My Brother's Keeper

by Marcia Davenport

  John Holt had been there beside the bed for over an hour, trying to calm Lily and induce her to stop sobbing. He had never known her to cry so; it seemed as if her sobs must rip her lungs to pieces. He had pleaded and soothed, cajoled, caressed, and whispered all the tender words and phrases he knew, but the shuddering and heaving, the great gasping sobs continued. On the marble-topped stand at his elbow there were sal volatile, a vinaigrette, and a bowl of ice-water out of which he wrung folded handkerchiefs to bathe her swollen face. He tried clumsily to hold the cold compresses over her red, streaming eyes, but she turned and tossed too much, rolling over to lie on her face and weep into the pillows. He stroked the back of her neck, put his cheek down on her matted curls, and whispered another plea to try to be quiet. “You must,” he said, “dearest, darling Lily, please try to stop crying.”

  Gradually the fit-like gasping subsided. John sat down on the edge of the high-headed walnut bed, and lifted up his wife so that she lay with her face hidden against his waistcoat. “That’s better,” he whispered. “That’s a good girl. You’re feeling better now.” He ignored the frantic shaking of her head. “Oh, yes you are,” he said in an artificial, soothing tone which made him feel clumsy and foolish whether it reassured her or not. “You’re feeling much better.”

  But she shook her head violently. “No!” she said. She twisted herself up and looked straight at him. Her poor pretty face was raddled and puffed, her curly bangs all gone to strings round her forehead. “Take me away, John,” she said. Her eyes were heartrending. He felt as if he had punished an innocent small animal. “You must take me away. Away from her.”

  “Try to be quiet now,” he whispered, kissing her.

  She pulled herself up and sat, bracing herself with her hands. “It’s no use to talk like that,” she said, gasping between the words. “You must promise me now.” She stared so hard at him with her reddened, glassy eyes that he felt cowardly for looking away; but he could not look into her eyes. He sat gazing dully at the dark, heavily-furnished room dimly lighted by a single gas-jet above the rosewood bureau. “You’ve promised me before,” she said. “Many times. You’ve put me off that way. Haven’t you?”

  He bent his head and she sat watching the dark blush which swept slowly to his forehead. He kept his eyes on his hands which were gripped together on his knees. He felt his wife’s cold fingers closing upon the sides of his face. She leaned forward and said slowly, gasping less now, “It’s true and you know it. You promised to take me away. When will you do it, John? When?”

  She watched his face. All these things he had just said, all his pleading, echoed in her mind. “Anything,” he had said, begging her to stop crying. “Whatever it is, but please, darling … please, Lily… .” And now she watched his face and saw it troubled, irresolute, abashed. An older woman, wiser, and longer a wife would have seen and become resigned to the hopeless truth. But she was twenty-eight and he was forty-seven.

  She shook his head a little between her hands, and her voice turned shrill to force his attention. “Why don’t you take me away, John? Why did you promise?”

  “I shouldn’t have.”

  “But why? You know we can’t go on like this. Why?”

  He had no answer. Lily was trembling in little starts, still breathing unevenly. “Why can’t we have the house you promised me, all to ourselves?”

  “—not easy to understand,” she heard him mutter.

  “But I have to know! You’ve got to tell me. Why can’t we just—just leave?”

  “Money,” he murmured, still avoiding her eyes.

  “But you’re rich. Father told me so.” She was artless.

  “Mother is. It’s hers, you see. And she told me, I mean she made me—”

  He felt Lily’s hands stiffen against his head and then fall heavily away. He raised his eyes, prompted by uneasy shame, and saw her face turn pale, her eyes grow round and wide. “Oh,” she breathed. “Oh. You promised her first, you promised her long ago. You said you’d never leave her, you said we’d all live with her. John!” she cried in a voice of pure terror, “how could you do such a thing?”

