The Folded Leaf

by William Maxwell

  The boys took a brief dislike for Spud until he persuaded Reinhart and Pownell to go to the gym with him one afternoon and box. They nicknamed him “The Killer” and from that time on, he had his place in the gallery of freaks; he belonged.

  Most of the boys ate at a mixed boarding club which was three blocks from the rooming house. The weekly meal tickets were five dollars and if you wanted a date of a certain kind, the boarding club was an easy place to get it. The boys from “302” ate at the same two tables breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Sometimes Lymie and Spud were separated when there was only one chair vacant at each table but usually they ate together.

  In a fraternity house this would have been spotted almost instantly. One of the brothers would have said, “It’s time to break that up.” Spud and Lymie would not have been allowed even to walk to the campus together without someone stepping between them. At “302” nobody cared.

  Sometimes, while Lymie sat at his desk with a book open in front of him, Spud got himself into trouble (the crime was unspecified) and Lymie took the blame for it and gladly and willingly spent the rest of his life in prison so that Spud could go free. Then they were in a lifeboat, with only enough food and water for one person, and Lymie, waiting until Spud was asleep, slipped noiselessly over the side into the cold sea. Then they were fighting, back to back, with swords, forcing the ring of their enemies slowly toward the little door through which one of them could escape if the other went on fighting….

  Spud spent at least an hour every evening tidying up the room. He lined up his shoes and Lymie’s in a straight row on the floor of the closet. Then he rehung several pairs of trousers so that the creases were straight, and made sure that Lymie hadn’t concealed the vest of one suit inside the coat of another. The objects on top of his desk—his pencils, his blotter, his fountain pen, ruler, and bottle of ink—had to be in an exact arrangement, and the desk and bureau drawers in order. Otherwise there was no use in his trying to concentrate on calculus or German grammar.

  Not all of this tidying was love of order. Spud’s conscience wouldn’t let him go to a movie on a week night or read detective story magazines; that wasn’t what he had come down to college for. But he managed to put off studying until he had done everything else he could think of, and what with visitors and playing with the dog and other unforeseen interruptions, very often he would read two or three pages, yawn, and discover that it was ten o’clock, time to put the book down and get ready for bed.

  He and Lymie were always the first ones to go up to the dorm. In the big icy-cold bed they clung to each other, shivering like puppies, until the heat of their bodies began to penetrate through the outing flannel of their pajamas and their heavy woolen bathrobes. Lymie slept on his right side and Spud curled against him, with his fists in the hollow of Lymie’s back. In five minutes the whole bed was warmed and Spud was sound asleep. It took Lymie longer, as a rule. He lay there, relaxed and drowsy, aware of the cold outside the covers, and of the warmth coming to him from Spud, and Spud’s odor, which was not stale or sweaty or like the odor of any other person. Then he moved his right foot until the outer part of the instep came in contact with Spud’s bare toes, and from this one point of reality he swung out safely into darkness, into no sharing whatever.

  27

  The first afternoon that Sally brought Lymie home with her, she led him upstairs to Professor Forbes’s study, where her father and mother were sitting with Professor Severance. Mrs. Forbes was darning socks. A pair of tortoise-shell glasses rested insecurely on the bridge of her nose. She had Sally’s eyes, hair, and coloring but she was more self-contained. Her hair was parted in the middle and came down over her temples in two raven’s wings. Her smile was charming but also rather ambiguous.

  “I’m glad you decided to put in an appearance, Lymie,” she said. “I was beginning to wonder about you. Some of the people Sally talks about don’t exist, I’m sure. They couldn’t…. This is Mr. Severance.”

  “Mr. Peters and I are already acquainted,” Professor Severance said, nodding. “We see each other every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at two.”

  “And that’s my Pop,” Sally said.

  Professor Forbes rose and held out his hand. He was a tall, black-haired, black-eyed man with thick lips showing through his beard. He offered a box containing cigarettes and Lymie shook his head.

  “Did you notice the tree as you came in?” Mrs. Forbes asked.

  “Which tree?” Sally asked.

