The Folded Leaf

by William Maxwell

  “Who looks after him?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Spud said. “Nobody, I guess. He and his father eat out.”

  “No wonder he’s so thin. Nothing but restaurant food,” Mrs. Latham said.

  “I ate at the Palmer House once,” Helen said, as she finished the last of the dinner plates. “It was quite good.”

  “You wouldn’t think so if you ate there all the time,” Mrs. Latham said. And then to Spud. “You must bring him home with you again, do you hear?”

  Spud stopped in the doorway to the dining room. “Who?” he asked.

  “This boy,” Mrs. Latham said. “Bring him as often as he’s willing to come——”

  But Spud was already on the way to his own room.

  Mrs. Latham poured the dishwater out and it made a loud gurgling noise which prevented conversation for a minute. Then she said thoughtfully, “I’m really very glad. Spud needs somebody. He gets bored when he’s alone and doesn’t know what to do with himself. Lymie isn’t the kind of boy I’d expect him to pick out for a friend, but he’s a very well-behaved, nice youngster and maybe he’ll be a good influence on Spud.” There was a silence, while Helen spread her dish towel on the rack to dry; then Mrs. Latham said, “That explains everything, doesn’t it?”

  “What explains everything?” Helen asked. She had begun to clean up the mess in front of the cupboard.

  “I mean the fact that his mother is dead. I knew there was something wrong the minute I saw him,” Mrs. Latham said. She finished rinsing out the dishpan and hung it on a nail under the sink. Then she stood in the center of the floor and listened. The only sounds came from Spud’s room, where the two boys were saddle-soaping his boots. Their voices sounded pleased and excited.

  18

  On the tenth of March, which was the anniversary of Mrs. Peters’ death, Mr. Peters and Lymie got up early and went down to the Union Station. From Chicago to the small town they had once lived in was a trip of a little less than two hours, on the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad. They made this journey every year. The scenery was not interesting—the cornfields of Illinois in March are dreary and monotonous—and there was no pleasure attached to the trip in the mind of either of them. But to live in the world at all is to be committed to some kind of a journey.

  If you are ready to go and cannot, either because you are not free or because you have no one to travel with—or if you have arbitrarily set a date for your departure and dare not go until that day arrives, you still have no cause for concern. Without knowing it, you have actually started. On a turning earth, in a mechanically revolving universe, there is no place to stand still. Neither the destination nor the point of departure are important. People often find themselves midway on a journey they had no intention of taking and that began they are not exactly sure where. What matters, the only sphere where you have any real choice, is the person who elects to sit in the empty seat beside you from Asheville, North Carolina to Knoxville, Tennessee.

  Or from Knoxville to Memphis.

  Or from Memphis to Denver, Colorado.

  Sometimes it is a woman with a navy-blue turban on her head and pearl earrings, pictures in her purse that you will have to look at, and a wide experience with the contagious diseases of children.

  Sometimes it is a man who says Is this seat taken? Or he may not say anything at all as he makes room on the rack over your head for his suitcase, his battered gray felt hat, his muffler, and overcoat, and the small square package wrapped in blue paper and tied with red string. Before he gets off the train (at Detroit, perhaps, or at Kansas City) you will know what’s in the package. Whether you want him to or not, he will spread his life out before you, on his knees. And afterward, so curiously relaxed is the state of mind engendered by going on a journey, he will ask to see your life and you will show it to him. Occasionally, though not often, the girl or the young man who sits beside you will be someone whose clothes, ankles, hands, gray-blue eyes all are so full of charm and character that, even though they are only there for a short time and never once turn and look at you, never offer a remark, you have no choice but to fall hopelessly in love with them, with everything about them, with their luggage even. And when they get up and leave, it is as if you had lost an arm or a leg.

  Accidents, misdirections, overexcitement, heat, crowds, and heartbreaking delays you must expect when you go on a journey, just as you expect to have dreams at night. Whether or not you enjoy yourself at all depends on your state of mind. The man who travels with everything he owns, books, clothes for every season, shoe trees, a dinner jacket, medicines, binoculars, magazines, and telephone numbers—the unwilling traveler—and the man who leaves each place in turn without reluctance, with no desire ever to come back, obviously cannot be making the same journey, even though their tickets are identical. The same thing holds good for the woman who was once beautiful and who now has to resort to movement, change, continuous packing and unpacking, in order to avoid the reality that awaits her in the smallest mirror. And for the ambitious young man who by a too constant shifting around has lost all of his possessions, including his native accent and the ability to identify himself with a particular kind of sky or the sound, let us say, of windmills creaking; so that in New Mexico his talk reflects Bermuda, and in Bermuda it is again and again of Barbados that he is reminded, but never of Iowa or Wisconsin or Indiana, never of home.

  Though people usually have long complicated tickets which they expect the conductor to take from them in due time, the fact is that you don’t need to bother with a ticket at all. If you are willing to travel lightly, you can also dispense with the train. Cars and trucks are continually stopping at filling stations and at corners where there is an overhead stop light. By jerking your thumb you will almost certainly get a ride to the next town of more than two thousand inhabitants where (chances are) you will manage to get something to eat and a place to sleep for a night or so, even if it’s only the county jail.

