My Brother's Keeper

by Marcia Davenport

  “Like anybody. But really he only sings hew-hew-hew-hew-hew.”

  “With variations.” He rolled over on his side and lifted the dark mass of her hair and raised himself on his elbow to see her face. “Renata,” he said. “Do you know I have never asked you to forgive me?”

  She did not speak, she lay with her eyes wide open but this was not a bright night, one did not see every expression. She said after a time, “Nor I you.”

  “That is not—that is different. You may have been—never mind all that. I have damned myself every day since, for the way I treated you when you, we, talked in the street in New York.”

  “Was entirely natural what you did.”

  “It was entirely inhuman.”

  “I do not think so, really. Was equally inhuman when I went—” she stopped and even in the dark he perceived the grave hardening of her features. “Away,” she said. “To Buenos Aires.”

  “It was panic. Despair. At the time I thought you utterly irresponsible, but now, as you are with John—”

  She turned her head and he knew that the barrier was up. She was silent for a long time and at last she said stiffly, “Was part of my penitenza you must think that. Was not a sudden thing I did. Many months I had in which to think about it. Was necessary decide only for the best of the bambino. I could not know,” she said in a way which flooded his eyes with tears, “how would be the disastro with the Simorr. Is impossible know everything.” She had not spoken as much as this in all the months since they had come here. Afraid to embarrass and silence her, he said nothing. He remained braced on one elbow, from time to time gently stroking the hair back from her brow.

  “Only I knew, like I have try to tell you there in the street,” she said, her voice as dull as if a film of lead had come over it, “what would be like the life for that child if I bring it here. Without money.”

  He did not need to remind her that he had seen how good her people were, and how difficult this was for him to understand. She continued as if he had said that. She said, “You have seen only the life of my village, my parenti who are good, like I tell you. You have not seen the real life of the poor in Italy, the towns, the cities. It was necessary to think. I must think, what can become of this child? A contadino, you would want him like the Nino, the Domenico? They will ever be different than now? Is good enough for them, va bene—but that child? Or he should be an artigiano—or an operaio—work perhaps in a factory in Sesto?”

  “How could you know?” he murmured. “Before he was born.”

  “A woman know,” she said. “Many things. I knew him.”

  “And also, you had a premonition about yourself? You thought you would not be able to sing always, to earn enough money—”

  She nodded, with a bitter set to her mouth. “Was never a strong voice,” she said. “Never a real career. Always I knew that, why you think you found me never serious? Even,” she said, “when I had so bad the diphtheria in Buenos Aires and it leave me without the voice any more. I was not surprise’.” After another long pause she said, “Probably because I have deserve’ it.”

  “I have wanted to ask you something ever since I came here,” he said slowly. Then he was afraid to say more. But she said, “Well? Go on.”

  “You said, that awful time, ‘In Italy is a tragedy to break the heart, it follow all through the life such a child, how it is born.’ ” He had quoted her exactly, keeping his eyes averted; he had already exposed her too much to cruel memory. “What did you mean, Renata? I have been wondering about that ever since I came here.”

  “I meant,” she said slowly, “what you find when is to be educated a child, when you hope he will become a person—how you would say—person of consequence? Something not ordinario.”

  Randall nodded gravely. “Yes. What happens?”

  “You can see,” she said, “if you understand how is the question here of identità. Every person, he is known not alone with his own name and the cognome di famiglia, but with his father’s name too. Always there are the documenti, every kind of paper that make possible go to school, to work, to marry, whatever concern the life. To everybody is tied always the name of the father. If is living the father, is called per esempio my cousin, Gandolfi Domenico di Luigi. If was dead the father, would be Gandolfi Domenico fu Luigi. Always is fixed in this way every Italian.”

  She stopped speaking and the ensuing silence was gravid with the next question, which it was unnecessary to ask. Randall had not even been so ignorant as he seemed of what she had already explained; one could not live a fortnight here without having remarked it. He forced out at last what they both knew he must say.

  “And when the child has no—when its parents were not—”

  “Then,” she said, her voice perfectly toneless, “is called the person by the cognome of the mother, with afterwards N.N. Anonimo. So, per esempio—” He saw her nostrils flatten; she drew a deep breath as if to reach for greater control, “—Tosi Sebastiano di N.N. Then everybody know all his life long, is the person a bastardo.”

