Seed on the Wind

Nevertheless she hated him, and for the first time the hatred was in her voice as she flung at him:

“All right, if you won’t say what you think, but you might as well know right now you’re not going to do to me what you’ve done to Mother. I won’t stand for it.”

There was an immediate reply, but it came in a thin tense voice from the crack in the door:

“Leave me out of it, child, just leave me out of it. You go right on, I’ll take care of myself.”

She’s afraid of her life, Lora thought, she’s scared stiff. Her father turned to observe disdainfully towards the crack, “Oh, you’re there, are you,” but the face had disappeared. Then he turned back to Lora, and she saw that his face had suddenly gone red and his hands were trembling.

“What have I done to your mother?” he demanded.

Lora did not answer. She knew what it meant when he looked like that, though she had seen it but seldom; and without stopping for consideration, either of valor or of policy, she fled. She darted past him toward the door which still stood a little open, burst through it, and was halfway up the stairs on the way to her room before he could have had time to move. Inside her room, she closed the door and locked it; then deciding that to be an unnecessarily theatrical gesture, she turned the key back again, but left the door closed. She observed that she was panting much more than was justified by a bound up the stairs on her strong youthful legs.

Sitting at her dressing-table and starting to do her hair, she was conscious of neither anger nor hatred; of no emotion whatever in fact except a feeling of emptiness and sour dissatisfaction. She wished vaguely that she had stayed for the explosion, something positive and definite at least might have come of it; but she knew it was well that she hadn’t; he might have kicked her; not to be funny about it, he might really have done something terrible. She heard her mother’s light hesitating footsteps on the stairs, and some ten minutes later her father’s heavier confident ones; neither approached her door; she heard each time the door of their room open and close. This night she was struck with fresh and increased horror on consideration of a fact which had seemed to her incongruous and grotesque for as long as she could remember: the fact that her father and mother slept in the same bed. However incredible — in view of their waking relations — it was unquestionably so; in childhood she had on various occasions actually seen it; and to this day circumstantial evidence proved that the strange practice persisted, unless she was to suppose that one of them slept on a chair. Maybe they took turns. Maybe Father perched on the footboard. She giggled to herself, her nerves still on edge a little, opened the windows, turned out the lights, and bounced into bed.

That was all. Nothing happened. In June she finished high school, and having decided against college and being impelled toward no particular vocation, found herself without any functional activity save the desultory continuation of her piano lessons. There was nothing for her to do at home; her mother always said that there was scarcely enough to keep herself and the maid occupied. Mr. Winter, holding that automobiles were dangerous, refused to buy one, though he could easily have afforded it, since the business of his hardware store, wholesale and retail, continually prospered — and though Lora had long since learned to drive the cars of her friends. She was not at all bored; she played golf and tennis, danced, rode horseback now and then at the home of a friend a few miles out of town, took her piano lessons, went to the movies once a week, played bridge occasionally, and as opportunity offered permitted kisses to any one of a dozen young men — boys rather — in the circle of her orbit.