Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [364]
He walked over to the parlor window, looked out at the street, wet and gloomy under the raw day, and he guessed he would just have to sit around home and not do much of anything. An automobile sloshed by. He stared at a space of blackened pavement, seeing the rain patter on it. He watched a man in a tan raincoat hasten by. A woman wearing a bright green raincoat came out of the apartment hotel building, buried her head under an umbrella, half ran in a clumsy, feminine way.
He turned away from the window, yawning, feeling imprisoned. And the damn gloomy weather made him feel twice as rotten. He looked wistfully at the crumpled copy of the morning paper, regretting that he had already read it. He picked up a copy of The Argosy Magazine , slumped in his father’s chair, fitfully glanced through it until he came to a story of secret-service men who thwarted an effort of Chinese and shaggy-bearded Bolsheviki to blow up the Panama Canal. He read on, how the hero took a general’s daughter into his arms, kissed her, and in the last paragraph they stood by a steamer rail, looking shoreward at the dimming outlines of land in the red sunset, kissed, talked of how happy they would be back in the good old U. S. A. where he would receive a higher salary serving Uncle Sam, kissed again. Drowsy, emitting a noisy yawn, he dropped the magazine, thinking that they would then have gone into their cabin and on to the next step after kissing. Interesting story, fast and full of action, with good descriptions, too. He saw himself as a secret-service agent, on the trail of Bolshevik agents and smugglers all over America. He didn’t have the imagination to go on thinking how he would track them down, and he rested his eyes dreamily on the ceiling. Anyway, he wished that he had lived and was living an adventurous life, like a secret-service agent.
And instead of anything like that, here he was, nearly thirty, and just in a hell of a pickle, getting just about nothing but the sour grapes of living. He had lost nearly all of the money he owned, on the market. He had lost his girl. His health was on the fritz. The way things were going, pretty soon he probably wouldn’t even have a pot to take a leak in. And just a couple of months ago when he and Catherine had become engaged, he had hoped for and planned on so many things. Already that night by the lake seemed long ago, and he was lonesome for it. He was still where he had always been. Just hoping. And where was his dough that was going to be backed by the public utilities of the Middle West and the brain of Solomon Imbray? The stock at seven. Wait till he saw snaky Ike Dugan again. . . . Now, too, didn’t he realize how having a little dough of your own gave you confidence!
He leaned forward and turned on the radio, hearing an oily masculine voice.
One of the blotches on the name and civic reputation of Chicago is that during all these years of astounding growth in this great Athens of the Middle West no consistent and scientific method of solving the traffic problem has yet been devised.
Tough luck, Teddy, he thought, dialing on a new station.
Just a gigolo . . .
He returned to the window and forgot his worried thoughts by watching the rain hit the street, turn silver, almost bounce. The drops hung like crystals to the leaves of the small tree in front of the apartment hotel, slid off. An automobile passed with a clatter, and the rain splattered on its tarpaulin top. The sky, dull, heavy black clouds ranked above the tall apartment hotel. Bells, warning of a train at Seventy-first Street.
People seem to know . . .
A girl with tan raincoat and galoshes, a few inches of silk stockinged leg showing. Neat. Who was she? Had she ever been made? How did being made change a girl? And before they were made were they as curious about what it was and how did it feel