Fred rose. The others didn’t. He had to make it severe — at least he tried to make it severe, even in face of Enos’s leering remembrance of himself as fat little Freddie Cornplow:

‘Enos! Have Cal and Mac come to see me at the Triumph agency tomorrow, between ten and twelve. I’ll see if I can’t put them to work.’

It took half an hour before the Tillerys oozed out of the house, during which period Hazel peeped in and looked at Fred like the Gorgon sisters; it took five days and a hundred dollars before Fred coaxed them to ooze out of Sachem. As Mac and Cal were only half an hour late in coming to see him the next day, he put both of them at work, washing though rarely cleaning cars.

The brief comedy of the Tillerys affected him as biliously as Sara’s conversion to communism or Howard’s desire to leave college.

Fred had not hugely differed from Enos Tillery in a simple faith that a man is as chained to his family, even to all of his blessedly lost relatives, as he is to the law and the prophets and his most understanding friends. But the affaire Tillery, coming just a day before the family gathering on his fifty-sixth birthday, left him in a shocking state of tribal infidelity.

‘My own bunch are Hazel, and now Annabel, and friends like Doc Kamerkink and Walter Lindbeck — none of them blood relations, thank heaven!’ he blasphemed, and, greatly daring, he wondered whether he was compelled to serve the desires of even Howard and Sara, unless they should choose to be his friends as well as his children.

At dinner, Hazel said, ‘Did I hear those people say they were cousins of yours? Why didn’t you invite them to dinner?’

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

The Prodigal Parents, by Sinclair Lewis

Chapter 9

The living-room was littered with crocuses and daffodils, lilies and hothouse roses, for Fred’s birthday party, and he, who hated this clammy reminder of advancing years, grumbled, ‘Sure! Getting me used to my funeral by degrees!’

The dining-room was set out with the gold-and-sky-blue Limoges plates, cut-glass dishes of Hazel’s celebrated brandied peaches, and gold-rimmed, faintly etched wineglasses, from which they would each drink two doses of champagne, except for Fred, who would have three, and Annabel Staybridge, who would have ginger ale.

The more he disliked birthdays, the more Fred drove himself to be merry and grateful, particularly when they produced the surprise gifts, which he had already viewed, in their hiding-place in the linen closet, with disapproval. The gifts were also a give-away of the donors. Fred had complained that he hadn’t a dressing-gown long enough to cover his nervous feet on a winter morning, and from Hazel he had a woolly robe large enough to cover the feet of Jumbo. But it was of a dizzying purple, edged with fiery red cord, and the sash, he was certain, would never stay tied. Howard gave him a framed photograph — of Howard; and from his friends and guests Dr. and Mrs. Kamerkink, he had a pipe. It was the second pipe they had given him, and Fred never smoked a pipe, but the Doc believed that for a gentleman of forty and upwards a pipe was more manly and hygienic than cigarettes.