Old Folks

YEARS ARE SO LONG--Josephine Lawrence--Stokes ($2.50).

Though Years Are So Long could not be called propaganda for Mother's Day, it is a novel with a Social Message. Its message is in the form of an implicit and unresolved question: Who is responsible for aged parents, and what is to be done about them? The unsentimental coldness with which Author Lawrence states her typical case-history is well calculated to shock readers into horrified protest, but the exaggerated indifference of her manner saves her story from drabness, gives it a painful point.

Old Mr. Cooper, a very ordinary little man, had reached the age when he was too old to be a bookkeeper any longer. He had never taken out insurance, had saved nothing for himself and his fat old wife, Lucy. They had five grown children, all married, all with jobs. In Father Cooper's creed the children owed their parents support in their old age. But the children, it appeared, did not feel that way about it. Instead of vying with each other for the privilege of putting up their parents, they all did their best to duck the job. Eldest Son George, to cap his father's and mother's humiliation, stated the children's case in blunt language. None of them was well off, none really had room in his home or time in his life for two superannuated grasshoppers who had not seen the winter coming. By the harsh terms of the compromise Father and Mother Cooper, married half a century, would have to leave each other, "visit" their children separately for three months at a time.

As their only alternative was a Home for the Aged, Parents Cooper gave in. They missed each other frightfully. In their children's small apartments or crowded little houses they were always in the way. Their pathetic attempts to make themselves useful were brusquely disregarded. They had nothing to do. They were very lonely. Even to see each other at lengthy intervals they had to sneak off, take wearisome bus rides, sit shivering on park benches because they had no money, nowhere to go. When Father Cooper caught a chill and died because his daughter-in-law was too stingy to get a doctor, his old wife tried to take it well. She tried to mean it when she said: "At least he didn't die among strangers." With the old man out of the way, the family conclave decided that the best thing for their mother would be an Old Ladies' Home.

Author Lawrence writes her brutal story with an icy detachment that will not recommend any of her characters to a reader's wholehearted sympathy. Indignation, disgust, pity she certainly succeeds in arousing. And for insurance men Years Are So Long should be required reading.

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