Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [294]
“Yes, Patrick. And I know that everything is going to come out shipshape,” she said, smiling at him in consolation.
“I guess we have to have faith and confidence, and not let ourselves believe we’re licked,” Lonigan said after a gulp of coffee.
III
Studs sank into a rocking chair opposite the radio, while his father, toying with the dials, produced grating static. The parlor suddenly filled with howling jazz, and Lonigan again tinkered with the dials, decreasing the ear-splitting volume. Out of the swift tempo the notes of a saxophone came like a clear stream of fluid sound that seemed to flow into Studs, shivering up his spine, spilling through his nerves, and pouring poignancy into every corner of his brain. He leaned back, a brooding expression settling on his face, and again the saxophone was lost in a rising cacophony that crashed into a wild conclusion. Lonigan looked at his bulky gold watch, its ornamented case flashing back a ray of electric light that had hit it.
“Amos and Andy will be on about ten o’clock. Gosh, they’re funny, and when they get going they can touch anybody’s funny bone,” Lonigan said in an interlude between songs, while an announcer’s eulogy of furniture went unheeded.
Studs nodded. Maybe in the morning he’d better dump the stock, after all. But if he did, and the stock rose, wouldn’t he want to shag his tail around the block six ways from Sunday for having pulled out with clammy feet? He looked at his father, wondering whether the old man were really listening to the radio music or not. He was getting along in years now, and it was showing, his gray hair thinning out, wrinkles coming into the blown red face, bags under the eyes, the look of all-around tiredness on it. Pretty tough, too, having worries in old age. He heard a faint wheeze with every breath his father took, and he continued to glance at the relaxed face. Tough!
And how would things be going in ten years—1941. Would his father and mother be alive? Would he? Martin, what would he be doing? Would he and Catherine have kids of their own? How many? Would they be well-heeled with dough? And Phil and Loretta? These questions disturbed him. He was kind of afraid of what might happen in the next ten years. He let himself slump into his chair to receive the song of a cloying-voiced radio crooner.
Just a gigolo,
Every where I go,
People know the part I’m playing.
Paid for every dance,
Selling each romance,
Every night some heart betraying.
There will come a day,
Youth will pass away,
Then what will they say about me?
When the end comes, I know they’ll say,
“Just a gigolo,”
As life goes on without me.
He didn’t like gigolos. They were like pansies, worse even. But he felt something sad in the music, and it seemed to make their home, the parlor, his father and mother, himself, seem sad, as the chorus of the song was crooned a second time. Wiping her bony, chapped hands in an apron, his mother entered the room and took a seat near a tall, ornate floor-lamp. He noticed his parents again, and he wondered when he and Catherine were old would they sit night after night the same way, listening to the radio, with hardly a word to say, and would they have children of their own to feel sorry for them in the same way that he was feeling sorry now for his mother and dad, and would he seem to his children to be ready for the ash heap as he dozed half-awake at nights?
He tried to shift to other thoughts, and words from the song stuck in his mind. Youth will pass away, Life goes on without me. His stocks could give him a start and prevent him from fearing lest he end up like the old man. Oh, Jesus Christ, why, why couldn’t they just go up and double, triple, in value. If they went to a hundred bucks, that would be seventy-five bucks a share profit. And other people had made plenty this way. Why couldn’t he?
And there they were, his father and mother, seeming to have other things