My Brother's Keeper

by Marcia Davenport

  “What’s the matter with you?” Seymour came across the room polishing his spectacles. His thinning fair hair and his moustache were still wet, carefully combed into place.

  “Nothing,” muttered Randall.

  “Well, damn it, then, don’t be so grumpy. It wasn’t my fault the evening turned out like this.”

  “Oh, all right.” Randall turned indifferently from the window and started to follow Seymour from the room. If I’m going to watch him I’m not going to let him know it, he thought.

  They had not dined alone together in months. And now that they were here they had nothing to say. Seymour made desultory stabs at talk and Randall answered in monosyllables. He ate nothing but a bowl of fish chowder and not all of that. He sat crumbling a pilot biscuit into it and dabbing at the thick porridge with his spoon.

  “You know,” said Seymour, “you were absolutely right when Renata made that silly fuss about your picnic. Of course it’s out of the question.

  “Why bring that up now?” Randall moved his shoulders irritably.

  “Well, because she began to harp on it again last Friday when I picked her up before we came for you.” Randall had been kept later than usual at the parish house.

  And she had harped on it on each of the three afternoons that Seymour had been with her since the dinner at Brighton Beach. He had warned her that she was being madly unreasonable, reckless, in fact; that a caprice like this could make a disaster as terrible as the worst capitulation to jealousy. “You are clever enough never to be that kind of woman,” he had said to her. “What the devil has got into you now?”

  “I want to go to that Processione,” she said stubbornly.

  “What you want,” he said, “is to pit Randall against me to see if you can get something you consider essentially innocuous—which it is. But this time we’re both impervious to you, Renata, and I warn you to drop it. I warn you not to mention it to him again.”

  “E’ una bella cosa you warn me something about your brother!”

  “You’ll do as I say about my brother.” Seymour had stood over her with his long face reddening, his weak eyes glaring in a show of temper which she had never come up against. She turned away contemptuously, muttering something in Italian.

  He decided then himself to mention the subject to Randall to shut it out of discussion once for all.

  Randall said now, “She needn’t harp on it any more. To anybody. That’s the end of it.”

  What Seymour did not know was the strength of Randall’s urge to hide the tokens and the symbols of emotion, as powerful in a different way as Seymour’s own fanatic secrecy about his eyes. He did not know that Randall too had his violences of mind, stranger, more devious, more inexplicable than Seymour’s own secret bawling rages. He did not know what touched off detonations in the depths of Randall’s being, which no eye resting on his lovely face could guess.

  Nor did Randall know. He only knew that when Renata in her unwonted perversity had begun a few mornings ago to tease and wheedle him about the church picnic, he had once for all said, “Stop it. It isn’t fair to ask me for something I can’t consent to. Why don’t you ask me for something I can give? Those are the things I wish you would ask, Renata dear. And you never do.”

  He had gone down to St. Timothy’s in an agitation of mind all out of proportion to the silliness of the question. And there on his table in the parish house he found a pile of boxes. The tickets for the picnic had come. He opened the top box and picked up a bundle of tickets and stood and looked at it, weighing it on the palm of his hand. Now, he thought, if these things didn’t exist there couldn’t be any picnic and if there weren’t any picnic Renata wouldn’t want to make a fool of me and if she didn’t want to make a fool of me she would really love me and if she really loved me … he stood there, dreaming or imagining, detached from any sense of the immediate and the real. He had no idea how long he stood there or how far his fantasy carried him. He only knew that when he looked at the clock on the wall it was half-past one, and that the two curates and the Church secretary were all out at lunch. He was entirely alone in the parish house with six boxes full of tickets for the picnic. It doesn’t matter what I do with them, he thought, still spinning his dream. It doesn’t matter a bit. But if nobody can find them it’s going to settle the question of that picnic. The whole dream was irrational, but why should he know that: it was a dream.

