The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [443]
All those south-bound automobiles on Michigan. People in them going home. Were the men and women in all these automobiles happy? What did they have on their minds? For-rent signs in these fine buildings on Michigan. Property ruined by the niggers. And a closed bank at Thirty-ninth Street. God, how long could it all go on? And Bill? He had a feeling that Bill was dead. He didn’t want to go home to the house where his son had died. Unthinkingly, he drove his car more slowly.
Near White City he stopped in front of a speakeasy, deciding that one good, stiff shot would jack him up. Several men were lined up at the bar of the small saloon when he entered.
“Shot of whisky,” he told the ruddy-faced bartender.
Lonigan gulped it down, convincing himself that a man in his shoes had to brace himself up with something, and this one would make him feel better about going home.
“And, Pat, I suppose you think I’m only a toothless old drunkard, headed for an alcoholic grave?” a stunted old man said, hanging over the bar.
Catching Lonigan’s eye, the bartender winked. Lonigan smiling in response, drank half of the whisky before him and gulped down a chaser of water.
“Pat, don’t tell me I’m no good. Because I swear to God on it, and to the memory of my saintly old mother in Heaven, that there’s no Irishman alive who hasn’t some good in him. Pat, we belong to a race blessed by God. But we have been oppressed for centuries by John Bull, the curse of the human race. And by God, I’m proud to proclaim that my name is McGuire.”
The drunkard laughed repulsively, staggered from the bar, jigged clumsily, fell forward, toward Lonigan, and looked at him sternly, slouching against the bar.
“Sir, doesn’t God love the Irish?”
“You’re right, Dad,” Lonigan said with a smile, finishing off his drink.
“Dad, bejesus no. I want the likes of all you to know that Timothy McGuire is a granddaddy,” he said shaking with laughter that sounded ribald.
Two lads in their early twenties, one wearing a nicely pressed blue suit, the other in splotched working clothes, entered and strolled up to the bar smiling. They reminded Lonigan of his son, and he saw Bill in other days, stopping off after work for a drink, stepping up to a bar the same as these lads, talking, kidding with a drunk as these two were with McGuire, maybe thinking the same kind of thoughts as they were. Martin, too, was like these lads. And once he himself had been. He wanted almost to cry, and he sipped his third glass of whisky.
“Boys, I’m just a no-good Irishman,” McGuire said, staggering up to the newcomers.
“You’re no good, and we’re no good. That’s what we got to brag about. Ha, ha,” the lad in the blue suit said.
“By Jesus, I’ll shake on that profundity. No good. Was there ever an Irishman that was good for anything but the bottle and a song and the ankle of a pretty lass? Ha, ha,” McGuire drooled, shaking hands with both of them.
“Come on, Pop, have one on us,” the lad in the blue business suit said.
“By gosh, you’re gentlemen, even if I do say so,” McGuire said, supporting himself against the bar.
“Join us, stranger,” the lad in working clothes said, and Lonigan raised his fourth drink in response, feeling warm with a sense of companionship.
“Well, spittin’ in your eye,” McGuire said, gulping a thimble-glass of moonshine.
McGuire staggered to a thin man who sat slumped at a table over a cocktail.
“Why so pale and dour, fond friend?” he said, unsteady before the man.
The stranger frowned. McGuire made a face and returned to fall over the bar.
Lonigan looked into his fifth drink with melancholy, feeling like he wanted to hear songs, to sing sad old songs himself, like The River Shannon, and Dear Old Girl, and When I First Met Mary, and Silver