Seed on the Wind

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.