That day when Seymour burnt the piano Lily for the one time in her life forced the courage to try to intercede with Mrs. Holt. Seymour had been sitting upstairs for hours, sullen and defiant in his refusal to give a reason for what he had done. Between the intervals when the old woman had gone up to interrogate him, Lily had been hovering outside the night nursery, hoping to help him, but too frightened to disobey the order that forbade her to speak to him. She wanted to advise him to say anything rather than drag out the stupid punishment. She understood the explosive mixture of rebellion and jealousy which had driven him, but she herself could not have justified it in words: how could a child?
She knocked on the library door and entered, trembling, to face her mother-in-law. Mrs. Holt was sitting stiffly in her chair by the fire, staring at the coals. She raised her bushy eyebrows as Lily appeared, but her manner was rather less harsh than usual as she said, “Well?”
Lily swallowed apprehensively and tried to keep her voice calm.
“I thought,” she said. “I wanted—”
“Sit down.”
Timidly she took the other red satin chair across the hearth. She was about to speak, but Mrs. Holt anticipated her. She said, “I suppose you want to talk to me about Seymour?”
Lily nodded, with her eyes cast down. She said, “You know, it really was my piano, Mother Holt. He was very naughty, but—”
“I know it was your piano. Have you the money to buy another for Randall?”
Lily shook her head; her lips trembled and she said, “I wish I had. If it would make any difference with you about Seymour.”
“Not the least difference, Lily. He must be punished. I can perfectly well buy another piano. But I wonder whether I can root this terrible streak of temper and destructiveness out of Seymour.” She spoke thoughtfully.
Lily looked up, drawing a long breath and praying for courage. “Are you sure this is the way to do it?” she asked. Her heart beat wildly. Oh, she thought, how I hope I don’t set her off. “Is it possible you could be too strict with him?” She was frightened at her own temerity and afraid it would desert her. To her great surprise the old woman, instead of lashing out at her, said slowly, “In the circumstances I don’t think so.” She paused as if considering something; then she said, “Seymour has too many qualities like my husband.”
“Oh.” Lily had never before heard John Holt’s father mentioned. She sat back and looked at the old woman and tried to imagine what she meant. For a long time there was no sound but the faint spurt and hiss of flaring coals. Lily murmured at last, “John never spoke to me about his father.”
“He scarcely knew him. My husband died when John was six years old. And I had no wish to keep his memory alive.”
Lily had never known Mrs. Holt in such a mood, never could she have thought her human enough to venture a confidence. Many questions passed through her mind but she did not dare ask them. Her silence appeared to placate the old woman. They sat in a phenomenal moment of comity, which they had never once shared; and though Lily was a silly and unreasoning creature she grasped, beyond her fears and her anxiety for Seymour, that the old woman perhaps unconsciously was invoking her understanding if not her sympathy. It had never occurred to her that this rigid, bitter character could ever have been pliant enough to suffer hurts such as she habitually meted out.
“My husband,” said Mrs. Holt slowly, looking into the fire, “was a dissolute, passionate, violent-tempered rotter. I did not know it when I married him. I found out afterwards.”
“Did you,” asked Lily softly, “were you—?”
Mrs. Holt sighed. It was like the silly fool to think in such terms.
“Of course I was in love with him,” she answered brusquely. “I was young once too. And nobody remembers it now, but I was thought handsome and clever. It was supposed to be a very good match.”
“He—I suppose he was well off?”
“Very. Rich, splendid to look at. I expected a good life.” She paused and knit her brows, while Lily wondered whether she would go on talking. She said, “Within six months of our marriage I scarcely ever saw him. He was always away, racing or gambling, always with men like himself and the women they consort with. There is nothing,” she said, her craggy face contorted, “that I do not know about such men and what they do to their wives and children. He was away on a debauch for a whole week when my son was born.”
Lily sat forward, dumb with surprise. It was not the story which amazed her so much as Mrs. Holt’s startling capitulation to the impulse to tell it. Once having breached her reserve the old woman went on talking. “So perhaps you can understand,” she said, “that the single purpose of my life has been to make of my own son, and now of your two, men who could not resemble a hair of my husband’s head. For that one needs authority—and my husband was in no position to deny it.”
So that, thought Lily, is why he had to leave her all his money and nothing directly to John. I wonder if he could have known what the result would be. She did not know what to say. She had it on the tip of her tongue to ask whether John or either of her own boys had ever given Mrs. Holt real reason to suppose they could resemble her husband. Merely these outbreaks of Seymour’s temper? And surely not Randall, that angelic sweet-natured little boy. She thought of her John, and said mildly, “You couldn’t have worried about John. He was so good, so gentle—”
“Because he never had a chance to be otherwise.”
Lily wondered. The old woman went on. “It would have been better had he not married. I never meant him to.”
“I know that. I’ve always known you didn’t like me.”
“I should not have liked better any wife of John’s.”
