My Brother's Keeper

  “I will not kill a child,” she said. She looked him straight in the eyes.

  He wanted with all his strength to turn on his heel and walk away and leave her there. He could almost have done so, propelled by the waves of his rage and disgust. But he had made an error, allowing himself to look at her eyes. Against the whole force of his anger, his brutal disillusionment, his passion to protect Seymour, the silent intimation of truth in that glance shook him profoundly. In his mind he struggled to hold shut a figurative door, behind which swarmed the memories that could undo him. He was right now; he had been wrong then; for Seymour’s sake he must remain right. As he had done at other crises in his life, he reached for the one prop which could get him through this and beyond it. He invoked the thought of Seymour and what he would say or do; and having grasped it clearly, he spoke in what he conceived as Seymour’s words.

  “And how long,” he sneered, “have you been in this consecrated state?”

  “Three and a half months.” She still looked him steadily in the eyes, commanding rather than pleading that he make for himself the simple calculation which would state exactly what she had come to tell him.

  “And you have the extraordinary idea that I—that—”

  “Or one or the other,” she said. “You or your brother. It makes no difference about me, I tell you I think only of the child.”

  “We will both be damned in hell before we will lift a finger for it or for you either. How could you have been such a fool as to think anything else?”

  “I have know’ you when you display a goodness, a generosità, like I have never hear about in all my life. In that time you do it for a woman, you are innamorato. In this time I ask that same man do something for an innocent child.”

  Struggling to keep his voice icy he said, with stiff lips, “And what do you suppose can be done for the child?”

  “I am not sure,” she said. “Only I know is a terrible thing for a child to find itself a bastardo. I am straniera here, in America is nothing I can do, I do not know enough to think how to help my child. Only I could take it in Italy, and in Italy is a tragedy to break the heart, it follow all through the life such a child, how it is born.”

  “There have been plenty of other such children in Italy,” he said. “Yours will just have to be another. I don’t know what kind of idea you may have had, thinking there was anything we would do about it. Surely you couldn’t have thought—” his mouth hung open, silent, and he felt himself sinking down again into the quicksands of revulsion. “You go away from here,” he said, breaking into irrationality. “Go away and don’t ever come near either of us again.”

  He swung away and hurried almost at a run the short distance to his own place, and turned in there and got into the house and shut the door behind him. He stood with his back against the door, staring into the hall and towards the dark staircase. He heard Seymour’s voice at the top of the stairs.

  “Is that you, Ran?”

  “Yes, Brother.” Randall stood there taking long breaths, trying to get his voice under control so that Seymour should not hear he had been upset.

  “Are you all right?” asked Seymour gently.

  “Why, of course! I’m sorry I was so long, I was trying to find some specially nice crisp apples for you, the red and white kind you like. Now I’m just lighting the gas, I’ll be right there.”

  He was careful all evening while he was reading aloud, to keep his voice light and clear, and not to let it betray his agitation in any way. He looked constantly at Seymour’s face, watching for the scowl or the nervous sag of the mouth or any tense expression which would reveal that Seymour too was struggling with this knowledge and trying to keep Randall unaware that he knew. But Seymour sat quiet, his face like a mask, except at the scattered moments when he laughed—Randall wondered with how much difficulty—because they were reading Mr. Dooley.

  Randall had one of his worst nights. Hour after hour he lay remembering other nights as bad, garnished with shreds and fragments of horror; bad, searing memories from which he would fling and toss and twist away, only to find worse ones on the farther side of his bed, the other side of his pillow. He was harrowed with misery about Seymour, but sometimes Seymour, or an image which caricatured him, rose in the midst of all this wreckage to glide forward, cynical and elegant, at the side of a laughing Renata, both together to mock at Randall until he could have screamed for surcease. Then he swung around, groping and snatching for something to drive this away, and came face to face with the newest of his chimaeras: Renata abandoned, alone in the dark street, pleading with him for help, for mercy, for—no, he groaned into his pillow. No, that can’t be so. And if it is, it’s Seymour’s fault. Why? Didn’t she tell me, how can she know, what do we all know … what difference does it make? Does it matter which of us was the worst? What can we know? Now in the ugly December dawn he knew only that he had turned on her, his cruelty complete and final. And I meant it, too. Did you? Were you speaking for yourself or for Seymour? Oh, Christ! he snarled. He leaped to his feet and rushed at his clothes. He went up to the fourth floor and spent an hour in the old day nursery.

  When the day was half over he had convinced himself for the hundredth time that he had done right and that there was nothing else he could have said to her, no other attitude he could have taken. There, he told himself, that’s settled. What’s settled? How could he be sure that she would stay away from him, and how could he know that she would not again entreat Seymour? He could fix that at least. Seymour was lying down in his room. Randall ran down to Seymour’s shop in the cellar. He knew nothing about tools but he clambered his way over masses of stuff to get a screw-driver and a pair of pliers. He went quietly upstairs to the hall and examined the telephone on the wall. He was not sure that he knew how to remove it, but, he thought, even a fool like me can find a way to put it out of order.

  He had the box off the wall and was twisting away with the pliers at the wires he had exposed, when he heard Seymour’s soft step behind him, and looked over his shoulder to see him groping quietly along the wall. Seymour’s hand fell on his shoulder and he said gently, “Randall, are you trying to disconnect the telephone?”

  “Yes.”

  “So she reached you too. Come here, Ran.” He drew Randall into the library and sat down and pulled him down on the hassock near his chair. “What did you say to her?”

  “About the same thing you did, I suppose.” Randall sat doubled over, his head in his hands.

  “Then you think—” Seymour spoke uneasily—“I did right?”

  “Oh—oh, how do I know!” Randall’s voice broke shrilly. “It’s all such a hideous, tragic mess.”

  “It is. But you know yourself what she—” Seymour shook his head with a sigh.

  “She swore there’s been nobody else.”

  “I’d be afraid to take her word for anything, Ran.”

  The memory of her eyes yesterday, level and curiously fearless even in the midst of panic, gnawed at Randall. He only said, “Did she tell you how long she’s been pregnant?”

  “Eh—yes.”

  “Well.”

  “There’s something I hope you know,” said Seymour slowly. “After that day, that day last August, you know the day I mean. I never—”

  “Oh, don’t talk about it!”

  “I think I should. We never have. When you disappeared then, I realized what had happened. Although the very first night, when you didn’t come home, of course I thought—” he shrugged. “If that was so, God knew I wished you well and wouldn’t for the world have touched her again. But when days passed and you didn’t come home, I was beside myself. I was so alarmed that I went and asked her if she knew where you were. She was very upset, and I can tell you, no two people ever hated the sight of each other more. We hated ourselves and each other and what we had done to you. That was the end of her so far as I was concerned.”

  “Brother,” said Randall, in a high, tense tone frightening to Seymour’s sensitiv
e ears and nerves, “do you realize what all this means?”

  “I suppose so.”

  Randall’s voice turned louder. “She’s been pregnant since the end of August. She swears she’s been alone ever since, but even if she’s the biggest liar in the world it doesn’t make any difference. One of us—oh, my God!” He broke down.

  Seymour leaned over and put his arms round Randall’s shoulders. He held him so for a moment and then said, “The chances are that it is I, you know. I don’t want to make you think about it—” as Randall winced, “but since it will be your nature to try to lay the blame on yourself, I’d rather you put it on me right from the start. It will help you to put it out of mind, eventually.”

  “But how can I do that when it can exactly as well be I?”

  “Can it?”

  “Can’t it?”

  Seymour let go of Randall’s shoulders and shrank down in his chair, covering his blind eyes with one long, bony hand. He said, “It’s unendurable, to have done this to you. Now, especially—when you’re—” he cringed, “trapped with me. Oh, Randall, how you must hate me.”