  Slowly Randall turned away; his hand which had been curved at her temple fell lax on the pillow. He had never heard of anything so cruel. He had never felt until this moment the whole terrible enormity of what they had, all three, done. Renata in some way seemed diminished, wafted a spectral distance away by the beating of the great dark wings of his anguished conscience. Close before his eyes and, he felt, his very heart, was the beloved innocent face of the boy. He had never loved and could never again hope or want to love a human being as he loved that child. It was my love that made me bring him here, he thought; I brought him to shelter and shield him, to find a little timeless peace in which to let him grow. It is timeless, infinitely peaceful, more than I thought to find. But it too like all the rest is illusory. Behind this smiling softness lies as she always said, reality; the last grey crag of the inexorable. He lay with his eyes closed, following the dark beating wings as they flailed first at one mute door, then at another. Which, he thought, will be the one that opens; or are they locked, one upon the other, like the doors that I have sealed upon my secrets? One by one, space by space, room by room, he faced them all; and chained in the deepest dungeon of the spirit he came upon his brother, helpless, abandoned, condemned, alone. He lay with his eyes closed, struggling with the furies, but still as if in sleep. The woman beside him watched for a time, motionless as he; then she moved very gently away, intending to go to the other room. He turned, roused, and with a rending cry, flung himself upon her breast.

  “It is the effect of the place,” said Renata on a December night, when Randall had been reading the Corriere aloud and laid it down, saying, “It seems so unreal, so far away.” Yesterday had been Santo Stefano and he had read the music critic’s exhaustive review, and the elaborate chronicle of Society and fashion at the great night of the Milanese year, the opening of La Scala’s season. “It seems impossible to imagine you ever there, Renata. Simply fantastic. Or else all this is a dream.”

  She laughed a little. “Is only sixty kilometers away,” she said, “but I agree, is another world. Here has changed nothing in so many secoli, it seem the air keep the people always the same too.”

  “You could say that of all of Italy—any of Europe—”

  “Perhaps. But is more than a leggenda, what we say about the Lago. It has something make nobody wish to move or go away or be changed, if he stay long enough to catch this malattia. Or if he was born here.”

  “But you left.”

  “In a certain time. I was young, I have tell you long ago how I was. But after I have no more the instrument to make possible the life of art and pleasure, is time to forget it, no?”

  “You came straight back here from South America, you didn’t think of anything like your former work in Milano?”

  “You mean, to sew? To work for a sarta?” She shook her head, then turned it slightly and stared at the far wall of the room. “You do not know how much earns such a woman in Milano?” She named
a figure. He winced. “So what you suppose she do in order to eat or maybe keep clean?”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Well.” She shrugged. “Besides, as you found me here was the life I earned by what I did.”

  “How you have changed,” he said slowly after a time.

  “No, caro, you are mistaken. Is not I have change’, but that the life change everybody. Like also I have tell you long ago. Like you too.”

  “Still,” he said, ruminating, “don’t you ever miss your former life? All that activity, and the music and the theatre which does get in one’s blood, doesn’t it?”

  She looked at him. “How much you miss your own music?” she asked.

  “Why—” he stared. “You know, it’s true, I never think about it.” He looked round at the sparse but comfortable furnishings of the room. “Do you know, if there were a piano here, I don’t think it would ever occur to me to touch it?”

  She sat back and laughed, looking at him quizzically. “There, you see? Like I say.”

  “What I see,” he said slowly, “is that I was never really a musician at all. I never had the least thing to do with deciding it.”

  “And you think is strange how I can forget when I was singing!”

