Leah had come to the apartment twice, once the day before Christmas and once in February, and on both occasions had been refused admittance. The first time Lora, lying big on her bed, had not even seen her; the second time she had gone to the door and told her firmly that she might as well stop coming, it was impossible to trust her. Leah pled and threatened and wept, tried to kiss Lora’s hand, declared she would kill herself, asseverated once again that Maxie had not called his son’s mother a whore. At the end, feeling her cause hopeless, she stated categorically that Morris was not Maxie’s son anyway.
“Ha,” said Lora, “you’re right, he isn’t.” And at the new fury that blazed in the other’s eyes she hastily and forcibly closed the door against her and locked it.
It was hard to believe that Max had been Leah’s brother. Possibly he wasn’t; the faith in paternity is always more religious than scientific. He had been placid, agnostic and Occidental, with questionable traits from beyond the Aegean showing but rarely; as for instance when at their third meeting he had asked her to marry him and she had said no nor anyone, he had at once proceeded to try the other road. He had said immediately in his agreeable modest tones:
“You’re probably right; neither Yahveh nor Christ nor civil blessing could make it more agreeable to kiss your hand. Nor brighten the glory of your hair. I have never seen such beautiful hair. You’re right not to have it cut; I want to see it down over your shoulders.”
That had been on a September day in Union Square; Albert Scher had taken Roy, then a little more than three years old, to the Bronx Zoo, and Lora had as usual been six times around Union Square, with Helen, still in her first year, in the carriage with the broken wheel. Only a week had passed since Albert had brought Max to the diminutive flat on Eleventh Street at the dinner hour, having found him in a Fifth Avenue gallery examining with a magnifying glass a blue necklace on a Hals portrait. At that time Albert, big and booming and blond, midway between thirty and forty, was still doing galleries and exhibitions for the Star; Max, nearly ten years his junior, was beside him remarkably compact and swarthy.
“My friend, Max Kadish,” Albert announced from the threshold, “is going to grace our table. This, my boy, is Lora the Lorelei. Miss Lora Winter, permit me, engaged, as you see, in the miraculous process of turning beef stew into milk entirely without divine assistance.”
Lora, seated with Helen at her breast, unembarrassed and unruffled, looked up at them and smiled. “Not tonight he isn’t, there isn’t enough,” she said. “How do you do, Mr. Kadish; another time. You two go out and eat, there’s only enough here for me. You know I wasn’t expecting you, Albert.”
“Hell, we want an evening at home,” Albert protested.
Max spoke, diffidently. “If you would permit me, I am a very good cook, it would be a great pleasure — a big dish of scallopini for instance, and chicory with oil dressing...”
“It’s a lot of trouble,” said Lora.
“Grand idea!” Albert declared. “And a bottle of wine. We can do it in ten minutes. I’ll help.”
Out they dashed, and soon were back again, Albert with olives and wine and bread, Max with a package of meat and cans of mushrooms, string beans, tomato sauce, pimiento and olive oil. Lora had got Helen into her crib in the little back room, where Roy was already sound asleep.
“The door’s shut,” she said, “but for heaven’s sake be quiet anyway. I’ll set the table. Albert, you’d better go in front and look at pictures or something.”
“Do you realize,” Albert demanded, “that olive oil comes from olives? It’s incredible. Good god, think of the olives it must take.”
The scallopini was excellent, the salad delicious, the wine sour but possible. They sat on the wooden chairs in the kitchen and drank coffee for two hours, then Albert and Max washed the dishes while Lora went in front to feed the baby again.
“We have a swell maid,” Albert explained, “a wench from Alabama that looks like Aida except she’s cross-eyed, but she only comes four hours a day and if we don’t do these now we’ll have nothing to eat breakfast on. So Lora would say. I demur. The Romans used no dishes. Today, in a belt within twenty degrees of the equator north and south, precisely on the earth’s belly, there are half a billion people eating without dishes. In our decadence—”
The platter that had held the scallopini, now soapy and dripping, slipped from his fingers onto the floor, taking a carom off the garbage pail in its flight, and was shattered into a dozen pieces. Albert knelt, scooped the pieces together, and dumped them into the pail.
“In our decadence,” he repeated, “we make gods of bread-and-butter plates.”
A week later, the day they met in Union Square, Max told Lora that thanks to Albert he was already acquainted with a workable outline of her history. He had been told, he said, that she was twenty-six years old, had never been married, was intellectually and esthetically an infant, and was totally devoid of the vices of ambition, greed and curiosity. Lora merely smiled and let him hold her hand as they sat on the bench near the middle of the Square, though it was broad day and passersby were nudging each other and grinning at them. She didn’t notice; she was wondering about Albert. For one thing, he was becoming impossibly careless about money. Presumably he still had seventy dollars a week from the Star, reinforced by an occasional check for an extra piece, but the proportion that got to her had gradually decreased until now it was touch and go even with such essential items as the rent and the grocer’s bill and the maid’s modest wages. That Albert had ceased to be amusing was not intolerable, that had always been only a sideshow; but that he was apparently no longer amused threatened danger. She did not feel herself in competition with the rich young widow from West End Avenue who was suddenly finding Albert’s constant advice essential in her search for bargain Seurats and Gauguins, nor with the little blond art student, whose name she did not know, who was apparently a successful candidate for a solider and less subtle seduction; merely they were menaces to the sternest of all her necessities; and if they could not be removed must be evaded. The difficulty about money, she knew, came from pure inadvertence; Albert got his pay on Tuesday, and on Thursday or Friday, when he got around to consideration of the responsibilities of a father and the head of a household, no one was more astonished and irritated than he to discover himself once again plunged into insolvency. “Nobody will ever succeed in persuading me,” he declared, “that the tendency of money to evaporate is controllable by human forces. So help me god, Lora mia, I had five tens in that very pocket yesterday morning.”
She would not, or could not, compete with the widow and the art student. The expedient of dragooning Albert on Tuesday evening, before the process of evaporation had set in, did not even occur to her. Just as her body was always her body, and Roy and Helen always her babies, so was Albert’s seventy dollars his money. It might by good fortune or the exigencies of existence become the grocer’s or the landlord’s or the maid’s, but never was any part of it hers.
She liked Max Kadish. Often that autumn he came early in the afternoon to the apartment on Eleventh Street, helped her get the baby in the carriage and Roy ready for the street, and walked with her to Union Square or Washington Square and sat with her on a bench while Helen slept and Roy chased his ball or bruised pedestrians’ shins with his scooter. When she protested that he must be neglecting his business he explained that in his line hours didn’t matter, the point was contacts. Yesterday, he said, to give an illustration, he had bought for his employers, a big and highly respectable firm, for the sum of twelve hundred dollars, a ring which they had sold two weeks ago for four thousand. His commission, as usual in such transactions, had been twenty percent of the gross profit. This particular ring was an uncommonly fine one; his firm had sold it no less than four times in the past year. Contrary to the popular belief, he said, it wasn’t always millionaires who bought nor chorus girls who sold; one of his best contacts was a woman who lived with her husband in a quiet little apartment on Lexington Avenue and gave teas at the Mayfair.