“Chicago Avenue police station,” he said to the driver, and he was in ahead of me. “They took her there,” he told me, “from where they found her—on West Division Street near the river.”
He had no doubt whatever that she was Dorothy Crewe—his Dot whom he had loved; and, for what had come to her, he was holding himself guilty.
“Steve, she thought she was going with me!” he cried out. “It was my Keeban! There is a Keeban, you see; my Keeban took her away and killed her!”
I jerked in spite of myself. You, of course, cannot understand why without this word of explanation. Jerry and I, as most of our acquaintances know—and the Chicago papers, in their occasional discussions of the Fanneals, always veiledly refer to the fact—are not blood brothers. It is a perfectly evident fact to any one who has seen both of us; for I am the Fanneal type,—tall and with big bones, strong and spare in flesh but slow moving; my features are Rhode Island Yankee transplanted to Illinois, regular enough but too angular; too much nose, a bit too much chin, also. My hair is sandy brown; my eyes blue. Jerry’s eyes are blue but mine have no quality of the living color of his; when I set the word down, it suggests that our eyes, at least, are alike, whereas we are nowhere more different. Mine are merchants’ eyes, come down from ten recorded generations of cautious traders; Jerry’s are—who knows? Jerry’s long, graceful body is not so strong but twice as quick as mine; Jerry’s clear, dark skin and his soft, black hair on his daredevil head; his small-boned but strong hands; the laugh and the lilt of him and his élan are—French, perhaps? Or Spanish, or Italian? All three together or none, but some other marvellous blend of energetic, passionate people? No one can say, least of all, Jerry himself. For one day, when I was about two years old and my nurse had me playing carefully by myself in a selected and remote spot in Lincoln Park, Jerry appeared under the trees and ran across the grass to play with me. Of course my nurse immediately jumped to protect me from contamination from a dark stranger, though it is remembered that he was clean and nicely clothed; she tried to send him away and, when he wouldn’t go but eluded her and hugged me—and I hugged him—she parted us and tried to take him back to his mother. But she couldn’t find his mother or any one else who claimed him; she couldn’t find even a policeman. (Obviously I had no memory of my own about this but was told it long afterwards.) Then my mother was driven by that way and found Jerry and me together.
It seemed that mother considered my nurse to blame for Jerry becoming detached from his own party; my mother always fixed blame for occurrences; also, she always felt responsibility. She felt that now for Jerry and took him in her carriage and brought him home where she kept him isolated in a guest room while she had the police notified and advertisements put in the papers. She said she would persist in efforts to return Jerry to his parents until she got results; the authorities—she thought—were too careless about such matters and too soon gave up, and merely sent a child to an institution. Accordingly, Jerry remained at our house; and then, when my mother’s efforts brought no result, she still kept him. A child’s specialist examined him and found him reassuringly sound, with excellent development, no ascertainable defects or hereditary taints, all senses acute, and decidedly “bright.” Apparently, he was about two years old; “of European parentage” was as far as the doctor would commit himself.
“French,” my mother decided. “He says his name is ‘Jerry.’ I don’t think that it is his name; it probably represents ‘mon cheri.’”
“Spanish,” my father always said, for no reason, I believe, other than he thought my mother was too positive and also he particularly liked the Spanish. They couldn’t help liking Jerry, who knew, besides his name, only the usual hundred or so ordinary words which a child picks up first; English words, they were, at first spoken with a marked French accent, my mother said.
So they let Jerry and me play together; I was an only child. A companion, therefore, was “good for me”; and we have been together ever since. I cannot remember a time when there was not Jerry; he cannot consciously recall any home previous to ours or any one previous to us,—besides the nameless “mama” and “papa” whom he asked for, at first, and “Keeban.”
Keeban, apparently, was another child; a brother or sister; or perhaps only a playmate. Jerry could not describe him, of course; he could only go about looking for and asking for Keeban. Naturally, as time went on, my mother and father replaced Jerry’s own nameless mama and papa; but I never replaced Keeban; and Jerry never forgot him. As we became older, Jerry’s idea of Keeban became at the same time more imaginary and more definite; for Keeban changed from some one for whom Jerry searched to some one always with us,—an imaginary companion, a third to us two, interesting, always up to something and most convenient to accuse when we were caught in heinous wrong.
I can remember, when we were about seven, asking Jerry what Keeban was like. I did not consider that Keeban represented a real person; he was, to me, merely one of Jerry’s interesting imaginations.