“Well,” said Lily vaguely, “of course now they wouldn’t anyway.”
“They will,” said Seymour with a grim face. “As soon as this business is behind us.”
“Oh, darling,” said his mother in her wiry, plaintive voice. “You aren’t expecting to entertain?”
“Of course I am. Haven’t we had enough prison all our lives?”
“I don’t see—I wouldn’t know—” Lily’s hand fluttered to her lips.
“Oh, there’s plenty of time,” said Seymour. “First let’s get used to being ourselves.”
He found that the only provision for his mother was a direction by his grandmother to the Trustees to pay the bills for Lily Holt’s absolute necessities and a preposterously small annual sum for her clothes, out of the incomes of the trusts. The house was to be run on the same basis. Things were intended to be as nearly as possible what they had been in his grandmother’s lifetime. Seymour shut his jaw with a snap. “I’ll change all that,” he said to Randall, and when Randall asked how, he answered, “You wait and see.”
He intended to start at once with changes sharp enough to jolt his mother and Randall out of the routine of years, which they were continuing to follow sheerly from habit. He dismissed the servants and then asked his mother to engage a new staff. She turned pale and murmured, “Oh, dear. Please, I, why must I—”
“Mama,” he said, “I’m only asking you to do something in your own interest—and ours. We want people here who never had anything to do with Her. These last ones didn’t care a straw for us—none of them ever did. Would you in their places?”
“But Seymour, I don’t know how to find servants.”
“You simply go to an agency and tell them what you want and then sit there and talk to the people they’ve got. At least I suppose that’s the way it’s done.”
“Oh, dear,” said Lily.
“And when you do get a new cook,” added Seymour, “I wish you’d make sure there isn’t a way in the world she can find out what Grandmama’s meals used to be. No more Irish stew on Monday. No more pancakes or roast beef on Sunday. No more codfish on Friday. No more porridge for breakfast—ever again.”
“Hoo-ray!” called Randall from the stairs on his way down to practise.
But it proved one thing for Seymour to give orders and quite another for his mother to carry them out. She could not carry them out and her efforts to do so kept the house in a turmoil. For a long time Seymour was very patient. He did not need Randall’s rather timid advice to go slowly and give Mama a chance to get used to keeping house. He wanted to give her every chance and he made all sorts of suggestions which he thought would help her.
“Why don’t we do over the library?” he asked her. “Change everything around and fix it up so you can use it for a sitting-room. You’ve never had a corner of the house for your own except—”
“Oh, no!” cried Lily. “Not the library. I wouldn’t sit in that room for anything in the world!” She wrung her hands.
“But it would all be different,” said Seymour patiently. “That’s what I meant. Different curtains and chairs—we can shift the house all around. And get rid of those awful red satin armchairs,” he added, scowling. The things invoked the old woman at every glance.
“Not the library,” whined Lily. “Please.”
“Very well.” He controlled his irritation and his momentary impulse to snap at his mother. “Very well. I’ll use the room myself. I don’t see why I should study in my bedroom.”
At moments like this he could have added that he did not want to study or live in the house at all. Columbia was by no means the ideal place for the engineering he needed, and he would have gone away to Boston with eager relief. But it was out of the question to leave his mother and Randall going round in their tracks here by themselves.
For a time they were all satisfied with the sheer luxury of Mrs. Holt’s absence. They observed the first weeks of mourning with punctiliousness directly out of proportion to their real feelings; as Randall said, his blue eyes wide with ingenuous sincerity, “You know, we oughtn’t to feel so pleased and relieved. Everybody thinks we’re shut up here really mourning Grandmama.”
“Don’t you believe it,” said Seymour. ‘Everybody’ to him was personified by the Bayliss family. He was waiting only for the right moment, which instinct would mark, to go and call at the Bayliss’s and see how matters stood there now. “Everybody who knows us knows exactly how we feel. They’d be fools if they didn’t.”
He chose, finally, a Thursday afternoon the week after Lent began. The débutante parties would be over. Dorothy had had more than three months of such gaiety that even in his isolation Seymour knew she was ranked the prettiest and most popular debutante of the season. He had no reason to hope that he would be encouraged to see her, though surely he would not be forbidden now; every word of his talk with Allan Bayliss was as vivid as at the moment he had first heard it. He could be on probation for many reasons, but most of all because Mr. Bayliss would have to have time “to see what your upbringing has made of you.” The challenge seemed to Seymour tremendous but not hopeless. It was his redeeming chance and he was determined to make the most of it. By comparison the handicaps of his youth and the long prospective years of college and work seemed quite secondary.
He found Mrs. Bayliss alone in her drawing-room. This was as great a relief as Dorothy’s absence was a disappointment. Mrs. Bayliss greeted him cordially and asked for his mother, at the same time saying, “Dorothy is at the Sewing Circle this afternoon. All the girls, you know—”
Seymour wished he had known. But how should be remember that the Lenten Sewing Circle met on Thursday afternoons? He had forgotten it if he had ever heard it mentioned.
“How is Mr. Bayliss?” he asked. He felt awkward, if not a fool; he might as well have inquired outright for the measure of Mr. Bayliss’s feelings now.