  He thought it far stranger, he sat inwardly chilled by the thought of music as it had seeped and penetrated into the dark closed corners of his own life about which she had no idea. What would she say, he thought in sudden horror, if she knew about the pianos … pianos … he clenched his hands on the arms of his chair, as if to cling to something tangible while the wave washed up, heaved, broke upon his mind … how many pianos? What is that, what are you thinking? Five? Seven? An organ … No. This is beyond reason, what are you thinking about? How did it all happen? He sat rigid in his chair, holding his mouth closed hard, fighting off that wave, his head turned sharply to keep her from looking at his face. It is, he thought, like being sick, like being at sea, you feel that frightful plummeting inside, there is the cold sweat and the green feeling and the bitter taste in your mouth. What has all that to do with being here, what has it to do with anything? Does it exist or do I only think so, and if it does, then what of all this here is real? He did not know it, but he was breathing hard exactly like a person on the verge of a burst of nausea. She heard the loud, quick breaths, she had the urge to leave her chair and go and touch him and see if he had really been taken ill. But she was afraid to move, certain that she must not look at him, at least not let him know that she had stolen a glance. She sat very still. Gradually his breathing slowed, became quieter. She moved her eyes under her downcast lids enough to see when his left hand relaxed its rigid grip upon the chair. He sat back limp and said, “That’s queer, I really felt quite ill for a minute.”

  “Is better now?” She was careful not to seem alarmed.

  “Oh, yes, much. I think I must have eaten too much minestrone at supper.”

  “Was a little heavy,” she agreed. “In winter we use more pork fat.”

  After a time he glanced at the newspaper, lying where he had dropped it, and asked, “Renata, would it give you any pleasure to go to Milano? For the day, I mean, or the evening.”

  “You mean to La Scala?”

  “Well, yes. It’s one of those notions that don’t really matter. The kind of thing where you probably have a strong feeling about it one way or the other and I—” his expression was shy and rueful “—am just too clumsy to sense which it is.”

  “It had not ever occur’ to me,” she said slowly. “Now you have mention’ it, I feel the surprise. For myself, I think I would not wish to hear La Scala, but if would please you I could accompany you, without doubt. How you feel about it yourself?”

  “I feel,” he said, “to tell you the truth, something quite strange. I feel as if I ought to want to go, but the fact is, I don’t want to. I’m sure I am very lazy and ignorant and peculiar—who on earth would have lived here almost a year and not even thought of going to Milano, much less the Scala?”

  She made a gesture of casual assent. “Who would want,” she said, “would be either a tourist or a musicista. For them would seem necessary, would be important. For you—”

  “That does really sum it up. I’m not a tourist and I’m certainly not a musician any more. I’m just—” he looked at his toughened hands and then at his warm flannel shirt and then round the room and then at her. They laughed.

  “Besides,” she said, “to go to La Scala is necessary the proper clothes. I have not such things any more and you, you brought the dress for evening, Randalo?”

  “Good God!” He thought of his departure from the house. Then his thoughts stayed, like flies tangled in a film of glue, inside the house and up and down and through the rooms whose contents only he could know. Something occurred to him, prompted by her remarks about clothes, and he said slowly, “I wondered for a long time and I used to try not to think about it.”

  “About what, Randalo?”

  “Those trunks of yours that were, that you—”

  “That were in your house in New York. Well?”

  “They were full of opera costumes and pretty clothes. Why did you never send for them, Renata?”

  She did not answer at once. She happened not to be sewing this evening, and he was aware that if she had had some work in her hands she would have kept her head bent over it. Instead, she sat very still, looking past him, her dark eyes fixed on the farther wall. He wished he had not brought this up, he would have given his tongue not to have asked the question. When she did speak, her voice was so low and strained that he was careful not to look at her face.

  “Was because,” she said, “I thought if I leave them, you maybe try to find me and return them to me. After—after you not feel so angry any more.” She had whispered the last words. He turned his head to look at her and saw the pained, deep red which had swept across her pale face. He made a sudden motion which brought him to his knees beside her chair and he said, folding her hands inside his own, “You knew? You knew that I wouldn’t—couldn’t—stay as I was to you that time, that terrible, cruel—” His face was hidden over their hands clasped in her lap.

  “Dear Randalo,” she said. “Always I knew. Have I not tell you, you are good? Nobody, I have said before, was ever good like you.” He shook his bowed head, and felt her cheek bent for a moment to caress his hair. He looked up and into her face and no longer cared whether he could hide the tears in his eyes. Hers too were wet; very beautiful, with tears standing in them which did not flow to mar the classic stillness of her features.

