Seed on the Wind

II

Lewis Kane meant money to her. She sometimes idly wondered, without anxiety, what her life would have been like the past six years but for him. She couldn’t have gone on forever selling the jewelry Max Kadish had given her. That was funny about the life insurance; someone had diddled her, no doubt of that, probably Max’s mother and her lawyer. There was a curious thought for you: Max had meant money to her too, but how differently from Lewis! The money Max gave her wasn’t money, it was merely a handy tool, like the needle and thread she used to sew on his buttons. Whereas with Lewis — ha, that was different, Lewis was the tool himself, poor dear.

Pete Halliday had had no money. Long before. She had worked day after day, nine long hours a day. Nothing disastrous about that, nor even about his leaving; but shift the scene a bit, to another bed, another man, another day...

Her thought shied off, darted like a frightened hummingbird around the years, and searching for ease settled again on Lewis Kane.

Her first knowledge of him was lost somewhere in the distant past; she had seen him a dozen times, here and there, of no account, before that day six years ago when a telephone call had unexpectedly come from him to the flat on Seventy-first Street. He had given his name, so clearly and precisely that she understood it the first time, unexpected as it was, and without preamble had asked her to dine with him.

“No, I can’t do that.”

“You mean you don’t care to.”

“No, really I can’t. I never go out to dinner. I have three children to put to bed.”

“But surely there is a maid...”

“Can’t afford one. I never leave them alone except to go to the pawnshop.”

To either the pathos or the humor there might be in that he gave no pause. He said at once:

“I could find a woman somewhere, a trustworthy woman...”

“No, really I’d rather not.”

A week later he phoned again. In the meantime she had remembered things about him, his calm sensible face, his wealth, his air of assured propriety, and she had given some thought to the probabilities and her present situation. She was not bored, she was far from unhappy, but something was stirring within her. The practical difficulty with which she had put him off did not as a matter of fact exist; she had friends, especially she had Leah, Max’s sister. Indeed, she had too much of Leah, who was orthodox, very short and fat, and talked constantly and disconsolately of her dead brother.

Yes, something was stirring within her. Unhappy or not, she wanted something she didn’t have; that was as definite as she could make it. In Central Park of an afternoon, with Helen (not yet Panther) and the infant Morris both asleep in the carriage, and Roy dodging in and out among the moving trees that were pedestrians’ legs, she would wonder idly which of the passersby were free, entirely free, of the unrest of desire. It would be simple enough, she told herself, if you knew exactly what it was. Say she wanted a new dress, or a home in the country, or a husband. How simple! How simple, probably, no matter what it was. She could think of no object that appeared to be beyond the scope of her powers, nor could she think of any that seemed to be worth their exertion. Did she want — she shifted about on the park bench, she looked in her purse to see if her keys were there, she called Roy to her and straightened his cap and pulled up his stockings — but at length, ignoring the interruptions, the thought completed itself: did she want another baby? Involuntarily she pressed her legs together, tight, and closed her eyes; then opened them again, and watched her hand carefully smoothing out the folds of her soft dark red skirt. Suddenly she smiled. Hardly. Hardly! Three were enough. Indeed, with those three she would soon be wanting something much more modest than a country home, unless something happened. A husband, perhaps. That was not as unthinkable as you might expect, but she would rather not. The perfect husband. Not any.

No. No more babies, thank you.

When Leah came, as usual, in the late afternoon of the day after the second phone call, and Lora asked her if she would stay with the children the following evening, she did not look up, and remained silent, bending over Morris’s crib with her back turned. There must have been something in the tone of the question that startled her. Finally, still without turning, she said with quiet fury:

“You’re going to do it again.”

Lora, setting the table for two, paused with the knives and forks in her hand.

“Do it?”

“Yes, you are.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes you do. Tomorrow night you’re not going to any movies with your friends. I won’t come. I won’t ever come again, and God will punish you.”

