Strivers Row (49 page)

Malcolm glanced back over his shoulder—the figures pursuing him now less than half a block away, derisively hooting something at him.
They would eat my bones,
he thought—then scooped up the box, which was surprisingly heavy, piled high with fruit that came tumbling out.

“Mind the oranges!” the white ghosty man snapped at him, even as he waved him onward, through a gap in the iron fence, and down a half flight of stairs to a basement door. There, with a key, he pried open a rusted iron gate, then a rotting, wooden-and-marble door. Pulling it open to reveal—a transom stuffed to the top with moldy old newspapers, and a descending tunnel burrowed through the middle. A terrible smell emanated from it, some combination of dust and cockroaches, of wet paper and wet plaster, and cat piss, and all the other, most awful smells of the City, mixed together.

“Quickly, quickly! They are almost upon us!” the white man's voice sounded behind him, his tone more annoyed than frightened.

Malcolm hesitated for another moment, the box in his hands still, looking back at the followers racing toward him. Then he took the plunge—sticking the box under his arm like a football and diving face-first, into the hole in the newspapers. He slid down into the darkness, yelping with terror all the way down to the floor. Going abruptly silent then as he tried to get his bearings in the nearly total darkness—listening to the sound of a thousand, tiny, constant rustlings all around him.

“Well, that was rather melodramatic,” the ghosty man said behind him, walking hunched over, down the hole Malcolm had dived through. Somehow keeping his balance in his high, gaitered shoes even along the slick newspapers. As he did, Malcolm could make out at least a dozen cockroaches the size of his thumb and what looked like several mice scuttling out of the piled papers, and he understood what the sound of all that rustling was.

“Like something out of a blood-and-thunder down at Hurtig and Seamon's. Still, at least you got the point in time,” the ghosty man continued, lighting what looked like a miner's lamp near Malcolm's feet as he spoke.

He held it up, and for the first time Malcolm could see the extent of the vast, yellowed cave he was in. In its moldy airlessness, it felt like the drawings of King Tut's tomb that had once fascinated him in the Sunday supplements. The stacks of newspapers all around him were as dense and symmetrical as stonework. They reached to the ceiling, armies of roaches and silverfish crawling lackadaisically over them until Malcolm felt his skin crawl. And just beyond them was—everything.

There were piles of boxes and egg crates, and scraps of old wood. There were empty baby carriages, and twisted old bicycles with flattened tires, and crumbling leather seats. There were heaps of shoelaces, and balls of string, and blown-out umbrellas, and broken sawhorses. There was a crib, and boxes of shiny toy trains, still unopened, and a wooden school desk with the initials “H.C.” carved in it over and over again. There was a towering grandfather clock, and an old-fashioned phonograph with a horn, and a sewing machine. And an X-ray machine, and a Magneto-Electric machine, and a monstrous, glass-and-metal cabinet full of balls and cranks and bells that the man called a static machine. And there was a small rowboat, with oars, and an entire, neatly disassembled car—all of its parts laid out as if they were about to be lifted onto an assembly line and wrenched together.

“My father's Model T,” the man told Malcolm apologetically. “I keep meaning to put it together.”

“Why?” Malcolm asked.

The man looked taken aback. “So we could generate our own electricity, of course.”

“You could do that?”

“Certainly! I have degrees in chemistry and mechanical engineering from Columbia University!”

“What about the boat?” Malcolm asked.

“My father used to carry it on his head every day to the Harlem River, then row it down to Bellevue Hospital, where he had his practice. He was the finest gynecologist in New York in his day!”

He bowed slightly to Malcolm, though he kept his hands at his sides.

“I am Mr. Langley Collyer,” he said formally.

“I know,” Malcolm told him, and the ghosty man looked surprised at first, then slyly pleased.

“My celebrity precedes me!” he proclaimed—and began to chatter at Malcolm in a long string of words, nearly as overwhelming as all the junk. Picking up the miner's lamp and starting off through the dense maze of the ghost house as he spoke, gesturing at Malcolm to take up the box and follow.

