The Folded Leaf

by William Maxwell

  Lymie reached into the locker, found Spud’s shorts, and handed them to him. “Didn’t you hear me calling time?” he asked.

  Spud shook his head. “I didn’t hear anything,” he said. “I was busy keeping from getting killed.”

  He sat down on the bench to dry his feet. When he had finished, his shoes and socks were waiting on the floor beside him, and the boxing trunks and jock strap that he had brought up from the shower room in his hand were hanging on a hook in the locker. It was not callousness that let him accept these attentions simply and without thinking about them. He wouldn’t have allowed anyone else to do for him the things that Lymie did. And besides, he recognized that it gave Lymie pleasure to bend over and pick up the towel where he had dropped it, and to go off to the towel room and exchange it for a clean one.

  When Lymie came back, Spud was dressed and tying his tie in front of a small mirror which hung at the end of the row of lockers. “I feel wonderful,” Spud said. “What do you think we’ll have for supper?”

  “Wednesday, veal birds.”

  “I could eat a steer,” Spud said, “without half trying.”

  Lymie buried his head in the locker, searching for Spud’s big black notebook, and heard him say, “What’s this, a communication from the dean’s office?” and realized that he had discovered the gray envelope.

  “It’s for you,” Lymie said.

  Spud tore the envelope open and glanced at the note inside. “Here,” he said, and tossed the note at Lymie. Dear Spud, it said, Were having an informal house dance on the Saturday after Homecoming. Would you care to come? Sincerely yours, Sally Forbes. Lymie folded the note, slipped it back in the torn envelope, and laid it on the bench. Homecoming was the twenty-fifth. The dance would be the second of November.

  “What do you think?” Spud asked. “Do you figure I ought to go?”

  “If it were me,” Lymie said slowly (for he would have liked to be asked to the dance himself), “I’d go. You’ll probably have a good time.”

  “Has Hope asked you yet?”

  Lymie shook his head.

  “Why hasn’t she?” Spud asked.

  “Maybe she’s got somebody else in mind that she wants to ask,” Lymie said. “Or she may be waiting to see whether you decide to come or not.”

  “We’ll go together,” Spud said suddenly. “And we’ll tear the place down, shall we?”

  “All right,” Lymie said. “Anything you say.”

  He tossed the towel into the locker and closed it. On their way out of the gymnasium they stopped at the drinking fountain. Lymie held the lever down for Spud, who drank and drank. “Aah,” he said as he straightened up. “That’s better. I was dry as a bone.”

  “You’re always dry as a bone,” Lymie said. He bent down to the stream of water for a second only, and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  In the front corridor they swerved from their path and went over to the scales. Lymie put his own books on the tile floor and took Spud’s leather notebook from him. Spud planted himself firmly on the scales. The needle flew up to a hundred and fifty-seven pounds. He stepped down and Lymie took his place. This time the needle rose more slowly and wavered at a hundred and nine.

  “Would you look at that!” Lymie exclaimed. “I’ve gained a pound and a quarter. It must be from skipping rope. It must be the exercise.”

  “Give me my notebook,” Spud said. “You’re cheating.”

  Without the notebook the scales declined to a hundred and seven and three-quarters. Lymie stepped down, his face shadowed by disappointment.

  He and Spud were outside, almost at the front walk, when he remembered his own books. He ran back into the building for them, though he knew that Spud would wait. And when he had picked up the books, he hurried out again.

  There were very few moments in the day when Lymie had Spud all to himself, and the last two summers they had been separated six days out of the week by their summer jobs in Chicago. Even on Sundays, when Lymie went to the beach to be with Spud, he had to share him with other people and pretend that he didn’t mind when Spud rowed off in a boat with six other life guards, or lorded it over everybody on the beach from a high wooden perch where Lymie (although occasional marks of favor were bestowed on him) couldn’t sit. There were so many things Spud liked to do that Lymie couldn’t do with him, such as boxing, or playing football, or learning to fly an airplane, and Lymie spent a good deal of time watching from the sidelines, and waiting for Spud to come back to him. Oddly enough, Spud always did.

