Seed on the Wind

If Lewis Kane had telephoned in May instead of seven months later when the brass box was all but empty, he might not have fared so well. Lora was pretty well done with men, she thought, there was something wrong with all of them. Women were worse. This time I mean it, she said. Anne Seaver, informed by Albert of Max’s death, had been sympathetic and helpful; but Anne herself was so lugubrious at bottom, even when she laughed her short sharp laugh with her white teeth showing, that a day or two of her was enough. She had tried to keep Lora away from the funeral, but Lora wouldn’t hear of it. The day after Max’s death the Kadish tribe — mother and sister, uncles and aunts and cousins — had presented a demand for his body, and Lora had consented without a struggle. “Max himself would be the least concerned, he would be the first to say it isn’t worth fighting about,” she told Albert Scher, who was for grimly withstanding the Oriental hordes, as he called them. But Lora insisted on attending the funeral, and she went with Anne and Albert on either side of her and Morris in her arms; she insisted on that too. It was there that she first saw Leah; she did not really see Mrs. Kadish, who was swathed in veils with only her eyes showing.

It was a month later that the bell rang one afternoon and Lora, opening the door, saw Leah standing before her, her black eyes glowing with desperate resolve.

“I want to see Maxie’s baby,” she said.

“You’re Leah.”

“Yes.”

“Well. Come in.”

That first day she wouldn’t sit down; she stood by the crib and looked at him, and when he awoke and Lora picked him up she turned without a word and departed. In a week she was back again; by June she was there nearly every day. Lora didn’t mind; it was a nuisance, but also a convenience, especially after she let the nurse go and had the maid only four hours a day. She had begun to draw in her ropes, wondering what she was coming to. Max had once said something about insurance, but she couldn’t remember what it was, and there was nothing among his papers regarding it. Albert consulted a lawyer friend and the lawyer, so he reported, “communicated on several occasions with the mother and sister of the deceased,” but nothing came of it.

Albert indeed was a source of astonishment the first months following Max’s death; voluntarily and for no discoverable reason he seemed to be reassuming a share of the burden of which he had so providentially been freed. Lora was surprised and touched, but skeptical, and a little wary. Often he came for dinner and stayed the evening; or he would come in the early afternoon and spend hours on the floor with Helen and Roy in endless impromptu games or with blocks or picture-books. Helen, he declared, was responding splendidly to his experiment; her esthetic sense was obviously far finer than Roy’s, who would probably end in a stockbroker’s office. He devised various tests and kept records of the results; for example, Helen, on three different occasions placed within reach of a chair on which had been deposited, side by side, a daffodil and a can opener, each time grabbed the daffodil and made off with it; Roy, under similar conditions, took the can opener twice and the third time ignored both of them. Another test was snapshots. Six of them were placed in a row on a chair and Helen instructed to choose one; she selected one of Lora standing beside a rhododendron bush in Central Park. It was replaced; and in his turn Roy, with a brief glance down the line, took an automobile, a big handsome car which Lora had snapped beside the curb one day to use up a roll of film. Could anything be plainer, Albert demanded. Wasn’t it obvious that Helen saw the composition and the line, whereas Roy saw nothing, he merely reacted to an acquisitive instinct?

“It’s much too simple,” said Lora. “What about me for instance? I’d take this one.”

She picked up a group, taken by her only a couple of weeks before Max’s death, in the park; the ground was covered with snow, Max stood with the baby in his arms, Albert was beside him with Helen and Roy perched on his shoulders. It had turned out so well that she had had an enlargement made and sent it to her parents, with a note on the back explaining identities and relationships.

“Sure you’d take that one,” Albert laughed. “If you ever had an esthetic impulse it died the day Roy was born. Maybe before that, I don’t know what may have happened to you in some savage province B.C. Before Conception, that means. It also means Birth Control, though I blush to mention it in your presence. I know what it was, out beyond the mountains, beyond all the mountains — in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for instance, that’s a romantic spot — you were raped by the devil and begat an Imp of Fecundity, only you forgot to let him out. He’s still in there, running the show—”

“You’re a fool, and you talk too much,” Lora said; and gathered up the snapshots and returned them to the drawer.