My Brother's Keeper

by Marcia Davenport

  Against the realities of his anguished suspense about Renata, of flamboyant expeditions in Seymour’s motor car, of dinners and suppers in racy places with hilarious company, the church picnic seemed the last straw of implausibility. Five months ago he would have thought it important. Now it was absurd except to the degree that it piqued his conscience. It was hard enough to try steadily and doggedly to win Renata; it was made twice as hard with Seymour and Marietta Pawling constantly inciting her love of frivolity.

  Yet, he thought, at half-past five, ringing the bell of the little flat that she had sub-leased from an opera colleague, she was a good deal changed when she was alone with him. It could not be his imagination that she was gentler and quieter, he remembered too vividly her flaunting ways only a short time ago. She still crackled with mischief when the four of them were together, she still teased Randall and waited, the cat with the mouse, for his protesting blush and Seymour’s snorting laughter. Fingering the velvet box in his pocket, he thought again, she is different, really different. She opened the door and greeted him. There, you see? he asked himself. Her voice is different, too—affectionate—tender.

  “Caro!” she said. “How you are? Is hot, no?”

  The little flat was in perfect order, the blinds raised and the windows open to catch the bit of breeze from the east. Renata looked fresh as a strawberry blossom, dressed in a flowered muslin gown that she had made, frothing with her beloved ruffles. Her bright brown hair rose in springy waves from her forehead, piled high on her head. Randall held her hand to his cheek for a moment.

  “You are tired,” she said. “S’accomodi, take here the nice chair by the window. I bring you a bevanda.”

  He leaned back in his chair, listening to her hum while she chipped ice in the kitchenette. Presently she brought him a glass of Campari with ice and seltzer and a twist of lemon peel. She had a second glass for herself. She put it down on a stand beside her chair and sat down near him and took up her sewing again. He watched her.

  “You really sew beautifully, don’t you, Renata?”

  “E perchè no? Is not it please me so much, but is like the second nature. Is not worth go to a sarta make me things like this—” she fingered her new dress. “When must be molto elegante, is different.”

  “You always look elegant to me.”

  “Like you,” she said, with a sidelong glance as if to see how far she dare go. “Always—you look like what to me, Randalo? Guess!”

  He shook his head. “I’m not in the mood for that. I’m sorry I couldn’t come this morning. Have you had a very long day all alone?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Was no bad. Sometimes I like to remain alone—when I know is only for a short time.”

  “So you don’t want to remain alone all the time.”

  “Per carità! I?”

  “Well, neither do I.” He put down his glass and looked at her so meaningly that her hands dropped to her lap. She sat silent, then she made an awkward effort and said lightly, “Who say you are alone? You have your brother who is molto divertente and give you always the company. Now we have all together very often much amusement—” she paused. He wondered if she had been about to ask if that was not enough to satisfy him.

  He said, “Renata, don’t talk a lot of nonsense. You understand exactly what I mean even when I don’t say a word.” She was silent. He leaned forward and put his hand on her forearm and sat looking at her until she raised her head and looked him in the eyes. “I am alone,” he said slowly. “You can surround me with all the brothers in Christendom and all the tomfool things you all think of to do. I do them too because I want to be with you. But that still leaves me alone, do you understand? Utterly alone. Unless you marry me.”

  She sat there with her brown eyes gentle and tender, yet baffling. He tried to find in them some clue, some sign by which to hope that he had moved her. Many times before he had looked into those eyes so deeply set under classically-modelled brows, and many times he had wondered at the sculptural fineness of the high, straight nose, suggesting a contradiction of her peasant birth. But he had learned that when she wanted to make her eyes inscrutable it was useless to search them; and so she looked now.

  “Why do you make it so hard!” he cried suddenly, as if a gash had been torn in the difficult web of restraint behind which she forced him to hover. She sighed heavily; words for this sort of talk came very hard to the irrepressible chatterbox.

