Seed on the Wind

VII

By May she was broke. She took a necklace out of the brass box which she kept in a locked bureau drawer; she knew that it had cost Max four hundred dollars and that its current retail price was at least a thousand. The pawnshop on Columbus Avenue offered her a loan of three hundred, or three seventy-five outright. She put it back in her purse and went to a jeweler’s shop on Broadway; his offer, cash, was even less. The next afternoon she took it downtown and Max’s firm paid her five hundred and fifty dollars for it. “It’s a high price,” said the ugly and kindly old Jew, smiling at her like a grandfather, “but Max was a good boy and we like to do all we can...”

If Lewis Kane had telephoned in May instead of seven months later when the brass box was all but empty, he might not have fared so well. Lora was pretty well done with men, she thought, there was something wrong with all of them. Women were worse. This time I mean it, she said. Anne Seaver, informed by Albert of Max’s death, had been sympathetic and helpful; but Anne herself was so lugubrious at bottom, even when she laughed her short sharp laugh with her white teeth showing, that a day or two of her was enough. She had tried to keep Lora away from the funeral, but Lora wouldn’t hear of it. The day after Max’s death the Kadish tribe — mother and sister, uncles and aunts and cousins — had presented a demand for his body, and Lora had consented without a struggle. “Max himself would be the least concerned, he would be the first to say it isn’t worth fighting about,” she told Albert Scher, who was for grimly withstanding the Oriental hordes, as he called them. But Lora insisted on attending the funeral, and she went with Anne and Albert on either side of her and Morris in her arms; she insisted on that too. It was there that she first saw Leah; she did not really see Mrs. Kadish, who was swathed in veils with only her eyes showing.

It was a month later that the bell rang one afternoon and Lora, opening the door, saw Leah standing before her, her black eyes glowing with desperate resolve.

“I want to see Maxie’s baby,” she said.

“You’re Leah.”

“Yes.”

“Well. Come in.”

That first day she wouldn’t sit down; she stood by the crib and looked at him, and when he awoke and Lora picked him up she turned without a word and departed. In a week she was back again; by June she was there nearly every day. Lora didn’t mind; it was a nuisance, but also a convenience, especially after she let the nurse go and had the maid only four hours a day. She had begun to draw in her ropes, wondering what she was coming to. Max had once said something about insurance, but she couldn’t remember what it was, and there was nothing among his papers regarding it. Albert consulted a lawyer friend and the lawyer, so he reported, “communicated on several occasions with the mother and sister of the deceased,” but nothing came of it.

Albert indeed was a source of astonishment the first months following Max’s death; voluntarily and for no discoverable reason he seemed to be reassuming a share of the burden of which he had so providentially been freed. Lora was surprised and touched, but skeptical, and a little wary. Often he came for dinner and stayed the evening; or he would come in the early afternoon and spend hours on the floor with Helen and Roy in endless impromptu games or with blocks or picture-books. Helen, he declared, was responding splendidly to his experiment; her esthetic sense was obviously far finer than Roy’s, who would probably end in a stockbroker’s office. He devised various tests and kept records of the results; for example, Helen, on three different occasions placed within reach of a chair on which had been deposited, side by side, a daffodil and a can opener, each time grabbed the daffodil and made off with it; Roy, under similar conditions, took the can opener twice and the third time ignored both of them. Another test was snapshots. Six of them were placed in a row on a chair and Helen instructed to choose one; she selected one of Lora standing beside a rhododendron bush in Central Park. It was replaced; and in his turn Roy, with a brief glance down the line, took an automobile, a big handsome car which Lora had snapped beside the curb one day to use up a roll of film. Could anything be plainer, Albert demanded. Wasn’t it obvious that Helen saw the composition and the line, whereas Roy saw nothing, he merely reacted to an acquisitive instinct?

“It’s much too simple,” said Lora. “What about me for instance? I’d take this one.”

She picked up a group, taken by her only a couple of weeks before Max’s death, in the park; the ground was covered with snow, Max stood with the baby in his arms, Albert was beside him with Helen and Roy perched on his shoulders. It had turned out so well that she had had an enlargement made and sent it to her parents, with a note on the back explaining identities and relationships.

