The dark mother

by Waldo David Frank

“I must be off,” he declared. “Which way do you go?”

He was decreased to a more comfortable pitch by this let of energy: he came to David; with both hands half-helped him from his seat.

They had been long in darkness: in darkness some strange light from each had played upon them. Now at the mundane level of the gas-lamp, they stood and needed to look into each other. Their eyes were venturesome, but their darts of laughter proved them timid. They stirred: their bodies and their minds: swerving away. As if they dangled loose from one another and were close-fastened only by their eyes....

David walked yearnful through the City. It seemed sure to him that his heart was empty. He cared for no one. He was a speck caught in a petty whirl that gulfed him quite as whole as if an ocean had risen to immerse him. Happenings of the day and of all other days lay in the back of his head in a shadowed corner where he flung what he was too weary to dispose of: the corner of a curiously cluttered room that had no dear thing in it. So, walking the wild City, it was to David.

He stood in a great Square and heard New York. Low, brittleness of wagons, liquid hoof-blow of horses sweet against the opaque call of drivers, beat of the herds of men driven by iron streets. High, murmur of lamps wreathing with air that dropped like weight of sadness from the sky: weary air, sinking to the City streets of its own helplessness, in love with the warm lamps that turned away from such anguish. The buildings hummed their tune of mastership. But these were low: was low the plaint of the air that was being breathed and defiled by the herds of men. Under all was the City: above all was the City’s voice. David stopped still and heard it. A sudden, solitary shriek, coming from afar, dying, born anew.... The City hurried and did not hear itself.

David walked again. The cry was gone. He was deaf also: doubting, forgetful.

He walked to the house of the Tibbetts, where he was due to dinner. A warm hall: carpeted stairs leading up like a schemer’s invitation: balustrades that flourished and bold flat pictures that grimaced against walls with the effrontery of servants. The door closed. David stood on the thick carpet and felt the harsh mahoganous gleam, the cushioned unresilience of chairs, the obtuse blindness of leathered walls. He felt this Fay and her mother, how they were hard and soft: the black sleek fatness of Mr. Tibbetts moved against him, held out wide hands to take him in. A forbidding brutal gloss, like the woodwork, sheathed a softness, a give of sentiment and thought no more alive in these people than the red plush of the sofa....

All of it was suddenly obscene to David. He was in the mood he had found once in a house of prostitution: he had entered with a fellow from the Office in stern response to passion: he had fled as one flees in a nightmare. The Madame within the harsh green satin of her kimono, which was a mold for flaccid flesh: the hard faces of the women, the hard pastiche of their gestures upon which the flabbiness of their souls and the unexercised pulp of their minds came out, oozed out—David caught himself. What nonsense with these good friends asking him questions! What had that memory to do with this? He walked deliberately into the mood of the Tibbetts: he forgot his nausea, as he had forgotten the voice of the City.

But Tom he could not forget. His forgetting all else brought him inevitably to Tom. He was warm and alive with Tom. He felt that in Tom’s friendship more than in all else—more than in his work downtown or the slow reading of good books—he was growing up. He glowed with Tom as one might smile at the accomplishment before one’s eyes of a good prophecy.

All his life he had known that he was destined to become a man. An ecstasy, this, of wonderment and terror which ran, in a kaleidoscope of color, back to his childhood and to the time when his little arms had clasped his mother’s knees. Some day he would grow up and be a man. Whenever he heard these words inside him, they came by his mother’s voice. For she had brought them first like a fire to his life. She had burned him with them as a reproof, or thrilled him with their glow of destiny, or when her slow hands and her mouth upon him told of their imminent loss, lighted him as a sacrifice with their mysterious meaning. For in these words was a world beyond his mother. In them, coming from her mouth and from her breast that he loved, David knew the ruthless rhythm of his life away from childhood up to the passion of maturity: away from his mother to a motherless cold land for his own mastership. This destiny could be many things. It was a twinkling star he looked at from his safe world and laughed against: it was a fairy-field near only in his fancy, far from his being, dominioned by the will of his young ignorance: it was a menace from which he fled to his mother and toward which the vigor of his mother’s love yet drove him.