Book Review: My Brother's Keeper

Title: My Brother’s Keeper

Author: Marcia Davenport

Date: 1954

Publisher: Scribner

ISBN: none

Quote: “The place was a solid impacted block of massed paper and trash.”

This is a novel based on a news item: Two rich brothers inherited a mansion and, having never married, grew old and died in a hoard of old newspapers and junk, the first floor a maze of booby traps through which the healthier brother was able to get out. Both seemed sane—mostly—although one became physically disabled in old age.

Why why whyyy did they retreat from the woooorld, why ISOlate themselves, why turn their backs on HUMAAANity, people warbled...

Davenport spins a romance around the facts: Both brothers thought they were “in love” with one woman. Both were having sex with her. Neither was sure which one was the father of her son. They sent her and her son back to Italy and sent their money for the education of their child. They left him the house, but he was now rich and successful and didn’t want it. I don’t know the case well enough to have any idea whether there’s a fact in that part of the novel or not.

But these are the facts: People with physical disabilities were isolated from the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; at best, if their disabilities were relatively less frightening, they might be regarded as “shut-ins” who might be visited and read to, but there was no question of blind people or paraplegics going to work or school. But the able-bodied brother was not, in fact, isolated. He knew people in town, shopped, took care of business after his fashion.

He did a poor job of that. His wealth was inherited. In fact the brothers hadn’t had control of their money until they were middle-aged, but been looked after by trustees, so that when they did inherit their money they never thought of investing it, but continued to live in modest wealth on their monthly allowances. They never quite understood income tax, when that innovation came along, and didn’t pay it. Seeing that property taxes were paid were what the staff was for. All they’d really been trained to do was live within their allowances, and that the brothers did. They had had white-collar jobs, before one became disabled and the other stayed at home as his caretaker. They had studied a little engineering and architecture, but not had the sort of talent that makes people care a great deal about being able to work.

“But then, to die...alooooonne,” people ululated. No. The brothers did not die alone. They died together. They were old. I know of no patient who has ever seemed less dead, or even seemed to gain time, from being surrounded by a crowd of people rather than being at home with one or a few close relatives. Those who are about to be bereaved are well advised to provide themselves with witnesses. The dying, themselves, often seem happier without a crowd.

The brothers had inherited a full domestic staff, as rich families normally kept in the nineteenth century. They had dismissed their domestic employees, some for cause. Vindictive employees had harassed them at home.

The disabled brother had gone blind for no obvious reason. In the nineteenth century some people lost and later recovered their vision due to kidney diseases, and, not knowing how the kidneys could affect the eyes, they believed that “God” (or mental illness) had “taken away their sight,” mysteriously, and might be moved as mysteriously to give it back. The blind brother encouraged the sighted brother to save all the newspapers in the hope that one day he might be able to read them. Likewise he asked for toys, musical instruments, broken things he might be able to put together. But his blindness was not the temporary kind.

The brothers occupied their declining years booby-trapping the lower floor of the house, packing it almost solidly with newspapers that formed a maze. Between the second floor and the door one circuitous path led out. Other paths led to dead ends, or to places where stacks of newspapers and heavier things had been set up to crash down on an intruder, perhaps injuring or, even better, killing the sort of vermin who would harass a blind, crippled man in his own home. The construction and improvement of their booby traps occupied their old age.

Eventually, of course, the able-bodied brother stumbled into one of his own traps and was crushed. The blind brother then starved before people had time to notice that they hadn’t seen the able-bodied brother lately.

“But they were recluses! Hermits! They walled out peeeople...” No. They lost many of the people they knew best, as most older people have done. They socialized, while both were able-bodied. The able-bodied brother saw people every few days in town.

“But to...but they...”

It’s human nature: When someone dies, our brains start throwing off ideas about what we would have, could have, should have done. We think this way so easily that we can take examples from the deaths of public figures.

As a teenager I worked for Mitch Snyder’s Community for Creative Non-Violence, which worked very very hard at not being a personality cult and at staying together after its founder...Snyder was as charismatic a leader as I’ve ever seen. I didn’t have a crush on him; I might have had one if I’d worked or talked with him, but students almost never did; what supervision I got came from Carol Fennelly, and mostly students did donkey work anyway. Everyone at the C.C.N.-V. used kindergarten names, twelve-step-group style, but I didn’t know “Mitch” nearly as well as I did the people his age I called “Mr. Smith” or “Dr. Jones.” I did not, in fact, think Snyder was very bright, because he said so many things that were so easily refuted even if they were true in some way. (Many homeless people in Washington did have primarily or entirely financial problems. Snyder liked to talk as if Washington were typical, rather than exceptional.) I did not, in fact, stay with the C.C.N.-V. in the late 1980s; socialism was falling apart and all their left-wing ideas were wrong; I kept out of their way. Nevertheless when I heard a man on the Metro exclaim, “Mitch Snyder’s dead!” and grabbed a Post and read the story, that urge came over me. “Mitch,” I wanted to time-travel back and say, inexplicably hanging around after all the student labor had left, even less explicably bothering an older man in his room at night... “Mitch, you must have faith. The pressure you’re feeling, I’m feeling too. It comes from the air. We’re catching the edge of a hurricane. I hate that feeling too, and so does everyone in the city, but it’s going to break in less than twelve hours. You have to be strong for your people. Sing, brother! The storm is passing over, hallelujah!”

