The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [308]
He let himself in quietly and hurried to his room to change his clothes so his mother wouldn’t see the stains and go up in the air about them.
His father was drowsing by the radio, and smiled.
“Congratulations, Bill. And say, I’m sorry. You just missed Father Moylan’s talk. Did he roast the bankers! Tell me, how was the doings?”
Studs smiled knowingly at his father.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I
His stocks were off eight points, and that meant that he was out over six hundred bucks. His brows knitted, and he determined that he would pray this morning as he had never prayed before.
“Honey, what’s the trouble?” Catherine asked.
“Nothing. Why?” he asked, switching a forced smile on her.
“You look so worried and grumpy.”
“There’s nothing wrong. I was just thinking.”
“About what?”
“Oh, nothing in particular. I was just thinking.”
“No, you’re worried.”
“Not especially. Of course, in these times, you wonder about a lot of things that you never even thought of before.”
“What things?”
“Well, business.”
“Yes, darling, and I’ve been feeling the same way since I got that ten-dollar cut in my salary. But this is Sunday, and you’re just going to give business and worry a nice kick around the block,” she said with a dash of feminine decisiveness, as if she were energetically routing dust from a closet.
He smiled again, forced.
“Sometimes you are just like a boy.”
“What do you mean?” he asked with a mixture of embarrassed pride and pleasure.
“You men,” she exclaimed in mock contempt. “You try to be so big and important, and stick your chests out, and you’re lust like little boys playing games. That’s why we find you so sweet and love you.”
Feigning disinterest, he shook his head quizzically.
“Now, you forget all this serious business,” she coaxed, sliding her arm through his.
Jesus, if he only could walk along with her on a sunny spring morning like this one and not have a worry in his head, no worry about his dough sunk in Imbray stock, about his health and weak heart, and the possibility of not living a long life, and not be wondering would he. by afternoon, feel pooped and shot. And then it was so gloomy at home that it could be cut with a knife, and it was bound to affect him, the old man’s business going to pot, his dough lost and going fast, his expenses, unrented apartments, the mortgage. Just to have none of these things on his mind, and to be able to stroll along Easy Street with Catherine at his side, perfectly happy all day, and not having to feel that when he woke up tomorrow all these thoughts would pop back and keep going off like fire-crackers in his mind all day. And he had to decide about holding or selling his stock. Which?
Ahead of him along the sunny street he saw people moving, most of them also bound for church. To know that nearly everyone on this street was Catholic gave him a different kind of feeling than what he often had just walking along any street where the people on it were all going about to do any number of things. He felt that he had something in common here and he knew that much about them. They were all on the same side of the fence.
He glanced at Catherine, and she was pretty in her new black coat and her small black hat slanting on the left side of her head, and beneath her opened coat a black-and-white patterned dress with a wide black leather belt. Underneath these clothes there was a white, untouched woman’s body, and some day it was going to be his, and the thought of that unseen, untaken body of hers, hidden in clothes, made him kind of want their marriage to be soon. His woman.
There was something quiet and lazy about this street, with its three- and four-storied apartment buildings, its vacant lots, the earth beside the sidewalk loosening and muddy, the sun spread over it, the feeling of Sunday and early spring in the air. And around him other people going to church, walking slowly, and not seeming to have troubles on their minds. Did they? If things could be so quiet and peaceful and other people could walk along as if they had no bothers and worries, why couldn