Seed on the Wind

“Oh, be quiet!” the man exclaimed. “Here, hold this end. Look, Helen, look here, see the panther? With the grass all around him? These pictures were made by a man in Africa — wait, get your geography, Roy — no, no matter, no matter — see the panther, Helen? Isn’t he lovely? Wouldn’t you like to be a panther and lie in the grass? That would be a good name for you — Panther. I’m sick of Helen anyway. I think we’ll have to call you Panther. Lora!” He raised his voice to carry to the bedroom. “Lora, we’re going to call Helen Panther! What do you think of that?”

He felt a hard grasp on his arm and turned to find Leah there, her black eyes flashing menace. “It don’t matter you think if you wake up a sick baby,” she spat. “You should care if Maxie’s baby dies.”

“Oh, I forgot. I’m sorry. Really.” He turned another page of the portfolio.

Roy was making faces at Helen and repeating over and over, “Panther, Panther, Panther...”

Leah shrugged her shoulders, tiptoed across, and silently opened the door into the room where Morris lay.

Lora, in her own room with the door shut, was lying on the bed, on her back, her eyes closed. She was tired, not painfully tired, but she needed to rest, and to get away from the people out there. It was amazing how complete an annoyance Albert Scher could be — mild enough, nothing desperate, but completely an annoyance; and as for Leah — oh, well, it didn’t matter. All that did matter was inside her, in her womb. She loved the word, though she never spoke it. Now she repeated it aloud to herself, “Womb, womb.” Heavens, what a word! No man ever thought of it, a woman did that. Within her own was a warm comfortable feeling, full and pleasant. That’s ridiculous, she thought, it’s too soon to feel that way. I just imagine it. She placed the palm of her hand flat on her abdomen, but the dress was too thick to feel properly, so she unhooked it at the side and pulled up the underwear and got her hand against the warm bare skin and rubbed it, gently back and forth, up and down, from right to left and back again, then let it lie there, still. Ridiculous, she thought, I just imagine it.

Yes, she was tired; she had been going since early morning. Doctor Hardy had been a nuisance, fussing around; that baby was perfectly all right, he breathed like a top. A top doesn’t breathe. All right, all right. If Leah loved him so much, why didn’t she wash out his diapers once in a while? But that was unfair; Leah was really a big help. Only there was that to be done, and feeding the others, and getting her own breakfast and lunch — squeezing ten oranges and straining the juice took half an hour. She would have to stop nursing the baby, that was too bad; anyway, it would take more time to attend to his bottles, and heat the milk, and mix that stuff in it... Leah was so tragic about everything, could she be trusted to do it right?

Even with Leah coming in nearly every afternoon, and the colored girl for three hours each morning except Sunday, there was too much to do. She wanted time to read a little, to get her stockings and dresses fixed up, to get a manicure and a shampoo with Nouveautone... Why then did she not accept Lewis Kane’s offer and let him furnish the money for a nurse and a full-time maid, the rent for a larger apartment, a car to go around in? She made a face at the ceiling. Damn his money. Damn every-body’s money. Not that she had any neat conviction of superiority to it, or any harassed spirit of personal independence against a world of threatening and malevolent impingements; she was merely irritated at its elusiveness. Apparently, she thought, there was no hole deep enough to give it, buried, the peace of security; those who had it seemed to be compelled to hold on with finger-muscles strained even more frantically than those who were still grabbing for it. She had had to grab for it too, but never with any great degree of violence; she had been lucky. “I’ve been lucky all right,” she said aloud to the ceiling. Then suddenly she shivered and closed her eyes, and her hand, still inside her clothing next to the skin, was pressed tight and tighter against her firm round belly. “I’ve been lucky about money,” she said.

Nevertheless Lewis’s offer must be accepted, soon. Soon it would be a necessity. And why not? Was she not carrying his son? Daughter? No. He was determined it should be a son. What if there should be five daughters one after another? Ten. Twenty. A thousand; an endless sequence of daughters, all in a row, the most recent an infant at the breast, the earliest a towering giantess with her head bumping the moon. Or even if it were just a thousand, that would be nine thousand months, nearly a thousand years — more than seven hundred anyway... Maybe some of the old Jewish women in the Bible actually did it...