Studs Lonigan (113 page)

The warning bells distracted him. He looked eastward down the track at the approaching train and stepped back as it pulled alongside of the platform. Tossing aside his cigarette, he figured that he wouldn't smoke if he avoided the smoker, and he entered a car in the center of the train. The train rolled forward, and walking in the car aisle he looked to see if there were any girls he might sit next to, or anyone he knew. He took an unoccupied seat in the middle, by a window, and looked out as the train passed houses, vacant lots, people walking along Seventy-first Street.

When he saw Catherine, should he or shouldn't he mention last night?

“I saw her yesterday on Seventy-first Street, and do you know, she's wearing the same hat she wore last spring?” a stout lady behind him said to a middle-aged woman.

The train shunted through a tunnel, and Studs developed an anxiety to be out of the tunnel.

“Of course, I don't wish ill of anyone. But she put on so many airs when she had it, that it serves her right.”

The train broke into daylight again and rumbled into the Sixty-seventh Street station. He watched several men and women moving about the platform to enter the cars, and he thought of Catherine, of how he had met her. She had been a distant friend or something to the Dowsons, and anyway he had met her when his sister, Fran, had married Carroll. He remembered that Phil Dowson, Carroll's twin brother, who had married Gertrude O'Reilly, the niece of Judge Joe O'Reilly, had introduced her to him and she had said how do you do, or something like that, and he had just acknowledged the introduction in a formal way. She had looked a little fat, and not so hot that time. But there had been dancing, and since he happened to be standing next to her and there was no one else to dance with, he'd asked her to dance, out of politeness. She'd said something about his dancing nice, and he'd liked the compliment so he had asked her to dance again.

“Just as my husband, Arthur, says, he believes in the philosophy of compensation, and when you do something, there's always compensation for it. It's only a compensation to her now that her husband is not doing well because she was always flaunting herself and her clothes when she had it,” one of the women behind him said.

Regular hen party there, he thought. But, anyway, at Fran's wedding, when Catherine was leaving, he had walked over to her and he'd said, because of some crazy impulse or other, that he might be seeing her again. And she had smiled and said that would certainly be something to look forward to, so they had made a date then and there. He'd been sorry he'd made the date after she'd left, but it had been done, so he'd taken her to a show, and he'd decided, the second time he'd seen her, that she was better-looking than he'd first thought she was.

“Annie Rothschild is really psychic. And over a year ago Annie said that that one is going to have bad luck.”

And in the hallway after that first date she hadn't let him kiss her. She'd been very self-possessed and calm and had acted like she knew how to take care of herself. He'd taken her out again, until, suddenly, he had been going steadily with her. Funny how at first he hadn't even been able to kiss her and now, he'd copped her cherry.

He looked out the window and saw that the train was passing Fifty-seventh Street, and he noted the trees of Jackson Park below, and a block distant. And then the train was slowing beside the platform, and he saw people hastening to the car doors, and the trees and buildings of Fifty-sixth Street, and beyond it a patch of the lake, deep blue against the cloudy day. Two young fellows who looked like University students headed the procession of people entering the car, and they took the vacant seat in front of Studs. An asthmatic, graying man sat beside him and began making whistling sounds as he breathed.

“Then you really think that Annie Rothschild is psychic?”

“She's very good and she does it all with cards . . .”

The train was running, stopping again at Hyde Park Boulevard, and Catherine, what would he say to her when they met? He could see the tall apartment hotel buildings stacked beside the lake, and then the lake stretched, blue and gray and dotted with white-caps, on outward into a gray curtain of deep mist. He looked out at the lake, which was like a ruffling coat of gray and white, and he heard the two fellows in the seat ahead talking earnestly.

“Hal, we're old friends, and we were pals in high school together, and I'm talking to you for your own good when I tell you not to waste your time on such stuff.”

“Jack, I'm not wasting my time. I'm beginning to get my eyes opened for me.”

“You know what Mr. Boardman said when we took Poly Sci 101 in our freshman year. He said that Communism was an asylum for neurotics. What do you want to hang around with a bunch of neurotics for?”

Reds or something. A guy who must have gone crazy reading too many books at the U. But hell, all that was nothing in his young life. He thought how, after last night, he had begun to have a feeling of really being able to say to himself that he had a woman who was his own, his only. He had never thought of love in that way, of how it gave a guy that kind of a feeling, made him feel proud, important, confident in himself when he walked down the street.

“Where did Annie get her psychic powers?”

“One is born with them.”

He had felt so much different getting out of bed this morning from the way he had felt just two mornings ago. This morning he had not felt that he had a dull day ahead of him. He had been excited, and he had seemed to let his own excitement go out, and everything he looked at was not dull any more. He had awakened this morning with a whole new set of feelings.

“But, Hal, why don't you wait and study more? You're just young and what do you know about life? You're only a college junior, and you set yourself up to make such criticisms. There's a number of brainy men in the world who know more than you do.”

“Can it. You can't convince me. I'm going down to this demonstration before the Japanese consulate, and that's all.”

“But what'll it get you?”

Nuts, all right. He looked out the window at the lake, seeing first one part of the water roll and dip, then another part rolling, and then a whole succession of waves coming in. And far out he saw a boat as if pasted against the gray sheet of horizon, smoke issuing from its stack in a pencil-line of steam. Just like a boat in a picture.

“Roosevelt Road,” a conductor bawled.

He watched people pass down the aisle. How many of the men getting off, or on the train, too, had been with a woman last night or this morning? And how many of the dames on the train had had guys? Every night there were thousands of guys with their women, and now he was going to be one of them and it was going to be damn different from the way it was with whores and bitches.