Meh. Basic little-kid fantasy. I did not seriously imagine there to be any reason why I might have been able to enact such a scene when Snyder’s housemates were not. Nevertheless I understand the primal irrational urge to think, “I could have warned him...I could have dissuaded her...” It’s a coping mechanism, of course, a defense against the horrible fact that we couldn’t. The Light Brigade would have charged into the valley of death, and President Kennedy would have gone to Dallas, and the Titanic would have been carrying more passengers than lifeboats, if we’d been there. People who ignore the warnings they’ve received aren’t likely to be persuaded by a stranger equipped with no advantage but hindsight; and if we’d been there on that day we wouldn’t have had hindsight. Far from saving the Titanic or its passengers we would, very likely, have been among the passengers who drowned in its wreck.

The bachelor brothers were old, but not too old to be responsible for themselves. Their house was their own; a mess, because they hadn’t been taught to clean it, but their own mess. Nobody living in the years between 1860 and 1950 could have said to them with certainty, “You will never see again, so you might as well burn those newspapers,” or, “You will blunder into your deadliest booby-trap.” Nobody had a right to predict those outcomes rather than nicer ones.

The emoting about their being “alooone” was also fuelled by a feeling that people who could afford to hire a domestic staff, had never lived in a house without one, had no business cutting off that source of benefit to the local economy. Davenport postulates that the brothers gave up having their house professionally cleaned because they were ashamed of having committed fornication with the same opera singer. There may be an autobiographical element in this fiction; Davenport’s mother was an opera singer, and yes, before musicians unionized most female and some male professionals had traditionally “paid their dues” by living in sin with wealthy patrons. In reality we know that Victorian society did shame working-class people who “fell in love” easily with rich patrons, and when there was any idea of evening the score it took the form of shaming the rich patrons.

There are other possibilities.

The hired help the brothers inherited could have been the people who abused them when they were little; some Victorian adults relied on servants to beat their children, it being an article of faith that children were improved by being beaten.

The staff might simply have been incompetent, or thieves.

Or the brothers might have been quite different than Davenport paints them. They might have been paranoid-schizophrenics with voices in their heads telling them to live the way they did, as some people like to imagine all nonconformists to be; that’s rare but it has happened.

They might have been simply mean old misers who knew the people around them either depended on their wages or hoped for benefits from their wealth, and didn’t want to share their wealth for that reason. Few people feel much empathy for the social handicap of being rich, but rich people certainly feel their burden.

They might have positively enjoyed being grown up, retired, free to dismiss the naggy domestics who told them things had to be done “the right way.”

They might have been just guys who liked doing their thing without having to think about it—thinking being, as male writers constantly tell us, such a chore for a guy—and so, although they saw the benefits of washing their hands and wiping up spilled food, they never thought about what happens to that portion of spilled food that sinks through and soaks into a rug. They got used to their house having an “evil” odor of mold and rats.

The nose gets accustomed to almost anything that the brain fails to recognize as a source of immediate danger. When Victorians coughed and sneezed, they didn’t think about mold or food allergies; they thought about “consumption” by tuberculosis, and, having no idea how that disease might be cured, they just prayed that it wouldn’t kill them right way and went on living with their allergies. They had all sorts of theories and superstitions about how to keep their colds and allergies from “turning into” tuberculosis. I used to know a late-Victorian clergyman who had been infamous for inspecting children at a school bus stop near his home, admonishing them “Don’t sniff! Blow!”, and mopping their noses with a pocket handkerchief. (He lived long enough to realize that his efforts to keep the children from “damaging their lungs” by coughing actually helped spread tuberculosis. God, he thought, had had mercy on him and the children; they lived long enough to be cured by antibiotics.) In fact, even in the 1980s I remember thinking of the distinctive smell of Stachybotrys atra as the way cellars smelled, just as Victorians whose shiny-new “water closets” emptied into sewers thought of raw sewage as the way drains smelled.

So the brothers lived until they died, at what was considered a ripe old age for their generation, and they became a legend people occasionally use in efforts to bully mature adults into compliance with evil agendas. “Anyone who’s alone in a big old house with a lot of personal paraphernalia is going to become a hoooarder, and die alooone, like those rich old people who diiied...”

Enough I say. Anyone who lives long enough is going to die and although nobody’s in any hurry to go, I for one would much rather die alone than die in a crowded nursing home. Very likely the characters in this book felt the same way.