“I never said I was,” Lora protested. “I’m going to eat dinner properly with a middle-aged man.”

“God will punish you. I told Maxie a hundred times there was a devil in your womb. I told him a hundred times.”

Still she did not turn, and Lora, crossing over and standing behind her, leaned down and put her hands on the other’s fat shoulders and patted them gently. “I know,” she said. “Max told me; he shouldn’t have made fun of you. I don’t mind — perhaps I can get Anne to come.”

At this Leah straightened up, glared at her, and shouted, “If you ask that woman to tend Maxie’s baby I will never come here once more!”

“Well... if you won’t...”

“Don’t be a fool,” said Leah, and bent over the crib again.

The first dinner with Lewis Kane was dull, undistinguished, and interminable. It also appeared to be purposeless. Tall, correct, smoothly strong, a little short of fifty, with a firm discreet mouth and steady grey eyes, he sat and ordered an excellent dinner and with obvious difficulty hunted for something to talk about. Lora, amused, refused to help him. He didn’t matter anyway; she was being admirably warmed by her own fire. There was the mirror on the restaurant wall not ten feet away; and the green dress, though nearly a year old — Max had given it to her soon after Morris was born — was more becoming than ever. Any observer, on a guess, would have subtracted at least three or four years from her twenty-eight, and wouldn’t have guessed the children at all. The mirror showed the fine brown hair, almost red, red in the glancing light, the smooth white skin stretched delicately tight and sure over the cheek’s faint curve and the chin’s rounded promontory, and even the amber threads and dots in the brightness of the large grey eyes. The mirror showed this to her; as for Lewis, he had long ago said correctly, “You are more charming than ever,” and then, to outward appearance, had forgotten all about it. It puzzled her. What did he want? There was no gleam in his eyes, no invitation in his words; he sat and demolished a supreme of guinea hen calmly, leaving a clean bone and no fragments. The observer, invited to guess again, might have hazarded a lawyer with a not too important client or an uncle with a familiar niece, all talked out. After the dessert there were a couple of cigarettes, then an uneventful ride, soft and warm among the cushions of his big town car, back to Seventy-first Street, where he left her at the door.

The puzzle continued for weeks. His invitations became more frequent, always to the same little restaurant not far from Madison Square, and the dinners remained innocuous, never a theatre afterward, always the pleasant digestive ride uptown and the parting at the door. Once or twice he arranged to come early and they drove through the park or along the river for an hour or so with the windows open to the March breezes, he with the collar of his black overcoat buttoned tightly around his scarf, she with her throat open to the swift chill gusts. “He means something deep,” she thought, “or he’d take me to a show or something. Probably he’s going to offer me a job in his office as a filing-clerk; it’s just his thoroughness. Anyway, the dinners are good and Leah loves being left alone with the children.”

He talked correctly and unexcitingly of books, of dogs (Doberman pinschers particularly), of the superiority of Turkish cigarettes, of corruption in politics, of food and music and pictures and English tailors; never of himself or of her. But one evening late in April, as soon as they were seated at their usual corner table and the order had been given, he said suddenly, without warning, without any change of expression:

“You know I’m married.”

Ha, she thought, this is the big moment, he is going to ask me to go to the flea circus. She nodded, laid her gloves on the table, folded her hands under her chin, and watched his face.

“I was married in nineteen-three, twenty years ago,” he went on. “I was twenty-seven, she was a year younger. We have two children: George, sixteen, and Julia, fourteen. They are charming. Two years ago I discovered that I am not their father. Their father is a baritone who sings in a church, and I believe he now also has engagements on the radio.”

He stopped to lean back from the waiter’s arm with the soup, arranged the dish precisely in front of himself, with its edge exactly even with the edge of the table, and picked up his spoon. Lora, saying nothing, poised her own spoon ready for the plunge.

