Seed on the Wind

Lora opened her lips long enough to say, “You won’t get one,” and closed them again.

“But it did arrive,” Pete said. “That seems to have been pretty well established by the testimony of the maid — Martha, wasn’t it — at the inquest. Reinforced by the information furnished later by Mrs. Ogilvy, otherwise Cecelia, I never liked her. Your mother, by the way, nearly got herself into serious trouble; they couldn’t pry her mouth open. She was a medieval heretic confronted by the black-robed Inquisition; she raised her eyes toward heaven, or lowered them toward hell — the details are meager — and refused to utter a word. The sympathy of the community saved her from the righteous rigor of the law. But Martha was frightened and spilled the beans. There was a search for you high and low; you were traced as far as Chicago, and that’s where Cecelia came in, they suspected her of having hid you in a closet or under the bed. Acute fellows. What they were looking for was a baby, live if necessary but preferably dead, for that was what they had smelled. Pleasant inoffensive little game of hide and seek. They didn’t find it. It’s all forgotten now, of course, so you run no risk if you satisfy my curiosity.”

“No,” Lora said. She said again, “No. I won’t talk about it. There was no baby.”

“Oh, well.” He shrugged his shoulders. “If you won’t. Maybe you’re a little vague about it yourself; apparently your father was a man of action.”

“You sent a man out there?” said Lora.

“My paper did.”

“Did he see my mother?”

“He sure did. Oh, it’s all right so far, he said nothing about you, he had strict orders on that point. He saw your mother twice, but she wouldn’t talk, at any rate not about this. Otherwise she was quite chatty.”

“She still lives there?”

He nodded. “In a big brick house with three or four servants and a bald gentle husband.”

Lora stared at him. “A husband!”

“Indeed, yes. You know, it’s hard to believe all this is news to you. You’re not putting it on? No, I suppose not. She has a husband all right, got him years ago, I don’t know just when.”

“What’s his name?”

“I forget.” He considered. “It wouldn’t be Davis?”

Lora shook her head. Bald, she thought, and gentle. A newcomer, probably. Well! Her mother had a bald and gentle husband and a big brick house! She didn’t like the idea at all, it didn’t fit, and she resented it. She felt the irritation of the resentment within her, and that seemed absurd — good lord, wasn’t her mother welcome to a husband if she wanted one? The balder and gentler the better. But the resentment remained, and induced a sort of confused pseudo-disbelief. If she got on a train and went back to that town tomorrow she could not even go to her father’s house, there would be strangers in it; her father would be nowhere, actually not anywhere; and to find her mother she must ask, and could not even properly ask, not knowing her name. Certainly all this was true, but it could not at once be believed, and meanwhile must be resented. She thought the resentment was silly, but she did not try to banish it; indeed, she clung to it, and to all the shreds of emotion she could muster, regarding her mother and the absurd bald husband, regarding the house of her father and her father himself, now a ghost, a wraith that floated grotesquely from the hard reality of memory into the unsubstantial vapor of fact, and back into memory again.