On Max, as it turned out, Albert’s commiseration was wasted. With the two children, whatever their names might be, he assumed at once all the concern and responsibilities of a happy father. Often, downtown, he had eaten lunch with Lora and spent many afternoons with her, but after the establishment of the household in Seventy-first Street she never saw him after eleven in the morning or before seven in the evening. He must broaden his contacts and scare up all the business he could, he said; Lora’s wardrobe was deplorable, the furniture he had bought so hurriedly was unsatisfactory, and there was nothing Roy and Helen did not need and should not have. Lora was touched and amused by the sight of the twenty-six-year-old boy taking so enthusiastically upon himself the obligations whose proper roost was not only upon other trees but even in another forest; but Max didn’t need her pity either. When occasionally she remonstrated he would reply, “I know what I’m doing, dear Lora. As young as I am, I live my ideal; that is beautiful, almost as beautiful as you are.” But he was not always so serious about it; sometimes he even burlesqued his own gaiety, as when one evening, taking a bracelet from his pocket, a circlet of amethysts set in dull white gold, he held it dangling before her and, with lifted shoulders and eyebrows and palms turned upward, “Jewelry from contented Jews,” he said.
He would gladly have spent all his evenings at the apartment, but though Lora too would have been willing he wouldn’t hear of it. She must have diversion. Both a nurse and a maid he insisted on, and he arranged with the nurse to remain three evenings a week while he took Lora to a play or a concert, and a party now and then. Occasionally they even had dinner guests, Anne Seaver perhaps, or acquaintances of Lora’s from downtown or, more rarely, friends of Max’s; often Albert Scher. Lora enjoyed those evenings; it was pleasant and restful to sit at the end of the long table, with its smooth white cloth and shining silver and glass and the maid carrying dishes of steaming meat and vegetables and cool red and green salad, the children safely asleep behind the closed door, and Max saying with pride, “No, Lora can’t take any wine, not till the baby’s weaned; pass your glass, Mrs. Seaver.” It was rabbinical wine, quite good, and Lora regretted it a little; she hadn’t had a drink for four years, what with pre-natal and lactal periods overlapping as spring and summer, with autumn and winter entirely out of it. The plays and concerts she attended chiefly for Max’s sake; for the most part they bored her; she had never cared for the theatre, and music meant nothing to her but the mildly diverting pastime of trying to decide where it would go next. Except one night years before, when Steve Adams took her to a concert and the orchestra played a Brahms symphony…but that she had forgotten, that she would never remember. She had hated the name of Brahms ever since, and for a long while she had carefully kept herself away from music. If the grave of the past could not be entirely obliterated, at least the marked trails that led to it could be avoided.
One evening at a dance recital at Carnegie Hall, in the lobby during intermission, a man spoke to her—a tall middle-aged impeccable man with grey eyes. Then the man’s glance fell on Max at her side, and he nodded again, “Hello, Kadish. Lolita’s a sort of a bore, Miss Winter, don’t you think?” He was off again.
“I don’t remember that man, who is he?” she asked Max.
“Kane. Lewis Kane. He’s probably been around with Albert; he buys etchings. Downtown lawyer.”
“I don’t remember him. Is he one of your contacts?”
“Well…he’s a customer of the house. Nice fellow.”
At the end of the recital Lewis Kane was again suddenly beside them, inviting them to supper. Max, plainly astonished, glanced at Lora; she said no, she was sorry, she mustn’t keep the nurse up so late. Lewis Kane bowed himself away.
“We could have gone, Miss Ruggles is probably asleep,” said Max in the taxi.
It was that same evening, a mild evening in April, after they had got home and sent the nurse off for the night, and gone to the kitchen for sandwiches and grape juice, that she said to him suddenly:
“Well, we’ve done it. I’m going to have a baby.”
He dropped the breadknife and turned swiftly to look at her.
“No!”
“Yes.”
“Dear Lora. I can’t believe it.”
She put her hand on her dress, where Albert’s massive mountain once had been. “It’s here all right. Are you sorry?”