“You probably think I am leading up to a complaint against my wife,” he resumed. “Not at all. Macaulay was wrong when he assailed the common judgment that Charles was an excellent man though an execrable king. Mrs. Kane is an excellent woman, an excellent wife, an excellent mother, but an execrable moralist. She thinks well of her generosity in permitting me to believe that I am the father of two charming and intelligent children.”

He took another spoonful of soup and broke off a piece of bread; Lora, for punctuation, observed:

“She doesn’t know that you know.”

“No.”

“Maybe you don’t.”

“Oh, yes, perfectly. I have the most exact proof; if I had not been blind I should have known long ago. Next month it will be two years since I found out.”

“Well,” said Lora, “maybe it isn’t so bad. And maybe your proof isn’t as perfect as you think it is. It’s a rather hard thing to prove sometimes, there’s only one way really, and since she thinks you have no suspicion...”

That was putting it delicately, she thought; Pete would probably have said, you never know what you’re getting when you eat hash. But Lewis Kane wasn’t listening; he looked at her in silence a moment and then said:

“I want to be a father, Miss Winter.”

In order not to laugh she bent her head and took a spoon of soup. Ingenuous, direct, the words pleading but all the heart’s yearning crushed precisely to the last drop out of the dull even tone, he went on, “I want to have a son. My wife’s daughter, Julia, was named after my mother. I want to have a son and name him Julian.”

“Well... that should be possible.”

“Yes. You’ve been very patient with me, Miss Winter. No doubt you’ve been dreadfully bored these past two months; I couldn’t help it; I had to make sure you were the sort of person I could trust. You have behaved admirably.”

“I? I’ve eaten your excellent dinners.”

He waved that aside. “I have found nothing that is not extremely creditable. Your conduct since Kadish’s death — I knew him, you know — your general manner of living, your care of your children — by the way, what about Albert Scher? Do you see Scher often?”

This is delightful, thought Lora. What a man! What an incredible man! There was no telling; it might easily prove in the end that all he wanted was a wet nurse or a midwife. She was silent while the waiter removed the soup plates and replaced them with others, but Lewis Kane, not waiting, went on with a faint note of something like apology:

“I’ve missed out on Scher. My reports are very vague about him.”

She suddenly remembered something, and looked at him aghast.

“That man in the brown suit who keeps walking up and down in the park!”

“Perhaps. Does he always wear a brown suit?”

“Great heavens!” said Lora, and began to laugh.

“When I want to find out anything,” said Lewis Kane, “I take the most direct and efficient means at hand. I’m glad you aren’t annoyed.”

“Oh, I’m flattered! Terribly flattered! It would have been so amusing to know he was a detective. — But he seems to have fallen down on Albert. That wasn’t very efficient, was it?”

He frowned and regarded her silently. “Bah, Scher doesn’t matter,” he said finally. “It is apparent, I think, that you are no longer interested in him. But one evening in February, the eleventh, I believe, he went to your apartment and remained till after midnight. I wonder — I would appreciate it if you would tell me what he was there for. Obviously I am not suspicious, or I wouldn’t ask you.”

Lora, almost annoyed, decided to go on with it. “I really am glad you’re not suspicious, Mr. Kane,” she said gravely; and then stopped suddenly at sight of something in the steady grey eyes that was incredibly like a gleam of humor — a swift infinitesimal flash, not believable, like a single distant firefly in a grey evening dusk.

“You think I’m making a fool of myself,” he said. “Not at all. I’ve arrived at a very important decision. I’m attempting to provide every possible safeguard. I’m perfectly satisfied on every point but one. I must ask you again, what is the purpose of Albert Scher’s visits to your apartment?”

She smiled. “Really it’s none of your business, is it?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“Really—”

“Yes. I think it is. Of course, Miss Winter, you are far too intelligent not to know what I’m driving at. Perhaps I’m not going about it properly; with women I have always been — somewhat — at a loss. Certainly it is obvious that what I wish to propose is that you should be the mother of my son. Six months after I learned that I was not George’s father — by the way, he was named after his real paternal grandfather, which was an unnecessary impertinence — I decided that I should have a son. It took me six months more, of careful consideration and elimination, to decide on you, tentatively at least. I was just about ready to consult you when Kadish died, an unexpected complication. In a way I wasn’t sorry, since the delay made possible a more complete inquiry. I waited a year, a full year, surely all that any standard of decency might require.”

