My Brother's Keeper

by Marcia Davenport

  Shabby men and fat, blowzy women lounged up and fell to talking when he sat out on the steps, because that was what everybody did on a hot summer night in such a neighborhood. Some were curious; some were mean; some asked questions by which they would later determine, in arguments over a beer, whether that long-haired guy in the funny clothes was real crazy or just a little bit off his nut. Randall had no idea what they thought. When they asked him how his brother was feeling, he smiled, grateful for their interest, and said, “Splendidly, thank you. Improving all the time.”

  He had lived so long with his faith that the oranges and the whole-wheat bread would restore Seymour’s sight that it seemed perfectly natural to express this belief to any person interested enough to ask.

  “Is that so!” a neighbor would say, shaking his head: “Waddaya know about that?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Randall, courteous, naive, convinced that at last the neighborhood people were friendly. It was dark and he was up on the top step and could not see the winks and the nudges. But there were those who said that them brothers in that dump of a house were not as crazy as they acted. “The one comes out,” they said, “he ain’t crazy no more than you. He’s a real old-fashioned gentleman.”

  Randall knew all the time that if Seymour should ever discover he was acquainted with people in the block, he would go wild with panic. It was necessary to be very careful, not to say much, not to speak above a murmur. Up there in the second floor back in the library, barricaded with the papers, not even Seymour could hear quiet voices out on the front stoop. But there was a danger, just the same. When the weather cooled Randall stopped sitting out there. He merely nodded and said “Good evening” if he passed somebody on his way to do the errands.

  In these recent weeks, somehow, it was becoming more and more of an effort to go out and do the necessary walking. Sometimes he had not gone very far when he would stop in his tracks, moisten his lips once or twice, and try to swallow down the weak queer feeling that seemed to come up from his middle somewhere. Sometimes he would be heading for a certain street, walking along just as he had always done, and a little later he would find himself leaning against the side of a building, shaking and wet with sweat and his basket on the pavement where he had dropped it. He would look up at the lamp-post and not be able to read the street sign for a moment, because the letters were jumping and running together. Then when he could read he would see he was far away in the wrong direction. He began to worry secretly because he simply had to stay well in order to take care of Seymour. Perhaps the long walks were too taxing. He would try to change his ways and learn to do his errands near here, in Ninth or Tenth Avenue, where some shops were open at night. He could manage. He worried very much about the whole-wheat bread. Then when he came to the momentous decision not to walk to Brooklyn any longer, but to find a similar bread near here if he could, Seymour never noticed the difference!

  It was a long time since Seymour had been moved from his corner; since, in fact, he could have been moved, for the papers had been stacked two-thirds of the way solidly across the library. Randall sometimes thought a change had come over Seymour in that time. He did not know exactly what it was. At moments it seemed almost as if Seymour had become the tortoise which he had so long resembled. Unless something provoked him to slide his head forward from its position sunken between his shoulders, or to move his hands with a sinuous reptilian motion from their twisted clasp on his lap, he sat for the most part without moving. It was an unimaginable length of time since he had last allowed Randall to wash him, cut his hair, or change his clothes. He had years ago stopped shaving himself, which he had once done accurately by touch, but his beard had never grown long like his stained, hanging moustache, or the thin strings of grey hair falling from his crusted scalp. His chin was long and hard-angled beneath the dirty stubble that masked it. And all of that, thought Randall, creeping with breathless caution through the big booby-trap to get into the small space around Seymour, I can scarcely see anyway because it is always so dark. The kerosene lamps had been abandoned years ago. If he needed light, and he almost never did any more, he lit a candle, placing it carefully away from the stacked walls of paper. Light: what use was light? He was beginning himself not to think in terms of seeing. He could not remember such a thing as a looking-glass ever having been in this house, so long ago had the last of them been swallowed in the papers. And if, when he was out, he passed anywhere a mirror or a polished plate-glass window, which gave a reflection of a stooped, shaking, bearded figure, shuffling and trembling in ragged clothes, he had no idea who it was.

