My Brother's Keeper

by Marcia Davenport

  Automatically the brothers stood up and Randall held out his mother’s chair. They both kissed her quickly and went back to their places. Mrs. Holt had not said a word nor looked up. Lily glanced at her for a moment, then at Seymour, and then he saw the color drain from his mother’s face. She sat back, nervously wiping her lips and trying not to look again at Seymour. When matters stood in this condition one never knew quite what to do, if like Lily and Randall one were an innocent party. Sometimes it was better to try to make a little meaningless conversation, but that took more heart than this morning’s atmosphere allowed. Seymour sat, pretending to eat, and trying to catch the waitress’s eye so that she would relieve him of his dish as quickly and unobtrusively as possible.

  “Was it—” his mother began lightly to speak, in her nervous anxiety to mask the awful silence; and then she paused. She could not ask about the party, something had happened to Seymour which had to do with last night. “Was it nice weather?” Lily asked lamely.

  “Fine,” said Seymour. He had got rid of the bowl of porridge, which might of itself have raised a preposterous, childish issue. He sat waiting for his coffee, which his grandmother always poured. She continued to ignore him. The rest of the breakfast appeared, the invariable Sunday pancakes, the bacon which in summer took the place of winter’s sausages. Seymour could not have eaten a mouthful; his brain was already moving round and round in the circle which was to be a very long day’s treadmill. The old woman knew, but how could she know except she had been wide awake last night and lain there without making a sound, watching, by her bedside clock, to trap him? He suppressed a sigh. He had had enough years’ experience to know now that there was nothing better to do than to face it squarely, himself to put it up to the old woman. He sat waiting for his coffee, which she did not pour so that he had to ask her for it. She gave him an ugly look with her bagged, spectacled eyes and poured his coffee and handed him the cup without a word. He drank some coffee. Then, rallying his courage more to face humiliation before his mother and Randall than for the coming ordeal with his grandmother, he said, “May I speak to you before church, Grandmama?”

  “You are not going to church,” she said, in a thick tone eloquent of ill-suppressed rage.

  Never had she said such a thing before. Lily sat back, with quick tears of terror in her eyes, and Randall gazed at the old woman in horrified bewilderment. What could she mean?

  “You are not going out at all, anywhere,” said Mrs. Holt, “until we leave for New York tomorrow.”

  Seymour’s cup clattered into its saucer and he knew that his face must have turned brick red. It burnt so that his eyeballs stung. He sat rigid. There was nothing to say. He could ask her what she meant, but he knew what she meant. Memory upon memory broke over him in sickening waves, every sharp and scathing thing she had ever said about his mother, every scornful remark about his father’s disastrous marriage. He need not even remember the early and indelible impressions of the things he had overheard: he knew. She had her spy, or spies; how or by what means he would never be able to find out; but if she had been every moment of last evening there beside himself and Dorothy Bayliss, she could not be more aware. Then the sheer loathsomeness of her venomous, twisted view, a vile travesty and abasement of his feelings, rose up as if to suffocate him. He had never known real anger of this kind before. For all his violent temper and the savage, destructive things it had driven him to do, he had never sensed what he felt now, a righteous rage so enormous that it swept down his lifelong habit of cowed, hypocritical deference. Without knowing it, he was on his feet, saying, “You are contemptible! A sneaking, spying—you’ve spied on me! You vile old woman!”

  He did not know what he was saying, against the pandemonium of Lily’s squealing sobs and Randall’s heartbroken wail, “But the Cup! The Season Cup! He can’t miss the Labor Day Race!”

  “Silence!” bellowed Mrs. Holt.

  “Silence is what you’ll have,” retorted Seymour. “I was going to grovel before you and confess like a child about the clock. Now I’m not. Nobody else would ever find himself in such a position. You’ll have your silence. Move us back to your prison in New York. I can’t do anything about that. But silence is all you’ll ever get from me, if you beat me to death for it.”

