‘Gene!’ It slashed Fred’s heart to see with what agonized fondness his daughter was looking at the young man.

‘But you remind me, Sara,’ remarked Gene, and for a second his reckless smile came back. He dialled on the telephone, and murmured, ‘Miss Kitz, please . . . Oh, Frieda, this is Gene . . . Yes, they’ve been here — wrecked everything. I’m hitch-hiking out of town and glad of it. I’ll meet you in the old place in Albany, ‘bout eight to-night. O.K.? . . . Fine. Auf Wiedersehen!’

He turned debonairly on the Cornplows with, ‘You see, you needn’t worry about my future now, Mr. Cornplow! You wouldn’t be a bad sort, if you just had the sense to realize that your good-natured democratic sort of middle-roadishness is plumb finished — or will finish, in front of a stone wall.’

‘I suppose you want me to play safe and join the Communist Party!’

Fred believed that he had been chillingly sarcastic, but Gene answered serenely, ‘No I’m afraid we wouldn’t want you!’ and Gene was gone.

Fred turned pitifully to Sara, who was standing mute, hands at her breast. ‘Honey, it’s what you get if you mix up with folks that are crazy for power. Were you awfully fond of Gene?’

The tornado struck him squarely:

‘Gene? You call that little guttersnipe “Gene”? I hate him! I always did! He was just an experiment in psychology to me. “Fond”? Oh, can’t you even begin to understand me? . . . I’m going to the tennis club. I’ve been neglecting my game. I’m going out for it seriously now. But before I play, I’m going to have a Tom Collins and see if I can’t wash the taste of all this vulgarity out of my mouth.’ She looked indignantly down on the parent who had wished upon her these unpleasantnesses, the Coheeze and Protest & Progress and the police. She said, from the doorway, ‘It’s all very distasteful to me. Bribery! Insisting that I’m such a fool as to like that little rat, Silga. Very — distasteful — indeed!’

Fred was left alone with a mess of unpaid bills.

‘I won’t pay one cent of ’em,’ he stormed — with twenty-five-per-cent honesty.

An hour later, in front of a miraculously straightened table, he added, ‘I’d like to get out of this! I suppose I love my grateful son and daughter, but now I know what old man Solomon meant when he said, “Comfort me with apples for I am sick of love!”’

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

The Prodigal Parents, by Sinclair Lewis

Chapter 22

As an apprentice mechanic at the Triumph Agency, Howard was popular. For a couple of days he sulked at grease and overalls, the time clock and an aching back, but he discovered that the workmen were as individual as the pedigreed young gentlemen he had known in college, and more vigorous in humour. Their stories of jobs and girls and drunks, of the navy, the Pacific Coast, Detroit, seemed to him better than the giggling of young collegians, and it became important to him to be one of the boys.