The train was at Van Buren, then moving again under a bridge through a dreary, smoky stretch of railroad yards and tracks.

“Hal, if you don't care about yourself or your family, think of our fraternity. What kind of a name will it give us if one of its members is arrested at a Communist demonstration and it gets in the papers? You know, at the present time when the treasury is so low and we need members that kind of thing can't happen to our fraternity.”

What these college boys needed was a good piece of tail to educate them. The train stopped. Studs elbowed his way out of the car after the college boys. He was getting anxious. This was a new wrinkle for him, the first meeting with his girl, his woman, on the day after he had made her. He wondered what he'd say? How should he act?

“Oh, I didn't see you,” he said, trying to make his voice sound very ordinary when she met him in the lobby of the building where she worked.

“Was it that you didn't want to?” she said in a chastened tone which made him feel sorry for her and for what he had done to her.

“I was just standing here waiting for you, and looking around, and I thought I had got here too early.”

“Well, here I am.”

“Where'll we go?” he asked, still over-serious in his effort to be casual.

“Wherever you say, dear,” she said, her glance submissive.

“Let's go down to Randolph,” he said.

They stepped out to the street and she took his arm.

“Glad to see me?”

“Yeah,” he said, shaking his head.

“You don't sound very enthusiastic.”

“I am, Kid. I was just thinking.”

“Of what?”

“Something funny. Over in front of the public library, I saw a fellow in a cap and gown selling apples.”

“What was it, a fraternity initiation?”

“No. He had a sign on him saying that he was a qualified engineer out of work.”

“That's too bad.”

“It would be a little different if he wasn't a college graduate and an engineer. If he was just an ordinary bum, it would be different.”

“Maybe he was doing it for publicity, to get his name in the papers, the same way all these people are going in for marathons. Over on Clark Street there's a man in a music-store window who's trying to establish an endurance record for saxophone playing. He's been playing the saxophone for three days now.”

“It's goofy.”

“Yes, it's so silly.”

A round-faced man paced back and forth in front of a restaurant with cardboard signs tied around his chest and back.

 

JOHNSTOWN'S RESTAURANT
IS UNFAIR
TO ORGANIZED
LABOR

 

“These poor men have been walking back and forth here for three weeks. Yesterday in the pouring rain they didn't even stop.”

“Who's in the right in the strike?”

“I don't know but I think the men were foolish to strike in times like these. And what the restaurant did was to hire girls.”

“Yeh, I guess anyone who has a job these days better hang onto it,” he said, and he felt a pressure on his elbow.

“You know what, Bill?”

“What?”

“I'm glad to see you.”

“How do you feel?”

“I had pains,” she said, looking quizzically at him.

He turned a frightened glance at her, wondering had he really injured her. The least he could have done was that he could have been more careful. Like any decent girl, she had a right to be disgusted with him. He was grateful for the smile she gave him, though. Still, it seemed like a suffering sort of smile.

“I had pains here,” she said, pointing to her abdomen.

“Gee. . . . I don't think it can be serious. Maybe it's just natural. The first time, you know,” he said haltingly, trying, as he spoke, to make her feel that he actually knew what he was talking about.

“I cried last night after you left,” she said as they turned the corner of Dearborn onto Randolph Street.

A shifty-eyed man wearing a khaki shirt and dusty, unpressed, frayed suit forlornly held an apple out to him. Studs brushed by him.

“How is the Charlus Restaurant for lunch?” he asked, remembering the night he had proposed to her in that place.

“I think it would be nice. It's quiet, and I'd like to eat in a quiet place.”

“Yes, it is quiet,” he said with undue seriousness, realizing that she was different, a humbled Catherine, and he dreaded having to look into her eyes across a table, and yet he felt a pride of victory.

“Sure this will be all right?” he asked in front of the Charlus Restaurant.

She nodded affirmatively. They entered as a string trio played
The Evening Star
, and a tall, dark girl in a tailored black dress led them past tables where people talked in restrained voices to a small corner table. She almost made their seating a ceremony, smiled, pointed at the menus laid before them. Studs diligently searched his pockets for cigarettes.

“I always forget which pocket I put them in,” he said self-consciously.

She smiled at him meekly. A fleshy, attractive blonde waitress, neat in a white apron, laid water glasses before them.

“What'll you have, Catherine?” he asked, diligently reading the menu card.

“I wonder,” she thoughtfully replied, her face also lost behind the menu card.

“I think I'll take roast beef,” he said.

“Me, too.”

They laid their menu cards aside simultaneously, and Studs watched the waitress hobbling away from their table.

“Nice place,” he said, embarrassed by their lack of talk.

“Yes, and that's a beautiful piece they're playing.”

“It is nice to have the music, too.”

“Darling, darling. . . . What's the matter?” she said in a fright, seeing him become suddenly pale and throw his hand over his heart.

“I had a sudden pain. But it's nothing. It's passing now,” he said while she leaned anxiously across the table.

“Bill, dear, I worry so about you with your heart. Are you sure you're taking the best care of yourself? And, honey, you're still smoking. I wish you wouldn't.”

“I guess you're right,” he said, squashing his butt.

The waitress set their order before them. He tried to shutter the sense of fear out of his mind, but it lingered after the lapsing of that sharp, sudden thrust of pain. His heart beat with labored and disturbing rapidity. He felt weak, and a sweat had broken upon his brow. He wiped his forehead perfunctorily with a fresh handkerchief.

“Bill, you must be careful. Promise me that you'll be very careful. If you die now . . . Gee, I don't know what I'd do. Honest, I don't,” she said, and he could see how profoundly worried she was.