My Brother's Keeper

by Marcia Davenport

  “Anyway,” said Randall, “even if it weren’t for John’s sake, it was always you who wanted most to get out of here.”

  “I know. Curious, isn’t it, that such a succession of things happened to make it impossible.”

  “Well, it’s only three months now until you start getting your doubled income. That’s going to make a big difference.”

  “Oh,” said Seymour. “So you’re counting on my income. That’s thoughtful of you.”

  “Oh, Brother, be reasonable. You know what I mean. I’m willing to put up practically all of mine, and if you match that, we’d have enough to live quietly in some place like we’ve been talking about and you’d have about two thousand a year left over for yourself. Doesn’t that seem fair?”

  “I suppose so,” said Seymour grudgingly.

  Randall stared at him. Could it be possible that Seymour resented paying his share of their expenses? Randall saw no reason for reticence and he asked him outright.

  “Well—no. I don’t resent it. But after taking a couple of years to get out of debt to you and waiting all this time to have enough money to be of any use to a man—”

  Randall shook his head. He said, “I just hadn’t realized you had any plans of your own. In the circumstances.” He spoke gently.

  “Oh, I haven’t,” said Seymour. “I only mean I’d like the feeling of having some money for a change and having the satisfaction of keeping it without spending it all on this household you’ve saddled us with.”

  “But Brother, we’ve got to make a home for John.”

  Seymour smoothed his moustache. “Yes. But does it have to take everything we’ve got?”

  “I just told you it would only take half of what you’ll have. I don’t care if I use all of mine, I like to. What else have I got to do with it?”

  Damn him, thought Seymour. Those pious virtues of his. He uses them to rebuke me. He got up from his chair and went away to his room without having committed himself.

  A few days later, Seymour waited in mid-afternoon until John had gone out with Randall to make a snow-man in the back yard. His accurate ears informed him that Maggie was ironing in the kitchen. Standing in the passageway at the top of the cellar stairs he heard the thump of the sad-irons when she changed them, and smelled the crisp warm odor of starched linen. Mrs. Quinn had gone home. Seymour went quietly up to the third floor to John’s room, and felt around in his crib to find the teddy bear tucked against the pillow. It was never taken out in wet weather so it “wouldn’t catch cold.” Seymour took the bear, whose arm had been mended, and started downstairs with it. He intended to take it to the cellar. At the top of the stairs on the second floor he heard Maggie, unexpectedly coming up, proclaimed by the rustle of her skirts. He stood still and swore silently.

  “Why, Mr. Holt,” she said. “Did John leave his bear in the library?”

  “No. I got it from his room.” Unable to see the quick anger which suffused her face he heard her say, “I’ll take it along with me, sir.” She paused; he knew she was considering something. She said politely, “Or perhaps ye wanted to measure it for another thing like its toy chair? For Christmas?”

  “No, Maggie. I’m going to throw it away. John is too old for it. He’s turning into a mollycoddle and this bear is exactly the sort of thing that’s doing it to him. He ought to like different toys, real boy’s toys. He’s got some and I’m going to give him more for Christmas. He—”

  “Excuse me, sir.” Seymour heard the girl’s voice tremble and he supposed she must be afraid of him. Let her be afraid. He even shrugged as a commentary. But she said quietly, “Mr. Holt, I’ll have that bear from you, if you please.”

  “Just go on upstairs, Maggie and—” Seymour’s voice turned glacial, “shall we say—mind your own business?”

  “This is my business, sir,” she said. Her voice was also cold, and now perfectly controlled. “As long as I am in this house, John is my business and nothing else is. I know what is best for a child of his age.”

  “You might know if he were a girl. I have no intention of letting him turn into anything resembling one. He is not to be babied any more.”

  “He is not babied now, sir. Seeing as he has no mother, he gets less babying than any child I ever heard of. He’s got to be let to love something the way he loves that bear. Yell do him serious harm if ye take it from him, mark my words.”

  Seymour, who appreciated spunk, could not help admiring the girl for standing up to him. But that feeling, which could have saved the situation, was quickly submerged in the backwash of pent-up acrimonies which wore for him the guise of legitimate concern for John. His jealousy of Randall; his passionate, possessive love for the child, frustrated by his physical inability to do much for him or with him; his obsession that John become quickly—too quickly—a real boy, all coalesced into a hot spear of protest against this feminine way of doing things which, he thought, grew from Randall’s sentimentality.

  He said, “Get out of my way, Maggie.”

  “Not until you give me that bear, Mr. Holt.”

  “Damn you!” Seymour could have lunged forward on the stairway and knocked the woman down and in his rage stood there, trembling on the brink of doing it. She looked up at his red, twitching face, the blind eyes suffused, the muscles taut and cordlike. The veneer of her restraint broke sharply and her own Irish temper burst through it. She raised her strong right hand and brought it down like a cleaver across Seymour’s wrists. He yelped a shocking curse. The bear flew out of his hands and over the banister down to the ground-floor hall. Maggie turned, seizing her skirts high, and dashed down the stairs and through the hall, retrieving the bear on her way. She ran to the back door and shouted, “Mr. Holt, sir, Mr. Randall. Please come here at once.”

