368
PARTISAN REVIEW
be an adolescent critical of her. And he had thought that his sorrow
and pity for his mother's unhappiness began with the love
his
mother
had fixed upon him as an infant. Now that he saw that this was not
true, he saw his own being and character in an utterly reversed form.
He had really loved his mother very much and that was the reason
he had felt so much sorrow for her unhappiness. His mother had
never loved him and that was why he had sought vainly to be in
love. The girls who had been in love with him and whom he had
thought of marrying were too easy, they did not reject him, they did
not tum away from him, as his mother had. And it had been his
father who had really loved him! Who had turned on all the lights
when he cried and satisfied every wish of the child ! More and more
memories of early childhood returned and Jasper saw how his father's
departure from his mother must have been a great loss to the small
boy who was used to being a little king. His father had loved him
as Seymour had been loved by his mother.
"Your father thought there was nothing like you in the whole
world!" said Rebecca. "I have never seen a man make so much of
a child! That's why your mother always thought he would come
back to her, no matter how often he went off with other women."
"And that was why she never cared very much for me," said,
Jasper, repeating what
his
aunt had said as he understood it more
and more, "I was the hope that disappointed her most of all."
"That's what has been wrong with all of us," said Rebecca, "we
expect too much from our children. Everyone knows that we expect
everything fn?m them which we never had anywhere else. It is tim
to go to the hospital. Your grandmother will be waiting for you."
As
Jasper returned to the hospital, the history of his family arose,
illuminated, in his mind, as if he had entered a house at night and
turned on the light in each room, and looked at the things which had
long been there, but which he saw as
if
for the first time. Seymour
was what he was because of his mother, because he was his mother's
child. Yet Rebecca also was what she was because she had the same
mother. At the same time, Sarah was the kind of woman and wife
and mother she had turned out to be because her mother and her
father had liked their other children more; that was the reason for her
being a grasping being, turned in on herself and incapable of love.
And Nancy, turning from such a mother, had hurried to marriage,
just as Rebecca, having a different mother, had waited long for
marriage.
As
for John, it was too soon to see what kind of a human
being he was, but one could be sure that his being as a child would
