The Folded Leaf

by William Maxwell

  To pass the time while they were waiting, the boys in the front hall drew handkerchiefs out of their hip pockets and mopped their foreheads, or produced silver cigarette cases with an air of boredom, of disdain.

  Lymie was expecting Hope and Sally to come down the stairs together, but Hope came first and alone. She was wearing a brown flowered chiffon dress that Lymie, who knew nothing about women’s clothes, realized instantly was not right for her. It was not at all like the dresses the other girls were wearing.

  Spud pulled Lymie’s pants leg up a couple of inches in order to embarrass him, and although the effort succeeded, Hope didn’t notice. She handed Lymie a small enamel compact, a lipstick, a tiny lace handkerchief, and said gravely, “Put these in your pocket.” As they moved toward the entrance to the living room, the music ended. The couples stopped dancing and waited, in the subdued light. The girls were smiling with their eyes, or chattering. The boys reached inside their coats and drew their shirt sleeves up. Then, remembering where they were, they looked bored. The chaperons were in an alcove off the living room, playing bridge. The orchestra—a piano player, a drummer, saxophone, clarinet, trumpet, and slide trombone—was in another alcove partially concealed by potted palms. They made tentative noises with their instruments and then were silent. The dancers moved across the floor toward the dining room, toward the punch bowl, which was under the eye of Mrs. Sisson, the housemother. So far it had not been spiked. Lymie and Hope moved into a corner where they would not be noticed.

  “People ought to dress up oftener,” Hope said. “I’ve just decided that. It makes them nicer to live with. I stood in the upstairs hall and watched the girls go down.” The girls whose fathers had not retired from business, she meant; the girls who could have new clothes whenever they wanted them. Aloud she said, “They looked so lovely, so unlike themselves,” and raised her chin slightly, for she knew how she looked. She had seen herself in a full-length mirror in Bernice Crawford’s room. Bernice had said, “You can’t wear that, Davison. It doesn’t look right on you!” and had offered to loan her a black dress with gold clips and a narrow gold belt, but the black dress was too tight. As Hope drew it off over her head she prayed that Lymie, who was always absent-minded anyway, would forget to come; that she herself would have an attack of appendicitis and be rushed to the hospital; that something, some merciful intervention would save her from having to go down the stairs. She decided to leave a note for Lymie and sneak out the back way, down the fire escape, and spend the rest of the evening in the Ship’s Lantern, but it was already too late. Her bell rang, two longs and one short, as she was reaching into her closet for a coat.

  “You look very nice tonight,” she said to Lymie and before he had to answer her, the orchestra swung into the beginning of “Blue Skies.” He put his arm around her and they started dancing. They were soon surrounded by other couples and in a moment Spud and Sally danced by. Spud danced very well and he looked smooth on the floor, Lymie thought. Spud didn’t see them. His face when he danced was an unseeing mask. But Sally turned her head and called “Hello, Lymie, old socks!” She was wearing a peach-colored satin dress and her dark hair was piled on top of her head in a way that changed the shape of her face, made her look older, and emphasized her cheekbones and her wonderful dark brown velvet eyes. Lymie stepped on Hope’s foot and apologized.

  “Isn’t Forbes something!” Hope exclaimed.

  Lymie nodded without hearing what she had said. Here in this long dimly lighted room, where everyone had a price mark attached to him, he recognized Sally’s value for the first time.

  29

  Lymie got home before Spud and passed through Dick Reinhart’s room on the way to his own. Reinhart was in a sagging overstuffed chair and his feet, braced against his study table, were higher than his head. He looked up from Steve Rush’s copy of Psychopathia Sexualis and said, “Well, Don Juan, did you have yourself a time?”

  “I guess so,” Lymie said. His mind was churning with images and excitement, and he wanted to talk to someone but not to Reinhart. “How late is it?” he asked.

