My Brother's Keeper

by Marcia Davenport

  “Yes, and—and it’s so dark and empty, and somehow, it seems close, sort of stuffy.”

  “I suppose you’re right. I’m afraid I haven’t given it a thought. You ought to air a house once in a while even if you don’t use all the rooms.”

  “Oh, well, you’ve got other things on your mind.” Randall turned to mount the stairs.

  “Say, Ran,” said Seymour behind him. Randall heard uneasiness in his voice. He looked down and said, “What?”

  “I guess I ought to tell you. It’s meant to be a surprise, of course, but between you and me it will be a—a shock, to say the least. You’ll carry if off better if you know.”

  “Carry what off? What surprise?”

  “Don’t blame me, anyway. Mama has bought you a piano.”

  “A what?” Randall let go the stair-rail and pressed his hands to his head. “Brother, you aren’t serious!”

  “I am, God help us.”

  “But what do you mean? What did she do? The place is full of—” Randall stood with his mouth open.

  “Oh, I know,” said Seymour miserably. “She bought a Steinway concert grand for you, the finest piano in the world, she says. And she put the one from the drawing-room up in her room so you can play for her sometimes.”

  “Oh,” groaned Randall, “how horrible. Seymour, where did she get the money?”

  “Sold her engagement ring. It was a big stone, you remember.”

  “And you let her do it? You let them deliver the thing?”

  “I was away cruising on a new boat.”

  “Oh, no,” said Randall wretchedly. “What on earth shall we do?”

  “Nothing,” said Seymour. “I talked to the doctor about it. He says if we’re going to carry out this idea we’ve really got to do it. She’s so happy about you, she thinks—”

  Randall shuddered and passed his hand across his eyes. In the dim light Seymour saw that he was pale. “Horrible,” he said again.

  “It is,” said Seymour. “It’s one of those things you start without knowing how you’re going to finish. Now we have no choice, we’ve simply got to keep on fooling her about you.” He saw Randall wince again. “I mean,” he added, “let her believe whatever she wants to believe.”

  Randall said, “This is pretty hard on me, isn’t it?” His face was drawn.

  Seymour made a sad attempt at a smile; a tremulous expression of tenderness crossed his face, and he moved up the stairs where he put his arm round Randall’s shoulder. “I know,” he said. “I wouldn’t have put the whole burden on you, Ran. If I’d been anything she cared about in that way, I’d gladly have taken your place. But she’s so helpless—Lord God, you know better than I!”

  “I know.”

  “I’ll help, Ran, believe me. There’ll be lots of ways I can help. If you’ll just do something at least on the fringe of what she believes—”

  “Oh, I will. Of course I will. It’ll take a little while to work it out.” Randall turned and started up the rest of the stairs. At the top he stopped suddenly and looked down at Seymour and asked in a sharp tone, “Why is the house so empty? Where are the servants?”

  “Why—you know all that. I wrote you.”

  “Oh. Did you?”

  “Why, yes. What did I want with them, Ran? Mrs. Gerrity lives on the third floor with Mama and cooks for her there in a little kitchen I fixed up. I let them all go, somebody just comes in to clean.”

  “I see.” Randall went on towards the next flight of stairs. Seymour looked up at his bowed, drooping shoulders. “It’s all right,” he called. “You can dine with me at the Club.”

  “When you’re there,” said Randall from the landing.

  He was unnerved by every aspect of his homecoming. Putting off the meeting with his mother by talking to Seymour had only uncovered a maze of pitfalls through which he, carrying the whole burden of responsibility for his mother’s condition, must grope his way. He had not hoped for much joy out of coming home, but he had not looked for all this trouble. Two and a half years away from Lily made it no easier to face her now. It was a long time since he had been able to turn to her for comfort or reassurance about anything. The minutes dragged while he stood there in the dark hall, painfully conscious of the few steps to his mother’s door. He heard murmurs and muffled noises in the room beyond; then the door opened and his mother stood there holding out her arms.

