Seed on the Wind

This was in November, more than two months after their first dinner together — a dinner which Lora never remembered without a quiet inward smile and a chuckle of incredulity at the verisimilitude of memory. She had supposed when she left the office with him that Saturday afternoon that they would drive somewhere in his car and later eat at some outlying roadhouse or at one of the well-known uptown places — for she knew that Steve had an extraordinary salary out of all proportion to his age — among the girls at the office it was commonly reported to be a hundred dollars a week or more. But instead he had driven around the park for an hour or so, apparently preoccupied, talking very little, and then headed downtown, down Seventh Avenue, halting the car finally in front of a dingy red brick building in a part of town she had never seen before. The sign at the nearby corner said Bank Street.

Steve was fumbling with a bunch of keys, locking the car. Without looking up he explained that he had given up his place in Brooklyn and had taken some rooms here, a little apartment in fact — and he had thought it might be nice — he hoped she wouldn’t mind...

Lora saw that he was stammering, almost incoherent with excitement; his hand trembled so he couldn’t get the key in the hole.

The ride had made her hungry. “What about dinner?” she asked.

“It’s coming — that is — I’m having it sent in. From Chaffard’s, in a taxi.” He looked at his watch. “Seven o’clock, I told them. It’s six-thirty. We could have a cocktail...”

Lora looked at him, the man of action, and considered. He has no more idea what he’s doing than the man in the moon, she thought; and she pitied him and felt suddenly tender toward him with all her twenty years.

“What’s the matter, won’t it lock?” she asked.

“Yes. It’s all right now.”

He made the cocktails in the kitchen. After she had taken off her hat and jacket and looked at her hair in the mirror on the wall of the front room, and powdered her nose, she went to the kitchen and watched him, sitting on the wooden chair in the corner. She saw that the refrigerator was stocked with ice, and oranges and grapes and a melon; on another shelf was bacon, milk, butter and cheese; and in a cupboard at one side was a conglomerate array, everything from salt and pepper to two tins of caviar. She observed that he must have been living here quite a while, but he said no, he had moved in only the day before.

She liked the bitter cocktails, and they drank the shaker empty, sitting on the couch in the front room. It wasn’t a couch precisely; it was low and very wide, with neither head nor foot, with a soft dark blue coverlet. Steve gulped the cocktails down, but said little, and seemed immensely relieved when the doorbell rang to announce the arrival of the dinner. They both helped the waiter arrange it on the oblong table against the wall: salami and olives and anchovies, a whole roast chicken smoothly brown and glistening, peas in tambour shells, stringy crisp potatoes, an enormous fruit salad, and two bottles of wine.

“It’s enough for a whole family,” Lora said. “And two bottles! We’ll both be drunk.”

“It’s quite mild, just something to wash it down,” said Steve.

The cocktails seemed to have dissolved his excitement; he carved the chicken neatly and expertly, explaining that he had performed that duty at home for years. “Father doesn’t carve well,” he said, “he maintains that after he gets the legs cut off he can’t tell which is front and which is back.” Later, when their plates had been once emptied and refilled and the first bottle was nearly gone, he got started on the war. He had about decided to enlist, he said, and now with the draft on he wished he had; certainly it was more honorable to go voluntarily than to be forced into it. Not that he approved of war, no man of sense did, but one had to accept the liabilities of citizenship along with its benefits. His mother didn’t want him to go. Only yesterday he had had a letter from her, saying that the only thing worse than having her son murdered would be to have him a murderer. Of course she didn’t mean that literally, it was just her way of putting things.

He got up to take the empty wine bottle to the kitchen and open the second one, and came back and refilled their glasses.

“I mustn’t drink any more,” Lora protested. “My head is like a merry-go-round already.”

“It’s quite mild, quite mild,” he insisted. His eyes, shining, seemed a little uncertain of their focus. “Oh, I forgot, I ought to make coffee. Should we have coffee?”

“I don’t care. If you want it.”

Standing, he served the salad, spilling a little over the side of the dish and letting it lie there on the tablecloth.