Free Homer & Langley by E. L. Doctorow

rooms for dancing. Langley handled the turntable in the dining room, I took on the chores in the parlor, and, until Langley figured out how to wire everything with speakers so that one record player could be heard in the three rooms, he hired a man on a day-to-day basis to run things in the drawing room. Mrs. Robileaux tended the sherry bar and held out the salvers of her home-baked cookies to the customers sitting along the walls.
I had learned easily enough to set the record on the turntable without bumbling around and to put the needle in the groove just where it needed to be. I was pleased to be making a contribution. It was a special experience for me to be doing something that people were willing to pay for.
But there were lessons to be learned. Whenever I happened to play one of the livelier numbers, the dancers would leave the floor. Anything fast and happy, and they would sit right down. I would hear the chairs scraping. I said to Langley, The people who come to our tea dance have no fight left in them. They are not interested in having a good time. They come here to hold each other. That’s basically what they want to do, hold one another and drift around the room.
How can you be so sure about each and every couple? Langleysaid. But I had listened to the sound of their dancing. They shuffled about with a sinuous somnolent shushing. They made a strange otherworldly sound. Their preferred music was vaporous and slow, especially as it was played by some bad English swing orchestra with a lot of violins. In fact, what with one thing or another I had come to regard our Tuesday tea dances as occasions for public mourning. Even the Communist who stood at the foot of the front steps to pass out his flyers couldn’t rouse up our tea dancers. Langley said he was a little guy, a kid with thick eyeglasses and a pouch full of Marxist tracts. I could hear the fellow—he was a damn nuisance with his abrasive voice. You don’t own the sidewalk, he said, the sidewalk is for the people! He wouldn’t budge but it didn’t matter, he still had no luck handing out his flyers. The couples who came to our dance in their shiny suits and frayed collars, their threadbare coats and limp dresses, were the very capitalist exploiters he wanted to rise up and overthrow themselves.
Only Langley, the ultimate journalist, finally took some of the kid’s Communist reading matter, in this case the Daily Worker , their newspaper, which you couldn’t always find on a newsstand, and the minute he did that the kid apparently felt he’d accomplished his mission, for he strode away and never showed up at another of our tea dances.
Of course they weren’t to last that much longer anyway.
THE HEAVY HOUSEWORK that went along with our enterprise was indeed too much for poor Siobhan. When she didn’t comedown from her room one morning Mrs. Robileaux went up to see what was the matter and found the poor woman dead in her bed, a rosary wound around her fingers.
Siobhan had no relatives that we knew of, and there were no letters in her bureau drawer, nothing to indicate she’d had a life outside our house. But we did find her savings bankbook. Three hundred and fifty dollars, a tidy sum in those days unless you understood these were her life savings after more than thirty years’ employment with our family. She did have her church, of course, St. Agnes on the West Side in the Fifties, and they took care of the obsequies for us. The priest there accepted Siobhan’s bankbook, whose sums, he said, could be designated for the church’s expenses after the State had gone through its usual rigmarole.
By way of atonement Langley placed paid obituaries in every single paper in the city, not only the majors like the Telegram and the Sun and the Evening Post and the Tribune , the Herald , the World , the Journal , the Times , the American , the News , and the Mirror , but in the Irish Echo and the outlying papers, like the Brooklyn Eagle and the Bronx Home News