My Brother's Keeper

by Marcia Davenport

  He heard the back door open; Seymour came slowly out to the yard. He was feeling his way up the steps from the basement entry, dragging behind him an old zinc wash-tub, which banged on each step. Randall said, “What are you going to do with that, Brother?”

  “I’ve made a boat for John to sail, a very simple one. I thought we could sink the tub in a corner of his sand-box and put some water in it, and I think I can feel around well enough to show him how to sail the boat.”

  “That’s fine,” said Randall. John was much too young to sail a boat, but why spoil Seymour’s pleasure? “I only wonder—well, I’m a little worried he might fall in. That’s a pretty big tub.”

  “You may be right. Damn,” said Seymour, “why didn’t I think of that? I know. You tie a clothes-line around his waist and hold one end of it while you watch him. If he gets too near the edge of the tub you can yank him back.”

  So Randall helped Seymour to put the tub in place and put water in it, and Seymour brought out his boat, the simplification of an old one that he had made when he was a boy, and they tied the clothes-line round John’s waist. Randall guided Seymour to the corner of the sandpile and put him on his knees where he could reach the boat, and John scrambled along beside Seymour, following the boat and clapping his hands with delight while Randall sat holding the end of the rope. He marvelled to see how Seymour managed; how sensitive he was to the faint play of the summer breeze, how his nervous, delicate fingers adjusted the miniature rigging and set the boat on a true course across the tub. He is at last, thought Randall, beginning to be a little easier, a little reconciled. It is making him happy, or giving him a moment’s illusion of happiness, to do this with John. Thank God, Randall thought. In the beginning he could never have dared to hope for a time like this afternoon.

  When Randall was restless and wakeful in the night, when the bad memories came back at him as they had done through all these years, he lived again those terrible hours and days, the climax of all the disasters that had gone before, when Seymour raved and stormed and threatened and Randall for the one time in his life had been adamant. Now it seemed an impossibility that they could have got through that crisis and that John had survived it. Like so much else from which it was inextricable, Randall managed most of the time to keep it rammed away in the dark pit of wilful oblivion; but sometimes even now it broke out, horrible and vivid and worst of all, pregnant with some threat for the future. He had that to conquer too; it strode always beside him, a grey, powerful ghost. Seymour had raised it that very first night, had blown into it the breath of its hateful vitality; and Randall must struggle with it forever, holding John beyond its reach.

  The argument had been savage; never had a thing of such ferocity touched them before. Seymour had said he would not have the child in the house even for the night. Randall had said, “Either it stays or I leave with it.” Seymour had said, “You can’t go, you can’t leave, there must be some kind of law that will keep you from abandoning me for a nameless bastard.”

  “Nameless. But one of us is its father and both of us are going to take the responsibility.”

  “Bastards don’t have fathers. It can be anybody’s spawn. It’s not mine.”

  “Then it’s mine. And I’m keeping it.”

  “You’re not,” screamed Seymour from the top of those dark stairs, while the child wailed and gargled in the basket on the table. “If you try to keep it here I’ll kill it.”

  “If you do I’ll turn you in. I mean that.”

  And Seymour had known from Randall’s voice, a tone of voice he had never heard before, that this was true. So he turned to argument again, talking, talking, while Randall down in the hall ignored him and tried to quiet the screaming infant. He sat on the bottom step in the hall, holding the child bundled in his arms, clumsy, helpless, frantic, not knowing what to do. And upstairs Seymour stood clinging to the banister and talking.

  “Take it to a foundling hospital,” he said. “Get it out of the house. Take it to that convent over in Twenty-third Street. Go and take it now.”

  Randall ignored him. Seymour talked until he was sick and sweating, wildly repeating himself and no longer coherent, and Randall sat rocking the child and saying nothing. Little by little the child became quieter. Randall did not know that it was too hot, that he should have unwrapped it from the knitted blanket, he knew nothing, he could not see how to manage until morning when he would get help; but he paid no attention to Seymour. The child slept at last from exhaustion and Randall laid it back in its basket and said, “Seymour, shut up and go to your room. Not one word you’ve said makes the slightest difference. Shut up and go to bed.”

  Then Seymour said, “I suppose you realize that its sainted mother must be here in New York, that she stayed here plotting to do this. I’m damn well going to see she gets it right back.”

  “You’re going to see nothing,” said Randall. “You’re blind.”

  He heard a gasp from Seymour behind him up the stairs; he had not known he could be capable of such cruelty. But he had hit the mark.

  “At least,” said Seymour, “try to make sense enough to think about what I said. She obviously is here. And maybe we made a mistake, not giving her any money. If you go and talk to her now and tell her we’ll give her money, she’ll take the child back. You can’t keep it, Randall, you must be out of your mind.”

  “In or out of it, I don’t care. I’m going to keep the child.”

