My Brother's Keeper

by Marcia Davenport

  The paper fluttered to the floor. The fire in the stove snapped and crackled; there was a sudden hissing and splattering from the kitchen where something had boiled over; John, coming in from the loggia, exclaimed at the burnt smell which the two of them standing there had not noticed. Renata without turning stretched one hand towards the boy and caressing his head said, “It is too early to eat, tesoro mio, you have time to go upstairs and read for a while.”

  They stood listening to his footsteps climbing the stairs and pattering to his room where his books were kept. Still they said nothing. The burnt smell grew stronger. Renata made an exclamation of annoyance, went to the kitchen, and presently returned. Almost grey of color Randall said tonelessly, “Of course I have to go.”

  Her head went up and down slowly, nodding like that of a jointed doll. She still had a strange, possessed, staring look in her eyes.

  “It is too much of a coincidence,” he said, bent and shrunken together as if threatened by something. “It’s unnatural.”

  “That is the trouble,” she said, speaking slowly and very low, in Italian. “That is why we are so horrified. Randalo, listen to me—” she went close to him and her white face came forward, almost touching his. “It is no coincidence. You can believe me or not—but this is something I knew. For a long time past.”

  “I believe you,” he said. “You’ve had me expecting it ever since—” he looked up at the ceiling “—the talk we had about him.” Suddenly he wheeled round and seized her by the shoulders and said in a hoarse whisper, “If you have so much intuition why can’t you tell me—” he jerked his head towards the room upstairs where John was “—that? Why don’t you know?”

  “Ah,” she breathed. “Abbi pietà! Do you think I would not like to say? I would give my immortal soul if I could do so in truth. But I cannot, and that is part of my penitence. I do not know. This I must suffer to the end of my days.”

  “Forgive me,” he muttered. “I had no right, I less than any of us. We shall never speak of it again.”

  “We shall not speak of much at all, any more,” she said, shaking her head. “That is unnecessary when one’s duty is so clear.”

  He watched her, the gentleness in which he could see her enclosing every word, every expression of her face. She bent her head a little and put out her hands and took his and said, holding them clasped against her cheek, “Dear, dear Randalo. Beloved friend. I will pray for courage for you.”

  He could have screamed at her, in a flash of panic, that he did not want her prayers, her faith, her doctrine. He wanted John. He wanted to keep him, here or somewhere, anywhere that was not the looming, mouldy, rat-ridden prison to which he must return, cringing, burrowing; a prison webbed in prehensile memories, crammed with things which would not stay things, but which came alive to snare him and twist him and mock the frightened furtive shadow to whom this man standing here was a stranger. No, he said, almost aloud, they don’t stay things; they come to life, they are alive, and they get their life from me … boxes … crates … papers … wheels … shoes and cloaks and kettles and lamps … the pianos, the noises, the motion, the wave … there is the wave. They get their life from me. And I want only to have given it to him.

  He was shuddering in her arms, then she was holding his head against her breast. He heard her whispered words, felt the cool benison of her closed lips touching his eyes.

  “I know,” he heard her breathe. “Oh, I know. Did you think I did not understand?”

  He raised his face and she looked at it, into a wrack of suffering. He tried to speak, choked, and tried again. “I cannot bear to leave him,” he sobbed.

  She did not speak for a long time. When he looked at her as if to ask her, she said, “Is it given to us to choose?” Her voice was somehow very beautiful; he thought of the notes of a viola. “I would seek to comfort you,” she said, “if it would give you consolation to know that I too will be living a life of sacrifice. I,” she said, “forfeited my rights to the full joys of being his mother. If I should ever forget, and try to seize what is not mine, I would harm the future of the child, his best interests which must always be my only aim.”

  “You are sure you know what to do, Renata?” He spoke in English. She answered likewise, “I think I know. Mostly I have explain’ before. For the adoption I will consult the finest avvocato in Milano, first of all.”

  “Do you,” he asked slowly and with some embarrassment, “know any such people, Renata?”

  She nodded, with a sad, worldly smile. “Eh! You forget? I was—” she shrugged. “Non importa how it happen you meet somebody long ago. When is a question like this, are people very serious here.”