  He picked up his cup and saucer and flung them across the room where they smashed on the hearth. Then he kicked back his chair with a crash and strode from the room.

  CHAPTER 4

  For the ninth time Randall started again at the red mark where the second theme of the Larghetto began. This was deceptively simple, actually very difficult and more demanding of expressiveness, of what Professor Mundt called Innerlichkeit than the rest of the wonderfully poetic movement. “It iss for diss dat you play diss concerto beim Konzert,” he said. Randall was working hard to have it ready for the Students’ Concert, the day before Thanksgiving. For several years he had played at each of these concerts which took place three times during the winter, but this was his first concerto, to be played with a small orchestra of real Philharmonic players. Randall had chosen the concerto himself and begged for it in spite of Professor’s doubts. The Mozart C Minor, to which Professor taught him to refer as “Köchel vier hundert ein und neunzig” was too serious and difficult for him, his teacher thought; and Randall not mature enough. But Professor believed in letting his students follow their tastes.

  Yet Randall was having trouble. He tried to make the wistful, transparent melody reflect the mood of sad anxiety which permeated the house and surrounded his mother and himself like a mist. One must not be too personal in these efforts at interpretation, he knew; they must not be forced. But here with every reason to make it possible; with no real technical difficulty, music that he adored, and the desire to draw all he felt from the yearning theme, he could not bring it alive. He tried for a moment, sitting still, to evoke the mood of the plaintive woodwinds who opened the passage, so simple as to be nothing but five little notes made immortal by genius. Last winter when he had heard Paderewski play the concerto this passage had drawn tears to his eyes. Now he could only feel the inner wish to evoke the same feeling; he could not make his hands do it. He was suddenly overcome by discouragement and the sense that he ought not to have undertaken this. He laid his arms on the edge of the music rack and put his head down on them and sat there wishing he were not too old to cry.

  He heard the door open and close and he looked up and found Seymour standing near him. The room, except for the gas-mantle lamp by the piano, was quite dark and Randall realized that it must be past six, over an hour later than Seymour usually arrived home after his trip by the Hudson River Railroad from the University. Seymour said, “What’s the matter, Kid?”

  Randall gestured at the music. “Oh—nothing! It’s hard. Say, aren’t you home awfully late?”

  Seymour shrugged. Randall knew he had been calling at the Bayliss’s, which was the only motive urgent enough to induce Seymour to defy this year’s rule that he be home on the stroke of five o’clock every day. The old woman’s control of Seymour had become something of a mockery. The only real axe she could wield would be to refuse to pay his tuition at Columbia. She could not physically imprison him in the house but sometimes Randall wondered uneasily if she were not capable of hiring some man, like a prison guard, to escort Seymour daily to the University and back. From the sidelines, watching the deadlock between the two, Randall felt as if he could divine better than Seymour the vindictive lengths to which their grandmother might still go. It was all very well to admire Seymour passionately, as Randall did, for having the courage to hold to his vow. But the price of this might be beyond computing; and it would not be exacted of Seymour alone. Randall was thinking of this as he sat at his piano looking up at his brother’s handsome but gloomy and troubled face.

  “Where’s Mama?” asked Seymour, dropping into one of the fussy, tufted parlor chairs.

  Randall indicated upstairs with a tilt of his head. “You know.” She was almost alway
s lying down these afternoons, with the blinds drawn and a cold compress over her eyes.

  “Has She—” They had their own way of pronouncing the pronoun when they spoke about their grandmother. They never called her now by any other name between themselves.

  “Not that I know of, not today. Mama just said she didn’t feel well when I came in from school and I didn’t need her here.” Lily no longer practised regularly with Randall. He was well enough drilled not to require supervision during the long hours of scales and exercises and technical studies. For the rest, old Professor Mundt said, he had either developed enough musicianship to fix his own marks at which to aim, or he would never have it.