That was that, apparently, for he picked up his knife and fork, parted a chop neatly from its bone, cut a triangular morsel from one corner, and conveyed it to his mouth; following it, after a moment, with bread and butter and two swallows of milk. Lora, fascinated, wondered how many days, weeks even, had passed since he had determined to have lamb chops for dinner on this particular Thursday evening. She decided she must say something.

“In the first place, Mr. Kane, I won’t pretend to resent your insult to my womanhood.”

“Yes. Of course. It isn’t necessary.” The second bite of chop went in.

“But to speak of nothing else, the practical difficulties — for instance, it would be hardly possible to guarantee a son—”

“I told you I am not making a fool of myself, Miss Winter.”

“And do you really mean — would you really have made this proposal to me while Max was alive?”

“I am making it to you today, and Scher and Stephen Adams are alive.”

She caught her breath. “That’s rude, and malicious. What do you know of Stephen Adams? How do you even know he’s alive? I don’t. — Besides, it’s illogical.”

“It is,” he admitted. “The analogy is imperfect. But it was plausible to suppose that Kadish’s fate would resemble that of his predecessors. I was willing to wait.”

“I see. Six months to decide on a son, six more to pick out a mother, and a year to investigate her. These last two months — these dinners — I suppose their purpose was to make me fall in love with you? You were making love to me?”

“Good heavens, no!” His fork wavered in the air, was replaced on the table, then composedly he picked it up again, and resumed, “I selected you for a dozen reasons. You are healthy, and your children are healthy. Your education is sufficient. Your tastes are sound and not extravagant. You are young and handsome. There is no sentimental nonsense in your head. You have lived with three men, been faithful to each, and devoted to none. You never go to church. As for the past two months, there are certain personal inclinations that are discoverable only by intimate and frequent observation. Table manners. Cleanliness. Nervous habits — little nervous habits that escape the ordinary observer. If I thought I could make you love me I might try, though for my present purpose it would probably be inadvisable. My wife has told the father of her children — the letters have been destroyed, but I preserve them in code — that if I were left alone in the world with a million women the race would perish. She is a wit. You must understand one thing, the arrangement between us will be one of complete mutual trust. I do my investigating before, not after. I shall not annoy you. Your income, an adequate one, will begin at once. The details are here.”

Lora, overwhelmed, took the blue folded paper which he drew from his pocket and handed to her; it consisted of four closely typewritten sheets; opening it at random, she saw near the middle of the third page:

She refolded the paper and handed it back to him. Of course, a joke. No, actually, it wasn’t. She felt she must laugh, but she knew it was impossible. Poor man. She could laugh later. Somewhere behind the elaborate ridiculous façade, beneath the thick crust of efficient calculations and crisp phrases, even between the lines of the preposterous typewritten sheets, his harassed soul was squealing and trying to wriggle out of its trap. She could laugh later.

“So you haven’t been making love to me,” she said.

“No.”

“Of course I’m flattered by your list of my virtues. But a little skeptical. It’s too much to expect, even of myself. And I would die of anxiety for fear it might be a girl.”

“Even there your record is good. Two to one”

“True,” she smiled. “But no. I won’t crowd my luck.”

“There’s no hurry. Here.” He placed the paper back on the table beside her plate. “Take that home and read it. Take all the time you want. My mind’s set on this, but there’s no hurry. Let’s talk of something else. Did you see those pictures I spoke of — the moderns at Knoedler’s? If you like the one next to the end on the right as you go in, the red and blue things on a raft or something in the ocean, you can have it.”

He turned and called to the waiter, who hurried over.

“Take these away and bring the salad.”