  Randall looked up from the snow-man’s buttons, lumps of coal which they were putting in place; and seizing John by the hand, he ran towards Maggie as fast as their heavy galoshes and John’s short legs could manage. “What is it, Maggie? What’s happened?”

  She told him, trying to talk above John’s comprehension. But John, thinking she had brought Teddy down to see the snow-man, was not interested in talk anyway. He dragged at Randall’s hand, saying, “Show snow-man to Teddy. Teddy wants to see.”

  “Yes, John,” said Randall. “Right away. Take him over yourself and show him the snow-man and then come back.” It was the best way to keep the child from listening. “Oh, Maggie, I’m so sorry. This is terrible.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll be leaving now, Mr. Holt. I couldn’t do else.”

  Randall stood dumbstruck. He gave Maggie a look more eloquent than all the pleading words he could have spoken. Then he bent his head in a gesture of overwhelming discouragement and murmured, “What on earth shall I do?”

  “I’m that sorry, sir,” she said. “But ye surely knew this would happen sooner or later. It’s been awful trying, Mr. Holt, the way yer brother has been interferin’ and bossin’ me around these past months. A body couldn’t have stood it no longer. Nobody’ll work for two masters. But after what I just did—”

  “You were right, Maggie. You did right. But—” he looked at her with utter misery in his eyes. “What shall I do?” he said again.

  “If ye’re really askin’ me, I can only say one thing, Mr. Holt. Take John and get out o’ this house with him as fast as ever ye can.”

  Randall took off his mittens and ran his right hand over his forehead, thrusting his fingers into his hair. “My God,” he said. “Maggie this is awful.”

  “I know, sir.” She was shivering in her cotton dress.

  “Go inside,” said Randall. “I’ll bring John right upstairs.” In the nursery, while Maggie was pulling off John’s leggings, Randall paced up and down saying, “It’s going be so hard on him when he realizes. He’s going to be so unhappy.”

  “They always are when their first nurse leaves. He’d have to go through that some time. That ain’t the worst, sir, it’s that ye can’t go on livin’ like this, in
this house and—and all.”

  “I know it. Just the thought of how to manage—the food, and everything.” The thought of Seymour was the real trouble, too frightening to mention.

  “I know, sir. Ma wouldn’t stay without me. Not after this.”

  Randall sat down and put his head in his hands and said, “I feel just about desperate. I haven’t got any right to ask you to stay—”

  “It wouldn’t do any good if ye did, sir. When it happens, it happens.”

  They began to make shift with a colored woman named Essie who lived up in San Juan Hill and had never been in this neighborhood. She did the work that Mrs. Quinn had done and was a better cook. She prepared their midday dinner, and the broths and cereals that John ate for supper, and went home in the afternoon carrying with her things upon which Seymour and Randall were accustomed to depend for their light evening meal. She also cheated them through the marketing which Randall had to leave to her, as he had long left it to Mrs. Quinn, because he was entirely preempted by John. He had broken the shock of Maggie’s departure by moving upstairs to take her place in John’s room, and he replaced her in every other way as well. At first he was too stunned to think of looking for another nurse, and by the time he began to weigh whether he should, he saw that no nurse worth having would be willing to work here. Maggie’s parting advice was the echo of his own best judgment. The time had come to make the move he had been talking about. But how could he even set about looking for a town to settle in, or a house in which to live there, unless he took John along wherever he went? For Randall had arrived with foreboding at the conclusion that he was unwilling—or was he afraid?—to leave John alone with Seymour. If fear was at the bottom of his feeling he did not know what he feared Seymour would do. But he had learned long ago that fear of the intangible was infinitely worse than fear of the concrete. He was swamped in misgivings and immobilized by his unwillingness ever to take John out on the street. Nothing seemed to him more unendurable than the thought of running the gamut of those diabolical eyes and tongues. The result was that John, who would be three years old in five months, had never been outside this house or its back yard since he had first come into it. One need know nothing about bringing up children to realize that this state of affairs must be changed quickly if John were not to become more eccentric than any Holt who had preceded him. All of Randall’s adoring and protecting love could not spare him that—indeed, it might commit him more irrevocably to it unless Randall found the determination to act now.