  “You will have plenty of money. Always.”

  “Yes.” Her quiet assent, unembellished by awkward thanks, reassured him with the sense of his own share of the responsibility.

  “And you will—how can I say it—compensate your uncle? Make their life better somehow, in appreciation—”

  “Do not worry, Randalo. They all love the child, that matter the most.”

  “And his schooling? The very best? You will get good advice?”

  “The very best. Only we know now he is straordinario in his intelligence. Gradually will come the discovery what he may best do.”

  “He wouldn’t—you wouldn’t keep him here in a village for long?”

  “Only the first years, the Elementare, in Bellagio. After that will be necessary he go to a town for the Scuola Media. Such a town like Como, or larger.”

  “You would be with him?”

  She nodded, with a solemn expression. “His aunt. But only until he is an age not to be tied to a protector.”

  “And then after the—what we call high school?”

  “Is different here. After the two lower schools comes the Liceo.”

  “Yes, I remember it was something like that in Austria. I hadn’t thought. And that would be where?”

  “Should be Milano, or some big city. And finally, the University.”

  “I wouldn’t want him to be a musician,” said Randall suddenly and he knew, irrelevantly.

  Renata laughed a little. “Do not fear,” she said. “He has too much brains.”

  “Will you write, Renata? Will we? Are you going to teach him to write to me?”

  She rested her chin on her clasped hands and looked at him deeply, letting him see that she did not know what to answer. He shook his head a little, frightened and puzzled by her silence.

  “What do you mean?” he asked in a bewildered way.

  “Only that I do not know,” she said slowly. “I answer you yes, naturally. But only so far as I can see. This is a question can change very much with time, Randalo.” She sighed sadly. “How can I make such a promise? How can I know for how long?”

  “But,” he said, with the bright, heartrending self-deception of a child, “I will be back—when—you know, when I can leave Seymour. There’s no real reason why he has to go on living in that way. If—” he bit his lip. “If he—”

  “He will live,” she said.

  “Of course,” said Randall too quickly. “But that house, Renata. The whole thing.” He grimaced, thrusting away the images that clamored and battered behind their walls. “We always meant to get out of that house. Now when I go there I’ll see that we do.”

  “Yes,” she said. Her tone was without any meaning at all. His mind made a quick, frightened circle round the core of the subject. That house. Why we stayed before. What we waited for. How it will be different now. What were we always waiting for? Now he was not going to know, he was not going to allow himself to know. Behind the refusal to know lay what he would never see, never say, never feel. A good life for John was not too high a price, even if it meant his own imprisonment. A good life for John, for John the broad road outwards where the doors and the walls, the rooms, the locks, the dark, the hiding, the blight, the things, could never capture him. He will be free and will never have known that; that nor any of us who brought i
t to pass. Back in the farthest spaces of his memory hovered the predatory old woman, closer his mindless, shattered mother, closer still the imperative burden of his helpless brother. Yet they were far away. They might drift for the moment to hover and darken the spaces in which the spirit existed here; they floated away, back behind their doors and locks, and were unreal. Here there was a small clay stove, a bare table at his elbow, the splashing rain outside; before him the woman who had foreseen his duty and given him the courage to do it, and upstairs the boy whom he loved with the greatest love that the heart could know.

  After a long time he bent towards Renata and took her in his arms and said with his face against her hair, “Help me to go without making him sad, Renata. Help us to act as if it were not good bye.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Huddled in the corner to avoid seeing out the window Randall did not move when the cab slithered to a stop. He sat still, wilfully ignoring his whereabouts until the driver said, “Hey, Mister, ain’t this the address you told me?”

  “Yes.” Randall opened the door, stepped out unsteadily, and dragged his valise after him. The ground appeared to heave; the voyage had been a nightmare and he was still plagued by the motion of the ship. Inattentively he paid the cab-driver, leaving him all the change from a dollar rather than bothering to count it. He stood on the curb with his back to the house, conquering an impulse to shout, “Stop! I’m going further!” as the taxi drove away. It just would, he thought, be this time of day and this time of year, the gloomiest possible. The bad weather of months past had persisted all the way across the Atlantic and reasserted itself here in the form of driving sleet falling on streets ankle deep in filthy slush. It was almost dark, but only a little past four in the afternoon. The street lamps were not yet lighted. But across the street in the “terrace row” of drab rooming-houses, people had lit the gas here and there, which shone with a dim ugly gleam. He stood gazing stupidly at a lighted window where a small Christmas wreath hung between frayed curtains.