“Sure you’d take that one,” Albert laughed. “If you ever had an esthetic impulse it died the day Roy was born. Maybe before that, I don’t know what may have happened to you in some savage province B.C. Before Conception, that means. It also means Birth Control, though I blush to mention it in your presence. I know what it was, out beyond the mountains, beyond all the mountains — in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for instance, that’s a romantic spot — you were raped by the devil and begat an Imp of Fecundity, only you forgot to let him out. He’s still in there, running the show—”

“You’re a fool, and you talk too much,” Lora said; and gathered up the snapshots and returned them to the drawer.

All this time, probably unknown to himself, he had a surprise in store for her; it kept itself in reserve another month or so, and then, on an afternoon in May, the very afternoon she took the necklace downtown and returned with a check for five hundred and fifty dollars in her purse, it burst forth. On her return she found Albert seated on the stoop, his hat pulled over his eyes, half asleep in the sun.

“Where the hell is everybody?” he demanded. Lora explained that Leah had gone to the park with the children and that she had been downtown on an errand. He had tried the park, but hadn’t found them, he said, out of sorts; then went upstairs with her and helped wash the dishes from lunch. Afterwards, in the living room, he said he guessed he would go, no telling when Leah and the children would return; and then, suddenly and without warning, Lora found herself in his arms, his lips violently upon hers, his hands resuming long-relinquished privileges. Taken completely by surprise, for an instant bewildered, she merely submitted; tardily she got her hands against his shoulders and pushed, throwing back her head, but he was a giant against her little efforts and at once had her lips again and lifted her in his arms. She ceased struggling, aware of his fumbling at the fastening of her dress, then feeling herself carried to the couch against the wall, where he put her down, following her without freeing her lips. “The fool, the damn fool,” she was thinking; and finally, getting an arm free she reached up, grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled as hard as she could. He let out a yell and released her; she hung on, still pulling; he seized her wrist and jerked it away, then got to his feet and stood there, panting, looking down at her. She twisted around and sat on the edge of the couch, panting too.

“Well, for god’s sake,” he said quietly. “For god’s sake, Lora mia, explain that if you can. You damn near pulled my hair out, and I damn near pulled your dress off. You don’t deserve that, you’re by no means good enough for it. Jackass — ho, ho, what a jackass!”

She did not reply, and abruptly he turned, and was gone. She heard him getting his hat in the hall, and an instant later the door slammed.

“As long as you admit I don’t deserve it,” she said aloud; and feeling something in her hand, looked at it and found a strand of fine blond hair twisted between her fingers. That’s a pity, she thought.

It was a month or more before he showed up again.

That night in bed she amused herself matching the after-noon’s episode with the Albert of four years back. He had always been direct, but directness like everything else is a matter of degree; he had always been stupid too, but never so stupid as this. Once she had been very fond of him; still was, for that matter, for she would never forget his blunt and unassuming kindness during a whole year, a year and more, before there was any hint of a reward. Nor would she soon forget the uncomfortable and all but hopeless situation out of which he had yanked her.

Five years ago, she thought; yes, all of that, for Roy would soon be five. Just think of it, so short a time ago there had been no Morris, no Helen, no Roy! Now Roy could read, Helen could talk, Morris would soon have a tooth. But that was a fix for you, five years ago. Steve had gone for good, with so natural and unembarrassed a brutality that she had felt no resentment or indignation, leaving her lying on a couch in the living-dining-bedroom of a tiny furnished flat on which the rent would be due in three days, with — to his knowledge — something under three dollars in her purse and seven months of his child in her womb. Anne Whitman — poor Anne she had thought even then — waiting at the door below for him to come down with his bags, had gone with him.

Anne had sought her out two weeks later — to apologize! She had gone first, she said, to the flat; the janitor told her that Miss Winter had gone, and after various inquiries she finally got an address from the girl at the drugstore on the corner. She explained this somewhat breathlessly after climbing three flights of stairs to the little furnished room on Fifteenth Street to which Lora had moved two days after Steve’s departure — the rent was only six dollars a week, whereas the flat had been three times that, and light and linen, clean each week, were furnished. They called it linen, a technical term, to be broadly interpreted.

