My Brother's Keeper

by Marcia Davenport

  “You know the answer as well as I do.” His head was bent and turned away.

  “You mean she didn’t know? Or wouldn’t say?”

  Randall made a sound; assent or denial, let Seymour deduce his meaning for himself.

  “She was a damned fool, then. I wouldn’t have thought it of her. You mean to tell me, for such a reason, she wouldn’t marry and legitimize the child? I can hardly believe it.”

  “The child is legitimized. The child has a better identity than we have—for where he is.”

  “No! What on earth did she do? Marry somebody else, for God’s sake?”

  In a few words Randall explained. Seymour sat slowly shaking his head, incredulous and astonished. Suddenly he said, “Why didn’t I ask you all this long ago? When you first came back?”

  “I suppose it’s just as painful for you to think about as it is for me.”

  “I’m not a damn fool sentimentalist. I want to know whose child it is.”

  “You’ll never know, Seymour.”

  “Don’t be an idiot. I’ll make her say.” He gave a sharp, unnatural laugh. “I’ll make her say he’s mine.”

  “She’ll never say. If she could, she never would.”

  “She wouldn’t, eh?” Seymour made that menacing sound again, a cracked laugh that had no laughter in it. He banged his clenched right fist upon his useless knees and laughed again and said, “She wouldn’t? Well, you watch—I’ll find a way to make her say.”

  Randall was too harrowed to hear another word. He got up and went away to his room and flung himself on his bed, from which something sprang away in the dark without his knowing it. The bed was a tumbled mess of moth-eaten blankets and pillows covered only with stained, bare ticking. By what process laundry had drifted out of their lives they were not very clear … was it because the last of their grandmother’s sheets had fallen to tatters? He was lying there lost in a great misery of mind and spirit, the dark howling corners of the long-forgotten filled with clamor, closing in; his face was muffled in the evil-smelling pillow whose odor he could no longer smell, like other odors, and sights, and the feel of his own unkempt body, senses that had atrophied. But like Seymour he could hear, oh how sharply he could hear! sounds and echoes of the real, and the faint imagined voices of very long ago. There was a violent crash downstairs, glass smashing, and Seymour screaming in terror in the library. Randall ran to him. Seymour sat gibbering in his chair, his hands clutching for Randall. There was another crash, then the voices, hooting, yowling, the same loathsome words, the same brutal roars of animal laughter.

  “Don’t let them in,” shrieked Seymour, a twitching bundle of bones clinging to Randall. “They’ve broken in, they’re in the house …”

  “Sh—sh—” Randall’s throat was locked, he was sick with terror but trying to quiet Seymour. They clung together.

  “C’mon fellas, let’s smash up da bughouse …”

  “McBane” sobbed Seymour, panting. “It’s them, it’s …”

  “You go away,” shouted Randall, raising with effort a voice he did not know as his own. “Get out of here. We’re upstairs, we’ve telephoned for the police. Get out of here.” He bent down and whispered to Seymour, “I’ve got to go down, I’ve got to see—”

  “No,” moaned Seymour, “don’t leave me alone, don’t leave me, they’ll come for my box …”

  “I’ve got to get them out, Brother. Before they come and find out there’s no telephone.” Downstairs there was pandemonium, the same voices, the long taunting howls. “I’ve got to go. Let go of me, Brother.”

  He broke the grip of Seymour’s right hand on his forearm, and wrenched himself away. He gave a frantic look round the room; in a corner there was an old Webster on a wheeled iron stand. He seized it with one hand, turned and picked up the lamp in the other. Holding the lamp high he dragged the stand with the enormous book on it out to the hall and to the top of the stairs. He peered down; they were everywhere, kicking, roaring, smashing; the terrible bawling guffaws, the indescribable obscenities. The place was an uproar.

  “Get out,” he shouted, bellowing to overreach the noise. Then he shoved the iron stand to the top step and braced his foot against it and pushed. It went down with a tremendous crash, splintering some of the banister-rails. The howls and the jeering stopped. Randall held the lamp high above his head and slowly started down the stairs. At the bottom two faces stood staring up, horror-stricken, mouths hanging open.