  What a dreary time of year, he thought again; and clapped his hands to his ears, violently startled by the blat of a tin horn. He glanced round; two dirty small boys were capering behind him, hooting “Happ-y NOO Year!”, delighted to have frightened him. He ignored them. It must be the thirty-first of December; he had not really noticed. He sighed. Slowly he picked up his valise and raised his head for a first, painfully reluctant look at the house. It did not seem any different; blinded, blankly brown, every window like a closed eye. The top floor and the fourth floor, he thought; nobody could have been in those rooms, nor in Mama’s room on the third floor either. Seymour’s on the second floor might as well be sealed like the others; its windows looked just the same. So did those of the drawing-room below; Randall had left them that way. When, he thought, slowly lugging the valise up the littered walk, how long ago was it? Some part of his mind refused to say; another part refuted that with the icy fact: two weeks short of three years. You knew it all the time, you knew it to the day. No I didn’t, I don’t want to think about then, or about this, or over there, or them, or anything. I don’t want to think … Most of all I don’t want to think about the other time I came back here.

  How could he help it? Like then he had his keys, like then there was no question about getting into the house. But that time I thought I was going to leave Seymour forever. Yes, you thought so another time too. And now here he was. I’m not going to stay this time, he repeated, as he had been doing ever since his pathetic assurance to Renata. I’m going to find a way to … get Seymour taken care of … get out of here… . get rid of all this …

  He was standing in the front hall with his valise at his feet and the door closed behind him. It was pitch dark and he reached by old habit towards the brass match-safe on the wall near the hatrack. It had always held sulphur matches which Seymour as a boy had delighted in scratching on the seat of his pants, as he had seen Reilly the coachman do; a forbidden thing of course. Why think of that now? He stood in the dark with a match in his hand, wondering that he had found some in the brass holder. Who must buy them and put them there? He put off lighting the gas, because he did not want to begin seeing anything around him; whatever he saw would look the way this place smelt. It had a dead, dry, yet vaguely putrid odor, compounded of dust and bad air and sickness and other smells that he could not identify. Several times he swallowed uneasily. Then from upstairs he heard Seymour’s voice. It called, “Haggerty, aren’t you early? What time is it?”

  Randall lit the gas and started quickly up the stairs, saying, “I’m here, Seymour. It’s not somebody else.”

  He stopped on the second-floor landing to light the gas there. The door to Seymour’s room stood open, and by the light from the hall Randall saw, in the dark, the pallid face in its frame of hanging moustache, the high bald forehead, the blind eyes staring not only as if they could see, but see something horrifying. The mouth was wide open. Seymour sat in a wheelchair, facing the open door. Randall stood silent, shocked, gazing at Seymour’s left hand lying limply on his covered knees. The right one gripped the wheel of the chair. Randall’s eyes moved slowly from the hands to the blind eyes, back to the covered knees and the crippled hand.

  “What in hell are you doing here?” asked Seymour. His voice grated with scorn.

  “I came when I heard about you.”

  “Who told you?”

  “I—never mind. Did you suppose nobody would tell me?”

  “Why didn’t you say you were coming?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Where is the boy?”

  “None of your business,” said Randall, amazed at the curtness of his own voice.

  “Have you left him in Italy?”

  “I didn’t come back to report about him. If there’s anything I can do for you, tell me what it is and I’ll do it. I won’t talk about any of that.”

  “Charming of you to walk in and be high-handed with me.”

  “That’s not my intention, so far as you yourself are concerned. I’m extremely sorry you’ve had this accident and if you don’t mind telling me how you are, and how you’re being looked after, naturally I want to know.”

  “Oh,” said Seymour, with a disgusted flap of his right hand, “it’s a hell of a mess.”

