Lyle Saxon’s “The Forgotten Cigarette”

One of New Orleans’ most cherished authors is Lyle Saxon, often hailed as the historian laureate of the Crescent City. His most-read books include Fabulous New Orleans (1928) and Old Louisiana (1929).

Today’s post reproduces, in its entirety, one of Saxon’s earliest short stories, “The Forgotten Cigarette.”

Saxon’s origins were for years obscured by rumor and falsehoods. He led acquaintances to believe that he was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but this was untrue. His parents were Hugh Allen Saxon and Katherine “Kitty” Chambers. They married in 1890 and almost immediately thereafter traveled to the West Coast, where Hugh’s mother, Elizabeth Lyle Saxon, lived. Elizabeth was well known for her work as a politician, suffragist and writer.

Kitty gave birth on April 4, 1891, and named the boy Lyle, after Hugh’s mother. However, Hugh essentially abandoned his wife and son, possibly even before Lyle was born. Kitty and baby Lyle soon returned to Baton Rouge, where they lived with Kitty’s father, a bookstore owner.

Throughout his life, Saxon suffered the effects of his father’s abandonment. As a boy, Saxon made up—or at least exaggerated—stories of his birth and idyllic upbringing. And he resented his father, refusing ever to speak with him or return communications.

In the early 1920s, Saxon was employed as a reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper, where he published a handful of stories that reflected his parental resentments. One of them is reproduced below: “The Forgotten Cigarette” (originally printed in the Times-Picayune Sunday Magazine, May 20, 1923, p.7). Today it might be called “flash fiction.” In this brief tale, Saxon casts a dim light on a self-absorbed and negligent parent—this time a mother—who places her immediate satisfaction above her love for her son. This story and others are also reproduced in A Lyle Saxon Reader: Lost Stories of the French Quarter and Buried Treasure, published by the Cultured Oak Press, and available from bookstores and online.

The Forgotten Cigarette

By Lyle Saxon

The mother entered the room softly and closed the door. Far off, downstairs, she could hear the laughter of her friends, as they had their last highball before leaving for the opera. She approached the bed and looked down at the sleeping child, slowly her face softened and lost its look of cynical indifference; she became almost motherly. Looking around, almost as if afraid of being observed, she kissed the little boy who lay sleeping there.

It was then that she became aware of her cigarette, which she had lighted in the dining room, and which she still carried in her hand. She placed it upon the edge of the table beside her, and then she fell upon her knees beside the boy. She pressed quick kisses upon his forehead, flushed a little with sleep; she poured out little love words to his unheeding face. Then she jumped up and ran out of the room, moving her eyes furtively. “What a fool I am,” she said aloud. She reached the dining room before the guests had finished their highballs and in time to have another herself.

An hour later, as she sat in boredom looking to the world’s highest paid opera singers, her home burned and her child died crying miserably for her.

So she went to a sanitarium and took the long cure; in the spring she was quite well again. Aside from missing a season, all was as before.

Nevertheless, the child’s death had saddened her and she gave up smoking as a sort of penance, which of course was useless, but which gave her a sort of martyred feeling. And besides, smoking was making her teeth yellow. From her martyrdom she took much pleasure.

Here is the moral, bumptious reader:

A little control of the feelings will keep life balanced; a display of emotion is in bad taste at any time.

Photo credit: Ada Be. No changes were made to this photo.