Hurrah nine pound baby boy born July twentieth named Leroy mother and child doing nicely father not to be found.
The girl at the desk counted the words and surveyed her with cold hesitation, wondering, perhaps, if this should not be refused on the ground of obscenity; but finally mumbled, sixty-nine cents. She added mechanically, “Your address at the bottom in case of reply.”
“It isn’t necessary,” said Lora, paid and departed.
The man with no eyebrows she called, in her mind and to Albert, Daintico. His name was Holcomb Burleigh. The third day she went there he asked her to dine with him; she declined, saying that she never went out evenings, she had to stay with her baby.
“I know, Scher told me,” he said. “You’re a brave little woman, Miss Winter. A noble woman.”
“Sure,” Lora said.
A week later he asked her again; arrangements could be made about the baby, he suggested. No, Lora said, she wouldn’t like to do that. Lunch then. Goodness, no, lunch was impossible, she always went out with the baby at noon and stayed three hours; that was more impossible than evening even, for then he was usually asleep. Daintico blinked at her and appeared to give it up.
But two months later he presented her with a problem. In the meantime she had had other jobs which Albert found for her — a life class that met once a week, a man who did North Africa and Hawaii for a travel bureau, a young woman who painted her in pink and purple vertical lines and called it simply and unassailably, Study. She was sufficiently good-looking, especially her fine brow and eyes and the clear living quality of her skin, but it was her glorious wealth of hair and the rarity of her type that brought her, finally, more offers than she could accept. Soon Albert’s offices were no longer needed; she could choose and reject; and when he brought her another summons from Daintico she hesitated, then decided her first client should not be abandoned.
He used her for an outing series for a fashionable sports apparel shop. This, she thought, was ridiculous, it should have been a bobbed-hair flapper; what was the matter with him? She found out one day towards the end, she was to return only once more, when he took her hand suddenly, kissed it, and with a quiet and remarkable dignity asked her to marry him.
The next day, seated on a bench in Washington Square with Roy’s carriage beside her, wrapped in a thick wool coat with a fur collar against the December wind, she told Albert about it. He often joined her there, usually briefly, sometimes sitting with her for an hour or more. Now and then he even pushed the carriage as they encircled the Square, amusing Lora with his unconscious defiant glare at the casual glances of passersby.
“You misunderstood him,” Albert declared. “If Burleigh ever marries he’ll have to be kidnapped. He was reciting poetry.”
“He made it fairly clear,” said Lora. “He said he would ask me only to exchange Miss Winter for Mrs. Burleigh and let time defeat him or make him the happiest of men.”
“I told you it was poetry,” He glanced at her, frowning. “I might have known it would be something like this. A cottage at Great Neck, a new carriage of art wicker for the baby and a nurse with sterile rubber gloves, even a chauffeur perhaps if all goes well... Ha! To this, Venus has come.” He got to his feet, thrust his ungloved hands into his overcoat pockets, and stood looking down at her. “Listen, Lora mia.” That was the first time he called her that. “The baby could be put down to accident and ignorance; I forgive it. It is at any rate an inescapable prostitution, impossible to approve but necessary to condone. But to prostitute that divine body to a clipped lawn and a solarium is an intolerable affront to beauty. You’ll rot; the first of each month, promptly, he’ll pay the rent and the grocer’s bill, and each Saturday night, promptly too, you’ll pay your share of it. To escape that repulsive routine is the first necessity of a decayed and degenerated race. It began fifty thousand years ago when some hairy fool, sick perhaps from over-eating, first discovered that instincts were negotiable. Now we have nymphomaniacs and Lesbians, neurotics and prostitutes, wives and husbands, but Venus and Adonis are dead. Spermatozoa, once laughing children at play innocent even of curiosity, are skinny underpaid old men carrying indecipherable messages from one sickroom to another. The day you marry Holcomb Burleigh I’m going to wear a black band around my sleeve and get drunk.”
“That’s too bad, we’d like to have you at the wedding.”
“Go to hell.”
“What are spermatozoa?”
“You’re too young to be told such things.”
“I’ll ask Roy.” She leaned over the side of the carriage, where he lay with wide-open roving eyes, smiling as he saw her face above him. “Baby, tell me, honey, what are spermatozoa?” She went on without looking up, “Of course you know I told him I wouldn’t marry him.”
“Ha! You’ll marry him.”
She shook her head, making sure the blanket was well tucked in around the edges. “I’m cold, I’ve got to move around.” She stood, shivering a little. “I wouldn’t marry him if he were as handsome as you and as rich as Rockefeller. I wouldn’t marry anybody.”
“If you mean that, Lora mia, I’ll make the band a flaming red and wear it every day.”
“Well, I mean it. Come on, let’s walk.”
She never saw Daintico again, nor heard from him.
With the passing months she wondered mildly about Albert. What was it that moved him, selfish as he was, to devote so many of his hours to her? He said he loved to look at her, that it cooled his eyes to let them serenely enjoy her living loveliness, aloof alike from passion and from puzzles of technique. Having no such high opinion of her comeliness, she doubted this esthetic detachment, but she had to confess that he carried it off. As she knew, there was an apartment on Bank Street and a studio in Patchin Place where he was a privileged and favored visitor; a thousand morsels of Village gossip floated to her as she stood, draped or naked, on rugs or platforms, wondering whether Eileen had found the baby’s rattle or deciding what to take in for dinner — for long since she had moved into a large room downstairs, with a bath partitioned off in one corner and a sink and gas-plate in another. With hot soup and some chops and potatoes and a salad, she loved to sit in the big soft chair and eat leisurely, Roy in his crib not ten feet away against the wall, within her view, his eyes shaded by a scarf draped over the side of the crib, with a magazine or novel on the table beside her plate. It amused her sometimes to feed him and eat her own meal simultaneously; the double sensation brought a confusion of pleasure and each stimulated the other. “Wait a minute,” she would say, “the salad comes next, can’t you wait a minute, pig? Not there, you ninny, this one is the salad.”
She had never seen the studio, nor the apartment, nor the tenant of either, but she had heard all about them. One, Marie Stoeffer, tall and dark and not too young, was a secretary in an office downtown; the other, Anita Chavez, also dark but not so tall and much younger, modelled furs at Russeks. What she chiefly overheard regarding them was the argument, often repeated, now desultory, now furious, as to whether either knew of the other’s existence. Obviously not, one side declared, since the fiery Anita if she knew would stick daggers both in Albert and in her rival, and the dignified Marie, if she even suspected, would put a new lock on her door.
At about this point Lora would decide to try hamburger and onions for dinner, and not have any salad.