Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [377]
The train was at Van Buren, then moving again under a bridge through a dreary, smoky stretch of railroad yards and tracks.
“Hal, if you don’t care about yourself or your family, think of our fraternity. What kind of a name will it give us if one of its members is arrested at a Communist demonstration and it gets in the papers? You know, at the present time when the treasury is so low and we need members that kind of thing can’t happen to our fraternity.”
What these college boys needed was a good piece of tail to educate them. The train stopped. Studs elbowed his way out of the car after the college boys. He was getting anxious. This was a new wrinkle for him, the first meeting with his girl, his woman, on the day after he had made her. He wondered what he’d say? How should he act?
II
“Oh, I didn’t see you,” he said, trying to make his voice sound very ordinary when she met him in the lobby of the building where she worked.
“Was it that you didn’t want to?” she said in a chastened tone which made him feel sorry for her and for what he had done to her.
“I was just standing here waiting for you, and looking around, and I thought I had got here too early.”
“Well, here I am.”
“Where’ll we go?” he asked, still over-serious in his effort to be casual.
“Wherever you say, dear,” she said, her glance submissive.
“Let’s go down to Randolph,” he said.
They stepped out to the street and she took his arm.
“Glad to see me?”
“Yeah,” he said, shaking his head.
“You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”
“I am, Kid. I was just thinking.”
“Of what?”
“Something funny. Over in front of the public library, I saw a fellow in a cap and gown selling apples.”
“What was it, a fraternity initiation?”
“No. He had a sign on him saying that he was a qualified engineer out of work.”
“That’s too bad.”
“It would be a little different if he wasn’t a college graduate and an engineer. If he was just an ordinary bum, it would be different.”
“Maybe he was doing it for publicity, to get his name in the papers, the same way all these people are going in for marathons. Over on Clark Street there’s a man in a music-store window who’s trying to establish an endurance record for saxophone playing. He’s been playing the saxophone for three days now.”
“It’s goofy.”
“Yes, it’s so silly.”
A round-faced man paced back and forth in front of a restaurant with cardboard signs tied around his chest and back.
JOHNSTOWN’S RESTAURANT
IS UNFAIR
TO ORGANIZED
LABOR
“These poor men have been walking back and forth here for three weeks. Yesterday in the pouring rain they didn’t even stop.”
“Who’s in the right in the strike?”
“I don’t know but I think the men were foolish to strike in times like these. And what the restaurant did was to hire girls.”
“Yeh, I guess anyone who has a job these days better hang onto it,” he said, and he felt a pressure on his elbow.
“You know what, Bill?”
“What?”
“I’m glad to see you.”
“How do you feel?”
“I had pains,” she said, looking quizzically at him.
He turned a frightened glance at her, wondering had he really injured her. The least he could have done was that he could have been more careful. Like any decent girl, she had a right to be disgusted with him. He was grateful for the smile she gave him, though. Still, it seemed like a suffering sort of smile.
“I had pains here,” she said, pointing to her abdomen.
“Gee. . . . I don’t think it can be serious. Maybe it’s just natural. The first time, you know,” he said haltingly, trying, as he spoke, to make her feel that he actually knew what he was talking about.
“I cried last night after you left,” she said as they turned the corner of Dearborn onto Randolph Street.
A shifty-eyed man wearing a khaki shirt and dusty, unpressed, frayed suit forlornly held an apple out to him. Studs brushed by him.
“How is the Charlus Restaurant for lunch?” he asked, remembering the night he had proposed to her in that place.
“I think it would be nice. It’s quiet,