The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [327]
A frown suddenly settled on his face, and like a gloomy cloud the thought of his stocks came back to him. He walked in an aimless course, grabbed a handful of budding leaves off the bushes, scattered them, picked up a piece of broken branch, peeled the bark off with his finger nails, dropped it.
He lit a cigarette and looked around him, seeing with suddenness, and as if for the first time, the earth, grass in sunlight, with a few sparkles of dew, and in the distance, over trees, a light sky. A desire as if to catch these things he saw came on him, and then again the worry about money and stocks returned to fill his mind. He stopped to stare at an oak, its limbs rattling a trifle in the wind, hoping that by concentrating on it he would drive the worry away.
Christ, he was getting goofy as a loon! Studs Lonigan was a poet and didn’t know it.
“Fore. Fore.”
He turned to see golfers shouting and waving at him, and briskly returned to the bushes by the edge of the course. He saw a golf ball land, scud along the ground, stop. He saw grass and earth stretching away, people moving over the course, and, as he glanced upward, a bank of clouds smothering the sun and draping shadows over the park.
He had a sense he had often felt as a kid walking around in Washington Park, looking and wishing for something to do. But then he had had no real responsibilities, and he’d expected any damn thing to happen any minute. And now.
He saw in his mind, but not so clearly as he wanted to, the old Studs in short pants, playing indoors, on the small gravel diamond of the Washington Park playground, swinging, smacking the ball over the iron picket fence. And he remembered a rainy day when he was alone in the playground, and Miss Tyson, the playground director, had brought him into her office which was between the boys’ and girls’ cans in a rough-edged stone building. She had talked to him about what he wanted to be in life, and he’d felt that she was looking at him in a funny way. And when the rain had come down harder, she had closed the door, and she had sat with her legs crossed, letting him get a good eyeful, and she’d run her hand through his hair. Why had he been so dumb and innocent? He dropped into a bench along the walk that he and Catherine had passed last Sunday, and meditatively puffed at a cigarette. He felt as if he was the old Studs Lonigan, and he would see Dan Donoghue or Helen Shires before the day was out and.. .
“Got a light, lad?”
Studs looked up and saw a sandy-haired fellow with a seedy suit and blue shirt.
“What?”
“Got a match?”
“Sure. I was just sort of sitting here and forgot where I was, and didn’t hear you. Here.”
“Thanks,” the stranger said, accepting the book of matches and lighting a cigarette.
“I suppose you’re out of work like the rest of us.”
“Well, in a way.”
“I know I’ve been carrying the banner during these days of Hoover prosperity.”
“Yes, it seems pretty tough, but things ought to get better, and Hoover probably won’t be elected next year.”
“Things won’t get better for me, not under this system.”
“How come? There’s no use throwing up the sponge,” Studs said, thinking that, hell, the guy looked on the level, and like a white man and just down on his luck, and he might just as well try to cheer the guy up a little.
“I’m not throwing up the sponge. I’m just learning things, and I’ve learned, this last winter, that a guy like me isn’t worth any more than a rusty piece of machinery.”
Studs lit a cigarette and tried to think of something to say. The guy seemed sore at the world, the way he had just made that last crack.
“If you’re a workingman, buddy, none of those Democrats or Republicans mean anything for you.”
“Well, what