  “Oh,” he said softly, “Renata, my love …”

  Her head moved faintly, the merest shadow of abnegation. “My dear, dear friend,” she said.

  Zio Pepe, who descended from a time when peasants were untaught and had not learned to speak the national language easily, always replied in dialect when Randall spoke to him in Italian. It became, by force of habit, fairly easy to understand him. Once in a while Randall went out in the boat with him to draw in the nets, in place of his nephew who was usually the helper. It was a charming, picturesque procedure; lovely to watch from the shore, as two boats or three, working together, floated from the full circumference of the net towards a central goal, gathering in the net as they approached. One man stood up in the stern and rowed, backing water, leaning forward to his oars with a slow rhythmic jerk; the second man stood in the bow drawing in the net. At first Randall’s eye had been bewildered by this curious method of propelling a rather heavy boat, but when Zio Pepe asked how else should one row it, he had no answer. Could he suggest the only alternatives he had ever seen, the sail or the small steam engines of the fishing craft around Hare Island? Those tough sea-going boats had no relation to these, up-pointed at both ends, canoe-bottomed, arched overhead by the frame of the canvas awning. They looked heavy and clumsy and were not easy to handle, yet they had a certain natural grace in their own setting, which he knew to be the heritage of two thousand years. When he really tho
ught about it he could find no reason for supposing that these were markedly different from the Roman barks that had first plied these waters. He wondered what Seymour would think; it was impossible to contemplate boats without including Seymour in the same frame.

  He did say to Domenico that rowing anything by standing up and backing water looked ridiculous to him.

  “We would think it much more ridiculous to row a barca like a rowboat. Looking over your shoulder like a thief running from the carabinieri? How is a man to see where he is going?”

  Now that he knew about the fishermen and their ways he could join in Renata’s teasing which had made him feel so foolish in the early days of his first summer. Standing in the loggia on a beautiful warm night, breathing the perfumes borne on the mild, fresh wind, he had exclaimed at the loveliness of all these seductions to the senses; the visual beauty, the fragrance, the obbligato of softly lapping water. “Even those cowbells,” he had said, “they sound so sweet, so gentle and silly …”

  “Those what did you say?” Renata’s laughter rippled in the dark.

  “Why—cowbells. I never understand why we hear them from the direction of the water, but—”

  “Oh, Randalo! Come sei buffo!”

  “But why? What have I said? Only that it seems queer you people never let out your cows until night when they—”

  She had been convulsed. “The cows spend their nights like their days shut up in their stalls, until they go to the mountains in summer to the grass. Those bells you hear are the bells on the nets, so nobody will strike and tear them in the dark.”

  “Buoys, you mean!”

  “What? Ragazzi? Boys?”

  Then it was his turn to explain. But always after that, the tinkling of the bells on a soft summer night made them laugh before they lay still to enjoy the sights and perfumes and sounds which grew more treasurable the longer one stayed in this persuasive place.

  Once they went away for a day, to Como, to buy books for John. This was suggested by Renata, though it had been with Randall’s help that the child, then not quite five, had learned to read. He had long since mastered the handful of nursery favorites that had come with them from New York; now he could read with equal facility in English or in Italian, and was beginning to write as well. The natural reaction to this early show of intelligence was wondering smiles, stares, and head-waggings on the part of the Gandolfis. But as Randall watched the emerging evidences of real mentality in the child, he—or was it his heart, or some part of himself which this nirvana could not hold in its spell—moved steadily closer to the brink of what he had always dreaded: a profound, irrevocable decision. Its components eluded him. Sometimes he felt suspended, groping, nudged by blind instinct as he had been in the days in New York when the looming problem hung by Seymour like Damocles’ sword over the child’s head, had driven him to the sources of the only escape he could then devise. He had from the first called this time here a visit; he had implied and once or twice even plainly said, that one day he would take John back to some kind of life, inevitably in the United States, but irrationally free in his mind of the menace posed by Seymour. Renata had never uttered a syllable of comment. But one evening he saw in her expression more than hours of talk could have conveyed, when he said on the heels of their speaking of John’s absorption in reading, “Next year he ought to start school, oughtn’t he …”