The Folded Leaf

by William Maxwell

  13

  Mrs. Latham never stayed in bed after six o’clock. The light wakened her. In winter when it was dark until seven, habit made her get up anyway and dress and go out to the kitchen and start breakfast. At six-thirty she called Mr. Latham, and when he had finished shaving, he went into Spud’s room and shook him.

  The morning after the initiation, while he was still drugged with sleep, Spud discovered that there was something wrong with him. For a second he didn’t believe it. I could be dreaming that I’m awake and standing here in the bathroom, he told himself. But he actually was awake; there was no doubt about it. And when he looked at himself in the mirror over the washstand, those two enemies sickness and fright had him just where they wanted him.

  He pulled the lid of the toilet down and sat with his forehead against the washbasin, which was cool, though there was no comfort in it. “Oh …” he said very quietly, over and over, wanting to die. The minutes passed, and finally there was a sharp rap on the door. This was neither the time nor the place for despair.

  He sighed and stood up and took his toothbrush out of the rack. Because there was, after all, nothing else to do, he scrubbed his teeth vigorously, avoiding his reflection in the mirror. Then he untied the strings of his pajama drawers, pulled the coat over his head, and reached for the cold water faucet that was connected with the shower. The cold shock on his face and on his spine kept him from thinking, but afterward, when he stepped out of the tub and began to dry himself, his mind took up exactly where it had left off. The last traces of ink and iodine came off on the towel.

  Looking at them, Spud remembered, as though it were something that had happened long ago, how the neophytes, when the initiation was over and the blindfolds were jerked off, looked at one another with surprise and then at their own inkstained, iodine-smeared, sweating, dirty bodies. Ray Snyder gave them the password (Anubis) and showed them the sacred grip, which turned out to be the same as the Boy Scouts’. After what had happened this morning, none of that mattered in the least.

  At breakfast Spud sat with his head bent over his oatmeal and his mind off on a desperate search for some time or circumstance when he could have exposed himself. So far as girls were concerned, there weren’t any. In Wisconsin they used to play post-office at parties, and spin-the-bottle, but he hadn’t even kissed a girl since he moved to Chicago. The trouble was, you didn’t always need to get it from contact with a girl. The man who lectured in the assembly room of the high school (to the boys only; there was a woman who lectured to the girls) said you could get it in dozens of different ways; from drinking cups even, and from towels. Probably there was no use trying to figure out where he got it, since there were thousands of ways it could have happened. The only odd thing, the part Spud couldn’t understand, was how people could wake up happy in the morning and dress and eat breakfast and go about their business all day without ever taking any precautions, without even realizing the danger that existed everywhere about them.

  When Mrs. Latham said, “Do you feel all right?” he opened his mouth to tell her that his oatmeal dish would have to be washed separately, also the spoon he was eating with, and his eggcup; they’d all have to be sterilized, everything except his glass, which he hadn’t touched yet. But he couldn’t talk about such things to his mother. It was a part of life she didn’t know about, and if he told her now what was the matter with him, it would be just the same as if he had spattered her with filth.

  She put her hand on his forehead, and though it felt to him as if it were burning up, she didn’t seem alarmed. “I guess you just aren’t awake yet,” she said, and got up and went out to the kitchen.

  The sunlight, shining on the brick wall outside the dining room windows, cast Mr. Latham’s face in shadow and also cast a shadow on the Herald and Examiner. He complained about this to Mrs. Latham when she returned with the coffee-pot, and Mrs. Latham suggested that he change places with her but he merely frowned and went on reading. Spud watched him, in the hope that his father would look up suddenly and realize that he ought to put the morning paper down and get up and go into some other room, where they could talk in private.

  Helen got up from the table first. “What were you doing so long in the bathroom this morning?” she asked Spud, and without waiting for him to answer, went off to finish dressing. After she left, Mrs. Latham sat with a dreamy expression in her eyes as if, during the night, she had gone and done something quite unbeknownst to all of them. She took a sip of coffee occasionally, and the bottom of her cup grated when she returned it to the saucer. That and the rattle of the newspaper were the only sounds at the breakfast table. At last Mr. Latham stood up and, with the paper clutched in his hand, walked past Spud’s pleading eyes.

  Anyone at all familiar with Mr. Latham’s habits could have told, by the sounds which came from the next room, that he had chosen a tie from the rack on the closet door; that he was tying it now, standing in front of the dresser; that now he was using the whisk broom on his coat collar. In a moment he would come out into the hall and open the hall closet and then it would be too late to stop him. With his hat in one hand and in the other his brief case containing samples of insulating material, Mr. Latham would be quite beyond the reach of his family. Spud pushed his chair back and went and stood in the bedroom door.

  His father and mother’s bedroom was a place that he seldom wandered into, and never at this time in the morning. Mr. Latham was in front of the window with one foot on the low sill, polishing his right shoe with a flannel rag. He switched to the other shoe and Spud went in and sat down on the edge of the unmade bed. It occurred to him, as his father passed between him and the light, that in all probability, since the disease took some time to show itself (ten days or two weeks, the man said) his mother and Helen were already contaminated by him.

