The Folded Leaf

by William Maxwell

  Under Spud’s persuasion, Lymie gave in once more and then wished he hadn’t. A block from the apartment building where the Lathams lived, he and Spud went through the whole argument all over again, stamping their feet and swinging their arms to keep warm. Still certain that it was wrong, that no good would come of it, Lymie watched Spud fit his key into the inside vestibule door and kick it open.

  The Lathams lived on the second floor. When they got inside, Spud tossed his coat and muffler in the general direction of the chair in the hall and disappeared. The muffler fell where it was intended to, but the coat landed in a heap on the floor, between the chair and the hall table. Lymie picked it up and put it on the chair, with his own on top of it. When he turned and walked into the living room he knew instantly why it was that he hadn’t wanted to come here, and that he ought to get out as soon as he possibly could. There, staring him in the face, was everything he’d been deprived of for the last five years.

  He had thought he remembered what it used to be like but he hadn’t at all. He didn’t even have the house straight in his mind. It had taken on the monotonous qualities, the ugliness of the cheap hotels and furnished apartments he and his father had lived in ever since—all so similar that when he woke in the night he couldn’t remember for a second whether he was in the one on Lawrence Avenue or the one on Howard Street or the one on Lakeside Place. He had totally forgotten how different furniture was that people owned themselves from the kind that came with a furnished apartment; and that tables and chairs could tell you, when you walked into a place, what kind of people lived there.

  His eyes went on a slow voyage around the room, taking in every detail, fixing it (he hoped) forever in his mind: the curtains, the blue rug, the sofa, the lighted lamps, the phonograph, the Chinese embroidery, the sewing basket with the lid left open, the ashtrays, the brass bowl, the package of pipe cleaners, the fireplace, the brass candlesticks, the English cottage at twilight. This was how people lived, boys his own age, who didn’t have to get their own breakfast in the morning, or wash their face in a dirty washbowl, or go to sleep at night in a bed that hadn’t been made; boys whose fathers didn’t drink too much and talk too loud and like waitresses.

  When Spud came back, bringing Mrs. Latham, Lymie turned, ready to apologize and pick up his things and leave. He saw that Mrs. Latham’s hair was not bobbed, that she had no makeup on, and that her skirt was well below her knees.

  “Mother, this is Lymie Peters,” Spud said.

  “How do you do, Lymie,” Mrs. Latham said, and shook hands with him. Before Lymie could explain that he had changed his mind and wasn’t staying for supper after all, she turned to Spud and said, “Show him where the bathroom is, and see that he gets a clean towel. We’re all ready to sit down as soon as your father comes.” Then she was gone.

  “You see?” Spud said, straddling the bowl of the toilet while Lymie washed his hands. “All that fuss for nothing.”

  16

  To know the world’s injustice requires only a small amount of experience. To accept it without bitterness or envy you need almost the sum total of human wisdom, which Lymie Peters at fifteen did not have. He couldn’t help noticing that the scales of fortune were tipped considerably in Spud’s favor, and resenting it. But what gnawed at him most was that Spud should be, besides, a natural athlete, the personification of the daydream which he himself most frequently indulged in.

  In this fantasy Lymie was in another place. His father had had to move, for business reasons, and he went along, of course, and they settled down in a nice big house in some place like New York or Philadelphia, where nobody knew them or anything about them. His father stopped drinking and was home every night for dinner, and they had a housekeeper who kept the place spick-and-span and saw to it that they had his favorite dessert (made of pineapple, marshmallows, oranges, maraschino cherries, and whipped cream) at least once a week.

  One day, one Saturday morning, he was walking past a vacant lot where some guys were playing baseball, and he stopped to watch. In the last of the ninth inning the pitcher sprained his ankle and had to quit. They asked Lymie if he wanted to play. He didn’t want to particularly but he didn’t have anything else to do so he said all right and took his coat off and threw it on the ground. Then he tossed his cap beside it, loosened his necktie, and rolled up his shirt sleeves. They asked him if he wanted to pitch and he said “Sure.” His side had a slight lead. The score was five to four, but there were three men on bases and no outs. Lymie (who had never pitched before) stepped into the dirt-drawn square which was the pitcher’s box and with the heavy end of the batting order coming up, struck out three men, one right after the other, and won the game.