  Now that his work was done he often sat in the corner with Seymour, silent, still, lost in the spaces of no thought at all. Memory lay beyond his reach, like his things, the tokens of memory, many of them hidden where he could never touch them any more. He had not quite intended that, but it had happened in the course of his work. He was content; so, it seemed, was Seymour.

  He came in not very late one night, since his walks had been so much shortened, and prepared to take food upstairs to Seymour. He could only carry a few things, a couple of tins, two or three oranges, through the tunnels at a time. The big booby-trap in the library was very narrow and even when the ropes were unrigged, it was dangerous to touch the steep, perilously-balanced, stacked paper walls. He knew exactly how to go through, his elbows tight to his sides, one foot straight ahead of the other. He put some oranges in his pockets and took some bread and a tin of soup for Seymour. Then he started the long, tortuous journey, stopping to take apart the noise-traps and, much more cautiously, to unfasten the ropes in the booby-traps, every strand of which he knew. When he was inside the tunnel in the library, approaching the big trap, he heard Seymour shrilly calling, “Is that you, Randall? Is it you? Answer me!”

  “Yes, Brother,” shouted Randall. “I’m right here. Just a few minutes now, don’t worry.”

  “I’m hungry,” he heard Seymour whining. The voice was reedier, with a higher, more querulous twang than before. “I’m hungry.”

  “Coming, Brother.” Randall was about to unrig the ropes. On the other side of the tunnel he heard Seymour, fretting and shrill. He would do his best to hurry.

  He did not know, in the close pitch-dark of the tunnel, whether that queer feeling was just his being in the tunnel—he had felt it before—or whether it was like the weakness that had caught him several times in the street, and left him gasping, all in a sweat. He tried to draw a long breath, and told himself he was all right. He groped for the knots and when they were not right there, he felt rather relieved. Why, he thought, I was all mixed up there for a minute. I’ve unrigged them already, I’ve got the way clear. He picked up his things again, holding his elbows close and his right hand a little advanced, and calling, “I’m coming, Brother,” he took a step forward.

  The crash was a vast thundering temblor, rocking the rotten floor, shaking the cracked walls. Seymour’s chair was shaken like a rat in a terrier’s teeth; he clung to its arms and shrieked “Randall! Randall—!” He crouched, gibbering and shrunken with terror. “Randall—”

  Thick dust floated into his open mouth, he choked and hawked. He tried to scream again, but only a drooling gargle came from his throat.

  “Randall!” He spat and gagged. He beat the arms of his chair. “Randall, speak to me!” He thrust his head forward, his acute left ear towards the tunnel; he listened, holding his breath. There was no answer. The old man twisted in his chair, strangling on the dust, crying and calling. “Randall!” he squealed, in a long cracking wail.

  There was silence. Seymour whimpered.

  PART III

  They found the body of Randall Holt on the thirteenth day after I had joined the searchers in the house. I was upstairs in what I now knew to be the old day nursery on the fourth floor, sorting out fragments of crumbling music from the impacted mass of other paper which two men from the Department of Sanitation were cautiously taking apart. From time to time one of them would carry down the stu
ff that I had weeded out and put it in the old basement dining-room, from which all the newspapers and loose trash had been cleared, leaving only the wreckage of the furniture and of two upright pianos and an organ. Every afternoon when I left the house I took the day’s accumulation of material in a taxi to the main office of the bank, where a room had been set aside for this purpose. And every evening until late into the night, I sat there sorting, reading, cogitating, checking against the calendars of almost half a century the scattered clues which at that time were far short of weaving a consecutive record of what had happened.

  Up on the fourth floor we heard the commotion, the exclamations, and the sounds very like groans of horror or disgust, which told me before I seized my electric torch and started down the stairs that the search was over. Deering heard me coming down and shouted, “Say, Mr. Wycherly, I wouldn’t come in here if I were you.”

  “Have you found him?” I asked.

  Deering came out to the second floor hallway and stood at the bottom of the rickety stairs. The light from my torch showed his heavy square face a sick yellow; his forehead was damp with sweat. I did not need any answer to my question. Deering stood there making a sign to me to stay away. The stench was overpowering, more so than ever before. I said, “I see. But I am supposed to be a witness even if I didn’t want to look.”