  “Jeest,” he heard. “Looka da loon …”

  “Jesus Christ. Getta hell out …” The others were leaving the drawing-room, they were jumping from the windows through which they had climbed after throwing in the bricks. The two stood gazing up at the ghostly face in the circle of lamplight, the floating colorless hair, the staring eyes. He kept on moving down the stairs.

  “C’mon, for Chrissake,” rasped a voice. “Ain’t ya had enough …”

  “Jeest,” hissed the other one, turning away. They were gone.

  Randall moved all the way to the bottom step and set the lamp on the hall stand before his knees gave out and he collapsed. He was sitting there shaking, soaked with the sweat of terror, when Seymour’s wails and cries recalled him—Seymour alone and helpless there in his chair in the pitch dark—but it’s always dark for Seymour, said some detached echo in Randall’s mind, always dark. But this is different, the terror, the fear. They’ve broken in, that was what we feared, I wasn’t quick enough to find a way to stop them, I should have done more after that other time, that time outside. He stood up, mopping the sweat from his face with his harsh frayed coat-sleeve. I’ll start to do something now, right now, this minute. First he must quiet Seymour. He turned and began slowly to climb the stairs, leaving the lamp behind, edging away from the broken banister-posts and the gaping, rising space as he mounted upwards. He climbed laboriously, breathing hard, moving his hands before himself up the peeling papered wall.

  Next day he had a glazier to replace the broken window-panes, and after the man had gone, uneasily looking back over his shoulder at the house he had been afraid to enter, Randall set about making it impossible for them ever to break in again. For the time being it would have to do to drag the biggest pieces of furniture up against each of the ground-floor windows. It was a long, exhausting job and he was not nearly strong enough for it. But somehow by nightfall he had managed to set some object to block every window. Upstairs later, lying spent in his chair in the library with Seymour, trying to rally the strength to go out and do the errands, he listened while Seymour sat and pondered aloud what they could do to make the house impregnable. At first he was too tired to attend to what Seymour said, but by degrees he felt a little better, and when Seymour said, “If we could just pack it, make it perfectly solid everywhere except where we want to go …” Randall found himself answering in a flat, commonplace tone, “Why that’s what I’ve been doing upstairs for a long time, Brother. It’s not so difficult.” And he explained about his work.

  Seymour listened carefully. This was not all news to him, he had merely not realized exactly what Randall had done because he had never had occasion to go up there in the days when he could have gone.

  “That’s just fine,” he said slowly, weighing the situation. “You had a fine idea, Ran. All we have to do is keep on with it. We don’t care how long it takes. You ought to start now on the ground floor where they broke in, and by degrees you’ll get it filled up solid the same as the top … and then if we think we’d feel better you could keep on working from the bottom up as well as from the top down …”

  “But of course I have to be able to get from certain places to others, Brother … and be able to move you …”

  They were both thinking aloud.

  “Yes,” said Seymour musing. “You’ve got to consider that. You could plan it in such a way as to leave passages for yourself …” and he went on slowly, with the ingenuity of his mechanical mind, to devise the idea which was to result, after years of painstaking, backbr
eaking labor, in a system of intricate tunnels. Randall sat and listened, nodding from time to time, saying, “My, I could never have thought of that, you always were a wonder at building things.”

  They talked so late that Randall’s shopping was forgotten and when at last, trembling with exhaustion but reassured by Seymour’s cleverness, he suggested they go to bed, he was astonished to see the raw grey of early dawn as he peeped fearfully round the edge of a drawn blind.