  “Quarter to one,” Reinhart said. “Time all Phi Betes were in bed.” His eyes were already searching for the place where he had stopped reading: CASE 138. Z., age thirty-six, wholesale merchant; parents were said to have been healthy; physical and mental development normal; irrelevant children’s diseases; at fourteen onanism of his own accord; began to….

  Reinhart looked up from the page and saw that Lymie was still standing there. “You ought to read this book sometime,” he said. “It’s very interesting. I used to think I was a regular heller but compared to some of these guys I’m not so bad I guess. I could teach Sunday school if I wanted to.”

  Lymie went on to his own room and undressed. Then with his bathrobe pulled around him and his winter overcoat over his knees, he sat down in Spud’s Morris chair and tried to read The Eve of St. Agnes, which Professor Severance had assigned for Monday. He got as far as the owl that for all his feathers was a-cold and then the page blurred, the words ran together like water. When his eyes focused again, he was looking at the row of suits, his and Spud’s, hanging from the pole in the closet.

  Lymie got up and went over to the closet and reached for the two victrola records which he kept on the shelf, under Spud’s R.O.T.C. hat and spurs. He turned out the light and went into Pownell’s room, which was also dark, and put one of the records on Pownell’s victrola. The record was “Tales from the Vienna Woods” played by the Philadelphia Orchestra. As a rule he only played his records on Sunday morning early, when there was nobody around who might object to classical music. Now he drew a chair up and sat with his head between the doors of the machine. The room filled with waltzers, with girls turning and turning to the music, and he was in love with all of them, with their soft white arms, their small breasts, their dark eyes and their shadowy hair, which became Sally’s hair, her coal-black bangs. She turned and smiled at him deliriously, and the peach-colored skirt flared out like the petals of a flower.

  Lymie played the record twice and then turned the victrola off and sat with his forehead resting on the hard arm of the chair. There was a strange ache in his chest which he seemed to remember from a long time before, from when he was a child maybe. He sighed and then a few minutes later he sighed again.

  Colter and Howard came in and passed through the room without turning the light on and without discovering him. Spud came home. Lymie recognized his step on the stairs and raised his head to listen. Spud stopped in Reinhart’s room and Lymie heard them talking in low voices. A shoe dropped. Lymie was about to get up and go join them when he heard Spud say quite distinctly, almost as if he were complaining: “I’ve seen it happen to a lot of guys but I somehow never thought it would happen to me.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Reinhart said.

  “The funny thing is,” Spud said, “I don’t know what to do about it.”

  “You don’t have to do anything,” Reinhart said. “You’re hooked.”

  Lymie, listening, felt a double twinge of jealousy. The words could only mean one thing, no matter how you twisted them. And since it had to be that way, the least Spud could have done was to tell him about it first, not Dick Reinhart.

  While Spud was in the bathroom brushing his teeth, Lymie crept up the stairs. He was, to all appearances, sound asleep when Spud crawled in beside him.

  30

  Dick Reinhart was from South Chicago. When he was two years old his father died and about a year later his mother married again. Dick’s stepfather didn’t like children and so he was sent to live with his grandmother, a devout German woman, who used to sit beside him at the kitchen table and feed him from a big spoon, long after he was old enough to manage for himself. Although she had been dead for years now, he could still hear her voice saying, Mund auf … Mund zu … kauen. … The year he was seventeen he fell in with a gang of hoodlums who were caught breaking into a freight car one winter night. The other boys took to their heels and got
away, but Dick didn’t run fast enough, and the judge sentenced him to six months in the state reformatory at St. Charles, Illinois. He made no effort to cover up the fact that he had been there, but when the boys at “302” tried to find out what it was like in the reformatory, he wouldn’t tell them. He didn’t seem to want to talk about it.

  After he finished high school he got a job with a construction company in Cicero, Illinois, and was made foreman of a sewer gang. The men worked in continual danger of being buried under a cave-in. They were sullen and hard to handle. He never dared turn his back on them, for fear he would be hit over the head with a shovel, but he liked his job, even so, and he made friends with an Italian family who lived in the neighborhood. After the day was over he would sit in their kitchen drinking homemade wine with them.

