The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [154]
“I saw Loretta the other day and she has certainly grown into a sweet young girl.”
Not much for them to say to each other. It made him sorry they had changed and drifted apart, because he could remember how she had been such a pal, just like a guy you liked a lot.
“Seen any of the old bunch?” she asked, after the silence between them had grown uncomfortable.
“Bill comes around once in a while and we go to a show together. He has a pretty good job, repairing adding-machines.”
“And how’s Fran?”
“All right.”
He wanted to talk about old times, and have them just naturally talk about themselves, and maybe Lucy.
“I saw Jim Clayburn. He’s studying law,” he said.
He told her about last Sunday’s football game and the fight.
“You’re just the same as ever, aren’t you? Haven’t changed, even to the fighting,” she said in a complimentary way; he was pleased, and looked at her out of the corner of his eye. Might date her up at that and make her; she probably could be made, and every jane a guy made was another notch in his belt. But he liked her and wished they could be as they used to be.
“What’s your sister doing?”
“She’s in high school. She’s a flapper now,” Helen said.
“You haven’t changed either, Helen,” he said, but it was a lie. She wasn’t the old Helen. And she looked sort of whipped, too. Maybe it was because she wasn’t good-looking or something.
They stood awkwardly at the corner of Fifty-eighth and Indiana. Finally they said they’d have to be trotting along. Studs said they’d have to get together some time, and she re-plied vaguely. He watched her walk mannishly along, her dumpy figure swaying a trifle. He wished... He went in the drug store and bought copies of Snappy Stories and the Whizz Bang to read after supper, since he wasn’t going out.
He felt moody over having seen Helen, noticed the way she seemed whipped, and wasn’t the old Helen. And then losing that game too. He yawned, tired. He remembered what good times he and Helen and the old bunch used to have roasting marshmallows and baking potatoes in a bonfire nights over by the foundation when the Prairie Theater was just being built.
XI
A hollow roar, like heavy thunder splitting the sky in a storm, boomed over the neighborhood. People near Fifty-ninth and South Park Avenue heard falling glass, and in some cases, their buildings, and the very bedrooms in which they slept, quaked. Inside of five minutes, a crowd was collected in front of a low, two-story, red stone house between Fifty-ninth and Sixtieth on South Park Avenue. Two policemen stood before the crumbled steps, and the long wide porch before the building was splintered and half-wrecked.
The crowd was steadily enlarged by people of all ages who displayed the signs of hasty arousal from sleep; men with trousers and coats pulled on over pajamas, kids with tousled hair and sleep still in their eyes, surprised and half-dressed women. There was much talk and speculation, and amongst them there was a general consensus that the bomb had been placed there through the machinations of real-estate people who desired that Abraham Clarkson, the leading colored banker of Chicago, should sell his property and cease living in a white man’s neighborhood. Most of the excited and gaping people present also eyed the wreckage wth approval, wishing that it would have a proper and fearful effect. But they knew that the bomb would teach no lessons and inspire no fear. For Abraham Clarkson had been bombed before, and he had stated defiantly that he would move from his home to another one only in a casket. It was nerve for the nigger to say that and go on ruining a white man’s neighborhood, living amongst people who didn’t want him. Secretly, many of those present wished that he had been killed. Some of the Catholics wished only that it had wounded him, un-mortally, for didn’t he always give Father Gilhooley a hundred dollars in the annual Easter and Christmas collections. The crowd increased. After about three quarters of an hour of gaping, it slowly dispersed. Red Kelly