Seed on the Wind

III

Leah, her bulging form tightly encased in a shiny pink silk dress, the integrity of its seams a desperate tribute to the stubborn heroism of thread, sat in a straight-backed chair by the dining-room window looking vaguely down into the summer lethargy of Seventy-first Street. Suddenly, for the twentieth time within an hour, imagining she heard a noise from the next room, she went to the door and softly opened it, fastened her black Asiatic eyes on Morris sound asleep in his crib, closed the door again and returned to her chair. She was furiously angry. On Sunday afternoons she was permitted — “permitted, my God” — to take the baby, alone, into the park. Outside was July sunshine and a pleasant breeze, not at all hot; and merely because that fool of a doctor didn’t like the baby’s breathing here she was, helpless, sitting in a chair listening to that stupid man with yellow hair talking to that little baby girl — well — he was a bigger fool than the doctor. There was nothing wrong with Morris anyway; tomorrow she would come back and take him out into the sun, and let them try to stop her!

“Here’s another one with a donkey,” the man with yellow hair was saying. “Look, Helen. See the way his tail hangs down. See the lines of the branches on the cypress trees, they hang down the same way. That’s pretty nice. Don’t you think that’s a nice one?”

He was seated across the room near the large table, with Helen on his knee and a portfolio of lithographs propped up so she could see. Five-year-old Roy, silent and looking a little bored, stood at his other side.

“What do the words say?” demanded the girl.

The man frowned. “There aren’t any. Look, can’t you see? There aren’t any words. Pictures are one thing, and words are another thing; I’ve told you that a hundred times. I suppose you’d better say it yourself, repeat it... No, that won’t do, that won’t do, don’t say it. You must feel it. You must feel it. See, here are these lovely trees and this lovely donkey, all these lovely lines — what do you want with words?”

The little girl’s face, with its features, soft and delicate as they were, yet bearing an unmistakable resemblance to his own, was tilted mischievously upwards, full upon him. She liked this familiar game they were playing. She glanced across the room to where Leah sat silently fuming, then placed her finger on her lips and said softly, “She shows me nice pictures in the paper with words all over.”

“Damn!” exploded the man, half turning, so that the portfolio nearly tumbled to the floor.

There came a laugh from the other side of the table, from Lora, who was passing through on her way from the kitchen to her bedroom.

“Still at it?” Lora observed. “You know perfectly well it’s no use, Albert. You can’t train a child in two hours a month. Anyway, she thinks you’re playing a game.”

“It would work if you’d help me instead of laughing,” he grunted. “By god, it’s got to work.”

No use arguing, thought Lora, as she proceeded to the bedroom.

“By god by god,” put in Roy, helpfully.

“Oh, be quiet!” the man exclaimed. “Here, hold this end. Look, Helen, look here, see the panther? With the grass all around him? These pictures were made by a man in Africa — wait, get your geography, Roy — no, no matter, no matter — see the panther, Helen? Isn’t he lovely? Wouldn’t you like to be a panther and lie in the grass? That would be a good name for you — Panther. I’m sick of Helen anyway. I think we’ll have to call you Panther. Lora!” He raised his voice to carry to the bedroom. “Lora, we’re going to call Helen Panther! What do you think of that?”

He felt a hard grasp on his arm and turned to find Leah there, her black eyes flashing menace. “It don’t matter you think if you wake up a sick baby,” she spat. “You should care if Maxie’s baby dies.”

“Oh, I forgot. I’m sorry. Really.” He turned another page of the portfolio.

Roy was making faces at Helen and repeating over and over, “Panther, Panther, Panther...”

Leah shrugged her shoulders, tiptoed across, and silently opened the door into the room where Morris lay.

Lora, in her own room with the door shut, was lying on the bed, on her back, her eyes closed. She was tired, not painfully tired, but she needed to rest, and to get away from the people out there. It was amazing how complete an annoyance Albert Scher could be — mild enough, nothing desperate, but completely an annoyance; and as for Leah — oh, well, it didn’t matter. All that did matter was inside her, in her womb. She loved the word, though she never spoke it. Now she repeated it aloud to herself, “Womb, womb.” Heavens, what a word! No man ever thought of it, a woman did that. Within her own was a warm comfortable feeling, full and pleasant. That’s ridiculous, she thought, it’s too soon to feel that way. I just imagine it. She placed the palm of her hand flat on her abdomen, but the dress was too thick to feel properly, so she unhooked it at the side and pulled up the underwear and got her hand against the warm bare skin and rubbed it, gently back and forth, up and down, from right to left and back again, then let it lie there, still. Ridiculous, she thought, I just imagine it.

