The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [365]
When he saw Catherine, should he or shouldn’t he mention last night?
“I saw her yesterday on Seventy-first Street, and do you know, she’s wearing the same hat she wore last spring?” a stout lady behind him said to a middle-aged woman.
The train shunted through a tunnel, and Studs developed an anxiety to be out of the tunnel.
“Of course, I don’t wish ill of anyone. But she put on so many airs when she had it, that it serves her right.”
The train broke into daylight again and rumbled into the Sixty-seventh Street station. He watched several men and women moving about the platform to enter the cars, and he thought of Catherine, of how he had met her. She had been a distant friend or something to the Dowsons, and anyway he had met her when his sister, Fran, had married Carroll. He remembered that Phil Dowson, Carroll’s twin brother, who had married Gertrude O’Reilley, the niece of Judge Joe O’Reilley, had introduced her to him and she had said how do you do, or something like that, and he had just acknowledged the introduction in a formal way. She had looked a little fat, and not so hot that time. But there had been dancing, and since he happened to be standing next to her and there was no one else to dance with, he’d asked her to dance, out of politeness. She’d said something about his dancing nice, and he’d liked the compliment so he had asked her to dance again.
“Just as my husband, Arthur, says, he believes in the philosophy of compensation, and when you do something, there’s always compensation for it. It’s only a compensation to her now that her husband is not doing well because she was always flaunting herself and her clothes when she had it,” one of the women behind him said.
Regular hen party there, he thought. But, anyway, at Fran’s wedding, when Catherine was leaving, he had walked over to her and he’d said, because of some crazy impulse or other, that he might be seeing her again. And she had smiled and said that would certainly be something to look forward to, so they had made a date then and there. He’d been sorry he’d made the date after she’d left, but it had been done, so he’d taken her to a show, and he’d decided, the second time he’d seen her, that she was better-looking than he’d first thought she was.
“Annie Rothschild is really psychic. And over a year ago Annie said that that one is going to have bad luck.”
And in the hallway after the first date she hadn’t let him kiss her. She’d been very self-possessed and calm and had acted like she knew how to take care of herself. He’d taken her out again, until, suddenly, he had been going steadily with her. Funny how at first he hadn’t even been able to kiss her and now, he’d copped her cherry.
He looked out the window and saw that the train was passing Fifty-seventh Street, and he noted the trees of Jackson Park below, and a block distant. And then the train was slowing beside the platform, and he saw people hastening to the car doors, and the trees and buildings of Fifty-sixth Street, and beyond it a patch of the lake, deep blue against the cloudy day. Two young fellows who looked like University students headed the procession of people entering the car, and they took the vacant seat in front of Studs. An asthmatic, graying man sat beside him and began making whistling sounds as he breathed.
“Then you really think that Annie Rothschild is psychic?”
“She’s very good and she does it all with cards .. .”
The train was running, stopping again at Hyde Park Boulevard, and Catherine, what would he say to her when they met? He could see the tall apartment hotel buildings stacked beside