Seed on the Wind

Max spoke, diffidently. “If you would permit me, I am a very good cook, it would be a great pleasure — a big dish of scallopini for instance, and chicory with oil dressing...”

“It’s a lot of trouble,” said Lora.

“Grand idea!” Albert declared. “And a bottle of wine. We can do it in ten minutes. I’ll help.”

Out they dashed, and soon were back again, Albert with olives and wine and bread, Max with a package of meat and cans of mushrooms, string beans, tomato sauce, pimiento and olive oil. Lora had got Helen into her crib in the little back room, where Roy was already sound asleep.

“The door’s shut,” she said, “but for heaven’s sake be quiet anyway. I’ll set the table. Albert, you’d better go in front and look at pictures or something.”

“Do you realize,” Albert demanded, “that olive oil comes from olives? It’s incredible. Good god, think of the olives it must take.”

The scallopini was excellent, the salad delicious, the wine sour but possible. They sat on the wooden chairs in the kitchen and drank coffee for two hours, then Albert and Max washed the dishes while Lora went in front to feed the baby again.

“We have a swell maid,” Albert explained, “a wench from Alabama that looks like Aida except she’s cross-eyed, but she only comes four hours a day and if we don’t do these now we’ll have nothing to eat breakfast on. So Lora would say. I demur. The Romans used no dishes. Today, in a belt within twenty degrees of the equator north and south, precisely on the earth’s belly, there are half a billion people eating without dishes. In our decadence—”

The platter that had held the scallopini, now soapy and dripping, slipped from his fingers onto the floor, taking a carom off the garbage pail in its flight, and was shattered into a dozen pieces. Albert knelt, scooped the pieces together, and dumped them into the pail.

“In our decadence,” he repeated, “we make gods of bread-and-butter plates.”

A week later, the day they met in Union Square, Max told Lora that thanks to Albert he was already acquainted with a workable outline of her history. He had been told, he said, that she was twenty-six years old, had never been married, was intellectually and esthetically an infant, and was totally devoid of the vices of ambition, greed and curiosity. Lora merely smiled and let him hold her hand as they sat on the bench near the middle of the Square, though it was broad day and passersby were nudging each other and grinning at them. She didn’t notice; she was wondering about Albert. For one thing, he was becoming impossibly careless about money. Presumably he still had seventy dollars a week from the Star, reinforced by an occasional check for an extra piece, but the proportion that got to her had gradually decreased until now it was touch and go even with such essential items as the rent and the grocer’s bill and the maid’s modest wages. That Albert had ceased to be amusing was not intolerable, that had always been only a sideshow; but that he was apparently no longer amused threatened danger. She did not feel herself in competition with the rich young widow from West End Avenue who was suddenly finding Albert’s constant advice essential in her search for bargain Seurats and Gauguins, nor with the little blond art student, whose name she did not know, who was apparently a successful candidate for a solider and less subtle seduction; merely they were menaces to the sternest of all her necessities; and if they could not be removed must be evaded. The difficulty about money, she knew, came from pure inadvertence; Albert got his pay on Tuesday, and on Thursday or Friday, when he got around to consideration of the responsibilities of a father and the head of a household, no one was more astonished and irritated than he to discover himself once again plunged into insolvency. “Nobody will ever succeed in persuading me,” he declared, “that the tendency of money to evaporate is controllable by human forces. So help me god, Lora mia, I had five tens in that very pocket yesterday morning.”

She would not, or could not, compete with the widow and the art student. The expedient of dragooning Albert on Tuesday evening, before the process of evaporation had set in, did not even occur to her. Just as her body was always her body, and Roy and Helen always her babies, so was Albert’s seventy dollars his money. It might by good fortune or the exigencies of existence become the grocer’s or the landlord’s or the maid’s, but never was any part of it hers.