Yes, she was tired; she had been going since early morning. Doctor Hardy had been a nuisance, fussing around; that baby was perfectly all right, he breathed like a top. A top doesn’t breathe. All right, all right. If Leah loved him so much, why didn’t she wash out his diapers once in a while? But that was unfair; Leah was really a big help. Only there was that to be done, and feeding the others, and getting her own breakfast and lunch — squeezing ten oranges and straining the juice took half an hour. She would have to stop nursing the baby, that was too bad; anyway, it would take more time to attend to his bottles, and heat the milk, and mix that stuff in it... Leah was so tragic about everything, could she be trusted to do it right?

Even with Leah coming in nearly every afternoon, and the colored girl for three hours each morning except Sunday, there was too much to do. She wanted time to read a little, to get her stockings and dresses fixed up, to get a manicure and a shampoo with Nouveautone... Why then did she not accept Lewis Kane’s offer and let him furnish the money for a nurse and a full-time maid, the rent for a larger apartment, a car to go around in? She made a face at the ceiling. Damn his money. Damn every-body’s money. Not that she had any neat conviction of superiority to it, or any harassed spirit of personal independence against a world of threatening and malevolent impingements; she was merely irritated at its elusiveness. Apparently, she thought, there was no hole deep enough to give it, buried, the peace of security; those who had it seemed to be compelled to hold on with finger-muscles strained even more frantically than those who were still grabbing for it. She had had to grab for it too, but never with any great degree of violence; she had been lucky. “I’ve been lucky all right,” she said aloud to the ceiling. Then suddenly she shivered and closed her eyes, and her hand, still inside her clothing next to the skin, was pressed tight and tighter against her firm round belly. “I’ve been lucky about money,” she said.

Nevertheless Lewis’s offer must be accepted, soon. Soon it would be a necessity. And why not? Was she not carrying his son? Daughter? No. He was determined it should be a son. What if there should be five daughters one after another? Ten. Twenty. A thousand; an endless sequence of daughters, all in a row, the most recent an infant at the breast, the earliest a towering giantess with her head bumping the moon. Or even if it were just a thousand, that would be nine thousand months, nearly a thousand years — more than seven hundred anyway... Maybe some of the old Jewish women in the Bible actually did it...

She stirred, rolled over and sat up on the edge of the bed, and tossed back her head to get the reddish-brown hair out of her eyes. Then she lay down again, on her side with her cheek resting on her upturned palm.

Child of love. She smiled with good-humored contempt; that, she thought, was a masterpiece among the meaningless phrases men have devised regarding children born out of wedlock. Look at that, you had to use another one to tell what you were talking about!

The man who invented “child of love” should have seen Lewis Kane that night two months ago. Whether he had for some time maintained bachelor quarters separately from his home, or whether the apartment had been prepared especially for this occasion, she had not known. It had not looked new; the furniture, clean and comfortably worn, had a settled air not to be found in a transient atmosphere. Lent by a friend, perhaps, she had thought, though that didn’t seem like Lewis. They had driven straight there after a late dinner; Lewis, after sending the chauffeur off with the car, had carried her little bag to the elevator, and on the twelfth floor to the door at the far end of the wide hall. Inside, he had turned on the lights, hung his hat and stick in the foyer, carried her bag to the bedroom and placed it on a chair, and returning to the large sitting room had lit a cigarette for her and started one himself, though he usually preferred a cigar.

“There’s no one about,” he said. “I thought you would be more comfortable.”

She nodded her thanks. “You’re a much more thoughtful person than you pretend to be.”

He waved it aside. “It’s merely a matter of common sense.”

“And sensitive. You’re really quite sensitive.”

“I don’t know. I think not. At the present moment I am in a situation popularly supposed to be emotional. If I am sensitive why am I so calm about it? Not that you are not charming; very charming. Chiefly I am concerned about our purpose; it doesn’t matter what I feel or don’t feel so long as I don’t flunk it when it comes to the point. I confess that I have been restless all day, for these things are beyond our control. In that respect you are fortunate; you have no responsibility. Doubtless you have noticed my uneasiness?”