  “The one between the curbing and the walk.”

  “No,” Sally said, “what about it?”

  “Your father ran into it today.”

  “No!” Sally exclaimed. “How could he? It’s at least four feet from the driveway.”

  “He did it,” Mrs. Forbes said triumphantly. “Don’t ask me how…. My husband is learning to drive,” she explained for Lymie’s benefit. “He’s had several lessons and today he took the car out alone, after lunch, and as he was coming back he turned into the driveway and knocked almost all the bark off one side of that huge tree!”

  “You’re exaggerating,” Professor Forbes said, without removing his cigarette from between his lips. “The whole story is a gross exaggeration.” The cigarette ashes drifted down on the front of his smoking jacket.

  “I’m not exaggerating,” Mrs. Forbes said. “I went out and looked at it.”

  “What about the Albrechts’ bay window?” Sally asked.

  “The Albrechts’ bay window is still intact,” Mrs. Forbes said.

  Professor Severance shook with laughter.

  “Couldn’t we change the subject?” Professor Forbes asked irritably.

  Mrs. Forbes looked at him over her glasses. “Maybe we’d better,” she said, raising her eyebrows.

  “How’s Mrs. Sevvy?” Sally asked.

  “Better, thank you.” Professor Severance abruptly regained his composure. “She’s still in bed though. The doctor said another day or two wouldn’t hurt her.”

  “Mr. Severance’s mother is a most remarkable woman,” Mrs. Forbes said, turning to Lymie. “She’s seventy-three and serves the best food and gives the gayest parties of any woman in town. I hope you meet her sometime.”

  Professor Severance said, “I’ve been wanting to tell you, Mr. Peters, how much I enjoyed reading your examination paper.”

  Lymie blushed.

  “It’s so discouraging to get your own words thrown back at you twenty or thirty times,” Professor Severance went on. “I feel as if I were lecturing to a class of parrots. It’s all on account of those miserable notebooks, of course. Some day I’m going to collect them all and throw them out of the window.”

  “You might as well throw the students with them,” Professor Forbes said.

  “Some of them are too large,” Professor Severance said, “and too athletic.”

  “What about my examination paper?” Sally said, leering at him. “Wasn’t it original, Sevvy?”

  Professor Severance cleared his throat and then beamed at her affectionately. “Yes, my dear,” he said, “almost wholly original. My one—ah—hesitation about it was that there seemed to be an insufficient acquaintance with the subject matter of the course.”

  “There,” Sally said, turning to her mother, “you see?”

  “Only too plainly, I’m afraid,” Mrs. Forbes said. She excused herself and left the room.

  A heavy silence descended. Sally was embarrassed by her mother’s remark, and Professor Forbes had come to depend so on his wife’s small talk that he had none of his own to offer. Politeness prevented Professor Severance from continuing the subject they had been discussing when Sally and Lymie appeared—Spenser’s indebtedness to the Orlando Furioso—since it would probably have no interest for them.

  Lymie’s eyes wandered around the room. The ceiling was low and sloped down to the long bookcases on two sides. There were Holbein prints on the walls and a colored map of Paris. Professor Forbes’s desk was placed near two small front windows. Next
to it was a large table with a lamp on it, and more books piled helter-skelter, some of them in danger of sliding off onto the floor. Lymie’s glance came to rest on a large Chinese lacquer screen.

  “That’s a beautiful thing, isn’t it?” Professor Severance said. “It’s all very well about not coveting your neighbor’s wife and his she-asses and his camels but when it comes to objets d’art, I find myself wavering sometimes.” He got up and crossed the room so that he could examine the screen more closely. “Modern?” he inquired, over his shoulder.

  “My brother-in-law sent it to us,” Professor Forbes said noncommittally.

  “The one who travels so much?” Professor Severance asked.

  Professor Forbes nodded. “He got it in a hock shop in Manila.”

  “It’s very beautiful,” Professor Severance said.