“Our family is one of the oldest and most distinguished in New York, you know. The first Collyer came over from England on the
Speedwell
, which was really better than the
Mayflower
. My mother and father were cousins of the Livingstons. Mother used to read us Greek in the original. As a matter of fact, I have a smattering of that language myself—”

“What all's in the box?” Malcolm asked, in part just to stop the dizzying flow of words. Holding it up close to his nose to try to block out the awful, tomblike stench, breathing in the same citrus tang that he had noticed emanating from Langley Collyer the last time they had met.

“Oranges, and meat for my brother. Milk, wine. Fresh-baked, whole wheat bread I walked over to Williamsburg to buy today—”

“Williamsburg—in
Brooklyn
?” Malcolm asked, still hazy about the geography of the vast City.

“Certainly! An invigorating walk! Keeps the system circulating. As a matter of fact, I had just returned when I saw you—”

“Why did you help me?” Malcolm asked him.

“Oh, I know what they can do,” he said. “I have seen people held up right under that old elm tree out there. I've peered out at night through the shutters, and seen them stabbed and robbed!”

He shook his head bitterly as he led them onto a flight of stairs.

“These terrible people. They break my windows, and pour rubbish in my yard. They make my life miserable. They call me
Spook
, and say I drag dead bodies into the house after dark—”

He interrupted himself with an emphatic “
Stop!
,” pressing a hand back against Malcolm's chest. Malcolm obliged, though he couldn't see any reason why they should. But then Langley pointed down at the stairs, toward a thin line of metal wire that Malcolm could make out only when he stared at it intently. He pointed back up at the stairway ceiling above them, then—where Malcolm could discern a jumble of pots and pans and enormous cannery jars, packed full of what looked, incredibly, like urine and feces, hovering precariously on a shelf just above him.

“You see? I've booby-trapped the place against these people,” Langley said gleefully, leading Malcolm carefully over the tripwire, the pans and jars of excrement jangling faintly against each other in the stillness.

“Maybe they can still get in—but they won't get out!”

They traveled on up to the higher floors, which were just as dark and gloomy, and infernally hot in the summer night. Here, too, every window was blocked up with more towering piles of newspapers, the rooms piled chockablock with junk. As they proceeded, a gentle snow of papers drifted continuously down on them. Malcolm simply brushed them away at first, only half aware of what they even were, just wanting them off him. But after a while he began to examine them in the flickering light from Langley's lantern, staring at each of them in turn, trying to decipher just what they were, and why anyone would want to keep them.

There were yellowed photographs of women in old-fashioned bathing suits, smiling boldly into the camera, and an advertisement for cognac, from Flegenheimer Brothers in the Bronx. There was a program for
The Magic Flute
, at the Metropolitan Opera from February 27, 1914; and a certificate of merit for punctuality and good conduct, awarded to Langley Collyer at Public School 69, on April 19, 1895; and a handful of tickets to the annual excursion of the Trinity Church Sunday School for Saturday, July 8, 1905. There were even sheets that had no writing on them at all that Malcolm could make out, only tiny bumps that moved like goose flesh under his touch.

“Braille sheets, for when Homer was going blind,” Langley explained without being asked, glancing back over his shoulder. “Of course, he could have learned it. But then, with the rheumatism, we decided I should just read to him instead.”

As they climbed up through the building, Malcolm slowly realized that many of the rooms were organized by objects. One was filled completely with grounded gas chandeliers; another with framed weapons—pistols, shotguns, rifles, a bayonet, a sword. In one room he counted thirteen different mantel clocks, including one that was a metal bust of a maiden, with coins still dropping mechanically from her ears and chest—the metallic, ticking sound unnerving in the otherwise still room. In another there were piles of musical instruments, pipe organs, and a trombone; a cornet, and an accordion, and a clavichord, and five violins piled on top of each other, the whole edifice wheezing and sighing as they went past.

The eeriest room of all was one crowded with old Christmas trees—half of them still strewn with strips of tinsel and balls, their brittle, dried-out needles raining down on the floor as Malcolm walked through. But everywhere, in every room, there were pianos—pianos of every conceivable kind, grands and baby grands, and boxes and uprights.