“I... really... I—” She gave it up and threw back her head and laughed, a little louder and longer than need be, for she was on edge herself, not embarrassed exactly, but shaky a little, even a little indignant. She thought, he’s really an ass, the only thing he has forgotten is a pamphlet on hygiene.

An hour later she was in the room in front, in bed, with the covers turned down expectantly on the other side. A lovely, disturbing sight: her hair, almost black in the dim light, in sharp contrast to the white skin and the flimsy white gown, brushed smooth and glistening, seemed to whisper an invitation to urgent ravishing fingers; her bare arm curved across the coverlet; her half-exposed breast, large with milk, was at once shameless and a denial of shame. She was looking up and sidewise at Lewis Kane, who stood beside the bed wearing tan silk pajamas with enormous purple stripes, the corner of a white handkerchief sticking out of the breast pocket. He was standing up straight, and she thought to herself that he looked big and powerful and quite determined. And rather silly. She wanted to laugh again, as she had laughed in the other room.

“Do you want a drink of water, Miss Winter?” he asked. “No? I drank two glasses; I always do. I suppose I’d better turn out the lights. Do you want them all out?”

She said yes, and watched him go to the wall and press the switch, and then heard him return, more slowly but without hesitation, through the darkness. He got into bed, pulled up the covers, and lay on his side facing her and began at once to talk.

“It sounds pretty awkward, that Miss Winter. I think I shall have to call you Lora. You might call me Lewis, I suppose. These things seem unimportant, but we live so much by words and formulas that I imagine their effect is considerable — like the recoil of a shotgun. By the way, my uneasiness is over, thank heaven. One of us is to be congratulated — gallantry would say you.”

Lora, embarrassed at last, lay on her back without replying, her eyes closed. Why should she help him? It was he who wanted a son. If he thought he could get one by talking... But suddenly she felt his hands firmly and surely grasping her shoulders, the pressure gradually increasing, and she let her eyelids open — the barest slit — and smiled.

She awoke because something heavy was on her chest and it was hard to breathe. Struggling painfully out of sleep, she gasped for air and with an effort pushed out her upper ribs against the weight that restricted them. What could it be? There was pain too, a real pain... then as sleep left, memory came and she sat up in bed and cupped her hands under her breasts. They seemed to weigh a ton. The milk, of course. She hadn’t intended to go to sleep at all. What time could it be? Lewis’s deep breathing came regularly from the other pillow. She got to the floor, groped around in the dark for her clothing, dropped a stocking and found it again, and made her way down the hall to the sitting room and turned on the light. A clock ticking on the mantel said a quarter-past two. She yawned, rubbed her eyes, and smiled at the neat pile of Lewis’s clothing at one end of the long narrow table.

Half an hour later she was seated in the dining room at home, with Leah, who obviously had not slept at all, standing and glaring at her, while the baby industriously tried to make up for lost time. Lora was smiling and thinking to herself, “Certainly he needn’t have been so uneasy. It’s all a fake, his not feeling anything. His wife gave him a scare, that’s all.” She never saw the apartment again. A week later, at dinner with Lewis, at the same inconspicuous little restaurant, he expressed his belief that another effort might not be necessary; and in another fortnight she was able to announce the probability that he was correct. “Splendid, splendid!” he exclaimed as he dished the broccoli. She wasn’t surprised, she explained, she was that way, she needed no more than a hint. Lewis went on to say that he supposed she was up on all the modern technique, he felt that he could safely leave all that to her, but did she have a good doctor? No, she admitted, as a matter of fact she didn’t, Doctor Hardy was competent but too fussy; whereupon he produced from his pocket a card containing a name and address and telephone number, saying that he had made careful inquiries and that no better was to be had.

