The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [435]
Halted by the traffic lights at Halsted Street, he understood why he had come to this neighborhood, and where he was going. His mood softened into one of deep nostalgia, and he told himself that he was going back to an old neighborhood, to look at places where he had lived and played as a shaver. He remembered his Irish father and mother, his sister who had become a whore, Joe, getting old and tired, working still on the street cars, plugging along, Joe’s oldest son Tommy in the pen for sticking up a store. Ought to see Joe. Joe, poor fellow, had had a hard life. And he and Joe were the only ones left, he guessed, unless Catherine was. still alive. And Joe’s wife Ann, she was sick, not much life left in her. Once she had been like Mary also, a blooming, innocent young girl. He felt kindly toward Joe, toward Ann, even toward the memory of Catherine. He wanted to see them again, talk to them. And all he could do was to shake his head sadly and sigh.
“Ah.”
Horns tooted behind him. Blocking traffic by falling asleep at the wheel. He drove forward, and he parked his car by a vacant lot that was thick with weeds and littered with rocks, refuse, papers, tin cans. Stepping out of the car he caught a whiff of stale garbage from the prairie. He turned back and locked the door of his Ford. He glanced down a block-paved street, with tumbling and sinking wooden houses stacked between old brick buildings of two and three stories, most of the houses appearing uninhabitable in a pall of gray smoke. The neighborhood still looked something like it had in the old days, only worse. He slowly moved down a narrow cracked sidewalk, unable to recognize most of the houses. He halted before a boarded, untenanted structure that was weather-worn and lop-sided, as if threatening to fall into a heap of junk at any minute. He noticed that the windows were broken, black with dirt and soot, and the grassless plot of dirt in front of the house was messed with papers, small broken pieces of board and rusty tin cans, and the steps dropping into the cellar entrance were barricaded with refuse. Chewing on his cigar, he tried to remember what family had lived there. O’Learys? Doyles? Schaeffers? He scratched his head. Golly, he couldn’t remember. And all those who had lived along this block then, where were they, and what had happened to them? He flung the cigar-butt away. Some of them, like all the older folks, dead. The last O’Leary boy had been killed by an automobile. Dan Doyle dead, his oldest son killed in the war. The Schaeffers disappeared. He sighed.
Across the street from the abandoned house some boys were playing ball in a narrow lot, shouting like hell. Golly, he had played ball like that and so had his brothers, Jack and Mike and Joe, and so had Bill and Martin around Fifty-eighth Street. And now here were these boys.
“Go on, you sonofabitch, I’m safe.”
He laughed. Tough kids, all right. A whole new generation, going through the same mill that he had. Going through the same kind of a mill that Bill and Martin had. No. Bill and Martin had been given advantages that he’d never had, and these kids weren’t getting them, either.
“If I’m a sonofabitch, you’re a …”
Swearing like teamsters. Well, when he was a shaver he’d done the same thing. What would become of these lads? They’d scatter like the kids he’d known. Some go to jail. Some just get nowhere. Some pull themselves up by their own bootstraps just as he had done. He remembered Packey Dooley. Packey had died young, of consumption. His mother had wanted him to learn the violin. Maybe if Packey had lived he might have been a great violinist. Ah, life was a funny thing, and Boots Brennan, the toughest kid in the whole block, who had always sworn like