My Brother's Keeper

by Marcia Davenport

  “Oh!” she cried. “Oh, Seymour, I’m so frightened. Mama’s so frightened.”

  “Pshaw,” he said roughly. “It’s nothing, Mama.” He patted her shoulder. The rain began to fall in splashing sheets.

  Inevitably the door opened and Mrs. Holt said, “You will not be able to play out of doors, boys.” She stood watching Lily clinging to Seymour. “You,” she said to him, “may go down and work at your workbench.”

  Seymour’s polite reply was smothered by a tremendous clap of thunder; lightning blazed past the windows and Lily screamed and quivered.

  “Now, now,” said Mrs. Holt. “Don’t be stupid, Lily. Seymour, you may go.”

  “Oh, leave him here,” wailed Lily. She was on her knees with her arms round Seymour’s neck and her face buried against his shoulder. “Please leave him here!”

  “Nonsense, nothing is going to hurt you.” Mrs. Holt took a step forward and Seymour unconsciously held his mother closer. “I want you to take Randall upstairs to Nana, Lily, and if you cannot control yourself, at least remain in your own room until the storm is over.”

  Lily clung to Seymour; he felt her stiffen and hold her breath as another flash and thunderclap shook the house. Randall had slid off his piano-stool and was hovering near Lily and Seymour, also trying to comfort his mother. “Don’t be frightened, Mama,” he said in his small, high voice. He patted her arm. “We won’t let it hurt you, will we, Seymour?”

  “Never mind, Randall,” said Mrs. Holt. “Nor you, Seymour. Go and do as I say.”

  She spoke rather more gently than usual, and Seymour wondered if she could be feeling sorry for his mother. He disentangled himself from Lily’s arms and said, “Yes, Grandmama. Would you like me to take Randall upstairs first?” He knew this was a ridiculous suggestion, Randall was perfectly capable of walking upstairs by himself. Nine years old!

  “Never mind,” said Mrs. Holt.

  Seymour left the room and went down the basement stairs to the corner of the cellar where his workbench had been set up, close to a window-grating which gave him light from one of the high windows opening on the back yard. There was also a gas-jet directly overhead at a height that he could easily reach. Since last year he had been permitted to light the gas instead of asking somebody to do it for him. He lit it; then he took off his jacket with a whistle of relief and flung it on a canvas-covered hulk standing in the corner.

  He should have hung the jacket neatly on the hook provided for it, but there was satisfaction in not doing so, or any of dozens of other equally trifling things, if he could get away with it. He stood for a time eyeing the model which he was in the midst of building, the model of an imaginary ferry-boat which should be an ingenious improvement over the clumsy bloated side-wheelers that he had seen all his life, plying the river to the Jersey shore and back. Ever since he could remember he had had this knack for making odd and original boats out of bits of wood and tin and string and wire, and it was an established habit in the house for everybody to save such odds and ends for Seymour. Some of his ideas came from watching the stream of shipping which moved up and down the Hudson only two blocks west of the house, where he went to watch and dream and idle whenever he could contrive to drag Nana or Mama, and inevitably Randall, on the walks which alternated with those dreary stupid hours in the back yard. But his favorite boats were suggested by the wonderful riches of Hare Island; the ugly efficient sword-fishing craft, the dories of the lobstermen, the graceful classes of sailing boats, racing sloops and yawls and little skidoos; and best of all the beautiful yachts that belonged to the Newport swells, which moored in the harbor in full sight of the house when they were out on cruises.

  On a shelf above his bench stood a finished two-masted schooner yacht in full sail, one of the best boats he had ever made. Usually he gave his boats to Mama when they were finished and she kept them proudly in her room and treasured them. This schooner belonged to her too, but Seymour had brought it back to his workshop because he meant to make a change in the rigging. That was intricate work and he was not always in the mood to do it. Today he found he did not much want to go on with his new ferry-boat either. He stood at the bench turning over the model in his hands, measuring and re-measuring a piece of the hull that did not fit properly, and trying to get up the willpower to take the whole thing apart and cut the central piece over again. But his attention wandered. He thought about all sorts of things … whether Tom and Willy had got caught in the storm out on Old Rory’s Pier … whether Mama was feeling better now and whether Randall had really been sent up to Nana or allowed to stay with her … whether (and here he tried very hard not to think any more) he oughtn’t to hang up his jacket instead of leaving it where it was. Actually he was not thinking about the jacket at all, but about the old piano underneath it, muffled in canvas. He hated it to be there and that was exactly why it was there. “That will be your punishment,” Grandmama had said. “That piano will stay there in your own corner of the house and it will stay as long as the house stays. You will keep it and never throw it out and it will have taught you something, Seymour.”