  That was the way it was with everything he did in that place he moved to. He didn’t care whether people liked him or not, so he didn’t try to keep on the good side of everybody, and sometimes he got in a fight because this person or that didn’t like his attitude, but he always came out on top, and the other guy apologized afterward and they became good friends.

  After the guys found out he was so good at games, they always took him first when they were choosing up sides, and whichever side he was on won. He was never by himself any more because somebody always seemed to be waiting for him by his locker after school, and when the phone rang at night it was invariably for him. The guys were always after him to go to a movie or do something with them but he stayed home night after night with his father, reading or listening to the radio, and went to bed early and got plenty of rest. Because he’d been playing games a lot and exercising, his arm and leg muscles developed. He looked like all the rest of the guys in plus fours, only better. The girls smiled at him when he walked past with his chin in the air but he only nodded; he didn’t smile back. He didn’t have any time for girls. He hardly had time for his homework but he managed somehow so that he got all S’s and was elected president of the senior class and captain of the football, basketball, baseball, and fencing teams, before he grew tired of daydreaming and let himself slip back into the actual world.

  With gentle jabbing Spud propelled Lymie through the dining room, and Lymie’s head swam for a second with the wonderful conglomeration of long-forgotten cooking smells that met him as soon as he set foot in the kitchen. The predominating one was of roast pork, which he could hear sizzling in the oven. A girl with light hair like Spud’s was standing on a stool. In her hands was a large blue platter which she had just taken from the top shelf of the china cupboard.

  “Hello, Lymie,” she said, when Spud introduced her. “I hope you realize you’ve come to a bad end.” Her voice was cheerful and contradicted her words. Lymie saw that she took his being there as a matter of course. Except for the color of her hair, she had almost no resemblance to Spud. Their dispositions seemed entirely different.

  “Don’t pay any attention to my sister,” Spud said. “I don’t listen to her, even. If she bothers you, tell her to go fan herself.”

  “I’m sure that Lymie doesn’t talk to his sister that way,” Mrs. Latham said. She had tied a kitchen apron around her waist and was holding a large aluminum basting spoon under the hot water faucet.

  “Lymie hasn’t got a sister, have you, Lymie?” Spud asked.

  Lymie shook his head.

  “You don’t know how much you have to be thankful for,” Spud said. “When do we eat?”

  “As soon as your father gets home,” Mrs. Latham said. “He may be a little late tonight.”

  “O grim-look’d night,” Spud said. “O night with hue so black! O night which ever art when day is not! O night! O night! alack, alack, alack! I fear my Thisbe’s promise is forgot.”

  Helen got down off the stool carefully and pushed it under the kitchen table. “It’s bad enough to have you out here in the first place,” she said, “without your showing off.”

  “I wasn’t showing off,” Spud said. “That’s poetry. Shakespeare.”

  “It’s all the Shakespeare you know or ever will know,” she said
, and then, turning to Lymie: “When he was in seventh grade they did a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. You should have seen it. Spud was Pyramus and he had to make love to a freckle-faced boy named Bill McCann. They were both done up in old sheets and I’ve never seen anything so funny in all my life.”

  Lymie had a feeling that she was trying to use him as a weapon against Spud. He backed against the china closet, where he could hardly be considered more than a spectator.

  “They kept forgetting their lines,” she continued. “And the teacher had to prompt them.”

  “Is that so?” Spud exclaimed hotly. “You think you’re so smart! What about the time you got up in assembly to make a speech and gulped so loud they heard you clear in the back row?”

  “Go in the other room, all of you,” Mrs. Latham said, “and stop arguing.”

  Lymie leaned forward, ready to follow Spud and his sister out of the kitchen; to his surprise neither of them showed any signs of leaving. There was a look about Mrs. Latham, a certain firmness in her mouth, which indicated that she could mean what she said. But apparently this wasn’t one of the times.

