The dark mother

by Waldo David Frank

David must be saved!

From now on, she went about with it. While she worked or played—seldom this was—and went through the grimacings of a social creature; while she slept—there it was ever upon her breast: that David must be saved!

He had not come to see her.

She said to herself: it is no matter. To have seen him would have been joy, or rather ecstasy so packed she could for many days have had her joy of it. It was no matter. For she had no plan. What would she say to him, or do, when he came? Let him stay away until she was more ready. It was bitter to know he had not come, and she expecting him. It was no matter.

Her sleep was a strange thing. No real dreams—streakings of thought and dream ran through her night like falling flames. So that her night was neither sleep nor waking. It was an endless trembling between two worlds, it was a part of Chaos. She lay there and her body was a restless weight holding her down. She was like a little boat tossed at anchor by a broken sea. Her body and her consciousness: these were the anchor. They kept her from running wild with the waves. And the waves kept her from being quiet at her anchor. She was torn. She was a continuous play of hindered movement.

When the day came, she lay there wearied as if she had been swept by a great fury.

Her nights were streaked by these running ribbons of dream: and always they were the same insofar as always they were really nothing. They were David. Her problems in David. Her plans and her helplessness to solve them. Never, even in her sleep, did she sink to some quiet haven of dream with David: have him there to talk to gently, to be with gladly. Something surging within her took this great Wish and cut it up into bloody fragments and strewed her night with them. All of David was never there: nor all of a single moment with her holding his head on her breast. David’s laughter or David’s troubled frown or David’s voice: or merely David’s name—David, David, David—falling down her night like drippings of blood. And she, lost in this welter of struggle between wish and the real, unable to take sides.

There was no rest in such nights. She lay in her narrow bed, cast up in her cell-like room as upon some rocky shore. And looking back upon her sleep, she had a sense of a delirious underworld, yellow of hue with veins of livid red wriggling athwart it, and of herself who followed the veins. It was a shattered and scattered self that had been thrown through the night, thrown, somehow intact, upon the shore of the morning.

Like a bruised woman, she was out of her bed. She placed the coffee on the gas-burner, and took a bath. Cornelia had no pleasure of her body. Unclothing herself, she did not care to look at her lean nakedness. It was as if she had feared to find great bruises upon it. She laid her gaunt hands on her breast and shivered, for it was cold and the water was none too hot which she had heated. She noticed how small were her breasts and that they had begun to droop. She remembered that once they had been beautiful and that she had been tempted to use them for a model; she had not dared, since then people would look on them. And after all, they were girl breasts, not those of a mother. Now they were neither. They were beginning to shrink and narrow and droop. They were becoming the breasts of a woman who had not lived. Yet, looking at them now, Cornelia felt no sorrow or regret. She took this fading as she took the world—the world outside her. She was outside herself. She did not care if her breasts were no longer beautiful. Who, indeed, had ever seen them? What good had she had of their beauty?

She stood before her dresser and put on her clothes. She dressed meticulously. There was no warmth in the care with which she braided her thin hair and knotted it into a Psyche back of her head. What was her hair to her? There was no warmth in her choice among her waists of the one she would wear that morning. She smoothed the loose ends under the belt and tidied the little linen collar. Her hands were fast at their work. They did not fail: also they did not linger.