  He shrugged and turned back to the room, the old library. I followed him. The room was still very dim with towering stacks of the newspapers which they had not yet moved. It was just as well. All I could bear to see before I closed my eyes in horrified revulsion was a foot; a shoe, more exactly, an old-fashioned high boot with straggling laces and a gaping hole in its sole. It was twisted back from the bones of a decomposing ankle.

  When I felt I could keep a grip on myself I opened my eyes, holding my handkerchief before my nose and mouth, and looked at what they had found. Randall Holt’s body lay on its side, facing towards the baywindow corner where Seymour Holt had been found dead in his wheelchair. The right hand was extended in what looked to our appalled eyes like a gesture of pleading; just beyond it lay a tin soup-can, squashed flat. The foot that we could not see was doubled underneath the oozing mass of rotted cloth, tangled in the rope that had sprung the boobytrap. I cannot bear to describe the head, the hands, whatever I saw uncovered, which had been gnawed by rats. The body was partly decomposed, and they had not yet moved away a crushed, tattered suitcase and two smashed tin bread-boxes which lay on top of it. The whole thing was not ten feet from the spot where Seymour Holt had been found, and for three whole weeks they had searched this house inch by inch, while a general alarm for Randall Holt had been on police dockets across the country.

  The Medical Examiner had been sent for when they first saw the tip of the boot and knew what they were about to uncover. He arrived while we were standing there, accompanied by those men with the long, narrow, covered basket. I did not watch while he made his examination; indeed, during that time I had to go downstairs and outside for some air. When I went back to the library they were using something like shovels to scoop the thing into the basket, and as they carried it away we followed them down the stairs and out to the desolate front yard.

  “At least a month,” said the Medical Examiner. We stood out there in a little group, shivering in the raw November wind. But, as Blyfeld said, we all felt sick enough to have shivered had it been a hundred in the shade. “He’s been dead at least a month,” said the Examiner. “After the laboratory work is finished I’ll be able to tell you to within a day or so.”

  Thus I had my facts. How could anybody have guessed in the beginning the sequence of this horrible thing: that Randall Holt had died first, caught and killed in his own booby-trap, and that Seymour Holt had lived on for several unthinkable days, dying at last of slow starvation. I had two or three very bad nights following this. I slept scarcely at all, tormented by gruesome, indescribably revolting nightmares. But I managed to pull myself together, chiefly because we now had the facts to enable us, Cullom and we at the bank, to do the work that it was our responsibility to do.

  Bowen Dugdale had had me transferred temporarily from the Foreign Department to the Trust Department, so that all my time could be assigned to the Holt case until it was cleared up. We had many conferences about it, together with Rodney Cullom. The discovery of Randall Holt’s body put a different light on the situation, especially after we had made sure that he had left no will. We did not have to search for his bank records, because I had found them packed into a japanned tea-chest buried under a mass of broken crockery and bundled newspapers in the bathroom. Now as I write about this, I find myself constantly drawn back into the frame of mind of those days, a strange state which consisted, as nearly as I can describe it, of the hard core of the facts that had involved me in this fantastic situation, surrounded by intangibles, clouds, mists, dreams almost, which I knew to be the story of the lives of the Holt brothers and Renata Tosi as it came to me through the crumbling archive of Randall Holt’s hoarded papers. The hard-core element kept me searching single-mindedly for my original objective, anything which would induce Renata Tosi to answer the question required by Seymour Holt’s will. The rest of it, the nebulous part, the part which grew and took pitifully human, moving form, impelled me away from the reality of trying to settle a will, and carried me into those haunting spaces of the imagination which I have tried to describe heretofore.

  I worked for four weeks in the room assigned me at the bank, reading, sorting, and classifying Randall Holt’s things, since we had decided that I ought to prepare a careful and consecutive transcript of every word of reference to Renata Tosi. With this, we decided, I should go back to Italy and once again confront the old woman. We could not imagine how, in the face of this compendium of facts, she could refuse to make the statement which would enable her and Sebastiano Gandolfi to inherit the property which we considered rightly theirs.