  Spud pulled the kitchen stool out and began to teeter on it. “If you won’t let us talk about Shakespeare,” he said, “what do you want us to talk about?”

  “You don’t have to talk at all,” Mrs. Latham said severely. “You can get the bread knife and cut the bread and put it on the table.”

  This time Spud did as he was told.

  Lymie would have liked to take part in the confusion and bickering but he didn’t quite know how. He stayed close to the china closet until Helen came over and said, “One side. Have to get in there.” Then he moved away cautiously and stood with his elbows resting on the kitchen window sill.

  A door opened somewhere in the front of the apartment. After a second Lymie heard it close.

  “Was that your father?” Mrs. Latham asked, when Spud came back from the dining room.

  “It was,” Spud said.

  “Der Papa kommt,” Helen said.

  “German,” Spud shouted contemptuously at her. “Who wants to talk German? If I were a Frenchman now, waiting in a shell hole, and you were a big fat Dutchman crawling toward me on your hands and knees——”

  “Germans and Dutchmen are two different nationalities,” Helen said. “Dutchmen are Hollanders. They didn’t take part in the war. They were neutral.”

  “Yeah, the dirty cowards,” Spud said.

  Mrs. Latham opened the oven door and took the roast out. It was a large one, brown and crisp. She made no effort to prevent Spud from reaching out and snitching a small piece of fat that was hanging loose at the side.

  “Just for that,” Helen said, “you don’t get any second helping.”

  “I pity the guy that gets you for a wife,” Spud said.

  A voice interrupted them, a deep masculine voice saying, “Anybody home?”

  “We’re all home,” Mrs. Latham called out.

  Everybody had something to do but Lymie. Helen began to mash the potatoes furiously. Spud let the water run in the sink and filled the cut-glass pitcher. Mrs. Latham transferred the roast to the blue platter and made gravy in the roasting pan on top of the stove. Feeling very much an outsider, Lymie picked up the gravy boat and held it for her, so that all she had to do was tip the pan. She thanked him, and then, as if she knew everything that was going on in his mind, said, “Now you’re a member of the family, Lymie. You’ve been broken in.”

  She didn’t smile, and Lymie realized that he could take what she said quite seriously. With a feeling of sudden and immense happiness he carried the gravy boat into the dining room and set it down in the center of the table.

  17

  All through dinner Spud addressed his mother formally. “Mrs. Latham,” he said, pointing to the roast on the platter, “would you be so kind and condescending as to give me a piece of the outside.” “Mrs. Latham, you’re losing a very valuable hairpin.” “Watch out, Mrs. Latham, you’re dipping your elbow in the gravy.”

  He also announced that somebody was kicking him under the table and kept complaining about it until finally they all leaned over, raised the tablecloth, peered under it, and proved conclusively that nobody’s foot was anywhere near him.

  Lymie was so amused that his eyes filled with tears. It was the kind of thing that never happened at the Alcazar.

  Helen and her mother cleared the table for dessert, and then it was Mr. Latham’s turn. He rose and placed the knife blade between the prongs of his fork, transferring the musical sound to Lymie’s glass, then to Spud’s, and so on around the table. Mr. Latham could also (which was really astonishing) hold the sound back and release it whenever he wanted to. This was something he learned in the Masonic Lodge, he explained solemnly, and Mrs. Latham for the first time burst out laughing. Her face colored and she looked almost as young as Helen.

  If Lymie had been told that all meals at the Lathams were not like this one, he would have refused to believe it. The others knew better, of course, but Mrs. Latham attributed the gaiety of the occasion to the roast, which was exceptionally tender and done to a turn. Mr. Latham felt that at last the apartment, which had seemed so dark and unlivable, was beginning to be like home. Spud was not given to analyzing. Helen alone knew the real cause—that Lymie’s shyness and his delight at being there had affected all of them, arousing their feeling for one another and drawing them temporarily into the compact family that he thought they were. She felt sorry for him, but she was also suspicious of him. She was suspicious of everybody. The letters from Wisconsin had stopped coming. The last was in December, two days after Christmas. Now, so far as Helen was concerned, there was nothing good or kind anywhere, people lost their youth and grew middle-aged without finding anybody to love them, and happiness was a delusion.

