My Brother's Keeper

by Marcia Davenport

  “Want some?” he asked Randall. “I’ll go and fix it for you.” This was more bravado and Lily knew it. She wondered what had got Seymour into this mood.

  Randall shook his head. He would have liked just one bite of Seymour’s snack, but he was not hungry enough to want a whole piece for himself. He said so. Seymour said, “Oh no. You can have your own but you can’t have any of mine.”

  Lily raised her eyebrows as if to ask an explanation, but such a trifle was not worth talking about when she had a moment to enjoy both boys together. She patted the divan on her right and when Seymour sat down there, flung an arm about each boy and hugged them both. Seymour submitted with a show of patience, eyeing the closed album on the small table before them.

  “Up to that stuff again,” he said. “Don’t you ever get tired of thinking about the same old things? Old pictures and dead flowers and stuff.”

  “It’s no worse than all that rubbish of yours in the cellar,” said Randall.

  “Why, darling!” Lily’s face was quite shocked. “What a thing to say!”

  “I don’t care,” said Seymour, swallowing the last of his bread and butter. “If he’s too stupid to see what I do with things—”

  “Sh. Stop squabbling, boys. Let’s have a few happy minutes together while we can.” Lily drew the children close to her, hugging each by the shoulder until their cheeks were resting against hers. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” she sighed, “if only we were always—”

  They all jumped a little. They had heard Mrs. Holt’s voice downstairs; the library door must be open and Mrs. Holt giving some order to Minnie for whom she had rung. Lily’s eyes, together with Seymour’s cool grey ones and Randall’s wondering blue globes, turned to the crystal clock ticking fussily on her bedside table. It said twenty minutes past five.

  “We have ten minutes,” said Lily anxiously.

  Seymour shook his head, drawing away while she tried to hold him closer.

  “Mnh, mnh,” he sounded, with his lips closed. “She wants to know if we’re upstairs getting washed.” He pulled himself away from his mother and stood up. “Come on, Ran.”

  “Oh, dear.” Lily hugged Randall closer and looked up at Seymour with a babyish, pleading expression. Seymour’s face was quite stern, he wore that look which Lily could never quite believe, setting his little-boy face in severe lines utterly unrelated to his soft skin and fine fair hair.

  “It’s no use, Mama. Do you want to get us in trouble?”

  Lily sighed and let Randall go. He stood up and then threw his arms quickly round her neck and gave her a hug and a kiss.

  “I told you to come on, Ran,” said Seymour, watching them. “He’s too old to be babied like that, Mama.” Lily looked at Seymour with her most docile expression, and Randall said, “He’s not Grandmama. You don’t have to obey him too.”

  “I—I’d rather, darling. He’s only trying to keep us out of trouble, don’t you see?”

  “Well,” said Randall with prim deliberateness, “I guess I do. I’m coming, Brother,” he said, as Seymour started towards the door. “Have you got anything to show her?” he asked anxiously, as they slid quietly through the hall to their own rooms. Their grandmother usually demanded an accounting of their time after an afternoon like this; she would require to see what Seymour had made and to hear what Randall had memorized. They got into the night nursery and gave each other a confiding grin. Nana was not there, probably down in the kitchen at her everlasting tea, and they hurried to wash their hands which she would be here to inspect before sending them down to the library.

  “Have you?” asked Randall again.

  Seymour snickered. “What makes you so sharp today?” he asked, drying his hands. He put the towel away and began to feel in his pockets.

  Randall giggled too. He pointed to Seymour’s right shoe, whose heel had apparently got glue on it, for a tangle of white string and shreds of cloth had stuck to the shoe. Seymour looked down at it and then at Randall. “Gee,” he said, flushing. “Thanks.” He sat down on the floor and cleaned his shoe and put the wadded-up mess in the wastepaper basket. Then he looked Randall over to insure quick approval at inspection. Then he pulled a piece of whittled wood from his pocket and said, “This’ll do. It’s a thingummy.”

  “A what?”

