The dark mother

by Waldo David Frank

He stood at his manhood’s threshold, not daring to turn back. A deep and cavernous beginning. A passage lost in shadows. Not seeing the passage, he dared to enter. His mother’s going had been the bidding of her love that he should leave her. But David was not alone. A part of him was still the short and sturdy child that clasped his mother’s knees. All this was changed, and all this was eternal. For now, again, David was not alone. Tom who had shown him the coming of his manhood would accompany him through it.... His friend and comrade: though David knew it not, in a way marvelously true and false the legate of his mother.

VIII

DAVID lived alone for a little more than a year. Already in that year’s Spring the two friends decided to find a place together.

Their living room opened from a narrow hall. Along a darkness, sidling, their two bedrooms, symbols of our forbidding attitude toward sleep as a dull thing crowded between bright periods of bustle. They blinked, these rooms, with their hopeless single eyes flat on the gray bricks of the adjoining house: blinked like purblind old women against something too close for focus. Here, sleep was imprisoned, that might heal men from the poison of their days, but that men have turned into a merely deeper and more occult brew of their days’ poisons.

The room where the sun came was the room they thought they lived in. Their home, that: though they spent far less hours there than in the blinking sleep rooms, and though, of course, the sun was usually there when they were not—they who weighted each day into the City as miners go down shafts. But it was good to know the sun was there even with them away: they had hunted long for a southward room. The resilient Mrs. Lario, with her bare arms giving to no touch and her smooth throat so palpably immune from the gust of a man’s passion, above the tight composure of whose eyes brooded her hair like a black tempest of contradiction, came and cleaned. She turned the mattresses: she sprinkled water for the dust of the crumbling floors. She made the rooms gleam with a moist complacence like her own widowed virtue. But then, beside Mrs. Lario, came the sun: dried the moisture of her mop, turned all this artificed cleanness that smelt so of its triumph over dirt into a health that glowed, self-sustainedly, without a hint of being mere reform. The sun came and balanced Mrs. Lario; and made her possible. So that when Tom and David were up, ruffled and wearied, through their shafts at night, they felt that their home had been not cleaned alone but redeemed also. And if there was a flavor of must in the tidied bedrooms, the rococo sitting of the pillow-shams, the somewhat chromo-patterned regularity of things left on their bureau, there was as well good air, still a-thrill with the sun’s last coming. On Sundays, they greeted the sun as one they knew, who knew their home better than they: greeted him a bit like a familiar god with his long frank strides shattering their windows.

David was making a success in his uncle’s business. He had at last achieved a salary determined rather by his place in the office than his relation with its head. Mr. Deane’s theory had unconsciously been one of compensation. He balanced his knowledge of the boy’s advantage by miserable pay. This enabled him quite honestly to say: “David gets no more than any other beginner.” An easy way of feeling just. Now David was beginning to lead the life of a young bachelor in the City. He had outgrown his little Eastside room: he was after all a representative of the Deanes. If he went to the theater, it was not right that he should sit in the gallery like a clerk. If he went hunting for rooms with this smart chap Rennard, he must not, by an admission of the low price he could afford to pay, reflect on the House of Deane. Mr. Deane was a little on his mettle with his nephew as most men with their sons. He was approaching the time of vicarious satisfaction. He made David assistant to the Credit Department, and gave him a good salary.

David knew the nepotic alloy in his good fortune. It did not trouble him. He thought, somehow, he deserved it. He recalled vaguely an old remark of Tom’s about another matter. “Men who get what they deserve always do so, you will find, for inappropriate reasons.” David was letting the sweet illogic of America come in on him. He was lost in wonder at the perfect and complex weave of manifest occurrence which armored the reality, latent and different, beneath. The weave was one of grace, good will and beauty. It was in contradiction to the moving nakedness he felt fatefully aswing below his life and the whole City. He was after all in much a child: one who wanted the world to be good to him: to whom the real was the most splendid of fairy-tales. He fitted into this social structure so close akin to the land where hags turn into princesses and pumpkins become coaches. He was that sort: the sort who wanders blithely through an enchanted forest where great black trunks of trees stand under a green sea of murmur like protective stanchions and who picks up an acorn, finds it to be a golden apple, eats it with neither indigestion nor surprise. The whirling petulance of American life, its oneness with the tempo and technique of the dream, was very near and very sweet to David.

There was then a true immersement of David in this world. And in this fact a danger. Nothing is so rebellious as reality. No man who does not first move with the world can change it. If the deep mute sense of life in David pushed ever upward in revolt, that revolt would be the mere fused head of all his being: of the world’s: it would find its articulated deed. He would go farther, infinitely, in rebellion, than the rebellious Tom whose mental area of understanding kept him in a sort of passionate inertness. The emotions of Tom Rennard were conservative: the part of him that loved loved what was still and plumbed—and there; the manifest world he found rather than its latency of change. Only his mind ventured ahead into potential realms. His mind was much like a courier at work in advance to fit and to pare down conditions for the advent of his master.

So Tom felt a hazard in his friend. He wished to live in the world that he found. He wished to live with the friend that he had found. It was needful, therefore, that his friend should live there also: that he should change just in so far as to fit Tom’s world, yet not so greatly change as to be no longer David. Tom realized that the world’s acceptance he desired in David, and its possession he feared, were very close to one another. He looked at his friend, and wondered....

David lay back in his rocker, with his legs out straight and the mist of his pipe rising above his upturned head. He was comfortable: above his waist his body huddled in a condition of collapse that made the rigid straightness of his legs and of his arms falling down by his side a comical diversion. Tom looked at him from his rush seat chair, direct and simple. He sat at ease, straight. He picked a paper from the floor, but below his waist his posture was unaltered. His head moved on his neck like a hinge: his torso moved on his hips like a hinge. There was David reaching for a match: his legs shifting, his chin dropping upon his chest.