“I’m not sorry. I can’t believe it. Does it hurt?”
She laughed. “Of course not. Oh, lord, there goes half the chicken on the floor. It will hurt before it’s over, but I don’t mind. I’d like to be sure you really aren’t sorry.”
“You know what I said.” He had picked up the breadknife again, but now dropped it back on the table and went to her and gently grasped her arms from behind and smoothed them up and down. “I want whatever you want. I really don’t care a damn, I argued against it at first for your sake. I don’t want to hurt you, I don’t want anything to hurt you.…”
As they sat and ate their sandwiches and all the implications of this news began to find their places in his mind, he became more and more enthusiastic, more and more satisfied. “I begin to understand the patriarchs,” he declared. “Doubtless I shall understand them better. But I could never be one. To me you could never be a means, dear Lora; you justify yourself; I welcome this only because you want it. How I shall feel after he comes I don’t know—or she—”
He stopped, and suddenly exclaimed:
“When Momma hears of this! And Leah! Poor Momma. She’ll hang me by the beard of Moses, she’ll put a dybbuk in your soup—do you remember The Dybbuk?”
“I didn’t care for it,” said Lora. As a matter of fact, she had hated that play, and had left after the second act.
So much for that, she thought to herself that night in bed. He had really been very sweet about it. He would be. She wished he hadn’t mentioned the dybbuk, and then laughed at herself for having any feeling about it. Such demons were invented to scare children. Enough things could happen, god knows, enough to make you hold your breath till you die, until there was no more breath, without dragging in nonsensical fairy tales. She remembered the white face of that girl in the play, the slender beautiful arms uplifted in terror, the shriek of fear.…It was wicked to put such things on the stage, people were fools to make up lies like that.…
“My baby, my little live baby,” she whispered in the dark.
“What is it, dear?” Max murmured.
“Nothing. Prayers. I thought you were asleep.”
“Prayers?”
“Nothing.”
She stretched out her hand and patted his shoulder and then turned over, away from him.
As spring became summer and the weeks passed until half her time was gone it was increasingly a surprise to her that she did not resent Max. She didn’t understand it and it amused her. She would lie passive, aloof, her whole body relaxed and attending indifferently to its own affairs; that was to be expected; but why did she not with repugnancy close her lids upon his hot red face and staring devouring eyes, her ears to his gasping breath and incoherent murmurings; why did her lips and skin not shrink from his loose kisses and his clutching caressing hands? Even as she felt them she would lie idly and wonder; perhaps, she thought, it was because he demanded nothing of her, because she felt in him no tinge of resentment against her own passivity; he too was aloof, playing his own game as she was playing hers, though he would have been astonished and indignant if she had told him so. Once, as he dropped his head on her shoulder and for a moment did not move, she smoothed his hair and said quietly:
“It’s a terrible waste, isn’t it, Max?”
“My love,” he murmured.
“I thought so,” she smiled.
A little later, as he sat on the edge of the bed lighting their cigarettes, he asked, “What was it you thought?”
“What?”
“You said you thought so.”
“Oh. Nothing.”
“No, tell me, what was it?”
“Nothing. I just thought you wouldn’t hear me.”
“I did hear you.”
“You don’t know now what I said.”
“Sure I do, something about a waist, A terrible waist. I don’t know if you meant mine or yours. Yours isn’t terrible. It’s lovely, it gets lovelier every day.” He reached over and smoothed her body, languidly and tenderly on the thin nightgown, not without difficulty, for she was shaking with laughter at the inane and ridiculous pun.
“Go on and laugh,” he said. “Half the time I don’t know what you’re about. I don’t care. I know there’s a lot of you I haven’t got. Sometimes when you are in my arms I have a feeling it isn’t you at all, and if your eyes are closed I ask you to open them and when you do it is less than ever you. Then I forget, I no longer care, I do not even feel you, I feel only myself. And when it is all over there you are back again, beautiful, more beautiful than ever, smiling into my face. Where do you go? Why are you not with me? It doesn’t matter. I am happy.”
