Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [332]
They peered over the lake, its waters like a shiny cover being stirred from underneath, like a blue cloak being ruffled, and the sunlight on the lake seemed like a pattern sewn into the cloak.
“Darling, I’ll never forget the night we became engaged and walked down by the lake.”
“Yes.”
“And will you ever forget it?” she asked.
“No.”
“I know you will. You men, you think such things are sentimental or foolish, and you don’t remember them. I know you don’t.”
“I do,” he said with an effort to make himself sound convincing.
“Honest?”
He nodded.
“Cross your heart?”
He quickly crossed his heart.
“I love you.”
He wanted to tell her the same thing, telling himself how he did, really did, think a hell of a lot of her. He grinned sheepishly.
“Love me?”
He nodded and she squeezed his hand. Then she clung tightly to his arm.
“We won’t be able to come swimming here, though, this summer,” he said, pointing at the low gray pavilion of rough-edged stone which housed the Jackson Park beach. “It’s become the hunkies’ community center here now. I came here one day last summer, and I tell you I didn’t think there were as many hunkies and polacks in the world as I saw here.”
“Yes, isn’t it too bad? And there was trouble here last summer with niggers trying to go swimming along here. Ugh. Think of it, going with niggers,” she said, shuddering.
“Seventy-third-Street beach is much better, but every year you see more noisy Jews there. Pretty soon there won’t be a beach in Chicago left for a white man.”
Ahead, beyond the end of the park, they saw several close-packed, tall apartment hotels, lost in webs of sunlight which refracted from the windows and bathed the bricks with soft reflections of color. Looking persistently at them, Studs wondered if they, as well as Phil and Loretta, could afford to live in one of them. If they could, it would be better than living in the old man’s building.
At the edge of the park she pulled him toward a bus, and before he realized what he was doing he was sitting toward the front of the upper deck of a downtown bus, idly watching the buildings and the people along Hyde Park Boulevard. They turned north at Drexel Boulevard.
“Lots of flats for rent around here,” she said.
“I know, but this isn’t a good neighborhood, like it used to be,” he said as the bus bounced over the Forty-Seventh-Street car-tracks.
“And such nice places and homes, too,” she sighed.
He slumped in his seat, liking the bus ride in the sun, Catherine close to him. He scented her perfume, saw people drifting along, looked at girls in new clothes, thinking whether or not they were nice. But he didn’t want to trade her for the girls he saw. She was a damn good kid, best in the world for him. Wanting her to know it, he took her hand, smiled at her, received in return a squeeze of the hand and a grateful smile.
“Love me?”
“Uh huh! you’re darn right I do,” he said with false gruffness.
III
Already yesterday seemed like a blur to him. It was like some happy dream which was forgotten the moment he woke up, and all that was left of it was the memory of having felt good. On the bus with Catherine everything but her and his own feelings had seemed covered by a curtain, and he had felt that in the future only good things and good luck could possibly come to him. He could see now that he had no right to feel that way.
He sucked malted milk through a straw, and watched the soda jerkers hustle orders amid the noise and clatter of the buzz of the electric malted-milk shakers. They worked their pants off and they didn’t get a hell of a lot for it, either. He was glad he wasn’t in their boots, and he guessed he was better off than most of them. It was a flunkey’s job, and a guy must feel pretty lousy working at it day after day, with no future and only hard dumb work. It was something to know that there were others worse off than he was.
He licked his straw and set it back in the glass, swung off the chair by the soda counter, and walked by drug articles stacked on tables to the cashier’s desk at the door.
“Hey, Dugan.”
“Oh, hello,