The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [383]
“Bill, it would be awful to do such a thing. I know! If you say that, you make me feel that you don’t really care for me. You know you got what you wanted, everything I had to give you, and now you seem to be acting as if you only wanted to get out of trouble the easiest way.”
“Kid, please,” he said, still at a loss for words, wishing he could carry things off and lie better.
And he was just so goddamn mixed up and jumbled himself. He didn’t want such a thing to happen. She’d be disgraced and ruined, and everybody would know that they had had to get married. And Christ, right off the reel they would have the kid. What would he do about a kid of his own? Studs Lonigan, a father already! He didn’t want to do that, and he didn’t know what to do about it. And how could they afford it? There he would be in the future with cords about him, hand and foot.
Join the Navy now, brother, he told himself sardonically.
He remembered how he used to hear fellows around the poolroom kidding about it, and how he’d razzed fellows like Wils Gillen when they were worried about girls they’d knocked up. Goddamn it, it wasn’t anything to laugh over, Jesus Christ, it wasn’t.
And there she was beside him, sniffling, and he had to say or do something about it. He heard a distant automobile, and it made him think of how, right now, there were people driving around, free from having all the troubles and worries he had. He just felt helpless, hopeless, with a sword swinging right above his neck.
“Bill, tell me, do you love me?” she asked with a ring of insistence and desperation in her voice, and he grew rigid from the sudden thought that maybe in this mood she might just go and jump in the lake or do something as bad.
“You know it, Kid,” he said, still choked up.
“Well, you take a poor way of showing it. You don’t even hold me tight and kiss me when I tell you these things.”
He kissed her, aware of warm tears trickling down her cheeks, and they gripped each other in a mood of desperation. Released, they sat side by side, surrounded by trees, alone in a quiet where they could clearly hear each other’s breathing.
“Bill, we got to do something. I’m afraid to go to a doctor or take medicine,” Catherine said after a period of silence.
“It won’t hurt you.”
“But I can’t, I can’t do such a thing.”
“Well, it’ll mean plenty of trouble for us.”
“But if you love me.”
“Yes, but, Kid, can’t you see, right off the bat you’ll be tied down with a baby?”
“I don’t care for myself. But maybe it’s you. You’re afraid and you don’t want to be tied down.”
He knew that she craved some positive word from him, and all he could do was pat her hand gently and hope that his gesture would give her confidence and substitute for all the words he could not speak.
“Both of us have money saved up,” she said.
“I never told you, you know,” he said awkwardly.
“What?” she said with fresh anxiety.
“Well, after we became engaged, I felt that we ought to be able to start out with more money than it looked like we were gonna have. So I bought some shares in a new issue of Imbray Stock. I paid twenty-five a shot for it, and it’s down to six dollars a share now, so my two thousand dollars is now worth, let’s see... oh, about two hundred and forty dollars. It’s hardly worth selling it, so the money’s all tied up until we get better times and the stock market goes up.”
Christ, now he was only beginning to fully realize what a chump he’d been. Oh, how sweet it would be to take Ike Dugan out and pound him full of lumps!
“But Bill!” she exclaimed, stunned with surprise.
“I thought it would turn out all right,” he said dejectedly.
“But Bill, how could you do that and never say a word to me?” she said, breaking freely into tears.
He halted his impulse to say that it was his money, wasn’t it, and he felt as helpless as she, sobbing beside him. “And now we have no money,” she said forlornly.
“I thought that