“Maybe it’s you who go.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He lifted her hand and covered her bare arm, systematically, with kisses to the shoulder.
When hot weather came he insisted on the seashore and they went for two months to a cottage on the south shore of Long Island. Endless afternoons Lora reclined in a chair under a huge umbrella, while Roy, now past his fourth birthday, played with other children in the sand, and Helen, just learning to walk, toddled herself from one sleep into another. Max would come out in the evening—business was slow, he said, with nearly everyone away from the city—Albert Scher spent a week with them, and Anne Seaver came for a Saturday and Sunday. It was at this time that Albert embraced his theory of esthetic education and put it into practice by drawing designs for Helen in the sand.
“Of course,” he would say to Lora, standing mountainous in his bathing suit, his hair pale as bleached straw in the sun and the skin on his shoulders a fiery red, “she wouldn’t understand if I tried to explain it. That must wait. For the present we merely put them before her in their simplest forms, a part of the very earth she walks on—unconsciously they make their picture in her mind.”
“It wouldn’t hurt to make them a little smaller,” said Lora, looking at the gigantic circle he had traced in the sand with intricate radii and tangents in all directions. “She isn’t six feet two.”
“Oh. By god, you’re right.” He turned to look, and instantly shouted, “Hey, Roy, let that design alone! Hey! You vandal, get off of that!”
In late September they returned to town, to the apartment on Seventy-first Street, and there, ten weeks later, at noon of a sunny crisp December day, the baby was born. The doctor had advised a hospital, but Max was against it, insisting she would be better cared for at home, and Lora was indifferent. At nine in the evening she went to bed, the doctor came, and a nurse was sent for. Max sat quietly in a chair in a corner of the room, watching every movement they made.
“You’d better go somewhere,” said the doctor. “Have you a friend nearby? Go and get some sleep.”
“I’ll stay here.”
“Then go in the other room. Go to bed. It’s all right.”
Max shook his head. “Let me alone.” A groan came from Lora’s bed and he trembled all over. “I don’t like this. Let me alone.”
He stayed. Once during the night he said to the nurse. “Good god, it’s silly. She’s worth a thousand babies. I didn’t want a baby anyway.”
“She was a baby herself once, Mr. Kadish.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
In the morning, when the pains were more frequent and at their worst, he held her hands for two hours; rather, he put his own in hers and stood with his feet braced, bending over so she could stay on her back, while her convulsive grip and tug crushed his knuckles and twisted the skin of his fingers. The doctor, returning, tried to get him away; he said, “This is none of your affair,” and wouldn’t budge. Towards noon Lora released him and pushed him off, with her hands and her eyes; he returned to his chair in the corner. When a little later he saw the nurse carrying something to the elaborately equipped table that had been set up on the other side of the room he didn’t know it was all over; he got up to see what she was doing, and she said savagely, “It’s a boy, and you get out of here. We’re busy, get out, I tell you.”
As he started toward the bed, where the doctor was, Lora said without opening her eyes, “It’s fine, get out, Max. Please get out.”
He turned and left without a word. In the dining room the maid met him with a tray of hot coffee and made him take a cup. “Miss Ruggles took the children to the park, it’s a fine day for babies,” she said. When an hour later the nurse went to tell him that the boy weighed eight pounds and that Lora was fast asleep she found him in the little bedroom in front, himself sound asleep on the floor beside Helen’s crib.
The next morning he sat in a chair beside her bed and read stories aloud. He wanted to hold her hand, but she said no, it made her nervous. He was amazed at how well she looked, not wan, not exhausted even, her grey eyes quick and bright and strong, “I’m always that way,” she said, “It’s hard while it lasts, but it’s wonderful.” She laughed. “You look as if you’d done it yourself.”
“I was a nuisance.”
“Oh, no. You were very nice. Go on and read to me.”