There were two chairs in the room, one made entirely of wood, the other with a seat of green imitation leather. When Anne entered Lora was seated on the latter, sewing linings in coats. There were two piles of coats on the narrow bed, one with linings already in, the other without; the ready linings were at one end, and the wooden chair served as a sewing-table. Standing, Anne explained how she got there, stammering with embarrassment; then Lora moved the wooden chair over for her to sit on.

“It took a lot of courage to come, didn’t it?” Lora observed. “You needn’t have bothered. I have nothing against you.”

Anne had had to come, she said. It had taken courage all right. If Lora didn’t have anything against her she was an angel; she must have, she couldn’t help it. “I hate myself, I can’t expect you to forgive me,” Anne said. “I would have done anything, that’s all there is to it. I’d do anything for him, and he loves me, he does truly love me. You do believe he loves me, don’t you, Lora?”

Lora pitied her a little. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Yes, he loves you. He was through with me anyway.”

Anne nodded eagerly. “That’s it. He told me so a long while ago, two months ago, in March it was, you remember the night you wouldn’t go to dinner with us and we went to a party at Joe Curtis’s? I told him it wasn’t any use, he’d have to stick to you, he really ought to marry you I said, and he was wild, he swore you’d played a trick on him and were trying to force him into it and he wouldn’t stand for it. I didn’t believe that, of course I told him I didn’t believe it. We were in that little alcove at Joe’s, and he put his arms around me...”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Lora, who had resumed her sewing, wishing the little idiot would go.

“Anyway,” said Anne, and stopped. “I don’t know how to say it,” she continued, “but anyway it’s about money. I know you haven’t got any, and here—” she was fumbling in her purse — “here’s twenty dollars — of course it isn’t much—” She laid two ten-dollar bills on the corner of the bed; one of them slid to the floor and she picked it up and put it back. Lora looked at her, at the money, and back at her again.

“Steve didn’t send that,” Lora said.

“I get a little from my father,” said Anne. “Please don’t be angry. Steve doesn’t realize, it isn’t that he doesn’t care, he just doesn’t realize...”

“I need it all right.” Lora picked up the bills, folded them, and placed them on Anne’s lap. “Steve’s out of it, I wouldn’t even take the trouble to call him names. The only thing I’m concerned about is the baby. I need money all right, but I’d rather not take yours.” She grinned. “You’ll need it too, see if you don’t. Not for a baby maybe. Perhaps you’ll need it to get Steve out of jail, you’d better hang onto it.”

“Jail!” Anne stared at her.

“Don’t be frightened; nothing will happen probably. He got himself exempted by calling himself married, maybe he said I was pregnant too, I don’t know. I don’t blame him; I wouldn’t want to go to war either.”

Anne had jumped to her feet, fright and terror in her eyes. “I didn’t know — good god, they might shoot him — they might take him — if you don’t tell— Oh, Lora, for god’s sake don’t tell—”

“It isn’t that, why should I tell, but there must be people who know about it.”

Lora was sorry she had mentioned it, there had been no gratification in it anyway; and now she had a terrified and imploring Anne on her hands, begging her not to tell, begging her to do something — tell everybody they were married, for instance — anything to save Steve, careless and imprudent but well-meaning Steve. Finally with a flood of promises and reassurances Lora got rid of her — got her out of the room and the door shut, and heard her footsteps clumsily negotiating the dark narrow uncarpeted stairs. Then she restored the wooden chair to its office of sewing-table and picked up another coat. Stupid fool I was, she thought, to say anything about it.