  “But I don’t, Brother! Maybe I have at times—or even still might, in a way. But it has nothing to do with what I really feel for you. Don’t you know that?”

  Seymour was silent.

  “Don’t you know it?” cried Randall again. “Brother, you must believe me. I love you, more than I ever feel—ever felt—anything else about you. Won’t you believe me?”

  “Of course I believe you.” Seymour’s hand groped towards Randall and rested for a moment on his cheek. The cheek was wet and Seymour let his fingers lie there as if he had not felt that. “Of course I believe you. But I don’t deserve it.”

  “I’m so confused,” said Randall, suddenly giving up the struggle to control his voice. Seymour heard it break. “The whole thing, all mixed up like this. I don’t know. I talked to her yesterday just the way she said you had, but I couldn’t do that again, Brother.” He looked at Seymour as if to plead with those unseeing eyes. “I couldn’t.”

  “But you did right,” said Seymour. “There wasn’t any other way to treat her. You know what she was when you first knew her. How she behaved with me. I’m not trying to duck any blame. But, Ran, it takes two to hit it off. She knew what she was doing. She wanted to do it.”

  “Oh, I know that.”

  “Then she’s got to take the consequences. And if you should begin to weaken about it and think you owed her anything, you’d end in a mess worse than this. If that were possible.”

  “I know.” Randall sat with his head down, his clasped hands hanging between his knees. “But I just can’t keep on feeling so—so raging—as I was yesterday, and all those months before. I feel as if it had all been emptied out of me at once.”

  “You feel sorry for her. You would, with that tender heart of yours. I wronged you worse than she did, and see how you are with me!”

  “You weren’t any worse than she—than any of us.”

  Seymour sighed and said, uncharacteristically, “Judge not. But now what’s done has got to stay done, Ran. We mustn’t back down. If you won’t believe me for any other reason, you will admit I know more about women than you do. We did the right thing yesterday and we’ve got to stick to it.”

  They were silent for a long time. Seymour wished wretchedly that he could see Randall’s face. He could imagine all too vividly its pitiful, drooping bewilderment, but only his eyes could have told him whether he had convinced Randall to any lasting degree. After a while he said, “Ran, did you take the telephone off the wall, or what?”

  “Just about. It’s hanging by a wire. What do you want me to do about it?”

  “Why, finish what you started. What do we want it for anyway?”

  The weeks went by at a dead-march pace, one blank stretch following on the next. Seymour lived in terror that Renata Tosi would return to importune Randall, which he would be helpless to intercept. Randall lived in tormented anxiety because she did not. Having emptied out all at once, as he had said, the seething poisons of his outrage, he felt as if he had also broken the vessel that had held them. They did not seep back; he had no place in which to retain them. The catharsis had left him his truest, simplest self, a person whom Seymour knew minutely but could never really understand.

  Seymour could take a decision effortlessly and live by it without the least further concern either that it might have been faulty or that wisdom might suggest revising it if the circumstances should change. For Randall any decision was difficult, and a radical one, agony. This one in whose jaws he was caught was brutal, and he could not rest on the accomplished fact. His thoughts of Renata did not hang upon her cruelty to him, but upon his to her. His mind was permeated by memories which he loved even while he could no longer love her. He had loved standing by her when she was helpless; now his imagination saw her more helpless still. Why was he alive, if not to act in the only way his nature knew? The enormity of her situation hounded and haunted him. How was she living? Where? What about money? What about her health?

  He had abandoned the self-deception of never looking at the music news in the papers and he followed minutely the casts billed in the opera announcements. She was singing about three times a week. So long as she could keep this up, he calculated, she could support herself and if she was careful, save enough to live on for a time after she must stop singing. But that would be soon now; this was the end of January. When would it be impossible for her to appear any longer on the stage? Then what would she do? Go to Italy? She had made it pitifully clear that that was what she most dreaded. He remembered fragments of her talk at different times; he saw her sitting across a restaurant table, or standing in the Maynards’ cornfield, scattering shreds of knowledge which he pieced together to envision the stringency of her childhood. Where could she go but to her native village, to throw herself and the child on the mercy of her relatives?