  He could not answer, he sat silent. Lily raised her hands to her temples and pushed back the tangles of her hair, eyeing him with fear and bewilderment. “You did that,” she breathed. “You did that to me and those little boys.” He felt her trembling; she was shaken by long, slow tremors quite different from her mindless hysteria of before. He raised his head and saw that she had begun to weep again, but in a manner altogether different, without violence and without sound. Her eyes remained wide and staring, and from them there rolled large tears, sliding one after the other slowly down her cheeks. He saw with pain that this was her defeat; there would be no more storms of useless protest. She sat drawn away from him, weeping, with her square white hands cupped piteously in her lap. He turned his head slowly away.

  “You knew you were doing this,” she whispered. “You knew it and you lied to me and you’ve lied all these years. You never told the truth until now. I never knew you were cruel,” she breathed, speaking the words with slow spaces between them. Amazement and revulsion began to contort her face. “Cruel—oh! ” She raised the back of her left hand to her eyes as if to shut out the sight of him.

  “Oh, Lily, no! No! ” He tried to take her other hand but she shook him off. They both shrank as they heard a tap at the door.

  “What is it?” asked John roughly.

  The waitress stood there. “If you please, sir, Mrs. Holt sends word it is past dinner-time. She is waiting in the drawing-room.”

  “Tell her we are sorry, Nora. Mrs. John is not well and will not be down for dinner. Ask my mother not to wait for me.”

  The door closed and John Holt watched Lily turn away in dull revulsion. She lay down quietly on her left side, with her back towards him. He sat confused and wretched and uncertain. What did one do, what could one do, in such a situation? Without a penny of one’s own, how could one buy or even rent a proper house for a family like his? He had never made money, he had never seen the need to do so, his mother had held that a gentleman should not. His stipend as the least of the partners of his old-fashioned law firm could not meet a fraction of what it would cost to maintain his family by himself. His mother had always managed everything, as well she might between her own ample fortune and her outright life tenure of her husband’s money. John’s father had died when his son was a child. And only now, with sudden perverse surprise, did the son dare ask himself how such a state of things could have come about. Would it not have been more natural for his father to have arranged that he receive his inheritance on coming of age? Why this? And what—John Holt felt almost dizzy with the unfamiliar sensation of inquiring coldly into the hitherto unquestioned—could his mother have done to assure his father’s making such a will?

  His mother had taken good care that he should never find out. All his life he had accepted her rule. He had not failed to see that others found it harsh, but she had been good to him within the narrow confines she allowed. Not until his marriage had he ever overstepped them and perhaps not even now, except for Lily’s terrible distress, would he have had the resolution to rebel. But his mother had made the error of driving him to a choice. He made it, with a sense of purpose so unfamiliar as to feel extraordinary. He leaned forward and put his hand on Lily’s shoulder.

  “Lily dear,” he said. She twitched away. “No, please. Listen to me, dear. I’ve got to tell you something.”

  “I won’t believe it,” she said, her voice like lead.

  “You must.”

  “You’ll tell me you will take us away. John, I can’t believe you,” she said, flinging her arm across her eyes.

  “I know, I know, I don’t deserve to be believed. I’ve been—I was weak, Lily. But I’ve made up my mind now. Truly I mean it.”

  “And when will we go?” she asked. “How will you get the money?”

  He did not dare say that he did not know. Also he did not want to
lie to her again—not that he had ever intentionally lied, but words came too easily when it was not going to be possible to implement them.

  “I’ll change my work,” he said. This had never occurred to him before. And having said it he felt bathed in relief, for he knew that he had not blurted out something he could not live up to. “I’ll get a partnership in another firm, some newer one.” (The sort of firm his mother would call ‘upstarts,’ he thought.) “I don’t have to stay with Wright and Pettengill.”

  Lily turned slowly, rolling her slight body across the wide mattress until she lay on her right side, facing him. Her cheeks did not seem in the dim gaslight so waxen pale as a little while ago. Perhaps she had taken heart, he thought. She looked at him and presently said, “Do you really mean it, John?”

