The Child Is the Meaning
of This Life*
DELMORE SCHWARTZ
DURING
THE YEARS
of the depression each person of the family
slowly accepted his own life, the deprivations, the comforts, consola–
.tions, and substitutes, and the wasting defenses with which they coped
with their own desires and weaknesses. As Seymour accepted his job
which made it necessary for him to climb apartment house stairs,
so James accepted his wife's family, and Rebecca, who always accepted
everything, accepted the violent temper of her husband and the fact
that he talked too much, that he made speeches about international
politics at the dinner table, boring everyone and appalling visitors
with the mannerisms he had learned through a correspondence school
course on elocution some twenty years in the past. She knew that
James also repelled many of his patients and lost them by orating
to them as they sat in the dentist's chair, awaited pain, and with
stuffed mouths listened like mutes to his theories and opinions. Sarah
too accepted her husband's departure and as Seymour no longer
believed in his luck, so she no longer believed that he would return
to her and the children. The children were growing up and both
were in high school. Jasper was a good student, but he was a difficult
boy who read books all the time and did not go out to play like the
other boys. Nancy was more difficult in one respect, she liked the
boys too much and she went with the fast crowd at high school.
Nothing had ever made Sarah as angry as the possibility of Nancy's
promiscuity. Nancy denied all under her mother''S questioning and
she told her mother that she knew very well how to take care of
herself. Sarah did not understand the deep-sea necking- the term
used by Nancy's friends-in which her daughter indulged, for in
Sarah's youth the •relations of boys and girls had been less open and
less discussed.
"Nowadays the girls of today will do anything," a friend of
Sarah's had told her.
Sarah had brooded about this report. She felt, however, that
Nancy would not,be able to lie to her if she had actually had a serious
love affair and permitted some boy to have his way with her.
*
Continued from the last issue.