  Mr. Latham stuffed the flannel rag in a little brown bag which hung on the inside of the closet door. Then he turned to Spud and said, “Do you need some money?”

  In a despair so complete that it blurred his vision, Spud shook his head and saw his father go out into the hall. A moment later the front door closed with a click. After a while Spud got up, went back to his own room, and gathered up the books he had brought home the afternoon before. I’ll have to get through this day somehow, he decided. I’ll have to go to school so they won’t suspect anything, and come home, and eat supper the same as usual. When the lights are out and they’re in bed and asleep, I can figure out some way to kill myself.

  It was ten minutes of eight when Spud reached the schoolyard. The snow had melted in places, leaving patches of gravel exposed. Spud saw Lymie Peters coming up the walk behind him. He walked faster but Lymie hurried too and caught up with him as he started up the wide cement steps. They went into the building together. Neither of them mentioned the initiation but as they passed the door of the boys’ lavatory on the first floor, Lymie said, “Did you pee green this morning?” and deprived Spud of the last hope, the one comfort left to him.

  The disease showed.

  If it had been any of the others, Spud would have swung on him. He couldn’t hit Lymie. Lymie wasn’t big enough. Besides, he remembered what he saw the night before when he ripped his blindfold off: Lymie, his thin naked body marked with circles and crosses and the letters I EAT SHIT, trying to get to his feet, without help from anyone. The scene had stayed in his mind intact. Also the curious feel of Lymie’s shoulder under his hand. Instead of lying, which he would have done if it had been any of the others, he still had enough trust in Lymie to be able to say “Yeah,” in a weak voice. “Yeah, I did.”

  “So did I,” Lymie said. “I thought it might be—you know. So I asked my father. He said it must be that pill they gave us.”

  The sickness receded, leaving Spud without any strength in his knees.

  “That was probably it. They figured they’d scare us,” he said, with no outward sign that he had, in that instant, gone completely crazy. He wanted to laugh out loud and prance and dance and kic
k something (there was nothing to kick in the corridor) and hit somebody (but not Lymie) and throw his head back and screech like a hoot owl. He managed to walk along beside Lymie and to climb the stairs in the center of the building, one step at a time.

  The door of Room 211 stood open, and high-pitched voices were swarming out of it. Spud and Lymie walked in together and down separate aisles. In spite of the babel and the steady tramping outside in the corridor, each of them heard the other’s footsteps; heard them as distinctly as if the sound were made by a man walking late at night in an empty street.

  14

  The fraternity house which was referred to with such a carefully casual air in LeClerc’s was a one-room basement apartment that Bud Griesenauer got for five dollars a month through an uncle in the real estate business.

  They took possession on Ground-Hog Day and spent Saturday and Sunday calcimining the walls a sickly green. The woodwork, the floor, and the brick fireplace were scrubbed with soap and water, but there was nothing much that they could do about the pipes on the ceiling, and they decided not to bother with curtains even though small boys peered in the windows occasionally and had to be chased away.

  The apartment was furnished with a worn grass rug, a couch, a bookcase, and three uncomfortable chairs from the Edwards’ attic. Carson brought an old victrola which had to be wound before and then again during every record, and sometimes it made terrible grinding noises. Mark Wheeler contributed a large framed picture of a handsome young collegian with his hair parted in the middle, enjoying his own fireside, his pennants, and the smoke that curled upward from the bowl of his long-stemmed clay pipe. The title of the picture was “Pipe-Dreams” and they gave it the place of honor over the mantel. The only other picture they were willing to hang in the apartment was of an ugly English bulldog looking out through a fence. This had been given to Mr. and Mrs. Snyder twenty-two years before, as a wedding present. The glass was underneath the slats in the fence and they were real wood, varnished and joined at the top and bottom to the picture frame.

  To get to the fraternity from school the boys had to take a southbound Clark Street car and get off and wait on a windy street corner, by a cemetery, until a westbound Montrose Street car came along. It was usually dark when they reached the apartment and a grown person would have found the place dreary and uninviting, but they had a special love for it, from the very beginning. This was partly because it had to be kept secret. They could talk about it safely in LeClerc’s but not at school, in their division rooms, where the teacher might overhear them and report it to the principal. And partly because they knew instinctively that sooner or later the apartment would be taken away from them. They were too young to be allowed to have a place of their own, and so they lived in it as intensely and with as much pleasure as small children live in the houses which they make for themselves on rainy days, out of chairs and rugs, a fire screen, a footstool, a broomstick, and the library table.

  Sometimes the boys came in a body, after school; sometimes by two and threes. Carson and Lynch were almost always there, and when Ray Snyder came it was usually with Bud Griesenauer or Harry Hall. Catanzano and deFresne came together, as a rule, and Bob Edwards and Mark Wheeler. Lymie Peters attached himself to any group or any pair of friends he could find, and once Spud Latham turned up with a blond boy from Lake View High School, who kept tossing his hair out of his eyes. He didn’t think much of the apartment and made Spud go off with him somewhere on his bicycle. Later, without being exactly unpleasant to Spud, they managed to convey to him that he had made a mistake in bringing an outsider to the fraternity house, and after that, when Spud came, which was not very often, he came alone. Ford also came alone. As a result of his refusing to jump off a stepladder blindfolded he was now known as “Steve Brodie” and sometimes “Diver” and he had stopped going to LeClerc’s.