  The appointment you have made to meet somebody at such and such a day at noon on the steps of the courthouse at Amarillo, Texas, you may have to forget. Especially if you go too long without food or with nothing but stolen ripe tomatoes, so that suddenly you are not sure of what you are saying. Or if the heat gets you, and when you wake up you are in a hospital ward. But after you start to get well again and are able to sit up a short while each day, there will be time to begin thinking about where you will go next. And if you like, you can always make new appointments.

  The great, the universal problem is how to be always on a journey and yet see what you would see if it were only possible for you to stay home: a black cat in a garden, moving through iris blades behind a lilac bush. How to keep sufficiently detached and quiet inside so that when the cat in one spring reaches the top of the garden wall, turns down again, and disappears, you will see and remember it, and not be absorbed at that moment in the dryness of your hands.

  If you missed that particular cat jumping over one out of so many garden walls, it ought not to matter, but it does apparently. The cat seems to be everything. Seeing clearly is everything. Being certain as to smells, being able to remember sounds and to distinguish by touch one object, one body, from another. And it is not enough to see the fishermen drawing in their wide circular net, the tropical villages lying against a shelf of palm trees, or the double rainbow over Fort-de-France. You must somehow contrive, if only for a week or only overnight, to live in the houses of people, so that at least you know the elementary things—which doors sometimes bang when a sudden wind springs up; where the telephone book is kept; and how their lungs feel when they waken in the night and reach blindly toward the foot of the bed for the extra cover.

  You are in duty bound to go through all of their possessions, to feel their curtains and look for the tradename on the bottom of their best dinner plates and stand before their pictures (especially the one they have been compelled to paint themselves, which is not a good painting but seems better if you stay
long enough to know the country in more than one kind of light) and lift the lids off their cigarette boxes and sniff their pipe tobacco and open, one by one, their closet doors. You should test the sharpness and shape of their scissors. You may play their radio and try, with your fingernail, to open the locked door of the liquor cabinet. You may even read any letters that they have been so careless as to leave around. Through all of these things, through the attic and the cellar and the tool shed you must go searching until you find the people who live here or who used to live here but now are in London or Acapulco or Galesburg, Illinois. Or who now are dead.

  19

  “When you grow up,” Mr. Peters said, “there won’t be anybody to make things easier for you.”

  Lymie, who had brought this lecture on himself by losing his return ticket, was walking ahead of his father down the white cemetery path. In his right hand he held a long narrow cardboard box done up in green florist’s paper. In the other hand he carried a Mason jar filled with water, which slopped over occasionally. His shoes, which had been shined in the railway station at the same time as his father’s, were now scuffed and muddy. He had no hat. The sun was out and it was windy but not cold.

  “You’ll want to provide yourself with a nice home and pleasant surroundings and all the comforts and conveniences you’ve been used to,” Mr. Peters said. “You’ll want to marry and have a family, which you can’t do if you spend all your time reading and going to art museums.”

  So far as Mr. Peters was concerned, there was a definite connection between Lymie’s absent-mindedness and the fact that he seemed to gravitate toward whatever was artistic and impractical. Mr. Peters wanted to be proud of his son and he was glad that Lymie had a good mind, but he was not a millionaire (how much Mr. Peters made exactly was nobody’s business) and he had tried therefore to make Lymie realize that before you have a right to indulge in any kind of activity which is not practical, you must learn the value of money. If earning a living takes all your time and energy, it is something that you must resign yourself to. There is no use pretending that life is one long Sunday school picnic. Nothing is ever gained without hard work and plenty of it. But if a person is ambitious and really wants to make something of himself; if he can keep his chin up no matter what happens to him, and never complains, never offers excuses or alibis; and if, once he has achieved success, he can keep from resting on his laurels (also his equilibrium through it all and his feet on the ground) he will have all the more success to come and he need feel no fear of the future.

  This philosophy was too materialistic to be very congenial to Lymie, and as a matter of fact Mr. Peters didn’t take much stock in it himself. It was not something that he had learned from experience (his own business methods were quite different) but mostly catch phrases from the lips of businessmen he envied and admired. Where they got it, there is no telling.

  Mr. Peters’ career in business had never been very successful, never wholly unsuccessful. He was a salesman by accident rather than by disposition. His first job was with a bill-posting concern and had involved free passes to circuses, street carnivals, and moving picture houses. He still remembered it with pleasure. After that he tried real estate and life insurance, both of which had their drawbacks. When his wife died he decided that he wanted to move, to get away from anything and everything that reminded him of her, so he took a job with a wholesale stationery house, operating in the Chicago area. For the past five years he had remained in that business, though the concerns he worked for changed rather frequently. Each one, for a short while, was a fine company headed by men it was a privilege to work for. This opinion was eventually and inevitably revised, until a point was reached where Mr. Peters, for his own good, could no longer afford to work for such bastards. As a rule he quit before he was fired.