  “I have work’ hard da bambina … I did not laugh … for poor contadini is a different thing … . walking four chilometri up and down the mountain … carrying on my back … thirty-five cents a week…” He did not need to think further what her life would be; he knew. Well, she will go away afterwards and sing again. Yes, but the child? “In Italy is a tragedy how it follow such a child …” But what could he do? Even if he could decide to do something, what should it be?

  He knew, because anybody would know; only money could help her through the worst of her ordeal and shield her from the total impact of everything she most feared. She had not asked him for money but it was the only help he could give; he was inclined to agree with Seymour that the child was the consequence of her own voluntary acts, and she must find her own solution for it. Her own voluntary acts … for a moment the burden of his deadly guilt came sweeping back, but he held his ground against it because his memories were so clear.

  Now he must contrive to send money to her in such a way that Seymour should not know, and she should understand this was all that Randall would do. Anything beyond that could bring her back into their orbit to harass his helpless brother and make discord between them. That must not be. No: it had to be money. He was pondering that the next morning, when he went downstairs to take in the newspapers and the morning mail. Few letters ever came to the Holt house, but today was the first of February; the post had brought his bank statement, and Seymour’s and a sheaf of bills which he sorted as he walked slowly upstairs to the library. Perhaps because he had been thinking for several days about money, to which he ordinarily never gave a thought; or perhaps because up to now so many greater concerns had preoccupied him in his care of Seymour, he had not really noticed these bills as they went unopened through his hands on the first of each month. It was part of the slow lesson of learning to care for Seymour, to act out the ghastly farce of respect for his privacy. Randall had handed him his mail when it came, and never yet had Seymour submitted to the humiliation of asking to have a letter read to him. Randall had somehow never won
dered why. Now he stood in the library doorway, with his right hand full of envelopes addressed to Seymour, and he saw suddenly that Seymour in these four months had received scarcely any other mail at all.

  He went over to Seymour and said, “Here’s your mail, Brother,” and laid the pile on Seymour’s knee. He sat down in his own chair and ripped open his bank statement. He had never kept close track of his balance, and he was startled to see how it had shrunk. He sat back and ran his fingers into his hair and began the futile mental backtracking of trying to understand where the money had gone. Most of it on Renata, between last April and August; her illness had eaten up the accumulated income that he had not spent before. And since then he had quit his job, and now he realized, turning over his cancelled vouchers one by one, and thinking about the past four months, he had been paying all the living expenses which he and Seymour had always shared before. The gas and the coal and the food and Mrs. Quinn’s wages—it didn’t amount to so very much, but four months of it made quite a total. And then he had bought the small upright piano so that he could play for Seymour. Well, he would have to find a tactful way of suggesting that he write out the necessary checks for Seymour, and guide his hand while he signed them. But, he saw, picking up the yellow bank statement again, even after Seymour had reimbursed him, he would have to be extremely careful—penurious, in fact—if he were to send Renata even a little money; as little as would help her at all. He was digesting this in worried silence when Seymour said, “Randall.” He looked across at his brother. “Yes,” he said.

  Seymour was sitting with the pile of unopened envelopes clutched between his hands as if he were about to tear the lot in half. His forehead was stitched in a nervous scowl, and his whole appearance was so tense that Randall had for a moment the illusion that Seymour had been able to read the mail which had upset him. Seymour dragged at his moustache and started several times to say something, and shut his mouth again while Randall sat watching him and waiting for him to speak. Finally he dropped the pile of letters on his knees and felt them over until he found the large envelope from the bank. He opened it. His long precise fingers made as neat a job of it as they did of everything. He drew out the statement and unfolded it. There were no cancelled checks enclosed. He thrust the yellow paper at Randall and said, “It’s a damned bloody nuisance … . would you mind telling me what it says? The balance?”