Fifty

I was reading the text of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” when I reached the lines below that almost made me laugh.

The scene was during a dance between Benjamin and Hildegarde (Cate Blanchett’s role equivalent in the short story). Benjamin looked fifty but as many of us have learned from the movie adaptation, he was probably in his late teens to early twenties at the time, which Hildegarde didn’t know yet. She thought Benjamin was fifty years old.

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"I like men of your age," Hildegarde told him. "Young boys are so idiotic. They tell me how much champagne they drink at college, and how much money they lose playing cards. Men of your age know how to appreciate women."

Benjamin felt himself on the verge of a proposal--with an effort he choked back the impulse.

"You're just the romantic age," she continued--"fifty. Twenty-five is too wordly-wise; thirty is apt to be pale from overwork; forty is the age of long stories that take a whole cigar to tell; sixty is--oh, sixty is too near seventy; but fifty is the mellow age. I love fifty."

Fifty seemed to Benjamin a glorious age. He longed passionately to be fifty.

"I've always said," went on Hildegarde, "that I'd rather marry a man of fifty and be taken care of than marry a man of thirty and take care of him."