It was on the afternoon that Albert Scher came to visit his daughter and gave her another lesson in the esthetic necessity of removing the art of line from all contact with literature, that Lora first noticed a look of suspicion in Leah’s sharp black eyes. Of course Leah was always chronically suspicious, but this look was specific and direct. Bah, Lora thought, Leah had from the first been annoyed by Albert’s visits, infrequent and exclusively paternal though they were, and on this day the annoyance was increased to the point of rage by the doctor’s insistence that Morris be kept in the house. Nevertheless, sooner or later Leah would know, and there would be the devil to pay. A good thing she wasn’t Italian instead of Jewish; give that stuttering passion of hers a few drops of blood from the toe of the boot and the problem would be serious. But, thought Lora, that could wait; there were other more pressing problems. Should she begin taking money from Lewis? Bah, he wouldn’t be the first, why not? Was this the way women who were married felt about it? But she was much too realistic to let herself be confused by that quibble, she knew that had nothing to do with it; married or unmarried, the question is at bottom purely personal, each case unique. It was because Lewis was so damned direct, “For one male baby,” he said in substance, “delivered in good condition, complete, I’ll pay a thousand weekly installments of two hundred dollars each. Here’s the contract; look me up in Bradstreet’s.” Like that he would buy a baby. Oh, no, he wouldn’t; not her baby, not the baby she already imagined she was beginning to feel. But there was the rub; he really was going to pay adequately, more than adequately according to the current market. What, in fact, would be a fair and reasonable price for an A Number One baby, guaranteed pure and unadulterated? One-tenth of one percent benzoate of— Oh, piffle! His money was no different from any other money; what’s the use, why make so much fuss?

She got up and crossed to the dressing-table and sat there brushing her hair; from the next room she could hear Albert’s rumbling bass, the leaves of the portfolio turning, and now and then an exclamation from Helen or Roy; no doubt Albert would say at a fresh discovery of the esthetic delight of the pure line.

The following day even Doctor Hardy admitted that Morris’s breathing was above suspicion, and when Leah came in the afternoon she was allowed to bundle him into the carriage and take him to the park. Lora, leaning from a window, watched them safely across Central Park West; you could never tell when Leah’s contempt for an alien civilization might explode into a calamitous disregard of the physical properties of a speeding taxicab.

The rest of July and most of August were hot. The sun blazed down from above, and New York’s pavements took the heat, mixed it with a thousand odors, increased it by some secret process to the temperature of a blast furnace, and hurled it up into the gasping faces of its citizens. Lora stuck it out. It was far from pleasant, what with the irritability of the children, a two weeks’ indisposition of Helen’s, Leah’s torrents of perspiration, and the morning nausea, but though Lewis suggested an Adirondack hilltop or a place at the seashore, Lora decided that it wasn’t worth the vast complication of the journey. She took off her clothes and lay on the floor somnolent in the heat, or went to the park with Helen and Roy and sat gasping on the grass while they tumbled around oblivious to thermometers. At home the new Swedish maid, paid out of the proceeds of Lewis’s first checks, was sweating over the vacuum cleaner or the washtub.

Lewis had not insisted on the seashore; he had suggested it, enumerated its advantages, and then quietly accepted her decision not to go. A few days later he had departed for Canada, headed for a little chateau in the Saguenay country where there was golf and trout-fishing, leaving behind him a card with the address typewritten on it and an invitation to wire him if any difficulty arose.

“Difficulty?” said Lora. “What difficulty could there be?”

“I don’t know. I’m quite ignorant,” he replied. “Don’t bother to write.”

So every few days she sent him a line or two to say that the union of chromosomes (this, long previously, from Albert) was proceeding without hindrance. There was no word from him, but each week an envelope came from his downtown office — Kane, Hildebrandt & Powers — containing a check neatly folded into a crisp blank letterhead. Surely less than impeccably discreet, she thought, but doubtless the intricate machinery of the legal factory of which he was the head somehow incorporated this weekly disbursement with an ambient indistinguishable vapor that would defy all analysis. The checks were generous and made many things possible. She bought Roy a velocipede and Helen a doll that walked three steps, and new clothing for all of them; she repaid Leah several hundred dollars which she had borrowed the preceding winter; she rescued from the pawnshop the necklace with platinum links and clasp which Max had given her the day after Morris was born; and one Sunday afternoon early in September she told Albert Scher, who was making his first paternal visit since July, that he need no longer bother about his monthly contribution to her household purse. Albert, seated on the floor trying to make Helen’s new doll go without falling over, looked up at her and blinked.

“What’s that, what’s that?” he demanded. Then he whistled in surprise and scrambled to his feet. “Let’s go into the bedroom,” he said; and then to Helen, “You try to make it go.” On his way past his foot clumsily knocked the doll on its head, but the child’s cries of protest went unregarded.