  Randall was so accustomed to think all mail was meant for Seymour that he almost gave him the long envelope which came on a certain day in 1928. But there were not nearly so many letters for Seymour nowadays as there had been long ago, and this one, he saw, peering at it in the murky light of the barricaded front entry, was addressed to him. He sat down on the bottom of the stairs and opened it. Several times he read through the papers inside. They were confusing, disturbing, meaningless. He let them fall to the floor and sat with his head in his hands trying to realize what they meant. There were so many words and such worrisome references to long ago that he had to think quite hard to get to the point, the fact that he was about to reach his forty-fifth birthday and that, on that day, the trust established for him by his grandmother would terminate. Whoever it was that had written the letter was asking for an appointment in which to discuss all this and—a lot of writing that Randall could scarcely understand—render the Trustees’ accounting and turn over to him the securities in the trust.

  He did not know what to do. He had no intention of seeing anybody, reading anything, signing anything, bothering with any of this. It had no meaning. He had no money. He was a poor man, a penniless fool, Seymour was always telling him so. Seymour had been saying it for years … why did Seymour say it? He sat there trying to understand, slowly shaking his head between his grimy, scaly hands. Did this stuff here have anything to do with Seymour? He tried to get it straight and find the answer to that too. He was not clear. Somehow he sensed that this letter would interest Seymour, dimly he remembered the year or two when Seymour had had all that correspondence about something which had probably been like this, but he could not recall very clearly. All he felt about this was the impulse to hide it, like everything else written on paper. He stooped slowly, scraped together the papers, put them back into the torn envelope, huddling them inside his coat, and climbed to his place on the fourth floor. He put them away, down in the very bottom of a battered, steel-banded sample case which he had got somewhere. It had a tumbler lock and a padlock as well. When he had put back all the other contents of the box on top of the letter, and locked the case again, he felt he had put the whole nagging thing out of mind.

  But then the postman began to plague him. Like the newsboy, the postman had always been tolerated; he seemed to be on their side. He came and pushed the letters through the slot in the front door and rang the bell once and went away. After the bell broke Randall did not need to hear it to know that the postman had come; there were the few, infrequent letters lying on the entry floor. And nobody could have walked up the steps of the stoop and down again without Randall’s knowing it, wary and anxious on the other side of the front door. Even though he knew the postman’s step, and the hour of early morning when he made his rounds, Randall was sick with fear the day he heard the heavy pounding on the door, the Irish voice calling, “Hey! Hey, in there! Your bell’s broken, it don’t ring. Registered letter, here.”

  Randall put his hand on the bolt, trying to get up the courage to slide it back, but the hand fell away again. It struck the heavy chain below the bolt and set it jangling.

  “I hear ye!” shouted the postman. “I don’t want nothin’, I’ve only got a registered letter to deliver and ye have to sign for it.”

  “I—I don’t want it,” said Randall hoarsely.

  “Aw, it ain’t nothin’,” said the burly voice. “It’s only a letter. But I got to do me duty, don’t I? I can’t hand it in without ye sign for it.”

  Randall gulped and began, trembling, to unlock the door. He opened it a crack, holding it in such a way that the postman could not see past him into the entry. He scribbled his name on the book that the man shoved through the crack, and took another long, thick envelope, and shut the door again. Outside a woman watched the postman trudge down the walk, shaking his head.

  “They’re bats in there, ain’t they,” she mumbled, leering.

  The man tapped his forehead with a shrug and went on to the next house.

  Randall did not open that envelope at all. He simply put it away upstairs with the first one. But others came after that. He never knew at what intervals they appeared, but a good deal of time must have elapsed because one day Seymour, who heard every sound inside the house, and many at some distance outside, said, “I suppose they’ve turned over your securities to you, Randall? It’s been over six months since you were forty-five.”

  “How did you know that?” Randall’s face, surrounded by a dusty, colorless mass of uncut hair, was pinched with disquiet.

  “Why, just that I knew. Among other things, do you expect to go on sponging on me the rest of your days?”

  “Oh,” said Randall. After a long time he muttered, “I haven’t any money. I gave it all away.”

  “You couldn’t,” said Seymour crisply. “At that time. You could only dispose of the income.”

  “Oh.”