“Quite well, thank you.”
Seymour drank his tea nervously, grateful that Mrs. Bayliss found small matters about which to chat. He could not have made a word of conversation when urgent feelings were pressing all sorts of unspoken questions which he could not bring out. Suddenly he found himself painfully afraid that Mrs. Bayliss would say something about Hare Island, or boats, or next summer; and then he realized for the first time that she and all the others must know what his grandmother had done. He struggled with a plunging wave of mortification, cruelly sharpened by his own stupidity in not having thought of this sooner. If he had, perhaps he would not have had the courage to call today. He took his leave as soon as he could, and was only faintly comforted when Mrs. Bayliss said kindly, “It was nice to see you, Seymour.”
“Please—please give my regards to Dorothy,” he said.
“Of course. And mine to your mother.” She smiled and he bowed and went away. It had been nearly completely unsatisfactory, but Seymour was still not sure of the real state of affairs. Sitting in the Twenty-third Street horse-car he stared out at the dirty, mired slush of late February, the carriages lined up at the entrances of the department-stores, the vans and drays with their great steaming horses, the hurrying crowds on the pavements. Everything and everybody in sight seemed to have more purpose and be more alive than he. He sighed as the horsecar crossed Ninth Avenue and slowly approached his own corner. He could not remember just when it had begun to happen, but only a few years ago, he thought; Chelsea was turning into a bleak and ugly district, its fine houses one by one degenerating into rooming-houses, its pavements unmended, its trees unreplaced when they died. Many of the neighbors among whom he had grown up had moved away to other parts of the city, eastward and uptown. And here he was, with Randall, condemned to live in the Chelsea house no matter what Chelsea was becoming, unless he or both of them should earn enough money to go away and make what they chose of their lives, leaving the old house to rot if that was what its fate must be.
He walked from Tenth Avenue round the corner and eastward on Twenty-fourth Street, for th
eir house was nearest the Tenth Avenue end of the block. As he approached the gate he was surprised to see a large van standing there, backed up with its doors open and two heavy planks running from the rear of the van to the street. The horses were stamping in the slush. Seymour peered into the van and found it empty; then he walked up the front path, eyeing the open door, and into the hallway of the house. An upright piano stood there, with four bluejacketed men around it and Randall and Lily discussing where it was to be put.
“What is this thing?” asked Seymour. “Where did this piano come from?”
“It’s from Hare Island,” said Randall. “Look.” He handed Seymour a piece of paper which, he said, had been brought by the man with the van. Seymour saw at a glance that the paper was a delivery order from Mrs. Holt’s executors, which made it clear that the only thing which had not been sold lock, stock, and barrel with the Hare Island house was this piano. Seymour stood and glared at it. Randall said, “It’s a pity. The piano’s no good, the dampness at the Island, you know, and—” He paused and looked at Seymour with a sudden grimace of emotion.
“I wish,” he said, and choked.
Seymour asked by a gesture what Randall meant, and Randall said miserably, “I wish it were your boat.”
“If ye please, mum,” said the van boss gruffly to Lily, “wull ye be tellin’ us where to put this pianney? We ain’t got all day.”
Lily said, “Oh,” and looked helplessly at Seymour.
“Put it down in the cellar,” he said roughly. “Down there.” He pointed to the door under the stairs. “Put it by the other one that’s down there.”
He had not formed the habit of imitating the profanity of some of the young men he knew, but now, stamping into the library and slamming the door behind him, he stood in the middle of the room and swore.
About a fortnight later he knocked on his mother’s door one day and after her faintly shrill “Come in!” he entered the room to find her nervously ruffling the pages of a blank-book. He could see that the pages were written in her vague, rather childish hand, and she closed the book with a little gasp as he came near enough possibly to see anything written in it.
“It’s my housekeeping notebook,” she said, a bit breathlessly. “Sit down, darling.”
Seymour stood for a moment eyeing the room and wondering quite where to sit down. This clutter, this thing of furniture piled with small objects and boxes, or strewn ribbons, bits of lace, hat-trimmings, and unfinished scraps of knitting, had become much more noticeable in the past year or two. Mama’s room had always been full of stuff like this, but it had been kept in a certain amount of order. Now it appeared as if the system, whatever it had been, had worn out and burst its seams.
Seymour pushed a pile of old photographs from one end of the divan and sat down.
“I’m glad you’re really doing the housekeeping,” he said with a smile. “It’s not so very bad, is it?”
“Oh, yes!” Lily’s mouth trembled, and she said, “I do try so hard to please you. That’s why I—” she patted the closed notebook on her knee. “I copy receipts out of the Ladies’ Journal and try to think of things to eat.”
“Well, isn’t the cook any help at that?”
Lily sighed. Then she said, “Oh, cooks are so cold blooded, Seymour. When I—sort of ask her—what it would be nice to have, she just stands there and says, ‘That’s for yerself to say, mum.’ It makes me feel—well, I think she’s laughing at me, Seymour.” Lily’s eyes filled with tears.
“Oh, nonsense. You’re just not used to her. We’re getting along fine. And I wish you’d do something for me, Mama.”