  Before they went off to college, Lymie assumed that they would both belong to a fraternity, as a matter of course, but Mr. Latham put his foot down. It would take all the money he could scrape together, he said, if Spud was going to have four more years of schooling. For him to live in a fraternity and pay dues and have a lot of extra expenses, unless he could find some way to make the money himself, was out of the question. Lymie didn’t want to belong to a fraternity if Spud couldn’t and so when Bob Edwards, who had graduated the year before and was a Sigma Chi at the university, invited them both to stay at his fraternity house during Rushing Week, they wrote and declined the invitation.

  The following September Lymie and Spud, Frenchie deFresne, and Ford all sat together on the train going down to the university, which was located in a small town something over a hundred miles from Chicago. Frenchie had been captain of the football team in his senior year, and he was staying at the Sigma Chi house. Ford had invitations from the Sigma Chis, the Delts, and the Phi Gams, and he was staying at the Psi U house. Mr. Ford had been a Psi U, and so his son was prepared to be one too.

  One of the Psi U’s met him on the station platform and took his bag. Frenchie was surrounded by five upperclassmen, three of them letter men in football. Lymie and Spud saw him a few minutes later riding off in a rattletrap open car without fenders or top, and with signs painted all over it.

  They checked their suitcases in the station and took a tiny streetcar which bounced and jounced and eventually went right through the heart of the campus. Lymie and Spud got off there and looked around. The buildings seemed very large, the stretch of green lawn interminable. Before they found a place to live that they liked, they walked up and down several of the streets bordering on the campus. Even without the sign ROOMS FOR BOYS in the front window, it was easy to tell which houses had rooms for students and which were private homes. The rooming houses invariably needed a coat of paint. There were no shrubs or flower beds around them, and the grass, when there was any, was sickly from too much overhanging shade.

  Spud would have turned in at the first one they came to, but Lymie stopped him. They kept on walking until they found themselves in a slightly better neighborhood. At the first sight of the house with the mansard roof, Lymie said, “There’s the place we’re going to live!” It was painted white, and set well back from the street; and it had fretwork porches which ran around the front and sides of the house, on two stories, like the decks of a river steamboat.

  They went up on the porch and twisted the Victorian doorbell, which gave out a hollow peal. Inside the house a dog started barking. Through the frosted glass landscape in the front door they could make out the shapes of furniture crowded into the front hall, as if the people who lived here were just moving in. They heard the dog quite plainly then, and a man’s voice saying, “Pooh-Bah, for pity’s sake, it’s only the doorbell!”

  The door swung open and they were confronted by a middle-aged man with gray hair and horn-rimmed glasses which hung on a black ribbon.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “We’re looking for a room,” Lymie explained.

  The words were drowned out by the barking of the dog, a black and white spaniel trying frantically to work his way between the man’s legs.

  “Excuse me, just a moment,” he said, and grabbed the dog by the collar. “Pooh-Bah, will you be quiet? I’ll have to get a switch and whip you, do you hear? I’ll whip you good!” Then with an expression o
f extreme agitation on his face, the man turned back to Lymie and Spud. “He must have thought you were the postman. Two separate rooms, did you say? Or do you want a room together?”

  “We want to room together,” Lymie said.

  “Well,” the man said, backing away from the door, “come in and let me show you what I…. Stop it, Pooh-Bah. I won’t have this continual yiping and carrying on. These are two young gentlemen who are interested in a room, do you understand? Now one more bark out of you and I’ll shut you up in the kitchen.”

  Single file they threaded their way through the spinning wheels and drop-leaf tables, the marble-topped washstands, the Boston rockers, andirons, horsehair sofas, chairs, and whatnots that cluttered the front hall.

  “I hope you don’t mind all this,” the man said, waving at a collection of glass hats, hens, and hands. “My sign is being repainted just now so there’s no way, probably, that you’d know it from the outside, but I’m in the antique business. The first floor is my shop, as you can see. I try to keep it tidy but people bring me things and suddenly there isn’t room to breathe.”

