The dark mother

by Waldo David Frank

Lois knew already the inwardness of marriage. There was much talk of this at the luncheon table. She had the right contempt for the girls who married unmoneyed men for love: for the men who risked their future—their finances—in alliance with unmoneyed girls: and for the novels she read where love was extolled and the sentimental match defended. These books were—well—for reading. Novels and stories were indulgences like red and emerald peppermints after dessert. They lied.

And Lois knew already the inwardness of friendship. Muriel and her mother had friends. They kissed them and flattered them and entertained them. At the luncheon table they discussed them. No one but was a tissue of deceptions, of selfishness, of deceit. Their morals were largely obstacles they were forever dodging. They flirted—with fops or fools. They angled—for goldfish. They were miserable at home. One was none too anxious to have children. One was none too faithful to her husband. All of them were none too good at all.

Immediately after lunch, Florence was to call for Muriel and take her for a walk. Florence was violently trying to win the King boy whose father had nearly a million. But it was hopeless because Mabel—mutual friend—had told Muriel all about it and she was secretly engaged to Clifford King. Oh, Aline wouldn’t know! Clifford was bored by Aline. Muriel and Mabel had had a good laugh over Florence—poor child—such antics.

“She really loves him, you know.” Muriel smiles complacently. This is an interesting if somewhat superfluous detail in her wish to wed him. Mrs. Deane nods, mildly concerned.

Later: “Hello, Florence dearest. I was so afraid you’d be late....”

Indeed, Lois knew already the inwardness of life. Life was, in the patriarchal term, a “business proposition.” Out of the arcana of the past her intellect could summon the picture of a free land peopled by striving men and women. This land was America. Its freedom meant the opportunity of all “to get along”: to become rich. Men achieved this in business, women in marriage. The sublime distinction of America was that no castes interfered with business, and no classes with marriage.... Sharply there emerged from this hallowed field one man and one woman. The man was her father. He had grown rich by being quick and clever. The woman was her mother. She had grown rich by being sensible, by seizing her chance. Romance in their lives was a hidden function, if it existed at all. It was bound up with the mysteries of birth and sex. These things took care of themselves.

The important thing for Lois, since she was a woman, lay in the need of being sensible. Lois knew what this meant. She knew as well the proportional insignificance of her own girlish impulses. Lois loved to play, loved to be loyal to a friend, would have loved to love a man. But these were part of her childhood, and childhood was a special state. Its needs were indulgences one must outgrow. Childhood was of the same dim category as art and stories. It wasn’t true. It was “make-believe.” It lied. Muriel had already cast it aside like her short dresses. Lois was aware she was carrying it a bit too far and too long. She was sixteen and in ankle skirts and her braids were already gathered on her head. She deemed herself brave and a trifle foolish to be so frolicsome at sixteen. She was unswervingly confident of knowing how to change at the needed moment. Meanwhile, she felt herself slightly inferior in the things that held her and in the moods she loved. The rule of life was to harden the present into a mold for the future. Yet Lois could not resist pouring herself still into immediate and short-lived moments: giving herself to emotions that must have no future. The gay spirit still danced fast. Inexorably, from without, the things she learned bore inward, seeped downward, stifled the things she had merely always felt. Her acquired consciousness was a slow acid mist that would eat away the stir and laughter of her birth. The gay spirit danced fast, though it was dancing to death.

All this was Lois. All this was drawing, with her and in her, near to David. With David the stalwart muteness of the years that inclosed him with his mother: the sting and the song of his father: the drowsy stir of the Town not yet awakened, not yet awakened to its death in the crash of the industrial Age.

Two little teeming worlds, spying each other, craving each other across the Nothing....

David and Thomas Rennard had agreed on an evening by letter. They were going to dine together, and then to theater. Tom waited in the lights of a Broadway chop-house.