“We own fourteen of them, including one that Queen Victoria herself gave my mother,” Langley said proudly, running his fingers over the keys of a baby grand, but too lightly to make any sound.

“A lovely tone, that one!”

“You play piano?” Malcolm asked him.

“Oh, I haven't touched any of them in a long, long time. When I did play, though, I won ten grand prizes. I could play twenty-five hundred different pieces from memory! None of this modern nonsense, mind you—”

“Why don't you play anymore?”

Langley stared bleakly back at him. “My last concert was at Carnegie Hall. Paderewski followed me. He got better notices than I did. What was the use of going on?”

He led Malcolm into what seemed like a large front room, although he was too disoriented by now to have any very good idea of where he was. When Langley Collyer held up the lantern, he could see that this room, alone, had some swaths of empty floor space. Yet every inch of the walls was filled with great, fat books, covered in mats of dust. The dust was so thick that it fell away intact in the molds of the book spines when Malcolm swiped at a few shelves nearest him. Revealing the rich, brown and blue and red leather covers underneath, the gold-stamped titles all Roman numerals and the word
LAW—LAW—LAW
, repeated over and over again in the dust.

“Don't touch those!” Langley thundered at him. “Those belong to my brother, Homer, and he will want to use them again when he gets his sight back and renews his practice. It is the finest library on admiralty law in existence! My family have always had an interest in the water, you know. My great-grandfather, William Collyer, owned the largest shipyard on the East River waterfront. Our people built the finest steamboats on the Hudson—”

He went on and on, talking about the greatest this and the best that, while he led Malcolm deeper through the tunnels catacombing the house. Malcolm had begun to wonder if his brother Homer really existed at all, despite the fact that he had heard Jakey Mendelssohn say there were two of them.
Has anyone really seen him?
he thought. But just then they came out into a kitchen, with a kerosene lamp burning in one corner. Sitting there on a cot in front of them, with his knees doubled up to his chin, was the oldest, most tortured-looking human being Malcolm had ever seen.

He was dressed in a frayed gray nightshirt that reached down to his ankles, a burlap bag and an old great coat the only covering on his cot. His body was emaciated, his skin was the same larval white color as Langley's, though his hair and beard were much longer, and matted and tangled in knots. He sat so still on the cot that Malcolm wondered if he was actually dead—until his jaw dropped down, and he cried out in a mournful, wailing voice.

“Langley! Langley, is that you? Who is that with you? Another one of those intrusive police officers? I am Homer L. Collyer, the lawyer. I want your name and shield number!”

“Why your knees up at your chin like that?” Malcolm asked.

“My legs are doubled up with rheumatism. I can never lie down again,” Homer Collyer told him more matter-of-factly then. “Langley, who have you brought home?”

“
They
were after him—outside,” Langley explained, going over to his brother. He tucked the coat up over his shoulders, then set to work piling the oranges on the kitchen table, where he peeled and quartered them.

“Oh, those terrible people!” Homer tsked. “When our father bought this house, Harlem was a wonderful neighborhood. The millionaires of the City used to pace their trotters up and down Lenox Avenue. They played the finest music at Pabst's Restaurant on 125th Street! Ladies went calling in their Victorias! Look at what's happened to it now.”

“When's the last time you went out?” Malcolm asked.

“My brother lost his sight nine years ago,” Langley said, bringing the oranges over to Homer, who began to pick at them with surprising delicacy. “We decided that Homer will rest his eyes, and eat one hundred oranges a week, until his sight returns.”

Homer seemed to smile—his mouth a tangled, orange maw— and popped in another section.

“I believe it's already improving!”

Langley went over and lit a small kerosene stove that rested on top of the huge, black iron stove, bolted to the wall. He put a small piece of skirt steak into a frying pan and began cooking it up, the smell of frying meat temporarily dousing the overpowering stench of body odor, and mildew and dust that pervaded the kitchen—even if there was an alarming, new rush of unseen roach scuttlings that made Malcolm's stomach turn over.