  By the time they reached the foot of the stairs, the dog had stopped sniffing at Spud’s trousers and was making overtures of friendship. Spud bent down and scratched his ear.

  The rooms on the second floor opened one out of another, and no two of them seemed to be on the same level. The windows were large and the ceilings high, but the rooms themselves were cut up into odd unnatural shapes, apparently after the house was built.

  “I have only two vacancies at the moment,” the man said, “and one of them is too small for you, I feel sure. It’s hardly more than a cubbyhole. But this one—” He threw open a door “—if you don’t object to a north exposure and that Chinese gas station across the street, is quite respectable.”

  The room had two large windows and was furnished with two study tables, two unsightly wooden chairs, two cheap dressers, a Morris chair with a cigarette burn in the upholstery, and a small empty bookcase. The curtains were limp, and the rag rug was much too small for the floor; it was also coming unsewed in several places. Lymie looked from the pink and blue flowered wallpaper to the shades, which were green and had cracks in them. It was not the room they had imagined for themselves. It was not at all like the college room in the picture of the young collegian smoking a long-stemmed clay pipe. Spud looked inquiringly at Lymie, and then walked over to the closet with the dog following at his heels. The closet was a fair-sized one.

  “Suits me,” he said.

  “How much is it?” Lymie asked.

  “Well, I tell you,” the man said thoughtfully, “I’ve been getting fifteen for it, for one person, a charming young man who graduated last spring. But it’s really worth more than that: It’s a good-sized room, as you can see, and I don’t know that I can afford to rent it for any less than—my coal bills are really outlandish, you know, and so is the electric light. And of course you get hot water and all. Suppose I say eighteen dollars for the two of you?”

  “A week?” Lymie asked anxiously.

  “Oh dear no. I wouldn’t dream of asking eighteen dollars a week. Not for a room like this. Not with all this dreadful furniture in it anyway. Eighteen dollars a month. Nine dollars apiece for each of you. I think you’ll find, if you look around, that that’s as good as you’ll do any place. A room this size, and with a decent light and all. There’s nothing the matter with it really. The only thing you may not like is living with so many people. There are eleven people living on this floor now—all of them students, of course—and somehow, I don’t know what it is exactly, but whenever you get too many people under one roof, it always seems to lead to violence.”

  They decided to take the room.

  That night after they had finished unpacking, they went out for a walk. There was a full moon, the biggest they could ever remember seeing. They were both aware that the world had grown larger, and that they had money to spend (though not a great deal) and that no one would inquire how they spent it. They had escaped from their families, from the tyranny of home. Feeling a need to celebrate all this they turned into a drugstore and ordered vanilla ice cream with hot fudge sauce. It was so wonderful when it came that they made up their minds to have ice cream with fudge sauce every night of the school year.

  26

  The antique dealer’s name was Alfred Dehner. He occupied a large bedroom on the first floor, next to the kitchen, and slept in a four-poster bed with a soiled white canopy. There was no bathroom downstairs, so he used the one on the second floor and kept his toothbrush and tooth powder, his Victorian shaving mug, brush, and straight-edged razor, a cake of castile soap, iodine, and bicarbonate of soda in the medicine chest over the washstand. Although the boys stole from each other continually, they never touched his toilet articles.

  Within a week after Lymie and Spud had moved in, they discovered that Mr. Dehner had jacked up the price of their room—two boys had occupied it the year before, not one, and they had only paid fifteen dollars a month. What Mr. Dehner had said about violence, however, proved to be true. The genteel atmosphere created by the antique furniture ended at the foot of the stairs. On the second floor the boys came and went from the shower naked or with a towel around their hips, and anybody who felt like singing did, at the top of his lungs. The boys seldom stayed in their own rooms but wandered aimlessly all evening long, looking for somebody who would let them copy his rhetoric theme, somebody who would loan them four bits till Friday, somebody to practice jujitsu, somebody to pester. Six or seven of them would crowd into a single room and sit around on the floor, talking about football or baseball or girls. Occasionally when the racket was louder than usual, one of the boys would look up from the serial in Collier’s that he was reading and yell “Study hours!” but it never had the slightest effect. It was not intended to. It was just a remark, or perhaps even an excuse to start a fight.