“But I loved him so much,” said Lily, as if such a reason could at this date have softened her mother-in-law. Mrs. Holt’s face tightened; she glanced witheringly at Lily. To Sabina Holt the word “love” had long been a synonym for damnation. If love be pure, it must be eloquent of her own sufferings; if impure, the symbol of her husband’s depravity. This sentimental fool here could not grasp that, nor realize that John Holt’s death, however tragic, appeared to his mother a vindication of her dictum that he must never leave her, least of all at the importuning of a wife. If he had had no wife he would not be dead. What was the use, thought the old woman. She was beginning to regret already having talked so freely to Lily. Perhaps it had been a mistake. But having done it, she would leave matters as they were.
“You may go upstairs to Seymour,” she said, looking away, “and put him to bed. I know why he burnt the piano; I thought it necessary to make him say.”
“I truly don’t believe he can, Mother Holt. He won’t do such a dreadful thing again.”
“If he does, he will go through with his punishment.”
When Randall was left in the drawing-room with Mama and Grandmama he listened with delight to the heavy drumming of the rain outside. It meant that he would not have to go out this afternoon and it might even mean, with luck, that he could stay in Mama’s room for a while instead of in the day nursery. This might take a little doing. For a moment he wished Seymour were here to help; they had their own understandings about how to manage certain things. But then he thought, no; when it has to do with Mama, Seymour can be almost as bad as Grandmama. Mama was still trembling and whimpering on account of the thunderstorm, and instead of continuing to pat her shoulder and comfort her, Randall walked over quietly to the piano to put his music away. He was very neat. Everything was arranged just so in the music cabinet and he kept it that way without supervision. He put the Clementi and the Czerny and the Schumann away in their alphabetical places and closed the cabinet and the piano, and put the piano stool exactly where it belonged, and Mama’s small chair back in the spot where it always stood grouped with its mates around a gilded bamboo whatnot. He did all this with grave attentiveness, as if he were unaware that Grandmama was watching him. Then he said, his innocent blue eyes very childlike, “What do you wish me to do now, Grandm
ama?”
“Why—” Randall felt a ripple of satisfaction; this was a good sign. It came only when one asked Grandmama for orders instead of having them thrust at one. “Have you finished your French for tomorrow?”
“Not quite.” As a matter of fact he had not only read and translated Le Corbeau et le Renard, he had memorized it, just as he made all his best efforts for any of his work supervised by Mama. Grandmama had long since given up the empty gesture of teaching French words to the boys, because there was no denying that Lily had been brought up to speak it well. Let her teach it to Randall along with music, a soft unmanly thing he had inherited from her. Seymour was of different fibre; one could expect to make something of him.
“Well then,” said Mrs. Holt to Randall, “you might as well finish your Fable for tomorrow. Lily, you are quite all right now, are you not?”
“Oh, yes, Mother Holt.” Lily spoke with eager brightness which deceived neither her son nor the old woman. “I feel splendidly. I’m sorry I—I’m so sorry—”
Mrs. Holt shook her head as if to dismiss the subject and proceeded heavily from the room. “I shall be waiting for you and Seymour punctually at five-thirty in the library,” she said to Randall. That was the half-hour when she read them the Bible every evening before their supper.
“Yes, Grandmama,” said Randall demurely, following the two billowing, rustling sets of skirts up the stairs. Mrs. Holt disappeared into the library and Lily continued to the next floor, followed by Randall. Each knew that the other, but for the old woman there behind the door she had just closed, would have broken into a run and flown up the stairs to the refuge that they could scarcely wait to reach. But they moved sedately. Lily’s room was the large double one at the third floor front, which she had shared with her husband, and which to the very least detail she kept exactly as it had been when he was alive. She slipped inside the room now, and Randall behind her, as if they had been conspirators; the door was no sooner shut behind them than they ran into each other’s arms swiftly and fervently like lovers who had been kept apart for days. Lily held Randall clasped to her bosom and stroked his fair curls and kissed his temples and his eyelids and Randall kissed her pale cheeks and hugged her and whispered, “Dear Mama, please try to forget about her, don’t think about her.”
“Yes, yes,” she whispered. “Oh, Randall, dearest, what would I do without you!”
For a time they made a show of going through Randall’s lesson, sitting close together on the divan, her left arm round his shoulder, their cheeks touching as they bent their heads over La Fontaine. But he knew his Fable already; soon they put the book aside, and Randall curled up close to her, with his head on her shoulder. Sometimes she sang to him in these stolen moments and sometimes she talked, dwelling on her few treasured memories of happiness, which Randall knew well how to evoke. He knew that she loved him to open one or another of the drawers, cupboards, or boxes where she kept every token of memory which had ever come into her possession. Her room was therefore crowded and though superficially neat, actually a series of small concealed clutters, each of which was the touchstone of some sentimentality intensely significant to her. So Lily and Randall, sitting there with an open photograph-album on the table before them; or a box full of yellowed ball-programmes with faded ribbons and tarnished gilding; or the small top drawer of Papa’s dressing-stand filled with collar-buttons, moustache-shapers, brushes, pomatum, and manicure implements, would lose themselves in talk which thawed the frost of fear where they existed.
