He watched Spud pull the shades down and leave the room without having any idea of what he had done.
BOOK THREE
A Cold Country
22
“Alastor is not antisocial,” Professor Severance said, with a puckered expression about his mouth. Apparently there was something else he would have liked to add, something which was perhaps too flippant and would have destroyed (or come dangerously close to it) his hold on the class. “Alastor understands people rather better by getting away from them than by being buffeted by them.” Heads bent over notebooks, fountain pens began to scratch. “In solitude only can we attune ourselves to the meaning of nature and the deep heart of man,” Professor Severance said, teetering slightly, and with all traces of the flippant remark, whatever it was, gone from his rather tired, his definitely middle-aged, scholar’s face. “So the poet turns from love to understand love.”
This struck Mrs. Lieberman—the small, quiet-faced, prematurely white-haired woman sitting in the third row next to the window—as just nonsense. Her fountain pen remained idle in her hand. She was enrolled as a listener and so it didn’t matter whether she took notes during the lecture or not. She wouldn’t be called upon at some later date to fill two pages of an examination book with the house of cards that Professor Severance was now erecting, sentence by sentence.
“Alastor loves beyond the Arab maid,” he continued, “and understands human nature beyond human intercourse.” He spoke directly to Mrs. Lieberman, since she was the only person in the class who was looking at him. That he was well taken care of, there could be no doubt, she thought. But by whom? He was never without a fresh white handkerchief in his breast pocket, he never forgot his glasses. But on the other hand, Professor Severance didn’t look like a married man. There was never a flicker of complacency, and also his lectures—always beautifully phrased, models of organization, style, and diction—from time to time showed a shocking (or so it seemed to her) lack of experience.
He picked up The Complete Poetical Works of Shelley in order to read from it, or perhaps in order to pretend to read from it, for his eyes only occasionally skimmed the page.
Earth, ocean, air, beloved brotherhood …
The voice in which Professor Severance read poetry was high and reedlike. The young man who sat on Mrs. Lieberman’s right, the blond athlete with the block letter sewed on the front of his white pullover, thrust one long, muscular, football player’s leg into the aisle and looked pained. In the row ahead of him, his exact human opposite—flat-chested with a long pointed face and straight dark hair that grew down on his forehead in a widow’s peak—didn’t seem to be listening either. His eyes were vacant. But when Professor Severance cleared his throat and said, “Mr. Peters, in what other English Romantic poet do we find these same ‘incommunicable dreams,’ these ‘twilight phantasms’ that invoke a greater responsiveness to ‘the woven hymns of night and day’?” Lymie separated his legs, which were twisted together under the seat, and said, “Wordsworth?”
“Precisely!” Professor Severance exclaimed and Mrs. Lieberman decided that he must live with his mother.
It is always disturbing to pick up an acquaintance after several years. The person is bound to have changed, so that (in one way or another) you will have to deal with a stranger. Yet the change seldom turns out to be as great as one expects, or even hopes for. The summer that Lymie was seventeen, Mr. Peters found a place for him in a certified public accountant’s office, downtown in the Loop. He wanted Lymie to learn the value of money by earning some. When Lymie went back to high school in September he saw that most of the boys his own age had put on weight. Some of them had put on as much as twenty-five or thirty pounds. That summer it seemed to happen to all of them. Their faces hadn’t changed much, but they seemed to move differently. From being thin and gangly, they had spread out in the shoulders, their legs and arms had become solid, and they were beginning to be broad through the chest. Ford, who had never been heavy enough for anything but track, played football. So did Carson and Lynch. Lymie had grown slightly more round-shouldered from sitting all day on a high stool in front of a comptometer, but that was the only physical change in him. He tried doing setting-up exercises morning and night in front of the open window, but they didn’t help. And he had an uneasy feeling that he had somehow missed his chance.
Perhaps he attached too much importance to physical development. It is, after all, a minor barrier in the Grand Obstacle Race. The ordinary person manages it successfully (or doesn’t) and goes on to leap (or fall into) the twenty-foot pit of shyness, to clear (or go around) the eight-foot wall of money, to climb (or fall headlong from) the swaying rope net of love, and so on and so on. Some fail at one obstacle, some at another. The sensible ones go on, if they fail, and try the next. Those with too much imagination keep throwing themselves at the first one they fail at, as if everything depended on that, and so forgot the others which they might have managed easily. When Lymie was in high school, not being able to hold his own in games had serious consequences. Now that he was a sophomore in college, it no longer mattered, or at least nothing like so much. But he still clung loyally to that one insurmountable barrier.
At nineteen he was almost painfully thin. The look of adolescence was gone from his face, his hair was less unruly, and his hands had taken the shape they would have for the rest of his life. His eyes still had a hesitant look, even when Professor Severance called on him and he produced the right answer out of the air. Which may have been the result of one failure after another on the high school baseball field and in the swimming pool. Or this hesitancy, this habitual lack of self-confidence, might well have been the cause of those failures.