  Fights developed all the time, out of nothing at all—over a fountain pen that had been borrowed and then returned without any ink in it, over how many yards had been gained by a certain end run against the University of Illinois two years before, over who broke a string in the house tennis racquet. It was nothing to come home and find two figures in the upstairs hall, rolling over and over, grunting, gouging at each other, and kicking the floor with their heels. Mostly the fighting was good-natured but sometimes it was in earnest. If you wanted to stay and watch, you could. If you didn’t, you stepped over the bodies and went on to your own room.

  In the wintertime there was no heat in the radiators after ten o’clock. As the study rooms got colder the boys put on more clothes—sweaters, bathrobes, overcoats, and mufflers, until finally they had to go to bed to get warm. The dormitory was on the top floor, under the mansard roof. There was no heat in it, and the windows were left wide open from September until late in June.

  At night, in the deepest quiet, bare feet would pad across the floor and a conversation started downstairs would go on gathering momentum until everyone in the dorm was awake and taking part in it. Sometimes two or three people in a row would stop when they came to Lymie’s bed and shake him gently and say, “Want to pee, Lymie?… Do you have to pee?” Sometimes the door would fly open and a voice would cry “Fire! Fire! Steve Rush is on fire!” and ten or eleven boys would leap from their beds and rush to the second floor bathroom for water. If the fire spread, Freeman or Pownell also had to be put out. Usually Rush’s bed was the only one that got soaked. He was a sound sleeper and also he had a mean streak in him and could be counted on to emerge from the dorm screaming and cursing and ready to kill anybody he could lay his hands on.

  The noise and the confusion bothered Spud, who was used to quiet when he studied, but Lymie felt at home in the rooming house as soon as he sat down at his desk and wrote “Lymon Peters Jr., 302 South Street,” in all his books. His desk faced one window, Spud’s faced the other. When Lymie was studying, he seldom saw the boys who walked through continually on their way to some
other room. When they tripped over the sill and started swearing, he looked up sometimes and smiled.

  If there was no other sound, if peace descended on the second floor for five minutes, somebody was sure to start making faces at the dog and the dog would whine and bark and race around wildly until Mr. Dehner came running to the foot of the stairs.

  “Are you teasing that poor animal again?” he would shriek up at them with his hand on the banister. “Really, such cruelty, such lack of any decent human feeling! If you don’t stop it I’m going to call the dean’s office! I give you my word! I’m going to call the dean’s office and I’m going to ask to speak to the dean!”

  Mr. Dehner’s voice was shrill and penetrating, and his accent was not Middle Western. The r’s were slurred. The a’s were broad and for some reason they seemed to carry better than the flat kind. Whenever Mr. Dehner started talking loudly, Lymie put down his book and listened. Mr. Dehner was nearly always agitated about something—or, as it turned out nine times out of ten, about nothing. His voice would rise higher and higher, as if he were at last in real trouble, and Lymie would tiptoe to the head of the stairs, lean over, and discover that Mr. Dehner was talking to a couple of faculty wives about Paul Revere silver, or telling them how to take alcohol rings off the tops of tables with spirits of camphor.

  The boys called him “Maggie” behind his back, but they liked him. They liked anything that was odd or extreme. They thought it was fine that Colter knew how to call pigs; that Fred Howard was a Christer and spent all his spare time at the Wesley Foundation; that Amsler’s mother drove over from Evansville once a week just to see that he was getting enough to eat; and that Freeman every now and then at dinner took out six of his upper front teeth and tossed them into the water pitcher.

  Far from holding it against Lymie that he was so thin, they bragged about him to strangers. Geraghty, who was a premedic, used to come into Lymie’s room at night and make him take off his shirt. It was as good as having a skeleton, he said; he could find and name every bone in Lymie’s body.