The next evening, when he and Renata were alone after the Maynards had gone to bed, he was surprised when she asked, “Randalo, tell me, why is so strange your big house in the city?”
“How do you mean, strange?” he asked. The question made him uncomfortable.
“Oh—is not necessary explain. I have seen it was once very elegante, but is now so—I don’t know what is. For somebody else would be poor, but you and the Simorr, you are not poor.”
Randall wondered what to tell her, and decided on the truth. He explained about their grandmother’s will and their intention to leave the house as soon as possible without having wasted a penny or repairing it or anything in it. Renata considered for a moment and then said, “Well. Perhaps you are right. But is so strange leave a rich property go in ruin. In Italy would nobody do such a thing.”
“Well, we can’t help it, Renata dear. She was a very peculiar old woman and we have no control over what becomes of the house. We both hate it and we hated her. That’s why—” he took her hand and drew it through his arm and said, watching her face, “Look at me, Renata. Please.” She turned her head and gave him a vague, patient smile. “That’s why I want—you know what I want. A life of my own. Someone to live for, to love. I love you,” he said timidly, afraid that she would spring away again at the mention of the word. Instead she sat quite still. Then she put her hand softly on his cheek and said, “Abbi pazienza. Do not say this again, Randalo. I have promise’ think what you ask me. Until now I cannot be different from what I said. You are so good,” she murmured, shaking her head sadly. “Why you want the only thing I am not prepare’ to give?”
“But can I hope?” he pleaded. “Why do you go on—like this—without any other plans—” he stumbled on, trying to express himself and terrified lest she take offense. “Unless you—want to be with me—in some way?”
“I want,” she said simply. “I told you.”
“And I told you. I am too much in love with you to think of you as—” he made a motion as if to describe Seymour’s concept of women. “Don’t shut your mind to it. Will you at least let me hope?” he pleaded.
She sighed and hung her head and because she gave no audible answer he told himself that he had received an unspoken one. He held her hand to his cheek and kissed its soft sunbrowned skin, and presently she turned her head and kissed him gently on the mouth. He put his arm round her and drew her head to his shoulder and sat for a while in the dark without moving.
But a few days later, as the week end was approaching, she said, “Randalo, I think would be a good idea I move now to New York.”
Though this was not unexpected, he felt as if a hammer had struck him. “Why, dear?” he asked, which was a stupid thing, he knew, to say.
As usual she was perfectly honest. “Because I begin to be bore’ here.”
“Bored with me?”
“Ma no, caro! But is here very far from the life, the divertimento. Look how much trouble is we make a little trip on Wednesday.” It had been; they had gone by train to White Plains where Seymour and Marietta had met them with the automobile, and they had returned the same way because Seymour dared not make many runs as far as here on account of his tires. “If we are in New York, is possible do many amusing things.”
“I was afraid you’d soon be getting bored alone with me here.”
“But I am not alone with you! Not even like I have offer’. If is to be with you among others, is more amusing your brother and his amante than these contadini here.”
Randall said wearily and with uncharacteristic irritation, “There are no peasants in America, Renata.”
But he could not prevent her going, and perhaps it was as well. He would have extra work to do in August while Dr. Fitzhugh was away, and if she was content to remain in New York, he would be nearer to her that way than otherwise. He said, “Where would you want to go in New York? To the Hotel Westwood again?”
She looked doubtful. “I think is expensive, no?”
“But—well, what difference does that make?” He looked at her with the silent assurance that he expected to go on taking care of her until—until what? He had not yet dared ask himself plainly. Would she one day capitulate and marry him? And if not, she had her profession, by which she could very well support herself. But she surprised him by saying, “I have a little money, Randalo. I would like now not be so—” she smiled ruefully. “So to depend on you. Already you have done so much, Dio mio!” As they had before, tears welled into her eyes; she seized his hand and said with passionate sincerity, “Nobody was ever good and generoso like you. You are an angel.”