  “My boy! My wonderful boy! “

  “Mama dear. How good to see you.” The slight body in his arms was draped in nondescript shawls and veils, the blank pale face framed in queerly colorless hair. Randall tried for an instant to get a good look at Lily’s face, but there was too little light in the dim room. Everything ran into a dark blur, the tomblike pieces of walnut and rosewood furniture, the heavy bed, the chairs and divan strewn with boxes, baskets, pictures, papers, ribbons and laces and slippers and clothing; the piano in the farthest corner by the heavy drawn curtains. She had opened the piano and raised its lid; Randall hid his grimace of revulsion by bending to kiss his mother.

  “Wonderful!” she crooned. “Oh, darling Randall, how wonderful you are! You can’t imagine how proud I am.”

  “It’s nothing, Mama,” he said, wishing she could know how much he meant it. “I haven’t really done anything.”

  Lily laughed her tinkling, baby’s laugh. “Don’t be silly, now!” She chided him with a wavering forefinger. “Don’t think I haven’t hung on every moment of it!” She turned and made an unsteady dive for a shabby leather box tucked beside the pillows on her bed. “See!” she said, lifting and caressing the worn mass of his letters in the box, “just see how I’ve treasured these. You were so good, darling, so good to me. Such wonderful letters.” She bent over the bed, handling and smoothing and folding the letters, murmuring to herself and visibly fading back into the mist in which she lived. She had forgotten that Randall was there. He stood hesitating, wondering what to do and whether he could slip away and pick up the thread some other time. He moved quietly to the door, but it swung open before he reached it and a stout authoritative woman came in, carrying a small tray with a glass and spoon on it.

  “Well!” she said, too loudly for Randall’s nerves. “Here we are! Now ain’t it grand to have your famous boy home again, Ma’m?”

  “Wha—why—” Randall watched his mother drift back to the scene. “Oh!” she exclaimed shrilly, “oh, yes! Wonderful. Randall, come here, look. It’s here, you see, I had it brought up here.” She clung to his arm, looking up into his face with her queer pleading eyes. “Didn’t you see it?” She pulled him towards the piano in the corner.

  “I—of course, Mama.” He tried to speak heartily. “I was just too wrapped up in you to notice it at first. Yes, it’s fine if you like it.” He stopped uncomfortably.

  “Ah, the grand surprise,” said Mrs. Gerrity’s heavy voice.

  “Yes,” said Lily, with hectic eagerness. “Of course you haven’t seen it, you ran straight upstairs to me, didn’t you? But wait till you see it, just wait!”

  “What, Mama?”

  “My surprise! Downstairs in the drawing-room, darling, oh, I’m so proud of you and they said it’s the finest one they ever made and Paderewski was trying to buy it oh Randall you’ll love it so and when you aren’t practising for your concerts I thought you’d play to me here sometimes it’s really the best, they said, the best one they ever—”

  Randall saw the sign in Mrs. Gerrity’s spectacled eye.

  “It’s fine,” he said lamely. “Just fine. I don’t know how to thank you—”

  “You haven’t seen it yet! You must go and see it. Try it.”

  “Yes, of course, I’m going.” He drew a breath hoping for courage or the chance that he might say the right thing, and said, “Don’t you want to come and see it with me, Mama?” He put his arm gently round her shoulders.

  “I?” Lily shrank back, her face puckering and crinkling, her eyes clouding. “Why—oh,” she breathed, looking round the dark clutter of her
room and putting her wavering hands to her face, “oh—you see—I couldn’t do that!” She turned to a chair and began pawing through the mess strewn over it. “I have so much to do, you see, I wanted to get everything ready—” Her voice trailed away in mutters.

  Randall turned slowly away. The nurse gave him a signal with a tilt of her grey head, and he left the room and went in search of Seymour. The library was a reassuring relief. Seymour was working at his desk. When Randall came in he sat back, put down his slide-rule and pencil and took off his spectacles. He laid them down, rubbing his eyes and studying Randall’s face to learn how he had taken the meeting upstairs. Randall sat down slowly and said, “See here, you haven’t got a drop of brandy or something, have you?”

  “Of course I have. Damned good idea, too.”

  Seymour rose and went to a cabinet for a decanter and glasses. Randall sat silent, too shaken to try to throw off his distress. Staring as one does, at such moments, at nothing in particular he noticed the spectacles that Seymour had taken off. Their lenses were extremely thick and so heavy that the gold frames were a peculiar shape in order to hold them. Seymour came over to sit opposite Randall, handing him a pony of cognac. Randall looked at him closely; his eyes appeared blank, exhausted.