  “So I just want to warn you, in case you’re giving away the principal now, or mean to, you’d damn well better reconsider and hang onto something for yourself.”

  “But I don’t need any money,” said Randall vaguely.

  “No? Now that you’ve got some, do you think I’m going to pay all the taxes on this house, and all the food you eat … everything?”

  “Taxes? Why I thought—”

  “You didn’t think. You’ve never thought. Now you listen to me.” Seymour leaned forward, gripping the arms of his chair, posing his face rigidly in Randall’s direction in the eerie way which made it seem he was staring. He explained, in a few cutting words, that the house had always been incorporated into the two trusts, that in the years since his trust had terminated he had paid the part of the taxes proportional to his share of the house, and that Randall now, instead of his Trustees, must pay the other part. “Otherwise,” said Seymour, “they’ll seize the house one day for unpaid taxes and you don’t think I’d stop them, do you?”

  “But—”

  “Oh, stop ‘butting’! Pull your wits together. You’re going to find yourself liable for your share of all our expenses, not to mention your own income tax, and-”

  “Income tax? What’s that?” Randall’s forehead was puckered with perplexity.

  “Damn it to hell!” snarled Seymour. “Go and find out for yourself. I’m warning you, that’s all. You’re just damn fool enough to make yourself penniless. And if I died,” he added, with a tiny cackling laugh, “you woulldn’t get a dime …”

  Perhaps if he could have seen Randall’s trembling, helpless bewilderment he would have spoken more kindly. As it was he sank back in his chair with his head squeezed between his shoulders, his yellowish moustache trailing along his skinny jowls, slowly stroking the back of his atrophied left hand with the long, dirty, nervous fingers of his right.

  After that Randall spent days on end, how many days he had no idea, nor that they had dragged out to a string of months, trying to compose a letter to those people who had been pestering him, telling them what to do to settle the questions about his money. He never wanted to think about the subject again, once he had taken care that the amount he stipulated—and it was nearly all—should go where all his income had been going up to now. He thought he had about got it clear, he was almost ready to make a clean copy of this letter over which he had worked so long, he was even beginning to look for writing—paper on which to copy it, when he found another letter on the entry floor one morning, quietly delivered without intrusion. It lay face up, addressed to him in purple ink in a slanting, distantly familiar hand, and its fore
ign stamps were blue, from Italy. He bent and looked at it without touching it, squatting there over it for a long time. At last, with his hand shaking very badly he picked up the letter, so thin and light by comparison with those horrid things that had been plaguing him, and he put it in his inside pocket and took it away upstairs. He sat all morning, brooding, before he took it out and opened it. He unfolded the single sheet of crackling thin paper and, beginning to read, blinked and squinted and cupped his forehead in his hand, and wondered what to do. The letter was written in Italian. But I know Italian, he thought. I did. Don’t I still? I cannot read it. Oh, he thought, that can’t be true, of course you know Italian. No. How shall I know what it says? Perhaps I’d better not read it at all. Perhaps that’s why it’s written in Italian, so I needn’t know. But that, he thought, that’s nothing you have to hide from. You never had to hide from anything there. He drew long, rattling breaths, trying to get past the choked and beating feeling in his throat; and when he was past it, he started again to read the letter. It was not the least hard to understand. He read:

  “My dear, good Friend,

  “The time has come to tell you of the results of your wise generosity and benevolence. I have had it in mind to write to you, but I am not in the habit of communication and might have put off longer the effort of writing a letter, except I have received notices from New York which I do not fully understand, but which appear to concern the funds which all these years you have deposited for me in Switzerland. It does not matter that I do not well understand these recent letters, since I have been ready in any case to tell you that it is no longer necessary for you to send money.

  “Sebastiano six months ago was awarded his Doctorate in Physics at the University of Pavia, with the highest honors ever accorded in his science. His record was brilliant at the Liceo Scientifico in Milano, and he has completed his undergraduate and postgraduate courses at the University in such a way as to assure his future in the work he has chosen to do.