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.
VII
By May she was broke. She took a necklace out of the brass box which she kept in a locked bureau drawer; she knew that it had cost Max four hundred dollars and that its current retail price was at least a thousand. The pawnshop on Columbus Avenue offered her a loan of three hundred, or three seventy-five outright. She put it back in her purse and went to a jeweler’s shop on Broadway; his offer, cash, was even less. The next afternoon she took it downtown and Max’s firm paid her five hundred and fifty dollars for it. “It’s a high price,” said the ugly and kindly old Jew, smiling at her like a grandfather, “but Max was a good boy and we like to do all we can...”
If Lewis Kane had telephoned in May instead of seven months later when the brass box was all but empty, he might not have fared so well. Lora was pretty well done with men, she thought, there was something wrong with all of them. Women were worse. This time I mean it, she said. Anne Seaver, informed by Albert of Max’s death, had been sympathetic and helpful; but Anne herself was so lugubrious at bottom, even when she laughed her short sharp laugh with her white teeth showing, that a day or two of her was enough. She had tried to keep Lora away from the funeral, but Lora wouldn’t hear of it. The day after Max’s death the Kadish tribe — mother and sister, uncles and aunts and cousins — had presented a demand for his body, and Lora had consented without a struggle. “Max himself would be the least concerned, he would be the first to say it isn’t worth fighting about,” she told Albert Scher, who was for grimly withstanding the Oriental hordes, as he called them. But Lora insisted on attending the funeral, and she went with Anne and Albert on either side of her and Morris in her arms; she insisted on that too. It was there that she first saw Leah; she did not really see Mrs. Kadish, who was swathed in veils with only her eyes showing.
It was a month later that the bell rang one afternoon and Lora, opening the door, saw Leah standing before her, her black eyes glowing with desperate resolve.
“I want to see Maxie’s baby,” she said.
“You’re Leah.”
“Yes.”
“Well. Come in.”
That first day she wouldn’t sit down; she stood by the crib and looked at him, and when he awoke and Lora picked him up she turned without a word and departed. In a week she was back again; by June she was there nearly every day. Lora didn’t mind; it was a nuisance, but also a convenience, especially after she let the nurse go and had the maid only four hours a day. She had begun to draw in her ropes, wondering what she was coming to. Max had once said something about insurance, but she couldn’t remember what it was, and there was nothing among his papers regarding it. Albert consulted a lawyer friend and the lawyer, so he reported, “communicated on several occasions with the mother and sister of the deceased,” but nothing came of it.
Albert indeed was a source of astonishment the first months following Max’s death; voluntarily and for no discoverable reason he seemed to be reassuming a share of the burden of which he had so providentially been freed. Lora was surprised and touched, but skeptical, and a little wary. Often he came for dinner and stayed the evening; or he would come in the early afternoon and spend hours on the floor with Helen and Roy in endless impromptu games or with blocks or picture-books. Helen, he declared, was responding splendidly to his experiment; her esthetic sense was obviously far finer than Roy’s, who would probably end in a stockbroker’s office. He devised various tests and kept records of the results; for example, Helen, on three different occasions placed within reach of a chair on which had been deposited, side by side, a daffodil and a can opener, each time grabbed the daffodil and made off with it; Roy, under similar conditions, took the can opener twice and the third time ignored both of them. Another test was snapshots. Six of them were placed in a row on a chair and Helen instructed to choose one; she selected one of Lora standing beside a rhododendron bush in Central Park. It was replaced; and in his turn Roy, with a brief glance down the line, took an automobile, a big handsome car which Lora had snapped beside the curb one day to use up a roll of film. Could anything be plainer, Albert demanded. Wasn’t it obvious that Helen saw the composition and the line, whereas Roy saw nothing, he merely reacted to an acquisitive instinct?
“It’s much too simple,” said Lora. “What about me for instance? I’d take this one.”
She picked up a group, taken by her only a couple of weeks before Max’s death, in the park; the ground was covered with snow, Max stood with the baby in his arms, Albert was beside him with Helen and Roy perched on his shoulders. It had turned out so well that she had had an enlargement made and sent it to her parents, with a note on the back explaining identities and relationships.
“Sure you’d take that one,” Albert laughed. “If you ever had an esthetic impulse it died the day Roy was born. Maybe before that, I don’t know what may have happened to you in some savage province B.C. Before Conception, that means. It also means Birth Control, though I blush to mention it in your presence. I know what it was, out beyond the mountains, beyond all the mountains — in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for instance, that’s a romantic spot — you were raped by the devil and begat an Imp of Fecundity, only you forgot to let him out. He’s still in there, running the show—”
“You’re a fool, and you talk too much,” Lora said; and gathered up the snapshots and returned them to the drawer.
All this time, probably unknown to himself, he had a surprise in store for her; it kept itself in reserve another month or so, and then, on an afternoon in May, the very afternoon she took the necklace downtown and returned with a check for five hundred and fifty dollars in her purse, it burst forth. On her return she found Albert seated on the stoop, his hat pulled over his eyes, half asleep in the sun.
“Where the hell is everybody?” he demanded. Lora explained that Leah had gone to the park with the children and that she had been downtown on an errand. He had tried the park, but hadn’t found them, he said, out of sorts; then went upstairs with her and helped wash the dishes from lunch. Afterwards, in the living room, he said he guessed he would go, no telling when Leah and the children would return; and then, suddenly and without warning, Lora found herself in his arms, his lips violently upon hers, his hands resuming long-relinquished privileges. Taken completely by surprise, for an instant bewildered, she merely submitted; tardily she got her hands against his shoulders and pushed, throwing back her head, but he was a giant against her little efforts and at once had her lips again and lifted her in his arms. She ceased struggling, aware of his fumbling at the fastening of her dress, then feeling herself carried to the couch against the wall, where he put her down, following her without freeing her lips. “The fool, the damn fool,” she was thinking; and finally, getting an arm free she reached up, grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled as hard as she could. He let out a yell and released her; she hung on, still pulling; he seized her wrist and jerked it away, then got to his feet and stood there, panting, looking down at her. She twisted around and sat on the edge of the couch, panting too.