Stupid too to have refused the money. Why shouldn’t she take it? Twenty dollars — that was four dollars more than she had got for the watch she sold yesterday — the watch Pete Halliday had given her. Almost would she have preferred to cut off her hair and sell it, the hair Pete had braided — not that, enough of that. She bit off a thread, compressed her lips, and started the other edge. She should have taken Anne’s money, why not? Idiotic stupid pride — if she wasn’t above that she might as well give up. Nothing in god’s world mattered but the baby, she was going to have that baby — ha, wasn’t she though! But it was about time she used her intelligence, everything she did was stupid. These coat-linings — she couldn’t possibly do more than fifteen a day — at eight cents that was a dollar twenty — the rent alone was nearly a dollar. Imbecile. Instead of jumping at this the minute that little tailor suggested it she should have waited, looked around for something worthwhile. She was handicapped by her condition, of course; she couldn’t get a job in a store or an office with her front bulging out magnificently like a dahlia and ready to burst; anyway, she simply had to lie down once in a while. If she could have stood it the baby couldn’t, she felt sure of that. If she could only see it! It was dumb to fix it so it couldn’t be seen; there ought to be an opening somewhere so you could look in, so you could touch it even; what if one of its legs got twisted or its arm doubled under? Lord, it would be ugly, an awful-looking thing probably, but how she would love to see it! You could see it move too, it certainly did move, no doubt about that.

She took another thread. Damn the coat-linings; even if you worked like the very devil each one must take at least thirty minutes; she wished she had her watch so she could time herself. Or the alarm clock from the flat; that was stupid too, not to have brought anything that had belonged to Steve. Pride, ha! Pride was well above the subsistence level.

But something, Anne’s visit perhaps, or the natural progression of her own intelligence and will, had cleared her head a little. This was not only stupid, it was dangerous. If she didn’t look out, she reflected, she’d be having her baby in a charity ward or on the sidewalk, and she did not propose to do either. To hell with the coat-linings; she wasn’t such a boob, she’d find something. When the boy came at six o’clock she gave him the finished coats and told him not to bring any more.

The next morning, a warm June day, she put on the thin dark grey coat, which didn’t look bad at all with the buttons moved over, and started out. The man at the drugstore liked her, he might have something — what about making pills for instance, somebody had to make them. No, he was sorry, nothing. Mr. Pitkin, at the office where she had worked the summer before, was genial but had no suggestions to offer; he cracked a joke or two and tendered a ten-dollar bill which she took calmly with a smile of thanks. By noon she had about exhausted her list of possibilities, and she was dead tired; she had been unable to keep her breakfast. She stumbled into a bookshop and sank into a chair, but after a few minutes saw that that wouldn’t do; obviously she wasn’t welcome, and anyway she couldn’t hold her head up. So she got back to her room, somehow climbed the stairs, and tumbled onto the bed without taking off her coat. She was furious; I’m nothing but a damn weakling, she thought, it makes me sick, some girls work hard right up to the very day. That gave her a start — could she have counted wrong? She lay on her back with her eyes closed, touching her fingers one by one, naming the months aloud. No, she was right, it wouldn’t be for five weeks yet, maybe more.

It was the woman at the tea-room who told her the next day about Palichak. She had been told by Joe Curtis, who of course would know. It appeared a remote chance to Lora, but by that time she was desperate, so she trudged down to Macdougal Alley and rang the bell at Number Seven. Palichak himself, short and dark and massive, let her in; inside were a couple of girls drinking cocktails and a man with a beard at the piano.

“I came to see you because I’m pregnant,” said Lora. “Mrs. Crosby at the tea-room said you wanted a model.”

“I beg your pardon,” he said, his thick accent almost unintelligible.

“Enceinte, mon vieux,” called the man with the beard. “Beremenna.”

Palichak took her in with a swift inclusive glance. “Of course, how very nice,” he bowed. “You would like to work?”

“I don’t know,” Lora hesitated. “I came to see, I don’t know anything about this.”

“Ah. If you would be so kind — par ici — you take your clothes off—” He led her to the rear of the room, where an enormous metal screen enclosed a corner.

Behind it Lora removed her coat and hat and placed them on a chair. Then her dress, and her shoes and stockings. Then she stopped. What did he mean anyway? She called out:

“All my clothes?”

“Of course, Madame.”

A minute later she called:

“All right, I’m ready.”

He appeared at the edge of the screen, turning it back a little. “Good. Come where I can see you.”

She didn’t mind the men, but she wished the girls weren’t there. Oh, well, to the devil with them. She stepped out, away from the screen, into the window’s direct light. She looked boldly at the girls and saw only mild curiosity, then admiration in their eyes; the man with the beard had turned on the stool, with his elbow on the keyboard and his chin in his hand, his other hand dancing on the treble, his eyes carefully appraising her; Palichak stood away, gazing at her with a frown. Suddenly his teeth gleamed in a smile and he clapped his hands.

