My Brother's Keeper

by Marcia Davenport

  Next afternoon he presented himself again at the Bayliss house, and was ushered by an expressionless parlormaid into a drawing-room unoccupied by anybody. The second parlor was also empty.

  “Mrs. Bayliss is having tea upstairs in the library, sir,” said the maid. “I will announce you.”

  “I—” Seymour had no chance to say he had come to call on Miss Dorothy. The maid had left the room. He waited, heartsick, with a galloping pulse, and suspense wrenching at the pit of his stomach. It seemed to him that the maid was gone an hour; she was in fact very long, with Seymour standing erect and motionless on the hearth when he could in his wretchedness have paced the nap off the carpet. At last the maid stood in the doorway and said, “Will you come up to the library, sir?”

  Seymour followed her upstairs and passed the door she held open. Mrs. Bayliss was seated on one side of the library fire, and facing her, with his back to the door, Dorothy’s father. Seymour realized with a start that this was Saturday. He had lost track of everything since last night, and had not expected to find Mr. Bayliss at home from his office. Dorothy sat in a low chair between them, pale and with trembling lips. Seymour saw that she had been crying and there rose above his own apprehension a surge of longing to comfort and reassure her. But nothing could be more futile, more impossible. He shook hands with Dorothy’s parents and then with her, startled that her small fingers were icy cold.

  “No, thank you very much,” he said, as Mrs. Bayliss motioned him to a chair and began to pour tea for him. “No tea, thank you.”

  He remained standing, looking with a sinking heart from the gentle face of Dorothy’s mother, clearly troubled, to Allan Bayliss who had known his father well and Seymour all his life. Dorothy had bent her head, a mild, resigned gesture which hurt him with a prescient pang. He could see only the top of her head, the crisp light brown curls shining in the firelight. Seymour thought for a distracted moment how he should love to touch her, to put one hand under her chin and raise her face so that he could see it again. But this was no moment for such dreaming, and he waited only long enough to sense that the answer to the question he had come to ask could be had only from Dorothy’s father, or by way of his permission.

  “I hadn’t expected to see you, sir,” he said, “but perhaps it’s just as well. I wanted to ask if I might speak to Dorothy.”

  Allan Bayliss looked at his wife and then at Seymour, with an expression which was at once stern and full of regretful affection.

  “I’m not surprised, Seymour. I know, I understand why you are here.” He looked at Dorothy for a moment, sitting with her hands twisted round her fine handkerchief. “Don’t you think, dear, it would be better if you and Mother go and leave Seymour and me here by ourselves?”

  She started to rise from her chair; then she sat up straight and Seymour’s eyes smarted as she said, her lovely soft voice dark with forced courage, “Seymour asked to speak to me, Father. I can—I will—” She choked. Her mother reached over and grasped the girl’s hand and Seymour swallowed and said, “Dorothy, I’m awfully grateful but I think your father is right. Please go.”

  “Won’t you sit down, Seymour?” asked Allan Bayliss when the door was closed. “Do you smoke, have you a pipe?”

  “No thanks, sir.” Seymour smiled lamely. “I’ve never smoked.” But he sat down slowly in the chair facing Dorothy’s father.

  “I—this had to come, of course,” said Mr. Bayliss. “But I wish I could spare you, my boy. And the worst of it is I’ve got to ask for your understanding with every word I say.”

  “I don’t think it will be very difficult to understand, sir,” said Seymour. In a streak of awareness as if a closed door had been flung open, he sensed what was coming.

  “You have courage,” said Bayliss. “You have many other qualities that I admire and—let’s be completely frank here—that Dorothy would find it natural to love. You are both very young, but not too young to fall in love.” He pulled thoughtfully on his pipe for a moment. Then he laid it on the table beside him and leaned forward and said, gently shaking his head, “That’s what I’ve told Dorothy absolutely must not happen.”

  “But—but—I-we—” Seymour was trying to find a way to tell his feelings in a word of truth.

  “Not yet,” said Bayliss. “I saw exactly what was happening last summer. I was weighing then how I would feel if things took a serious turn. I talked to Dorothy after that evening, that night you brought her home. She told me everything that passed between you. There was no harm in that, none whatever.”