  When he had been working about six months, a man named Warner, who was in the office of the construction company, took a liking to him and taught him how to do elementary surveying.Warner was in his late forties and had been divorced twice. His second wife had been a parachute jumper and Warner was in love with her, he told Reinhart, but she tried two-timing him, so he walked out on her. When Warner found out that Reinhart liked to drink, he started taking Reinhart around with him at night. Warner could hold any amount of liquor without showing it, and he knew all the speakeasies in and around Chicago, and the women were crazy about him. No matter where they went, there were always three of them—Reinhart on one side of Warner and a woman on the other. He used to introduce Reinhart as his son, and he even talked about adopting him, but Reinhart never thought he would actually do it.

  All this part of his life Reinhart told Spud one night when they were both staying up late in order to study for exams. Spud didn’t get much studying done, but he didn’t mind; he was finding out about life.

  One day, Reinhart said, Warner called him into his office and asked him if he wouldn’t like to go back to school. Unless he did, Warner said, there was no real future ahead of him in the construction business. He needed mathematics and a general background in engineering. Warner offered to give him the money for his books, tuition and room rent. The rest Reinhart would have to do for himself. The money was to be in the form of a loan, without interest. Reinhart could pay it back after he was out of college.

  That fall he came down to the university and got a job in a drugstore, behind the soda fountain. There was no money in it; he worked five hours a day in exchange for his meals. Within a week he was pledged to a fraternity. It had a name like Beta Theta Pi, only one of the letters was wrong. The house was new and built of red brick with two-story white columns along the front of it, the architect having arrived at a compromise between the new Georgian architecture of the south campus and a Mississippi mansion. The house was out near the stadium, where land was cheaper. That meant a ten-minute walk to and from the buildings on the campus. The older fraternity houses were all within three or four blocks of the university. They had been built twenty years before, and they were not very impressive from the outside, but then they didn’t have to be.

  Reinhart had had no intention of joining a fraternity. What happened was that a kid who worked with him behind the soda fountain asked him to his fraternity house for a meal. The food was good and it was a beautiful warm night and that week there happened to be a full moon. After dinner a boy from Terre Haute played the banjo, somebody else played the piano, and the brothers stood around on the terrace outside the fraternity house, singing. It was exactly what Reinhart had always thought college would be like, and after three days of working behind a soda fountain, it made his eyes fill with tears.

  A group of the boys took him indoors later and led him to a leather sofa in front of the big fireplace, where he could get a good look at the trophies on the mantel. When they produced a pledge button and asked him if he’d like to be one of them, he said he would, right away. He was afraid that if he hesitated, they’d change their minds about wanting him. Afterwards he realized that he ought to have asked Warner about it first. The trouble was, Warner had been a Phi Gam when he was in school and without seeing this beautiful new house or having a chance to get acquainted with the brothers, he was almost certain to think that Reinhart had made a mistake.

  As soon as Rushing Week was over, the boy with the banjo cleared out. So did several others. They had graduated the year before, it seemed, but that fact wasn’t made clear until now. The brothers who were left were not the ones Reinhart had liked especially. They were athletes, most of them, who had done well enough in high school to get their names and sometimes their pictures in the papers, but after they came to college they pulled a tendon or got water on the knee or became ineligible because of their grades. They stayed ineligible year after year and the greater part of the time they slept. Whenever Reinhart passed through the living room he found at least one of them stretched out on a leather couch, sound asleep with the radio going full blast in his ear.

  Reinhart roomed with a senior who needed two and a half hours to graduate and was out tomcatting every night. Reinhart never saw anything of him; only his clothes strewn from one end of the study room to the other when Reinhart came down in the morning. The clothes, of course, had to be picked up, and there were pledge duties. Even though Reinhart was working and didn’t have as much free time as the other freshmen, he had to sweep the front walk one week and the next week he had to see that the grate fire in the living room didn’t go out, or to take the mail down to the railroad station at eleven-thirty at night, or to get up at six and go through the dorm waking the others at fifteen-minute intervals until seven-thirty. On Saturdays he had to wash windows and wax floors and clean study rooms with the other freshmen. The owner of the drugstore made him work longer hours than they had originally agreed upon, and he got so little sleep that the moment he opened a book his eyelids grew heavy. He began to fall behind in his engineering subjects.

