Seed on the Wind

She did not like the dream; there was something uncomfortable and a little disquieting about it; but neither did she greatly dislike it. She never recollected any other, but in time she grew to know the details of this one so well that it seemed almost like a part of her real existence. Sometimes she would try to remember when it had first come, but she could not even be sure whether it was before or since she had met Lewis Kane. The memory was lost.

She never mentioned it to anyone, not even to Albert Scher, one of whose favorite subjects was dreams.

In Albert she found a mild and comfortable enjoyment. He was good company. The same was true in less degree of Lewis; she was never wholly at ease with him; but now and then he aroused in her an interest and curiosity which Albert never awakened. Neither, however, cut into her very deeply; their visits to Maidstone were pleasant recurrent commas in the smooth phrases of her life; there were no sharp ejaculations or disturbing interrogations.

The infrequent major points of punctuation were furnished by the children. Roy came home late from the playground with a bloody nose. Panther contributed a sleepless and anxious week with diphtheria. Morris after three days’ trial refused point-blank to go to school, the only reason he would give being that it made his legs hurt to sit down so long. Roy declared the true reason to be that he was jealous of Tony Rahlson, who, being a year older, was two classes ahead. That was not so, Morris protested vehemently; in the first place, he would soon be ahead of Tony anyway; secondly, the girl across the aisle made faces at him; and thirdly, it made his legs hurt. Lora let him stay out two days and then took him back and arranged with the teacher to seat him on the other side of the room. This solved the problem; he reported that his legs still hurt a little, so that he had to walk with a jerk — he showed Lora how this was, back and forth across the dining room — but that he was willing to put up with it for Lora’s sake. She praised him for that, and he went out to play with Tony, Lora tactfully failing to remark that he was leaving his jerk behind.

This episode was in the autumn preceding Julian’s fifth birthday, and Lora’s thirty-third. It was still possible for Albert occasionally to call her Venus without sounding ridiculous, for the lines of her body were as clear and graceful as ever, and her face seemed unaware of time’s chief function. She had never bobbed her hair; usually now she wore it coiled at the back of her head, brushed straight back from her brow over her scalp’s well-modelled mound; when Albert tried to find a single grey hair to confront her with he had to confess defeat. The clear white skin still stretched with the most perfect smoothness over her cheeks and cheekbones, her chin and throat, even under her eyes and on her forehead; the amber-grey eyes held their steady unimpassioned light; the mouth, a little too large, maintained the line of its curve right to the tips of the corners, without a droop or any sign that the skin was finding it necessary to pull a bit here and there in the effort to adjust itself to unnecessary accumulations beneath. She had never cared for dancing, but now and then on a Sunday afternoon Albert would turn on the radio and insist on showing her a new stomp or drag he had picked up in Harlem; she would follow him properly almost at once, without thinking about it, close against him, letting her body move with his; Roy and Panther would imitate them, and Lewis Kane, half-reclining in a corner of the divan, would beat time with his foot and applaud them, with his eyes on Lora’s still tranquil face flushed a little with exertion, or the flowing graceful response of her body. That was what was wrong with her, Albert would say impatiently, her body flowed, and you shouldn’t flow with jazz; nor jerk either; what it required was a series of delicately broken motions, not legato, but each one beginning precisely where the last left off...

Don’t tell me there’s anything delicate about jazz, Lewis would object; and Lora, leaving them to have it out, would watch Roy and Panther and marvel at the tireless energy of their flying legs and supple little bodies.