The dark mother

by Waldo David Frank

“I am sure of it,” she snapped. Then, quietly, like a mother to her son, “So stop protesting, like a dear man. Yes?”

It was true. Tom knew it, however, as well as his wise sister. She understood with a great clarity only a part of Tom. She did not know how, in these protestations, he pleaded against himself, not with her. There was a depth in Tom more cold to these mundane blandishments than the surface was warm to them. Tom’s conflict was deeper than the desire to conceal from himself and from his sister this worldliness which guided him about. It was a conflict rooted in his nature. There was a part of Tom that despised his conduct, hated his success, rose forever like a gaunt, uninvited guest to spoil his banquet. A ghost in Tom that was very much alive....

It was born perhaps near the hour of Tom’s birth in Dahlton. A very looming part of the world of Tom was this father whom his mother loved. His father was there. He needed to be taken. He needed to be taken as his mother took him. At the beginning, the bar between the mother and her child has no reality to the child. Mother and child are one to the child’s rapt omniscience. The tall, gray-faced man had nervous hard hands which were strong. Often his hands viced the woman’s arms till she screamed: they screwed her to a chair while his words lashed her: they turned her about to the door she was ordered to pass through. Then, in that dawn of the world, those hands left the mother who was cowed; they took the passionate sprawling flesh of Tom and thrust him to his crib, they turned him about so that Tom’s eyes gazed at a blank wall whose denial of sight was terror.

Mrs. Rennard loved Tom’s father. Her senses had mostly pain of him, but passion also. Since her senses loved him, they needed to love what her husband gave them. Tom, feeling in these dim passionate days the aching presence of his father upon his world—upon his mother and upon himself—the visitation of his cruelty upon them—took him as did his mother. He shared his mother’s sensuous satisfaction in abject pain. Like her he made joy of anguish: like her, molded himself to love and to depend upon this man as the pain-giver, since such was the form of his love, such the burden of his support. Mrs. Rennard loved her husband, her senses took him. Tom looked upon his father with his mother’s senses.

His mother died. Curtin Rennard went to the child. He lifted him in his arms.

“Thomas,” he said, “you are to be a motherless child. Your mother is dead. I want you to pray with me to God—to thank Him for the cruel thing that He has brought upon us.”

Tom repeated his father’s words as his father spoke them. “My mother is gone, I bless You and thank You, God. She is gone, and I am alone without a mother. God, I thank You. She is gone to join the Chosen in Your presence. God, I thank You. My mother is gone—perhaps—to be damned in Hell. God, I bless You and thank You.”

Curtin Rennard took the child high in his arms: gazed into his frightened eyes: seemed pleased thereat, for he embraced him. Tom was happy then. He did not miss his mother.

He never missed her. All his will was fixed on the pain-dealing, passionate parent. His rival—his rival-self—his mother was no more there. He was more free to love, to suffer, to rebel, now that the great sick lover, the great sufferer, the unsucceeding rebel with her wide skirts and her clear wan forehead was gone from their world.

A deep and subtle relationship grew between the tremorous child and the thwarting, thwarted, powerful man, his father.