Studs Lonigan (138 page)

She thought of Jesus in Gethsemane, sweating blood for the sins of man, and of Jesus on the cross, wearing a crown of thorns, drinking vinegar and gall, his side pierced with a lance, Jesus, crucified, muttering to God, not my will, but Thy will be done. She lay her trust in Him. She would bear the burdens He sent her. If William must die, it was His will, and she would bear it.

Again she saw a vision of her William in a black cassock. She saw herself kneeling in Saint Patrick's while William celebrated his first mass. She saw herself giving a reception to friends and relatives, after his first night. Father William Lonigan smiling, meeting everyone, bestowing his blessings, she at his side, his mother. What a pride! What a blessing to her and her family!

Again she prayed.

 

 

And the fruit of her womb. Was there a mother in this world, suffering tonight as she was, she asked herself?

His face revealing an alcoholic stupor, Lonigan hiccupped. He laid his face on the kitchen table and cried. Paddy, buck up and be a man! He moved unsteadily to the stove and lit the gas under the coffee pot. He drew a cup and saucer from the cupboard and set them on the table.

Paddy, buck up and be a man!

He wheezed and wiped his perspiring face. He lowered his head on his left forearm, thinking that he might just rest a minute until the coffee boiled. He raised his head and stared at the calcimined ceiling. He looked at the clock on the window sill, above the table. A quarter to two.

The coffee slowly bubbled and commenced to boil.

He was acutely aware of the clock ticking in the quiet house. He wished that it would stop, that time would come to a dead halt. He had a nauseating headache, but he was beginning to sober up and the coffee would fix him just right.

Buck up, Paddy, and be a man! he told himself.

Tired, he laid his head again on the table, waiting for the coffee to boil.

“Goodness, Patrick, what's this? Is the house on fire?” Mrs. Lonigan excitedly said as she rushed into the kitchen sniffing, seeing her husband asleep. She shook him.

“What, Mary? Oh, hello,” he said, looking at her dazed, his words seeming to float listlessly in the air as if there were nobody behind the utterance.

She rushed to the stove, and burned her hand removing the burning pot and dropping it in the sink. He gazed at her with the guilty expression of a boy while she sucked on her fingers. She went to him, and he stood up, clenching her in his arms.

“Father,” she moaned.

“Now, Mary, we got to be brave and strong, and face whatever the Lord visits upon us. I know it's hard, Mary, but you and me, we've come through a lot, and we've still got one another, and our other children. And I have a feeling that Bill will pull through.”

He patted her head, gently kissed her eyes, her cheeks, her lips, the top of her gray head.

“Oh, Patrick!” she sobbed.

Martin Lonigan paused at the first landing and warned himself to be quiet because his brother was pretty sick. He steadied himself against the banister, and staggered up the stairs. He withdrew his door key from a trouser pocket and thudded against the door. He rebounded. He tried to fit the key into the lock, jabbed it against the metal, and heard subdued voices from within. As he again strove to insert the key, the door opened and he fell into the house. His father gripped him. Mrs. Lonigan appeared behind her husband, and at the sight of Martin, she blessed herself.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. First the sweetheart tells me she's having a baby. Then the father and son come in drunk.”

She fainted.

“Mother. Mother,” Lonigan softly exclaimed, staggering with her into the parlor, while Loretta rushed to the kitchen for water.

Martin hung his coat and hat on the rack, his mother's fainting having had a partially sobering effect.

“Hello, Fran,” he said, floundering into the parlor.

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” Fran snapped, looking daggers at him.

“Now Fran, you know I like Studs. Always did. Studs was a great guy. It ain't right for him to be sick like this, and he's my brother, you know. I hate to see him kick the bucket . . . die. I want to see him alive. He's my brother, and I respect him. Don't want to see him sick. We all like Studs, don't we?” Martin said, lighting a cigarette.

“Aren't you ashamed of yourself?” Fran said, vigorously shaking his shoulders.

“None of us wants Studs sick, do we?”

She led him off to bed, and the father and Loretta revived the mother.

He seemed to be choking.

“Mother, it's getting dark,” he called feebly.

He gasped. There was a rattle in his throat. He turned livid, his eyes dilated widely, became blank, and he went limp. And in the mind of Studs Lonigan, through an all-increasing blackness, streaks of white light filtered weakly and recessively like an electric light slowly going out. And there was nothing in the mind of Studs Lonigan but this feeble streaking of light in an all-encompassing blackness, and then, nothing.

And by his bedside was a kneeling mother, sobbing and praying, two sisters crying, a brother with his head lowered hiding a solemn and penitent face, a father sick and hurt, and an impatient nurse.

Lonigan went to the kitchen. He poured himself the remains of a bottle of whisky and gulped it. He sat by the table, his face blank, his mouth hanging open. He heard his wife scream.

The two daughters led the hysterical mother out of the room, and the nurse covered the face of Studs Lonigan with a white sheet.

 

THE work that was to become
Studs Lonigan
evolved from a short story I had written in which the hero had died young. As the story grew into a novel, I asked myself what Studs's life had been like during his short years. I had planned a novel of one volume, beginning with the night of Studs's graduation from grammar school in June of 1916. But as I wrote—for some twenty months—I had written most of what was to become the first two volumes of this trilogy,
Young Lonigan
and
The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan,
revising and rewriting some chapters a number of times.

In revealing Studs's life day by day, I realized that his life itself was not so unusual; that the most unusual thing about him was his early death.

In February of 1931, I submitted what was then the first section of this work-in-progress to publishers as a separate novel. At the time this was a carefully revised manuscript of about one hundred and eighty pages. The novel was published as
Young Lonigan
by Vanguard Press in April of 1932.

