Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [439]
Gazing up hopefully at Mrs. Lonigan, and seeing the woman’s face kind, sad, understanding, she again dismissed a cautioning thought. She could not keep it silent any longer. It had to be known sometime. She had to talk, or else, she felt, this secret would drive her crazy. She lowered her head, sobbed. Mrs. Lonigan gently patted her hair. She looked up, her face torn with distress. It simply had to come out now.
“I’m having a baby,” she cried, lowering her head onto her arms.
Mrs. Lonigan’s face pinched, tightened, and she coldly watched the girl’s unrestrained sobbing.
“You know we shan’t be able to do anything to help you. Mr. Lonigan’s bank has just failed, and he is, poor man, near bankrupt. And if William dies, with his Order of Christopher insurance made out to you, he will have on his shoulders the extra burden of a funeral. So I am afraid we shan’t be able to do anything to help you,” Mrs. Lonigan said with a calculation made doubly vicious by her even voice.
Catherine knew she had made a mistake. She feared looking up, meeting Mrs. Lonigan’s eyes. She wanted sympathy now. After kneeling and praying with his mother, she didn’t want to, she couldn’t, fight or quarrel. She continued sobbing, trying to pretend that she had not heard these last words of his mother. But this insult. She couldn’t pretend. It was like a shame growing in her. She looked, forcing an angry expression on to her face.
“I didn’t ask you to,” she said curtly, but she could not contain herself, and with another sigh she flung her head against her arm on the side of the chair, permitting an uncontrolled flood of tears.
“You shouldn’t have done such a thing,” Mrs. Lonigan persisted clucking her tongue, shaking her regretful head from side to side. “You should have had more decency and self-control about you.”
What could she say to this woman? Already she felt as if she had taken off her clothes in a room full of strange men. And she didn’t care if it was Studs’ mother, she was an old witch, and Catherine couldn’t tell any more to the old witch. Mrs. Lonigan had been young once, and she should know how people feel when they’re in love, and how when a girl loves the way she loved Bill, she couldn’t help herself, and had to let herself go and do whatever he wanted her to do. She remembered intimacies with Bill, her cheeks hot with shame because she feared that Mrs. Lonigan was thinking of what the two of them had done, forming pictures in her old witch’s mind of herself and Bill naked in each other’s arms.
“What are we going to do?” Mrs. Lonigan asked with insistence, standing over the girl, a gleam of apparent enjoyment in her eyes as Catherine cried. “You’ll have to do something. It is hardly possible that you can save your name, even if my poor sick son is not called above. And if he does pass away, you will not be able to save your name by a marriage at the last minute, because he is too weak, and he might never even regain his senses.”
“Please. . . . Please, Mrs. Lonigan!” the girl beseeched.
“And you won’t be able to hide it from people very long. You’re already beginning to show it. If my son dies, I’ll be ashamed at the funeral, and it will scandalize everybody. What are you going to do?”
“Oh, God, please! What can I do?”
“You can’t just stand and be a disgrace to my family and to yourself and your poor mother. You can’t do that. And your poor mother, does she know? What has she to say of your goings on?”
“I’ll scream! I’ll go crazy. I don’t care. . . I don’t care! I can’t stand this! Please . . . Please!”
Catherine was light-headed, dizzy, and this woman was still standing over her, like a devil, using words so that they cracked and lashed her more than if Mrs. Lonigan were beating her with a whip. Her cruel words, her face, oh, God, she hated that thin, hard, wrinkling face, calculating, intense, insane, yes, insane, and saying these things to her now.
“I won’t say that you killed my son. I won’t. I won