Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [329]
Ahead of him along the sunny street he saw people moving, most of them also bound for church. To know that nearly everyone on this street was Catholic gave him a different kind of feeling than what he often had just walking along any street where the people on it were all going about to do any number of things. He felt that he had something in common here and he knew that much about them. They were all on the same side of the fence.
He glanced at Catherine, and she was pretty in her new black coat and her small black hat slanting on the left side of her head, and beneath her opened coat a black-and-white patterned dress with a wide black leather belt. Underneath these clothes there was a white, untouched woman’s body, and some day it was going to be his, and the thought of that unseen, untaken body of hers, hidden in clothes, made him kind of want their marriage to be soon. His woman.
There was something quiet and lazy about this street, with its threeand four-storied apartment buildings, its vacant lots, the earth beside the sidewalk loosening and muddy, the sun spread over it, the feeling of Sunday and early spring in the air. And around him other people going to church, walking slowly, and not seeming to have troubles on their minds. Did they? If things could be so quiet and peaceful and other people could walk along as if they had no bothers and worries, why couldn’t he?
Across the street he watched a well-set-up fellow in a loud, snappy gray suit, with a girl whose slim, tall but meaty figure was wrapped in a stylish blue cloth coat, and when the fellow talked, Studs could hear her ringing laughter. Happy. . . . If they could be happy, so could he. Damn it if he couldn’t!
“Look, Bill, two for-rent signs in this building. We ought to stop in on our way back. All along here there are for-rent signs, and it would be fun to look at them.”
“We don’t have to. We can have a big apartment in our building.”
“But it’s fun,” she said.
But maybe these people weren’t in danger of losing every penny they owned in the world, and they hadn’t had a run of tough luck about their health.
“Bill, dear, when are you going to let me teach you bridge as you promised me you would?”
“I don’t like the game,” he answered in an annoyed masculine whine.
He had settled the question by telling her he didn’t care about bridge, and here she was at it, showing no respect for his wishes.
“How can you say you don’t like it, when you’ve never played, and don’t know it, or how much fun it can be? You ought to be at least tolerant enough about it to wait and see how it is before you say, like a gruff old bear, that you don’t like it.”
“It’s the game for tea-hounds and parlor athletes.”
“Bill, you’re just being silly. Nice fellows play bridge, and you’re just trying to act like a great big tough guy. It’s so silly.”
“I couldn’t learn it. I’ve never been good at cards, and bridge has too much to do with figures,” he said, shifting his defense because he was stumped for a reply even if he did know he was right. And wouldn’t he feel like a sap, sitting down at a bridge table?
“You’ll like it a lot, I know you will, if you’ll let yourself learn it.”
“Well, maybe I will,” he said to change the subject and postpone having to make a definite promise.
They turned a corner, and saw the low, sand-stoned, wide-facaded church with its broad steps and the large space of sidewalk before it. Pat Carrigan, in a group down from the church front, waved and Studs waved in response.
“But, Bill dear, will you