  “I’m glad you felt that way, sir.”

  Bayliss smiled sadly. “I did. I do. But the very next day I was forced to consider what Dorothy would be up against if I should let things take their course, let her see as much of you as you both would like.” He paused and gave Seymour a look of complete frankness. Seymour waited a moment and said, “You can imagine how I felt.”

  “I can imagine, indeed. Your grandmother did a shocking thing, a thing which reflected not only upon you, but upon my daughter. Naturally nobody at Hare Island or any friends of ours could misunderstand. Unfortunately we all know her too well. And that’s the crux of the matter, Seymour.”

  Seymour sat silent, wretched and not confronted with anything that he had not really known before. Bayliss did not speak for some time. Then he said slowly, “Of course there was always the chance that you would both outgrow a first love, people do, you know. But then there was the chance that you wouldn’t.”

  “I really—well, sir, I never thought all the way into the future. I have to go through college, get to work—”

  “Of course you do. And no man really wants to see his daughter tied up in a long-standing promise like that. But that is not my objection, Seymour, you should be perfectly clear about it. The objection is your grandmother. So long as that woman is alive, I will not let my girl have any chance to—to become attached to you. Nothing. No meetings with you at all, except on the most distant possible basis.” He leaned forward in his chair, ready to exchange any glance, however painful, with Seymour; but Seymour was sitting with his head between his hands, staring at the floor. Bayliss felt wracked with regret and pity. Seymour said slowly, “My grandmother is over eighty years old.”

  “I know that, my boy. I follow you. But even after she is dead, I would still want time. Time to see what your upbringing has made of you, to put it frankly. Your father was a friend of mine, you know, he was only six years older than I. I have seen your grandmother’s handiwork ever since I can remember—and I am not going to let my girl risk her whole life in such a danger.” He paused and Seymour looked up slowly and saw that he was weighing something else; then he said thoughtfully, “I remember Lily Randall, too, when she married your father. I was at their wedding. She was—she was rather like Dorothy.”

  Seymour put his head between his hands again. Bayliss closed his mouth hard and blew his nose. A man would be, he thought, a stone not to be wrung literally to tears by this boy’s plight. For Seymour it was dark; he sat with his eyes closed, his teeth clenched, and a hollow probing pain somewhere, anywhere, everywhere inside him. For the first time in his life he saw himself not as of the moment, not as of the years of childhood past, but as of the future; and his future seemed now a fearful and impenetrable space of endless darkness. Had he been deluding himself that by seizing the initiative, defying the old woman, stubbornly taking the first steps towards independence, he could hope to escape a fate which this kindly and admirable man clearly feared for him? Why, Seymour asked himself in silence; why is this so? Can I not begin to live even when she is dead? No matter how I try? And Bayliss’s memory of his mother, a girl who resembled Dorothy, something which had never occurred to Seymour, rose now to invoke a whole new train of anxious thoughts about his mother, vague and frightened and silly and helpless. Where was this to lead him? What could he see but sorrow and emptiness and grief? He raised his head slowly, unashamed of his wet eyes and unafraid of Allan Bayliss, who in dealing
him an extreme hurt had shown him more kindness than he had ever in all his life known.

  “So there is really no hope for me at all?” asked Seymour, struggling to hold his voice level.

  “How can I see into the future, my boy? I only know that I care more for my daughter and her happiness than anything in this world. I am trying to do the right thing, and it isn’t—it hasn’t been, easy. Nor for Dorothy either.” He saw Seymour bite his pale lips. “She is a good girl and not a silly one. It is very seldom a girl will let herself be advised before it is too late.”

  “You are right,” said Seymour. Bayliss thought his voice imposing in its control.

  “I am very deeply impressed by you,” said Bayliss slowly. “You have been more than manly about this. I cannot tell you how much I regret what I have had to do. I wish I could retract somehow—but my dear boy, I can’t.”

  “I understand.”

  “That’s what I told Dorothy. That’s what I said she ought to count on when I advised her to write you that note.”