“Hair!” he exclaimed. “Hair too! What do you think, yes?”

“She’s perfect,” said one of the girls.

“Wonderful, marvelous,” said the other.

“Laissez tomber les cheveux,” demanded Palichak.

“Let your hair down,” the man with the beard translated.

She pulled out the pins and shook her head, and the red-brown curtain fell below her waist, covering her shoulders and back; a strand hung sinuous through the valley between her breasts. She stood natural and straight, creamy-white curves and columns glowing with life even in the shadows, unmindful of them, entirely at ease to their businesslike appraisal.

“She will do, eh?” Palichak beamed.

The man with the beard left the piano and strolled towards her.

“You know what this is,” he said. “Pally is doing some murals for the Institute Building at Detroit, and he wants a model for Fertility. He wouldn’t explain, he can’t talk you know. Thought you might fear it was for a barroom idyll.”

She returned to the screen and dressed herself, overhearing meanwhile their unanimous agreement on her perfections. When she came out again Palichak hurried over.

“You can begin tomorrow?”

“How much do I get?” she demanded.

“Three dollars is usual.”

“Three dollars a day!”

The man with the beard spoke up. “Three dollars an hour. Some days one hour, some two, some three if you can stand it. You may rest of course.”

Lora hesitated, looking from one to the other.

“I’ll have to have five,” she said.

Palichak glared at her, and let out a flood of Russian. The man with the beard shook his head at him and grinned.

“It’s extortion,” he said, “but of course you’ll get it.”

“I can’t help it, I need the money,” said Lora.

That evening she ate at Mrs. Crosby’s tea-room, a dollar and a quarter. I can’t do this every day, she thought, but I can afford to celebrate.

It was upstairs at Number Seven that Palichak worked. Lora stood on a velvet mat on a little wooden platform, her right arm upraised with the hand back of her head, her hair flowing loosely over her left shoulder, and a filmy strip of silk gauze draped from her right shoulder to her left thigh and thence to the platform. Behind her, from ceiling to floor, were the rich folds of a purple curtain. Palichak never talked. He frowned sometimes and swore often, always in Russian, and did not address her except to announce a rest period. He was considerate about resting, except occasionally he would forget, and then when Lora could stand it no longer she would drop her arm, he would frown and then grin at her, and she would step down. They were nearly always alone, but now and then someone would drop in for a moment. The most frequent visitor was the man with the beard, who would enter without knocking, look critically at the picture, glance at Lora with a nod, settle himself in the big leather chair near the window, and remain there an hour or more without speaking.

One day he brought a stranger with him, a tall blond blue-eyed man in his early thirties, with his suit unpressed and his necktie under his right ear.

“You know Scher,” said the man with the beard. “Albert Scher of the Star.”

Palichak nodded, not offering to shake hands, and went on working. The blond man looked at the picture and said nothing. Then he looked at Lora, and he looked so long and his blue eyes seemed so friendly that, feeling she must do something, she winked at him.

“Venus vulgaris, you ought to be ashamed of yourself,” he said, and rejoined the man with the beard.

A week later she was dining with Albert Scher at the Brevoort. He was careful to explain that this would probably prove to be unique, not by any means a precedent. “I eat here,” he said, “every time I find a woman more beautiful than any woman I have ever seen. If possible, with the woman, but it doesn’t often turn out that way. Though I should say you aren’t even a woman, you’re just a girl — how old are you?”

Lora, tasting for the first time the devilish and irresistible savour of clams à l’ancienne, said simply, “Twenty-one.”

“You’re not married.”

“No.”

“I knew that. I wanted to see if you’d be embarrassed. A girl pregnant at twenty-one who doesn’t blush when asked if she’s married is either dumb or divine. Which?”

“Right now I’m just hungry. I think you’re trying to shock me, Mr. Scher. I don’t mind.”

“Shock you, after the way you winked at me the other day?”

“Oh, you understood that.”

“Not at the time. Since then I’ve found out about you. You’re alone, and broke, and on the verge of a tribute to embryology, which is quite apparent. If I were capable of sustained indignation I’d seek out the fond father and knock his block off. I’m told his name is Steve Adams. He ought to be in France anyway; that’s all wars are good for, they kill off a few like him.”