  Also, there was one sophomore who made trouble for all the pledges. They’d be in their study rooms after dinner and the sophomore would stick his head in, hoping that they’d gone out of the room and left the light on; or he’d want them to go on errands for him. He thought up more errands and gave more black marks than any other upperclassman in the fraternity. He seemed to have a particular dislike for Reinhart. One night he came into Reinhart’s room, backed him up against the wall, and gave him a lecture on his attitude: “Reinhart, you’re one hell of a good guy, or could be if you weren’t so goddam lazy. You’re the laziest human being—I guess you’re a human—that I’ve ever seen or heard of. You’re so lazy….” There was a great deal more of this, and Reinhart stood it all patiently. When the sophomore got through talking he pulled Reinhart across the hall into his own room and said to get busy and clean it up. Reinhart saw, in a bloody rage, that it was at least a two hours’ job. The sophomore’s room had been cleaned on Saturday and now you could hardly wade through it. He told the sophomore that he couldn’t clean the room up; that he had to study. The sophomore gave him five more black marks for disobedience. When Reinhart said, “You dirty son of a bitch, clean it up yourself!” the sophomore took a poke at him and Reinhart laid him flat.

  At this point in the story, Spud rolled his eyes and rocked with pleasure.

  Half an hour later, Reinhart said, the upperclassmen held a special meeting in the chapter room, which was in the basement. When it was over, two of them came into his room and told him to be downstairs in front of the fireplace at quarter of eleven, for a paddling party. He took the pledge button out of his lapel and handed it to them, and the next day he moved into Mr. Dehner’s rooming house, where there were no pledge duties, and where a sophomore was no better than anybody else.

  Warner continued to send him money regularly all through his freshman year, and when summer vacation came around, Reinhart went back to his old job. Warner got married, very suddenly, on the Fourth of July, and his wife, a thin, rather nervous blonde, didn’t like Reinhart. She thought he was a bad influence on Warner. In a mo
ment of confidence he told Reinhart, but it would have been better if he hadn’t, because Reinhart didn’t like Warner’s new wife very much either, and the more he saw of her the less he liked her. When Warner wanted him to go out drinking with them, on a Saturday night, Reinhart made excuses and finally Warner stopped asking him.

  Toward the end of the summer Reinhart noticed, or thought he noticed, a change in the way Warner acted toward him. He made a very slight mistake on the job, something that was easily corrected and that ordinarily Warner wouldn’t have paid any attention to. They had an argument about it, and Reinhart lost his temper. He apologized the next day, and Warner told him to forget it, but there was a speculative gleam in his eye which Reinhart saw several times after that. Apparently he thought Reinhart was trying to put something over on him.

  Before Reinhart went back to school, Warner told him that his wife was going to have a baby. The baby was born early in April. It was a boy and Reinhart was very happy about it. He sent Warner a telegram, which Warner didn’t answer for about ten days. The letter was typewritten and had been dictated to one of the stenographers in the office. At the bottom of the page, Warner had added a postscript in ink: he was very sorry but he had had a good many extra expenses lately and he wouldn’t be able to send any more money.

  It was very hot that April and the third floor was like an oven. The boys dragged their mattresses down to the second-story porch and slept there, until one night Reinhart, full of liquor, rolled off the porch and broke his arm. He could easily have broken his neck. The next day the news of the accident was all over the campus and cars kept driving by with people hanging out to look. The other boys were proud, naturally. It gave their rooming house prestige. The first time Reinhart left for the campus with his arm in a sling, five of the boys just happened to be leaving at that moment and they surrounded him like a military escort of honor. For a long time afterward, people walking by “302” would say, “That’s the place where the boy fell off the roof.”