When Professor Severance went on with his lecture, Lymie wrote something in his loose-leaf notebook which couldn’t have had anything to do with Wordsworth or Shelley, because the two girls who sat on either side of him read it surreptitiously and smiled. They were friends, the three of them. They arrived at the classroom together, and small folded pieces of paper often passed between them, sometimes to the annoyance of Professor Severance, who, as a gentleman, could only combat rudeness by ignoring it.
Sally Forbes, the girl who sat on Lymie’s left, had on a red leather coat and a close-fitting gray felt hat with a clump of cock feathers over each ear. Her father was a full professor in the department of philosophy. The cock feathers were light green and bright blue, and the ends curled over the brim of the hat and lay flat against her tanned cheeks. Her hair was straight and almost black. Bangs covered her forehead, and her mouth was large and a little too prominent, but nothing could destroy or in any way diminish the effect of her very beautiful, eager, dark brown eyes. She had entered college when she was sixteen, and was now seventeen, and looked older than that. Her shoulders were square, her back as straight as a child’s, and she hadn’t yet outgrown the childish habit of biting her fingernails. Her hips were narrow, her legs were slender but strong. Her breasts were small and there was no suggestion of softness about her anywhere.
Lymie and Hope Davison had known each other in high school, but not very well. They didn’t actually get to be friends until they came down to the university. Hope’s tan coat and skirt, white sweater, and brown and white saddleback shoes all said There is a right and a wrong way to dress. Hope disliked bright colors, loud-voiced people, and any display of egotism. Her face was small, delicate, and sober. Her mouth was nicely shaped but obstinate, and her light blue eyes had an unnerving effect on young instructors who were not used to lecturing from a platform. They left no room anywhere for the mysterious or the irrational. If voices had spoken to her out of a burning bush, in all probability she would have stood waiting for some natural explanation to occur to her.
Professor Severance did not mind being stared at. He had been teaching for twenty-two years, and knew that the faces that looked up at him would shortly be replaced by other faces not unlike them. His own face, at that moment, was turned toward the windows. Se
eing handfuls of leaves coming down in a sudden stirring of the air outside, he spoke with such intensity of the despair that dogs every hope, and the resurrection through scourging, that his words at last reached the minds of his students. They realized uneasily that he had stopped talking about Shelley and was referring in a veiled way to himself. The fountain pens stopped scratching.
“Through crucifixion,” Professor Severance said, “one arises to a new life. Death is a mere incident, for Alastor dies daily, entering more and more into eternity, so that when death comes to him it is somewhat overdue.”
There was a solemn pause when he finished speaking.
“On Wednesday,” Professor Severance said, “I shall take up the relation between Shelley’s ethical philosophy and the idiom of his art. Will you please be prepared to recite on—” The bell rang before he could complete his sentence, and with the ringing of the bell, his power went out of him. He was Samson without his hair. Voices broke out all over the classroom. His students, a moment before so docile and so determined to get into their loose-leaf notebooks all that he had to say about the life of solitude, rose up in their seats and filled the aisles to overflowing. Professor Severance put the works of Shelley away in his battered brief case and gathered up his hat, his gray gloves, and his cane. The aisles were emptied almost immediately. He bowed Mrs. Lieberman out of the door ahead of him, and then marched briskly down the corridor.
Outside it was the very peak of fall. The sky was clear and very blue. The air was warm, the leaves were coming down in showers. Mrs. Lieberman was right behind Lymie and the two girls as they descended the iron stairs at the back of the building, and then were forced off the sidewalk by the two streams of traffic—one leaving University Hall, the other coming toward it. They stood a moment, talking, until dust and leaves, caught up in a miniature cyclone, made them turn their backs.
Hope said, “Hang on, Lymie—we don’t want to lose you.”
“Okay,” he said, and took hold of her arm lightly.
“In case you think that remark was funny, Davison,” Sally said, “you’re sadly mistaken.”
“I suppose I am,” Hope said, “but on the other hand, I didn’t mean to—”
“You never do,” Sally said. “Why don’t you hit her, Lymie?”
“I can’t,” Lymie said. “I wasn’t brought up that way.”
“Well, I wasn’t either” Sally said, “but I knocked a boy out cold when I was nine years old, and nobody taught me how to do it. I just picked up a brickbat and hit him with it. Johnny Mayberry, his name was. He was a very nice boy. I don’t remember what he did to me that made me so irritated with him, but anyway they had to take five stitches in his head, and his mother wouldn’t let me come over and play in their yard for a long time afterward.”
While she was talking, she opened a book and took out a gray envelope, pressed between the pages. Then with a strange asking look on her face she said, “Lymie, will you do something for me? Will you give this to your stuck-up friend?”
Lymie took the envelope and thrust it in his coat pocket. “He’s not really stuck-up,” he said slowly. “It was just a misunderstanding.”
