BEING TIED UP AND unable to move leads one to reflect. The fact was that thugs had broken into our home and taken it over and not once had we offered any resistance.We had befriended the family, sitting with them and having coffee, I feeling sorry for Massimo — but how was that anything but propitiation? The more I thought about it the worse I felt. At no time did they consider us worth shooting.The rope around my arms and chest seemed to be tightening with my every breath. I was ashamed, furious with myself. We could have played some kind of trick, suggested that Vincent was dying. These morons wouldn’t have known the difference. I might have persuaded them to let me leave and find a doctor.I listened to the ticking of the kitchen clock. A sense of the futility of life rose in my gorge as an overwhelming despair. Here we were, the Collyer brothers, totally humiliated, absolutely helpless.And then Langley cleared his throat and spoke as follows. I remember what he said as if it was yesterday: Homer, you were too young at the time to be aware of it, but one summer our mother and father took us to a kind of religious resort on a lake somewhere upstate. We lived in a Victorian manse with wraparound porches on the first and second floors. And in the whole community every house was like that — Victorians with shade porches and cupolas and rocking chairs on the porches. And each house was painted a different color. Does any of this ring a bell? No? People got around on bicycles. Every morning began with a prayer breakfast in the community dining room. Every afternoon there were merry sing-alongs led by a banjo band of men in straw boaters and red-and-white-striped jackets. “Down by the Old Mill Stream.” “Heart of My Heart.” “You Are My Sunshine.” The children were kept busy — potato-sack races, classes in raffia weaving and soap carving — and down at the lake the community fire engine had the nozzle of its water cannon aimed at the sky so that we could run under the spray shrieking and laughing. Every afternoon with the sun beginning to set over the hills a paddle steamer came down the lake with hoots and whistles. In the evenings there were concerts or lectures on worthy subjects. Everyone was happy. Everyone was friendly. You couldn’t walk a few steps without being greeted with big smiles. And I tell you, I had never in my young life been so terrified. Because what could the purpose of such a place be but to persuade people that this was what Heaven would be like? What other purpose than to give an inkling of the joys of eternal life? I was young enough to think there was such a thing as Heaven … to imagine myself spending eternity with the banjo band in their straw boaters and striped jackets, to think I might someday be stuck there among all these imbecilic happy people praying and singing and being educated in worthy subjects. And to see my own parents embracing this hideously unproblematic existence, this life of continuous and unrelenting happiness so as to indoctrinate me to a life of virtue? Homer, that dismal summer is when I realized our mother and father would inevitably fail all my expectations of them. And I made a vow: I would do whatever it might take to avoid going to Heaven. Only when, just a few years later, it became clear to me that there was no Heaven was a heavy weight lifted from my shoulders. Why do I tell you this? I tell you this because to be a man in this world is to face the hard real life of awful circumstance, to know there is only life and death and such varieties of human torment as to confound any such personage as God. And so that is affirmed here, isn’t it? To find the Collyer brothers tied up, helpless and humiliated by a vulgar brute? This is one of life’s own speechless sermons, isn’t it? And if God is there after all, we should thank Him for reminding us of His hideous creation and dispelling any residual hope we might have had for an afterlife of fatuitous happiness in His presence.Langley was always able to lift my dark moods from me.
ALL RIGHT, I SAID, then this is just something else to deal with. Let’s get to it.We were tied to the ladder-back Shaker chairs with rush seats that were my mother’s choice to go with the big farm table that Vincent had used as a bed, itself an outrage as I thought about it. It was no use struggling against the clothesline webbed and knotted round our arms and in and out of the back slats. But I had noticed that the legs of my chair wobbled a bit as I moved from side to side. These chairs are older than we are, I said.Right, Langley said. When I say three, throw yourself to the left. We’ll go down. Watch your head.And so that’s what we did — heaved ourselves over and when we crashed to the floor the back of my chair broke apart and suddenly the clothesline was loose enough for me to twist around and slip out of the loops and untie Langley.There was great satisfaction in accomplishing this maneuver. We staggered to our feet, brushed ourselves off, and shook hands.
THIS WAS IN THE early autumn of the year. It was still quite warm, and so by way of enjoying our liberation we went out and sat on the bench directly across the street under the old tree whose branches reached out over the park wall. It felt good to be outside. Even the fumes of a passing Fifth Avenue bus smelled good. I heard some birdsong, then someone walking a dog, a big dog by the clicking sound of its paws on the pavement. I sat back on the bench and tilted my face toward the sky. Never had normal ordinary life in the out-of-doors been so delicious.Langley appraised the condition of our house. The lintels over the second-floor windows, he said. Chipped away here and there. And the cornice, chunks of it missing. I don’t know when that happened. And there’s some sort of filthy bird’s nest tucked in one of the gaps. Well why not birds, he said. Home to the world. Thieving servants, government agents, crime families, wives …Only one wife, I said.One’s enough.We discussed going to the police but of course we would never do that. Self-reliance, Langley said, quoting the great American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. We don’t need help from anyone. We will keep our own counsel. And defend ourselves. We’ve got to stand up to the world — we’re not free if it’s at someone else’s sufferance.And so we sat there for some time in philosophical reflection and let the shock of the experience wear away in the warm autumn afternoon with Central Park at our backs and the image of its composed natural green world filling my mind.
WHEN WE WERE tied up in those chairs Vincent had crumpled up a couple of hundred-dollar bills and thrown them down at Langley’s feet, like to a beggar. I thought we used the money well by ordering in from a lumber supply house heavy louvered shutters custom fitted to the front windows. Langley had them painted black. We also had the front door bolted with steel brackets and a two-by-four cross brace. This would encourage us to ask who was there before we opened the door.But the shutters seemed to be a signal of some significance to the real estate profession. Brokers were drawn to our house as birds to a feeder. Their knockings on the door and presumptuously cheerful hellos became a daily occurrence. Most of the time they were women. And when we stopped answering they took to dropping their cards and brochures through the mail slot. And then someone, probably one of those same real estate agents, had tried to phone us and, receiving a perpetually busy number, reported that to the phone company. And so telephone repairmen appeared, and there were further poundings on the door and shouts from us that we didn’t want any. Since the day Langley had ripped the phone out, neither of us had felt the need to be reconnected. And even as the phone company should have known from their repair department that the phone was already out of service, they sent letters threatening to disconnect us if we didn’t pay the ever increasing past-due bills. Langley thanked them, saying we were already disconnected but eventually we had to deal with a collection agency, the first of several representing creditors with whom Langley’s battles were to achieve a kind of notoriety.My brother and I conferred. He had understood my uneasiness with the perpetual darkness in the house. You would think that wouldn’t matter to me, but I had found myself gravitating to the back rooms, whose windows still looked out. I could tell daylight from darkness by the varying temperatures or even by scent, darkness smelling one way and light another. So I had not been entirely happy with our self-reliance. My Aeolian didn’t like the darkness either, its tonal quality seemed to have changed, it was more muted, less declarative, as if it had found itself muffled in the gloom.And so, what with one thing and another, we threw open the shutters and, for a while, we would again be windowed on the world.