Studs Lonigan (83 page)

“I guess not, since you're doing so many other things,” Studs said as if he were seriously answering an important question with a valued answer.

“You don't talk a lot, do you?” she remarked after they had walked on a few more paces.

“Well . . . I talk when I've got something to say, and when I haven't, . . . what's there to say. I don't believe in talking just to hear my own voice like some fellows I know,” he said, enjoying a vision of himself as a strong man whose words always meant something, wanting her to catch that same impression of him. In an afterthought, he realized that she often did a lot of chattering, and he regretted his remark, fearing it would make her angry.

“But who, for instance?” she said, smiling.

“What?” he asked, not sure that he understood what she meant.

“What fellows talk to hear the sound of their own voices?”

“Well, lots of fellows. There are fellows like that who could sell you Lake Michigan or the Masonic Temple,” he said.

“For instance?”

“Oh, lots of fellows.”

“I know, but who?”

“Oh, well.” As he thought, Red Kelly's name popped into his mind, and he did not want to be talking about a friend of his behind his back. “Well, Red Kelly does,” he said against his will.

“How does he do it?”

“Oh, well, he likes to talk a lot,” Studs said in a fidgety manner.

“About what, besides his wife?” she asked, and Studs felt that she was making a dirty dig.

“Oh, well, he likes to let everybody know he's in politics and expects to be a big shot.”

“I always felt that,” she said, squeezing his arm. “And he isn't so much as some people I know.”

Studs' cheeks seemed to be hot, and he was both happy and nervous. He found it hard to look at her, and he was happy for the excuse to enter a cigar store and buy a package of cigarettes. He loitered in the store, finding change in his pocket and lighting a cigarette, and he was happy as he dallied.

“Bill, I do wish you wouldn't smoke so much,” she said as he stepped out of the store.

“Yes, I guess I better cut down, but there's no use in throwing one away after I just lit it.”

“But, Bill, you really do smoke too much and I know that it isn't good for you. Now, why don't you, for the rest of Lent, give up smoking as a sacrifice? It will be so good for your health, too.”

“It's a good idea,” he said evasively.

“I do wish you would!”

“I will. But of course, though, after you've been smoking for years, it's kind of hard to give it up all at once, and it's much better to cut down gradually and by doing it that way, I should be more successful.”

“Bill, I know you can do it if you make up your mind to, because you have the will power.”

He liked to have Catherine talking about him this way. She was showing him she liked him. She spoke the same way his mother and sisters often had when they tried to get him to do something for his own good. But when they did he was bored, and when Catherine did it, he liked it. She squeezed his arm, and as they crossed over to a show he was sure that tonight he was going to pop the question.

Studs steered Catherine into the Charlus Restaurant on Randolph Street. A tall and attractive hostess in a silken black dress flashed a business smile upon Studs and led them past rows of tables with fresh linen tablecloths, to a quiet comer. Just above the brown stained panelings in back of their table for two there hung an elaborately framed oil painting of a nymph who was semi-nude behind a trailing of gauzily painted white veiling. Hanging their coats on a hook, he gazed nonchalantly about the crowded restaurant where people spoke in slightly subdued voices. If anybody among them was watching him, he wanted them to see that he acted as if such restaurants were natural to him.

A waitress, whose white dress and apron gave Studs a sense of cleanliness, approached, waiting patiently for their order.

“I'll just have a glass of warm milk,” Catherine said, smiling across the table.

“Warm milk, coffee, and a hamburger sandwich,” Studs ordered.

He stared absently about at a lank, thin fellow seated nearby and across from a blonde girl who was beautiful enough for the movies. She laughed at what the tall thin fellow said, and her eyes were for him. That guy was in luck having such a dame.

“Gee, will I feel good when I finish my diet and lose those ten pounds,” Catherine said.

“I should imagine so,” he said, still fretting over the question of proposing.

Studs puffed nervously on a cigarette.

“I'm beginning to feel a lot better than I used to,” he said, fearing that she would remind him of his promise to cut down on his smoking.

“Gee, Bill, I'm so glad. At times I worry about your health and I wonder if you are taking the best care of yourself.”

“I'm all right, and I'm going to be all right,” he said.

“I know, Bill. I know it. But, Bill, you must take care of yourself, and cut down on your cigarette-smoking, too, like you promised me tonight you would.”

“Was I smoking?” Studs said, looking with an attempt at feigned surprise at the burning cigarette between his fingers. “Can you imagine that! I had the cigarette lit and was smoking without thinking I was doing it.”

“Bill, you should watch that and realize. And Bill, I don't want you to think that I'm nagging you, because I'm not. I'm not nagging you, am I, when I say you should watch about your smoking cigarettes?”

“No, you're right, and after I finish this one, I'll watch myself,” Studs said.

The waitress set their orders before them, and Studs squashed his cigarette in the glass ash tray. He began to feel that he had no guts because here he was delaying asking her after he had made up his mind.

“Catherine?” he suddenly blurted out, his nervousness seeming to choke his breath and force the syllables of her name out of his mouth.

Sipping at her milk, she looked at him, opening her eyes widely.

“How did you like the picture?” he asked, feeling foolish.

“Good, I always like pictures with a happy ending. Sad pictures send you away feeling blue and most of them are so foolish. For a while I thought that Ralph Hardwyne—isn't he a handsome actor though?—was going to lose out and not win back his wife, but I sighed with relief when he did.”

“I thought it was a pretty good picture. Good acting, too.”

“I don't like books either with unhappy endings. Life is sad enough without people writing sad books.”

He lit a cigarette after finishing his sandwich and coffee. He delayed speaking and tried to seem as if he felt natural and normal. They looked at one another, their sympathies conveyed with glances, feelings that they did not trust to words.

