Seed on the Wind

“Lord, no. I don’t know.”

“He’s already christened,” she said. “By his father and mother. That’s enough. You can sprinkle him if you want to.”

So Max, grinning, handed the baby to her and went to the kitchen and brought a bowl of water, dipped his fingers and sprinkled a few drops on the little fat red face.

“By authority of the goddess Lora, divine in Beauty and Grace, I christen thee Morris,” he said solemnly.

Lora, smiling, was wiping off the drops of water with her handkerchief.

By the time Morris was two months old Max had become completely a father. He was fond, solicitous, and inquisitive; he insisted on a weekly visit from the doctor; he tried to insist on a weekly test of Lora’s milk, but she laughed him out of it. This was a new experience for her, and she was alternately annoyed and amused. What an idea, for anyone to pretend to an equal — superior even — concern about her baby! He was polite about it, of course, but what nerve! As it went on, a faint alarm stirred within her, and she determined to put an end to it. He was a fine sweet boy and she was really very fond of him, but he mustn’t be permitted to get ideas fixed in his head...

As it turned out, no action was ever required; for on a miserable raw wet day in March, the day that he had prepared to celebrate as marking the completion of his son’s third month, Max went to bed with a cold which within twenty-four hours the doctor pronounced pneumonia, and in less than a week he was dead.

The first day Lora got a cot and rigged it up for herself in the living room, with the baby’s crib beside it, and arranged their own room, with the big bed and the sunny windows, for Max. She spent very little time on her cot, for at first he insisted on her presence, he would take medicine or food from no one but her, and by the hour he would lie and stare at her without saying a word; if she left the room he would rise up and call for her, and try to get out of bed, and when she returned would have nothing to say but her name. It got him like lightning. When the delirium came he could be quieted only by her, and on the fourth and fifth nights she had her cot moved in beside his bed and lay there in the dim exasperating light, with the nurse upright on a chair against the wall; when he moved and began to murmur or cry out Lora, at once on her feet bending over him, would touch him, grasp his arms, and talk to him. She wondered that he did not once speak of Morris.

When the delirium left he was so weak that he could not lift his hand; he could not even smile, though Lora saw that he tried to as she leaned over to wipe his brow or arrange his pillow. It was his heart that did it; no good, the doctor said. He did once insist on talking and managed it with a great effort, while Lora was alone with him, holding his hand. She could see the effort in his eyes.

“Dear Lora,” he said.

“Sh, be quiet, dear,” she whispered.

“Thank god for this,” he said. “I thank god for it. I was just fooling myself. I would have hated to go on fooling myself all my life. Momma and Leah will say you killed me. Don’t believe them. They’re terrible hateful people. They’re right though. You killed me, dear Lora.”

She drew back as if he had struck her, took her hands away, then for a moment controlled herself.

“Max darling, that’s a wicked lie,” she said.

But abruptly she got to her feet and left the room; in the living room she stood, quivering with a remembered terror, her face white. Again she controlled herself. He’s sick, he’s going to die, he doesn’t know what he’s saying, she forced herself to think; and swiftly she got Morris, sleeping, from his crib and went back to the sick man’s room. The nurse had returned from the kitchen and was bending over Max with her finger on his pulse. Lora advanced to the bedside with Morris in her arms.

“Max dear,” she said softly, “here’s your baby.”

But he did not hear, for he was dead; Lora saw it on the nurse’s face. She said nothing; she stood a moment, then went back to the living room and put Morris back in his crib; he had not awakened.

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...”