The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [355]
Reds or something. A guy who must have gone crazy reading too many books at the U. But hell, all that was nothing in his young life. He thought how, after last night, he had begun to have a feeling of really being able to say to himself that he had a woman who was his own, his only. He had never thought of love in that way, or how it gave a guy that kind of a feeling, made him feel proud, important, confident in himself when he walked down the street.
“Where did Annie get her psychic powers?”
“One is born with them.”
He had felt so much different getting out of bed this morning from the way he had felt just two mornings ago. This morning he had not felt that he had a dull day ahead of him. He had been excited, and he had seemed to let his own excitement go out, and everything he looked at was not dull any more. He had awakened this morning with a whole new set of feelings.
“But, Hal, why don’t you wait and study more? You’re just young and what do you know about life? You’re only a college junior, and you set yourself up to make such criticisms. There’s a number of brainy men in the world who know more than you do.”
“Can it. You can’t convince me. I’m going down to this demonstration before the Japanese consulate, and that’s all.”
“But what’ll it get you?”
Nuts, all right. He looked out the window at the lake, seeing first one part of the water roll and dip, then another part rolling, and then a whole succession of waves coming in. And far out he saw a boat as if pasted against the gray sheet of horizon, smoke issuing from its stack in a pencil-line of steam. Just like a boat in a picture.
“Roosevelt Road,” a conductor bawled.
He watched people pass down the aisle. How many of the men getting off, or on the train, too, had been with a woman last night or this morning? And how many of the dames on the train had had guys? Every night there were thousands of guys with their women, and now he was going to be one of them and it was going to be damn different from the way it was with whores and bitches.
The train was at Van Buren, then moving again under a bridge through a dreary, smoky stretch of railroad yards and tracks.
“Hal, if you don’t care about yourself or your family, think of our fraternity. What kind of a name will it give us if one of its members is arrested at a Communist demonstration and it gets in the papers? You know, at the present time when the treasury is so low and we need members that kind of thing can’t happen to our fraternity.”
What these college boys needed was a good piece of tail to educate them. The train stopped. Studs elbowed his way out of the car after the college boys. He was getting anxious. This was a new wrinkle for him, the first meeting with his girl, his woman, on the day after he had made her. He wondered what he’d say? How should he act?
II
“Oh, I didn’t see you,” he said, trying to make his voice sound very ordinary when she met him in the lobby of the building where she worked.
“Was it that you didn’t want to?” she said in a chastened tone which made him feel sorry for her and for what he had done to her.
“I was just standing here waiting for you, and looking around, and I thought I had got here too early.”
“Well, here I am.”
“Where’ll we go?” he asked, still over-serious in his effort to be casual.
“Wherever you say, dear,” she said, her glance submissive.
“Let’s go down to Randolph,” he said.
They stepped out to the street and she took his arm. “Glad to see me?”
“Yeah,” he said, shaking his head.
“You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”
“I am, Kid. I was just thinking.”
“Of what?”
“Something funny. Over in front of the public library, I saw a fellow in a cap and gown selling apples.”
“What was it, a fraternity initiation?”
“No. He had a sign on him saying that he was a qualified engineer out of work.”
“That’s too bad.”
“It would be a little different if he wasn’t a college graduate and an engineer. If he was just an ordinary bum, it would be different”“
“Maybe he was doing it for publicity, to get his name in the papers, the same way all these people are going in for marathons. Over on Clark Street there