The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [53]
Frances asked him if he was going over to see Lucy after supper, if he was, she’d walk over with him... and she said if he was he had better wash himself clean and shine his shoes.
The old man sang monotonously:
Goodbye, boys .. .
For I... get... married... tomorrow .. .
Mrs. Lonigan seriously warned him that he was still a little young and he would have plenty of time later on for girls, and girls would make a fool of him, and he should not be thinking of them, but he should be praying and meditating to see if he had a vocation or not.
Studs walked out of the room, saying that they could all go to hell.
He heard them laughing after him. Even the walls and the furniture seemed to laugh, to jibe and jeer. He went out for a walk without eating, and he met Helen Borax on Fifty-eighth Street. She asked him how Lucy’s gentleman was, and said that she heard he was a specialist in osculation; she said she would never have believed it, but she couldn’t doubt all the proof she had seen around the neighborhood in the last few days, And she would never be able to understand how Lucy mistook him for Francis X. Bushman; but then everyone had his or her right to like people. She said she knew Lucy needed a sort of roughneck to carry her books when she went to high school, because Lucy was going to St. Elizabeth’s, and it was in a nigger neighborhood, and he could protect her, and walk home with her through the nigger neighborhood. Helen spoke so swiftly and cattishly that Studs couldn’t get in a word edgewise. She didn’t stop for over five minutes, and then she only paused for breath. After she had talked a blue streak, they stood making faces at each other.
He said, sore as a boil:
“Kiss my ….”
She blushed, gulped, swallowed, looked shocked and horror-stricken. He turned his back on her, and walked away.
“Lucy’s gentleman!” Helen called after him.
He turned and thumbed his nose.
VI
The next day he wandered forlorn streets, wishing that he would meet Dan, or Helen Shires, or someone, and not having the nerve to go around Indiana, where he might find them. At Fifty-eighth and Prairie, he met Lucy. She was with some girl he didn’t know, and she said hello booby to him, winking at her friend. He got sore, and stuttered goofy things to her, like she needn’t think she was so much. She said she was a lady, and only cared to associate with gentlemen. He said that girls were a pain. She said that girls wouldn’t think much of him after the awful thing he had said to Helen Borax; she said her mother would certainly forbid her to associate with such a person. He stood looking at her. She asked him if he saw anything green. He didn’t have any comeback.
They walked away, their heads stuck up, laughing at him. He stood there, trying to figure out why girls were so un-understandable, and why they changed and were flighty like the weather. He walked on in a trance, thinking about this and about things in general. He told himself again and again that the world was lousy and he was going to give it one Goddamn run for its lousy money, all right. It was rotten, all right. Just when things were jake, they blew up like they had a stick of dynamite under them. Well, Goddamn everybody, let them lump it. He walked, thinking, dream-planning heroic revenge, telling himself how he would become something daring and famous like an aviator, a lone wolf bandit, an Asiatic pirate, a German submarine commander.
He walked. The day was fine. The wind was cool. It would have been so nice to walk with Lucy. He went over to the park, and found their tree and sat up there, imagining that Lucy was by his side swinging her legs and kissing him. He forgot where he was, and everything else. He only thought of Lucy. Then he thought he was some place else, and this time, some place else was sad, and he didn’t want to be in it, and there was no place else for him to go. The wind again waved through his hair, but now it was only the wind.
He cursed.
He finally grew lonely and needed to find someone, anyone, to be with.