Seed on the Wind

That spring she wrote a letter to her father and mother, the first in two years.

I haven’t a husband yet, but I have another baby. A boy, and the best yet, I believe. That makes four in case you’ve lost count. He looks a little like you, Dad, with his eyes wide apart and his nose as straight as a rifle barrel. Of course his own father thinks he looks like him, but he really doesn’t at all. He was born on January 16th, so he’s nearly three months old. By the way, Morris’s father, Max, you remember I told you, the Jewish jewelry salesman, is dead. He got pneumonia and his heart was weak the doctor said a year ago last March. Morris is over two years old now and has the funniest little nose, I wish Max could see him. I wish you could see all of them — maybe some day we’ll pay you a visit.

When it was finished she read it through twice, slowly, her brows drawn together and her lips closed tight. They’ll read it all right, she thought; they’ll leave it lying around for a day or two unopened and she’ll finally open it and read it and then he’ll read it too. Before sealing the envelope she went through a drawer of snapshots and enclosed a dozen or more. Several were of Leah, with Morris — on her lap, in her arms, held perched on her shoulder — and Lora shook her head at them. It’s too bad, but I can’t help it, she thought.

Leah had come to the apartment twice, once the day before Christmas and once in February, and on both occasions had been refused admittance. The first time Lora, lying big on her bed, had not even seen her; the second time she had gone to the door and told her firmly that she might as well stop coming, it was impossible to trust her. Leah pled and threatened and wept, tried to kiss Lora’s hand, declared she would kill herself, asseverated once again that Maxie had not called his son’s mother a whore. At the end, feeling her cause hopeless, she stated categorically that Morris was not Maxie’s son anyway.

“Ha,” said Lora, “you’re right, he isn’t.” And at the new fury that blazed in the other’s eyes she hastily and forcibly closed the door against her and locked it.

It was hard to believe that Max had been Leah’s brother. Possibly he wasn’t; the faith in paternity is always more religious than scientific. He had been placid, agnostic and Occidental, with questionable traits from beyond the Aegean showing but rarely; as for instance when at their third meeting he had asked her to marry him and she had said no nor anyone, he had at once proceeded to try the other road. He had said immediately in his agreeable modest tones:

“You’re probably right; neither Yahveh nor Christ nor civil blessing could make it more agreeable to kiss your hand. Nor brighten the glory of your hair. I have never seen such beautiful hair. You’re right not to have it cut; I want to see it down over your shoulders.”

That had been on a September day in Union Square; Albert Scher had taken Roy, then a little more than three years old, to the Bronx Zoo, and Lora had as usual been six times around Union Square, with Helen, still in her first year, in the carriage with the broken wheel. Only a week had passed since Albert had brought Max to the diminutive flat on Eleventh Street at the dinner hour, having found him in a Fifth Avenue gallery examining with a magnifying glass a blue necklace on a Hals portrait. At that time Albert, big and booming and blond, midway between thirty and forty, was still doing galleries and exhibitions for the Star; Max, nearly ten years his junior, was beside him remarkably compact and swarthy.

“My friend, Max Kadish,” Albert announced from the threshold, “is going to grace our table. This, my boy, is Lora the Lorelei. Miss Lora Winter, permit me, engaged, as you see, in the miraculous process of turning beef stew into milk entirely without divine assistance.”

Lora, seated with Helen at her breast, unembarrassed and unruffled, looked up at them and smiled. “Not tonight he isn’t, there isn’t enough,” she said. “How do you do, Mr. Kadish; another time. You two go out and eat, there’s only enough here for me. You know I wasn’t expecting you, Albert.”

“Hell, we want an evening at home,” Albert protested.