The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [29]
Studs left home immediately after breakfast so he could get away from the old lady. She was always pestering him, telling him to pray and ask God if he had a vocation. And maybe she’d have wanted him to go to the store, beat rugs, or clean the basement out. He didn’t feel like being a janitor. He would work, but he wouldn’t be a janitor. Janitor’s jobs were for jiggs, and Hunkies, and Polacks, anyway. He’d asked the old man again to take him to work, but the old man was the world’s champion putter-off. Every year since Studs could remember, he’d been promising that he was going to take the old lady to Riverview Park, and he was still promising. That was just like the old boy. Studs walked along, glancing about him, feeling what a good morning it was, walking in the sun that was spinning all over the street like a crazy top. He could feel the warmness of the sun; it entered him, became part of himself, part of his walk, part of his arms swinging along at his side, part of his smile, his good feelings, his thoughts. It was good. He walked along, and he thought about the family; families were goddamn funny things; everybody’s old man and old woman were the same; they didn’t want a guy or a girl to grow up. His mother was always blowing off her bazoo about him being her blue-eyed baby, and his old man was always giving advice, bossing, instructing him as if he was a ten-year-old. Well, he was growing up in spite of them; and it wouldn’t be long now before he had long britches on every day. Let ‘em do their damnedest; Studs Lonigan would tell the world that he was growing up.
He goofed around for a while in the vacant lot just off the corner of Fifty-eighth and Indiana. He batted stones. He walked around kicking a tin can, imagining it was something very important, some sort of thing like an election or a sporting contest that got on the front page. Then he thought about Indiana Avenue. It was a better street than Wabash. It was a good block, too, between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth. Maybe when his old man sold the building, he’d buy one in this block. It was nearer the stores, and there were more Catholics on the street, and in the evening the old man could sit on the front porch talking with Old Man O’Brien, and his old lady could gossip with Mrs. O’Brien and Dan’s mother, and Mrs. Scanlan. The house next to Scanlan’s would be a nice one to live in. Some people named Welsh owned it, but they were pretty old and they’d be kicking the bucket soon. There were more trees on Indiana, too, and no shines, and only a few kikes. The building on the right of the lot was the one where yellow-belly Red O’Connell lived, the big redhead. Studs wondered if he could fight him. He’d love to paste O’Connell’s mush, but Red was big. Maybe the old man would buy the building and kick the O’Connell’s out. Down two doors was the wooden frame house where the O’Callaghans lived. Old Man O’Callaghan had been one of the first guys to live in the neighbor-hood, and he was supposed to be lousy with dough. And then the apartment buildings where the Donoghues lived. And then the series of two-story bricks, where Lucy, Helen Shires and the O’Briens lived. And then the home where those Jews, the Glasses, lived, and then the apartment buildings on the corner, where punk Danny O’Neill, and Helen Borax, and goofy Andy lived, and they had that bastard of a janitor, George, who was always shagging kids. Some Hallowe