  All that night he stayed downstairs in the drawing-room, watching and hovering over the child. Hour by hour his helpless desperation grew, as the child howled weakly from hunger and discomfort and heat, none of which Randall knew how to assuage. Towards morning he grew frightened, the child was quiet, but he thought, too quiet. Suppose it should die. He knelt beside the divan where he had placed the basket, and put his head in his hands and prayed, though to whom, in what words, he could never have said. As soon as it was light he began to watch from the window for somebody out in the street whom he could hail, and after a time he saw a boy walking along on his way to some early job. Randall threw up the sash and called to him. The boy came to the window and Randall handed him out some money and told him to go to Mrs. Quinn, who lived in Twenty-seventh Street near Eleventh Avenue, and ask her to come at once, because there was an emergency.

  Randall heard her come in soon through the side door. He went out to the hall and called her into the drawing-room. The child was wailing feebly. She stood in the doorway in her shabby clothes, a cracked straw hat with a red rose pinned to her topknot. Her mouth was wide open with amazement. Randall only said, “I won’t explain anything, Mrs. Quinn. But please—please—take care of this child. I—” he turned away, unable to speak.

  The woman crossed the room and looked into the basket and with a capable scoop lifted the child out and unwrapped it from its shawls. Oh, the poor thing,” she said, and then, “Mother o’ God, Mr. Holt, it can’t be much over a week old.”

  “I know.” He was standing at the window with his back turned. “Can you—look here, it isn’t going to die, is it?”

  “Die? I should say not. Here, now.” She sat down on the divan, rummaged in the basket, and was soon busy changing the child’s diaper and making it comfortable. “That’s better,” she said, in her fat brogue. “Lord, what a mess. He’ll be feelin’ better now.”

  “He?”

  “Yes, sir. He. There’s the little man.” The child was quiet.

  Later in the morning Randall had a talk with Mrs. Quinn. He intended to say as little as possible, but looking at the woman’s plain, common-garden face, her eyes which would see such a thing only in its brutal elementary reality, he said, “Mrs. Quinn, there is no use my telling you the story behind this. If I tell you lies, you’ll know they are lies, and the truth you can guess for yourself. Which of us is the father—that is what I’m not going to tell you. Nor who the mother is either. The child is here—and I intend to keep it. Will you help me?”

  The woman said s
lowly, “Mr. Holt, sir, I don’t mean to be steppin’ out of me place. But I don’t think it would be fair to a child to raise it up like that. It’s an awful odd situation, sir.”

  “I know that. You may as well know my brother thinks as you do. He wanted me to take it to an orphanage last night.”

  “Well, sir, in a way he’s right. Them childer, the poor things—”

  “And you honestly think I can’t give this child a better life than the foundlings in an orphanage?”

  “Why—” her mouth hung half open.

  “There you are. That’s what I mean. I don’t know anything about this yet, but I’ll learn. The minute you saw what I meant, you began to think so too.”

  She stood silent, twisting a corner of her apron. He saw that she was weighing something which she hesitated to say. He nodded at her and said, “I know what you’re thinking. We’re pretty queer here. Both of us. This house—” he motioned overhead to indicate all the locked, derelict rooms. “And my blind brother. You may be thinking this is no place for a young child. You may be right. All I know is the child is here,” he was unconscious of repeating himself, “and I mean to keep it.”

  “Very well, sir,” she said quietly.

  “Thank you. Now what should we do about taking care of it?”

  “I should say it had ought to have a nurse, sir. Someone’s got to be with it all the time while it’s so little.”

  “You couldn’t do that yourself? You couldn’t just move in here and stay?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve got me husband, sir, and the three younger childer. I’m needed at home, the hours I’m not here. But—”

  “Then find me a nurse. I’d rather have somebody you know. Somebody who—” he smiled lamely. Somebody who will be trustworthy with the child, he meant, and charitable about this grotesque house and its occupants, and perhaps even decent enough not to blab about them too maliciously. He asked Mrs. Quinn in a burst of helpless frankness if that was too much to hope. She wove her hard red fingers together in her embarrassment, and bit her lip; then she said, “That’s awful hard to answer, Mr. Holt.”

  “I suppose it is. A woman used to work for us, named McBane—”

  “I know. She’s no different from most. But you can’t be like—excuse me, sir, like you are, and not have everybody in a neighborhood know it. I tend to mind my own business more than Mary McBane, but—” her unfinished sentence told him the uselessness of wanting human nature to be other than it was.

  “Well, the important thing is a nurse now. Can’t you find me somebody, Mrs. Quinn?”

  She said slowly, “I was thinkin’ about me daughter Maggie. She works as nursemaid for Mrs. Worthington over on Gramercy Park—”

  “Then get her! I hadn’t hoped for anything as good as that. How quickly could she come?”

  Mrs. Quinn looked embarrassed again. “Oh, quickly enough, I suppose. But you see, sir—” she hung her head. Randall stood and watched her and once again her awkward silence told him what she could not find a way to say.

  “I see,” he sighed. “You wouldn’t feel too good about having your own daughter work in such a—an—unconventional situation. I understand. I wish it could be different. But don’t you see—I must have help? If it were anything but a child—”

  “I know. You see, good jobs depends on always havin’ good references —the best. And Maggie’s been near two years with Mrs. Worthington, it’s her first job. If she left it for—” Mrs. Quinn shut her mouth, then sighed and said, “for a place like this, what would happen when she went to apply for the next one?”

