Studs lonigan, p.91
Studs Lonigan, page 91
He slouched down beside her on the bench and looked at the black wall of bushes opposite, a narrow and uneven stream of moonlight unexpectedly flowing through them while a slight wind scratched the leaves. He shifted his glance, and partially closed his eyes to get a different sight of the bushes. He made an effort of lighting a cigarette.
Catherine sniffled.
“Bill,” she sobbed.
Studs turned toward her, frightened, and took her hand.
“Bill, dear, I can’t stand this. I can’t go on sneaking the way we got to, as if this was something awful between us, afraid of being caught or seen by somebody, having to be ashamed of doing this when we love each other, and have to be sneaking about it in the park and in my hallway. And even that awful time in the taxicab. I can’t stand even the idea of it, and if we were caught by someone, some stranger, I’m afraid I’d even kill myself.”
“Kid . . .” he said, looking down at her while she sobbed with her head against his shoulder. He had no other words to utter. Puzzled, he shook his head slowly from side to side.
“Bill, we got to get married!”
“When?”
“Right away.”
“But won’t it seem a little queer to everybody? And it will take a little time for us to get ready, won’t it? We’ll have to have the banns published and fix things up.”
“Tomorrow morning we can go to mass together, and right after mass we’ll go to see Father Geoghan, and make arrangements then.”
“Well . . . but . . .”
“Bill, darling, I can’t stand this sneaking and skulking. And it’s not right. It’s a sin this way, and it can’t be really wrong and sinful, because I love you. I love you so much!”
He was embarrassed and gratified by the way she flung her arms around him and kissed him, and still, he didn’t know what to say.
“Kid,” he said hoarsely.
“You love me?”
“Yes,” he said, the reply coming as if it had been propelled out of his mouth by force.
“You mean it?”
He looked at her, nodded, leaned over, kissed her, held and patted her hand. He looked moodily away.
“Because I’ve been afraid to tell you, and now I’ve got to,” she said.
He turned back to her, his face pallid in the darkness and moonlight, its expression trapped in worry and surprise. He glanced away again, then back at her, just as her round face was cross-cut by an exposure of moonlight.
“Something has happened to me,” she said, looking aside.
“What?” he snapped out quickly in a choking voice, while at the same time, as if in a split part of himself, he was beginning to see his predicament as a drama filled with seriousness and importance.
“You know, Bill,” she said, seeming to him like a soft, frightened, utterly helpless thing in his arms, “you know, I’m afraid that I’m going to have a baby.”
Her head lowered, as in shame and modesty. She took and held the fingers in his right hand.
Jesus Christ! he thought to himself, even though he had guessed what she had to say from the way she’d led up to it.
“Can’t we do something about it?” he asked.
“What?”
“See a doctor. Or maybe I can get some medicine to take care of it.”
Looking up at him, she dabbed her eyes quickly, and he could see that she was fighting not to cry.
“Bill, darling, that’s awful. We can’t do that.”
“But why?” he asked, his voice shaky, puzzled.
He tried to substitute a persuasive glance for the convincing words which he could not bring forth. He drew her gently against his shoulder, feeling the quivering of her warm and nervous body. Her fear made him feel strong and brave, and he began to feel a sense of power as if it were a pulse within him. He was the strong one, the one to be depended upon in a time of trouble, and it was up to him to be the captain steering a course out of it.
“Bill, it would be awful to do such a thing. I know! If you say that, you make me feel that you don’t really care for me. You know you got what you wanted, everything I had to give you, and now you seem to be acting as if you only wanted to get out of trouble the easiest way.”
“Kid, please,” he said, still at a loss for words, wishing he could carry things off and lie better.
And he was just so goddamn mixed up and jumbled himself. He didn’t want such a thing to happen. She’d be disgraced and ruined, and everybody would know that they had had to get married. And Christ, right off the reel they would have the kid. What would he do about a kid of his own? Studs Lonigan, a father already! He didn’t want to do that, and he didn’t know what to do about it. And how could they afford it? There he would be in the future with cords about him, hand and foot.
Join the Navy now, brother, he told himself sardonically.
He remembered how he used to hear fellows around the poolroom kidding about it, and how he’d razzed fellows like Wils Gillen when they were worried about girls they’d knocked up. Goddamn it, it wasn’t anything to laugh over, Jesus Christ, it wasn’t.
And there she was beside him, sniffling, and he had to say or do something about it. He heard a distant automobile, and it made him think of how, right now, there were people driving around, free from having all the troubles and worries he had. He just felt helpless, hopeless, with a sword swinging right above his neck.
“Bill, tell me, do you love me?” she asked with a ring of insistence and desperation in her voice, and he grew rigid from the sudden thought that maybe in this mood she might just go and jump in the lake or do something as bad.
“You know it, Kid,” he said, still choked up.
“Well, you take a poor way of showing it. You don’t even hold me tight and kiss me when I tell you these things.”