  When Mr. Peters stopped on the cemetery path to light a cigarette, Lymie stopped also, his eyes busy with the mounded graves, the faded American flags in their star-shaped holders, and the tombstones, row after row of them, all saying the same thing: Henry Burdine died … Mary his wife died … Samuel Potter died … Jesse Davis died … Temperance his wife died …

  “You get out of life,” Mr. Peters said as they walked on, “just what you put into it.”

  Mrs. Peters’ grave was at the far end of the cemetery, in a square lot with a plain granite tombstone on it about six feet high. On the stone was the single name Harris. Two small headstones marked the graves of Lymie’s maternal grandfather and grandmother. A little apart from them were two other graves, one full-sized and one small, as if for a child. The inscription on the headstone of the larger grave said Alma Harris Peters 1881-1919.

  Lymie set the Mason jar down and tore both string and paper off the box, which contained a dozen short-stemmed red roses. He tried to arrange them nicely in the Mason jar but the wind blew them all the same way and he caught the jar with his hand, just before it toppled. By bracing it against the headstone, in a little hollow, he could keep the jar from falling, but there was nothing he could do about the roses.

  “Quit worrying with them,” Mr. Peters said. “They look all right.”

  He stood with his hat in his hand, staring in a troubled way at the grave.

  Lymie was embarrassed because he had no particular feeling, and he thought he ought to have. He looked down at the low mound with dead grass on it and tried to visualize his mother beneath it, in a horizontal position; tried to feel toward that spot the emotion he used to have for her. He waited, knowing that in a moment his father would ask the question he always asked when they came here.

  Though Lymie could remember his mother’s voice easily enough, and how she did her hair, and what it was like to be in the same room with her, he couldn’t remember her face. He had tried too many times to remember it and now it was gone. It wouldn’t come back any more.

  On the other side of the lot the ground dropped away abruptly. The cemetery ran along the end of a high bluff from which you could look off over the tops of trees to the cornfields and the flat prairie beyond. In the whole winter landscape the roses were the only color.

  “Your mother has been gone five years,” Mr. Peters said, “and I still can’t believe it. It just doesn’t seem possible.”

  Lymie remembered how his mother used to say his father’s name: Lymon, she said, my Lymon—proudly, and always with love.

  He remembered the excitement of meeting his mother suddenly on the stairs. And the sound of her voice. And the soft side of her neck. And the imprint of her lips on the top of his head after she had kissed him. And being rocked by her sometimes, on her lap, when he had been crying. And being allowed to look at her beautiful long white kid gloves.

  He remembered waking at night and realizing that she had been in his room without his knowing it—that room he remembered so clearly and that fitted his heart and mind like a glove. The bed he woke up in, and the dresser with all his clothes in it, and the blue and white wallpaper, and the light switch by the door, and the light, and next to it the framed letter which began Dear Madam I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of… and which ended Yours very sincerely and respectfully Abraham Lincoln. And the picture over his head of a fat-faced little boy and a little girl with yellow curls, both of them riding hobbyhorses. And the bear that he slept with …

  “Before she died,” Mr. Peters said, “I was sitting on top of the world. I used to look around sometimes and see somebody I knew who was in a mess or having trouble of one sort or another and I’d think It’s his own damn fault.”

  What became of the bear? Lymie thought. Whatever could have happened to it? Did somebody take it away?

  “It didn’t occur to me that I had anything especially to be thankful for,” Mr. Peters said. “Probably if I had—” And then instead of finishing that sentence he asked the question Lymie had been waiting for: “Do you remember your mother, son?”

  “Yes, Dad,” Lymie said, nodding.

  He remembered the time his m
other saw a mouse and screamed and jumped up on one of the dining room chairs and from the chair to the table. She was deathly afraid of mice. And when they went to the circus at night they never could stay for the wild West show because his mother grew nervous as soon as they started loosening the ropes. But she loved lightning and thunder.

  He himself used to be afraid of noises in the night, and of the shadows which the gaslight made in the hall. The gaslight flickered, and that made the shadows move. But it also guided him on that long trip down the hall from the door of his room to the door of the bathroom, which he entered quickly, being careful not to glance to the left, where there was danger, darkness, and the back stairs. He was also afraid, horribly afraid deep down inside of him, when the man leaned over and put his face in the lion’s mouth. But these were things that he had never told anybody.

  “Your mother was a wonderful woman,” Mr. Peters said. “I didn’t know what I was getting when I married her. She was just young and pretty and always laughing and tying ribbons in her hair and I knew I had to have her. But that wasn’t what she was really like at all, and it was quite a while before I found out.”

  Lymie remembered the tray of the high chair coming over his head and being lifted out of it when he choked. And later, when he was old enough to sit at the table in a chair with two big books on it. And taking iron through a glass straw. And sometimes having to take cod-liver oil. And the square glass shade that hung down over the round dining room table, with the red-and-green beaded fringe. And the fireplace with the tapestry screen in front of it during the summertime. And the Japanese garden with putty for the shores of the little lake, grass seed growing, and carrot tops sprouting with little green leaves, and a peculiar, unpleasant smell. And the real garden outside, beyond the grape arbor. And around in front the two palms in their wooden tubs on either side of the front walk….