The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [237]
He was a disillusioned young man.
He wanted to get coffee in the Greek restaurant. But he might meet some of the guys. He hated them. He didn’t want to see them. And Christy, whom he had always talked to in the restaurant, was gone. He didn’t know why. The new waiter had just said he had left. He walked home, carrying a brief-case full of books. Studs Lonigan, Red Kelly, and Barney Keefe passed on the other side of the street. They called him goof and told him to leave it alone. He didn’t answer. Some day, he would drive this neighborhood and all his memories of it out of his consciousness with a book. He swerved again from disillusionment to elation.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Studs and his father stood in the parlor and the early morning sunlight glared through the unwashed, curtainless windows. They looked around at the covered furniture. The room had an appearance of disruption.
“Bill, I’d rather let the money I made on this building go to hell, and not be moving,” Lonigan exclaimed, with wistful regret.
“Patrick, are you sure all your things are packed,” Mrs. Lonigan said.
“Yes, Mother,” Lonigan said, very gently.
It seemed to Studs that his mother wiped away a tear. She turned and went towards the back of the house to ask the girls if they had all their things packed.
“Hell, there is scarcely a white man left in the neighborhood,” Studs remarked.
“I never thought that once they started coming, they’d come so fast.”
“You know, Bill, your mother and I are gettin’ old now, and, well, we sort of got used to this neighborhood. We didn’t see many of the old people, except once in a while at Church, but you know, we kind of felt that they were around. You know what I mean, they were all nearby, and they all sort of knew us, and we knew them, and you see, well, this neighborhood was kind of like home. We sort of felt about it the same way I feel about Ireland, where I was born,” said Lonigan.
Studs didn’t like the old man to let himself out like that because how could he reply? The old man and old lady were taking it hard.
“Yeah, it used to be a good neighborhood,” said Studs.
“Well, Patrick, we’re going to have a new home,” Mrs. Lonigan said, returning to the parlor.
“Yes, Mary, but no home will be like this one has been to us. We made our home here, raised our children, and spent the best years of our lives here.”
“Sunday in church, I watched Father Gilhooley. Patrick, he’s getting old. He’s heartbroken, poor man. Here he built his beautiful church, and two years after it’s built, all his parishioners are gone. He’s getting old, Patrick, poor man, and he’s heartbroken.”
Studs stood there, looking at nothing, feeling goofy, vague, as if he was all empty inside.
“We’re all getting old, Mary; it won’t be long before we’re under the sod.”
“Patrick, don’t talk like that, please.”
“Goddamn those niggers!” Lonigan exploded.
“I guess it was the Jew real-estate dealers who did it,” said Studs, believing that he ought to say something.
“Mary, remember that Sunday, a long time ago, when we came out here in a buggy I rented, and drove around. It was nearly all trees and woods out here then, and there wasn’t many people here,” the old man said.
“Yes, Patrick, but now are you positively certain that you’re not leaving anything behind?” Mrs. Lonigan said.
“Nothing, Mother! And remember when we bought the building over on Wabash. That was before you were born, Bill.”
Studs walked over to the window. He saw two nigger kids twisted together, wrestling in the street. They went down squirmingly. He remembered how, coming home from St. Patrick’s every night, they used to wrestle and rough-house like that, and Lucy and the girls, not meaning what they said, would call them roughnecks, and then they would go at it all the harder. Funny to think that was all gone, and here he was twenty-six, actually twenty-six, and next fall, he’d be twenty-seven. He lit a cigarette.
“Out there there’ll only be about ten buildings in our block, the rest’s all prairie,” Lonigan said.
“It’ll be nice, though,” the mother absent-mindedly ex-claimed.