The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [8]
He took a long puff. He gazed out, and watched a group of kids, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, boys like Bill, who sat in the gravel near the backstop close to the Michigan Avenue fence. What do kids talk about? He wondered, because a person’s own childhood got so far away from him he forgot most of it, and sometimes it seemed as if he’d never been a kid himself, he forgot the way a kid felt, the thoughts of a kid. He sometimes wondered about Bill. Bill was a fine boy. You couldn’t find a better one up on the graduating stage at St. Patrick’s tonight, no more than you would see a finer girl than Frances. But sometimes he wondered just what Bill thought about.
He puffed. It was nice sitting there. He would like to sit there, and watch it slowly get dark, because when it was just getting dark things were quiet and soft-like, and a fellow liked to sit in all the quiet and well, just sit, and let any old thoughts go through his mind; just sit and dream, and realize that life was a funny thing, but that he’d fought his way up to a station where there weren’t no real serious problems like poverty, and he sits there, and is comfortable and content and patient, because he knows that he has put his shoulder to the wheel, and he has been a good Catholic, and a good American, a good father, and a good husband. He just sits there with Mary, and smokes and his cigar, and has his thoughts, and then, after it dark, he can send one of the kids for ice cream, or maybe sneak down to the saloon at Fifty-eighth and State and have a glass of beer. But there was many another evening for that, and tonight he’d have to go and see the kids get a good sendoff; otherwise he wouldn’t be much of a father. When you’re a father you got duties, and Patrick J. Lonigan well knew that.
While Lonigan’s attention had been sunk inwards, the kids had all left the playground. Now he looked about, and the scene was swallowed in a hush, broken only by occasional automobiles and by the noise from the State Street cars that seemed to be more than a block away. Suddenly, he experienced, like an unexpected blow, a sharp fear of growing old and dying, and he knew a moment of terror. Then it slipped away, greased by the thickness of his content. Where in hell should he get the idea that he was getting so old? Sure, he was a little gray in the top story, and a little fat around the belly, but, well, the fat was a healthy fat, and there was lots of stuff left in the old boy. And he was not any fatter than old man O’Brien who owned the coal yards at Sixty-second and Wabash.
He puffed at his stogy and flicked the ashes over the railing. He thought about his own family. Bill would get himself some more education, and then learn the business, starting as a painter’s apprentice, and when he got the hang of things and had worked on the job long enough, he would step in and run the works; and then the old man and Mary would take a trip to the old sod and see where John McCormack was born, take a squint at the Lakes of Killarney, kiss the blarney stone, and look up all his relatives. He sang to himself, so that no one would hear him:
Where the dear old Shannon’s flowing,
Where the three-leaved shamrock grows,
Where my heart is I am going,
To my little Irish Rose.
And the moment that I meet her,
With a hug and kiss 1’11 greet her,
For there’s not a colleen sweeter,
Where the River Shannon flows.
He glowed over the fact that his kids were springing up. Martin and Loretta were coming along faster than he could imagine. Frances was going to be a beautiful girl who