  She ought to have thrown it away. She ought at least to have sold it to the old cabinetmaker who had said there was quite a bit of useful rosewood in it. It was only the inside that was burnt out. And she hadn’t had any right to decide about it anyway, for it belonged to Mama, it had been one of her wedding-presents from her father; Mama had told Seymour how he had bought it for her only a few months before he lost all his money and died. Seymour wished that all the men in his family had not got such a way of dying and leaving everything in control of Grandmama. He had never known either of his grandfathers; he had only heard vaguely of an Uncle George, Mama’s brother who had died long ago; and Seymour remembered all too vividly Papa’s death only five years ago. Randall was already very vague about Papa and knew him mostly as a name because Mama so often spoke it, but Seymour remembered him perfectly and often tried to act as if Papa were not dead at all, but only away for a time. One of Seymour’s favorite notions was a scene that repeated itself often in his imagination. Papa was all dressed and ready to go away on some journey; his valises and travelling-rug stood ready in the front hall, where Seymour himself was standing with Mama in the open drawing-room doorway, while Grandmama stood in the vestibule cutting off their full view of Papa while she said good-bye to him. Then Seymour would walk forward and politely bow Grandmama aside, and Papa would say, “That’s right, Seymour, you must be the man here while I am away. Take good care of Mama and Grandmama and Randall, and see that everybody… .” But Seymour was never very clear after that just what his father would have had everybody do. Move to the different house that Papa had talked about that afternoon when Seymour had been hidden under the library table? Not very well without Papa.

  He began slowly to separate the glued parts of the ferry-boat. His fingers worked accurately even though he wasn’t thinking much about the change he was going to make in the hull. The dark heavy rain fell with a sullen splash outside. Seymour liked the sense of being safely shut away down here, released from the boredom it would have been to have had to play out of doors with Randall. There were moments when he liked to be with Randall but they had to come about of themselves and not be decreed by Grandmama or Nana … He had got the glued ferry-boat apart now and stood turning over the pieces and trying to feel interested enough to start over again, but this was one of those times when that looming bulk in the corner made him think about one thing when he really wanted to think about another… .

  It was only a couple of years ago, a winter afternoon just before school closed for the Christmas holidays. He was still too young to walk back and forth alone and Nana always took and fetched him. He had finished at school a Christmas present for Mama, a small album in which he had copied out in shiny white ink The Night Before Christmas. The pages of the album were of bright red paper, and each one was elaborately decorated with pictures and snow-scenes illuminated with sticky white crystals scattered onto gl
ue; the horns of the reindeer were carved from tiny slivers of wood, and Santa Claus’s beard was a delightful blob of real white wool, surreptitiously picked from the nap of a blanket. Seymour was very proud of it. As soon as Nana opened the front door he made a rush for the drawing-room, he could not wait to give his present to Mama. Nana called him back; Seymour knew he should obey her and besides she was perfectly right when she said he should put his present away and save it to give to Mama on Christmas morning. But at the moment he did not care, not even when Nana said, “Your grandmother first, Master Seymour. Go straight upstairs to the library.”

  “I won’t,” he answered, which was a dreadful naughtiness, and ran to his mother sitting at the piano with Randall. He thrust the album at her but she only smiled a little, shook her head, put her finger to her lips, and pointed to the ceiling to remind Seymour to go up to report to Grandmama. Randall kept on playing. It was some kind of silly exercise which sounded like three notes struck over and over again. Seymour hated it. He hated every single thing he could see and feel and hear, the room, Mama, Randall, the piano, all of it. He stood for a moment beside Mama but she paid no further attention to him and presently he turned and went away, slamming the door behind him.