He kissed her, aware of warm tears trickling down her cheeks, and they gripped each other in a mood of desperation. Released, they sat side by side, surrounded by trees, alone in a quiet where they could clearly hear each other’s breathing.
“Bill, we got to do something. I’m afraid to go to a doctor or take medicine,” Catherine said after a period of silence.
“It won’t hurt you.”
“But I can’t, I can’t do such a thing.”
“Well, it’ll mean plenty of trouble for us.”
“But if you love me.”
“Yes, but, Kid, can’t you see, right off the bat you’ll be tied down with a baby?”
“I don’t care for myself. But maybe it’s you. You’re afraid and you don’t want to be tied down.”
He knew that she craved some positive word from him, and all he could do was pat her hand gently and hope that his gesture would give her confidence and substitute for all the words he could not speak.
“Both of us have money saved up,” she said.
“I never told you, you know,” he said awkwardly.
“What?” she said with fresh anxiety.
“Well, after we became engaged, I felt that we ought to be able to start out with more money than it looked like we were gonna have. So I bought some shares in a new issue of Imbray Stock. I paid twenty-five a shot for it, and it’s down to six dollars a share now, so my two thousand dollars is now worth, let’s see . . . oh, about two hundred and forty dollars. It’s hardly worth selling it, so the money’s all tied up until we get better times and the stock market goes up.”
Christ, now he was only beginning to fully realize what a chump he’d been. Oh, how sweet it would be to take Ike Dugan out and pound him full of lumps!
“But Bill!” she exclaimed, stunned with surprise.
“I thought it would turn out all right,” he said dejectedly.
“But Bill, how could you do that and never say a word to me?” she said, breaking freely into tears.
He halted his impulse to say that it was his money, wasn’t it, and he felt as helpless as she, sobbing beside him.
“And now we have no money,” she said forlornly.
“I thought that things would get better and it would be a good investment. I took a chance,” he said, shrugging his shoulders in an ineffectual gesture.
“But Bill, how could you?” she asked, and he saw that she was more frightened than angry.
“There’s still a chance. Imbray, you know, is a smart man. And the stock is based on things that everybody needs, and they should be good investments in the long run. A man like Imbray can’t fail when he’s got stock backed by almost all the public utilities of the Middle West. I still think that I’m going to get more money out of my investments than I put into them.”
“That doesn’t matter, Bill darling. We’re going to get along, all right. I know it. I can just feel it.”
“Well, what do you want to do?” he asked nervously.
“Honey, you and me, we’ve just got to get married. And I’m not afraid of having a baby of yours, and I don’t care what people say.”
“Well, you know we’ll be tied down.”
“I don’t care,” she said, snapping her head, a note of defiance coming into her voice.
“It’s going to be tough sledding. You know, I’m not working a lot with my dad, because there’s nothing much doing.”
“I don’t care! I don’t care! I don’t care!” she said rapidly, clasping his hand tightly, digging her nails into his palm.
She slumped against him, sobbed, and in persisting confusion and helplessness he put his arm around her shoulders.
“Brace up, Kid!” he said, lacking conviction and looking vacantly at the bushes.
She ceased crying, and he seemed to drift into vague dreaming, forgetting everything, not wanting to move, liking the feel and pressure of her against him. Suddenly she sat up, and to him her action was like being curtly awakened from sleep.
“The dew is falling, and I don’t like you sitting in the dampness. You might catch cold, and summer colds are worse than winter ones.”
“I’m all right.”
In the dark, she tried to arrange her hair. They walked slowly, Studs hearing the crunch of their shoes on the gravel. He remembered how he had so often seen fellows and girls walking in Washington Park on nights like this, just as they two were now. He didn’t envy such guys now like he used to. Walking just as he and Catherine were doing, as if they were happy with each other, and had no worries in the world, nothing to fear, happy in love with each other, as if there was nothing else that counted. A sardonic smile came on his face, and over and over again the line from a popular song hummed through his mind.
Walkin’ my baby back home . . .
Others, too, seeing him and Catherine, they’d think the same thing. He shook his head ironically, and told himself, yes, he was walking his baby back home. And it just showed, he thought, that appearances were deceiving. Walking his baby back home with everything seeming so tranquil, when things were hemming him in, hemming both of them in more and more.
But he didn’t want to think anymore tonight of all these goddamn griefs. And he didn’t want there to be a tomorrow when he would wake up and realize what he had to do. Tell his family about it, and go to see the priest, face him when the priest might get sore and bawl him out and all that stuff. Start figuring out and preparing and arranging for the marriage. And then, Christ, her being knocked up! If he’d only waited! A few minutes each time, then feeling tired, feeling sometimes disgusted and wanting no more of it, or else wanting it the next time and hoping there would be more in it than there was the time before, and now for that they were in all this deep water. Or if he hadn’t been such a chump and had taken precautions every time. But it was always that way. Afterward, when it was too late, you saw what you should have done.
And now all that he wanted was to be home and in bed asleep, so that none of these things would be on his mind, making him feel so tight and feel that any minute something might happen. Even if he was going to sleep for only seven or eight hours, and then wake up again to all these same worries, he wanted sleep. Eight hours of sound sleep seemed like a century.