Lora looked at him, and took an olive.

“Me, you’re thinking,” he grinned. “They won’t have me. My eyes are in wrong side up. That’s how I got a job as art critic on a newspaper. Thank god for that — the eyes I mean. I was born in Austria; my father got naturalized.”

“Oh. Naturally you’d be pro-German.”

“Pro-nothing,” he snorted. “Pro-intelligence, so I’d be in a minority no matter where I was.”

Lora glanced at him; would she want to fight, she wondered, if she were a man? She thought not. Her baby might be a man...

After dinner he wanted to take her home in a taxi, but she said no, they should walk the ten blocks, they must avoid bad precedents. “Unless I’ll embarrass you; people look at me.”

“Embarrass, hell — but I can’t walk slow,” he declared; lifted his hat, bowed, and was gone, leaving her on the sidewalk. She leisurely made her way home, loving the warm summer air, reluctant to return to the little furnished room. It would be fun to have a baby outdoors, she thought, on the grass in the sun, beside a little stream perhaps — you could wash it in the stream if it wasn’t too cold — with the crickets hopping around wondering what was going on. Probably women used to do that before there were houses...

When in the middle of July Palichak was finally through with her she had saved nearly a hundred dollars; this she kept always on her person, in a little bag sewed to a string around her waist. She didn’t seek another job; she expected and hoped there wouldn’t be time. She had seen Albert Scher only once since the dinner; he had come to the room one evening, sat and talked for an hour, and departed. There should be a doctor, he had said, he would arrange it, and the next day one had come; but Lora, informed of his terms, outrageous she thought, had sent him off and made arrangements with a midwife instead, a kindly, middle-aged, not-too-clean Italian woman who talked of the prospective event as if it were no more than a tooth-pulling, and who advised Lora to ride a lot on street-cars. “It don’t cost much,” she said, “and the bumps bring it on. Busses are better because they bump more, but they cost a dime and there’s no use spending the extra money.” Lora smiled and sat in Washington Square as a compromise.

It began late one night, after she had been in bed several hours. That’s funny, she said to herself, I thought it always started after you had moved around or stooped over or something. But this must be it. Oh, lord — this must be it. It felt just like that, exactly like that, the other time...

She clamped her jaws together. “I will not think of the other time,” she said aloud to the darkness. “I will not, I will not. I will think of this time, this wonderful lovely time — oh lord, my god — there it’s over... I think...”

She lay a minute or two, waiting, then, when it did not return, got up and turned on the light, put on her bathrobe, got a nickel from her purse, and made her way down the three flights of stairs to where the slot telephone hung on the wall at the rear of the hall. A door opened and a face appeared; then it opened full and a woman in a torn white cotton nightgown came rapidly to her. “You poor thing — you should of yelled — I told you to yell, didn’t I — you go right back — here, give it to me.”

“I’m all right,” Lora said.

“Go on back — what’s the number?”

“Really I’m all right, Mrs. Pegg.”

But the woman pushed her off down the hall. “Go back I tell you, go to bed, do I want to be getting Tom up to carry you upstairs...”

Lora gave her the number and climbed back up the three flights. In bed again, she was suddenly alone and afraid; she felt no pain or movement whatever, and all at once she knew, the conviction took her by the throat, that the baby was dead. She became instantly rigid from head to foot, and stopped breathing, choked with terror. She tried to scream Mrs. Pegg’s name, but no sound came. Slowly her hand, under the sheet, made its way down her body and on her abdomen stopped, pressing at first lightly, then strong and stronger; all was still. “By god, I’ll get it out,” she said aloud in a calm voice, “I’ll cut myself open and get it out and look at it.” She jerked herself upright, then fell back again on the pillow, doubled herself up with her knees almost touching her chin, and began to scream as loud as she could:

“Mrs. Pegg Mrs. Pegg Mrs. Pegg!”

At once rapid footsteps were on the stairs, and the door opened.

“Shut up, it won’t kill you,” the landlady snapped. “She’ll be here in a minute.”

Lora sat up and stared at her.

“You’re a nice one,” she said, “it’s dead.”

