The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [22]
He sat there and sucked enjoyment from his stogy.
“And ain’t it the truth?” said Mrs. Reilley.
“Yeh,” muttered Reilley, who was slumped back in his chair seriously engaged in the effort to enjoy the stogy Lonigan had handed him.
“The Catholic religion is a grand thing,” Mrs. Reilley said.
Lonigan told how he had heard two little Catholic girls, no bigger than his own youngest daughter, swearing like troopers. It was because their parents didn’t send them to the sisters’ school. They all agreed, with many conversational flourishes; and Mrs. Reilley said the girls would sure be chippies.
Mrs. Reilley stated, with swelling maternal pride, that her son, Frank, would attend a Jesuit school and then prepare for the law so that he could some day be a grand Catholic lawyer, like Joe O’Reilley, who had almost been state’s attorney.
“The Jesuits are grand men and fine scholars,” said Mrs. Lonigan.
“They got these here A. P. A. university professors skinned by a hull city block,” Reilley said.
Mrs. Lonigan said that yes the Jesuits were grand men, and she would like to make a Jesuit out of her son William. “But has he the call?” jealously asked Mrs. Reilley.
“I think so. I say a rosary every night, and I offer up a monthly holy communion, and I make novenas that God will give him the call,” Mrs. Lonigan said.
“And wouldn’t I give me right arm if me son Frank had the call?” Mrs. Reilley said.
“But, Mary, you know I’m gonna need Bill to help me in my business. Why do you want to start putting things like that in the boy’s head?” protested Lonigan.
“Patrick, you know that if God wants a boy or a girl for His work, and that boy or girl turns his back on the Will of Almighty God, he or she won’t never be happy and they’ll stand in grave danger of losing their immortal souls,” said she.
“I’sn’t it the truth?” said Mrs. Reilley.
“But Mary ..”
“Patrick, the Will of God is the Will of God, and no mortal can tamper with it or try to thwart it,” his wife replied.
Lonigan protested vainly, saying how hard he had worked, and how a father had some right to expect something in return when he did so much for his children.
Mrs. Lonigan opened her mouth to speak, but Mrs. Reilley beat her to the floor and said that when a body gets old, all that a body has is a body’s children to be a help and a comfort, and that a body could expect and demand some respect from a body’s children. She and her old, man had worn their fingers down to the bone working for their children. Reilley had been a poor teamster, and he had gotten up before dawn on mornings when the cold would almost make icicles on your fingers in no time, and she had gotten up and got his breakfast, and fed the horses, and both of them had worked like niggers in those days back of the yards before their children were born. And a mother doesn’t have her back near broken with labor pains for nothing. She held up her red, beefy, calloused hands. Then she boasted that she was proud that her children would not have such a hard time. Frank would be educated for the law; Frances would teach school; and maybe she would make a Sister of Mercy out of little June.
Reilley yawned. Lonigan detailed how hard he had worked.
They could hear the young people laughing, having a harmless good time in the parlor. Lonigan said it was great to be a kid, and then spoke of the Orpet murder trial. Everybody felt that hanging was too good and too easy a punishment for such a cur. Mrs. Reilley, in a blaze of passion, said that if a boy of hers ever did such a vile thing to an innocent girl she would fasten the rope around his neck; but her Frank would never be that kind of a cur; her flesh and blood, he couldn’t be. Lonigan made a long speech averring that it was a beastly violation of the natural law. June Reilley and Loretta appeared, and Mrs. Lonigan signaled her husband to pause until she shooed the innocent ones off to Loretta’s room. They scampered out of the