Studs Lonigan (134 page)

“Ah.”

Horns tooted behind him. Blocking traffic by falling asleep at the wheel. He drove forward, and he parked his car by a vacant lot that was thick with weeds and littered with rocks, refuse, papers, tin cans. Stepping out of the car he caught a whiff of stale garbage from the prairie. He turned back and locked the door of his Ford. He glanced down a block-paved street, with tumbling and sinking wooden houses stacked between old brick buildings of two and three stories, most of the houses appearing uninhabitable in a pall of gray smoke. The neighborhood still looked something like it had in the old days, only worse. He slowly moved down a narrow cracked sidewalk, unable to recognize most of the houses. He halted before a boarded, untenanted structure that was weather-worn and lop-sided, as if threatening to fall into a heap of junk at any minute. He noticed that the windows were broken, black with dirt and soot, and the grassless plot of dirt in front of the house was messed with papers, small broken pieces of board and rusty tin cans, and the steps dropping into the cellar entrance were barricaded with refuse. Chewing on his cigar, he tried to remember what family had lived there. O'Learys? Doyles? Schaeffers? He scratched his head. Golly, he couldn't remember. And all those who had lived along this block then, where were they, and what had happened to them? He flung the cigar-butt away. Some of them, like all the older folks, dead. The last O'Leary boy had been killed by an automobile. Dan Doyle dead, his oldest son killed in the war. The Schaeffers disappeared. He sighed.

Across the street from the abandoned house some boys were playing ball in a narrow lot, shouting like hell. Golly, he had played ball like that and so had his brothers, Jack and Mike and Joe, and so had Bill and Martin around Fifty-eighth Street. And now here were these boys.

“Go on, you sonofabitch, I'm safe.”

He laughed. Tough kids, all right. A whole new generation, going through the same mill that he had. Going through the same kind of a mill that Bill and Martin had. No. Bill and Martin had been given advantages that he'd never had, and these kids weren't getting them, either.

“If I'm a sonofabitch, you're a . . .”

Swearing like teamsters. Well, when he was a shaver he'd done the same thing. What would become of these lads? They'd scatter like the kids he'd known. Some go to jail. Some just get nowhere. Some pull themselves up by their own bootstraps just as he had done. He remembered Packey Dooley. Packey had died young, of consumption. His mother had wanted him to learn the violin. Maybe if Packey had lived he might have been a great violinist. Ah, life was a funny thing, and Boots Brennan, the toughest kid in the whole block, who had always sworn like a trooper, Boots was now Father Brennan. But most of the kids hadn't turned out so well, and they had come to no good end. He had escaped all that, but for what? Only now to be ruined and bankrupt. And was he coming to a good end? And how many generations of kids had come and gone since his time, and how many more would follow after those kids cursing and playing ball in the lot across the street? Oh, life was a funny thing.

He hadn't remembered his childhood in years as he was remembering it today. Poverty, the cold house in winter with the wind breaking through the cracks. Days without food. His father, a big strong man, worrying, coming home drunk. He remembered his father once staggering in with not a cent of pay left. His mother had cried and cursed him. The old man had punched his mother and she had fallen, and Catherine, like a little tigress, had ripped into the old man until she'd gotten a whaling. And then for two weeks his parents hadn't spoken. He could remember his mother, day after day, working and slaving, washing, scrubbing, cooking in their crowded little home. Ah, life was a funny thing.

Thrilling with pride, he told himself that he had taken his family away from such a life. Even now, if he was a ruined man, he had lifted them up, and they would have something better. His girls would. Martin? He was worried about Martin, and Bill. Oh, if only. . . . But where was he? He tried to convince himself that he was worrying too much, and he stood watching a black-shirted blond boy hit the ball over third base and run the bases while the others shouted. Oh, to be a shaver again, playing like these kids, stealing coal from the railroad yards. And then the days when he was a young buck, sowing his wild oats, the nights at dances and in saloons, and Mary. Mary such a sweet young girl, winning all the races at picnics. Mary whose dark eyes went only for him, Mary who had really made a man out of Paddy Lonigan.

