Well, he persuaded himself in the taxicab, for good or ill, this one child had been set on the way. But there was another child that needed him, needed him urgently . . . he hoped.

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Last updated Sunday, March 27, 2016 at 11:57

The Prodigal Parents, by Sinclair Lewis

Chapter 39

Howard’s flat was a ‘second-story walk-up’. The first flight of the stairs was clean and waxy; the second, littered with cigarette butts, mud and a dozen milk bottles, some empty and tumbled on their sides, some full of milk turned sour.

When Fred knocked, from within came a voice, apparently Cal Tillery’s, bawling, ‘Ah gwan, beat it!’

Fred walked in. The living-room, which Annabel had kept sweet as a new moon, was like a junk shop. Middle of the floor lay a glass lamp, smashed, with its vellum shade dented, and beside it, Annabel’s volume of Yeats, with the cover torn off. Cal Tillery, in undershirt and trousers, happily waving a cigarette, lay on Annabel’s chaise-longue, upon a woolly afghan (she had knitted it). Beside Cal was a highball on a low maple table, in the middle of which a cigarette had burned itself out. The charred paper and ashes still outlined its corpse.

Nailed to the wall with an ice pick was a photograph of Annabel’s father, the beard daubed red with a coloured pencil.

Cal looked up cheerfully. ‘Hello, Cousin Freddie! Who let you out? So they wouldn’t keep you in Europe heh?’

Fred took an appreciable time in walking over to him. His voice was low. ‘Get out. Quick.’

‘What’s your hurry? Have a drink?’

Fred’s voice was not so low now. ‘Quick, I said!’

‘Give a fellow time to put his shoes on, can’t you?’

Fred looked about for the shoes. They had been placed, carefully ranged side by side, on Annabel’s baby-grand piano, which her mother had given to her when she was ten. Cal’s straw hat and coat were dumped on the floor. Fred picked up shoes, hat, coat, and threw them out into the hall.

He was thirty years older than Cal, and small and fat and unexercised. He stooped over Cal, his plump hands making clawing motions. He must have looked mad.

‘I said — quick!’

‘All right — all right — keep your shirt on — Freddie!’ But Cal was staggering out, as he said it.

Howard could be heard groaning, ‘Oh, what’s all racket?’ from the bedroom.

Before Fred went to him, he looked over the kitchen-dining-room. There was not one plate or glass left in the cupboard; a pile of dishes, smeared with egg yolk, bacon grease and burned toast crumbs, tottered on the dish slide. In the sink were a dishpan full of greasy water, the smashed ruin of a glass coffee percolator and the slowly perishing shred of a cake of expensive hand-soap. The roller towel, behind the door, was streaked with black.

Fred marched into the bedroom. Howard, in pyjamas, the top unbuttoned over his woolly red chest, lay flat on the bed, groaning, trying to stroke his wet and blazing forehead. A whisky bottle was snugly tilted on the pillow beside his cheek.