  “A thingummy. Oh, I’m going to tell her it’s the deck-housing of a coal barge.”

  “Is it?”

  “What do you think?”

  “What will she think?”

  “Here’s Nana,” said Seymour, making a face. “We’re all ready, Nana,” he said sweetly. “Come on, Ran. And take a long time over your French when she asks for it, will you?”

  They filed past their old nurse who stood looking after them with her heavy, horselike gaze. Like a horse she was conditioned by years of driving to a set of automatic, obedient reactions and also like a horse she knew a master when she saw one. “It’s herself,” she said, as the boys’ thick boots clumped down to the library. “Another wan just like herself.”

  She shook her head, well satisfied that a new place with younger children was to be found for her at the end of this year. Master Seymour, if she knew anything, would soon be a job she wouldn’t care to handle. And Master Randall—too much of that piano-strumming and nonsense in his head like that poor weak whiny one.

  CHAPTER 3

  Seymour had just won the Saturday afternoon Class A race, his sixth straight victory, bringing him within two weeks of the Season Cup. He was full of happiness and excitement as he brought his boat in to its mooring. He came about, dropped the mainsail, and slid round in one smooth manoeuvre as Randall up forward neatly hooked the dinghy. Seymour could never have enough of sailing, especially after he had waited years for the supreme joy of owning his own boat. But Randall if anything was the more proud. He said, as they went to work furling, “That was a beauty today.” He grinned at Seymour with overflowing admiration. “You really are a sailor.”

  “Oh, I guess it’s the boat. And you’re a good hand.” They were trying to outdo each other in generosity. It had been a fine race. There was a big spanking breeze outside and tacking had been a very tricky job. The Crawley and the Richmond boats had both been disqualified, and they were sailed by older men who had been racing for years. But Seymour had only received his boat two months ago, in June, as a grand cumulative present to celebrate several major events: his eighteenth birthday last winter, his graduation with honors from school, and his behaving with good grace about his grandmother’s insistence that he go to Columbia next autumn and live at home, instead of going away to The Massachusetts Institute as he had hoped.

  “I guess it’s worth the price,” he said to Randall, throwing him a sweater and adding, “Put that on, Kid.” He motioned with his chin across the harbor to their lawn, where they could see Mrs. Holt standing bulky and black-clad as always, with her telescope to her eye.

  “I had the cold,” said Randall wearily. “Weeks ago.”

  “I know. But you think I want a harangue about you this evening?”

  “I thought you were going to the Milburns’ beach party this evening.”

  “I am—I hope. That’s why I don’t want any trouble beforehand.”

  Randall pulled the sweater over his head and went on with his work.

  “This spinnaker’s too wet to stow,” said Seymour. “Let’s take it to the house and dry it there. I won’t be around later to come out if we leave it drying over the boom.”

  “I could come,” said Randall.

  “Oh, no. There’d be a fuss. They never used to let me row out alone after supper when I was crew for Mr. Jarrett, they’d be the same about you. And you think I want—”

  “Never mind,” said Randall with a laugh. “You’re right. What’s it like on those beach parties, Brother?” His fine fingers were making short work of the mainsail stops, and his face was wistful.

  “It’s fun. You’ll be old enough to go pretty soon. Grand things to eat, and sitting
around a big driftwood fire. And toasting marshmallows later, and singing, and tonight there’s going to be a moon.”

  Randall knew too what else Seymour was anticipating but you didn’t talk about that. It was part of the reason why Seymour seemed so changed lately and so far away. They had finished making everything shipshape; they dropped the spinnaker into the dinghy and sprang in after it, cast off, and Randall asked to row in. Seymour said, “Better not. You know.” It was Mama they had to consider now; she was always trying to make Randall promise not to row and get his hands calloused. They shot across the harbor and Randall said, “Look, Brother, there’s Dorothy Bayliss waving at you.”

  He watched Seymour’s face, and the careful, blank expression which came over it. Seymour looked over his shoulder and saw that his grandmother had left her lookout post; then he waved quickly and casually towards the Bayliss place and bent to his oars again.

