The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [385]
“Do I look all right?”
Studs replied gutturally without even having heard her question. They emerged from Jackson Park at Sixty-third and Stony Island.
“Let’s walk home,” he said, too constrained within himself to stand waiting for a street car.
They crossed the street, and in front of the Greek restaurant with the modernistic decorations, a group of fellows stood, cluttering the sidewalk. Studs glanced to see if he knew any of them. Two drunks detached themselves and stood blocking the sidewalk. Studs’ fists clenched automatically, and he watched them cautiously, hate suddenly overpowering him,
“But, George, if we call her up and she’s not there, someone else answers the phone. So what? We lost a nickel.”
“Suppose we telephone Marie instead. So what. We spend a nickel,” the second drunken fellow seriously said, while Studs, tense and wary, led Catherine around them.
“They’re having a good time,” Catherine said with a thin smile.
“Yeah, a problem in high finance,” Studs said, pleased because she laughed at his crack.
They used to be crowding around the street in the same way in the old days. And then, no cares and responsibilities like now. He guessed, too, that what he really needed was to go out and get himself uproariously drunk. And if he’d only watched his health more in the old days he could do that now. If!
“Honey, please don’t let yourself get so worried,” Catherine said.
“I’m not worried. I was just thinking.”
“You were, too. I could see it on your face,”
“No. I was just thinking about those two drunks and their problem in high finance,” Studs answered, and Catherine’s lips tightened as she looked away.
Studs stared ahead at the lights of Sixty-seventh and Stony Island. They passed a row of drab apartment houses, a line of darkened stores, a vacant lot, and then a brightly lit Upton Oil and Refining Company Greasing Palace, and Studs purposelessly watched an automobile back away from a greasing rack.
A group of young fellows approached, talking loudly, and Studs became nervous, in case they might start some trouble! “Hell, he doesn’t work! He’s only the foreman and just walks around the joint. It don’t take no brains to be a foreman. You just got to be able to walk,” a dusky fellow in the group shouted as the fellows passed, and Studs heard their loud voices while they moved on.
“Sometimes you hear people say funny things on the street,” Catherine said.
“Yeh.”
They entered a crowded chain drug store, and sat down at a vacant tile-topped table. Waiting for their chocolate malted milks, Studs looked around, gathering a general sense of noise and well-being, seeing the crowd lined along the soda fountain, the fountain men frantically working to fill orders, the white-aproned waitresses scurrying with trays among the tables where there were many couples and groups, and other customers around the drug counters on the opposite side of the store.
He began wishing that he was like some of the other fellows in the store who were at soda tables with girls, so carefree. Like the fellow in a palm beach suit several tables down who talked to a blond girl and then laughed so loudly. A couple laughing like that couldn’t have a problem like he and Catherine had.
“It’s crowded here, isn’t it?” Catherine said after the malted milks had been set before them.
“Yes. These stores must be making money, depression or no depression,” Studs said, thinking that it might have been a much sounder investment to get stock in a chain drug outfit like this one.
“Yes, they do a lot of business at a store like this one,” she said, breaking open the small paper package of wafers that came with the malted milk.
“I’d be willing to bet they make money,” Studs said, drawing the malted milk through two straws.
He finished it quickly, and while Catherine continued sip-ping he again stared around at random, and he began to think how all these fellows with their girls, they were guys