Lit Matters: The Noise You Make After "In the Gloaming"

by Michael Nugent

I can’t explain the awful noise I made when I finished "In the Gloaming." The sound, from my own throat, went long, low, and hard. Maybe I sobbed for all I didn’t get or wailed with regret over everything I should’ve done. Maybe I was moaning for any kind of salvation that would have me.

"In the Gloaming" is a short story by Alice Elliott Dark that first appeared in the New Yorker in 1993 and later in a collection bearing its title. Alice Dark is now an assistant professor in the MFA program and the English Department at Rutgers University in New Jersey, my home state. "Gloaming" was included by John Updike in The Best American Stories of the Century and was made into films by HBO and Trinity Playhouse.

It’s a simple story involving a 33-year-old man with advanced AIDS who returns to his family home to die. He wants to get to know his mother better and thereby come to know himself. They talk in the evening, her favorite time of day. Her Scots, she reminds him, call this time the “gloaming,” when day ends and the sky’s purple light makes the Earth seem as if it's “covered with heather.” In the gloaming, they share what they like; they talk about their favorite authors, about sex, about how her waking him up now reminds him of when she looked in on him in his crib, and, gingerly, about his father, her husband. The conversation is slow, almost mundane, sorrowful and tender, as darkness gathers.

The father is always somewhere else. He finds a way to excuse himself from the table, the conversation, their lives. He always has. His son is dying, and he is holed up in his office, on a conference call, distant. The lingering, loving conversation in "Gloaming," between fading son and mother, has no words between father and son. None.

I first read "Gloaming" with my father decades dead. I don’t think he ever understood me. I didn’t get him. I don’t think he really liked me. I also entered the "Gloaming" with a growing son both distant and distanced. I was sorry for all that, truly.

One evening the conversation ends, the son dies. Moments after his body is taken away, the mother drops onto one of the twin beds in his childhood room. The father, Martin, comes in, still in his office clothes, and lies on the other. They talk about the funeral, and the father says perhaps the Scottish bagpipes played at her father’s funeral would be nice. The mother agrees, yes, her boy Laird would like that.

The father turns to her, begins sobbing and asks at the story’s end: “Please, Janet, tell me—what else did my boy like?”

This was my father talking. This was me, is me. This will be my boy. In my gloaming I let out a long, low, hard cry for them and for me.

This post is part of our annual Lit Matters series, in which writers and readers express why supporting and elevating literary arts—the mission of Lighthouse Writers Workshop— is important to them. If you agree, consider supporting Lighthouse on Colorado Gives Day. Mark your calendar for December 8 or schedule your gift now. Thank you!


Mike Nugent is a member of the Book Project and lives on the Jersey shore when he isn’t working in New York City. He writes purportedly noir novels, a short story or two, literally, and lots of poetry assembled in a journal called “nobody reads my poems.”