  “I guess she’s trying to congratulate you about the race,” said Randall. “You’ll see her at the party, won’t you?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Everybody says she’s the prettiest girl on the Island.”

  “Aw—” Seymour thought better of what he had been about to say. If he tried to shut Randall up the kid would only harp more on the subject. “There are lots of others.”

  Randall knew better than to say anything more about this now. They had reached home anyway, and there was no more time to talk. They climbed the slope to the sprawling “cottage” of brown weathered shingles, where Mrs. Holt had spent her summers ever since her husband had built the house when she was a bride. Hare Island was a thoroughly conservative place, duller and stuffier than Newport which was at that time a sleepy little town not yet dreaming of its own spectacular future. Hare Island people were smug, satisfied, and free from the proddings of restlessness and vulgarity which, they would one day say, had laid Newport open to the barbarian invasions of the new millionaires. In truth the Hare Island colony were not and never had been rich enough to score; they were old-fashioned families descended in a sound blue line from the English settlers of New York. This was the reason for the one seeming inconsistency in Mrs. Holt’s rigidity: the vast difference for the boys between their New York winters and their Hare Island summers. They were allowed in summer the only freedom they ever knew, because their grandmother supposed that they could not come to harm or fall under bad influences on an island miles out at sea, tightly colonized by people she had always known.

  Lily, whose silly romantic views occasionally proved disconcertingly realistic, was less sure than her mother-in-law of Hare Island’s impermeability to life and the outside world. She was still young enough to see Seymour as she was sure he appeared to his contemporaries, superbly handsome, with a fascinating tendency to silence made provocative by his finely modelled features and deep grey eyes. What Seymour felt or even more rarely, said, was worth waiting to learn. Randall was the ingenuous one who had not yet developed in the kiln of Mrs. Holt’s exactions the hard and undeniably attractive glaze of the instinct for shrewd self-preservation. Sitting now at tea with her mother-in-law as the boys surged up the porch steps outside, Lily had to restrain the impulse to rush out and throw her arms about them and make the fuss which Seymour’s victory deserved. Instead she waited until they came in, bronzed and panting, and flung themselves upon the bread-and-butter and cake.

  “It’s too wonderful,” cried Lily, wishing she dared run over and hug Seymour. “Tell us all about it.”

  “Oh—not much out of the usual,” he said, with his mouth full. “Thank you, Grandmama.” He took the cup of tea she had poured out for him. “Some of them had a little trouble at the Cat and Kittens.”

  “But Seymour did it this way!” Randall illustrated with his hands the series of quick tacks that had brought their boat through ahead. “And Mr. Jarrett was awfully nice, he hailed us and saluted Seymour.”

  “Edwin Jarrett is a fine man,” said Mrs. Holt.

  “A sportsman,” said Seymour.

  Mrs. Holt raised her eyebrows as if to remind Seymour that her pronouncement was intended to be the last word. Lily had nothing to add to the conversation, she sat smiling brightly at the boys and surreptitiously glancing at the mantel clock. It was after five and Seymour, she knew, was supposed to be at the post-office at six, where the party were to meet to ride out in hay-wagons to Barren Beach. Whenever Seymour was about to go out to enjoy one of the privileges which his age and his good behavior had wrested from the reluctant old woman, Lily suffered torments of suspense until he was safely out of the house. She loved Seymour to go out, she loved in imagination to follow him as he met with the jolly group of young men and girls, who, she knew, admired him and liked him, the girls for his good looks and the boys for his prowess as a sailor. There had been times this summer when Lily, alone with him for a moment, had whispered, “Do be careful. Oh, Seymour, I’m so afraid sometimes that she’ll—you know.”

  He had patted his mother’s cheek reassuringly. “If I haven’t learned to watch my step by now, Mama, I’d really be a fool.” He laughed.

