BEFORE HE WAS shipped overseas, Harold Robileaux had made one of those little Victory records that soldiers sent home in the mail so their family could hear their voice. Little three-minute recordings on scratchable plastic records the size of a saucer. Apparently there were these recording studios in the same penny arcades near the army bases where you got four photos for a quarter or a bearded mechanical fakir in a glass case would lift his hand and smile and send your printed fortune out of a slot. So Harold had sent Grandmamma his V-record though it took some months to reach us. Until Langley thought to check the postmark it was unnerving to have found something from Harold in our mailbox. You understand this was after Grandmamma had heard from Ella Robileaux that Harold had been killed in North Africa. Perhaps the army censors had to listen to every one of these V-records just as they read every letter the soldiers wrote, or perhaps the post office in Tuskegee was overwhelmed. In any case when this record arrived in the mail Grandmamma thought Harold was alive after all. Thank you, Jesus, thank you, she said, crying for joy. She clapped her hands together and praised the Lord and would not hear from us anything about a postmark. We sat with her in front of the big Victrola and heard him. It was a tinny-sounding record but at the same time it was Harold Robileaux, all right. He was well, he said, and excited to have been promoted to tech sergeant. He couldn’t tell us where he was going or when but he would write when he got there. In that soft New Orleans lilt, he said he trusted that Grandmamma was well and to please give his regards to Mr. Homer and Mr. Langley. It was all what you’d expect from any soldier in the circumstance, nothing unusual, except, being Harold, he had his cornet with him. And being Harold, he put it to his lips and played taps as if offering the musical equivalent of a photograph of himself in uniform. The quality of that cornet’s sound overcame the primitive nature of the recording. A clear pure heartbreaking sound, every phrase lifted to its unhurried perfection. But why did he play the elegiac taps rather than, say, reveille, to indicate his affiliation with the army? Grandmamma asked Langley to play the record over, and then again three or four more times, and though we didn’t have the heart to discourage her, maybe it was that solemnly reflective dirge, the mournful tones filling all our rooms over and over, as if Harold Robileaux was prophesying his own death, that made her admit to herself, after all, that her grandson was gone. The poor woman, having been made to suffer his death twice, could not control her tears. God, she cried, that was my blessed boy you took, that was my Harold.Langley went out and bought gold-star pennants for the front windows of all four storeys, gold being the star for soldiers who had made what the politicians called “the ultimate sacrifice,” there being presumably a sequence of sacrifices a soldier could make — arms, legs? — before the ultimate one. Usually a single pennant with one star of blue or gold in a window was enough advertisement or consolation for a household, but Langley never did anything like everyone else. My brother’s sorrow was indistinguishable from rage. With the death of Harold Robileaux his whole attitude toward the war had changed and he said that when he finally prepared the front-page war dispatches for his eternally current and always up-to-date newspaper, its advocacy would be explicit. I look at all these papers, he said, and they may come at you from the right or the left or the muddled middle but they are inevitably of a place, they are set like stone in a location that they insist is the center of the universe. They are presumptively, arrogantly local, and at the same time nationally bullish. So that is what I will be. Collyer’s One Edition for All Time will not be for Berlin, or Tokyo, or even London. I will see the universe from right here just like all these rags. And the rest of the world can go on with their dim-witted daily editions, whereas without their knowing it, they and all their readers everywhere will have been fixed in amber.
GRANDMAMMA’S GRIEF FILLED the house. It was silent, monumental. Our condolences were met with indifference. One morning she announced that she was leaving our employ. She intended to go to New Orleans and find Harold’s widow, whom she did not know, a young girl, she said, who might need her help. Apparently an infant child was involved. Grandmamma was resolute and it was clear to us that these were relationships she would foster, putting together what was left of her family.The day of Grandmamma’s departure she made breakfast for us in her traveling clothes and then washed the dishes. She was taking a Greyhound bus from the terminal on Thirty-fourth Street. Langley pressed traveling money upon her, which she accepted with a regal nod. We stood on the sidewalk as Langley waved for a cab. I was reminded of the day we stood here like this to say goodbye to Mary Elizabeth Riordan. There were no tears and no parting words from Grandmamma as she got into the cab. Her mind was already under way. And so as she rode off the last member of our household was gone, and Langley and I were left to ourselves.Grandmamma had been the last connection to our past. I had understood her as some referent moral authority to whom we paid no heed, but by whose judgments we measured our waywardness.
WHEN THE WAR ENDED with the victory over Japan it was one of those oppressively close August days in New York. Not that anyone minded. Cars paraded along Fifth Avenue, drivers blowing their horns and shouting out the windows. We stood at the top of our stoop like generals taking review, because people were running by as closely as in ranks, thousands of footsteps scuttling downtown looking for the party. I had listened to the same excitement, the laughter, the running feet like the whir of birds’ wings, on Armistice Day 1918. Langley and I crossing the street to the park found strangers dancing with one another, ice cream vendors tossing Popsicles to the crowds, balloon sellers letting go their inventory. Unleashed dogs ran in circles, barking and yelping and getting underfoot. People were laughing and crying. The joy rising from the city filled the sky like a melodious wind, like a celestial oratorio.Of course I was as relieved as anyone that the war was over. But underneath all this gaiety I found myself in an awful sadness. What was the recompense for the ones who had died? Memorial days? In my mind I heard taps.We had a joke, Langley and I: Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.
WHILE THE WAR WAS on I had come to feel my life was purposeful, if only in its expectations for the future. But with peace I found there was no future, certainly not in any way to distinguish it from the past. In the light of naked truth I was a severely disabled man who could not expect for himself even the most normal and modest of lives — for instance, as a working man, a husband, and a father. This was a bad time in the midst of everyone’s joy. Even my music had lost its appeal. I was restless, slept poorly, and in fact was often afraid to go to sleep, as if to sleep was to put on one of the gas masks Langley had brought home in which I could not hope to breathe.Have I not mentioned the gas masks? During the war he’d acquired a crateful. He saw to it that two were hung on nails in every room of the house so that wherever we happened to be, if the Axis powers did attack New York, and gas bombs were dropped, we were prepared. Given his lifelong cough and shredded vocal cords, his company having been without masks in 1918 when the fog rolled in, I did not demur. But he insisted that I practice putting on a mask so that when and if the time came I would not die fumbling around. To have my nose and mouth covered in addition to being in the dark was frightening. It was as if the sense of smell and taste, too, were being taken from me. I found it hard to breathe through the canister, which meant I could avoid dying of poison gas only by dying of suffocation. But I made the best of it and did not complain, even though I thought a German gas attack on Fifth Avenue highly unlikely.By the time of war’s end, the productive might of the American economy having overproduced everything a soldier would need, we’d collected, besides the gas masks, enough military surplus to outfit an army of our own. Langley said G.I. stuff was so cheap in the flea markets that it presented a business opportunity. We had ammunition belts, boots, helmets, canteens, tin food containers with tin utensils, telegraph keys, or “bugs,” developed for the Army Signal Corps, a table-top full of olive drab trousers and Ike jackets, uniform fatigues, hard wool blankets, pocketknives, binoculars, boxes of service ribbons, and so on. It was as if the times blew through our house like a wind, and these were the things deposited here by the winds of war. Langley never did work out the details of any business opportunity. So along with everything else, all these helmets, boots, etc. ended up now where they had been deposited, artifacts of some enthusiasms of the past, almost as if we were a museum, though with our riches as yet uncataloged, the curating still to come.Not everything would go to waste — when our clothes wore out we would take to wearing fatigues, both trousers and shirts. And boots too, when our shoes fell apart.Oh, and the oiled M1 rifle that had never been fired. This was one of my brother’s prize acquisitions. Fortunately he hadn’t found the cartridges to go with it. He drilled a heavy nail into the marble mantel and we hung up the M1 by its shoulder strap. He fancied his work so well that he did the same for the Springfield rifle that had been sitting there for almost thirty years. They dangled over the fireplace, the two rifles, like Christmas stockings. We never touched them again and though at this point I cannot get anywhere near the mantel, so far as I know they are still there.