  He found a piece of cord and tied the six boxes together so that he could carry them, and he put on his straw hat again and calmly walked out to the street. There he stood for a moment wondering what to do with the boxes. I can’t throw them any place, he thought, they’ll only be found. I might burn them but where can I find a furnace going in the middle of August? No, there was only one thing to do. Randall hailed a cab and got into it and went home. He got out the keys and went up to the fourth floor and opened the boxes and began carefully to stow the bundles of tickets away. He was well satisfied; in three or four crammed bureaus and wardrobes in various rooms up here he could hide every bundle of the tickets so that nobody until kingdom come would ever know they were there.

  Whenever he was alone in the following days he found himself remembering those words or glances of Marietta’s. Only his will not to understand spared him the agony of understanding all too clearly. He told himself that she was disgruntled; what could that be but that Seymour once again was growing bored with her? Why need it mean anything else? She must, he thought, have said something to Renata about it, and that was why Renata had been so kind to her the night of the rainstorm, as a way of reproaching Seymour. Well, yes, he argued, but why did she make me think, that night, of watching Seymour? What is there to watch? Nothing, he told himself, nothing …

  But he watched. Though they were gay on Thursday evening, when they drove up to Yonkers and dined at a new restaurant on the banks of the Hudson, he watched all three of them with every sense sharpened to catch any meaning look or word, not alone from Marietta; from Seymour or Renata as well. But there was nothing. Renata was in her funniest mood; even Randall, full of hopeless yearning for her, was convulsed like the others when she fell to mimicking certain of her more celebrated colleagues at the opera, and graphically telling some of their seamier secrets. Only once all evening did Randall feel a pang of concern, and that was for Seymour, when he saw him wince and strain to keep his eyes open as they were entering the gaudy restaurant ablaze with electric lights. His eyes must be worse, Randall thought, they must be much weaker. I wonder if he’s careful enough of them. He had never tried to question Seymour about this without meeting a rebuff. I suppose he knows best, Randall thought uneasily. He put his attention on the party again.

  On the way back to town the air was chilly and Renata let him wrap her shoulders in the light shawl that she had brought along. He was surprised when she settled back in the seat, close to him for warmth, with her hand lying quietly in his. Very seldom was she ever in a mood like that. He kept her hand in his all the way, sometimes raising it to his lips. She smiled at him, and he thought wistfully of the peaceful days at the Maynard farm, before Seymour and Marietta and this snorting red intruder had broken in. He tried to weave a dream of such a time to come again.

  Not only did the dream elude him; so did sleep, most of that night. He tossed and thrashed; one after another his worries writhed and bored to the surface of his mind, like snakes emerging from a hole where they had hibernated, to weave their ugly heads about and vie with one another to command his notice. At first they were separate, each a color and a type of itself. Then they began to tangle and merge into a twisting mass, every one a factor in the compounding of some awful evil which, though its different parts were as unrelated as his fear of the rats in the attic and of the deferred crisis which must break over the lost picnic tickets, still came to the same festering head, his suspicion of Seymour. But of what did he suspect Seymour? … nothing that he could bring himself to face. Then one snake weaved apart from the others and to his horror sai
d in his own voice, I’ve got a brother just like you. No, said Randall into his pillow, no I won’t hear it, I won’t think it … a brother just like you just like you just like you … stop it, stop hearing that …

  He tried to sweep it all away with the great clean tender beauty of his love for Renata, the love he believed would win her and bring them together and take him away from all this, all these rats and snakes of his imagination, which had their nests deep in every corner of this house. Please help me, he breathed in the dark, please, please, though whether he prayed to Renata or to some deity who had no place in St. Timothy’s Church he did not know. He could not lie still any more, he rolled off his bed and stumbled to the window and stood there trying to calm himself with a breath of the damp dawn air.

  He did not want to face Seymour in the morning; a glimpse of his own sickly grey face in the glass was enough to decide him. He did not want any coffee, nor any food; he did not want to go to St. Timothy’s, because St. Timothy’s was no longer the pleasant place where he worked, it was the place where something dreadful was going to happen on account of those picnic tickets. His horror was not a fear of disgrace; it was a fear that they should ever discover his deepest secrets. He would simply not go there any more. He would go to Renata and tell her some of his sufferings of the night, and get from her company the consolation that only she could give.

