The dark mother

by Waldo David Frank

A relationship unmeasured and un-named in the peripheral vicissitudes of their ages and their minds. An eye unchecked by surfaces and the color of habit, drawn to the womb of life, must have found Tom’s love for his father in those days deeply atune with the love of his father’s wife who was dead: must have seen the bereaved love of Curtin Rennard astir for a new replenishment in all his children.

So deep a dream could not grow unchallenged in one as quick with reality as Tom. He rebelled. His nature munitioned itself for rebellion.

There was Cornelia. She saved herself from her father by making into an ideal her dim devotion to her mother. Tom took her as ally. Cornelia imaged her saving devotion in maternal deeds, she imaged it in clay. Her mother was sanctuary from the common danger. In Tom grew great love for his protecting sister: above all tense self-abandonment to his father’s greatest rival, the real world. Here lay freedom for Tom! His blood knew that the hidden love must scorch and shrivel in the sun. He courted the sun. He was in perpetual revolt against his father’s hold on his emotions: against his father’s closeted ideals: against the source of his father’s hold, his own deep identity with his mother.

Hence, Tom’s distrust of women, his devotion to Cornelia, the frenzied scatter of his forces in objective life. During Tom’s boyhood, he was almost a woman in his attitude toward women: in each of them he fought his mother, fought her betrayal of him—as of herself—to his dominant father. His love of Cornelia was at once a way-station for his self-freeing will and a substitute for the parental yokes from which he needed freedom.

Directly through her, indirectly against his father, Tom grew in love with imagery, with color, with the Symbol—the artist in Tom grew. From his passionate seeking of the outer world, there rose his power of success in society and in law. For the world loves the lavish spender of himself: it will run to the largess of his ruin as wolves to their meat.

Yet as Tom saw his practice swell, saw the doors behind which stood butlers open to him, the silent music of his blood went on. All these talents and emotions were reactions. Behind them stood the Image of a man—hating art, hating social intercourse, hating life,—of a man beckoning Tom back to an ecstatic, fabular peace. For that man’s hatreds also were reactions ... behind them....

All that ancient lure was now resistance to the life Tom flung himself upon, even as all this life was his resistance to that hidden lure. He would consecrate his talent, he would build him his church, Success. But his mind ran against it, weakened the rock on which he builded. Cornelia was knowing. Here were depths beyond her vision. She saw chiefly the young man so soaked in his Puritan upbringing that he was loath to face the joys he had of his worldly undertakings: a very usual hypocrisy and of no importance, but one she hated since she was full of it also.

“I don’t see,” she said, “why you should be ashamed of enjoying Mrs. Duffield’s parties. Heaven knows we had lonely enough years, here, first.”

“You go with artists—with intelligent people. You have too much kindness to imagine how dull the rich and the successful are.”

“Nonsense! Their success speaks continual wise words. Their gold is brilliant.”