I SHOULD MAKE it clear that I did not wish for another war to lift my spirits. It seemed like just a few moments since V-J Day — that’s what the victory over Japan was called — and we were at it again. I thought how foolish we had all been that day of delirious celebration, the whole city shouting its joy to the heavens.When I played piano for the silent movies the picture would end and the projectionist would stick his head out of the booth. The next feature will begin shortly, he’d say. A moment, please, while we change reels.And so there we were at war in Korea, but, as if we needed something of more substance, we and the Russians were racing to build bigger nuclear bombs than the bombs dropped on Japan. Endless numbers of them — to drop on each other. I should have thought just a couple of superbombs to char the continents and boil the seas and suck up all the air would be sufficient to the purpose, but apparently not.Langley had seen a photograph of the second atom bomb that had been used on Japan. A fat ugly thing, he said, not sleek and sharklike as you would expect a respectable bomb to be. You’d think it was something to hold beer. The moment he said that I remembered the empty kegs and ponies he had brought into the house from a brewery that had gone out of business. He lugged these aluminum barrels up to the front door, somehow lost control, and they bounced down the stone steps clanking and booming and rolling across the sidewalk so that I now thought of the atom bomb as an implodable beer keg, lying on its side and spinning on its axis until it decided to go off.The trouble with listening to the news with Langley was that he became agitated, he raved and ranted, he talked back to the radio. Langley, as an expert newspaper reader, reading all the papers every day, knew what was going on around the world better than the commentators. We’d listen to some commentator and then I’d have to listen to Langley commentating. He would tell me things I knew were true but which nevertheless I didn’t want to hear, all of it just adding to my depression. Eventually, he would stop giving me his political insights, which boiled down anyway to a hope that there would soon be a nuclear world war in which the human race would extinguish itself, to the great relief of God … who would thank Himself and maybe turn His talents to creating a more enlightened form of creature on a fresh new planet somewhere.Whatever the news of the world, with Grandmamma Robileaux gone we were faced with the practical problem of how to feed ourselves. Homer, said my brother, we will take our meals out, and it will do you good to be up and about instead of sitting in a chair all day and feeling sorry for yourself.We had our breakfast at a counter place on Lexington Avenue, a brisk ten-or twelve-minute walk. I’m just thinking a moment about the food: they served fresh orange juice, eggs any style with ham or bacon, hash brown potatoes, toast, and coffee for a dollar and a quarter. I usually had my eggs as an omelet sandwich on the toast as that was easy to handle. For a breakfast it wasn’t cheap but other places charged even more. For dinner we went to an Italian place on Second Avenue, a twenty-minute walk. They had various spaghetti dishes, or entrées of veal and chicken, chopped salad, and so on. It wasn’t very good but the owner saved the same table for us every night and we brought our own bottle of Chianti and so it was passable. We skipped lunch entirely, but in the afternoon Langley would boil water and we’d have tea with some crackers.But then he toted up the month’s dining bills and, forgetting he had prescribed our eating out as a way of improving my state of mind, he decided to cook at home. He sought at first to duplicate the restaurant meals we had had for breakfast and dinner. But I would smell things burning and weave my way to the kitchen, where he was cursing and tossing hot and hissing frying pans into the sink, or I would sit patiently at the table long past the usual dinner hour, starving and in suspense, until something unnameable was laid before me. Langley asked me one day why I supposed I was looking so peaked and thin. I didn’t say, How else should I look given the culinary experiences I have endured? Finally, he gave up and we began to eat out of cans, though he had decided that oatmeal was an essential constituent of good health and put up a batch of the gluey stuff for breakfast every morning.It would take some time before his interest in healthful eating expanded and he would turn his attention to my blindness as something curable via nutrition.
WHAT LANGLEY DID by way of cheering me up was to buy us a television set. I did not even try to understand his reasoning.These were the early days of television. I touched the glass screen — it was square with rounded sides. Think of it as pictorial radio, he said. You don’t have to see the picture. Just listen. You’re not missing anything: what is static on a radio is like it’s snowing on the TV. And when the picture does clear, it tends to float up off the screen only to rise again from the bottom.If I was not missing anything why bother with it? But I sat there in the interest of science.Langley was right about the relation to radio. Television shows were structured like radio programs, coming in half-hour segments, or sometimes even whole hours, and with the same daytime soap operas, the same comedians, the same swing bands, and the same stupid advertising. There was not much point to my listening to television unless it was a news broadcast or a game show. The news was all about Communist spies and their worldwide conspiracy to destroy us. That was hardly cheering, but the game shows on television were another matter. We got into the habit of tuning them in mostly to see if we could answer the questions before the contestants did. And we were able to do that quite often. I knew the answer to almost anything having to do with classical music and, because of my time playing records for the tea dances, I’d come up with a fair guess or two about popular music. And I was pretty good with baseball and literature. Langley knew history and philosophy and science to a fare-thee-well. Who was the first historian, the quizmaster asked. Herodotus! said Langley. And when the contestant was slow to answer, Langley shouted, Herodotus, you idiot! as if the fellow might hear him. That made me laugh and so it became our habit to call those people on the shows idiots. How far was the sun from the earth? Ninety-three million miles, you idiot! Who wrote Moby-Dick? Melville, you idiot! And even when a contestant happened to come up with the right answer, listening, say, to the opening phrase of Beethoven’s Fifth — Da-da-da-dum, the same three shorts and a long that in Morse code meant the V, which made it a popular piece during the war — and saying the composer was Beethoven, we’d shout, Good for you, you idiot!Given our success rate with these game shows, we naturally considered offering ourselves as contestants. Langley did a little research as to how to go about it. Apparently there was a great demand for slots on these shows, and why not, as there was money to be made. One sent in a C.V. and had interviews and background checks, just as if the show was produced by the FBI. We gave ourselves a test listening to one half-hour show and we broke the bank. The trouble was, Langley said, that we were too smart. There would be no suspense. And Homer, these contestants who come on smiling like fools, they are an embarrassment. When they win something, they jump up and down like marionettes on a string. Would it be worth the money to you to carry on like that? No? I said. I agree, he said. It’s a matter of self-respect.And so we chose not to proceed. Of course I had some idea at the time that we were not sartorially typecast. He had told me the men predictably wore flannel suits and rep ties and crew cuts and women down-to-the-ankle skirts and blouses with big collars and bangy hairdos. Langley, who was now bald on top, had let the gray hair on the back of his head grow down to his shoulders. My own Lisztian fall from its center part was considerably thinned out. And our preferred dress was army greens and boots, leaving to the moths in the closets our old suits and blazers. We couldn’t have gotten past the front door.