  Then there was trouble with Grandmama for what he had done, and he was sent to spend an hour alone in the night-nursery, standing in the corner with his face to the wall. He had hidden the album inside his jacket, and standing there he took it out and tore his beautiful present to the smallest bits he could. When that was done and the floor around him littered with shreds, he stood and listened with the sharpest care in order to place each person in the house. Grandmama was still in the library, one always heard her heavy step along the hall when she left that room. Randall had finished practising, Seymour heard him coming into the day-nursery with Nana. That meant that Mama would have gone to her own room. It was quite late in the afternoon, but not yet so nearly dark that Minnie would go through the house drawing the thickly stuffed curtains and lighting the gas chandeliers. But Seymour knew that she soon would do that and he began to think. All his life he had seen Nora or her successors lighting the gas cocks of the chandeliers with thin wax tapers attached to the end of a long wooden pole that stood in a corner of the pantry. The tapers were kept in a drawer nearby, and so were a lot of big sulphur matches.

  Everything seemed to be on Seymour’s side. Nobody saw him slip through the halls and tiptoe down the flights of stairs to the pantry. Minnie was not in the pantry when he pushed the swinging door open a crack and peered in. He crept to the drawer, seized a handful of wax tapers and several matches and crammed them into the waistband of his blouse. Still unnoticed, he went to the drawing-room and silently closed the door behind him. He laid open the lid of the square piano. Then he took the bunch of tapers, scratched a match—the most strictly forbidden of all forbidden things—lit the tapers, and flung the whole bunch together with the rest of the matches right into the insides of the piano.

  Out of all the confusion afterwards, Mama’s cries and wails, Randall’s terrified screaming, the yelping prayers of the servants to Holy Mary and all the saints, the sickening acrid smell of burning varnish and felt, Grandmama’s most awful voice, the lowest-pitched but loudest she ever used, Reilly slinging buckets of water into the smouldering piano, the final wreck of the drawing-room, its maroon plush and festooned gimp and crimson wallpaper and podgy chairs and sofas dumped on their backs or waving their silly feet in the air, Seymour remembered most vividly the way it had ended, with Grandmama standing before the marble chimneypiece, whose swagged plush drapery hung crazily awry dripping pink water on the hearth. The servants had been dismissed and there was nobody in the room but Grandmama and Mama and the boys. Lily was whimpering and trying to edge towards the door, with Randall’s hand clutched in hers.

  “No,” said Grandmama, in that voice like something out of the Bible. “You are to stay here, Lily. Randall too.” Randall only looked up at her with great blue eyes swimming with bewilderment. Seymour stood as far from her as he could go, off in the corner by the windows, staring at the toes of his boots. He knew that if he looked up he would see Mama’s hurt and puzzled face, reproachful but not angry; she had never been angry with him or with Randall, and Seymour knew very well why not. Grandmama’s anger was as much as any house and any family could contain.

  “Now why,” she intoned at Seymour, “did you do this wicked, this unspeakably evil thing?”

  There was silence. Seymour stared stubbornly at his feet, pressing his lips together and grinding his back teeth. He knew that his ears must be fiery red; he could feel them tingling.

  “Answer me!”

  Seymour remained silent.

  “Seymour!” Such a tone must be audible from the cellar to the roof.

  Seymour began to feel very queer, as if his head were swelling up and likely to snap from his neck and sail away like a freed balloon. He swallowed, he drew long breaths through his nose, and he did not say a word.

  Then Mama said, in a trembling whisper, “Answer Grandmama, Seymour.”

  For Mama’s sake he would have spoken if he could think of anything to say. They were all watching him, he felt their eyes piercing and boring and trying to take him apart. He licked his lips quickly, several times, and then pinched them shut again.

  “Please,” he heard his mother gasp, and he knew she was trying to hold off Grandmama.

  He raised his head and stared at the sodden wall—why had they got the whole room in such a mess, anyway?—and said through his teeth, “I don’t know.”

  “That is no answer,” said Grandmama. “You will answer my question. Why did you try to burn up the piano?”

