Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [64]
“Eh bien Nin,” I say, “faura du pas faire car (Well Nin, I shouldn’t a done that.)
We come to the St. Jean Baptiste church and Nin wants to go in for a second to see if the third-grade girls at St. Joseph for girls are having their Lenten exercises, wants to check on her girlfriend’s little sister–ah the poor little girls of Lowell I knew that died, at 6, 7, 8, their rosy little lips, and little eye glasses of school, and little white collars and Navy blue blouses, all, all, underdusted in fading graves soon sinking fields–ah black trees of Lowell in your March glare–
We peek in at the church, at shuffling groups of Little girls, at priests, people kneeling, doing the sign of the cross in aisleways, the prim flutter of front altar lights where a pursymouth youngpriest wheels sensationally to kneel and hangs knelt like a perfect motionless statue of Christ in the Agony of the Garden, budging for just an instant as he barely loses balance and all little kids in church who watched have seen, the sensational wheel failed, I notice all this just as I slip out the door–after Nin with a flick at the fount-waters and quick cap-on (my cap was an old felt hole-hat).
Bright morn blanked our eyelashes right there, inside the church perpetual afternoon, here: morning… But as we proceeded right on Aiken Street and left up on Moody the day stretched to noon with a faint whitish glare now come into the halyards of the blue and the trumpets have stopped sounding, half lost their dew–always hate morning going– The women of Moody Street were rushing and shopping literally in the shade of the Cathedral–at Aiken and Moody, center of traffic activities, it cast its huge bloat shadow on the scene–climbing a tenement or two in shadow-vertical-extenuation lengthening with afternoon. Nin and I gaped at the drugstore window: inside, where neat black and white tiles made a golden sun floor for the drugstore, and where the strawberry ice cream sodas were foaming at the top in pink bubblous mist froth at the slavering mouth of some idle traveling salesman with his samples on the stool, soda in glass sitting in steel glass-grip with round clinky girderbottom, a solid soda, huge, oldfashioned, with a barbershop mustache on it, Nin and I sure wished we could get some of that. Joy of the morning was particularly keen and painful in the marble slab counter where a little soda was freshly spilled–I romped, we romped on up the Moody. We passed several regular journeyman Canadian grocery stores crowded with women (like our Parent’s) buying hamburger and huge pork chops of the prime (to serve with hot mashed potatoes in a plate in which also hot porkchop fat is floating around beautiful with luminescent golds to mix with the mash of hot palate, add pepper). In fact Nin and I grow hungry remembering all our long hikes to the Royal, looking at sodas, walking, seeing the women buying sausage and butter and eggs in the grocery stores. “Boy mue faimer a ben vite, tu-suite” Nin says rubbing her dress over her belly (Boy me I’d like real soon, right away—) “un bon ragout ctboullette, ben chaud (a good porkball stew very hot) dans mon assiette, / prend ma fourchette pis jell mash ensemble (in my plate, I take my fork and I mash it together), les boules de viande molle, les patates, les carottes, le bon ju