He looked at her with a smile, but she felt behind it something fixed and determined which made her realize beyond question that Seymour was no boy any longer, nothing at all like Randall who never showed this streak of hardness. Lily felt he never would; he was so gentle and so affectionate with her. She wished Seymour hadn’t said he wanted something and she was uncomfortable because he sat waiting there for her to ask what it was.
She said timidly, “Well?”
“I wish you would write a note to Mrs. Bayliss and invite her and Mr. Bayliss and Dorothy here for Sunday supper next week.”
Lily shrank down in her chair as if Seymour had said something to make her afraid. “Oh,” she said weakly, “please—please not.”
Seymour’s jaw looked as if he had set it hard. He said coldly, “Mama, this is silly of you. We can’t go on like this all the time.”
“But—but it’s too soon to entertain,” she said.
“This is not ‘entertaining.’ Sunday supper in the middle of Lent can hardly be called that. I told you I want you to ask the Baylisses here—and I do.”
To his annoyance, she began to cry. “I—can’t,” she sobbed. “It’s too soon. I—I mean—”
“You don’t mean anything that makes any sense to me.”
“I—I’m—” Lily gulped.
“You’re a little unused to it,” said Seymour, in the gentlest tone he could. “I know that. But Mama, really you ought to see—it’s not only that we have a right to be like other people—we’ve got all that lost time to make up for. And besides this makes a great difference to me.”
His mother stared at him and nodded her head slowly, while tears slid down her cheeks, but she said in her querulous voice, “I see, but just the same I can’t, Seymour. Not yet. I’m afraid.”
“But of what? Certainly not of old friends you’ve always known?”
“I don’t know,” she wailed. “Stop badgering me. I just don’t know. I’ll try later on, truly I will. Please give me time.” She put her hand on his arm and looked up at him. Her pale, puffy face with its red-rimmed eyes, her faded hair which straggled and no longer made those pretty curls above her forehead, her trembling lips and her nose which seemed to have lengthened to a different shape from the piquant short one of her early photographs, all went together into an unlovely blur which was part of this dim, cluttered room with its faintly musty odor and its aura of secrecy. “Please give me time,” she begged again. “Don’t make me do it now, Seymour, please. I can’t.” She put up her handkerchief to her face and sat there weeping. He stood up and said curtly, “Very well, then, we’ll have to wait awhile. But remember I asked you, and somehow or other you’ll have to get used to the idea. I mean it.” He went away.
On Easter Monday Mr. and Mrs. Bayliss announced the engagement of Dorothy to Paul Parsons, the elder son of the Dorsey Parsons of Washington Square and Hare Island. The wedding took place in June at Grace Church. The groom was a rich young banker, seven years older than the bride, and the match was thought most suitable. Seymour, enclosing his mother’s card with his own, sent a dozen salad plates from Tiffany’s.
CHAPTER 5
Professor Mundt from his shabby armchair looked over the tops of his half-spectacles and nodded his white head slowly. Randall had finished the Waldstein Sonata and sat tired, with his hands in his lap. Sometimes at these moments he bent his head in a certain way which touched the old Professor and gave him at the same time a sense of anxiety. There seemed a meekness about Randall, a lack of assurance as if in silent pleading for approval, which was not part of the personality of an artist. Yet he played very well. His technique was good, his musical taste sound so far as it was formed, his keyboard mastery more than satisfactory for a student of his age, especially, thought the Professor, for one with a meagre musical background. Professor Mundt had always said that while Randall had talent and the essential quality which the old man called echt Pianismus, he could only develop the stature of an artist by intensive study and life in Europe, preferably in Vienna since that had been the old man’s own birthplace and the Conservatorium his musical home. This idea had been so long taken for granted yet so vaguely suspended that to Seymour it had become a backdrop for Randall, undiscussed like the streaked purplish-striped moiré wallpaper in the drawing-room, about which something would one day have to be done. But his teacher knew that
Randall’s day had come now. The boy was nearly nineteen years old, there was no more time to waste.
“So,” said the Professor. “Es geht schon. I haf finished vit’ you.”
Randall looked up with surprise. “What do you mean, Professor?”
“Just vat I said. I haf done all I am goot for, you go no farder vit’ me. Now you go to Wien.”
“It hadn’t occurred to me just yet.” Randall spoke with hesitation.
“It should. Now you finish your school, finish vit’ nonsense, entweder you make now das Künstlerleben, oder—” The old hands went up in a gesture of finality. Randall rose slowly from the stool and stood in the bend of the piano with his hands in the pockets of his jacket. His teacher sat looking at him, unconsciously nodding a little at his own thoughts: it was a handsome lad, a beautiful one; look at that fine head with the golden curls, the wide blue eyes, the intelligent broad brow; the mouth and chin, however, a bit too soft? Too much of the mother there? Ach, the boy could grow a beard!
“How do I know I could get into the Conservatorium?” asked Randall. “Maybe I’m not good enough.”
“I haf prepared you for the examinations. I tell you you pass, you leaf such t’ings to decide by me. The journey undsoweiter decides your brother, nicht?”
“Well—yes. Of course my mother—”
My Brother's Keeper Page 11
