The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [322]
“Yes, isn’t it too bad? And there was trouble here last summer with niggers trying to go swimming along here. Ugh. Think of it, going with niggers,” she said, shuddering.
“Seventy-third-Street beach is much better, but every year you see more noisy Jews there. Pretty soon there won’t be a beach in Chicago left for a white man.”
Ahead, beyond the end of the park, they saw several close-packed, tall apartment hotels, lost in webs of sunlight which refracted from the windows and bathed the bricks with soft reflections of color. Looking persistently at them, Studs wondered if they, as well as Phil and Loretta, could afford to live in one of them. If they could, it would be better than living in the old man’s building.
At the edge of the park she pulled him toward a bus, and before he realized what he was doing he was sitting toward the front of the upper deck of a downtown bus, idly watching the buildings and the people along Hyde Park Boulevard. They turned north at Drexel Boulevard.
“Lots of flats for rent around here,” she said.
“I know, but this isn’t a good neighborhood, like it used to be,” he said as the bus bounced over the Forty-seventh Street car-tracks.
“And such nice places and homes, too,” she sighed.
He slumped in his seat, liking the bus ride in the sun, Catherine close to him. He scented her perfume, saw people drifting along, looked at girls in new clothes, thinking whether or not they were nice. But he didn’t want to trade her for the girls he saw. She was a damn good kid, best in the world for him. Wanting her to know it, he took her hand, smiled at her, received in return a squeeze of the hand and a grateful smile.
“Love me?”
“Uh huh! you’re darn right I do,” he said with false gruffness.
III
Already yesterday seemed like a blur to him. It was like some happy dream which was forgotten the moment he woke up, and all that was left of it was the memory of having felt good. On the bus with Catherine everything but her and his own feelings had seemed covered by a curtain, and he had felt in the future only good things and good luck could possibly come to him. He could see now that he had no right to feel that way.
He sucked malted milk through a straw, and watched the soda jerkers hustle orders amid the noise and clatter of the buzz of the electric malted-milk shakers. They worked their pants off and they didn’t get a hell of a lot for it, either. He was glad he wasn’t in their boots, and he guessed he was better off than most of them. It was a flunkey’s job, and a guy must feel pretty lousy working at it day after day, with no future and only hard dumb work. It was something to know that there were others worse off than he was.
He licked his straw and set it back in the glass, swung off the chair by the soda counter, and walked by drug articles stacked on tables to the cashier’s desk at the door.
“Hey, Dugan.”
“Oh, hello, Studs. How are you? Gee, I’m glad to see you.”
“See this? The stock market went all to hell today. Where’s all the dough I was going to clean up on the Imbray stock of yours?” Studs asked, nettled, showing Ike the account of a stock-market break recorded in The Chicago Questioner.
“You know what that is, don’t you?”
“What?” Studs asked anxiously.
“That’s just fluctuation.”
“That stock is thirteen, and I’m out nine hundred and sixty bucks. Is that what fluctuation means?”
“I’m out more if you pay any attention to this. I’ve been buying Imbray stock every week. But we don’t pay any attention to this at the office. It’s just fluctuation. You can’t lose on Imbray stock with all the public utilities of the Middle West and the brain of Solomon Imbray behind it.”
“That’s what you said before, and the stock has lost twelve bucks a share.”
“I know. And I stand to lose more than you do. I’ve been buying Imbray stock out of my pay for months now. And I’m not worried, I don’t bother about whether it goes up or down a little on the market. It’s thirteen now, isn’t it? Well, when we signed the stock agreement, it was twenty-five, and we’re still buying it at that price, and