  The boys ate two helpings of peach cobbler, pushed their chairs back from the table, and went off to Spud’s room. Mr. Latham retired to the living room and the solace of his cigar. Mrs. Latham and Helen cleared the table and got ready to do the dishes.

  As Mrs. Latham was stirring the dishwater into a froth she turned and said suddenly, “Where on earth do you suppose Spud found that child?”

  “The same place he gets all the others,” Helen said. “There’s a place he goes to that’s like a dog pound and that’s where he finds them.”

  Mrs. Latham shook her head. “I’ve seen him bring home some mighty strange creatures——”

  “Strange!” Helen said.

  “—just so he could have somebody to play football with. I suppose that’s what he’s meaning to do with this one.”

  “It’s the wrong time of the year,” Helen said. “You don’t play football when there’s snow on the ground. Besides, did you notice his hands?”

  “No,” Mrs. Latham said, “what’s the matter with them?”

  “Nothing, except that they wouldn’t go very far around a football.”

  “Ummm,” Mrs. Latham said, and began to put the glasses one by one into the scalding hot dishwater. “Thinnest youngster I about ever saw. I’d like to keep him here for a month or six weeks.”

  “Where?” Helen asked, reaching for a dish towel.

  “Oh, we could put him somewhere.”

  “I don’t know where. He’s too long for the couch in the living room and I won’t have him sleeping with me.”

  “Don’t be vulgar.”

  “I’m not being vulgar,” Helen exclaimed. “Just practical. Let him stay at his own house.”

  “I suppose we’ll have to, in any case,” Mrs. Latham said. “But he doesn’t look to me as if he got the right kind of food. Or maybe he’s growing too fast and hasn’t any appetite.”

  “It seemed to me he ate very well,” Helen said. “He kept right up with Spud, helping for helping.”

  Neither of them said anything more for a while. Helen dried the glasses and stood them upside down on an aluminum tray on the kitchen table. Mrs. Latham filled the rack with plates and sau
cers. While she was pouring hot water over them out of the teakettle she saw a shadow in the doorway and looked up. The shadow was Spud. He had been showing Lymie his favorite neckties and the plaid golf socks with tassels on them that he wore whenever he wanted to pick a fight with somebody. Lymie had admired the Navajo rug on the floor and the picture of a four-masted schooner cutting its way through an indigo ocean. Now, while Lymie sat on the bed looking at the illustrations in Mr. Midshipman Easy, Spud was free to come back to the kitchen. He knelt down and began to root around in the bottom shelf of the cupboard. Six bars of Ivory soap came tumbling out on the kitchen floor. The kitchen cleanser, several wire brushes, a Mason jar filled with tacks, a tack hammer, a putty knife, a can of silver polish, and a ball of twine followed.

  “What are you after?” Helen asked. “Do you know exactly?”

  “Saddle soap,” Spud explained.

  “Why do you have to have it right now?” Mrs. Latham asked. “Couldn’t you wait and use it some other time?”

  Spud shook his head. “What have you done with it?” he asked. “It used to be right in here somewhere.”

  Mrs. Latham opened both doors of the cupboard and took out a cigar box with a heavy rubber band around it. “Did you look in here?” she asked.

  The saddle soap was inside the cigar box.

  “What about straightening up the cupboard?” Helen said, as Spud started for the dining room door. He glanced back at the confusion he had made.

  “I haven’t got time,” he said. “We’re going to saddle-soap my riding boots now. I’ll clean it up later.”

  “That’s a very nice boy you brought home,” Mrs. Latham said. “Where does he live?”

  “Over by the lake,” Spud said.

  “He has very nice manners. You can see that his mother has tried to bring him up properly,” Mrs. Latham said.

  “He hasn’t got any mother,” Spud said. “His mother is dead.”

  “What a pity!” Mrs. Latham exclaimed.

  “Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise,” Helen said, but Mrs. Latham was not amused.