He turned, staring ahead of him, slowly pacing this familiar, and yet not familiar, street. An old woman came toward him. Her skin was rough and wrinkled, her gray hair stuck out from a black shawl pulled tight around her shrewd, peasant face. Bent, walking slowly, she made him sadly remember his old mother in her last years. She had ended up like this poor old woman was, before any of the children had been in a position to help her. She must, though, be getting her reward in Heaven. A wave of sympathy, such as he had not experienced in years, overpowered him, almost dragged tears out of his eyes. He wanted to say something kind to this old woman, who was thrusting a suspicious glance at him, something jolly, he wanted to smile at her and call her mother, drop a little word of cheer into her life. She passed on, and he watched her, scurrying on toward Thirty-fifth Street.

He lit a fresh cigar and tried to fancy himself as the prosperous Paddy Lonigan he had been just a couple of short years ago, walking back through these changed scenes of his boyhood, trying to keep his mind on the distance he had travelled since those days. He suddenly caught the odor of decay and stink from the nearby stockyards that were just south of this section. He smiled. Just like old times. That was something he hadn't thought of in years, golly, the stockyard smell. In those days he had always lived in that smell and gotten not to mind it. He tried again to keep his mind on the distance he had travelled since those days. But what did it mean now? He cursed. They were robbing him. Goddamn it, they couldn't take his building. They couldn't. He'd get a shot-gun and defy them.

A crowd was gathered at the end of the block, and he walked more rapidly toward it, noticing, as he approached, that there were policemen. Trouble. Coming up to the crowd, he saw a bailiff and two workingmen removing an assortment of ancient and scratched furniture from a three-story brick tenement while three broad-shouldered policemen stood about with surly, challenging expressions. A lean woman in a ragged black dress sat in a stuffed chair with a baby in her arms. Beside her, a leathery man stood, talking down at her. Two unwashed girls of ten or twelve, and a small boy with holes in his stockings stood beside the man, crying.

“Get back,” a policeman said to a ragged kid who ran toward the furniture.

“This can't go on forever,” a small, nervous man in overalls and a blue shirt said, too loudly, and a ruddy-faced policeman walked quickly toward him.

“What did you say?”

“Come on, break it up. Break it up,” a second cop called, quickly joining the first.

Lonigan stepped off the curb and aside.

“I didn't say anything.”

“Break it up.”

“Move on. Don't block the sidewalk.”

Their faces surly, the crowd was edged down the sidewalk. Lonigan walked around the sidewalk, toward the corner. Might be trouble, and he didn't want to be mixed up in any riots or trouble. There had been riots, started by the Reds, in the Black Belt when niggers had been evicted. But that poor family. Losing their home, four children, too. Poor fellow, must be out of work. He remembered the remark of the small, nervous man. Could these hard times go on forever? His own building, they were taking it away from him, the building into which he had put all the money earned by the sweat of his own brow. Yes, it was earned by the sweat of his own brow. They couldn't take it away from him. They couldn't.

He passed a box-like, red-brick factory, sooty, with smokeless cylindrical chimneys. The windows were dirty, many of them broken. He guessed kids had done that. Closed factory. That meant men out of work, machinery rusting, people with money invested in it getting no return. Ah, hard times were hard, and we needed a new man of the people in the White House, to end all these hard times and unemployment.

Two short blocks ahead he saw a crowd gathered on a corner. He hastened forward on tired feet, breathing asthmatically, to see what was up.

Strange music filling the street, the shouts and cries of an approaching throng headed by an overalled white man and a Negro carrying an American and a Red flag, policemen stretched along the curbs in both directions, shabby people behind the line of bluecoats, a crowd constantly augmenting in front of the corner speakeasy saloon, children scampering and dodging through the group; all this befogged and confused Lonigan, and he puzzled with himself trying to figure out what it was. He heard a snickering voice beside him, and his face livened with the discovery that it was a Red parade. Goddamn Reds. They shouldn't be permitted to march in the street. Wouldn't if he had any say about it.