  Seymour sat humped in his chair, with his chin propped on his knuckles. He looked very unhappy. Randall began to wonder whether something was troubling him beyond the alarming situation here at home. He tried to find a tactful way to ask, and then gave it up. Seymour would confide in him if he wanted to, and never by any sort of possibility if he did not want to. Randall only said, “I think Mama is terribly worried.”

  “I know. That’s the only part I mind. She isn’t really ill all the time, she hasn’t got headaches like she says.”

  “Of course not. She only does it to keep out of the way.”

  “The more she does it the likelier she is to believe herself when she says she feels ill.”

  “She’s awfully unhappy, Brother.”

  “I know she is. So are you. So am I. But will you tell me if it was any better before? Now I’ve got the old bully checkmated, at least.”

  Once more Randall tried to find the courage to warn Seymour that this might not be so true, or so simple. He was in the house more hours of the day than Seymour, even though he spent that time shut up at the piano, and he was uneasy every moment. “It’s something queer,” he said, slowly. “Something going on.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t tell, that’s the trouble. I have a feeling She—She does something to Mama when we’re out.”

  “What can She do? Mama always stays in her room while you’re at school, she always did. She never goes there, that’s why Mama started shutting herself up like that.”

  “Maybe I’m all wrong,” said Randall, with hopefulness which did not deceive Seymour. The boy was really worried. Now Seymour found himself uneasy even beyond his own anxieties which Randall did not know about.

  “Maybe you’re not wrong, too,” he said. “If you mean—well, I haven’t exactly admitted it to myself either, but there is a difference in Mama. I know what you mean.”

  Randall nodded, pulling down the corners of his mouth. “And a difference in Her too. She’s sort of, I don’t know—secret. Locked away. I wouldn’t care if I didn’t think it meant some kind of trouble. She used to make me go and do all that reporting to her in the library the way we always had to and now She doesn’t send for me so much.”

  “Well, what are you kicking about?” Seymour laughed with an acid rasp. “Haven’t I done you a favor? I wish somebody’d done as much for me four years ago!”

  “Maybe She’s going to die,” said Randall coolly. It took nerve to say the words and he felt pleased with himself.

  “What else should She do by now?” Seymour got to his feet and looked at the old tombstone clock. “Dinner in a quarter of an hour. Come on, wash yer hands, Master Randall, and change yer collar, now.” He spoke in the fussy, nasal brogue of old Nana, gone years ago, whom he had always liked to mimic. The brothers laughed and went away upstairs.

  After dinner, when Seymour was trying to study in his own room, the calculus which was usually not difficult for him turned intolerably hard. He was doing brilliantly at Columbia; the Dean said few freshmen showed such aptitude for mathematics and engineering. There was already every likelihood that Seymour could finish his undergraduate course in three years. After some graduate work in special engineering he would be ready to start work as a naval architect, the one thing he had wanted all his life to do. And he had seen clearly for a long time past that nobody could have stronger motives than he for wanting to be independent. He supposed there was a good deal of money tied up in the family, but little as he knew of the details he knew that his grandmother would use every possible device to keep him financially in her power whether she were alive or dead. He must make for himself the means to break away.

  The figures swam and wriggled on the page before him. Seymour pushed away the textbook and with his elbow dashed to the floor his notebook, with its engraving-like notations and drawings in his small, fine hand. He sat with his head between his hands. Eight or ten weeks ago it had all looked quite simple. Beyond his inflexible intention to keep to the one declaration that he had vowed in his rage, from which he could not back down, he was prepared to be as reasonable as possible. He knew that if he stayed out of the house at hours outside his college day, his mother and Randall would have to take the punishment. So he had seen almost nothing of Dorothy. He had resigned himself to that. He knew the situation could not continue forever. What troubled him most was that he never seemed to have a chance to explain to Dorothy, or to talk to her alone; he had never said a word about the precipitate departure from Hare Island. On his few calls at the Bayliss house over on Gramercy Park he had not once found Dorothy alone. Either her mother was receiving callers and Dorothy as the debutante daughter must assist; or some of Dorothy’s own friends were there in a chattering, fluttering bevy, full of excitement about the season’s parties which were beginning at Thanksgiving.

