“I... really... I—” She gave it up and threw back her head and laughed, a little louder and longer than need be, for she was on edge herself, not embarrassed exactly, but shaky a little, even a little indignant. She thought, he’s really an ass, the only thing he has forgotten is a pamphlet on hygiene.
An hour later she was in the room in front, in bed, with the covers turned down expectantly on the other side. A lovely, disturbing sight: her hair, almost black in the dim light, in sharp contrast to the white skin and the flimsy white gown, brushed smooth and glistening, seemed to whisper an invitation to urgent ravishing fingers; her bare arm curved across the coverlet; her half-exposed breast, large with milk, was at once shameless and a denial of shame. She was looking up and sidewise at Lewis Kane, who stood beside the bed wearing tan silk pajamas with enormous purple stripes, the corner of a white handkerchief sticking out of the breast pocket. He was standing up straight, and she thought to herself that he looked big and powerful and quite determined. And rather silly. She wanted to laugh again, as she had laughed in the other room.
“Do you want a drink of water, Miss Winter?” he asked. “No? I drank two glasses; I always do. I suppose I’d better turn out the lights. Do you want them all out?”
She said yes, and watched him go to the wall and press the switch, and then heard him return, more slowly but without hesitation, through the darkness. He got into bed, pulled up the covers, and lay on his side facing her and began at once to talk.
“It sounds pretty awkward, that Miss Winter. I think I shall have to call you Lora. You might call me Lewis, I suppose. These things seem unimportant, but we live so much by words and formulas that I imagine their effect is considerable — like the recoil of a shotgun. By the way, my uneasiness is over, thank heaven. One of us is to be congratulated — gallantry would say you.”
Lora, embarrassed at last, lay on her back without replying, her eyes closed. Why should she help him? It was he who wanted a son. If he thought he could get one by talking... But suddenly she felt his hands firmly and surely grasping her shoulders, the pressure gradually increasing, and she let her eyelids open — the barest slit — and smiled.
She awoke because something heavy was on her chest and it was hard to breathe. Struggling painfully out of sleep, she gasped for air and with an effort pushed out her upper ribs against the weight that restricted them. What could it be? There was pain too, a real pain... then as sleep left, memory came and she sat up in bed and cupped her hands under her breasts. They seemed to weigh a ton. The milk, of course. She hadn’t intended to go to sleep at all. What time could it be? Lewis’s deep breathing came regularly from the other pillow. She got to the floor, groped around in the dark for her clothing, dropped a stocking and found it again, and made her way down the hall to the sitting room and turned on the light. A clock ticking on the mantel said a quarter-past two. She yawned, rubbed her eyes, and smiled at the neat pile of Lewis’s clothing at one end of the long narrow table.
Half an hour later she was seated in the dining room at home, with Leah, who obviously had not slept at all, standing and glaring at her, while the baby industriously tried to make up for lost time. Lora was smiling and thinking to herself, “Certainly he needn’t have been so uneasy. It’s all a fake, his not feeling anything. His wife gave him a scare, that’s all.” She never saw the apartment again. A week later, at dinner with Lewis, at the same inconspicuous little restaurant, he expressed his belief that another effort might not be necessary; and in another fortnight she was able to announce the probability that he was correct. “Splendid, splendid!” he exclaimed as he dished the broccoli. She wasn’t surprised, she explained, she was that way, she needed no more than a hint. Lewis went on to say that he supposed she was up on all the modern technique, he felt that he could safely leave all that to her, but did she have a good doctor? No, she admitted, as a matter of fact she didn’t, Doctor Hardy was competent but too fussy; whereupon he produced from his pocket a card containing a name and address and telephone number, saying that he had made careful inquiries and that no better was to be had.
It was on the afternoon that Albert Scher came to visit his daughter and gave her another lesson in the esthetic necessity of removing the art of line from all contact with literature, that Lora first noticed a look of suspicion in Leah’s sharp black eyes. Of course Leah was always chronically suspicious, but this look was specific and direct. Bah, Lora thought, Leah had from the first been annoyed by Albert’s visits, infrequent and exclusively paternal though they were, and on this day the annoyance was increased to the point of rage by the doctor’s insistence that Morris be kept in the house. Nevertheless, sooner or later Leah would know, and there would be the devil to pay. A good thing she wasn’t Italian instead of Jewish; give that stuttering passion of hers a few drops of blood from the toe of the boot and the problem would be serious. But, thought Lora, that could wait; there were other more pressing problems. Should she begin taking money from Lewis? Bah, he wouldn’t be the first, why not? Was this the way women who were married felt about it? But she was much too realistic to let herself be confused by that quibble, she knew that had nothing to do with it; married or unmarried, the question is at bottom purely personal, each case unique. It was because Lewis was so damned direct, “For one male baby,” he said in substance, “delivered in good condition, complete, I’ll pay a thousand weekly installments of two hundred dollars each. Here’s the contract; look me up in Bradstreet’s.” Like that he would buy a baby. Oh, no, he wouldn’t; not her baby, not the baby she already imagined she was beginning to feel. But there was the rub; he really was going to pay adequately, more than adequately according to the current market. What, in fact, would be a fair and reasonable price for an A Number One baby, guaranteed pure and unadulterated? One-tenth of one percent benzoate of— Oh, piffle! His money was no different from any other money; what’s the use, why make so much fuss?
She got up and crossed to the dressing-table and sat there brushing her hair; from the next room she could hear Albert’s rumbling bass, the leaves of the portfolio turning, and now and then an exclamation from Helen or Roy; no doubt Albert would say at a fresh discovery of the esthetic delight of the pure line.
The following day even Doctor Hardy admitted that Morris’s breathing was above suspicion, and when Leah came in the afternoon she was allowed to bundle him into the carriage and take him to the park. Lora, leaning from a window, watched them safely across Central Park West; you could never tell when Leah’s contempt for an alien civilization might explode into a calamitous disregard of the physical properties of a speeding taxicab.
The rest of July and most of August were hot. The sun blazed down from above, and New York’s pavements took the heat, mixed it with a thousand odors, increased it by some secret process to the temperature of a blast furnace, and hurled it up into the gasping faces of its citizens. Lora stuck it out. It was far from pleasant, what with the irritability of the children, a two weeks’ indisposition of Helen’s, Leah’s torrents of perspiration, and the morning nausea, but though Lewis suggested an Adirondack hilltop or a place at the seashore, Lora decided that it wasn’t worth the vast complication of the journey. She took off her clothes and lay on the floor somnolent in the heat, or went to the park with Helen and Roy and sat gasping on the grass while they tumbled around oblivious to thermometers. At home the new Swedish maid, paid out of the proceeds of Lewis’s first checks, was sweating over the vacuum cleaner or the washtub.