The Folded Leaf

by William Maxwell

  “Is that so?” Sally said.

  “He likes Spud. He told me so. He thinks Spud is a very good guy. I do too, Sally. Only I think it’s too bad that he doesn’t belong to a fraternity. For your sake, I mean.”

  “I’ll manage,” Sally said.

  “I don’t mean that. Of course you’ll manage. All I’m trying to say is that Spud ought to belong to a fraternity. I think it would be very good for him.”

  With her lips curling slightly, Sally said, “And very good for the fraternity.”

  When Lymie appeared on the top floor of the gymnasium later that afternoon, Spud and Armstrong were boxing. They went at it easy, and after a few minutes Army said that he had had enough, and pulled the gloves off and went back to the iron rings. Spud turned to the punching bag for a while and then he walked up to Lymie, took the rope away from him, and held out the pair of gloves that Armstrong had been using. “Here,” he said, “put these on.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” Lymie asked.

  “Go on.” Spud unlaced one of the gloves. “Put your hand in here and shut up.”

  “I don’t want to box with you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t.”

  When the glove was on Lymie’s hand, Spud wrapped the strings twice around Lymie’s thin wrist and then tied them. “Hold out your other hand,” he said.

  “You’ll forget,” Lymie said, “and the first thing you know they’ll be sending for the pulmotor.”

  “No, I won’t, Lymie. Honestly. I’ll take it easy. I promise. I just need somebody to practice with.”

  “Well, keep off my feet, whatever you do,” Lymie said, and looked down at the gloves with distaste. Spud put on another pair and walked across the floor to the low parallel bars and held out his, gloves for a sophomore named Hughes to tie.

  “Now,” he said, when he came back. “You want to fight with one foot flat, see? And your weight on the ball of the other foot. Or you can shuffle—the idea being that you always stand so that you can move somewhere else in a hurry.”

  “I see,” Lymie said earnestly, and stood with one stockinged foot flat and his weight on the ball of the other.

  “Watch me,” Spud said. “Hold your arms like this and remember you’ve got to cover yourself no matter what happens.” He stepped out of position and shifted Lymie’s tense arms so that the elbows were in close to his sides and the gloves one in front of the other.

  “Something tells me I’m going to get killed,” Lymie said.

  “Nothing’s going to happen to you. Stop worrying.”

  “Okay,” Lymie said, and led with his right and followed with his left and caught Spud almost but not quite unprepared.

  “That’s fine. Always get the first punch, if you can, for the psychological effect…. No, cover yourself…. That’s it… there…. No … you’re wide open, Lymie…. See, I could have taken your head off if I’d really wanted to. I could have knocked you cold. Keep covered … that’s it… that’s it….”

  Stepping backward, and then backward again, trying vainly to defend himself from the incessant rain of blows, Lymie tripped over his own feet and sat down.

  “Did you hurt yourself?” Spud asked.

  Lymie shook his head and got up again.

  “You forgot what I told you about keeping on the balls of your feet. Keep moving, as if you were dancing almost.”

  When they stopped to rest, Lymie leaned against the wall, panting, his face red from the exertion. Spud turned away to the punching bag, and let fly all the energy he had been so carefully restraining. For a moment it seemed likely that the bag would break from its moorings and go flying across the gymnasium.

  “Time,” Spud said.

  Lymie advanced from the wall to meet him. In the second round Spud tapped him on the nose harder than he had meant to. He dropped his arms immediately and said, “Oh God, Lymie, did I hurt you?”

  Instead of stopping to feel the injury, Lymie lost his head and sailed into Spud with such a sudden and unexpected fury that he backed Spud against the brick wall. In Lymie’s eyes was the clear light of murder. Spud made no effort to defend himself and after a few seconds Lymie stopped, confused by the lack of opposition. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  Spud turned and leaned against the wall and laughed until he was weak. When he had gathered himself together again he saw that it was not Lymie’s nose but his feelings that had been hurt. Spud put his arms around him and said, “There, Lymie, old socks, I didn’t mean to laugh at you, honestly. I just couldn’t help myself. The look on your face was so funny. You were doing right well, though. Fine, in fact. If you keep on like that, you’ll be the next featherweight champion of the world. All you need is a few lessons.”

  But Lymie wouldn’t box any more. He pulled the gloves off without bothering to untie them, and returned to the skipping rope. Later, after Spud was dressed and as they were leaving the gymnasium, Armstrong, whose locker was on the other side of the swimming pool, caught up with them and began talking about Christmas vacation, which was three weeks off. His remarks were addressed exclusively to Spud, although he had seen Lymie just as often upstairs and knew that they roomed together. Spud answered in monosyllables, and Lymie walked along with his hands in his pockets and his eyes off to the side—the nearest he could come to deafness, dumbness, blindness, and utter nonexistence.

  He had to wait two days for Spud’s reaction to these rather pointed attentions. The reference, when it came, was oblique, but Lymie was used to that. They were in their room studying, after supper, and although Spud’s head was bent over his German reader, he had not turned a page for some time. When he was actually studying, you could always tell it. His eyes went back and forth continually between the day’s assignment and the vocabulary at the back of the book.

  “Do you think,” he began, in a faraway voice, “—do you think Sally would like me better if I belonged to a fraternity?”

  33

  During Christmas vacation Mr. Peters’ cousin, Miss Georgiana Binkerd, who was a very wealthy woman, came through Chicago. She had agreed to pay half the expense of Lymie’s college education (Mr. Peters paid the other half) and now felt a proprietary interest in him. The three and a half hours that she allowed for having lunch with Mr. Peters and Lymie was ample, but it did not allow her to find out very much about them. From the fact that she had her hat on and was waiting when the taxi driver rang the bell in the vestibule of the apartment building, one might gather that Miss Binkerd had arrived in Chicago with her conclusions already formed (Mr. Peters was the black sheep of the family) and wished to leave with them intact.