“What’s dead? Lay down, lay out straight. It will be dead if you don’t behave yourself. Lay down and shut up. You’ll wake the whole house.”

A bell sounded from below and Mrs. Pegg hurried out. Lora lay back and closed her eyes, and almost at once it came again. It began in the inmost center of her, then spread swiftly throughout her body, to the utmost extremities, so that her toes stretched and tightened and then drew themselves in and her fingers gripped the edges of the mattress with each little muscle fierce and fighting to help. She pulled up her knees, then straightened out again, and repeated it many times, pulling at the mattress each time, not hearing her groans or caring about them. She was aware that the door had opened again, and she heard a new strong voice:

“Don’t relax, dearie, push it out, that’s right.”

But it was slowing down, fading away from her, and she let go of the mattress and turning her head saw the dark-skinned wrinkled midwife, bareheaded, in a black dress with a long yellow scarf around her shoulders, taking things out of an old suitcase and an enormous paper bag and laying them on the chairs.

The midwife pulled down the sheet and felt her and looked at her; her hands were deft and swift and gentle.

“It’s dead, isn’t it?” Lora said wearily.

The other’s black eyes darted at her. “So that’s what you want, is it? What makes you think it’s dead? What did you do, what makes you think it’s dead?”

“You’re a fool,” said Lora sharply. “I didn’t do anything. It doesn’t move. If it’s dead I’m going to die too.”

Chuckling, the midwife took a towel from a nail on the wall and wiped the sweat from Lora’s face and brow. “There’s nobody dead in this room yet,” she said cheerfully. “You’ll have enough to keep you busy this night dearie without worrying about things that’s none of your business.” She straightened up, and said suddenly, “I thought you said this was your first one.”

“It is.”

The midwife chuckled again. “Then I’m a virgin and God help me if my Luigi could hear that.”

“It’s my first one I tell you.”

“All right, all right, dearie.”

She turned and busied herself with the articles she had arranged on the chairs. Mrs. Pegg appeared with two wash basins, a pitcher and some old towels, and the information that there would soon be plenty of hot water in the bathroom; she had turned on the heater in the basement. Would she be wanted any more? No, the other said, she wouldn’t need any help; she had once handled triplets all alone, with a sore back too, and they were all alive to this day.

Mrs. Pegg’s footsteps could still be heard descending the stairs when Lora said suddenly, sharply:

“Ah, look out, look out.”

The midwife glanced at her face. “It’s coming, dearie? Don’t let up on it now — here hold on to this — that’s right, my little one — push it out, it comes quicker that way, an hour maybe, soon now — push it out.”

But nine hours passed before it would push out. Lora had long since ceased to care about anything, anything in the world, except to have it end. At times she imagined the midwife was torturing her; at others she pleaded with her to do more, do something, do anything. Gradually the night’s stillness surrendered to the city’s million morning sounds, infrequent at first — the clatter of a milkwagon or a taxi’s horn — then two or three together, and more, until it swelled into another day’s bedlam. Along with that the window which Lora faced became again alive; when the blind was raised it was already dawn; steadily the light increased so that soon the midwife turned off the electric bulb that hung from the ceiling by a cord; and then the sun was blazing in and the pulse of the July heat throbbed again. The midwife pulled the blind down. She had put on an apron, her sleeves were rolled above her elbows, her coarse grey-streaked hair was tumbling over her left ear, and now and then she yawned wide and long. Lora, in those intervals when she could think, decided that a week must have passed, a month, a year. It seemed impossible that it had ever begun or that it would ever end. It was easy to see what was going to happen — it would keep up a little while longer, and then she would die without knowing it. How many more times would she have to do that? Five more, ten more? Ten more would do it perhaps. She couldn’t do ten more, nor five either; not even one, no by god not one, not one, not one...

It was nearly noon when, lying with closed eyes, dead at last, she became aware of a noise beside her, and slowly and wearily lifting her lids, saw the midwife standing there expertly balancing in one hand a red and squirming baby.

“You’re lucky, dearie, it’s a boy,” said the midwife. “No wonder he nearly split you open, he’s as fat as a priest.”

Lora tried to smile.

“It’s wiggling,” she said, “look at it wiggle.”