  Then he thought about her unusual gentleness in the car riding back from Yonkers, the unaccustomed tenderness of leaving her hand in his and sitting so close to him because she was cold. It had warmed and reassured him then, but now he stood weighing and pondering it, and he saw, as if it moved on two axial screws like this old-fashioned mirror in its frame, the whole thing roll slowly over and show him its reverse. No, he began to tell himself again, while he stood trembling in his nightshirt, no, I’m not going to believe that. Nothing will make me believe that. She did it to fool you. She did it to throw you off the track.

  He put his hand across his mouth as if he were afraid that he might scream, and he stood looking at that mirror which had taken on the dire power of showing him what he did not mean to see. He stood there until he was swaying on his feet. Then he wrenched himself away, pulled off his nightshirt, threw on the first clothes that came to hand and rushed downstairs and out of the house. He did not know where he went all day long. He tramped the streets and sat in parks with his head clutched between his hands, and tramped again, and stood for he did not know how long at the railing of Brooklyn Bridge, gazing at the swift tangled currents of water far below. Then it was three o’clock and he was walking up Broadway, past an office of the telephone company. There was a row of booths inside the door. He went in and looked up the number of Grew and Minturn and dropped a nickel in the box and asked Central for the number.

  When somebody answered he asked to speak to Seymour Holt.

  “Oh,” said the voice. “He is not here. Mr. Holt is never at the office in the afternoon.”

  He went out, walking fast and with sharp accuracy of which he was unaware. He took the subway and got out uptown at the corner nearest Renata’s apartment house and walked there, still like a wound-up toy. There was an open ironwork elevator shaft running straight up the centre of the building, and a stairway winding round it all the way from the ground floor to the roof. Some people used the stairs as often as the elevator, because they lived on the lower floors and the elevator was so slow. Randall walked into the lobby, past the elevator shaft which was empty because the car was up above somewhere, and began quietly to climb the stairs. He met nobody. He climbed to the fifth floor where Renata lived, turning his head away when the elevator passed him on its slow descent. He was not conscious of a plan, no part of this had he thought about more distinctly than about anything else today. It was still a great mixed writhing inside him. He stopped at Renata’s door and though he knew it would be locked, he tried the handle anyway. The door was locked, of course. He looked round the hall; nobody was there; he put his ear tight against the door. He could not hear anything, but he thought of the layout of the two rooms inside and the unlikelihood that one could hear sounds out here. He put his hands over his face for a moment, sick and bewildered and uncertain what to do. But that passed; he knew now with frightening clearness what he meant to do. He went back to the stairway and climbed to the landing on the half-turn of the stairs between the fifth and sixth floors. Standing there, in an angle behind a fire extinguisher on the wall, he could look down and see Renata’s door.

  And there he stood, for an hour which he measured because he was dully surprised to find that he had put his watch and chain in his trousers pocket when he rushed out of the house this morning. He stood with his watch in his hand, moving his eyes from the watch to the door, from the door to the watch. The full hour passed. He was drawing long breaths half-strangled by the pounding of his pulse. Then the door opened. Randall stood stock-still, watching Seymour come quietly through the doorway, shut the door behind him, and walk to the stairs. He’ll ring for the elevator, Randall thought, knowing Seymour’s ways; but Seymour did not. He started down the stairs, with Randall flattened in the niche behind the fire extinguisher watching him and thinking, “He probably thinks he’s less observed that way.” Randall leaned forward and watched Seymour going down and down, turn after turn, his footfalls growing fainter. Then Randall left his corner and ran down the few steps and put his thumb upon Renata’s doorbell and pushed it hard. For a moment he heard nothing. Then her voice said, “Is you, Simorr? You forgot something?”

  “Yes,” said Randall in a voice pitched enough lower than his own, and enough like Seymour’s for the monosyllable to have deceived anybody. The door opened slowly. He threw his weight against it, flung into the hall, and slammed the door behind him. Renata stood, naked except for a nightgown sheer as glass, dead white and silent. She was barefoot. Randall strode past her into her bedroom. The bed was in wild disorder, the pillows on the floor, the coverings tumbled everywhere. The blinds were drawn. Flung across a chair was a thin silk summer dressing-gown of Seymour’s.

