The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [164]
He crossed over into Washington Park. It seemed funny to him now, how it was something to brag about, like copping a cherry, and how back in the sixth grade, he and most of the kids had thought drinking was a horrible disgrace. He didn’t know why he had drunk so much of the world’s liquor in his twenty-two and a half years. He had just started drinking because all the guys did. But he was on the wagon. Yes, and for good... maybe.
Suddenly, he sensed that spring was in the air. He could smell it. He breathed deeply, changed his slouchy walk into a brisk one, and looked about him at the dark shadows, the naked shrubbery and trees. He crossed the park drive, and walked around the patch of shrubbery on the right-hand side of the walk that curved to the boathouse. He could see the lagoon, steely, dark, glittering here and there with the moon and stars. The world, the night, the park, spring that was going to come, it was all new. He felt as if he were discovering them for the first time in his life, as if the sense of budding things, of leaves coming out on the branches, the gradual warming and laziness in the air, the grass bursting green through the cold, hard, wintry earth, as if all these were inside of him. He wished that it were spring already. He determined that it was going to be a different spring and summer for him. He was fed up with the old stuff, and he had let himself go far enough already.
He stood by the lagoon watching while trifling waves swished into the thin line of pebbled shore. He glanced up at the sky and was quickened with surprise and elation because it was so clear, with such clean clouds, and a moon which seemed like frothy ice or frozen snow. And he had never realized there were so many stars in the sky, some of them blue like signal lights far, far off. They were all over the sky like jewels flung on a dark carpet and they made him wonder about life, and what it was and why people had such curious feelings. But he guessed that God had made life and the stars just as they were so that people would wonder like that, and marvel at His handiwork.
He had a feeling of freshness and cleanness, even if he, too, had often been drunk like a pig. Pig Lonigan! And the thought of the spring that was coming made him happy. He thought how he would walk about in the park, with the trees and smells and sky and shadows and people, young girls in summer clothes, looking like Lucy had looked just so soon after graduation. Spring was like new life to the world, and he was going to be a new person in this coming new spring. And that girl. He had seen her a couple of times at church, but she had not batted an eye; she didn’t know who he was, or if she did, she didn’t show it. But he knew, he had faith that she was going to be the center of his new life in this coming new spring, and he was going to be a different Studs Lonigan, not a pig, stinking with lousy gin, and rolling helplessly in the gutter, like he’d seen Hink Weber doing. Some day he’