Seed on the Wind

“I knew that. I wanted to see if you’d be embarrassed. A girl pregnant at twenty-one who doesn’t blush when asked if she’s married is either dumb or divine. Which?”

“Right now I’m just hungry. I think you’re trying to shock me, Mr. Scher. I don’t mind.”

“Shock you, after the way you winked at me the other day?”

“Oh, you understood that.”

“Not at the time. Since then I’ve found out about you. You’re alone, and broke, and on the verge of a tribute to embryology, which is quite apparent. If I were capable of sustained indignation I’d seek out the fond father and knock his block off. I’m told his name is Steve Adams. He ought to be in France anyway; that’s all wars are good for, they kill off a few like him.”

Lora looked at him, and took an olive.

“Me, you’re thinking,” he grinned. “They won’t have me. My eyes are in wrong side up. That’s how I got a job as art critic on a newspaper. Thank god for that — the eyes I mean. I was born in Austria; my father got naturalized.”

“Oh. Naturally you’d be pro-German.”

“Pro-nothing,” he snorted. “Pro-intelligence, so I’d be in a minority no matter where I was.”

Lora glanced at him; would she want to fight, she wondered, if she were a man? She thought not. Her baby might be a man...

After dinner he wanted to take her home in a taxi, but she said no, they should walk the ten blocks, they must avoid bad precedents. “Unless I’ll embarrass you; people look at me.”

“Embarrass, hell — but I can’t walk slow,” he declared; lifted his hat, bowed, and was gone, leaving her on the sidewalk. She leisurely made her way home, loving the warm summer air, reluctant to return to the little furnished room. It would be fun to have a baby outdoors, she thought, on the grass in the sun, beside a little stream perhaps — you could wash it in the stream if it wasn’t too cold — with the crickets hopping around wondering what was going on. Probably women used to do that before there were houses...

When in the middle of July Palichak was finally through with her she had saved nearly a hundred dollars; this she kept always on her person, in a little bag sewed to a string around her waist. She didn’t seek another job; she expected and hoped there wouldn’t be time. She had seen Albert Scher only once since the dinner; he had come to the room one evening, sat and talked for an hour, and departed. There should be a doctor, he had said, he would arrange it, and the next day one had come; but Lora, informed of his terms, outrageous she thought, had sent him off and made arrangements with a midwife instead, a kindly, middle-aged, not-too-clean Italian woman who talked of the prospective event as if it were no more than a tooth-pulling, and who advised Lora to ride a lot on street-cars. “It don’t cost much,” she said, “and the bumps bring it on. Busses are better because they bump more, but they cost a dime and there’s no use spending the extra money.” Lora smiled and sat in Washington Square as a compromise.

It began late one night, after she had been in bed several hours. That’s funny, she said to herself, I thought it always started after you had moved around or stooped over or something. But this must be it. Oh, lord — this must be it. It felt just like that, exactly like that, the other time...

She clamped her jaws together. “I will not think of the other time,” she said aloud to the darkness. “I will not, I will not. I will think of this time, this wonderful lovely time — oh lord, my god — there it’s over... I think...”

She lay a minute or two, waiting, then, when it did not return, got up and turned on the light, put on her bathrobe, got a nickel from her purse, and made her way down the three flights of stairs to where the slot telephone hung on the wall at the rear of the hall. A door opened and a face appeared; then it opened full and a woman in a torn white cotton nightgown came rapidly to her. “You poor thing — you should of yelled — I told you to yell, didn’t I — you go right back — here, give it to me.”

“I’m all right,” Lora said.

“Go on back — what’s the number?”

“Really I’m all right, Mrs. Pegg.”

But the woman pushed her off down the hall. “Go back I tell you, go to bed, do I want to be getting Tom up to carry you upstairs...”