“Well,” he said awkwardly. “You seem to overlook the happiness it gives me. And if you did save some money last winter you hadn’t expected to use it up this summer. You thought you’d be working. I wish you’d just keep it, Renata, it makes me feel you’re safer.”
“Vediamo allora,” she said. “I would like a little apartment—” she astonished him by blushing, which resolved into a peal of laughter and her flinging herself on his neck with a hug. “I start to say ‘like in Ansonia’ but then I feel ashame’ because you were so shock’ about Baldini. But now,” she cried, like a child delighted with a new discovery, “is my Randalo no better than Baldini! Ecco! I find such a little apartment which I like and I pay what I can and you—” she waved her hand with a wink. “Maybe I make you my amante yet.”
“Oh, Renata.” Randall shook his head and tenderly pushed her away. “Maybe I’ll make you my wife. One is beginning to look as unlikely as the other.”
CHAPTER 14
Seymour moved, luxuriously deliberate, from the wide bed to a chair nearby, and sat down, stretching his long legs. He clasped his hands behind his head and gave himself the pleasure of looking at Renata, slightly propped on her pillows, with her dark hair falling round her shoulders. She was smiling a little, with a sensuous twist to her lips. Her brown eyes, deep-set below the low white forehead, were mischievous.
“Is the pity you cannot smoke,” she said. “You would enjoy it now.”
“My Turkish tobacco is both pungent and lasting,” he said. “For the first I can accept a more piquant substitute and for the second—” he laughed a little. “You are extraordinary, Renata, something too delightful. I suppose you know it?”
She shrugged. “I have heard. Is very nice you think so. I am please’ too. You please me very much.”
The mid-afternoon sun was gratefully shut out by the drawn blinds, and Seymour enjoyed the special pleasure of looking at Renata when his eyes were not assaulted by strong light, either out of doors in the automobile, or indoors in the brightly lit places where they all dined together on most evenings. He reached round and felt for his spectacles in the breast pocket of his coat hanging on the back of his chair. He wiped the spectacles carefully and put them on; “The better to see you, my dear,” he joked, like a Nannie telling the story of Red Riding Hood.
“I have observe’ many times,” said Renata, “you have not the strong eyes. Is something grave the matter with them?”
“No,” he said, with a mocking downward turn of his mouth. “Of course not. Just a little myopia, you know, and it makes them a bit sensitive to light.” (‘And you will be well advised to be more careful of exposure to strong light, Mr. Holt. This is not the first time I have warned you. It can be as destructive as close application. The prognosis is increasingly unsatisfactory.’) He rammed the raw, recent memory back into its dungeon and turned a cool smile on Renata. In that moment her expression had become serious. “Please don’t give it a thought. I never do,” he assured her.
“I was no more thinking of that,” she said. “Is very noioso when somebody worry, and I wish not to be like that.” She pursed her pretty lips and peaked her eyebrows in a vivid reflection of doubt.
“I should guess, then, that you are worrying about Randall?”
She nodded a little sadly. “With the words, you understand, we can do no good. What is so, is so. Only I
have always the frighten he will be hurt.”
“One calculates one’s risks, my dear.”
“D’accordo. But what begin with a single giuoco take sometimes not many comedies to make a tragedy.”
“Well?” Seymour raised his straggling pale eyebrows and looked at her with cynical inquiry. “If you wish—of course I should regret—”
“Oh, you make seem so complicate’. Is not what I meant. Is not right I marry Randalo like he want. Who understand better than you?”
“Who indeed? I think you are enchanting but I don’t want you for a sister-in-law. You oughtn’t to marry anybody.”
“You see. Is true. I am like—like this.” She spread her hands. “But would be so sad the pity if this hurt Randalo after all his goodness. I am so grateful to him!”
“Which is distressingly different from other attitudes that Randall cannot understand. I am just as concerned about him as you are. He would be smashed to bits if he should learn about something which actually—though he could never believe it—can do him no more harm than if he had never known the people involved.”
