Homer Collyer took care of the funeral arrangements. It was not entirely unexpected, when Mother passed, and her funeral arrangements seemed like a simple and manageable task compared to the inheritance. Homer knew that he and his brother Langley would still be dealing with all they’d inherited long after they’d dealt with the grief surrounding their mother’s death.
It was a strange, detached sort of grief. Six years ago, their father had died, and four years before that, their parents had moved, leaving Homer and Langley the family brownstone in Harlem. Although he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the arrangement, Homer tried to see the house for what it was intended to be: a gift. Their father and mother had chosen to leave instead of coaxing the brothers out of the nest, and it seemed unnatural, the parents moving on and the children staying in the family home. But that’s what happened and Homer was, for the most part, grateful.
A not-insignificant part of him, though, resented the “gift.” The two-story brownstone apartment was in the heart of Harlem, and Harlem wasn’t what it used to be. Maybe that’s why his parents had chosen to leave, rather than the other way around. They didn’t have the heart to watch the neighborhood they loved so much devolve into this crime-riddled, rat-infested borough. Perhaps it was stubbornness that kept the Collyer brothers in Harlem, but Homer felt a sort of pride in staying put. As if he and Langley were two tall trees in a flood, clinging firm to the ground and watching as the changing world rushed by. He didn’t resent his parents for moving, but the estate they’d left behind was becoming a burden.
The Collyers weren’t rich by any means, but they owned a few valuable pieces of art and loved music. Homer was sure they would have room for the paintings, the musical instruments, and the gramophones. Their father had been a gynecologist at Bellevue Hospital, and though eccentric, was quite respected among his colleagues. When he wasn’t at the hospital or at home, Dr. Collyer could often be seen walking from Harlem to the East River holding a canoe above his head. He liked to paddle down the river to Blackwell Island where he was a consultant of sorts. The canoe, also, would have to come.
It was this process of cataloging their belongings that Homer dreaded most. It seemed like an insurmountable project; a house full of a lifetime of possessions suddenly—though not unexpectedly—made utterly irrelevant. It hurt his head to contemplate what amongst his mother and father’s things should be kept, what should be sold, what should be thrown out. Their father had been restoring an old Model T, and Good Lord there were all those books. He’d leave it to Langley.
Langley was looking forward to cleaning out the new house—as he called it—on West 77th. Dr. and Mrs. Collyer had only been living there ten years, and yet they’d managed to build quite a collection in that time. The musical instruments were the first things Langley saw to. In just over a week, the movers had managed to haul all twelve pianos and two organs from the new house into the one in Harlem. With the two pianos that had remained at home, that would make a total of fourteen. In the first load, he’d also packed the violins, the clavichord, and the horns. It was incredibly reassuring to Langley knowing that the family instruments were all in one place again. Adding to Langley’s own engineering texts, his father’s medical books were the next things to go, filling out the library downstairs. He was fairly sure he could get the Model T running again, the furniture would come of course, the gun collection was likely quite valuable, and it seemed a shame to get rid of the tapestries. It wasn’t long before Langley too, was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of stuff left to go through. All of a sudden, he couldn’t bear to part with a single piece, drenched as it all was in their parents’ memory; more or less on a whim, he decided to pack up the lot.
Every day Langley looked out his window, he could see that the neighborhood’s once-refined sensibilities were crumbling and giving way to the rats. The Collyers weren’t like that, and although he truly believed that a man was more than what he owned, he was proud of what they had and he felt it set them apart from the rest. Now that their neighbors were mostly gone, Langley took it upon himself to remember what it once meant to have an address on Fifth Avenue. He knew he was clinging to the past, but considering the state of things outside, he didn’t see anything wrong with that.