a glorious elegance prevailed, calming and festive at the same time. Life flowed through the rooms unencumbered by fear. We boys chased each other up and down the stairs and in and out of the rooms. We teased the servants and were teased by them. We marveled at our father’s jarred specimens. As little boys we sat on the thick rugs and pushed our toy cars along the patterns. I took my piano lessons in the music room. We peeked from the hall at our parents’ resplendent, candlelit dinner parties. My brother and I could run out the front door and down the steps and across to the park as if it was ours, as if home and park, both lit by the sun, were one and the same.

And when I lost my sight he read to me.

There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. The images of things are not the things in themselves. Awake, I am in a continuum with my dreams. I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where there is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself. My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in. If I could go crazy, if I could will that on myself, I might not know how badly off I am, how awful is this awareness that is irremediably aware of itself. With only the touch of my brother’s hand to know that I am not alone.

JACQUELINE, FOR HOW many days have I been without food. There was a crash, the whole house shook. Where is Langley? Where is my brother?