  The lacquer screen had three panels. On one side, the side facing the room, were white flowers which were like roses but larger and stiffer. Peonies, Lymie decided. The flowers were in square blue vases and the vases rested on carved teakwood stands, against a yellow background. Professor Severance folded the screen, turned it around, and opened it. On the reverse was a company of Chinese horsemen charging at an angle across all three panels.

  The fat-rumped horsemen rode over pink flames and blue curlicues representing smoke. Their long, loose sleeves whipped from their elbows. Their tunics divided, revealing mail leggings and bare feet. The air was thick with arrows. Some of the horsemen rode with their lances set, their shoulders braced for the shock; others with daggers upraised, knees digging into their horses’ sides. Here and there a rider twisted or rose in the saddle, and one of them hung from the stirrups with a spear coming out through the center of his back. Their faces were brick-red or deathly pale. All had identical thinly drawn mustaches and chin tufts, and expressions denoting fierceness or cruelty or cunning. The only calm face belonged to a severed head that had rolled under the feet of the horses and was gazing upward serenely toward heaven. The galloping horses shared in the frenzy of the riders. There were fat white horses, dappled horses, gold horses with the heads of dragons, ivory horses with gold manes and hoofs and tails, blue horses, pink horses, horses with scales and frantic, fishlike faces.

  “I’d like to have known the man who made this,” Professor Severance said. “The one who had the idea of putting still life on one side—those wonderfully placid white flowers—and warriors on the other.”

  “I assume it is a traditional juxtaposition,” Professor Forbes said.

  “No doubt, but somebody must have thought of it for the first time. The mutual attraction of gentleness and violence, don’t you see, Mr. Peters? The brutal body and the calm philosophic mind.”

  “Don’t talk to me about philosophic minds,” Mrs. Forbes said. She came in carrying a tray with a silver teapot on it, teacups, a silver sugar and creamer, slices of lemon, and bread and butter cut paper-thin. “If I ever marry again it’s going to be to a plumber. I’ve been trying for two days to get a man to come look at the hot water heater in the basement.”

  “Plumbing,” Professor Severance said reproachfully, “is pure deductive reasoning.”

  “With a leak in it,” Mrs. Forbes said.

  He turned the screen around so that the flowers were showing as before. Then he sat down and with a curious intentness watched Mrs. Forbes arranging the cups and saucers on the tray.

  “Sugar?” she asked, turning to Lymie. “Lemon?”

  “No thank you,” he said, both times.

  “A purist,” Mrs. Forbes said. She poured Professor Severance’s tea without asking him how he liked it.

  28

  The night of the sorority dance it took Spud over an hour to dress. He and Lymie stood under the shower by turns, soaping themselves all over and washing the soap off again time after time, as if by this symbolical means they were getting rid of certain adolescent fears which had to do with women. Spud handed Lymie the soap and the nailbrush, and bent over with his hands braced against his knees. Lymie understood what was expected of him. He scrubbed until the skin from the base of Spud’s neck to the end of his spine was red and glowing, and then turned around and submitted his own back to the same rough treatment.

  When they were partly dressed, Spud got out the shoe polish and a rag and made Lymie stand with one foot on a chair, and then the other. Spud’s shoes, already polished, were waiting with wooden shoe trees in them on the closet floor. He put them on, after he had finished with Lymie’s, and tied the laces in a double knot. Then he attempted to cut his fingernails, which were thick and very tough. He could manage the fingers of his left hand without much difficulty but when he switched over, the nail scissors felt awkward and wrong. He made an impatient face, and Lymie took the scissors from him and finished the job.

  Five whole minutes were consumed in picking out a tie for Spud, who had any number of them that he was especially fond of. The choice narrowed down finally to a blue bow tie with white polka dots and a knitted four-in-hand. Spud forced Lymie to pick out the one he thought Spud ought to wear, and Lymie chose the four-in-hand. Spud wore the bow tie, after explaining to Lymie all the reasons why it was better for this occasion, for a dance, than Lymie’s choice. The bow tie had to be tied three times before the result was acceptable, and between the second and third attempt Spud decided that his collar was wrinkled, and changed to another white shirt. At nine o’clock he finished arranging the handkerchief in his breast pocket and was satisfied, or nearly satisfied, with what he saw in the mildewed mirror over his dresser. Lymie, who had been waiting for twenty minutes, said “Come on, let’s go.” A sudden wave of excitement carried both of them down the stairs, through the clutter in the front hall, and outside. The night air was crisp and cool, the November sky was blossoming with stars.