  Randall moved slowly into the room, taking off his overcoat. He was swept by consternation and pity as, he thought, any human creature must be; he would stick to his refusal to discuss John and everything concerning him, but beyond that, Seymour’s condition would melt a heart of stone. His left hand was visibly disabled; there was an ominous look of stillness about the legs hidden under the blanket; worst of all, Randall felt now as if he had forgotten that Seymour had been blind long before he went away. The blindness had a terrible immediacy, as if to reproach Randall that nobody in his right mind could have gone off three years ago and abandoned this man. Randall put out his hand timidly in the instinctive gesture of touching Seymour lightly on the shoulder or the arm, a thing which had had to take the place of the glances that Seymour could not see; but he could not bring himself to touch his brother. He might hate it, he thought; and if he did, he’d have good reason.

  “Brother,” he said, and Seymour heard for the first time Randall’s natural voice, “won’t you tell me about it? At least—who’s been taking care of you?”

  Seymour shrugged. “An orderly from the Post Graduate Hospital. The doctor has him come here twice a day and move me from the bed to this bloody chair and back to the bed again. And do the other usual things.” He waved at a stand upon which stood basins and vessels. “I didn’t want any part of the filthy business.”

  “So,” Randall asked slowly and with audible distress, “you—you are—”

  “Helpless,” said Seymour abruptly. “Now are you satisfied?”

  “Brother—please! I want to help. Don’t be so—”

  “Oh,” muttered Seymour, “the hell with it.”

  “No! Why wouldn’t you go to the hospital? Where you
could be properly looked after?”

  “And be Exhibit Number One? I told you, the hell with it!” Seymour was almost screaming. “If I’m going to rot alive, I’ll do it shut up here.”

  Randall did not speak. He was fighting with the echo of Seymour’s words, overcome by the sensation of grappling with a writhing mass like the serpents setting upon Laocoön, monsters whose deadliness lay not in touch but in sound; murderous, strangling echoes, worming in from every side: shut up here shut up here … Randall twisted his cold hands together, slowly raising their blue knuckles towards his mouth as if to be ready to ram it shut should the torrent of his fears burst out. His eyes were fixed with incredulous horror upon Seymour’s long, hairy face. Seymour sat there silent, his head sunken between his shoulders, thrust a little forward in a position which bespoke eternal listening. Around his bitter mouth there played a faint, twitching look of devilishness. But when he spoke his voice was matter-of-fact. “There,” he said, “is my keeper coming in now.”

  Randall had not heard the door downstairs opening with a latchkey. “I hated having to give that man a key,” said Seymour. “I hate his knowing where I keep my money.”

  “But doesn’t he make you at least—well, less uncomfortable?”

  “He keeps me from having bedsores, or so the doctor says. That’s what all this damned shifting is for. Clear out now, Randall. Your homecoming can be spared the spectacle of my functions.”

  Randall went to his old room, the small one next to Seymour’s which he had occupied in the immeasurably long ago, before Maggie Quinn had fled and left him to care for John. He opened the door and stepped inside the dark chamber, and fumbling for the gaslight, almost choked on the dead, dust-laden air. When he had light, a glance round the room told him it had not been cleaned since the last time he had been in it. It was a revolting sight. His hand came away from the top of the bureau black with dirt, leaving behind a print like that of an animal in sand. The room smelt, not alone of dust and dead air, but of something that suggested a search for its source, a search that nobody would want to make. He supposed he would have to do it. He stood looking at the old glass-paned book-case, empty because everything that had been in it was locked away up on the fourth floor. All his things were there. His hand went to the bunch of keys in his pocket, the guarantee that his things were safe; his things which, even had Seymour not existed, were still the indissoluble link to this place. He had more things downstairs in his valise. I shall have to get to work tomorrow morning, he thought, and put them safely away too. He sat down slowly on the edge of the sagging bed. From the next room he heard the sound of Seymour’s voice, subdued, saying something not meant to be overheard, and the clink of glass or something metallic. He sat there for a long time, lost in the kind of thoughts which are weirdly unrelated to memory.