Wrote For Luck by D.J. Taylor Read Free Book Online

oiled hair in summer jackets labouring past with newspapers under their arms. ‘Those eye-ties sure get everywhere,’ Huey said, as if to suggest that such work, though not for him personally, would do very well for inferior races, and, wanting to conciliate him, to recompense him for the quarter-hour spent with her mother, she said: ‘Yes, they surely do.’ The streetcar stop was a block away and they went on rapidly, past the advertisement hoardings and big, high buildings out of whose upper windows men in shirt-sleeves leaned at forty-five degree angles with their elbows on the sills, with the heat growing stronger at every step, and she thought of the other girls at Lonigan’s, heads down over the green baize work-table, with Mary Daley, to whose care these commissions usually fell, collecting up two cent pieces to buy a pitcher of lemonade, and realised that in four weeks time, or maybe only three, she would not be there any more and Mr Lonigan would have to get by without her. The awareness of this impending revolution in her life scared her, and she said: ‘How are you getting on with your job, Huey? Is it going any better?’ And Huey, who worked for a man who hadinvented a patented sanitary drinking cup, frowned and said seriously: ‘I should say it is. That Mr Banahan is a live-wire. Do you know what he did the other day? He took a crate of cups down to the Loop, stood on a trestle table and shouted at people about how great they were. Sold the whole crate, too. Yes, he’s a real live-wire, and I’m proud to be working for him even if it is only a commission job.’ The position with Mr Banahan was Huey’s third commission job. Previously he had sold brushes and a curious kind of vacuum cleaner that did not need plugging into an electrical circuit.
    When they reached the streetcar stop there was already a crowd of people waiting: a priest in a cassock with a grocery sack, labouring men with bags of tools slung over their shoulders, a tall fellow with an unnaturally pale face in a suit of overalls whom the other passengers studiously avoided. ‘Jeez,’ Huey said, wrinkling his nose and divining the cause of this ostracism, ‘will you smell that guy? It’s no wonder nobody wants to stand next to him.’ ‘I expect he works at the meatpacking plant,’ she said, having caught the scent of fertiliser. ‘I don’t suppose it’s anything he can help.’ Nevertheless, it was a very powerful smell and she found herself edging further down the line. The streetcar came clattering up with the sun gleaming off its iron fender and the light blazing into its deep green windows and carried them away, and she sat looking out at the familiar streets and the dusty store-fronts and the street corners, where fat cops stood sunning themselves before the pink-and-white striped awnings and there were vendors out with milk-cans and packets of candy, thinking that the college at Wheaton would be very different to this, and wonderinghow she would find it, and what the other girls would be like. Huey, with his mouth half open, sat watching the traffic, and counting the Cadillacs, which was the automobile he favoured, or would have favoured, had the privilege of driving one ever been allowed him. It was hotter than ever, and the people in the street – the groups of girls talking to each other, and the negro women weighed down under grocery sacks with bored children toiling in their wake – seemed far away, as if the windows of the streetcar were made not of glass but of some dense, viscous membrane cutting her off from the teeming world around her and turning her in on herself. Back home her mother would be brewing herself a pot of green tea, reading the newspaper and going in every so often to ask her father if he intended to get out of bed. Mr Christie worked on the night-shift at the telephone exchange and was not always amenable to these enquiries.
    ‘Jeez,’ Huey said again, ‘but I could use a soda.’ Beneath his