  “Oh, I do. Believe me.” He bent over to touch her with his lips. “I can’t bear the way I’ve made you suffer—”

  The door was flung open behind them. They both jumped, tense, Lily with a sharp gasp.

  “John!” Mrs. Holt stood in the doorway, her stiff black taffeta gown sharp and bulky as a monument in the gaslight from the hall. “You are an hour late for dinner.”

  Lily’s hand closed on his arm as if to tell him not to rise to his feet. He had not intended to do so. He said, “I am sorry, Mother. I sent word by Nora that Lily is not well.”

  “She was perfectly well this afternoon, quite well enough to play the piano. She can—”

  “She is not well now.”

  “What is the matter with her?”

  “I think you can see for yourself, Mother. Lily is upset.”

  “She has brought that on herself. You spoil her and indulge this nonsense with your pampering. There is nothing the matter with her.”

  John held Lily closer in his left arm and said, “In any case, she does not want any dinner. And I asked you not to wait for me.”

  “I will decide when I wish to dine.”

  “Very well, Mother, but I am not coming down this evening. Nora can bring me up a cup of soup or something.”

  “I give the orders in my house, John.”

  He felt Lily cringe against his shoulder. “Just as you say, Mother. It doesn’t matter, I am not hungry at all. Please don’t wait dinner for me any longer.”

  Mrs. Holt turned as if to leave the room, but stopped again. He had known that she would. She said, “I want to see you in the library, John.”

  “Not this evening, Mother, please. I don’t want to leave Lily.”

  Even in shadow he could see the angry tightening of his mother’s jaw. He could hear her loud, almost whistling breathing, reflected in the sharp rise and fall of her bosom as she stood silhouetted against the lighted hallway. “I am shocked,” she said, in her hardest, coldest tone. “Shocked at your disloyalty. To me and to your home.”

  “It is all very regrettable, Mother, but it cannot be much of a surprise. Only this afternoon I tried to tell you that we will have to go away and live in a house of our own. I have promised Lily that we shall.”

  “You have promised? On the strength of what, may I ask?” The old woman’s scorn should have confounded him, but instead he found himself stimulated by the surprising thought that she sounded rather ridiculous. It struck him that he had been listening all his life to remarks which he might have heard in some set, stagey drama at Daly’s. Lily clasped there in his arm gave him warmth and courage. Perhaps it was true, as he had often heard and read and never dared to prove, that one strong assertion could dispel the power of a bully. His mother did not wait for his answer, as if to show by her contempt that she knew he could not have one. She only said, “Let Lily find out what your promises are worth,” and shut the door behind her with a thud.

  The little boys sat up stiffly at table as they had been taught to do, Seymour on Grandmama’s right and Randall, perched on a volume of the Encyclopaedia, on her left. Their soft fair hair, Seymour’s straight and Randall’s curly, was sleek and a little damp from Nana’s brushing, when she had washed their hands and faces and straightened their clothes and re-tied their full necktie bows before sending them downstairs for Sunday dinner. From her place between Randall and John at the head of the table Lily watched the children thoughtfully and wondered whether they were too young to sense that this Sunday was different from all the others which had preceded it in the rigid ritual that had been fixed by Mrs. Holt years before John Holt could first remember.

  Sunday never varied. It began with a heavy pancake breakfast, followed by the ceremonial drive to St. George’s, where the family pew was the scene of a discipline military in its precision and its alert obedience to the silent commands of its head. Mrs. Holt did not hold with any such nonsense as having small children slipped out and taken home before the sermon. They sat, heads up, hands folded, no fidgetting, inhumanly controlled. Church over, there followed the lengthy rite of greeting the Rector at the door and one’s friends in the porch and on the pavement, as the families stood waiting in their bulky finery for their carriages to roll up one by one, and carry them home to their enormous midday dinners. The traditional menu might vary from one house to another, but within each sacred enclave it was almost certain to remain unchanged every Sunday of the year. The Holts ate a thick soup and roast beef with mashed potatoes and a sweet chosen expressly for the children, since this was the only meal of the week which they ate with their elders. Lily who loathed all milk puddings had suffered through years of Caramel Custard or Floating Island, which she was not permitted to refuse: Mrs. Holt commanded that she set an example to the boys who were required to eat everything that was put before them.