Today Randall had taken down from a shelf an album which was one of a series of what Lily in her girlhood had called her “memory books.” All her friends had kept such books, velvet-covered volumes with blank pages of slotted cardboard, into which they slipped the daguerreotypes and sketches, the souvenirs, the notes, the invitations to balls and other parties, the flowers pressed in mica envelopes, which marked the thrilling time between one’s début and one’s marriage. There were later albums too, the sacred one full of wedding memories, the treasured mementos of the honeymoon, the precious volume which began with the birth of Baby and was followed by as many more books—each covered in pale pink or blue satin hand-painted with winged cherubs and garlands of forget-me-nots—as there were successive Babies. But Randall liked best the early albums which told how beautiful and gay and charming Mama had been, and what lovely parties she had gone to when she was young.
“But,” he asked, “why is it that you only went to parties until you were married? Don’t married people go to parties?”
“Why yes, darling, of course.”
“But you never go now. You never have parties here.”
“Well you see, I am a widow, and without Papa—”
Randall could not remember clearly the days when Papa had been alive but he was quite sure there had been no parties then either. “Were there?” he asked. “Did you and Papa go to parties then, or give them here?”
“Not—not exactly.”
“Why not?”
“Well, you see, Grandmama … we didn’t like to go out and leave her alone.”
Randall might have asked why Mama and Papa had not, then, invited their friends to parties here at home, but he could not imagine a party, the sort of thing Mama described, with dancing and beautiful gowns and music and flowers, here in the same house with Grandmama.
“Will I go to parties when I am older?” he asked.
Lily laughed. “I should hope so. Young men have the best time of all, they say. And you will have more wonderful things to do than most boys, you will be going to Europe to study—”
“You always say so, Mama, but how can you be sure?”
“What do you mean, darling? Of course I am sure!” Lily opened her eyes wide and held Randall by the shoulders. “You must go.”
“Yes, I know, but—”
“But what? Don’t you want to?”
“Of course I want to, if you say so.”
“Professor Mundt says so too. You must go to Vienna, he says, when you are older, that is the only place, and you will have lessons with some great teacher, perhaps Leschetizky, and hear all the wonderful concerts and operas and make lots of lovely friends and—”
“But—” Randall had a worried pucker on his forehead. “What about you, Mama? Aren’t you going with me?”
“Of course! We’ll have a flat, or a little house somewhere with a garden and—”
Randall nodded eagerly; none of this was new, they had talked about it many times before. Some of it was like practising, something he knew letter-perfect before he began to go through it all over again. This time, however, he asked a new question. “What about Brother?” he blurted, in such a way that Lily saw he had been making up his mind for a long time to say this. Randall had a way of calling Seymour ‘Brother’ at certain moments and with a kind of secret emphasis; he said ‘Brother’ only to Seymour himself or to Lily, never in the presence of his grandmother.
Lily paused and weighed Randall’s question, and he saw a vague look come into her eyes as he watched her face anxiously. “What about Brother?” he asked again.
“Oh,” said Lily, “why—why he won’t want to go, darling. I mean, that is, he—Grandmama would never let him go.”
“But this will be when I am big,” said Randall. “Is Grandmama—” Lily watched him nervously—“is she going to live forever, Mama?”
“Sh—” Her face turned pink in a sudden blush. She glanced quickly at the door. “We mustn’t, you oughtn’t …”
“That’s not naughty,” whispered Randall. “I only said she’s very old and she is. Don’t you ever think about that, Mama?”
“Oh, darling.” How could she cry, ‘If you only knew!’
“Well—suppose she—she—you know, suppose there were just the three of us? Wouldn’t we all be together?”
“Of course we would.” Lily found herself for the first time confronted by a thought so obvious that how could she possibly not have had it many times before?
She could dream and hope; she had prayed for years for freedom; and now, if she should be freed, the prospect startlingly held a problem of its own when heretofore it had shone clear and glorious like the gate to Heaven itself. Yet what exactly was this problem? Lily could not name it; it took the shape of some unimaginable obstruction to her dearest hope. And nine-year-old Randall had been the one to point it out.
“Oh,” she said, “there’s lots of time, darling. It will all come out beautifully, I am sure.”
Randall jumped lightly away from her as they heard a tap on the door and Lily, closing the album before them, cried brightly “Come in!”
It was Seymour. He was munching a piece of bread-and-butter-and-brown sugar and Lily gave a conspiratorial giggle when she saw it.
“Shut the door quickly,” she whispered. Seymour did so, with cool deliberation which was pure bravado.
“How did you get it?” she asked, for eating between meals was forbidden by Mrs. Holt and it was not easy to obtain anything from Cook or Minnie. The old lady kept track of all the food in the house, eyeing cut roasts of meat, and cakes and puddings and anything from which it was easy to notice a stolen slice. But bread and butter and sugar were more difficult to trace. “They weren’t in the kitchen,” said Seymour succinctly. “I guess they’re upstairs changing their uniforms.” He knew very well, and Lily knew that he knew, exactly when the maids left the kitchen empty, and when and where to place every happening and every object in the house which had the remotest interest for him.
My Brother's Keeper Page 6