  “What kind of glasses are those, Brother?” Randall’s tone was uneasy.

  “What? Those?” Seymour took a pair of ordinary spectacles from his breast pocket and began to polish them. “Which?”

  “Those.” Randall pointed to the desk. Seymour shrugged and said, “Nothing special. Lots of people use them for close work, you know. Tables and blueprints … how do you find Mama, Ran?”

  They sipped some cognac. Randall leaned back in his chair and rested his head against the cushion. He was still feeling the motion of the ship. In the first days out he had been seasick; now he felt desperately tired. He was silent for a long time. Then slowly he answered Seymour’s question. “It’s awful, Brother. She’s simply—well—she’s—”

  “But you knew that. She’d been going that way long before you went to Europe.”

  “Yes. It’s harder to believe when you haven’t been with her, though.”

  “It must be.”

  Randall winced. Perhaps Seymour did not mean that as it sounded. “I don’t quite understand why it’s necessary to do all this fooling her,” he said. “I should think she’s so—what can you say?—so far gone already it couldn’t make any difference.”

  “Doctor Slade says not. He says the shock if such people are jolted out of their illusions, or their obsessions, can be very dangerous. They’re all right so long as you let them pretend what they want. The main idea is to keep them occupied, you see. Mama thinks she is terribly busy now that you’re an important musical figure and will be giving concerts and all that.”

  “But I’m not!” Randall sat forward almost in panic. “I haven’t said that. All we agreed to say was—you know what we said. I’ll try to do some kind of work that will give us a leg to stand on, but not what will end in our making public fools of ourselves.”

  “It won’t,” said Seymour, trying to soothe him. “Take your time, Ran. Don’t be so upset about it.”

  “Upset! You’d be upset if you had to start out deliberately being a fake—and if you had that damned new piano hung around your neck.”

  “That’s too bad, it’s true.”

  “It’s horrible. When you think about the past and those—Brother, are those others still down in the cellar?” Randall watched Seymour’s face closely. A cold shuttered expression seemed to close down on it.

  “Why, I suppose.”

  “Well, let’s get rid of them. At least we can make that much sense, don’t you think so?”

  Seymour answered reluctantly. “Well—no,” he said. He gave Randall a sidewise look.

  “No? Why on earth not? They’re worthless, you know that.”

  “Not altogether. They’re full of copper wire and steel tuning pins and stuff I could use …”

  “Oh. Do you still make ship models?”

  Seymour’s brows drew together and Randall saw the hardening of his jaw, which meant tension. He said, “Sometimes I want to work a thing out with my hands instead of on paper …”

  His tone warned Randall to drop the subject, and Randall sat wondering why. He had a sharp sense that something was being hidden from him. Seymour had changed very much in the years of Randall’s absence; so had Randall himself. Each looked it and felt it and saw it in the other. Something like an enamel of cool assurance and confidence in his own attractiveness had formed a shell around Seymour; it had been plain from the first glimpse of him this morning. By contrast Randall, even with European clothes and the command of a new language and experience of a new milieu, still kept his pliant, docile ways. They were a fine-looking pair, the elder hardening in a distinguished angular mould, the younger almost beautiful with the suggestion of youth in bloom. They were silent. Randall looked at Seymour and thought, “He must be a devil with women,” and Seymour thought, “The kid hasn’t changed enough, he’ll always be too easy to hurt.”

  Randall did not know what to do. Here it was, late on a December day, and when Seymour had not come home by half past seven he began to feel alarmed. The dinner party was at eight. Dressed in the tails which Seymour had forced him to have made, he stood in the front hall with his watch in his hand, listening for Seymour’s step outside. At quarter to eight he was panicky, he must go now if he were to arrive on time, but how could he go without Seymour? What on earth could he say? That thought melted the last of the courage he had summoned to face the evening. At five minutes to eight he thought with horror that by now he should have sent a message to Mrs. MacRae, he could not imagine what sort of message except some spectacular lie, but whatever it might be, she should have had it by now. Damn this house, he said half aloud, without a servant in it to go on an errand or fetch a messenger-boy. He mopped his forehead with his fine handkerchief, bought at Seymour’s insistence. He looked again at his watch to find it now twenty minutes to nine. Impossible. Surely he had not stood thirty-five minutes in this draughty hall, paralyzed for lack of knowing what to do? It began to occur to him that something might have happened to Seymour. Perhaps there had been an accident, perhaps Seymour was ill. Randall knew in the same moment that this was not so. He paced the hall, quite certain what not to think, but wildly bewildered when he tried to find an explanation. Then he began to feel angry. Seymour had made a fool of him. It’s not as if I had wanted to go in the first place, he thought. I don’t care if I never see these people or anybody like them. But why should Seymour be able to put me in such a position?

