Seed on the Wind

On Max, as it turned out, Albert’s commiseration was wasted. With the two children, whatever their names might be, he assumed at once all the concern and responsibilities of a happy father. Often, downtown, he had eaten lunch with Lora and spent many afternoons with her, but after the establishment of the household in Seventy-first Street she never saw him after eleven in the morning or before seven in the evening. He must broaden his contacts and scare up all the business he could, he said; Lora’s wardrobe was deplorable, the furniture he had bought so hurriedly was unsatisfactory, and there was nothing Roy and Helen did not need and should not have. Lora was touched and amused by the sight of the twenty-six-year-old boy taking so enthusiastically upon himself the obligations whose proper roost was not only upon other trees but even in another forest; but Max didn’t need her pity either. When occasionally she remonstrated he would reply, “I know what I’m doing, dear Lora. As young as I am, I live my ideal; that is beautiful, almost as beautiful as you are.” But he was not always so serious about it; sometimes he even burlesqued his own gaiety, as when one evening, taking a bracelet from his pocket, a circlet of amethysts set in dull white gold, he held it dangling before her and, with lifted shoulders and eyebrows and palms turned upward, “Jewelry from contented Jews,” he said.

He would gladly have spent all his evenings at the apartment, but though Lora too would have been willing he wouldn’t hear of it. She must have diversion. Both a nurse and a maid he insisted on, and he arranged with the nurse to remain three evenings a week while he took Lora to a play or a concert, and a party now and then. Occasionally they even had dinner guests, Anne Seaver perhaps, or acquaintances of Lora’s from downtown or, more rarely, friends of Max’s; often Albert Scher. Lora enjoyed those evenings; it was pleasant and restful to sit at the end of the long table, with its smooth white cloth and shining silver and glass and the maid carrying dishes of steaming meat and vegetables and cool red and green salad, the children safely asleep behind the closed door, and Max saying with pride, “No, Lora can’t take any wine, not till the baby’s weaned; pass your glass, Mrs. Seaver.” It was rabbinical wine, quite good, and Lora regretted it a little; she hadn’t had a drink for four years, what with pre-natal and lactal periods overlapping as spring and summer, with autumn and winter entirely out of it. The plays and concerts she attended chiefly for Max’s sake; for the most part they bored her; she had never cared for the theatre, and music meant nothing to her but the mildly diverting pastime of trying to decide where it would go next. Except one night years before, when Steve Adams took her to a concert and the orchestra played a Brahms symphony... but that she had forgotten, that she would never remember. She had hated the name of Brahms ever since, and for a long while she had carefully kept herself away from music. If the grave of the past could not be entirely obliterated, at least the marked trails that led to it could be avoided.

One evening at a dance recital at Carnegie Hall, in the lobby during intermission, a man spoke to her — a tall middle-aged impeccable man with grey eyes. Then the man’s glance fell on Max at her side, and he nodded again, “Hello, Kadish. Lolita’s a sort of a bore, Miss Winter, don’t you think?” He was off again.

“I don’t remember that man, who is he?” she asked Max.

“Kane. Lewis Kane. He’s probably been around with Albert; he buys etchings. Downtown lawyer.”

“I don’t remember him. Is he one of your contacts?”

“Well... he’s a customer of the house. Nice fellow.”

At the end of the recital Lewis Kane was again suddenly beside them, inviting them to supper. Max, plainly astonished, glanced at Lora; she said no, she was sorry, she mustn’t keep the nurse up so late. Lewis Kane bowed himself away.

“We could have gone, Miss Ruggles is probably asleep,” said Max in the taxi.

It was that same evening, a mild evening in April, after they had got home and sent the nurse off for the night, and gone to the kitchen for sandwiches and grape juice, that she said to him suddenly:

“Well, we’ve done it. I’m going to have a baby.”

He dropped the breadknife and turned swiftly to look at her.

“No!”

“Yes.”

“Dear Lora. I can’t believe it.”

She put her hand on her dress, where Albert’s massive mountain once had been. “It’s here all right. Are you sorry?”

“I’m not sorry. I can’t believe it. Does it hurt?”

She laughed. “Of course not. Oh, lord, there goes half the chicken on the floor. It will hurt before it’s over, but I don’t mind. I’d like to be sure you really aren’t sorry.”