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

The Prodigal Parents, by Sinclair Lewis

Chapter 26

Men at the dangerous age, between forty-five and sixty, occasionally do land in court and have to writhe over their letters beginning ‘Sweetest little earwig’, but most of them have not only forgotten how to make love but forgotten that there ever has been so extraordinary a mania as that in which competent young males believe that some run-of-the-mill female, of a physique set forth in the anatomy books without any deception or anything up the sleeve, a young woman with toothaches, freckles, the hives, and admitted ignorance of Bach and bio-chemistry, is a new Helen of Troy.

Fred was of the more fortunate fraction. He exalted Hazel, not as a being of fire, ice and chronic hysteria, but as a companion true as bread and salt.

He had heard that a man sees the ageing of his contemporaries but never sees it in himself. But while he was conscious of his own swelling middle, his violent lack of interest in anything happening after one a.m., and the torture of trying to interest elfin young females skipping about at dances, yet in Hazel he could see no change. Oh yes. She did have grey hair. What of it? Went beautifully with her blue-eyed pinkness. And maybe the least bit more plump? Improved her. Didn’t he seem to remember that, thirty years ago, she had been too skinny?

He sang to her ‘Ev’ry morn I bring thee vi’lets’, but what he actually brought her every morn was fresh eggs. He walked all the way to the King’s Arms for chocolate pralines and the New York tabloids, and what could more add to a vagabond vacation than pictures of hammer slayers and punctured gunmen? Every night he kissed her; every morning he patted her hand. He admitted that these attentions might fall short of rapture, but he guessed that if he had done anything more, she would have been justifiably suspicious about his recent private conduct. He knew that in exile she was happy. She smiled at him naturally, and she hummed over the morning ham and eggs.

He was not conscienceless enough to be quite happy in deserting his family. When he walked alone at twilight, or in the tavern lounge he heard the radio play old songs, he remembered the curly-headed, tiny Howard, with a kitten, and the minute Sarah — not Sara, then — who had demanded the string cradles that no one but Daddy could make. The worst thing about real babies and kittens is that they look so much like sentimental chromos of babies and kittens.

In such an hour of grey nostalgia he could not have endured exile without the presence of Hazel. He dashed back to her for protection, and he fretted, while she sat before the rustic dressing-table, her handsome arms upraised to her hair, ‘Say, hon, maybe we ought to write the folks now — see how the Duplex and the new-married couple are getting on.’