  After a time he went up to his room, and wrenching off the new tailcoat, the white waistcoat, the stiff shirt and white tie with which he had had such a struggle, he pitched them into a corner. He pulled a jersey over his head and sat down stiffly on the edge of a chair. Now what should he do? It was long after nine, he was cold and angry and suddenly very hungry. He wanted something good to eat. He wanted something hot and filling and cosy like the Austrian food he had grown to like, Beuschel mit Knödel or Kalbsgulyasch mit Nockerl. He swallowed hungrily at the thought. He was sick and tired of the smart, well-served steaks and chops and roasts and oysters at Seymour’s club or the restaurants where they ate occasionally. He was more tired of the increasingly frequent evenings when he found himself alone, and of the only sort of restaurant where he ever ate alone, the dreary kind. Humble places in Vienna were easy and kindly and there had always been somebody from the Conservatory or the Opera at whose table he could sit down and eat his meal. Here he had some problem to face, some annoyance to swallow, with every bite of food.

  Presently he went downstairs, wrapped his neck in a muffler, put on his overcoat, pulled a cap over his eyes, and went out. The cold leaped at him. He had never felt such cold; intense, stinging, hard as black ice. He dug his hands into his pockets and turned east. He had no particular place in mind, but Twenty-third Street w
as full of restaurants. He walked quickly, driven by the cold. He tramped east on Twenty-third Street and paused for a moment, attracted by the bright lights of Cavanagh’s. It was a good place and the brothers knew it well. I guess I might as well go in, he thought, looking through the steamy windows at the big white tables, the comfortable chairs filled by heavy, well-fed trenchermen. One man was grinning at the biggest lobster Randall had ever seen. He put his hand on the door and then suddenly drew back. My word, he thought, I can’t go in there, I haven’t got a collar and tie on. He turned away. What’s the matter with me, he thought? Why do I care what Seymour does? I ought to be relieved, I didn’t want to go to the damned dinner or the ball either. He walked on, losing interest in food as he passed saloons and cheap eating-places, not knowing what he wanted, not knowing why he was so distraught. Damn, he thought, walking quickly but aimlessly, what’s the matter with me, why can’t I make up my mind? Just because I hate to eat alone?

  He went home and downstairs to the gloomy derelict kitchen, which was used only in the morning when the cleaning-woman made a pot of coffee for the brothers’ breakfast. Rolls were brought by the boy from the bakery on the corner of Tenth Avenue. And that was the extent of the housekeeping. Randall lighted a gas jet and shuddered to see the cockroaches scurrying away. He opened doors and cupboards, aware that he would find nothing, but doing it anyway. In a crock he found a roll, so stale that he could scarcely break it. In a tin there was a little tea. He shrugged disgustedly and put some water on the gas-ring to boil. The old kitchen range had not been lighted in years and the dank basement room was so cold that Randall did not take off his overcoat.

  The only warm room in the house was the library and though he felt diffident about using it when Seymour was out, he went there to get warm. He poured coal on the grate fire and sat down in the chair opposite Seymour’s, holding out his blue, chilled hands to the red coals. I shouldn’t, he thought, it’s bad for the hands; and then he fell into the long hopeless maze of what to do about these hands and the music which was all they were good for, and the blind alley of well-meant lies and timid experiments in which he was trapped. I’d like to read, he thought, sitting there and looking at the books which lined the old brown walls, I’d like to read and get my mind on something beside all this mess … he watched the books slither and waver, the colors of the bindings run together … I don’t want to go to sleep, I want to stay awake and be here to give Seymour hell when he comes in …