“You old fool,” said Lora. “Come, Leah, give him to me.”
Leah pushed up, shoving her mother from behind, and they ascended the few remaining steps to the landing, while Lora stepped back to give them room, stopping with her back against their door. With an effort she kept back, and kept her hands down; she didn’t like the look in Leah’s eyes.
“Give him to me,” she repeated.
Leah, her arms folded tightly around the bundle, seemed to speak without moving her lips,
“This is not your baby. Your baby is at home.”
“That’s a lie. Don’t be silly. Give him to me.”
“I will not. This is not your baby. You are a whore and there is a devil in your womb. Maxie told me that; he said, she is a whore, Leah, and my baby must go to you, my sister, and my mother. Now we have been to the rabbi and he is our baby; you can’t have him. If you try to take him you’ll see.”
“Max never said that,” Lora declared quietly. “Everything you say is a lie.” Plainly, she thought, they were both crazy; she should have brought someone, if only Albert Scher or the taxi-driver. Then she clenched her fists as she saw the bundle twisting around in Leah’s arms; from it came a whimper, then a louder one, then an open-mouthed yell.
“Get out of here, get away from our door,” said Mrs. Kadish. She took a step forward, so that scarcely a foot separated them, but fell back again, startled by a sudden blaze in Lora’s eyes. Leah too retreated; Lora’s tone was furious and threatening:
“So that’s it! You had him circumcised, did you! When you said rabbi I didn’t think — of course that’s it! Letting a dirty old man cut him with his filthy hands — I’ll have you arrested — you’ll go to prison, both of you — my god, you took him to a rabbi to be circumcised — here, Morris darling, baby darling, here you are, I’ll bet it hurts, of course it hurts, doesn’t it? All right, it’s Mother, darling.”
The baby, still yelling, was in Lora’s arms, without anyone knowing precisely how it had got there. Leah, whose face a moment before had seemed darkly and dangerously menacing, now looked merely foolish; her mother spoke in a confused torrent of indignation and dismay, shouting above the yells from the baby:
“That is not so! When you say the rabbi’s hands are filthy it is not so and God will punish you! Anyway if a thousand rabbis’ hands was filthy who would that send to prison? I ask you, in this country do they put you in prison for dirty hands? It was the truth Leah spoke, my Maxie said it, you are a whore, Miss Winter!”
“Sh-sh-sh, all right, darling, all right, sh-sh-sh!”
The yells became again a whimper, then that too ceased.
“Be quiet, Momma,” Leah was saying. “She wouldn’t have us arrested, be quiet. Listen, Miss Winter.” She put her hand on Lora’s arm and her voice trembled. “Let us have him. You don’t care, you don’t love him. I thought you wouldn’t care. You’ve got two more and soon you’ve got another one. Momma and me, we haven’t got anything since Maxie died. Please let us have him.” Two big tears came out of the corners of her eyes and zig-zagged down her cheeks, more followed, and she wiped them off with her hand, leaving wide marks clear to her ears. “For God’s sake, Miss Winter, please let us have him.” More tears came, and her voice broke. She got out, “Maxie didn’t call you a whore,” and then buried her face in her hands.
“I’m sorry,” Lora said. She moved to the head of the stairs, around Mrs. Kadish, who didn’t budge, and the baby whimpered a little. “Sh-sh-sh, all right, darling. I’m sorry. I’ll send the blanket back tomorrow, I need it now to keep him warm. You hurt him, damn it. If there’s an infection or anything I will have you arrested, both of you, and the rabbi too, so you’d better tell him to pray.”
Halfway down the first flight she called up, “I’m sorry, Leah. Goodbye.”
There was no reply; but when she got to the lower hall Mrs. Kadish’s voice, indignant, suddenly came from above:
“Wait a minute! Miss Winter! What about the money? The money Leah left — eighty-seven dollars—”
She shouted up, “Send the clothes back and I’ll send the money.”
“Wait a minute! You can take—”
The banging door ended it. Lora, in the outer vestibule, got her coat buttoned and her gloves on. The air was so cold it pinched her nose. She had to go to Eighth Avenue to find a taxi, and then it stopped so far from the curb that she slipped and nearly fell making the step.
“I’m sorry,” said the driver, “I didn’t see you had a baby.”
“You’re half blind as it is, I’ve got two,” she laughed.
“Nuts,” he said cheerfully, putting in the gear.
It was well past midnight when she got home and found Hilda seated at the dining-table with her head pillowed on her arm, sound asleep, an enormous piece of brown Swedish bread with a thick layer of butter clutched tightly in her hand.
That was the twelfth of December. On January sixteenth, missing Panther’s anniversary by just three days, she had Lewis Kane’s son, de luxe, in a commodious corner room of the Poole Hospital, with two special nurses and nine vases of flowers. She counted them many times in between the pains. The nurse in charge of vital statistics was somewhat bewildered; the information given did not seem to fit the mother’s competent and business-like assumption of her position and its responsibilities. What were things coming to, she wondered indignantly, if the unmarried ones were going to act like veterans, without shame and without remorse? She couldn’t help admiring Lora, but didn’t like her at all.
Lewis Kane did not come to the hospital. His first sight of his son Julian was at the age of ten days, in the apartment on Seventy-first Street. The new crib was in Lora’s bedroom, against the wall where the bureau had been; she sat in an easy chair by the window wearing a pale green negligee, a book in her lap and a tea-tray on a little table at her side.
“You know,” said Lewis, touching the tiny sleeping infant with a fearful and reluctant finger, “I believe that with George and Julia I felt unconsciously, even at the time, that they were not mine. Perhaps I imagine it, but this one does seem different. I suppose you are right to stay on here for the present; May should not be too early for the country, that will be only three months. I’m glad your milk is adequate; you don’t overlook anything, do you? The whole thing is very satisfactory, very.”
He turned and approached her.
“I believe I will have a cup of tea after all.”
V
That spring she wrote a letter to her father and mother, the first in two years.
I haven’t a husband yet, but I have another baby. A boy, and the best yet, I believe. That makes four in case you’ve lost count. He looks a little like you, Dad, with his eyes wide apart and his nose as straight as a rifle barrel. Of course his own father thinks he looks like him, but he really doesn’t at all. He was born on January 16th, so he’s nearly three months old. By the way, Morris’s father, Max, you remember I told you, the Jewish jewelry salesman, is dead. He got pneumonia and his heart was weak the doctor said a year ago last March. Morris is over two years old now and has the funniest little nose, I wish Max could see him. I wish you could see all of them — maybe some day we’ll pay you a visit.
When it was finished she read it through twice, slowly, her brows drawn together and her lips closed tight. They’ll read it all right, she thought; they’ll leave it lying around for a day or two unopened and she’ll finally open it and read it and then he’ll read it too. Before sealing the envelope she went through a drawer of snapshots and enclosed a dozen or more. Several were of Leah, with Morris — on her lap, in her arms, held perched on her shoulder — and Lora shook her head at them. It’s too bad, but I can’t help it, she thought.