  The day came when I had finished this transcript to the best of my ability. As I worked through Randall Holt’s papers, through the things that he had saved and hidden as well as through the tremendous mass of his tiny scribblings, mostly on the margins of musical scores, I had put aside those whose meaning was so categorical that I believed Renata Tosi, confronted with them, could no longer refuse to speak. Yellow, dry, and crumbling as they were, I felt the only thing to do was to show them to her. I sealed them in padded envelopes to keep them from crushing to powder in transit, and I packed them, together with my long, typewritten transcript, in a boarded attache case, safer for such fragile material than a brief case. I was ready to leave. I was due at the airport at four o’clock; my plane would take off at five. I looked at my watch. It was a little after two. I had meant to do an errand of my own in the hour at my disposal, but I had a different impulse and decided to follow it. There was no reason for it and it was unnecessary; but that did not matter. I got into a cab and drove to the Holt house.

  It was three weeks since I had been there, having taken over then the last of Randall Holt’s things that I had been able to find. After that the work of clearing out the house had gone quickly and was now finished to the extent that it was possible. As they had worked down to the walls and floors of the decayed, crumbling, rat-ridden rooms, the plaster disintegrated, the floors in places as pulpy as cheese, they had seen the real condition of the riddled shell. The Department of Housing and Buildings had within recent days taken the legal steps necessary to pronounce the house a public menace. And Rodney Cullom had told me that he and the bank, as Seymour Holt’s executors, and the Public Administrator acting, in the absence of a will, for Randall Holt’s estate, had moved to obtain authorization to demolish the building. So I knew that I would never see it again.

  I stood in the barren, filth-littered yard, with the case in my hand that held the story of fifty years of life in the condemned house; with threads weaving and pulling all through my imagination, back another twenty years to the childhood of those brothers born to a hopeless destiny. Whe
n I had first seen the house, in the early days of suspense and of gruesome discovery, I had been shocked and at the same time, almost titillated by a sense of raw excitement at being involved in such a sensational thing. Now all that was past. I held in my hand the text, as it were, of the tragedy for which this had been the stage-setting. The house as I gazed at it was utterly, irrevocably mute. It had nothing more to tell. Its windows, behind whose filthy crust I had first seen the tattered blinds, the dark massed blocks of mystery, were dull blanks now, blank, I thought like my image of the eyes of Seymour Holt himself. I thought about him, with pity, with censure, with bitterness, even with amusement; with consternation at his awful death. Curious, I remember thinking; curious that he is in my mind now, just when my real concern is with the others.

  A solitary policeman was there on duty, guarding the sealed house from curiosity-seekers. He looked uncomfortable and bored, there in the early December cold. I knew him; he had been there from the beginning. He said, “Good afternoon, Mr. Wycherly. Do you have to go inside?”

  I said, “No thanks, Leary. I just thought for a moment I’d forgotten something.” He nodded and I turned away and got into my cab and drove to the airport.

  Faced with another twenty-four-hour blank it was inevitable I should pass the time remembering my first interview with Renata Tosi. Against what I now knew of her story the old woman might, I thought, have been a minor creation of Dante. Her surroundings intensified the illusion, for San Bernardo is one of the crumbling villages dating from about the eleventh century, perched in the crevices of the mountainous promontory which divides the Lake of Como into two long, thin arms. The village looks as if little had ever been done to change it or its inhabitants either. It is the dead end of the narrow road and it consists of a small bare piazza surrounded by a handful of buildings and an humble church. The houses are uniformly pale, faded grey, thinly stucco-faced over the rough-hewn stone which is the native building material, and perhaps yellow-washed at some time or other, but long since allowed to weather. The roofs are eloquent of tremendous age, their ridges and humps like the knots on gnarled, aged hands, and their red color darkened to a winy brown. The church is the real measure of the antiquity of the place, for it has not received in seven or eight hundred years the inconsequent face-lifting which overtook many Italian village churches—a baroque façade casually stuck upon the front, with the other three walls left untouched in their mediaeval nudity.