  To her relief he was dismissed from tea in time to go upstairs to change his clothes. Lily saw that Randall yearned to tag along; he wanted to watch Seymour get ready for the party, his only way of vicarious participation in pleasures that seemed centuries away. Lily knew how hard it was for him to be dropped from things after years of living in tandem with Seymour. She longed to find something for him to do to make up for his disappointments now, but Mrs. Holt made that impossible. There was nothing at Hare Island to take the place of the concerts that Lily and Randall were allowed to hear in New York, because Mrs. Holt considered those part of Randall’s education and could not conceive of music as pleasure. Lily sighed. She could only offer Randall a game of dominoes after supper, with Mrs. Holt sitting nearby knitting in the lamplight.

  Seymour ran downstairs and came into the sitting-room to say good night. Lily tried her hardest not to gaze at him with loving admiration; she had been scolded for that, and such a scolding now might mount up to ruining Seymour’s evening. But he was so handsome! His fair hair, sun-bleached and cropped short, sprang in a crisp line from his bronzed forehead; his cool grey eyes were doubly striking in his sunbrowned face, and he wore his white flannels and striped blazer with an easy grace which reminded her poignantly of her husband, whom she had not even met until he was almost twenty years older than Seymour was now. But John Holt had kept all his life the youthful grace of figure and movement which made Seymour so charming to look at. Lily began to re-live the past in a reverie which kept her apparently preoccupied or, more fortunately for Seymour, somewhat indifferent, as he stood for a moment between her chair and Mrs. Holt’s.

  “Eleven-thirty sharp, Seymour,” said the old lady. At the age of eighty-two her voice if anything was more rasping and dictatorial than ever.

  “Yes, Grandmama.”

  “And stop the clock when you come in.” That was her way of policing him, an infuriating humiliation of the sort it was impossible to keep secret from his friends. One had to be tough-fibred to rise above that. At least, however, he was now spared reporting to her in her bedroom as he had had to do last year when he was first allowed to go out in the evening.

  “Good night, then.” His grandmother tilted towards him the angle of her whiskery chin. He kissed it, kissed his mother’s cheek, who breathed, “Have a good time, darling,” and gave Randall an affectionate slap on the shoulder. Then, holding his breath, he was out safe and free on the front porch, and down the steps in a bound. He took his bicycle from the shed, carefully secured his trousers with spring clips, and sped down the road, conscious of the glorious flavor of liberty, as if it were the taste of a rare delicacy. When he whizzed into the post-office square the three big hay-wagons were there, filling with the laughing, chattering party, the girls in fluffy muslin dresses which they wrapped, giggling, round their ankles as they were helped up to the high banks of fresh hay. His friends hailed him wi
th calls and shouts of congratulation, and several of them cried from their perches, “Here, Seymour! We’ve saved a place for you!”

  But he knew that there would be a place next to Dorothy Bayliss, without any remark about it. Many others knew it too, but he did not care. Nearly everybody had his special arrangement of this sort, but Dorothy was popular and there was competition. He sprang into the wagon where she was seated, shyly smiling at him, and dismissed with modesty the chorus of congratulations on the race today.

  “It really was wonderful,” said Dorothy softly. “I was out with Papa in the judges’ boat and saw it all.”

  “I saw you,” said Seymour.

  “You didn’t! You were working so hard you didn’t see a thing.”

  “Blind as a bat,” agreed Seymour. “I didn’t see you waving from your lawn when you got home, either.”

  “Anyway, you were splendid,” sighed Dorothy happily. Seymour looked at her small, pretty hands folded in her ruffled pale blue lap. He would have liked to take one of them and hold it just for a minute, but that was unthinkable. Dorothy looked at him and her bright face turned pink in a sudden blush. Seymour leaned over and said something to George Parsons about a tennis game tomorrow; and while George was reminding him, to his discomfiture, that Seymour could not play tennis on Sunday but would Monday do, the last of the guests swarmed into the wagons and in a chorus of shouts the big teams hauled off for the two-mile ride to Barren Beach.