Studs Lonigan (5 page)

He got soft, and felt like he was all mud and mush inside; he held his hand over his heart, and told himself:

My Lucy!

He flicked some ashes in the sink, and said to himself:

Lucy, I love you!

Once when he had been in the sixth grade, he had walked home with Lucy. Now, he puffed his cigarette, and the sneer went off his face. He thought of the March day when he had walked home with her. He had walked home with her. All along Indiana Avenue, he had been liking her, wanting to kiss her. Now, he remembered that day as clearly as if it had just happened. He remembered it better than the day when he was just a punk and he had bashed the living moses out of that smoke who pulled a razor on him over in Carter Playground, and a gang of guys had carried him around on their shoulders, telling him what a great guy he was, and how, when he grew up, he would become the white hope of the world, and lick Jack Johnson for the heavyweight championship. He remembered the day with Lucy, and his memory of it was like having an awful thirst for a drink of clear cold water or a chocolate soda on a hot day. It had been a windy day in March, without any sun. The air had seemed black, and the sky blacker, and all the sun that day had been in his thoughts of her. He had had all kinds of goofy, dizzy feelings that he liked. They had walked home from school, along Indiana Avenue, he and Lucy. They hadn't spoken much, and they had stopped every little while to look at things. They had stopped at the comer of Sixtieth, and he had shown her the basement windows they had broken, just to get even with old Boushwah, the Hunkie janitor, because he always ran them off the grass when they goofed on their way home from school. And she had pretended that it was awful for guys to break windows, when he could see by the look in her eyes that she didn't at all think it so terrible. And they had walked on slow, pigeon-toed slow, slower, so that it would take them a long time to get home. He had carried her books, too, and they had talked about this and that, about the skating season that was just finished, and about the spelling match between the fifth- and sixth-grade boys and girls, where both of them had been spelled down at the first crack of the bat, and they had talked about just talk. When they came to the elevated structure near Fifty-ninth, he had shown her where they played shinny with tin cans, and she said it was a dangerous game, and you were liable to get your shins hurt. Then he had shown her where he had climbed up the girder to the top, just below the elevated tracks, and she had shivered because it was such a dangerous brave thing to do, and he had felt all proud, like a hero, or like Bronco Billy or Eddie Polo in the movies. They had walked home lazy, and he had carried her books, and wished he had the price to buy her candy or a soda, even if it was Lent, and they had stood before the gray brick two-story building where she lived, and he had wanted, as the devil wants souls, to kiss her, and he hadn't wanted to leave her because when he did he knew the day would get blacker, and he would feel like he did when he had been just out of his diapers and he used to be afraid of the night. There had been something about that day. He had gone on in school, wishing and wishing for another one like it to come along. And now he felt it all over again, the goofy, dizzy, flowing feelings it had given him.

He puffed, and told himself:

Well, it's so long to the old dump tonight!

He wanted to stand there, and think about Lucy, wondering if he would ever have days with her like that one, wondering how much he'd see of her after she went to high school. And he goddamned himself, because he was getting soft. He was Studs Lonigan, a guy who didn't have mushy feelings! He was a hard-boiled egg that they had left in the pot a couple of hours too long.

He took another drag of his cigarette.

He wanted that day back again.

He faced the mirror, and stuck the fag in the right-hand comer of his mouth. He looked tough and sneered. Then he let the cigarette hang from the left side. He studied himself with satisfaction. He placed the cigarette in the center of his puss, and put on a weak-kneed expression. He took the cigarette out of his mouth, daintily, barely holding it between his thumb and first finger, and he pretended that he was a grown-up mama's boy, smoking for the first time. He said to himself:

Jesus Christ!

He didn't know that he bowed his head when he muttered the Lord's name, just as Sister Cyrilla had always taught them to do. He took a vicious poke at the air, as if he were letting one fly at a mama's boy.

He stuck the fag back in his mouth and looked like Studs Lonigan was supposed to look. He lowered the lid on the toilet seat, and sat down to think. He puffed at his cigarette, and flicked the ashes in the sink.

He heard Frances talking:

“Get out of my way, Fritzie . . . Get out of my way . . . Please . . . And mother . . . Mother! MOTHER! . . . Will you come here, please . . . I told you the hem was not right on this dress . . . Now, mother, come here and look at the way my skirt hangs . . . If I ever appear on the stage with my skirt like this, I'll be disgraced ... disgraced ... Mother!”

