The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [6]
Frances banged on the door and yelled.
“Aw, don’t get so darn crabby,” Studs said to her while he fanned the air with his towel.
‘See, Mother! See! He says I’m insane just because I ask him to hurry after he’s been in there all day. He’s reading smoking cigarettes... Please, make him hurry!”
“Why, Frances, how dare you accuse him like that!” Mrs. Lonigan commenced to say.
Studs heard his sister dashing away, hollering to the old man to come and do something. He fanned vigorously, and his mother stood at the door urging.
II
Old man Lonigan, his feet planted on the back porch railing, sat tilted back in his chair enjoying his stogy. His red, well fed looking face was wrapped in a dreamy expression; and his innards made slight noises as they diligently furthered the process of digesting a juicy beefsteak. He puffed away, exuding burgher comfort, while from inside the kitchen came the rattle of dishes being washed. Now- and then he heard Frances preparing for the evening.
He gazed, with reverie-lost eyes, over the gravel spread of Carter Playground, which was a few doors south of his own building. A six-o’clock sun was imperceptibly burning down over the scene. On the walk, in the shadow of and circling the low, rambling public school building, some noisy little girls, the size and age of his own Loretta, were playing hop-scotch. Lonigan puffed at his cigar, ran his thick paw through his brown gray hair, and watched the kids. He laughed when he heard one-of the little girls shout that the others could go to-hell. It was funny and they were tough little ones all right. It sounded damn funny. They must be poor little girls with fates and mothers who didn’t look after them or bring them up in the right home atmosphere; and if they were Catholic girls; they probably weren’t sent to the sisters’ school; parents ought to send their children to the sisters’ school even if it did take some sacrifice; after all, it only cost a dollar a month, and even poor people could afford that when their children’s education was at stake. He wouldn’t have his Loretta, using such rowdy language, and, of course, she wouldn’t, because her mother had always taught her to be a little lady. His attention wandered to a boy, no older than his own Martin, but dirty and less-well-cared-for, who, with the intent and dreamy piousness of childhood, played on the ladders and slides that paralleled his own back fence. He watched the youngster scramble up, slide down, scramble up, slide down. It stirred in him a vague series of impulses, wishes and nostalgias. He puffed his stogy and watched. He said to himself:
Golly, it would be great to be a kid again!
He said to himself:
Yes, sir, it would be great to be a kid!
He tried to remember those ragged days when he was only a shaver and his old man was a pauperized greenhorn. Golly, them were the days! Often there had not been enough to eat in the house. Many’s the winter day he and his brother had to stay home from school because they had no shoes. The old house, it was more like a barn or a shack than a home, was so cold they had to sleep in their clothes; sometimes in those zero Chicago winters his old man had slept in his overcoat. Golly, even with all that privation, them was the days. And now that they were over, there was something missing, some thing gone from a fellow’s life. He’d give anything to live back a day of those times around Blue Island, and Archer Avenue. Old man Dooley always called it Archey Avenue, and Dooley was one comical turkey, funnier than anything you’d find in real life. And then those days when he was a young buck in Canaryville. And things were cheaper in them days. The boys that hung out at Kieley’s saloon, and later around the saloon that Padney Flaherty ran, and Luke O’Toole’s place on Halsted. Old Luke was some boy. Well, the Lord have mercy on his soul, and on the soul of old Padney Flaherty. Padney was a comical duck, good-hearted as they make them, but crabby. Was he a first-rate crab! And the jokes the boys played on him. They were always calling him names, pigpen