After she had righted the doll and followed him into the bedroom he closed the door and turned to her: “What’s up? What are you talking about?”

“What I said, that’s all,” she replied. “I won’t need any more money. There’s nothing mysterious about it.”

“I’m not being mysterious. There’s no occasion to discuss it in front of Panther.”

“But we don’t need to discuss it, and children know everything anyway. It doesn’t matter, that’s all there is to it.”

He stared at her, and blinked again. “Has anything happened? I don’t get it. Has Roy’s father turned out to be a bootlegger?”

Lora laughed. “Albert darling, listen. I’ll need no more of your hard-earned money. Isn’t that enough?”

“By god, you’re going to get married,” he exclaimed.

“No.”

“Of course it’s none of my business—”

“No,” she agreed.

“But you can’t do this. I mean, Panther is my daughter and I have a right to furnish her support — as well as I can. By the way, why won’t you call her Panther? Helen doesn’t mean anything; there are a million girls named Helen. Panther gives her individuality. A panther is itself a thing of beauty, of flowing living lines; the psychological effect should be tremendous. Think what your attitude toward yourself and art would be like if your name were Toad or Ichthyosaurus or Warthog. Gradually but inevitably you would come to hate all nature; you would be blind to everything but ugliness; you would probably even give up bathing—”

“You named her Helen.”

“Then I was wrong. Not that Helen is bad; it’s merely negative. But Panther! Don’t you feel it? Panther!”

“I have no objection; Panther it shall be,” agreed Lora. “Then it’s understood about the money.”

“By no means. I am her father and I should contribute to her support.”

“But it isn’t necessary. Honestly I don’t need it any more.” She put her hand on his shoulder and patted it. “You are a dear, Albert, but I don’t suppose the magazines pay any better than they ever did, and I know there are things you would like to have...”

He frowned. “Last month, Art of Today handed me a hundred and fifty for the article on Van Gogh. Only four thousand words.”

“Yes, I know. It was worth three times that.”

“And what about my experiment? If I contribute nothing I could not expect you to let me see her, to promote the formation of her mind by a natural process, to keep constant watch against the obscene vulgarities—”

“You’ve been here, I think, seven times in the past year. Not so constant. But heavens, you can come as often as you want to. You didn’t think you were paying for it? It’s just that I don’t need the money. Come whenever you like. Come every day.”

“I’m frightfully busy—”

“All right. Whenever you like.”

He shook his head. “I can’t resign my share of the burden. You shouldn’t ask me to. It’s not decent. I should feel restricted, fenced out...”

“All right.” Again she patted his shoulder. “If you insist on it. But just think, fifty dollars a month. Put it away in a sock. Six hundred a year. In two years that would mean a winter in Europe—”

“You’re tempting me, you slut. Get out of here.” He grinned, and suddenly broke into a loud roar of laughter. “If you could see the holes in my socks! Get out of here.”

He opened the door and out he went, back into the living room where Helen, from this day Panther, kneeled over the prostrate doll trying to pour water down its nose.

The next day Lora got out some old dresses, the two thin woolen ones and the grey tweed she had worn when carrying Morris, and even an old favorite from Roy’s time, a beige silk which she had made herself; and tried them on in front of the long mirror on the bedroom door. The silk was far too long, and all of them hung like distorted bags. Surely all that fullness would not be needed! Why is a baby’s outward show so out of proportion to its tiny and fragile frame? At any rate, she thought, nothing could be done now, thank goodness the moths had been kept out — though for that matter she would this time be able to get as many new ones as she wanted. It was fortunate that it would be a winter baby, like Helen and Morris, for otherwise an entire new wardrobe would have been required. Wouldn’t it be amusing if it should happen to hit Helen’s very day. Only she must say Panther. Certainly it would be the same month; Morris had been some weeks earlier. It was nicer in the winter, everything seemed so warm and the warmth was so pleasant. Those suffocating July days with the first one — good god, no, not the first...

As she bent over the bed folding up the dresses to go back into the box she became aware of a presence and, looking up, saw Leah watching her from the door.

“There’s only two bottles,” said Leah.

“Yes,” said Lora. “Roy broke one. Two is enough. I’ll get more when I go out.”