  “I suppose I know what you’re thinking,” he said unhappily. “We’ve been all over this endless times before and you’re tired of saying the same thing over and over again. But so am I! Don’t you see—I can’t go on like this? Where is it getting us?”

  She had bent her head and because he wanted to make her look at him again he slid from his chair and sat down on the floor close to her, close enough to reach under her chin with his fingers and gently raise her face until he could see her eyes again. But they told him, if he could bring himself to believe it, even less than before.

  “If I didn’t know you so well,” he said rather bitterly, “I’d think you are just being cruel to me.”

  “That would be impossible,” she muttered. “To you—?”

  “Then—then—” He reached into his pocket and took out the threadbare velvet box. “I’ve got something here that—oh, God! ” he said, trying to control his voice. “Please understand!” He opened the box and took out the little butterfly. He held it on the palm of his hand and said, “It was my mother’s, Renata. She used to wear it sometimes when she was young and pretty, before—” he drew a long breath and said with difficulty, “before her life became something that—something very sad, dearest Renata. Something pitiful … tragic.” He tried again to keep his voice level. She saw the butterfly trembling on his hand. His blue eyes were glassy, suffused with tears. He said, “Don’t let such a thing happen to me too. Sometimes I’m afraid it will, if you won’t marry me.” He gave up the struggle with himself and hid his face, in tears, in her lap. He felt her hand touch his hair, a touch of infinite, lightness, benign, remote. After a time he looked up and took her hand and laid the butterfly into it. “For her sake,” he said, almost whispering. “Say you will.” He held her hands clasped between his, intently watching her face. He saw a deep blush travel slowly from the ruffles of her collar, up her slender neck and her face towards the roots of her hair. For this he had no precedent, he could not understand it, nor the unspoken phrase in Italian which moved her silent lips. He waited, holding his breath and gripping her hands. She did not speak and finally he had to beg her to.

  “I don’t know what to say,” she said slowly. “I am very move’. I am not degna—you say, worth—?”

  “Oh, no. Worthy has nothing to do with it. Only what you are to me. I love you, I need to love you. I need you. But in my own way, Renata. I know there are other ways, I don’t want to hear another word about them. I only want my answer from you.”

  Suddenly she gasped and burst into tears. This he had never known her to do; she sobbed helplessly, with the abandon of a child. He got to his knees and took her in his arms and held her tightly, and she wept with her head in his shoulder, until her sobs began to subside and he took the handkerchief from her belt and gently wiped her eyes and her cheeks. He blotted them with the handkerchief and then with his lips, covering her face with tender, adoring kisses. When she was quiet again she said, “Almeno I feel is no longer possible leave this like before, tutto sospeso. Randalo, caro amico, tell me—you would suffer also we do not see each other not any more?”

  “Oh, my God,” he breathed, wincing.

  “But also I make you suffer. Also you make me suffer, is so difficult such a decision. You do not know how difficult!” she exclaimed, as if to a third person, and left him wondering. “Senti,” she said. “I am finally convince’ is impossible not decide never. Hai ragione. Also is impossible, like before, decide now, today. Maybe would be better not be together but—” they both shook their heads helplessly. “
What you say,” she asked speaking very slowly, “if I promise give you the answer in three months?” She did not wait for him to comment, she went on, thinking as she spoke, saying, “In three months I promise is definite everything. Either I agree to marry you or we all agree not meet together no more, nobody, none of us. Così, if I must do that, almeno is no surprise. No shock. You can agree, Randalo?”

  He sat looking at her helplessly. He tried to say something and failed, and said, miserably, “What else can I do?”

  She leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead. She took his right hand and put the butterfly carefully into it and folded his fingers round the brooch. “Intanto this remain with you. In three months if I can feel I deserve, you give it to me then.”

  One day early in the following week they spent the afternoon at Brighton Beach at the races and afterwards dined at the adjoining hotel. Marietta Pawling had a passion for races and was avid for all gambling. Renata had enjoyed the excitement and the crowds and the splendid view of the ocean. Now, on the glassed-in terrace overlooking the beach, she gestured at the surf-capped breakers and the Atlantic horizon, and said, “Is very imponente, but I can enjoy only from a distance comfortable like this.”

