Seed on the Wind

But when young men began to call at the Winter home it was not her mother, but her father, who acted — as it was described in Lora’s circle — goofy. He would sit in the living room where they sat, though he ordinarily read in the dining room because he thought the light was better. If he spent the evening downtown at a lodge meeting and on returning home found a young man — no matter who, for there were many — on the premises, Lora could see that he was furious, though he said nothing. He would certainly have kicked the cat, she thought, if there had been one. The difficulty was that he said nothing. If Lora asked whether she was to be permitted to have friends he would reply, certainly, of course, why not; and then proceeded to make all their lives miserable if a friend appeared. It was an attitude invulnerable because unexpressed; there was no word or action that permitted of challenge or even discussion; had Lora requested to be left alone in the living room when she had callers he would immediately have acquiesced and then have conveyed on every occasion, by word and tone and gesture too subtle to be seized on, that the arrangement was an outrage. He no longer told her to pull her skirt down or made observations regarding his devotion to decency; in much more concealed and effective ways did he gradually induce a highly charged atmosphere which in time brought upon his wife a condition of chronic pallid tight-lipped silence and began to make a noticeable impression even upon Lora’s young and hardy nerves. On one occasion at the end of her eighteenth year, returning in mid-evening from an automobile ride with Speedy Clarke, who was halfback on the high school team, being accompanied to the porch by her escort in spite of an obvious reluctance which had descended upon him when they turned into the Winter driveway, they found the scene suddenly flooded with light from the bulb on the porch ceiling; and almost instantly the front door opened and Mr. Winter emerged. “Good evening,” he said, looking at Speedy Clarke, and that burly athlete blushed, stammered incoherently, and fled. On the spur of the moment, standing there on the porch, Lora said:

“Why do you dislike him, Father?”

Mr. Winter seemed astonished. He didn’t dislike him, he said; quite the contrary, he was obviously a nice young fellow.

“Then why do you look at him like that?”

“I wasn’t aware that I looked at him like anything in particular.” He was frowning. “It’s customary, I believe, to look at people when you greet them.”

Lora took a sudden resolution. “Look here,” she said, “if I do anything you disapprove of why don’t you say so? You act as if you didn’t want me to have any friends at all.” As she spoke she became aware that the front door had not been entirely closed, and that from within her mother had approached and now stood with her face wedged into the narrow opening, silently regarding them on the porch, but she went on breathlessly, “You must know how you look at them, they all hate to come here. If you don’t want me to have anybody come to see me why don’t you tell me so?”

Her father’s expression did not change; he continued to frown. He spoke quietly. “This is somewhat unusual, isn’t it, reproaching your father like this? Especially since it is entirely uncalled for. To answer your question: even if I wanted no one to come to see you I see no reason why I should tell you so; you are old enough to have a right to your own whims and opinions. Anyway I don’t at all object to your having friends; not at all; nothing could be more natural. As to the way I look at them, I don’t know what you mean; I look as I look, that’s all.”

“They’re all afraid of you, you know they are.”

“I hardly think it is your place to tell me what I know.”

But she kept to the main issue, refusing to be sidetracked. She insisted, “All I want is, tell me what to do. If I’m to see people only at other places, all right, that’s all right. Pretty soon they’ll refuse to come here anyway.”

“I repeat, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

And all at once she hated him, despised his monstrous and meaningless pretense, despised it all the more for her bewildered inability to understand it. He must be, no doubt of it, he must be, in some obscure and limited manner, insane; yes, to put it plainly, he was crazy. She was frightened and profoundly repelled, and at the same time she wanted to laugh and dismiss it with a shrug of the shoulders; it was all so trivial, so absurdly childish, getting — all three of them — mixed up in these idiotic twistings and turnings about something which was of no real importance. What did she care whether Speedy Clarke, or anyone else, was permitted to come on that porch? It was fit only to be laughed at, she saying to her father, “You quit making faces at my friends,” and he replying, “I’m not making faces,” like two babies in the kindergarten and not very intelligent ones at that. Her father at least was old enough to know better.