“I know it was.” Sally nodded. “I just said that. But the thing is, a note probably won’t be enough. And if it isn’t, will you?——”
Mrs. Lieberman realized suddenly that neither of these girls was for Mr. Peters. Over a period of weeks she had built up an elaborate speculation about the intimacy in the row ahead of her and now in half a minute it was demolished. This was ah ways happening to her, and it didn’t really matter, except she was sorry for him. He needed someone. He needed fussing over and caring for. He needed lots of love. (She had two sons of her own, both in college, but when they came klop-klopping down the stairs in the morning, it sounded like horses, and they slipped past her and out of the house and into a world of their own making, where nothing she said ever penetrated.) And what grieved her as she started on down the walk, under the high nave made by overarching elm trees, was that she herself had no daughter to push at him—for she would have liked very much to take him home, fatten him, and keep him in the family.
23
The front corridor of the men’s gymnasium was empty except for a set of scales facing the door and a glass case containing trophies. The prevailing odor was of chlorine, from the swimming pool. At either end of the corridor, a short flight of stairs went up and another flight went down, the result being in either case the same: row on row of metal lockers, long wooden benches, and shower rooms. In this part of the building, which was always overheated, the stale odor of male bodies met and grappled with the dank odor of drains.
The third floor of the gymnasium was a single vast room, light and sunny, with a narrow balcony running all the way around it and a high steel-ribbed roof. In the absence of partitions the floor space was divided by the equipment. Rings, parallel bars, ladders, tumbling mats, and a leather horse took up half the gymnasium. Most of the remaining area was required by the flying trapeze apparatus, but there was room under the balcony for several wrestling mats, and in the opposite corner a punching bag. Two sets of stairs led up to the balcony, which was an indoor running track steeply sloped at the curves and almost level on the straightaway. Three more sets of stairs went down to the locker rooms.
After four o’clock in the afternoon the gymnasium was like a men’s club. The same undergraduates, the same faculty members came there day after day to work out and most of them knew each other, if not by name at least to speak to. Lymie came up from the locker rooms, in his street clothes, with his logic book under his arm, and his leather notebook, his anthology of nineteenth-century poetry. He stood for a moment at the head of the stairs. His eyes took in the little group around the high parallel bars, the tumblers doing double backflips, the mathematics instructor pulling at chest weights, and the two boys who were slowly swinging, head downward, from the iron rings. In a far corner he located the person he was looking for—a boxer who appeared at ten minutes after four every afternoon, in trunks and soft, leather boxing shoes, with his wrists taped, and on his hands a pair of pigskin gloves with the fingers cut out of them. The boxer was Spud Latham. There was no mistaking him, although in four years’ time his face had grown much harder and leaner and his jaw more pronounced.
Spud was skipping rope when Lymie came up to him, and he acknowledged Lymie’s presence with a curt nod. On the count of thirty-nine the rope caught on his heel. His face relaxed and he said, “This is one hell of a place. Nobody will put the gloves on with me.”
“Did you try Armstrong?” Lymie asked.
“He’s still sore on account of what happened last time,” Spud said.
“You shouldn’t have hit him so hard, probably.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Spud said. “I just got excited, I guess, and the first thing I knew he was sitting on his can.”
“Well,” Lymie said, “you can’t blame him for not wanting to do it again.”
“I didn’t hurt him,” Spud said. “It just shook him up. You’d think with a whole gymnasium to choose from, somebody would be interested in something besides walking on their hands.”
“What about Maguire?” Lymie asked.
“Same thing.” Spud tossed the skipping rope aside and jabbed at the punching bag, making it ka-slap, ka-slap in whatever direction he wanted it to. His movements were quick, controlled, and certain, and there was a cruel look in his eye.
Lymie took off his shoes in order to practice skipping rope. His performance was not expert like Spud’s. He was too tense. He missed on the count of thirteen and had to start over.
Spud was a year older than Lymie and his body showed it. His body was finished. It was the body of a man, slender, well-proportioned, compact, and beautiful. He had been a life guard all summer long at one of the street-end beaches in Chicago and his hair and eyebrows were still bleached from the sun. His skin was so tanned from the constant exposure that it looked permanent. He could have bee
n a Polynesian. Though Lymie had seen him dress and undress hundreds of times, there is a kind of amazement that does not wear off. Very often, looking at Spud, he felt the desire which he sometimes had looking at statues—to put out his hand and touch some part of Spud, the intricate interlaced muscles of his side, or his shoulder blades, or his back, or his flat stomach, or the veins at his wrists, or his small pointed ears.
Spud turned away from the punching bag and went up on the balcony where the rowing machines were. While he was gone, a thickset boy with red hair picked up the boxing gloves which Spud had tossed aside, and started punching the bag. Spud came downstairs immediately and stood close by, watching him. When the redheaded boy turned aside to rest, Spud said, “You wouldn’t like to show me something about boxing, would you?”
The Folded Leaf Page 10