It was a little after that that he took the flat on Eleventh Street; he had a little furniture of his own, and Lora took the few pieces she had bought: the crib and the carriage, of course, and the easy chair and the screen with a hole in it. They bought a new bed, a big wide one with coiled springs and a new mattress. Lora said nothing of the money she had in the savings bank — a new crib was going to be needed, and lots of other things. She was ready also to yield to his insistence on a doctor instead of a midwife, though she doubted if it would make any difference; it was in there, and it had to come out, and that was all there was to it.
Distinctly she did not want Albert any more. She still liked to hear him talk and have him around, and it was convenient that he was often ready to take Roy somewhere or stay with him when she needed to go shopping, but she wished they had separate beds. She didn’t mind him really; she just didn’t want him. The chief trouble was the necessity of concealing her indifference and coldness, for she felt she owed that to him. Not wanting to hurt his feelings, she used the old gestures and phrases and accepted the old refinements and ingenuities, and it was really quite a bore. At length she decided that he must be the most insensitive of men; otherwise, in spite of her pretenses, he would have felt her detachment. But no, his groping hand still trembled and he still gasped, afterwards, flung away from her and his voice thick with satisfaction, “Let there be peace.”
But one night in her sixth month with his child she heard suddenly out of the dark, long after she thought he had gone to sleep:
“Listen, Lora mia, I’m going to speak and you are not to answer. I know Venus is dead. You’ve been very sweet about it. But it gets too painful; we might as well give it up. I said to myself, by god, she shall shudder once, she shall push my hand away, she shall turn her back on me, at the very least I shall feel her flesh minutely withdraw in spite of the will of her muscles. But you’re too much for me; I realize it at last, you’re pure prostitute, the only one possibly in existence, and I had to find you. I’m very fond of you, Lora mia, let’s forget our little tournament and go to sleep.”
“Albert, you don’t—”
“You’re not to answer.”
“You don’t realize when a woman is pregnant—”
“Blah. Superstition. I’m serious, really. You are not to answer. I beg you, spare me that.”
He found her hand under the covers, took it to his lips and kissed it; then, with a grunt, turned on his side with his back to her. Well, she thought, I might have known I wasn’t fooling him; and turned on her own side away from him, and they both slept.
Difficulties about money did not begin until Helen was several months old. That was summer; Roy’s third birthday was in July, and when Lora went to the grocer’s or the meat market he would trot along beside the carriage with one hand on its rim and in the other a bag of fruit or vegetables. He paid little attention to the baby except when an opportunity for action presented itself; he loved to hold the towel in readiness when it was having its daily bath, and out shopping, when Lora entered a store he would stay on the sidewalk with the carriage, to keep off dogs and other dangerous animals, he explained. He had already been to the zoo several times with Albert, and stood ready, he announced, to repel anything from a beaver to a giraffe.
It was around this time that Lora asked Albert one day if he would go with her to a photographer and have his picture taken with the children. He regarded her in amazement, actually speechless, unable to believe his ears.
“Not me, just you and the babies,” she explained.
“My god,” he cried, “and I thought I knew you clear to the bottom! You can’t mean this, it must be the heat. Flatly, no. I’ll stand on my head, I’ll roll a hoop in Washington Square, but I’m damned if I’ll have my picture taken with two infants.”
“Please, I don’t often ask you—”
“Not a chance.”
She levelled her eyes on him:
“You must, Albert. I want to send it to my father and mother.”
She had never before mentioned their existence. He looked at her a moment and then said, “I see. They do have fathers, don’t they?” Suddenly he grinned, “When were we married, Lora mia? Judging from Roy, it must have been about a year before I first saw you, Venus gravida, against the purple curtain—”
“All right, forget it,” she said shortly.
“But you do intend to exhibit a husband?”
“Of course not; you don’t know what you’re talking about. Let it go, forget it.”
“By no means; you excite my curiosity. I’ll do it if not gladly at least hopefully; if I submit to this degradation maybe some day you’ll tell me all about it.”
But she never did, though she got the picture; three different poses, of which she chose one with Helen seated on Albert’s knee and Roy leaning against the arm of his chair. The photographer was almost incapacitated with bewilderment at her refusal — mother, obviously, he saw — to make the group complete.
At that several weeks passed before she actually did get it, for lack of money to pay for it. Gradually money was becoming her one important concern; all her savings were gone, and Albert’s weekly seventy dollars was developing an elusive quality which he could not comprehend and she could not control. He dined in the flat only once or twice a week; more than half of his nights were spent elsewhere; that’s all right, it’s none of my business, she thought, but what am I going to do? She could, she supposed, go back to the studios, it would be possible to get someone like Eileen to look after the children, but she had been away from it a long time and she had never really liked it. Almost certainly, though, it would before long have become unavoidable if one autumn day Albert had not happened upon Max Kadish in an uptown gallery and brought him home to where Lora sat placid and smiling with Helen at her breast.
Even at times when the rent was long past due and Mr. Halpern at the grocery store had begun to take on a doubtful and reluctant air, she was not genuinely concerned. This mildly puzzled her; was it because she had Roy and Helen, she wondered; but no, that should work the other way — she had good cause to be worried with two small children to care for and Albert already more than halfway out of the straitjacket she had made for him. I’m getting old and sensible, she thought, it’s about time; nothing is worth worrying about; something always happens. Look at the day Steve left; that was difficult enough, desperate even, but how nicely it all came out! Or the day, nearly five years ago, she first arrived in New York...
But that was different. That wasn’t really a question of money, though she hadn’t had much. She remembered the exact amount: seventy-two dollars and forty cents; she had counted it on the train after it had passed the station at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street. Forty-three cents really, but she had spent the pennies for an evening paper at Grand Central and had decided that it shouldn’t be figured as part of her New York capital. She had calculated that at eighteen dollars a week she had enough for four weeks, and certainly it shouldn’t take a whole month to find some way of making a living.
But that hadn’t really been a question of money. In the first place she had been ill, frightfully ill. During the five-hour ride to Chicago she had had no thought of that; she had felt it but not thought about it, keeping herself back in the darkest corner of the car she could find with her coat collar turned up and her tam o’ shanter pulled clear down to her eyes, afraid to look up, terrified lest at any moment she might feel a hand on her arm and hear a familiar voice or the tone of authority. Only one thought was in her mind: she would not go back. Everything else was excluded from consciousness to keep her will clear and strong on that: no matter what happened, no matter who found her or what they said or did, she would not under any circumstances whatever go back. She wouldn’t tell why not, she would never tell anyone that, but rather than go back she would throw herself off the train.