  Seymour’s face expressed mock exasperation. He turned to Randall. “Can’t you appeal to her?” he asked. “Haven’t you any influence?” For Renata had stubbornly refused his repeated suggestions that they drive out to Larchmont, where several clients of his firm kept boats which he had standing invitations to use. Half a dozen times he had proposed a sail on the Sound and Renata had shrieked, “No! Never. Never you get me in any battello a vela. I am terrify’!”

  “But Seymour is a wonderful sailor,” said Randall. “Truly, Renata. He’s been doing it all his life, in fact—” Randall nodded derisively at Seymour, “boats and machinery are all he knows anything about.”

  “H’m,” said Marietta Pawling.

  “Non importa,” cried Renata. “I don’t care. Can be the Simorr più bravo than Amerigo Vespucci, Marco Polo, Cristoforo Colombo, tutti tre. I don’t go on that—” she pointed at the Atlantic—“unless is necessary cross it in bastimento. Then already I am praying to die.”

  “The Sound is not the ocean—” Seymour began.

  “Is the salt, no? Is the same acqua like the sea? I am sick like the dog. This year I have vomit’ already enough in the ospedale, no thank you, basta.”

  “But you said you love the water,” Randall reminded her.

  “I said I love the lakes, is true. But even il mio Lago di Como, he become sometimes a wild animal.”

  Seymour guffawed.

  “No, is true,” she said seriously. “Sometimes come subito a storm terrible like I cannot describe. Is drowned many people every year.”

  “Smart sailors you must have there,” said Seymour. Renata flashed him a look of genuine scorn. Randall saw it with surprise, and he noticed a curious narrowing of Marietta Pawling’s eyes as she saw it too.

  “Well,” said Seymour, “I’ve got to go out to Larchmont anyway the day after tomorrow, to check up on some work on the Robinson boat. You lubbers can ride along if you like and kill time at the Yacht Club.”

  “I can’t go,” said Randall. “I’ve got an appointment with some people at the parish house.”

  “My God, what a bore. In August—what for?”

  Randall explained about the imminent church picnic.

  “Pic-nic?” mimicked Renata. “What is, such a funny word?”

  They explained. Renata began to smile and nod, more enthusiastic every minute. “Che bello!” she cried. “Is the first thing I hear about your religione pagana which I can understand.”

  “It has nothing to do with our religion,” said Randall. “It’s a way of raising money for some of the parish work, and getting the kids in a good mood to go to Sunday School.”

  “Ecco!” she cried. “I tell you, just like us. The bambini they always march in the Processione, is very pretty. With the bandiere and the flowers and the holy images.”

  Seymour began to laugh. Randall said uncomfortably. “You’re just silly, Renata, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Marietta said, “There are no holy images in Protestant churches.”

  “No? Pensa! Never mind, we all go anyway, I must see this Processione.” She turned to Seymour. “You take us all in the macchina, va bene?”

  Seymour and Randall exchanged a look. Renata watched them and saw consternation in both faces, but particularly in Randall’s.

  “Perchè no, Randalo?” she teased. “Why you act so funny?”

  “But Renata, this isn’t what you think it is. A lot of stuffy old ladies and their starched-up grandchildren and the Rector and—no, Renata. It’s out of the question.”

  She appealed swiftly to Seymour. “You make him say yes,” she said abruptly. “I want to go.”

  Randall looked from one face to the next and saw Marietta Pawling weighing something carefully before she spoke. She had that shrewd look in her eyes again. She said, “We’d look like damned fools, Renata. And what’s worse, make a fool of Randall.” She put her attention on digging a bit of lobster meat from a claw. She had caused a moment of uneasy silence into which Seymour rushed with the scoffing assurance that they’d all be bored to death. “Besides,” he said, “Renata, this place can only be reached by ferry-boat and you’ve made your feelings about all boats crystal-clear.”