I planned to develop the remaining pages of this work as a sequel that would end with Studs's death.

But before that sequel was published, I read and reread, including James Joyce's
Ulysses.
I also continued with other writing. Between
Young Lonigan
and the sequel,
The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan
, Vanguard Press published my second novel,
Gas-House McGinty.

Following the conclusion of this novel, I resumed work on
The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan,
which was already in first draft. The final chapter described a wild New Year's Eve party. I knew this had to be the end of the book and that the death scene I had planned for Studs would not work here. I would have to write a third novel.

Thus, the trilogy.

It was my plan to devote almost the whole of the third volume to the dying consciousness of Studs Lonigan. The setting would be the Day of Judgment as forecast in the Bible.

I began to write
Judgment Day
in 1934. I knew I would need an introductory chapter in which I could place Studs on his deathbed, thereby leaving the rest of the book to his actual dying.

The book seemed to write itself. I wrote hundreds of pages, introducing the Great Depression in which we were living, before I came to Studs on his deathbed, including a chapter in which the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church, the Sacrament of Extreme Unction, would be administered.

Finally, I reached the stage where Studs was to die.

Later, James Henle, President of Vanguard Press, and I agreed that this scene seemed an unnecessary tour de force after the episode of the last rites. I deleted it.

For years I hoped to publish this section either as a small volume or as a story. But any question of such publication was ended abruptly in December of 1946 with a devastating fire in my New York apartment. Books, letters, documents, and manuscripts were burned. Firemen had thrown out charred and smoking papers into the back yard. There had been only one copy of the rough draft manuscript of Studs's death, of which I was able to recover some half-burned fragments—about thirty pages. These are the pages published here as an epilogue to this edition —the first appearance of this fragmentary work in book form. Thus it is entirely unknown to most readers of
Studs Lonigan,
and few who have written about the trilogy have been aware of it.

 

James T. Farrell
New York, 1978

. . . AND HIS CHEEKS BURNED, his legs were on fire, his chest was heavy, crossed by pains, warm, burning; all over him there was a fire consuming his skin and his nerves. His bones ached. In his backbone at the base of his spine there was pain. There was fire and weariness in the thin arms beneath the covers of his bed. There was pain and fire in his sunken cheeks. There was fever in his glazed half-opened eyes and in the lids that pressed them down. He tried to speak. . . . The strange white woman, her white soothing and . . . cool, bent toward him. In his mind, there formed the words:

I'm afraid.

They traveled to his tongue and issued as sounds that the strange white woman bent to hear.

The sick eyes closed. Blackness came . . . certain objects in the misty room bound . . . crossed in front of the blackness . . . through the colors, and a cool . . . surrounded by grass . . . large tree, and seemed to be propelled away from him fast, and faster and faster, and he suddenly broke into a run after the tree, and he felt that if he caught that tree, touched it, stood under it, climbed it, only caught up with it, he would not die, and he felt that he was dying. And the tree disappeared. . . .

Instead of finding himself dead, he found himself to be only a boy, and he could not understand it. He was a boy in short pants. He was walking down Indiana Avenue, and there were new houses on Indiana Avenue, and he couldn't understand how there could be new houses on Indiana Avenue today when there had been only the old houses on Indiana . . . and he looked to glance into the window of the stone house where Lucy lived. And it was not there. In its place was a tall apartment building; out of it people walked, strangers—men and women whose faces were not clear . . . a woman he felt he must have seen somewhere . . . someplace before, and he could not remember what . . . Helen Shires came along and said. . . .

Helen was gone. Indiana Avenue was gone. He was riding in an airplane, regretful, thinking of Indiana Avenue and wondering why he had been carried away and where he was going. He looked down and thought that he recognized Washington Park. He kept asking himself why he had been carried away. He shouted to the driver:

Hey!

The driver did not answer him. A pain began to spread over him, a pain of regret, of . . . unsatisfied.

He was no longer in the airplane. He did not know where he was. He saw shapes that he . . . phallic shapes, twisted, gargoyles . . . similar objects, chairs and stoves, and buildings . . . twisted and torn, and he felt sorry and sick . . . felt that he was dying, and that he was . . . many things.

Behind them, the fires of Hell burning with terrific heat, and he stood facing them helplessly, a terrific heat parching his body, causing the perspiration to drip from him in large warm drops that caused small and prickling irritations . . . little fires among dried grass at his feet. And with the face of Weary Reilley the Devil bobbed up and down in the flames and shouted each time his face appeared.

You're coming to me, you bastard!

Above the fires of Hell, the Sacred Heart of Jesus hung, blood dripping from it, sizzling in the flames.

“The wages of sin is death, you skunk,” the Pope of Rome said to him.

“Give me a nickel to save your soul . . . for the Church commands you to contribute to the . . . pastor,” Father Gilhooley said, extending his hand.

“. . . jazzed whores, and now you're going to get . . . your life in Hell. Ha! Ha!” Father Shannon said.

“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,” the Pope of Rome said.

“In your life you spent three times as much on whores as you did on the salvation of your immortal soul,” said Father Gilhooley.

“Woe unto you, you who disregarded my word in my missions, you in whom I placed confidence,” said Father Shannon.

“You're coming here, you bastard, and these flames go up your brown,” the Devil with the face of Weary Reilley said.

Hell, give me a break. Fathers, forgive me for I have sinned. I'm heartily sorry. Hell, give me a break. Jesus Christ, give me a break and a drink. I'm dying, I'm dying, I'm burning, for Christ's sake give me some water and put out the fire. I'm dying. Goddamn it! I'm dying.”

“Well, hurry up about it, you fatheaded slob . . . can't wait all eternity for a measly bastard with a . . . damned soul like yours to die,” the Devil with the face of Weary Reilley called out to him.