  “Note?” asked Seymour. “Dorothy wrote to me, Mr. Bayliss?”

  “Why, yes.” They stared at one another. “A week ago, I should think, when the invitations to her party were mailed.” Seymour was gripping the arms of his chair. Bayliss saw his white knuckles. “We had to talk about this then, of course. It had to be made clear once and for all. I believed it would be easier for you not to be asked to the ball, and I told Dorothy it would be better and more honest if she should write and explain. Once for all,” he said again.

  “So—so—” Seymour was almost choking. “So naturally she didn’t expect to see me yesterday.” He rose quickly to his feet. Bayliss rose also. They stood for a moment on the hearth, exchanging a look of grave and appalled understanding. “You see what happened, sir,” said Seymour. He put out his hand. “I’m afraid it only proves how right you are.”

  Bayliss wrung his hand. Seymour said, “Good bye, sir. I can’t stay any longer.”

  Bayliss gripped his hand hard again, and when Seymour had left the room, shook his head slowly and stood staring sadly at the fire.

  Seymour rang the doorbell at home with a long, angry peal. He had no latchkey, and when the new maid opened the door—the staff had been entirely changed when they returned from Hare Island—he strode past her without a word. He went straight upstairs and flung open the door of the library without knocking. His grandmother was sitting as usual in her ugly red satin chair, which with the curtains drawn and the gas lighted for the evening, was turned from the bay window towards the fire. He had not been in this room since last year. He closed the door roughly behind him.

  “I want the note from Dorothy Bayliss that you intercepted,” he said, in a tone ringing with fury.

  “I burnt it,” said the old woman. She might have been telling him the time.

  “I expected that. I really came here to tell you I know what you have done. I told you last summer you are contemptible. If I had a worse word I’d use it now.”

  His grandmother laughed. Seymour’s ears buzzed with the sound, augmented by his anger. “Words,” she said, in her heavy, hatefully resonant voice. “Those are cheap and you make a fool of yourself spending them. You are a fool anyway.”

  “Yes. Ever to have let myself be bullied by you. That’s all over. From now on I’m going to do exactly as I choose.”

  “More words. Don’t waste them, Seymour. You are absolutely dependent and haven’t any choice.”

  “Oh yes I have. I can move out of here tonight and get a job somewhere.”

  “And your education?”

  “That would only be another thing you’d ruined, depriving me of that along with everything else.”

  “Oh, you ought to have your education.” He could not tell whether she meant to be sardonic or, in some inscrutable way, reasonable.

  “Then I’ll have it on my terms. I’d say I would go away to Boston, to the Massachusetts Institute, except I can’t leave my mother and Randall alone in the house with you. So you’ll pay for it here. You’ll give me a latchkey and an allowance, and if you refuse, I will move out and go to work instead.”

  “Leaving your idiot of a mother and that piano-thumping milksop here.”

  “Whatever they are, it’s your fault.”

  “They haven’t got the stuff you have,” said the old woman amazingly. Seymour knew now that if he had treated her in this way years ago he could have saved himself and the others untold misery. “You may amount to something if you don’t throw yourself away on some snip like that Bayliss girl.”

  “Be still! Don’t mention her name, you wicked old woman. You may as well know that the Baylisses like the rest of us are marking time until you die. If I don’t see Dorothy Bayliss meanwhile, that’s because you don’t know how decent people feel. And next summer at Hare Island—”

  His grandmother interrupted him with a rough “Bah! Hare Island. I’ve sold the Hare Island house and put the money in the irrevocable trusts where you can’t touch it.”

  Seymour stood with his mouth open, slowly grasping what she had said. Then he asked, wrinkling his forehead, “And my boat?”

  “Your boat? I told you you are a fool. A minor has no title to property.”

  “You monster!” Seymour’s voice broke out wildly. All the hurt and humiliation of this heartbreaking day came to a head in a scream of protest about his boat. For his real loss, for Dorothy, he could struggle to grieve like a man, in courage and silence. This was different. “You are the vilest person in the whole world. What harm did I do you with that boat? The only—” he paused and drew in his breath with a great gulp, fighting not to burst into a sob and give her the satisfaction of seeing him suffer. She sat staring coldly down her nose, as if nothing unusual were happening at all.