  The sorority house was on the other side of the campus. From “302” the shortest way was through the university forestry, a narrow strip of woods which had sidewalks running through it and which at night was lighted at frequent intervals by street lamps. When the two boys emerged from the wood they were on the campus. The walk led them toward a series of new red brick Georgian buildings, each with dozens of false chimneys outlined against the starry sky. On the other side of the campus they passed a large unfinished building that was still under scaffolding—the new dormitory for men. As they came near the sorority house, they heard music.

  “In Wisconsin,” Spud said, “my sister used to go to dances at the lake club. She was fifteen and I was only nine or ten. They had dances every Saturday night. Sometimes my mother and father drove over in the car and watched, but I had to be in bed, because the dances didn’t start until after nine o’clock. And I used to lie there on the screen porch and listen to the dance music. I used to wish I was older so I could be over there across the lake, like my sister. I used to wonder sometimes if I was ever going to be old enough to go to the lake club dances. Time seemed too slow then. One day lasted a lot longer than a week seems to now.” Lymie put his right hand inside the pocket of Spud’s coat, a thing he often did when they were walking together. Spud’s fingers interlaced with his.

  “Just when I was almost old enough to start going to the lake club dances,” Spud continued, “we moved to Chicago. I don’t know whether they still have them any more or not. I guess they probably do. They were nice. You could see the clubhouse through the trees, all lighted up with Japanese lanterns. And the music came over the water, the dance music. It was very plain. I used to lie awake listening to it.”

  Curtains were drawn across every window of the sorority house, upstairs and down. The two small lights on either side of the front door seemed brighter than usual. As Lymie and Spud turned in at the front walk, they could hear the orchestra playing “Oh, Katarina” rapturously. While they stood by the front door trying to make up their minds whether, since this was not like any ordinary evening, they ought to ring the bell, a boy came up the walk whistling, opened the door, and walked in. They went in after hi
m.

  There were a dozen boys standing in the front hall. Armstrong was among them. Lymie had never seen him anywhere except at the gymnasium and he wondered what would happen now if Armstrong, in his double-breasted dark blue suit, were to brace himself and do a handstand on the polished floor. He showed no signs of wanting to. He looked detached, very much at ease, very sure of himself. He recognized Spud with a slight flicker of surprise and spoke to him. Spud nodded coldly and went on to the coatroom, with Lymie in his wake.

  All the hooks in the coatroom were taken and there were piles of coats on the floor. Spud took two of the coats off their hooks, dropped them on the floor, and hung his coat and Lymie’s where they had been hanging. Then he combed his hair in front of the mirror in the lavatory, straightened his butterfly bow tie, and squared his shoulders until his coat collar came to rest against his neck. With his hand in the small of Lymie’s back, pushing him, he came out into the hall once more.

  On the opposite side of the stairs from the coatroom was another closet, the same size, where the house telephone was, and a set of electric bells which rang in the study rooms upstairs. Lymie pressed the ones marked Davison: two long, one short and Forbes: one short, one long. Then he came out into the hall again and stood next to Spud at the foot of the stairs. He had managed, during the walk across the campus, to mar the polish on his shoes. His long thin wrists hung down out of his sleeves, and his cowlick, that he had spent so much time plastering down with water, was sticking straight up. He stood stiffly with his back to the wide gilt mirror and didn’t discover any of these flaws in his appearance.

  Armstrong had gone now. His girl had come down the stairs in a white dress and he was dancing with her in the long living room, which was swept bare of rugs and furniture. The light everywhere downstairs was softened. There were yellow chrysanthemums on the white mantelpiece, and lighted candles. Oak leaves concealed the chandeliers. The dancers swung past each other performing intricate steps, their eyes half closed, their heads sometimes touching.