  Nobody knew just why the trips in the Stevens-Duryea and the jolly foursome dinners began to be less frequent. The postponements or changes of plan were always impromptu. Seymour went to Larchmont alone in the train because he found that the car needed two days’ work on its brakes and its radiator. That evening Randall dined alone with Renata, and on a sentimental impulse took her to the same restaurant where they had first dined together on that Monday last April, which now seemed like years ago. The evening was not a success. Randall was ill at ease in some way far beyond the restraint that he had learned to impose upon himself, and Renata was strangely silent. Either she was bored, which he was too unhappily ready to believe, or she was disgruntled. Surely she could not be harboring a grudge about that preposterous picnic? He was afraid to reopen the subject to find out.

  The next time they went out in the car they were caught in a tremendous thunderstorm, with rain falling in cascades like the spill from a great dam. Instantly they were soaked to the skin and, halfway up Riverside Drive to Claremont, Seymour turned the car around and started for Renata’s flat, the point nearest to where they were. “I’ll take Marietta on home,” he said, jumping down, “and come along and collect you in an hour or so when we’ve all changed our clothes.”

  “No,” said Renata. “Is too far across the city drive the Marietta tutta bagnata così. She catch the terrible cold. I keep her here with me,” she said, taking Seymour’s hand and stepping from the car, holding her soaked skirts in a bunch.

  “Then we’ll pick you both up here,” said Seymour.

  “No. You cannot know is no more the rain. We stay here alone, I and the Marietta. I have in casa the eggs, I make a frittata, we eat some cheese and fruit. Basta, I am no longer in the mood to go out. Buona notte, Randalo, you ‘scuse us, please? Come, Marietta.”

  Randall gave his hand to Marietta to help her down. She had not given a sign of agreement, disagreement, or anything else. Barely moving her lips she murmured to him, “Are you beginning to catch on?”

  He stood shivering on the pavement, his thin summer clothes plastered to his body. Through the curtain of water he watched the two women disappear inside Renata’s door and Seymour, as ridiculously drenched as himself, start back across the sidewalk to the car. All three looked to Randall like puppets moving at the behest of some monstrously incomprehensible imagination. There was absolutely no sense in anything that he had drawn from a word or a look of Marietta’s, tonight or any other night. No sense. She doesn’t mean anything, his mind concocted, she’s talking to hear herself talk. She doe
sn’t mean anything, there’s nothing to mean … she’s … He jumped as the automobile started with a bang. He had forgotten it and the torrential rain streaming over his head and shoulders.

  “Come on,” shouted Seymour. “For God’s sake get a move on, what are you dreaming about?” He had had to push his goggles up on his forehead when the rain pelted them, and he drove slowly, sitting nervously forward as Randall had never seen him do, cautiously peering ahead.

  “I don’t want anything to eat,” said Randall when they had left the car in its shed which had once been the Dysons’ carriage-house up the street, and had run home and changed to dry clothes. All the while he had wilfully held his retrospective ear and eye and mind closed to Marietta’s words. Or he thought he had. Now he stood at the library window, staring at the bleary spectacle outside, the abandoned back yard churned by the rain to revolting black slime, the ailanthus tree graceless and dripping, under which he had played with Seymour while their grandmother from this window watched their every move. They had both learned to loathe being watched, they had learned beyond any other lesson never to watch one another. Now, what did she mean? Nothing, he snarled at himself. Nothing. She’s a cheap, silly … why? Why did she say those things? What’s she got against … No, he thought. I won’t think about it any more. How can I find out what she meant … except by watching Seymour … No I won’t …

  “I’m not hungry,” he said, turning from the window when Seymour urged him again to go and have something to eat. The rain had stopped; let’s walk over to Cavanagh’s, he had said, it’s the nearest place.

  “No thanks,” said Randall for the third time.