The unwelcome man

by Waldo David Frank

The rift was started by a visit home.

The Burts had moved into an apartment near the Hudson. In fact, from the windows of the drawing room and sitting room one’s sight dodged several towering structures and met the river, flat and cool below the city. Beyond, rose the serried strokes of the Palisades, purple for the most part, athwart the blue haze of New York.

It was a splendid apartment and Quincy’s family had moved to it after his return to college. So this was his first view. All the old furniture was gone. Sarah and Adelaide had had a fresh start. The seven years since Harriet therefore marked their change in the new trappings. For these years had nourished Adelaide. And her word was final in all things pertaining to the household. Long since, Sarah had sighingly accepted that “she had no heart” to manage servants nor the “trumpery” to decorate a parlor. It was by savage encroachments of this sort upon her ancient territory, that Sarah’s languor and decomposition were effected. It requires intellect to be a happy idle woman.

As they sat down to dinner something in the room’s blatancy gave the boy pause—rendered cloud-like the texture of the life he had been living. The room was panelled high in oak. The inevitable favrille-glass inverted bowl loomed over the table. Above, at the ceiling, was another cluster of lights. These shed their unimaginative glow. And the chandelier was dark. It seemed menacing to Quincy, like a rich thing without a spirit. But it was indefeasibly real. There was a side-board, also of oak, cut by a swinging door, radiant with silver. Upon the mantel stood four porcelain vases which Sarah had seen and rebelliously acquired. They were the room’s rococo residue—and the sole things in it Sarah could warm up to. They shrieked with their dove-blue and their rose-pink against the room’s sombre munificence. Between them stood a chaste, dull wooden clock—by Thomas, whose every tick was a protest against its neighbors.

Quincy was oppressed once more. He wished to get away. His afflatus seemed asthmatic in this rigid air. In sympathy, he almost liked the towering porcelain vases. They, at least, with their quaint scrollings and flutings, seemed to aspire upwards. The rest of the room’s dead perfection was a dead weight downward. It lacked even the falsetto spirit of the vases. The family teased Sarah about them. And Quincy took his mother’s part. This troubled Adelaide to silence. Marsden seldom stooped to teasing, Josiah had leaned on Adelaide and Jonas was busy eating. So Quincy’s word won the day for the rococo vases.

What was this acrid reality within his mother that brooked no blinking and ate into the substance of his dreams? Why did she make something—of all people—totter within him? Was she more real than the rest of the world? He could laugh at it!

Quincy went back to college, militant more than ever against her, yet unknowing of how great a tribute this militancy was. She was indeed more real within him than the rest of the world he laughed at. For we laugh only at things outside of us. The man lies who says he has laughed at himself—save his laughter be hysterical. Quincy could not laugh at his mother, for she was of him. But he could deny her, despise her, rail against her.

In this spirit of idealism, he returned to college.

And now, began the subtle dégringolade toward the great cross-road where Quincy was to meet himself. The stone that starts an avalanche need not be at the summit of the precipice. It may lie far down toward the valley. And its crumbling may unleash, farther and farther upward, stone after stone, in indirect progression, until the top be loosed and the whole mountain-side crush downward. But long ere this the lowly stone that started will lie buried in the valley. Such a stone was Sarah.

She lay low in the slope of her boy’s emotions. And as her stirring loosed the soil above her, she was the first to be overwhelmed. Quincy had suffered a sharp, rude shock in this reality of which she was the basis—the family that he had looked on as an outgrown cradle! This reality, the juices of his dream-life could not digest. As he left home, he therefore made his effort to cast it out. All this came rationally to the surface in fault-finding. But in the effort of rejection, a shock tremored through all of the boy’s factitious structure. And this shock was to have sequels.