OUR FRONT DOOR seemed to be a wartime attraction. We found ourselves answering to the knock of old men in black. They spoke with accents so thick we couldn’t quite understand what they were saying. Langley said they were bearded and had curls of hair around their ears. Also dark haunted eyes and rueful smiles of apology for disturbing us. They were very religious Jews, we knew that much. They showed their credentials from various seminaries and schools. They held out tin boxes with slots in which we were asked to put money. This happened three or four times over the course of a month and we began to be annoyed. We were uncomprehending. Langley thought we should post a plaque next to the door: Beggars Not Welcome.But they were not beggars. One morning it was a cleanshaven man who stood at the open door. He would be described to me as having close-cropped gray hair and a Victory Medal from the Great War pinned to the lapel of his suit jacket. He sported one of those skullcaps on his head that meant he too was Jewish. The man’s name was Alan Roses. My brother, who had a soft spot for anyone who had served in that war, invited him in.It turned out that Alan Roses and Langley had been with the same division in the Argonne forest. They talked as men do who discover a military kinship. I had to listen to them identify their battalions and companies and recall their experiences under fire. It was a completely different Langley in these exchanges — someone who accorded respect and received it in return.Alan Roses told us what the mystery was with these door-to-door appeals. It had to do with what was happening to Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe. The idea was to buy freedom for Jewish families — Nazi officials were happy to use their racial policies as a means of extortion — and also to inform the American public. If the public was aroused the government would have to do something. He was very calm, and spoke in great and telling detail, Alan Roses. He was, by profession, an English teacher in the public school system. He cleared his throat often as if to swallow his emotion. I had no doubt that what he was saying was true, but it was at the same time so shocking as almost to demand not to be believed. Langley said to me afterward: How is it those old men who knocked on our door knew more than the news organizations?It was difficult under the circumstances for Langley to maintain his philosophical neutrality. He quickly wrote out a check. Alan Roses provided a receipt on the stationery of an East Side synagogue. We went to the door with him, he shook our hands, and he left. I supposed he would find another door to knock on and subject himself to more embarrassment — he had the reticence of someone doing something out of principle for which he was ill-equipped by nature.With each day’s papers, Langley searched the news columns. The story was coming out on the back pages in dribs and drabs with no appreciation of the enormity of the horror. This went right along, he said, with our government’s do-nothing policy. Even in war, deals are made, and if they can’t be made you bomb the trains, disrupt the operation — anything to give those people a fighting chance. Do you suppose this land of the free and home of the brave is just not that crazy about Jews? Of course the Nazis are monstrous thugs. But what are we if we let them go ahead and do what they do? And what happens then, Homer, to your war story of good versus evil? Christ, what I wouldn’t give to be something other than a human being.
LANGLEY’S CONTRARIANISM was to evolve. How could it not? When we learned that Harold Robileaux had joined up — this was sometime later, I don’t remember what year of the war this was — we displayed one of those little blue-star pennants that people hung in their windows to indicate that we had a family member in the service. Harold had gone and applied to the Army Air Forces and been trained as an airplane mechanic, this musician of all sorts of gifts and capabilities, and by the time we knew any of this he was overseas with an all-Negro pursuit squadron.So now our spirits were lifted, we were as prideful as any family in the neighborhood. For the first time in this war I felt a part of things. The times had brought people together and in this cold city of impassive strangers where everyone was out for himself a sense of community was like a surprisingly warm spring day in the middle of winter, even though it took a war to do that. I would go out for a stroll — I used a cane now — and people would greet me or shake my hand or ask if they could help me, under the impression that I had been blinded fighting for my country. “Here, soldier, let me give you a hand.” I didn’t think I looked that young but maybe I was perceived as an officer of formerly high rank. Langley exchanged greetings with home guards from the neighborhood on their way to the rooftops of their buildings to scan the sky for enemy planes. He bought War Bonds on our behalf, although I have to say not purely from patriotism but because he believed they were sound investments. There may have been a European battlefront and a Pacific front, but we were the Home Front, as important to the War Effort, as we canned the vegetables from our victory gardens, as G.I. Joe himself.Of course we knew there was a powerful propaganda machine behind all of this. It was calling on us to tamp down the fear of the maleficent enemy that resided in our hearts. I would go to the movies with Grandmamma just to hear the newsreels — the boom of our battleship guns, our grinding tank treads, our roaring flights of bombers taking off from English airfields. She would go in hopes of seeing Harold sitting in an airplane hut and looking up from one of the engines he was fixing to smile at her.We had no victory garden, our backyard had been given over to storage — things accumulated over the years that we had bought or salvaged in expectation of their possible usefulness sometime in the future: an old refrigerator, boxes of plumbing joints and pipes, milk-bottle crates, bedsprings, headboards, a baby carriage with missing wheels, several broken umbrellas, a worn-out chaise longue, a real fire hydrant, automobile tires, stacks of roof shingles, odd pieces of lumber, and so on. In an earlier time I had enjoyed sitting in that little yard where a shaft of sunlight visited briefly toward noon. There was some sort of weed tree there that I liked to think of as an offshoot of Central Park, but I was happy to give up the yard just to get some of these things out of the house because every room was becoming a kind of obstacle course for me. I was losing my ability to sense where things were. I was no longer the young man with the infallible antennae who could blithely circumnavigate the household. The Hoshiyamas when they were with us had brought up furniture from the basement with every intention of restoring things as they had been, but of course that was impossible, everything was different now. I was like a traveler who had lost his map, Langley couldn’t have cared less where anything went, and so the Hoshiyamas had used their own judgment and, as well meaning as they were, inevitably had gotten things wrong, which only added to the confusion.Oh Lord, and then one terrible day, the phone rang and it was this tiny tearful girl’s voice, barely audible. She was Ella Robileaux, Harold’s wife, calling long-distance from New Orleans, and she wanted to speak with his Grandmamma. I hadn’t known Harold had married. I knew nothing about it, but I had no reason to doubt her identity, this child of the tremulous voice, and it took me a moment to collect myself, for I understood without being told why she was calling. When I shouted back to the kitchen for Grandmamma to come to the phone my voice broke and a sob escaped from my throat. This was wartime, you see, and people didn’t make expensive longdistance calls just to chat.