“Is a pericolo tremendo.”
“As I said, a calculated risk. How much pleasure do you want, and what are you prepared to pay for it? Or do you prefer to repay Randall’s devotion, so long as you do not break with him, by turning celibate—which is your only alternative unless you marry him?”
“Would be easier not see none of you any more,” she said abruptly.
“Easier, no doubt. But kind to Randall?”
“Taci!” she cried, seizing her head between her hands. “Is too confuse’.”
“I should think we might simply be prudent enough not to do any stupidities and in time—” he shrugged and she laughed.
“Time change everything,” she agreed wisely. But she said, “Is also another pericolo you must think.” She raised a forefinger and shook it slowly.
“Oh,” he said.
“Sì, la Marietta. If you do the least stupidaggine she become suspicious, poi follow something orribile.”
“My dear, you must think me really clumsy.”
“You are clever, davvero? You make her the love very often, you keep her well satisfy? If no, she become gelosa and make the terrible mischief.”
Seymour chuckled. “I like a clever woman, Renata,” he said, unfolding his lean length from the chair. “You are a delicious devil.” He sat down on the edge of the bed, and bent his head to her throat.
“Is too bad I dare not please you with the skin molto profumata,” she murmured. “But this would remark immediately the Marietta.”
“The nose police,” said Seymour, laying aside his spectacles.
“Appunto.” She smiled lazily and flicked his long moustache with her finger.
That morning after Seymour had left the house Randall took a bunch of keys from a concealed compartment in the black walnut secretary-bureau in Seymour’s room. He went up to the fourth floor to the old day-nursery. He unlocked the door and went into the room and locked the door again from inside. The atmosphere was suffocating. On a blazing August day like this any closed room would be cooler than the scorching heat out of doors. But the least motion stirred up a cloud of acrid dust, which settled and stuck to one’s damp skin on a hot day. In winter when he came occasionally to this room the mouldy chill turned his lips and fingers blue, and the smell of the mildewed wallpaper, its pattern long since unrecognizable, was sickening. In summer the damp dried out, leaving crumbling plaster and streaks of dry greenish fuzz on the walls. Randall believed he had thoroughly hardened himself against concern about this; in fact, his attitude when he came here was defiant, as if to tell the place repeatedly that he and Seymour were almost through with it, almost ready to consign it forever to its corruption.
He went to the rickety wardrobe in the corner, whose key he kept always on his own watch-chain with several others, and he opened it. Inside, face against the back of the wardrobe, was his old child’s desk. He turned that around and unlocked its drop lid and took from his inside pocket a bundle of papers. He glanced them quickly through, a mixture of receipted bills from hospital and hotel and doctors and the Maynards, his bank statement and other financial papers at which he never looked when they came; the usual bundle of music-manuscript paper minutely covered with his miniature handwriting. He rolled the lot together and thrust it tightly into a section of the desk and stuck a couple of childhood animal-tracings in front of it. Then he locked the desk and replaced it face backwards in the wardrobe and locked that too, and with a glance round to make sure that nothing appeared to have been disturbed, he left the room, carefully locking the door behind him, and started down the stairs.
On the third-floor landing he stopped at the door of his mother’s room. Something had been going through his mind for weeks, rising almost to the point of his accepting it, then being thrust away, back down into the turbid vault where the bad memories of two and three years ago were sealed. Other and older memories were there too, and among these the impediment which had stopped him on the few occasions when he had been on the verge of talking to Seymour about Renata. It should be infinitely simple to state that he wanted to marry her. But in some deeply disturbing way, the wish lost its simplicity on the brink of telling it to Seymour, and became entangled in murky memories of trouble and cruelty. If he should search closely enough in this morass he had a dim fear of coming up with the startling fragment of Seymour’s resemblance to their grandmother. It was not even a real resemblance, there was only a suggestion. But that was enough to remind him that one could never have thought of telling Grandmama that one wanted to marry. Must he hover now over a dead and buried fear—merely because Seymour’s jaw happened to have a certain length and angularity? He sat down on the top step and put his chin in his hands and stayed there thinking for a long time.
