The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [429]
What could she say to this woman? Already she felt as if she had taken off her clothes in a room full of strange men. Ana she didn’t care if it was Studs’ mother, she was an old witch, and Catherine couldn’t tell any more to the old witch. Mrs. Lonigan had been young once, and she should know how people feel when they’re in love, and how when a girl loves the way she loved Bill, she couldn’t help herself, and had to let herself go and do whatever he wanted her to do. She remembered intimacies with Bill, her cheeks hot with shame because she feared that Mrs. Lonigan was thinking of what the two of them had done, forming pictures in her old witch’s mind of herself and Bill naked in each other’s arms.
“What are we going to do?” Mrs. Lonigan asked with insistence, standing over the girl, a gleam of apparent enjoyment in her eyes as Catherine cried. “You’ll have to do something. It is hardly possible that you can save your name, even if my poor sick son is not called above. And if he does- pass away, you will not be able to save your name by a marriage at the last minute, because he is too weak, and he might never even regain his senses.”
“Please... Please, Mrs. Lonigan!” the girl beseeched.
“And you won’t be able to hide it from people very long. You’re already beginning to show it. If my son dies, I’ll be ashamed at the funeral, and it will scandalize everybody. What are you going to do?”
“Oh, God, please! What can I do?”
“You can’t just stand and be a disgrace to my family and to yourself and your poor mother. You can’t do that. And your poor mother, does she know? What has she to say of your goings on?”
“I’ll scream! I’ll go crazy. I don’t care... I don’t care! I can’t stand this! Please... Please!”
Catherine was light-headed, dizzy, and this woman was still standing over her, like a devil, using words so that they cracked and lashed her more than if Mrs. Lonigan were beating her with a whip. Her cruel words, her face, oh, God, she hated that thin, hard, wrinkling face, calculating, intense, insane, yes, insane, and saying these things to her now.
“I won’t say that you killed my son. I won’t. I won’t say that, but when a girl sins, it is not the boy’s fault as much as it is the girl’s, because the girl is different. And she should have more pride and self-respect and a sense of decency than to act like a mongrel dog or an alley cat. I won’t say that you killed my son. But I will say that by making a chippy of yourself, you have helped to ruin his chances. If you hadn’t thrown yourself on him like a streetwalker, he might not be on his death bed this very minute.”
Catherine crumbled forward to the floor. She had fainted.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I
“Mort, old man, I’m sorry to see things come to a pass like this,” Lonigan said, standing by a scratched desk piled with papers and samples of wall paper, and glancing away from Mort at a smoke-dulled scene of railroad tracks and sooty buildings.
“I know. I know, Paddy. I was saying to my oldest kid only the other night, I said to Joe, it must hurt Mr. Lonigan more than it does me, because I’ve been working for him all these years, and it isn’t just like he was my boss, because we’re friends. I know, Paddy, that times is hard, harder than I’ve ever known them before. Business is business, and we’re all in a rough spot.”
“That bank failing, Mort, has just put the kibosh on me. I had my money for the next mortgage payment on my building that’s coming due next month. And the bank won’t give me any time.”
“Yes, it’s a shame, Paddy. An honest man like you, the squarest man I ever met,” Mort lamented.
“I don’t understand why it’s got to be me, Mort. I’ve worked like an honest man all my life, and I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps. I earned every penny I ever made. It isn’t right, Mort, and it isn’t fair. It ain’t fair. Why do I have to be a goat? Why?”
“Yes, Paddy, it’s a dirty shame.”
“I’ll tell you what it is, Mort, it’s the Jew international