Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [393]
He looked at her, nodded, leaned over, kissed her, held and patted her hand. He looked moodily away.
“Because I’ve been afraid to tell you, and now I’ve got to,” she said.
He turned back to her, his face pallid in the darkness and moonlight, its expression trapped in worry and surprise. He glanced away again, then back at her, just as her round face was cross-cut by an exposure of moonlight.
“Something has happened to me,” she said, looking aside.
“What?” he snapped out quickly in a choking voice, while at the same time, as if in a split part of himself, he was beginning to see his predicament as a drama filled with seriousness and importance.
“You know, Bill,” she said, seeming to him like a soft, frightened, utterly helpless thing in his arms, “you know, I’m afraid that I’m going to have a baby.”
Her head lowered, as in shame and modesty. She took and held the fingers in his right hand.
Jesus Christ! he thought to himself, even though he had guessed what she had to say from the way she’d led up to it.
“Can’t we do something about it?” he asked.
“What?”
“See a doctor. Or maybe I can get some medicine to take care of it.”
Looking up at him, she dabbed her eyes quickly, and he could see that she was fighting not to cry.
“Bill, darling, that’s awful. We can’t do that.”
“But why?” he asked, his voice shaky, puzzled.
He tried to substitute a persuasive glance for the convincing words which he could not bring forth. He drew her gently against his shoulder, feeling the quivering of her warm and nervous body. Her fear made him feel strong and brave, and he began to feel a sense of power as if it were a pulse within him. He was the strong one, the one to be depended upon in a time of trouble, and it was up to him to be the captain steering a course out of it.
“Bill, it would be awful to do such a thing. I know! If you say that, you make me feel that you don’t really care for me. You know you got what you wanted, everything I had to give you, and now you seem to be acting as if you only wanted to get out of trouble the easiest way.”
“Kid, please,” he said, still at a loss for words, wishing he could carry things off and lie better.
And he was just so goddamn mixed up and jumbled himself. He didn’t want such a thing to happen. She’d be disgraced and ruined, and everybody would know that they had had to get married. And Christ, right off the reel they would have the kid. What would he do about a kid of his own? Studs Lonigan, a father already! He didn’t want to do that, and he didn’t know what to do about it. And how could they afford it? There he would be in the future with cords about him, hand and foot.
Join the Navy now, brother, he told himself sardonically.
He remembered how he used to hear fellows around the poolroom kidding about it, and how he’d razzed fellows like Wils Gillen when they were worried about girls they’d knocked up. Goddamn it, it wasn’t anything to laugh over, Jesus Christ, it wasn’t.
And there she was beside him, sniffling, and he had to say or do something about it. He heard a distant automobile, and it made him think of how, right now, there were people driving around, free from having all the troubles and worries he had. He just felt helpless, hopeless, with a sword swinging right above his neck.
“Bill, tell me, do you love me?” she asked with a ring of insistence and desperation in her voice, and he grew rigid from the sudden thought that maybe in this mood she might just go and jump in the lake or do something as bad.
“You know it, Kid,” he said, still choked up.
“Well, you take a poor way of showing it. You don’t even hold me tight and kiss me when I tell you these things.”
He kissed her, aware of warm tears trickling down her cheeks, and they gripped each other in a mood of desperation. Released, they sat side by side, surrounded by trees, alone in a quiet where they could clearly hear each other’s breathing.
“Bill, we got to do something. I’m afraid to go to a doctor or take medicine,” Catherine said after a period of silence.
“It won’t hurt you.”
“But I can’t, I can