  Because everything integral with his deepest feelings lay hidden among his papers and the other things locked away in his warren on the fourth floor, he took to going up there oftener than ever, very late at night when John was sound asleep and Seymour too. He read and re-read the crackling pages of music manuscript-paper on which he had recorded in his curious hand all that he had lived and shared, and everything that had been said to him, through the recent but weirdly remote past. It was, he felt, the earth and substance out of which John had grown, some of it as common and crudely odorous as the mixture of loam and animal manure in which he had seen good plants flourish and flowers bloom. His thoughts were drawn persistently towards memory of the Maynard farm, and of Renata as she had appeared there, part and parcel despite herself of the elementary life of the place even though she saw it from the viewpoint of another world. The lives of such people made sense, lives of hard work and limited outlook, to be sure; but Randall was repeatedly startled to find himself comparing that with the life which lay ahead of John—even the best future that imagination could contrive. Whatever that might be, there was not only Seymour, blind, jealous, increasingly domineering, to threaten it with strife and stricture. There was Randall himself, and here he had to plumb bitter depths to come up with the brute immutable fact that his own emotion about John could not exist and permeate the child without smashing head-on into equal emotion, equally intense and possibly violent, in Seymour. This was what they hid between them, this was what lay irrationally veiled by a plan to move to a small country town and construct a façade for existence behind which they would deceive themselves that John could grow up to be a normal if not a happy man.

  Randall sat for hours up in that clammy, dirty room, sometimes reading, sometimes not, staring at the streaked and peeling wall, or holding his head between his hands while he tried to reach the awful conclusion that lay beyond the last limits of his courage. Very long before he brought himself to face it, he knew what the answer was. He could not keep John to grow up in the house with Seymour. One day, a day looming imminently near, he would have to choose between them. And he would choose for John’s sake alone, he would make the choice that most nearly promised a good life for John. For weeks that choice appeared to be the simple departure from this house, to anywhere that would serve as the setting for the life that John should have. Then he touched the last barrier in the maze of thoughts too awful to be faced: are you sure that you, either, are the means to fulfillment for John? What have you to offer him, beyond love so great that it could smother him? Is Seymour right? Are you too soft, too protective, because the boy has no mother? Will you make him into a replica of yourself, and if you do, is that any better than a replica of Seymour? Are you so free of strangeness, of fear, of the secrets and tokens of a burdened past? Look about this room. Think what is in it, in the next room; think of Mama’s room, think of the attic, think of the things—the things—will you be a different man if you burn them all and go away to make this life for John? Will you burn them? Can you? Do you mean to? For any reason, even for John?

  That was when the simple strength of the world of earth and growth and hard-working people emerged as a thought so powerful that Randall knew it had always been there, a factor one could not ignore in facing one’s bounden duty to John. It is half his heredity, he thought, and because I and my brother are what we are, it might be the half that will save him.

  Now he understood why he had not only written down, but long since memorized, the names, the small words, the broken phrases, that were all he knew of that half of John. Poor they were, those people, yes, and poverty was the reason for such stringencies as could make their lives intolerable if they were so; but poverty; not fear, not queerness, he told himself; not being afraid, not being secret, not being bound by walls and locks and things and memories. Poverty was tangible, poverty one could do something about. Remove that as the real obstruction, and would there not be the chance, perhaps the only chance, that this plant, from its roots deep in earth and warm reality, might bloom? He could not know, it was a thing impossible to guess. But he could try to find out. He could find out too just what she had meant when she said, “in Italy it follow all through the life such a child …” She had spoken from her knowledge of unremitting poverty. Had that been her fear? Had it been to solve that one tangible problem posed by poverty that she had pleaded with him that night in the street? And if he had solved it, would she have turned desperate and left the child as she had done?

  These questions no longer mattered and she was no longer a reality. But the earth was, and the strong people who belonged to it, whose blood was half of John’s. Randall knew now that he could not truly do his duty to John until he had learned what they might be able to tell him. It had taken him weeks to labor through the maze and the mass of memory and instinct, carrying about his neck the albatross of his fears. When he emerged with knowledge and the elements of a decision it was none too soon, for Seymour was becoming impossible.

  There was no real reason for his obsession that Randall was spoiling John and coddling him and that Seymour must therefore be strict and exacting and train John to instant obedience. But with this obsession he made John’s third Christmas a torment, nagging, criticizing, and interfering at every turn. He contrived an inexhaustible string of reasons for interrupting each time that Randall sat down at the piano with John to play and sing the Christmas music which the boy loved. He catechized Randall to the last detail about every toy that John
was to receive, and he infuriated him by trying to destroy John’s blissful belief in Santa Claus. Randall had taught John that Christmas toys always came from Santa Claus. Seymour this year turned full of importance about his own very expensive present to John. It was a hobby-horse, large and lifelike, covered with real piebald horsehide. It had flaring red nostrils and an alarming glitter in its glaring glass eyes. John did not like it. He shrank away the moment he saw it. When Seymour said, “Uncle Seymour has given you the horse, John,” the child burst into tears and said, “Then Santa Claus didn’t come!”

  Seymour’s face reddened and from that moment he began to force John to ride the horse, which at first merely bored him, but soon became something he dreaded. He was not allowed to go a day without a session on the horse. Inside of a week the child was screaming, “No! No!” when Seymour led him to the horse and lifted him up to mount it. Randall stepped in and said, “Seymour, if I were you I’d let the horse go. He’ll take to it of his own free will after a while if you leave him alone.”