“Why don't we get married?” Studs suddenly asked before he realized what he was saying.

Their eyes met again in the effort to convey intangibilities of emotion.

“Do you really want to?” she smiled, her voice very natural.

“Why not?” he said casually.

“But you don't sound very anxious or enthusiastic. You must be joking with me, or you wouldn't be so matter of fact about it.”

“I mean it,” he said in a strained voice, leaning toward her across the table, his facial muscles grown rigid.

“Honest?”

“Why should I be saying it if I didn't mean it?” he asked, leaning back again in his chair. “I've been thinking about it for a long time now, and today on the train I decided that I was not going to wait any longer, or put it off. I made up my mind then and there.”

“You really care for me that much, Bill?” Catherine shyly said, her manner and voice thrilling him into an elation, causing her, because of his sudden uprush of feeling, to recede before his eyes, as into a veil of vagueness. An image of Lucy stirred in his mind. Lucy, pretty and seventeen, with her firm girlbreasts showing under her dress, her head tossing mischievously, waving and shaking her black curly hair. A lump came into his throat, and the image, persisting, made him feel all the mystery and all the attraction he had once felt, seeing Lucy one day on Indiana Avenue. He was aware of Catherine's knees touching him, and he wished that she were Lucy as Lucy had been that day.

“You know, Bill, I care for you, awfully,” she said, her knees still against him.

“Me, too,” he said, embarrassed with this confession of emotion, and determined to be casual. He couldn't, he told himself, give his hand away completely to a girl, because then it would be like it was with Lucy. He told himself he cared a hell of a lot for her, and Lucy was gone anyway, and she was going to be a better wife for him than Lucy could have been.

He screwed out his lips, and glanced around the restaurant, as if there were something interesting to see.

“All right,” he said, turning back toward her.

“All right what, Bill?”

“We're engaged.”

Outside, she slid her arm in his, glanced up at him, brushed her shoulder against his, and as they managed to wander in zigzags along the sidewalk, slowly toward Michigan Avenue, her shoulder continually brushed against him.

“Bill?” she said coyly.

“What?” he answered.

“When will we be married?”

“I haven't been working so regularly partly because business isn't any too good these days, and my dad does not get as many contracts as he used to in the good times. But I'll be able to work now, because I feel much better, and I think that business is going to start picking up. I'll save, but of course I have been saving money for some time now, only we ought to have a nice little nest egg,” Studs felt goofy using such a word, “to start with, and maybe I'd say that we ought to figure on the end of this year or early next year,” he said, his tone and manner suggesting the weight he was placing on his words, and the importance he was striving to give to his statement.

“Mother will be so glad to hear the news, because you know, she and dad, they like you. Gee, dear, I'm so happy, and, honey, I can hardly wait to tell them.”

That was the first time she had ever called him dear or honey.

They approached Michigan Avenue, now deserted, the Public Library building standing dim and dark on the comer, a news vendor, standing by a fire in a wire basket, calling out the morning papers.

“Honey, tonight let's walk down to Van Buren and get our train there.”

“All right,” he answered, as if it were an important decision.

He turned her on to Michigan Avenue. Behind them the avenue was brilliantly lit, and the street seemed like a fog of electricity and mist between the massive piles of stone. Ahead of them, way down at Twelfth, they saw the lighted advertising signs in the distance and the warm mist deflecting the electric rays.

“Isn't it grand, dear? And you know, I don't think I'll ever forget tonight and this walk,” she said.

“Yes,” Studs said, still striving to keep a lever of control on his excited feelings.

“And we'll have a cosy apartment all our own, won't we? Let's go looking for apartments next Sunday.”

“We'll have lots of time for that.”

“I know, but it'll be fun.”

“We'll have lots of time for that.”

“But Bill, maybe your mother will be angry and not like our engagement,” Catherine said after they had walked along silent for nearly a block.

“She and my dad both like you, and they are kind of expecting me to get married, and say, anyway, I'm not a kid anymore.”

“I like them,” she said, squeezing his hand, “and I like their son too.”

“Well, that's me, I'm their son, William,” he said with intended humor.

“And you know we're engaged, and you haven't kissed me. Now is that right, or is that the way it is done in the movies?” she laughed.

“Well, we're in public,” he said, serious in self-defense.

“There's a big park across the street,” she said, nodding toward the expanse of Grant Park.

“Come on, let's take a walk,” he said, anticipation hidden behind his level voice.

She clutched his arm firmly.

Ahead of them was the wide, cement driveway, flanked with brightly lit electric lamps, and in the distance surrounded by a waste of hard, snow-patched earth, the Buckingham Fountain, with the lively spray of water drenched in colored lights. Strolling over the bridge to the right of the Art Institute, he saw these objects in the panoramic scene before him, as if for the first time. A high-powered automobile shot by and he watched its moving red tail-light until the car swerved onto the right.

“Gee, a few years ago there wasn't any of this here, and just think, when I was a kid, the Masonic Temple was the biggest building in town,” he said, stimulated by the sudden and surrounding sense of the city's growth which he was experiencing.

A stiff lake wind blew against them, and they heard, from the railroad tracks below, the approach of a train.

“Isn't it so, and you know I can remember when North Michigan was not at all built up like it is now. They certainly have built up Chicago, and with the World's Fair coming in a couple of years, it's certainly going to be the most wonderful city in the world.”

The railroad engine chugged under them, and a flurry of hot cinders struck Studs' face, causing him to grumble.

“What's the matter, Bill?”

“Oh, a chunk of cinder hit me,” he said, wiping his face with his handkerchief.

“Yes, isn't it a shame to have smoke in such a beautiful city. I was reading an editorial in the paper only the other day about it, and my boss, Mr. Breckenbridge, was speaking of it, too.”