From The Dial
There is a bitter moment in youth, and this moment had come to Paul. He had passed his mother's door without entering or even calling out to her, and had climbed on doggedly to the top floor. Now he was shut in his sanctuary, his room, sitting at his table. His head rested on a hand, his dark eyes had an expression of confused anguish, a look of guilt and sternness mingled.... He could no more have visited his mother, he told himself, than he could voluntarily have chopped off his hand. And yet he was amazed at the cruelty in himself, a hard cold cruelty which prompted the thought: "Even if this means her death or my death, I shall go through with this."
It was because of such a feeling that he couldn't talk to his mother. Paul was one of those sensitive youths who are delivered over to their emotions—swept now and then by exaltation, now by despair, now by anguish or rage, always excessive, never fully under control. He was moody, and always seemed unable to say the right thing or do the right thing. Suddenly the emotion used him as a mere instrument and came forth in a shameful nakedness. But the present situation was by all odds the most terrible he had faced: for against the cold cruelty, there throbbed, warm and unutterably sweet, like a bird in a nest of iron, an intense childish longing and love....
You see, Paul was nineteen, the eldest son in a family of four, and his mother was a widow. She was not poor; they lived in this large comfortable house on a side street east of Central Park. But neither was she well off, and Paul was very magnanimous; he had given up college and gone to work as a clerk. Perhaps it wasn't only magnanimity, but also pride. He was proud to be the oldest son, to play father, to advise with his mother about the children, to be the man of the house. Yet he was always a mere child, living, as his two sisters and his brother lived, in delicate response to his mother's feelings and wishes. And he wanted to be a good son: he thought nothing was more wonderful than a child who was good to his mother. She had given all for her children, they in return must give all to her. But against this spirit of sacrifice there arose a crude, ugly, healthy, monstrous force, a terrible thing that kept whispering to him: "You can't live your mother's life: you must live your own life."
Once, when he had said something conceited, his mother had flashed out at him: "You're utterly selfish." This stung and humiliated him. Yet this terrible monster in himself seemed concerned about nothing but self. It seemed a sort of devil always tempting him to eat of forbidden fruit. Lovely fruit, too. There was Agnes, for instance: Agnes, a mere girl, with a pigtail down her back, daughter of the fishman on Third Avenue.
His mother held Agnes in horror. That her son should be in love with a fishman's daughter! And all the child in Paul, responding so sensitively to his mother's feelings, agreed to this. He had contempt for himself, he struggled against the romantic Thousand and One Nights glamour, which turned Third Avenue into a Lovers' Lane of sparkling lights. He struggled, vainly. Poetry was his passion: and he steeped himself in Romeo and Juliet, and in Keats's St. Agnes' Eve and The Pot of Basil.... It was then the great struggle with his mother began, and the large house became a gloomy vault, something dank, damp, sombre, something out of Poe, where a secret duel to the death was being fought, mostly in undertones and sometimes with sharp cries and stabbing words.
Now, this evening, with his head in his hand, he knew that the end had already been reached. To pass his mother's door without a greeting, especially since he was well aware that she was ill, was so unprecedented, so violent an act, that it seemed to have the finality of something criminal. His mother had said two days ago: "This can't go on. It is killing me."
"All right," he flashed. "It sha'n't. I'll get out."
"I suppose you'll marry," she said, "on fifteen a week."
He spoke bitterly: