Free Homer & Langley by E. L. Doctorow Page A

and even the Amsterdam News , for colored folks. To the effect that this good and pious woman had devoted her life to the service of others, and with her simple heart and passion for cleanliness she had enriched the lives of two generations of a grateful family.
But wait—I may be mistaken about the number of newspapers that ran Siobhan’s obituary, for by this time the World had merged with the Telegram , and the Journal had combined with the American and the Herald with the Tribune —mergers I rememberLangley reporting to me with some satisfaction as early signs of the inevitable contraction of all newspapers to one ultimate edition for all time of one newspaper, namely his.
Ours was the only car behind the hearse in the ride to Queens. We were to bury Siobhan in a vast hill-crawling necropolis of white marble crosses and winged angels cast in cement. Mrs. Robileaux, whom we had taken to calling Grandmamma in the manner of her grandson, Harold, sat in state next to me. For the occasion she wore a mothball-smelling stiff dress that crinkled as she moved and a hat whose broad brim kept slicing into the side of my head. She spoke of her fears for Harold, who was at this time back in New Orleans. He claimed in his letters that he was getting steady work playing the clubs, but she worried that he was making things out better than they really were so that she wouldn’t worry.
We were all in a somber mood. With the image of poor Siobhan in my mind, and remembering my trips to the Woodlawn Cemetery to bury my parents, I could only think of how easily people die. And then there was that feeling one gets in a ride to a cemetery trailing a body in a coffin—an impatience with the dead, a longing to be back home where one could get on with the illusion that not death but daily life is the permanent condition.
THE ITEM ABOUT US in the “what to do, where to go” section of one of the evening papers was the first sign of trouble: something to the effect of a high-class taxi dance on Fifth Avenuewhere you could rub shoulders with the upper crust. We didn’t know how the item got there. Langley said, These newspaper people are illiterate—how can one rub shoulders with an upper crust?
At the very next dance we had to close the doors with people still clamoring to get in. Those we had to turn away sat down on the stoop and milled about on the sidewalk. They were noisy. Naturally there followed complaints from the residences south of us: a letter of articulate disapproval, hand-delivered by someone’s butler, and an angry phone call from someone who would not give her name, although there may have been more than one phone call from more than one person. Indignation. Umbrage. The neighborhood going to seed. And of course there was the visitation one day of a policeman, though he seemed not to be acting on the complaints of our neighbors. He had his own amiable view of the problem.
Standing at the open door he brought a cold breeze in with him. He announced in rather formal tones that it was against the law to operate a commercial enterprise out of a residence on Fifth Avenue. Then his whiskeyed voice softened: But seeing as you are respectable folks, he said, I am inclined to overlook the matter for a kindly donation of, say, fifteen percent of the weekly monies to the Police Beneficiaries League.
Langley said he had never heard of the Police Beneficiaries League and asked what its work was.
The cop didn’t seem to hear. I leave the accounting to you in good faith, Mr. Coller, and I will come by of a Wednesdaymorning for the remittance and no questions asked, but with a floor of ten dollars.
Langley said: What do you mean “a floor”?
The cop: Well, sir, it would not be worth my time for anything less.
Langley: I understand that criminal matters in this city do press upon your time, Officer. But you see we don’t charge much for our tea dances, they are offered more in the nature of a public service. If we have forty couples of