  “Oh, I want you to know how I hate you,” he said, when he could control his voice. “I want you to know all about it. All that I always knew, when I was a little tiny kid, about the way you treated Papa. And how you’ve made my mother suffer.”

  “That sniveling idiot,” said the old woman.

  Seymour’s fists closed and he stood over her in her chair and said, “You are a monster, I said so. What’s the matter with you? Why have you got this mania for wrecking people’s lives? Why is every good and decent feeling poisoned when you touch it? Everybody hates you. Everybody is afraid of you—only I’m not any more. Not me. Everything I ever felt for you is one big hate. I hate you and I want you to die. I hope you die. Why don’t you die?” he roared, leaning over her and shouting into her face. “Why don’t you die?”

  To his amazement, something happened to the face. One side of it went up, twisting and curling like a piece of lighted paper, right up into the frizzle of white hair round her narrow forehead; and the other side went down, dragged and going sidewise, into her jowl. Her eyes behind their spectacles moved off into two crazy unrelated stares. Then one eye slowly, foolishly closed in a kind of leer and the other remained wide open, glassy like the eye of a doll. A dribble of spittle drooled from the downward side of her twisted mouth. Seymour backed slowly away, observing with a shocked sense of no surprise at all her body twisted and crooked like her face, the hands and feet awry with everything high on the left side and dragged down on the right. She was making a gargling noise. Seymour stood up straight for a moment, watching her. Then he walked to the bell and rang it. When the maid came he said coldly, “My grandmother has had a stroke. Run and fetch Dr. Wharton.” He remembered that the maid was new. He called after her, “Dr. Prentice Wharton. Three houses west, on this side of the street.”

  Mrs. Holt died on Christmas Eve, leaving a will which was read to Seymour and Randall and their mother following the funeral the day after Christmas. In the most ingenious possible way, and to the utmost extent of the law, the old woman had tied up all the money, her own and her husband’s by means of which she had imprisoned her son John, in two trusts. Seymour was the eventual inheritor of the larger share, Randall of the le
sser. Seymour’s share was to remain in an irrevocable trust until he was forty years of age, Randall’s until he was forty-five. While they were minors the brothers would not receive any income directly, but only small allowances in amounts to be determined by their Trustees. At the age of twenty-one they would receive a stingy portion of their funds, but the rest was to be reinvested. A further portion would be paid them at the end of ten years, but still not all. Neither, until he was past forty, would ever be able to put his hands on enough money at a time to make such a capital purchase as a house or other piece of major property. Meanwhile the house here in Chelsea was incorporated into the two trusts on a basis which forbade its sale; and at this point Seymour exclaimed, “But that’s madness. The neighborhood is running down so fast, it changes week by week.”

  The lawyer who was reading the will gave Seymour a look which could be interpreted as an opinion that the whole will was madness, but he continued to read. Seymour’s Trustees were the bank and this lawyer and another legal figure, a retired judge who could be expected to be more inflexible than Mrs. Holt herself. But in Randall’s case the will held a surprise: after Seymour was twenty-one he was to become one of Randall’s Trustees, his power limited to determining questions relating to Randall’s education.

  The brothers stared at one another in astonishment.

  “Now what,” said Seymour, “do you suppose she meant by that?”

  “I don’t know,” said Randall, “but it’s a good thing for me.”

  Their mother said nothing. The will was of no concern to her. She sat in a corner of the room with her hands crossed in her lap, pale and effaced and paying little attention. In her high-necked black dress she looked homely and dowdy. Neither she nor the boys had manifested the least sorrow as a hypocritical concession to the indifferent, transient servants or the few old family connections who had called out of a sense of duty or convention. Lily and the boys were wearing mourning because it had not occurred to them not to do so. They would observe the conventional period of mourning retirement for the same reason. But Seymour had already said, “Will you tell me what we are retiring from? How can you withdraw from withdrawal? Nobody ever invited us anywhere.”