The dark mother

by Waldo David Frank

The Vice-president of the Railroad had an estate three miles beyond the limits of David’s town. The Vice-president had a somewhat remote sister who used to visit David’s mother. Although Mrs. Markand always tried to stop her and to change the subject—it shamed her—this lady would talk of the glories of that estate and of the pride of its owner. So now this room was talking of the Deanes. A remote room it was, thrust out in limbo—an obviously spare room. But it was full and stridulous with observations.

David sat on the broad bed. Two dormer windows were open, and the street came in. A low ponderous murmur welling and declining. Fogged and blue. With sudden periodic flashes of near commotion: a passing cab, a car clanking. The pervasive sense of low hard pavement drenched with the beat of life swung up to him in flat strokes.

The room had the same fogginess, the same color as this new world: the same dull compression of incessant life. It, too, was a scabbard for some lancing emotion. Doubtless his glimpse of the family photographs had determined David’s mind more than he knew: the muffled finery of the house.

David had the sense of a prison; or was it a church? There were hearts here that beat against this place, and yet they were worshipful voices. He had never thought of the arrogant consistence of walls and of an aunt. He was not sure of his cousins.

Unknown to himself, with the naïve prescience of the wild caught thing, David found the spirit of the house: its angular and mournful fixity, its irrelevance of finery and comfort. He had been shocked to find that he knew these sorts of furniture and ornaments: there had been sporadic visits to stately country parlors. The City’s contribution seemed mostly the house itself, perhaps its work upon what was in it.... A City of somber houses sentineled like conquerors on sodden streets.

David settled back in the wide bed and drifted away; a cloud of porcelain fans and gilt settees and majolica statuettes swept in his mind with a mingling of soft girls, and beat on the frown of gray walls....

It was night when he awoke. A numbness was over David. He thought: “Why don’t all these things thrill me more?” He felt the plethoric breathing of New York. Night had always meant to him the freedom of dreams, play of stars. Here was a night that stirred with stifled pain. David jumped out of the bed and went to the window.

An unbroken flank of houses rose from the mist of the street. They were lightless and sleeping. They were not dreaming like most houses he had known that went musing by night. They were heavy and hurt. It was as if the day had struck them and blinded them; left them there in a coma. David saw the quavering glow of the sky. The air came to his naked throat with moist fingers that trembled. David crept away to bed....

“Your bath is ready, Sir.”

He heard this, he recalled the several knocks that had preceded. A sun slanted into the dormer windows, lay bright there in the corner of his room. But the shadows were everywhere—hostile hangers-on.