I suspect that everyone knows the story of Benjamin Button. I certainly did and I had not seen the movie before I took a little breather and read Scott Fitzgerald’s story, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
The first thing that struck me was that Mr. Button ran around buying clothes and thinking about how embarrassing it would be introducing a septuagenarian as his newborn son but there was nary a thought or remark or question concerning the condition of his wife. Is this because the fiction focuses on the newborn or does it reflect a time when women were just doing their duty having babies and taking care of the man of the house (this was just before the War of Northern Aggression, remember)? Then, when Benjamin and his father appeared to be about the same age (50 or so), the two gentlemen gussied up for a night on the town … where was Mrs.. Button?
A Celebration of Reading 