He heard his old lady hurrying to Frances's room, saying:

“Yes, Frances darling; only you know I asked you not to call Loretta Fritzie . . . I'm coming, but I tell you, your dress is perfectly even all around. I told you so this afternoon when you tried it on with Mrs. Sankey here.”

He could hear their voices as they jabbered away about her dress, but he didn't know what they were saying, and anyway, he didn't give two hoots in hell. Girls had loose screws in their beans. Well, girls like his sister anyway. Girls like Lucy, or Helen Shires, who was just like a guy, were exceptions. But there he was getting soft again. He said to himself:

I'm so tough that you know what happens? Well, bo, when I spit . . . rivers overflow . . . I'm so hard I chew nails . . . See, bo!

He took a last drag at his cigarette, tossed the butt down the toilet, and let the water run in the sink to wash the ashes down. He went to the door, and had his hand on the knob to open it when he noticed that the bathroom was filled with smoke. He opened the small window, and commenced waving his arms around, to drive the smoke out. But why in hell shouldn't they know? What did his graduating and his long jeans mean, then? He was older now, and he could do what he wanted. Now he was growing up. He didn't have to take orders any more, as he used to. He wasn't going to hide it any more, and he was going to tell the old man that he wasn't going to high school.

The bathroom was slow in clearing. He beat the air with his hands.

Frances rapped sharply on the door and asked him to get a move on.

He waved his arms around.

Frances was back in a moment.

“William, will you please . . . will you please . . . will you please hurry!”

She rapped impatiently.

“All right. I'll be right out.”

“Well, why don't you then? I have to hurry, I tell you. And I'm in the play tonight, and you're not. When you had your play last May, I didn't delay you like this, and I helped you learn your lines and everything, and now when I have to be there . . . William,
will you please hurry . . .
PLEASE! . . . oh, mother . . . Mother! Won't you come here and tell Studs to hurry up out of the bathroom?”

She furiously pounded on the door.

Studs was winded. He stopped trying to beat the smoke out. The smoke was still thick.

“All right, don't get . . . a . . . don't get so excited!”

He whewed, and wiped his forehead, as if there had been perspiration on it. That was a narrow escape. He'd almost told his sister not to get one on, and then there'd have been sixteen kinds of hell to pay around the house.

Whew!

You'da thought he wanted to stay in there, the way she was acting. Well, he was going to walk out and let 'em see the smoke, and when they blew their gobs off, he would tell them from now on he was his own boss, and he would smoke where and when he damn well pleased; and furthermore, he wasn't going to high school.

“William, will you please . . . please . . .
please
let me in . . . Mother, won't you please . . . please . . . OH, PLEASE, come here and make him get out. He's been in there a half-hour. He's reading. He's always mean and selfish like that . . . Mother, please . . . PLEASE!”

She banged on the door.

“Aw, I heard you,” Studs said.

“Well, if you did, come on out!” she snapped.

He heard his mother coming up to the door, while Frances banged and shouted away. He took a towel . . . why didn't he think of it sooner? . . . and started flapping it around.

His mother said:

“William, won't you hurry now, like a good son? Frances has to go in there, and she has to finish dressing and be up there early because she's going to be in the play. Now, son, hurry!”

“All right. I can't help it. I'll be right out.”

“Well,
please
do!” Frances said.

The mother commenced to tell Frances that William was going to let her right in; but Frances interrupted:

“But, mother, he's been in there almost an hour . . . He has no consideration for other people's rights . . . He's selfish and mean . . . and oh, mother, I got to go in there . . . and what will I do if I spoil my graduation dress on his account . . . make him, mother . . . and now I'm getting unnerved, and I'll never be able to act in the play.”

The old lady persuaded. And she told Studs that she and his father couldn't go until they had all the children off, and they would be disgraced if they came late for the entertainment on the night their son and daughter graduated.

Frances banged on the door and yelled.

“Aw, don't get so darn crabby,” Studs said to her while he fanned the air with his towel.

“See, mother! See! He says I'm insane just because I ask him to hurry after he's been in there all day. He's reading or smoking cigarettes . . . Please, make him hurry!”

