358
PARTISAN R.EVIEW
Ruth Hart's health became weaker and she had heart attacks
which were serious indeed. Through the years she had had many ill–
nesses and many griefs, until it seemed as if everything had happened
to her. She had been bitten by a dog, she had broken her leg on an
icy sidewalk, her appendix had been removed and she had suffered
the heartbreak of the death of her son. Yet she was cheerful once
more as soon as the trial was passed and she rejoiced in her children,
her grandchildren, her friends, and the love all felt for her. Bearing
in
mind how much she had suffered, her daughters said of her that
she had more lives than a cat and Seymour said that nothing could
kill her. ·
"How do you manage to live so long?" asked her grandson
Jasper who loved her very much and feared the day when she
would die.
She explained to him that she knew how to rest. She did not
sleep much and she never went to sleep for good until Seymour had
returned, but she dozed in the dark, waiting for him.
And then a year after Seymour's return from the army she had
the most severe of all her heart attacks. Seymour's behavior became
extraordinary. Although he expressed a mocking amusement at all
of her behavior when she was well, as soon as she became sick he
was sure that she was going to die, this was the long-feared moment,
and Seymour, overcome by the emotions he knew when he went to
a ball game on which much of his money was staked, became panicky.
He walked up and down in the bedroom and then he sat at her
bedside, and when the attack was at its worst, he became so sure
that she was going to die that he began to moan and refused to stop
moaning and would not leave his mother's bedside.
When she was well again, she told her grandson Jasper about
Seymour's behavior, speaking with some
disdain.~
"You should have heard that moaning, Jasper," she said, "he
was not like a human being, he was like some animal. I had to tell
him to go away, he was making himself such a nuisance."
The truth was that Ruth Hart was touched by her son's terror
of her death. But she was ashamed of what to her was unmanly
behavior. It was all right for a woman to scream at such times and
she herself had screamed more than once at the news of death or
disaster. But a man ought not to be like that.
"What will he do when I am dead?" she asked Rebecca. "I
think he will go to pieces."
"You are better than a wife," said Rebecca, "that's why Seymour