The noise and music swelled in volume, and he told himself, as if in an argument with someone else, that with things as bad, why couldn't the Reds let well enough alone, put their shoulders to the wheel, try to help things along back to prosperity instead of making conditions worse by parading to foment all this trouble and agitation. Kicking was all right, he continued with himself, and the Lord knew that he had as much reason to kick as any man. But that was no cause to want to tear down everything and have anarchy like in Russia. Why did these Jews and foreigners and Reds want to go on disrupting the way they did?

An explosion of shouts burst against his eardrums, and he stiffened with fear and surprise. He saw the head of the parade, half a block down, moving toward him like a howling mob. He remembered
Scaramouche,
a movie about the French Revolution that he and Mary had seen a long time ago in the old neighborhood. Were these Reds going to burn, and kill, and destroy the way the mob had in that picture? He looked at the broad back of a bull-necked policeman a few feet in front of him, and he guessed that the cops would be able to take care of any trouble if it started.

The shouts of the paraders broke upon him, the flag-bearers passed, several feet in advance of the parade, and he saw a swarm of faces, poster signs, banners, for blocks and blocks back. A tall, solid blond man in an unpressed blue suit, with frank features, followed the flag bearers, and Lonigan guessed that he was a Swede or an American. Behind him came a Jew, a Negro, and another tall, solidly built fellow who looked to Lonigan like a white man. A band followed, playing that strange tune, and Lonigan saw a sunken-chested little fellow in a gray shirt step beside him and raise his right fist and forearm. He couldn't understand it. A white and a black marcher carried the poles supporting a large banner.

 

TRADE UNION UNITY LEAGUE

 

They passed in a steady and confusing flow, men and women, white and black, blond and swarthy, carrying crude signs, slogans written on cardboard and attached to sticks and poles, singing and shouting, a succession of slogans breaking forth clearly, causing Lonigan to knit his brows and shake his head in wonderment.

“Comrades, join our ranks,” a plump girl called, passing Lonigan.

File after file strode forward. Poor people. Shabby people. Hunched and underfed men and women. Tall and powerful young men. Hefty, buxom Slavic girls. Lonigan looked idly from face to face, and singled out a tall buck Negro, his face black and surly, his pleated wide-bottomed brown trousers frayed, flopping and dragging at the cuff. Not a nice-looking customer, Lonigan decided. At the outside of the next rank a fat Negress with a red bandana about her head walked flat-footedly, constantly jerking her head about, smiling in a broad, white-toothed grin. She saw two flimsily-dressed, red-lipped, Slavic-faced girls on the curb ogling two corner hoodlums who had stepped out of the corner speakeasy.

“You ain't too pretty to starve,” the Negress called out loudly in a deep, rich voice, causing laughter to rake the marching ranks.

“Go on back to your washing,” one of the girls flung back, applauded by the loafers.

“Come on, folks,” the Negress shouted with a wave of a beefy arm and flashing a broad smile as she flat-footed by Lonigan.

“Comrades, join our ranks.”

Lonigan's mouth popped open in surprise. He watched a column of children in light blue uniforms with red armbands swinging behind a large banner.

 

YOUNG PIONEERS

 

A silent anger flushed his cheeks. Children shouldn't be let parade with all this riff-raff, taught socialism and anarchy and atheism and ideas against God and America and the home in their tender years. The children chanted in unison.

Not right or decent. These youngsters should be taken away from their parents by law and placed in institutions so that they would not be contaminated with all their vile Bolshevism.

 

NATIONAL STUDENTS LEAGUE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

 

From the University, too, he thought, slowly shaking his bewildered and shocked head, seeing students pass. And many of them were Jews, too. Father Shannon in his missions at Saint Patrick's had told what the A. P. A. professors at the University did.