Studs Lonigan (4 page)

The felt humanity of Studs does not insure him a full human existence, and the discrepancy between his capacities and the nourishment he gets is the source of Farrell's art. At bottom, Farrell was dramatizing not just the constraints, illusions, and injustices of American society, but those of life itself, the “universe of time,” the “cancer” he wrote of in his later years, the seriatim moments that can push people through existence without enriching them, transforming experience into an endurance test.
Studs Lonigan
is the great, archetypically American chronicle of the endless series of frightened adjustments called living, the confused haphazard sorting of the fragmented hurtful thoughts people wake up and go to sleep with, the hopefulness that grows untended and wild, like grass in the cracks of the sidewalk—the strange persistence that forever seeks its home.

 

Ann Douglas

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STUDS LONIGAN, on the verge of fifteen, and wearing his first suit of long trousers, stood in the bathroom with a Sweet Caporal pasted in his mug. His hands were jammed in his trouser pockets, and he sneered. He puffed, drew the fag out of his mouth, inhaled and said to himself:

Well, I'm kissin' the old dump goodbye tonight.

Studs was a small, broad-shouldered lad. His face was wide and planed; his hair was a light brown. His long nose was too large for his other features; almost a sheeny's nose. His lips were thick and wide, and they did not seem at home on his otherwise frank and boyish face. He was always twisting them into his familiar tough-guy sneers. He had blue eyes; his mother rightly called them baby-blue eyes.

He took another drag and repeated to himself:

Well, I'm kissin' the old dump goodbye.

The old dump was St. Patrick's grammar school; and St. Patrick's meant a number of things to Studs. It meant school, and school was a jailhouse that might just as well have had barred windows. It meant the long, wide, chalk-smelling room of the seventh- and eighth-grade boys, with its forty or fifty squirming kids. It meant the second floor of the tan brick, undistinguished parish building on Sixty-first Street that had swallowed so much of Studs' life for the past eight years. It meant the black-garbed Sisters of Providence, with their rattling beads, their swishing strides, and the funny-looking wooden clappers they used, which made a dry snapping sound and which hurt like anything when a guy got hit over the head with one. It meant Sister Carmel, who used to teach fourth grade, but was dead now; and who used to hit everybody with the edge of a ruler because she knew they all called her the bearded lady. It meant Studs, twisting in his seat, watching the sun come in the windows to show up the dust on the floor, twisting and squirming, and letting his mind fly to all kinds of places that were not like school. It meant Battleaxe Bertha talking and hearing lessons, her thin, sunken-jawed face white as a ghost, and sometimes looking like a corpse. It meant Bertha yelling in that creaky old woman's voice of hers. It meant Bertha trying to pound lessons down your throat, when you weren't interested in them; church history and all about the Jews and Moses, and Joseph, and Daniel in the lion's den, and Solomon who was wiser than any man that ever lived, except Christ, and maybe the Popes, who had the Holy Ghost to back up what they said; arithmetic, and square and cube roots, and percentage that Studs had never been able to get straight in his bean; cathechism lessons . . . the ten commandments of God, the six commandments of the church, the seven capital sins, and the seven cardinal virtues and that lesson about the sixth commandment, which didn't tell a guy anything at all about it and only had words that he'd found in the dictionary like adultery which made him all the more curious; grammar with all its dry rules, and its sentences that had to be diagrammed and were never diagrammed right; spelling, and words like apothecary that Studs still couldn't spell; Palmer method writing, that was supposed to make you less tired and made you more tired, and the exercises of shaking your arm before each lesson, and the round and round
and straight and straight
,and the copy book, all smeared with ink, that he had gone through, doing exercise after exercise on neat sheets of Palmer paper so that he could get a Palmer method certificate that his old man kicked about paying for because he thought it was graft; history lessons from the dull red history book, but they wouldn't have been so bad if America had had more wars and if a guy could talk and think about the battles without having to memorize their dates, and the dates of when presidents were elected, and when Fulton invented the steamboat, and Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin or whatever in hell he did invent. School meant Bertha, and Bertha should have been put away long ago, where she could kneel down and pray herself to death, because she was old and crabby and always hauling off on somebody; it was a miracle that a person as old as Bertha could sock as hard or holler as loud as she could; even Sister Bernadette Marie, who was the superior and taught the seventh and eighth grade girls in the next room, sometimes had to come in and ask Bertha to make less noise, because she couldn't teach with all the racket going on; but telling Bertha not to shout was like telling a bull that it had no right to see red. And smart guys, like Jim Clayburn, who did his homework every night, couldn't learn much from her. And school meant Dan and Bill Donoghue and Tubby and all the guys in his bunch, and you couldn't find a better gang of guys to pal with this side of Hell. And it meant going to mass in the barn-like church on the first floor, every morning in Lent, and to stations of the cross on Friday afternoons; stations of the cross were always too long unless Father Doneggan said them; and marching on Holy Thursday morning in church with a lily in your hand, and going to communion the third Sunday of every month at the eight o‘clock mass with the boys' sodality. It meant goofy young Danny O'Neill, the dippy punk who couldn't be hurt or made cry, no matter how hard he was socked, because his head was made of hard stuff like iron and ivory and marble. It meant Vine Curley, who had water on the brain, and the doctors must have taken his brains out, drowned and dead like a dead fish, that time they were supposed to have taken a quart of water from his oversized bean. The kids in Vinc's class said that Sister Cyrilla used to pound him on the bean with her clapper, and he'd sit there yelling he was going to tell his mother; and it was funny, and all the kids in the room laughed their guts out. They didn't have 'em as crazy as Vine in Studs' class; but there was TB McCarthy, who was always getting his ears beat off, and being made to kneel up in front of the room, or to go in Sister Bernadette's room and sit with all the girls and let them laugh at him. And there was Reardon with horses' hoofs for feet. One day in geography in the fifth grade, Cyrilla called on Reardon and asked him what the British Isles consisted of. Reardon didn't know so Studs whispered to him to say iron, and Reardon said iron. Sister Cyrilla thought it was so funny she marked him right for the day's lesson. And St. Patrick's meant Weary Reilley, and Studs hated Weary. He didn't know whether or not he could lick Weary, and Weary was one tough customer, and the guys had been waiting for Studs and Weary to scrap ever since Weary had come to St. Patrick's in the third grade. Studs was a little leery about mixing it with Reilley . . . no, he wasn't . . . it was just . . . well, there was no use starting fights unless you had to . . . and he'd never backed out of a scrap with Weary Reilley or any other guy. And that time he had pasted Weary in the mush with an icy snowball, well, he hadn't backed out of a fight when Weary started getting sore. He had just not meant to hit Weary with it, and in saying so he had only told the truth.

St. Patrick's meant a lot of things. St. Patrick's meant . . . Lucy.

Lucy Scanlan would stand on the same stage with him in a few hours, and she would receive her diploma. She would wear a white dress, just like his sister Frances, and Weary's sister Fran, and she would receive her diploma. Everybody said that Fran Lonigan and Fran Reilley were the two prettiest girls in the class. Well, if you asked him, the prettiest girl in the class was black- bobbed-haired Lucy.