He chose the name Morris one evening a few weeks later as he sat and watched his son’s bedtime meal. Lora didn’t care, she said, names didn’t make any difference; and Max replied that he didn’t care much either, only if it was all the same to her they might as well call him Morris, the name of his younger brother who had died in childhood, years before. “I loved him more than I’ve ever loved anyone except you,” he said. “It would please me to call him Morris, if you don’t object.”
Lora nodded, closing the front of her dress and starting to hook it. To free her hands Max took the baby, deftly and properly, and held it in his arms, looking down at it.
“By the way,” he said, “shouldn’t we have him christened or something?”
Lora glanced at him. “By a rabbi?”
“Lord, no. I don’t know.”
“He’s already christened,” she said. “By his father and mother. That’s enough. You can sprinkle him if you want to.”
So Max, grinning, handed the baby to her and went to the kitchen and brought a bowl of water, dipped his fingers and sprinkled a few drops on the little fat red face.
“By authority of the goddess Lora, divine in Beauty and Grace, I christen thee Morris,” he said solemnly.
Lora, smiling, was wiping off the drops of water with her handkerchief.
By the time Morris was two months old Max had become completely a father. He was fond, solicitous, and inquisitive; he insisted on a weekly visit from the doctor; he tried to insist on a weekly test of Lora’s milk, but she laughed him out of it. This was a new experience for her, and she was alternately annoyed and amused. What an idea, for anyone to pretend to an equal—superior even—concern about her baby! He was polite about it, of course, but what nerve! As it went on, a faint alarm stirred within her, and she determined to put an end to it. He was a fine sweet boy and she was really very fond of him, but he mustn’t be permitted to get ideas fixed in his head.…
As it turned out, no action was ever required; for on a miserable raw wet day in March, the day that he had prepared to celebrate as marking the completion of his son’s third month, Max went to bed with a cold which within twenty-four hours the doctor pronounced pneumonia, and in less than a week he was dead.
The first day Lora got a cot and rigged it up for herself in the living room, with the baby’s crib beside it, and arranged their own room, with the big bed and the sunny windows, for Max. She spent very little time on her cot, for at first he insisted on her presence, he would take medicine or food from no one but her, and by the hour he would lie and stare at her without saying a word; if she left the room he would rise up and call for her, and try to get out of bed, and when she returned would have nothing to say but her name. It got him like lightning. When the delirium came he could be quieted only by her, and on the fourth and fifth nights she had her cot moved in beside his bed and lay there in the dim exasperating light, with the nurse upright on a chair against the wall; when he moved and began to murmur or cry out Lora, at once on her feet bending over him, would touch him, grasp his arms, and talk to him. She wondered that he did not once speak of Morris.
When the delirium left he was so weak that he could not lift his hand; he could not even smile, though Lora saw that he tried to as she leaned over to wipe his brow or arrange his pillow. It was his heart that did it; no good, the doctor said. He did once insist on talking and managed it with a great effort, while Lora was alone with him, holding his hand. She could see the effort in his eyes.
“Dear Lora,” he said.
“Sh, be quiet, dear,” she whispered.
“Thank god for this,” he said. “I thank god for it. I was just fooling myself. I would have hated to go on fooling myself all my life. Momma and Leah will say you killed me. Don’t believe them. They’re terrible hateful people. They’re right though. You killed me, dear Lora.”
She drew back as if he had struck her, took her hands away, then for a moment controlled herself.
“Max darling, that’s a wicked lie,” she said.
But abruptly she got to her feet and left the room; in the living room she stood, quivering with a remembered terror, her face white. Again she controlled herself. He’s sick, he’s going to die, he doesn’t know what he’s saying, she forced herself to think; and swiftly she got Morris, sleeping, from his crib and went back to the sick man’s room. The nurse had returned from the kitchen and was bending over Max with her finger on his pulse. Lora advanced to the bedside with Morris in her arms.
“Max dear,” she said softly, “here’s your baby.”
But he did not hear, for he was dead; Lora saw it on the nurse’s face. She said nothing; she stood a moment, then went back to the living room and put Morris back in his crib; he had not awakened.