  Seymour kept his head bent and made it clear to all of them that this was neither shame nor abasement; it was defiance. He said nothing more. He heard his mother try again to plead with him, then Grandmama snapped, “That will do, Lily. I am here.” To Seymour she said, “You will tell me at once why you did this thing. You will give me your reason.”

  He jerked his head up and opened his mouth and shouted, “I DON’T KNOW.”

  He saw his grandmother’s long, wrinkled face harden into a shape he had never seen before, a jagged oblong like the faces of the stone animals carved on the buildings of the Zoo. She seemed to have turned the color of stone, too; she looked a strange shade of grey. Seymour was desperately frightened and he had known the feeling in varying degrees before. But for the first time he also felt something else, a sharp sensation like a knife-thrust through the sick lump of fear settled in his gorge. This was a sense of unexpected triumph, the last thing in the world he could have looked for today. If he stuck to his guns and refused to answer her question he could win hands down over Grandmama no matter what she resorted to in the effort to make him speak. Let her beat him, which she almost never had, for she was proud of her principle that she could train and mould children by force of will and character alone, without resorting to physical punishment.

  “This insolence,” she said, “is going to cost you dearer than all your shocking mischief. I will have your answer, Seymour, and you will remain in total disgrace until you have given it. Nobody will speak to you or notice you or act as if you were in the house. You will sit with your hands folded, on a straight chair in the night nursery and you will sit there exactly as long as you fail to answer my question.”

  “He—he—” whispered Lily.

  Grandmama turned to her and said, “Go upstairs, Lily. Go away and take Randall with you.”

  Seymour watched them go. He ought to feel more frightened than before to find himself all alone with Grandmama but instead he found he did not care very much. He listened indifferently while she said, “I am going to have your answer, Seymour, your reason for destroying Randall’s piano—”

  “It wasn’t Randall’s,” he muttered. “It was Mama’s.”

  “Do not contradict me. All this will be taken account of in your punishment. It was Randall’s, and he is to ha
ve a new one, a better one. The best piano that can be bought.”

  Seymour stood looking at Grandmama with dull disinterest. What was it to him if she bought another piano, or a dozen pianos? He could not care about any of it any more.

  “And you are going to pay for it,” said Grandmama. Seymour stared as if to point out the silliness of ordering him to buy a piano on his allowance of five cents a week.

  “That is insolence too,” she said. “I see the expression on your face. I tell you you will buy Randall a new piano, and when you are older you will see what I meant. Money has no meaning to you now. One day it will. You will find out when—”

  “It was Mama’s piano!” cried Seymour. To interrupt Grandmama was a terrible thing, and he did it without even hesitating. “I’ll buy Mama a new piano!”

  “Go upstairs!” said his grandmother in a thundering bellow. “Do as I said. Sit on that straight cane chair in the corner of the night nursery and if you move a muscle I will be there to deal with you.”

  He started to walk stiffly from the room.

  “And,” she said, “in case you think buying Randall a new piano with money that has no meaning is not much of a punishment, you may think about the piano you have just destroyed. It is going to remain where you will have to think about it.”

  That was when she had decreed that the burnt-out wreck was to stay in Seymour’s work-place in the cellar, a disgusting reproach to his memory and his eyes. At the moment that too had not seemed like the dire punishment she said she meant it to be. He had learned in fact to ignore it most of the time; it was just a lumbering bulk standing there in the corner. But sometimes like today he felt cranky and snarling and confused, sometimes he had a sense that Grandmama when she punished him was trying in fact to punish Mama—but for what? And why all this fuss about a piano, any piano, and what difference whose piano it was supposed to be? Seymour stood at his bench, studying the separated parts of the new boat, trying to get into the mood to carve down the hull so that it would fit better when he put the boat together again. But he could not feel interested, his attention wandered everywhere that he hated it to go instead of staying here to do what he wanted. He felt jumpy and rough. Each of his thoughts—Grandmama, Mama, Randall, pianos, boats, making things, doing things—was more annoying than another. Suddenly he seized the beautiful finished schooner from the shelf and holding it in both hands he brought it down with a crash on the edge of the old burned piano. The smashed pieces fell around his feet on the cement floor and Seymour raised his right foot and stamped on them with his heel, over and over again.