Then he stood up and shut his mouth hard and chose a key from the bunch and unlocked the door. He had never been here since that afternoon when he had railed and protested to Seymour, and had been led shivering back to his room. He would not be here now, except he had come arduously to his decision and he intended to effect it. He was going to choose a piece from among his mother’s bits of modest jewelry and take it to Renata and plead with her upon this talisman, which could not help but touch her heart, to give up her reservations and marry him. His hand shook as he opened the door, and the courage to enter the room almost failed him. He forced himself to take a few steps inside, and then he had to stop, because his way was blocked. He stood still, hiding his face in his hands for a moment. All of this took so much courage, all of it demanded so inexorably the facing of everything that he had learned, painfully, deviously, not to face. He remembered his mother hovering and whimpering through the last clouded years of her life, and earlier he remembered himself, frightened of everything in his little world except her, clinging to her over there on that divan where they used to look at the old memory-books and albums, listening all the while for the old woman’s pounding step and thundering voice.
He raised his head with a faint groan, and began to clamber his way across the room, pushing or lifting aside boxes and cases and parcels whose ancient paper and brittle ribbons fell apart at a touch. The ravages of moths were everywhere; no bit of wool, no cuff or tippet of now unrecognizable fur, was anything but bare brittle leather or a crumbling mess of holes. Oh, he thought, we must clean it out, we must, we must, we should carry it down and make a great fire in the boiler and burn it all and leave her memory clear.
He inched and twisted his way to the high rosewood bureau, and lit the gas-jet above it, and began carefully to search for the mother-of-pearl inlaid box that he remembered, where she used to keep her trinkets. He found it quite soon. Poignant memories stabbed him as he sorted through the things; this cameo brooch she always wore on Sundays; that pair of onyx earrings set with seed-pearls when she dressed her hair as he had liked it best, very high. Piece by piece he turned the things over. Her only valuable jew
el had been the big diamond which had bought his piano downstairs; he looked across at its predecessor dumb in the corner, whose felts had surely all been eaten away; and he thought of the burnt hulk down in Seymour’s warren in the cellar, of the defiant boy glaring at the old woman and roaring, “I DON’T KNOW.”
“I don’t know either,” Randall sighed, looking for an instant into the crackled greenish looking-glass. “I don’t know anything, least of all why we are as we are.” Distorted though it was, the face in the glass was handsome and even had he not thought so before, he reflected that Renata with all her flippancy had made him believe it. But it was a long time since she had said he was beautiful; perhaps she was learning. She was quieter and gentler and more serious when she was alone with him. Dare he hope that this meant the change he had been praying for? He turned back to the inlaid box and after much deliberation he decided upon a small brooch in the shape of a butterfly, of deep blue enamel, embellished with tiny stones and seed-pearls. It was charming and surely a butterfly was the perfect symbol for Renata. He found a worn purple velvet jewelry-box and shut the butterfly in it and put it in his pocket. As he did so, he thought he should probably make sure that Seymour had no objection to his doing this; then he rejected the question altogether and, to his own surprise, angrily. He turned out the gas and worked his way to the door again, and making sure that everything was as nearly as possible as he had found it, he locked the door and went away.
On most mornings, instead of practising he went to see Renata, but as this was Friday he went straight from the house to St. Timothy’s. In Dr. Fitzhugh’s absence he had a full day preparing the Sunday music. August was deadly in a city church; the Rector and Fitzhugh and two-thirds of the choir and almost all the congregation were away, but the services must continue no matter how few straggling souls rattled about the empty church. The two curates and Randall were left to make the best of it and of the other duties which had been assigned them. One of these was to make the arrangements for the annual Church Picnic, which took place on Staten Island in September to mark the opening of the Sunday School year.
My Brother's Keeper Page 29