  The fraternity house was a place to try things. Catanzano and deFresne smoked their first cigars there and were sick afterwards, out in the areaway. Ray Snyder fought his way through “I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls” on the ukulele, and Harry Hall appeared one day with a copy of Balzac’s Droll Stories which he had swiped from the bookcase at his grandfather’s. It was referred to as the dirty book, and somebody was always off in a corner or stretched out on the couch reading it.

  One afternoon when Carson and Lynch walked in they found Dede Sandstrom and a fat-cheeked girl named Edith Netedu side by side on the couch, with an ashtray and a box of Pall Malls between them. The girl sat up and began to fuss with her hair, and Dede said, “Haven’t you two guys got any home to go to?”

  Carson and Lynch had a feeling that maybe they weren’t wanted but they took off their caps and coats and stayed. Dede wound the victrola and put a record on, and after the girl had danced with him a couple of times she asked Carson and then Lynch to dance with her. Both of them were conscious of her perfume and of her arm resting lightly on their shoulders, and they felt that the place was different. Something that had been lacking before (the very thing, could it have been, that made them want the apartment in the first place?) had been found. They went off to the drugstore and came back with four malted milks, in cardboard containers, and it was like a party, like a housewarming.

  The other girls who ate lunch at LeClerc’s knew about the apartment and were curious about it but they wouldn’t go there. Edith Netedu was the only one. She was there quite often. She came with Dede Sandstrom but she belonged to all of them. They dressed up in her hat and coat and teased her about her big hips, and snatched her high-heeled pumps off and hid or played catch with them, and fought among each other for the privilege of dancing with her. She was a very good dancer and the boys liked particularly to waltz with her. She never seemed to get dizzy, no matter how much they whirled. They took turns, trying to make her fall down, and when one of the boys began to stagger, another would step in and take his place. Finally, when they were all sprawling on the couch or the floor, Dede Sandstrom would take over and dance with her quietly, cheek to cheek.

  When she was there, the place was at its best. They sang and did card tricks. Ray Snyder’s ukulele was passed around, and sometimes they just talked, in a relaxed way, about school and what colleges were the best and how much money they were going to make when they finished studying and got out into the world. Edith Netedu said she was going to marry a millionaire and have three children, all boys; and she was going to name them Tom, Dick, and Harry. When she and Dede Sandstrom put on their coonskin coats and tied their woolen mufflers under their chins and went out, they left sadness behind them.

  15

  When Spud Latham suggested that Lymie Peters come home with him to supper, Lymie hesitated and then shook his head.

  “Why not?” Spud asked.

  “Well,” Lymie said, “I just don’t think I’d better.”

  They were waiting for a northbound car with the brick wall of the cemetery at their backs, and it was snowing.

  “Don’t you want to come?” Spud asked.

  “Yes, I’d like to very much.”

  “All right then,” Spud said, “that settles it.”

  Actually it didn’t settle anything for Lymie. He liked Spud, or at least he would have liked to be like him, and have broad shoulders and narrow hips and go around with his chin out looking for a fight. But nobody at school had ever asked him to come home like this, especially for a meal, and Lymie had a feeling that it wasn’t right. Spud’s father and mother would probably be nice to him and all that, but afterwards, when he had gone …

  A streetcar came along and the two boys got on it, paid their fares, and went inside. The Clark Street car was always slow and this one kept stopping at every block to let people on or off. Lymie had plenty of time to wish that he had said no. He tried to suggest to Spud that maybe he oughtn’t to be bringing somebody home like this without asking permission first, but Spud seemed to have no such anxiety. He raised his cap politely to a woman across the aisle who had been staring at them, and this s
ent Lymie off into a fit of the giggles. The woman was offended.

  When the car stopped at Foster Avenue, Spud took Lymie by the arm and, partly dragging, partly tickling him, got him off. They stood and argued then on the corner, while the snow dropping out of the darkness settled in their hair and on the sleeves of their overcoats.

  “I’ll come some other time,” Lymie said. “If I go home with you now, your mother won’t be expecting me and she’ll—”

  “My mother won’t mind,” Spud said patiently. “Why should she?”

  “Well,” Lymie said, “it means a lot of extra trouble.”

  “If you think she’s going to send me out for ice cream on your account——”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Lymie said. “She may not be counting on anybody extra and she’ll be upset.”

  “You don’t know my mother,” Spud said. “Honestly, Lymie, she likes to have me bring kids home. When we lived in Wisconsin I did it all the time. Pete Draper used to eat more meals at our house than he did at his own. When anybody asked his mother how Pete was, she’d say, ‘I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Mrs. Latham.’ Jack Wilson and Wally Putnam used to be there too on account of the ring I fixed up in the back yard, to shoot baskets. And Roger Mitchell and a lot of my sister’s friends.”