  This afternoon was only the fourth time he had seen Dorothy since last August. Now when he could not study, when he was restless and probed by a twisting sense of imminent trouble, he thought back over every moment of the half hour he had spent in Mrs. Bayliss’s drawing-room; then he began to compare today with his previous visits; and something cold and sickening clutched at his throat as he forced himself to admit, with puzzled pain, that Dorothy was changed. Not only was she changed, with a constraint which he had at first and now, he thought, mistakenly, taken for shyness; she was more changed each time he saw her. Seymour drew a long breath and found himself mopping his forehead with his handkerchief. Had he been utterly stupid not to have realized this, or would anyone else have been as slow to comprehend as he? But what was wrong? Seymour did not feel he had ever said a word to Dorothy, or held a feeling for her, which was not the expression of the best there was in him. From every imaginable aspect he examined his own heart, and all this measured by her own scarcelyspoken but unmistakable meaning the night of the beach-party, made him sure that neither of them had done or said or felt anything wrong. His conscience was clear, and he believed in her. She was not a flirt and she had not been playing with him. What had happened?

  Today he had found her in the rear of the two adjoining parlors at her house, sitting with two girls whom he did not know well, girls who spent their summers at Newport. Mrs. Bayliss was pouring tea in the front parlor, chatting with some ladies, and Seymour was the only man present. Mrs. Bayliss had given him tea, and now as he sat carefully remembering and reconstructing every moment of the afternoon, he realized with another shiver of disquiet that she too was changed since last summer. He could still hear her pleasant voice in retrospect, thanking him that night for bringing Dorothy home and saying that they would ask him over soon; but no such words had ever been uttered since. She was calm and agreeable, but hardly cordial. When he had drunk his tea she had called into the other drawing-room, “Dorothy, Seymour is here to call,” and had sent him in to join the three girls.

  They were sitting round a low tabouret table, with long sheets of paper spread over it, and were going over, item by item, what Seymour knew at once was the invitation-list for Dorothy’s coming-out ball. She looked up as he came through the archway between the two rooms and before she spoke at all, her face, at which he had been trying not to look too fixedly, turned quite pink.

  Seymour sat now hunched in his desk chair, twisting his hands in sudden painful enlightenmen
t. She had not blushed from shyness or pleasure when he appeared; she was embarrassed. Why?

  “Good afternoon, Seymour,” she said, holding out the dainty hand he loved. “I think you know Seymour Holt,” she said to her friends. “Virginia Godwin. And Ellen Van Thuyl.” He did know them slightly; he bowed, they murmured something, and he sat down on the edge of a chair.

  “Isn’t it exciting, all the parties,” began Miss Van Thuyl. “We were just—”

  “I’m afraid there will be too many,” said Dorothy quickly. She had folded up the sheets of paper and put them under a book on the lower shelf of the table.

  “Oh, there couldn’t be too many!” The other girl was tall and boldly handsome, and Seymour could see her the centre of any ball. He laughed a little and said, “I shan’t be troubled with too many, at any rate.”

  And Dorothy had said nothing. At the moment he had not immediately remembered her words of last summer, when she had asked him to promise to come to her ball, and had said how much fun it would be, and how she was looking forward to the parties this winter. But now it broke over him in a chilling wave. He had not heard her say a word about the party since; and he realized with a shock that he was not going to be invited to it. Tumbling in the wake of this came a flood of other and graver realizations. Dorothy was not being shy, and she was not trying to withdraw from a moment’s sentimental yielding. Something more serious was happening. Seymour sat at his desk, staring at nothing, hours after he had heard Randall go to his room and turn in for the night.