  “I’d give her the best reference in the world,” he said quickly.

  She looked at him as if to ask who, upon verifying a reference from him, would think it anything but an obloquy. Overcome by mortification, he said with his eyes averted, “I understand. But this is—you do know, don’t you, that I’d pay your daughter, and you too, much more than ordinary wages? And—” he managed a tone of such innate, wellbred authority that it slightly reassured the uneasy Irishwoman, “when it comes time for a reference, something can be arranged, I’m sure.”

  She stood biting her lip, swayed by the promise of extra money. He said, “Please, Mrs. Quinn. Please do it for me.” He put his hand on her forearm and looked into her hard grey eyes with such pleading that she yielded to what her better sense had told her from the first would be a mistake. She sighed. A body would have to have a heart of stone, she thought, and went away to see Maggie.

  Seymour was furious. The first he knew of the arrangement was when he heard Randall upstairs that afternoon, dragging and pushing furniture around the old spare-room above the library, the rear bedroom on the third floor where their mother had lived in the front. He felt his way upstairs and along the hall until he stood in the room, smelling the warm air from the open window, which, mingling with the dust and must of a decade, carried a mouldy miasma to his nostrils.

  “What are you doing?” he asked Randall, though he knew perfectly well.

  “Getting this room ready to be used.”

  “There isn’t a room in this house fit to use.”

  “There will be when I get through with this one.”

  “You can’t get this room fit to be lived in. It stinks like a sty.”

  “It won’t.” Seymour heard a crash and Randall said, “If you don’t want to get hurt, get out of the way. I’m piling up the furniture in this end of the room. Move.”

  “Why?”

  “Seymour, go downstairs and mind your own business.”

  “Are you going to have any repairs made?” Seymour’s voice twanged.

  “Yes. Whatever’s necessary. I’m going to have the roof fixed so no more damp comes down the back of the house. And I’m going to have this room plastered and papered. Thank God it’s the one room in the house where there isn’t a lot of old stuff I’d have to stop and sort out.”

  “You’re going to ask the Trustees to pay for that?”

  “I certainly am. At least when I want them to spend some money they don’t have to go to court to get permission.”

  “I won’t have any of my money used this way!”

  “Don’t. I’ll tell them to use mine.”

  “And I’ll tell them,” Seymour shouted, “that you’re fixing up this room to keep your bastard in.”

  “Ours. I can always tell them that, and I will if you force me. Or I’ll just pay for the repairs myself. Instead of paying your doctor’s bill for another three months. In fact I don’t see how I can carry it any longer anyway.” He walked over to Seymour and put his hands on either side of his face and said, “Now you listen to me. You’ve used that word for the last time. Understand? I mean it, Seymour. God help you if you use that word again.”

  Seymour swore and said, “If you don’t take my advice and go and look for her before you let yourself in for all this, you’re a bigger damn fool than you ever proved yourself before. And that was spectacular.” He turned to go away.

  But next day, when Maggie Quinn, detached from Mrs. Worthington by a fictitious family emergency, was settled temporarily in the drawing-room with the child, and Randall had seen a contractor and ordered the repairs, he was nonplussed to find that he could not get Seymour’s words out of his head. He tried to keep too busy to think at all, but even while he was buried in the details of furnishing the third floor room, digging out from the shut-up fourth floor pieces of old nursery furniture which could be cleaned and painted and put to use, carefully leaving his own things hidden and locked up there, he found his mind uneasily turning over Seymour’s remarks about Renata. Was it possible that Seymour could be right? If she had stayed in New York it struck him suddenly that he ought to get some kind of assurance from her that she would never try to see the child. He sat down heavily and began to ponder the possibility that some day she might walk into their lives again and demand to take the child back. It did not fit with anything he knew of Renata, but he had read of far stranger happenings in
situations with the elements of this one. Presently it became clear that he would have no peace of mind until he had found out whether Seymour was right about her.

  It was surprisingly simple to trace her. That had not occurred to him at all. The Opera was closed, but he reached its booking-manager, who had sent Renata to St. Timothy’s those unbelievable fifteen months ago. The man gave him an address to which she had evidently moved from the flat she had sublet last summer. She had left there to go to another place, whose address was readily given him. He followed two more such moves, each a shabbier descent, and at the end of the day found himself on a doorstep talking to a heavy, sullen Italian woman with wary black eyes. He supposed this must be a musicians’ boarding-house, but if it wasn’t, he did not want to know what it was. The woman was a clam at first, she did not even admit that she knew anyone who fitted the description of Renata Tosi, and she shrugged indifferently at Randall’s assurances that he wanted to know nothing except where the young woman was. Then, damning his own naivete he took out his wallet and offered the woman a bill. Once again he asked if she knew where Renata Tosi was—if, perhaps, she was not right inside the house now?

  “No,” said the woman. “She went away.”

  “When?”

  “The day before yesterday.”

  “Do you know where she went?”

  The woman shook her head. But her black eyes shifted. “Not even for another five dollars?” he asked, “you don’t know where she went?”

  The woman shrugged. He handed over the second bill and she said, “She went in South America. The piroscafo leave the day before yesterday. In the afternoon.”