Seed on the Wind

Yes, something was stirring within her. Unhappy or not, she wanted something she didn’t have; that was as definite as she could make it. In Central Park of an afternoon, with Helen (not yet Panther) and the infant Morris both asleep in the carriage, and Roy dodging in and out among the moving trees that were pedestrians’ legs, she would wonder idly which of the passersby were free, entirely free, of the unrest of desire. It would be simple enough, she told herself, if you knew exactly what it was. Say she wanted a new dress, or a home in the country, or a husband. How simple! How simple, probably, no matter what it was. She could think of no object that appeared to be beyond the scope of her powers, nor could she think of any that seemed to be worth their exertion. Did she want — she shifted about on the park bench, she looked in her purse to see if her keys were there, she called Roy to her and straightened his cap and pulled up his stockings — but at length, ignoring the interruptions, the thought completed itself: did she want another baby? Involuntarily she pressed her legs together, tight, and closed her eyes; then opened them again, and watched her hand carefully smoothing out the folds of her soft dark red skirt. Suddenly she smiled. Hardly. Hardly! Three were enough. Indeed, with those three she would soon be wanting something much more modest than a country home, unless something happened. A husband, perhaps. That was not as unthinkable as you might expect, but she would rather not. The perfect husband. Not any.

No. No more babies, thank you.

When Leah came, as usual, in the late afternoon of the day after the second phone call, and Lora asked her if she would stay with the children the following evening, she did not look up, and remained silent, bending over Morris’s crib with her back turned. There must have been something in the tone of the question that startled her. Finally, still without turning, she said with quiet fury:

“You’re going to do it again.”

Lora, setting the table for two, paused with the knives and forks in her hand.

“Do it?”

“Yes, you are.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes you do. Tomorrow night you’re not going to any movies with your friends. I won’t come. I won’t ever come again, and God will punish you.”

“I never said I was,” Lora protested. “I’m going to eat dinner properly with a middle-aged man.”

“God will punish you. I told Maxie a hundred times there was a devil in your womb. I told him a hundred times.”

Still she did not turn, and Lora, crossing over and standing behind her, leaned down and put her hands on the other’s fat shoulders and patted them gently. “I know,” she said. “Max told me; he shouldn’t have made fun of you. I don’t mind — perhaps I can get Anne to come.”

At this Leah straightened up, glared at her, and shouted, “If you ask that woman to tend Maxie’s baby I will never come here once more!”

“Well... if you won’t...”

“Don’t be a fool,” said Leah, and bent over the crib again.

The first dinner with Lewis Kane was dull, undistinguished, and interminable. It also appeared to be purposeless. Tall, correct, smoothly strong, a little short of fifty, with a firm discreet mouth and steady grey eyes, he sat and ordered an excellent dinner and with obvious difficulty hunted for something to talk about. Lora, amused, refused to help him. He didn’t matter anyway; she was being admirably warmed by her own fire. There was the mirror on the restaurant wall not ten feet away; and the green dress, though nearly a year old — Max had given it to her soon after Morris was born — was more becoming than ever. Any observer, on a guess, would have subtracted at least three or four years from her twenty-eight, and wouldn’t have guessed the children at all. The mirror showed the fine brown hair, almost red, red in the glancing light, the smooth white skin stretched delicately tight and sure over the cheek’s faint curve and the chin’s rounded promontory, and even the amber threads and dots in the brightness of the large grey eyes. The mirror showed this to her; as for Lewis, he had long ago said correctly, “You are more charming than ever,” and then, to outward appearance, had forgotten all about it. It puzzled her. What did he want? There was no gleam in his eyes, no invitation in his words; he sat and demolished a supreme of guinea hen calmly, leaving a clean bone and no fragments. The observer, invited to guess again, might have hazarded a lawyer with a not too important client or an uncle with a familiar niece, all talked out. After the dessert there were a couple of cigarettes, then an uneventful ride, soft and warm among the cushions of his big town car, back to Seventy-first Street, where he left her at the door.