THE CHILD IS THE MEANING
355
years after his second marriage, a fact which Sarah regarded as a
personal vindication.
"If
he had stayed with his wife and children," she often said,
"he would be alive today."
Michael's estate was believed to be one of considerable wealth,
and Seymour as much as anyone was interested in how much money
Nancy and Jasper were going to inherit. He discussed tirelessly with
Jasper what might be done with the money which he was going to
get when he was twenty-one years of age. The lawyers for the estate
tried to suggest to Sarah that the general collapse 0f values was such
that the estate had merely a paper value, apart from some of the
stocks and bonds, and even the stocks and bonds might never return
to their value in the heyday of the bull market. Seymour told Jasper
that this was foolish, and he said that whatever went down must
eventually go up, it was like bouncing a ball. Jasper believed that
this was true, because he wanted to believe it was true, despite his
acquaintance with the radical political and economic theory. And
the whole family believed that Nancy and Jasper would be rich heirs,
for this belief had lived in the family for many years and it was too
pleasant to yield to any acquaintance with reality.
In 1937 Seymour made the most revolutionary move of his.
life, he became a bookmaker. It was soon recognized that he should
have done this many years before, instead of being the gambler who
threw his money away on betting. Seymour did not prosper as a
bookmaker might, but he managed to make a living sufficient to keep
his mother and himself in modest circumstances, so that at last, twelve
years after James first had demanded it, Seymour and his mother
lived in
.a
household of their own and James lived alone with his wife
and his son. But the two families lived in the same apartment house
because Rebecca was unwilling to let her mother go anywhere where
she would be unable to take care of her if she became
ill.
And Ruth
Hart was always in Rebecca's apartment, trying to help her, while
Seymour used his sister as
.a
kind of banker, giving her his money
to put in the bank for him and drawing upon her resources when he
was short of funds.
The entire family had now settled in the fixed forms of middle
age. James made a modest living, Seymour made a modest living,
Nancy and Jasper went to the city universities, the sickly John was
now in grammar school, and the generation of the children provided
the only unpredictable and unstable processes in the family life. As the
new war came nearer, the prosperity of the family became definite