Catherine paused under a lamp-post and opened her purse. Studying her tear-streaked face in the purse mirror, she powdered, patted her hair, and turned a weary smile upon him.
“Do I look all right?”
Studs replied gutturally without even having heard her question. They emerged from Jackson Park at Sixty-third and Stony Island.
“Let’s walk home,” he said, too constrained within himself to stand waiting for a street car.
They crossed the street, and in front of the Greek restaurant with the modernistic decorations, a group of fellows stood, cluttering the sidewalk. Studs glanced to see if he knew any of them. Two drunks detached themselves and stood blocking the sidewalk. Studs’ fists clenched automatically, and he watched them cautiously, hate suddenly overpowering him.
“But, George, if we call her up and she’s not there, someone else answers the phone. So what? We lose a nickel.”
“Suppose we telephone Marie instead. So what. We spend a nickel,” the second drunken fellow seriously said, while Studs, tense and wary, led Catherine around them.
“They’re having a good time,” Catherine said with a thin smile.
“Yeh, a problem in high finance,” Studs said, pleased because she laughed at his crack.
They used to be crowding around the street in the same way in the old days. And then, no cares and responsibilities like now. He guessed, too, that what he really needed was to go out and get himself uproariously drunk. And if he’d only watched his health more in the old days he could do that now. If!
“Honey, please don’t let yourself get so worried,” Catherine said.
“I’m not worried. I was just thinking.”
“You were, too. I could see it on your face.”
“No. I was just thinking about those two drunks and their problem in high finance,” Studs answered, and Catherine’s lips tightened as she looked away.
Studs stared ahead at the lights of Sixty-seventh and Stony Island. They passed a row of drab apartment houses, a line of darkened stores, a vacant lot, and then a brightly lit Upton Oil and Refining Company Greasing Palace, and Studs purposelessly watched an automobile back away from a greasing rack.
A group of young fellows approached, talking loudly, and Studs became nervous, in case they might start some trouble.
“Hell, he doesn’t work! He’s only the foreman and just walks around the joint. It don’t take no brains to be a foreman. You just got to be able to walk,” a dusky fellow in the group shouted as the fellows passed, and Studs heard their loud voices while they moved on.
“Sometimes you hear people say funny things on the street,” Catherine said.
“Yeh.”
They entered a crowded chain drug store, and sat down at a vacant tile-topped table. Waiting for their chocolate malted milks, Studs looked around, gathering a general sense of noise and well-being, seeing the crowd lined along the soda fountain, the fountain men frantically working to fill orders, the white-aproned waitresses scurrying with trays among the tables where there were many couples and groups, and other customers around the drug counters on the opposite side of the store.
He began wishing that he was like some of the other fellows in the store who were at soda tables with girls, so carefree. Like the fellow in a palm beach suit several tables down who talked to a blonde girl and then laughed so loudly. A couple laughing like that couldn’t have a problem like he and Catherine had.
“It’s crowded here, isn’t it?” Catherine said after the malted milks had been set before them.
“Yes. These stores must be making money, depression or no depression,” Studs said, thinking that it might have been a much sounder investment to get stock in a chain drug outfit like this one.
“Yes, they do a lot of business at a store like this one,” she said, breaking open the small paper package of wafers that came with the malted milk.
“I’d be willing to bet they make money,” Studs said, drawing the malted milk through two straws.
He finished it quickly, and while Catherine continued sipping he again stared around at random, and he began to think how all these fellows with their girls, they were guys just like himself. And maybe they had their problems, too. Fellows and girls when they went together always had that one problem. If they really felt about each other, they wanted to go the limit, and then there was the girl holding back because she was afraid, or thought that it was wrong, or if they did jazz, there was that worrying about getting knocked up, or else there was worrying over how they could get alone and not be seen and spoiling it by hurrying up so no one might catch them in the park or a hallway. Jesus Christ, life was one goddamn trial and tribulation, and love made it more of a trial and a tribulation. He wondered how many fellows there were in Chicago at this very minute who were in the same pickle as he was, with girls they’d knocked up. And yet, no matter if there were thousands of them, that didn’t help him. Misery loves company, but what the hell good does company do?
“Bill, I want you to promise me now that you’re not going to worry,” she said, observing the set expression on his face.
“I’m not worrying.”
“You are, too. You’ve furrowed up your face, and I can tell that you are.”
He forced a smile as they arose. They proceeded southward along Stony Island, and Studs looked at the many strolling people, asking himself how many of them were better off than he was. He took a covert glance at Catherine. She seemed pretty enough. And she was showing him that she had guts. It was something to have guts.
But he wished, Jesus Christ, he wished for something, something!
IV
In the hallway, she was very troubled and worried, and she looked up at him with eyes of desire and anxiety.
“Darling, we’re always going to be together,” she said.
He nodded, kissed her.
“And we’re not going to worry over this thing, either.”