  He stood and looked at the room and for a long time did not move at all; then his hands went slowly to his eyes as if to cover them from shame. Finally his hands dropped to his sides. He turned and went towards the hall and saw Renata standing as he had left her. Her face was still chalk-white. He raised his right hand and lashed it across her cheek and said, “Go in there.” She moved ahead of him into the bedroom, walking slowly with stiff steps like a doll.

  She stood in the middle of the room, looking neither to one side nor the other. Her eyes were fixed on the drawn blinds at the windows. She held her head up; he saw the sharp young angle of her chin and throat. Her right cheek was mottled with red where he had struck her.

  “So this is what you tried to tell me you were,” he said. His voice was loud and rough and later in hideous retrospect he would hear and not be able to recognize it.

  “I have tell you many times,” she said dully. “For you, may not seem so, but for me I am honest.”

  “Honest! Yes, like an animal. Why didn’t you tell me that?”

  “I did tell you. Everything, I have try’ to make you believe. Can I help if you are a child, also a puritano? Always I know is the terrible mistake I have anything to do with you.”

  “Why did you, then?” he shouted. “Why?”

  She shrugged, not contemptuously, but with the resigned heaviness of an old woman. She did not answer him, except with a long, grave, eloquent look.

  He began to rave at her, pouring out a stream of cruelty, of reckless injustices, of insane protests against what she could have reminded him he should have known. She never said a word. “I loved you,” he shouted. “I thought I could make you a woman worth loving, worth marrying, I dreamed of a life with you, I—”

  She shook her head slowly, reminding him of all her refusals and all her warnings. He took no notice, but went on raving. “I worshipped you, I believed I could make you want what I wanted, what I
could love, not what I am sickened by. I’ve had that too, you slut, that filth you call pleasure, you and my rotten lecher of a brother. Two of a kind. He saw what you are, he sized you up fast enough!”

  She stood looking at him with an expression which he was too frenzied to recognize as infinite regret and infinite pity.

  “I have try’ to tell you myself,” she said with astonishing dignity. He scarcely listened. He shouted, “Yes, I see you did. And I wouldn’t believe you, I thought I could make you worthy of real love by loving you. But I guess you knew better, you and Seymour. Seymour … All right!” he roared. “I’ll show you too, I’ll show you what you’re worth.” He began to rip and tear at his clothes. “I’ll take you at your own estimation. Slut! Strumpet! Whore!” He seized her by her shoulders and flung her violently on her back on the bed.

  CHAPTER 15

  The place was dim and evil-smelling. Raising his head from the gritty spot where it lay, Randall peered dully round. He recognized nothing of the little he could see: a leaden-grey wall, a barred rectangle near the low ceiling, something shuffling past it outside. He turned his head heavily the other way: a row of objects like this lumpy cot where he lay, each with a shape sprawled or flung upon it. Snores and snuffling sickly breathing, a belch, an undertone of witless mumbling, were all he heard. He stayed for a moment raised on one elbow, squinting at the dirty wall. His head weaved slowly, right to left, left to right, up and down. Presently it fell once more on the rough soiled ticking.

  When he roused again he heard a harsh, steady splashing. He pushed himself up on his hands and looked about. Now he recognized what he had seen before. The rectangle was a window, and the splashing was rain, and some of the cots along the wall were empty now. As if with some faculty that he was afraid to use, he began to try to understand where he was. Those were feet stumbling and dragging past the window. The trousers above them were dripping rags. This must be a cellar, he thought, which was his first thought about anything in a length of time which had no span. Like the reluctant turning of an unoiled wheel, his mind began stiffly to go round. Each fragment of thought was like another hard push on the wheel; it moved barely at all, creaking, grating; but it moved. This is a cellar, he thought innumerable times, and there he stuck until the shove which made him ask, what cellar? Slowly he sat up and swung weakly round and felt for the floor with his feet. His elbows fell on his knees, and his head into his hands, and he sat there for a long time.