“Why, Frances, how dare you accuse him like that!” Mrs. Lonigan commenced to say.

Studs heard his sister dashing away, hollering to the old man to come and do something. He fanned vigorously, and his mother stood at the door urging.

Old man Lonigan, his feet planted on the back porch railing, sat tilted back in his chair enjoying his stogy. His red, well-fed-looking face was wrapped in a dreamy expression; and his innards made slight noises as they diligently furthered the process of digesting a juicy beefsteak. He puffed away, exuding burgher comfort, while from inside the kitchen came the rattle of dishes being washed. Now and then he heard Frances preparing for the evening.

He gazed, with reverie-lost eyes, over the gravel spread of Carter Playground, which was a few doors south of his own building. A six o' clock sun was imperceptibly burning down over the scene. On the walk, in the shadow of and circling the low, rambling public school building, some noisy little girls, the size and age of his own Loretta, were playing hop-scotch. Lonigan puffed at his cigar, ran his thick paw through his brown-gray hair, and watched the kids. He laughed when he heard one of the little girls shout that the others could go to hell. It was funny and they were tough little ones all right. It sounded damn funny. They must be poor little girls with fathers and mothers who didn't look after them or bring them up in the right home atmosphere; and if they were Catholic girls, they probably weren't sent to the sisters' school; parents ought to send their children to the sisters' school even if it did take some sacrifice; after all, it only cost a dollar a month, and even poor people could afford that when their children's education was at stake. He wouldn't have his Loretta using such rowdy language, and, of course, she wouldn't, because her mother had always taught her to be a little lady. His attention wandered to a boy, no older than his own Martin, but dirty and less well-cared-for, who, with the intent and dreamy seriousness of childhood, played on the ladders and slides which paralleled his own back fence. He watched the youngster scramble up, slide down, scramble up, slide down. It stirred in him a vague series of impulses, wishes and nostalgias. He puffed his stogy and watched. He said to himself:

Golly, it would be great to be a kid again!

He said to himself:

Yes, sir, it would be great to be a kid!

He tried to remember those ragged days when he was only a shaver and his old man was a pauperized greenhorn. Golly, them were the days! Often there had not been enough to eat in the house. Many's the winter day he and his brother had to stay home from school because they had no shoes. The old house, it was more like a barn or a shack than a home, was so cold they had to sleep in their clothes; sometimes in those zero Chicago winters his old man had slept in his overcoat. Golly, even with all that privation, them was the days. And now that they were over, there was something missing, something gone from a fellow's life. He'd give anything to live back a day of those times around Blue Island, and Archer Avenue. Old man Dooley always called it Archey Avenue, and Dooley was one comical turkey, funnier than anything you'd find in real life. And then those days when he was a young buck in Canaryville. And things were cheaper in them days. The boys that hung out at Kieley's saloon, and later around the saloon that Padney Flaherty ran, and Luke O'Toole's place on Halsted. Old Luke was some boy. Well, the Lord have mercy on his soul, and on the soul of old Padney Flaherty. Padney was a comical duck, good-hearted as they make them, but crabby. Was he a first-rate crab! And the jokes the boys played on him. They were always calling him names, pigpen Irish, shanty Irish, Padney, ain't you the kind of an Irishman that slept with the pigs back in the old country. Once they told him his house was on fire, and he'd dashed out of the saloon and down the street with a bucket of water in his hand. It was funny watching him go, a skinny little Irishman. And while he was gone, they had all helped themselves to free beers. He came back blazing mad, picked up a hatchet, called them all the choice swear words he could think of, and ran the whole gang out into the street. Then they'd all stood on the other comer, laughing. Yeh, them was the days! And when he was a kid, they would all get sacks, wagons, any old thing, and go over to the tracks. Spike Kennedy, Lord have mercy on his soul, he was bit by a mad dog and died, would get up on one of the cars and throw coal down like sixty, and they'd scramble for it. And many's the fight they'd have with the gangs from other streets. And many's the plunk in the cocoanut that Paddy Lonigan got. It's a wonder some of them weren't killed throwing lumps of coal and ragged rocks at each other like a band of wild Indians. To live some of those old days over again! Golly!