  How different life would be, and, Lily dared to trust at last, how soon! In the short space of little more than a day she had built up a whole world in imagination, whose details were so clear to her that this morning as she sat watching her little boys suffer in church, she had resolved suddenly to move her family from St. George’s as soon as they moved from Mrs. Holt’s house. They would attend her own family’s church, the Ascension, which she had scarcely entered since her marriage there, for Mrs. Holt had made that quite impossible since the death of Lily’s parents. Perhaps if Eugene Randall had not lost his money and left his daughter a person not worth having married… had Lily really overheard Mrs. Holt say some such thing or was her imagination at work to help her through the ordeal of Sunday dinner?

  She smiled at her silent, wide-eyed little boys. They looked much alike, but Seymour’s face was longer than Randall’s and showed already the length of jaw and upper lip which was the basis of the strong resemblance between John Holt and his mother. Randall’s face was rounder and its softer contours, the wider cheekbones and the slightly cleft chin, were more a likeness to Lily than the mere unformed outlines of babyhood. Lily still thought and spoke of Randall as Baby, though he was past four, and Mrs. Holt had lately been reproving her for this. It was a habit difficult to break, for when Lily looked at Randall, she was seized by a sense of passionate tenderness evoked by the sight of his soft white neck fringed with delicate golden curls at the nape. She watched him carefully putting into his mouth spoonfuls of the cut-up roast beef, the potato, and the vegetables which had been prepared for him. He had a small appetite and sometimes there was trouble if he did not want to finish his food. Lily thought with ecstasy that after tomorrow when John should start to put his new decisions into effect, her children would begin to be her own. Soon they would be settled in their own house, away and safe from Mrs. Holt; Lily herself would sit at the foot of her own table with her sons on either side of her and her husband at the head. She could hardly dare to believe it true, but all of yesterday had gone into making plans with John, who had scarcely left her side since Friday night when the miracle, as she thought of it, had happened. It was not that she had really doubted his devotion before, only that fear and suspense and disappointment had made her feel as if she had. Even today, quite sure at last that John meant to carry out his plans, it seemed beyond belief that she was t
o be freed from her sufferings. In church she had fervently thanked God, she had whispered into her gloved hands a spontaneous torrent of gratitude.

  “May I carve more beef for you, Mother?” asked John.

  “No thank you.” Mrs. Holt’s voice was low and curt.

  “Lily?”

  “No, dear.” She gave her husband a tender smile to tell him that she was too happy to have much appetite.

  There was silence again. Nora came, with her heavy tread and her sullen face, to remove the platter in front of John and change the plates. The children watched her, their eyes round and solemn. When they had finished their caramel pudding, eagerly spooning up the last drops of brown syrup from their plates, their grandmother sat for a moment as if to reimpose the full force of her authority on her family. Then she rose from her chair with a sweep of black skirts and led the silent procession in file up the stairs from the basement dining-room to the drawing-room on the floor above. There in the doorway she bent down stiffly to offer the angle of her harsh chin to be kissed, by way of dismissing the children to the nursery for their naps. But instead of moving along to the next flight of stairs, Seymour stood still. He was waiting for his mother who was just reaching the ground-floor hall landing, followed by John. And Randall as usual did what Seymour did. The little boys wanted to kiss their parents too, they were still of the age when every parting and every greeting must be marked by a kiss.

  “Go upstairs, children,” said Mrs. Holt.

  “Yes, Grandmama,” said Seymour, echoed by Randall. But they ran towards their parents.