Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [445]
At Fifty-first Street he wheeled westward, driving along a dreary, dusty street, with shabby stores, wooden houses, sooty, low, brick buildings. A train roared overhead as he went under the viaduct, and he drove on, turning onto Wentworth Avenue, seeing again a dusty street filled with people, for-rent signs in store windows, and on his right a drab, low fence, in need of paint, with post-no-bills announcements spaced regularly along it. Several firemen lounged back on chairs in front of the fire engine house at Forty-seventh Street, and he thought that they weren’t getting paid because the city was broke. A crowd of men were cluttering a corner, two blocks down, and he guessed they were out of work. That was bad, because with nothing to do they got into trouble, especially the younger ones. He honked vigorously when a dirty-faced boy dashed before his car, dodged in front of a truck on his right, and leaped onto the sidewalk. Crazy kid. He’d get killed doing that some day. A street car donged behind him, and he curved off the cartracks. Another closed bank. Golly. More men on the corners. Women in shawls. Kids. More idle men.
He turned on Thirty-fifth Street and followed a surface car along the west-bound tracks, annoyed by the slow progress, the repeated stops of the car, the people who cut in front of him at the street crossings. Nervous, he passed the car, and jammed his machine to a quick halt to avoid running over an old woman in a blue coat. He cursed, and followed again in the wake of the car, cursing, telling himself that he would have to watch his driving. Dingy, smoky street. Wooden houses, buildings stained from smoke, drab stores, for-rent signs in dirty windows. Another closed bank. It made him suddenly realize something of what this depression was beginning to mean in people’s lives. When a bank in a neighborhood like this one closed, there must have been many men like himself, many poor working people who lost all their life savings. It meant that they were made paupers. Dirty crooks of bankers, he hissed to himself.
Halted by the traffic lights at Halsted Street, he understood why he had come to this neighborhood, and where he was going. His mood softened into one of deep nostalgia, and he told himself that he was going back to an old neighborhood, to look at places where he had lived and played as a shaver. He remembered his Irish father and mother, his sister who had become a whore, Joe, getting old and tired, working still on the street cars, plugging along, Joe’s oldest son Tommy in the pen for sticking up a store. Ought to see Joe. Joe, poor fellow, had had a hard life. And he and Joe were the only ones left, he guessed, unless Catherine was still alive. And Joe’s wife Ann, she was sick, not much life left in her. Once she had been like Mary also, a blooming, innocent young girl. He felt kindly toward Joe, toward Ann, even toward the memory of Catherine. He wanted to see them again, talk to them. And all he could do was to shake his head sadly and sigh.
“Ah.”
Horns tooted behind him. Blocking traffic by falling asleep at the wheel. He drove forward, and he parked his car by a vacant lot that was thick with weeds and littered with rocks, refuse, papers, tin cans. Stepping out of the car he caught a whiff of stale garbage from the prairie. He turned back and locked the door of his Ford. He glanced down a block-paved street, with tumbling and sinking wooden houses stacked between old brick buildings of two and three stories, most of the houses appearing uninhabitable in a pall of gray smoke. The neighborhood still looked something like it had in the old days, only worse. He slowly moved down a narrow cracked sidewalk, unable to recognize most of the houses. He halted before a boarded, untenanted structure that was weather-worn and lop-sided, as if threatening to fall into a heap of junk at any minute. He noticed that the windows were broken, black with dirt and soot, and the grassless