  Miss Binkerd was in her late forties and there was nothing about her to suggest that she had ever been any younger, but Mr. Peters could remember her when she was nine and had a brace on her right leg. Georgiana Binkerd’s mother and his mother were half sisters, and as a boy he had been taken to visit the Ohio relatives every summer. His two little cousins used to tease him because he stuttered, and since they were both older than he was and both girls (so he couldn’t hit them when he felt like it), they always got the best of every argument. At that time they lived outside of Cincinnati in a big square yellow brick farmhouse with a cupola on it and a double row of Scotch pine trees leading from the road to the front porch. What Mr. Peters remembered best about this place was the long room which took up half of the downstairs and had parquet floors. It was intended as a formal drawing room but his uncle used it as a place to store feed. At night the rats ran all over the house, inside the walls. As a boy Mr. Peters used to lie awake listening to them and imagining that he had a shotgun in his hands.

  He liked his aunt but he was afraid of his uncle, who had a beard and wore a gold collar button in his shirt on Sundays and didn’t like children. During those years his uncle was a farmer. Later he made a fortune in railroad stock, lost it, and made another fortune in a patent medicine which was still on sale in drugstores, with his uncle’s name and pictu
re on it. They lived now—his aunt and Georgiana and her sister Carrie—in a big ugly house in the best residential section of Cincinnati. Mr. Peters had visited them there also, after he was grown. By that time the old man was stripped of his authority. No matter what he said, his wife and daughters corrected him. Under the guise of caring for his health, they had taken complete charge of his mind, his habits, the way he dressed, what he ate, his very life. When it finally dawned on the old man that he was never going to get any of these things back, he died. The women were still flourishing.

  Georgiana Binkerd looked like her father except that he had been a large rawboned man and she was a small thin woman with pale selfish blue eyes that bulged slightly behind her rimless glasses. She had had infantile paralysis as a child and one leg was several inches shorter than the other and had no flesh on it. She was thrown off balance at every step and she walked with a nervous lurching which both Mr. Peters and Lymie, as they held the vestibule doors open for her, ignored. When they reached the cab, she turned to Lymie and put her clawlike hands on his shoulders and kissed him.

  “Good-by, my dear! I wish you were my own child,” she said, and with some awkwardness got her crippled body into the taxi.

  Mr. Peters stepped in after her and closed the door from the inside. “The Union Station,” he said, leaning forward and addressing the driver. From the tone of his voice one would have thought that it was he who had a train to make, not Miss Binkerd. She let it pass.

  “Good-by, God bless you!” she called to Lymie, and he called back “Good-by, Cousin Georgiana,” from the curbing. Though he continued to wave until the cab turned the corner, his mind was not on her but on her baum marten neckpiece, which was very lifelike. The cab turned south on Sheridan Road, then east for two blocks at Devon Avenue, then south again. Mr. Peters’ mind was on the thick roll of American Express traveler’s checks which he knew to be in Miss Binkerd’s black leather purse.

  “I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed this visit with you, Lymon,” she said, swaying with the movement of the cab.

  “It’s been mighty nice having you,” Mr. Peters said. His hand went toward the pocket where he kept his cigarettes, but he checked himself in time. “I’ve enjoyed every minute of it,” he said. “And Lymie has too.”

  “He looks like his mother,” Miss Binkerd said.

  Mr. Peters nodded.

  “I never saw Alma but the once, when I came for your mother’s funeral,” Miss Binkerd said. “But I remember her. She was a fine woman.”

  “She was indeed,” Mr. Peters said. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

  “It makes me cough,” Miss Binkerd said.

  Mr. Peters’ hand withdrew from his pocket.

  “There’s one thing I’d like to say to you,” Miss Binkerd announced impressively. “And that is, you deserve a great deal of credit for the way you’ve brought up your son all alone without any help.”

  “Thank you,” Mr. Peters said.

  “I watched him all through luncheon. He has very good manners. He could go among people anywhere and know what to do. The only thing that isn’t as all right as it might be is his posture.”

  “I know,” Mr. Peters said gloomily. “I nag him about it but it doesn’t seem to do any good. He just won’t stand up straight. Also, he’s not strong, as you can see. He needs to be outdoors more. I’ve thought some lately of joining a country club if I can lay my hands on the money to do it. Golf is very good exercise and I could probably manage to play with him every week end during the summer months. It would do him a world of good, if I could only arrange it.”

  The sudden hard light that came into Miss Binkerd’s eyes was not a reflection from her glasses. She had had a great deal of experience with remarks which could, if followed up, lead to a direct request for financial assistance.

  “Lymie’s a very nice boy the way he is,” she said. “I wouldn’t try to change him if I were you.”

  “Oh I don’t,” Mr. Peters said hastily. “I just meant that—”

  “I’ve never been sold on country clubs. Cousin Will Binkerd belongs to one and I hear that the men drink in the locker rooms.”

  “Lymie wouldn’t be likely to do that,” Mr. Peters said. “He’s not the type.”

  “No, I can see he isn’t,” Miss Binkerd said. “But even so. With boys you can’t ever be sure. The quiet, well-behaved ones often cause their parents the most misery and heartache before they’re through.”

  Mr. Peters suspected that this remark was directed obliquely at him, although as a boy he had not been conspicuously quiet or well-behaved.

  “When Lymie was little,” he said, “he used to have a terrible temper, and also he was very jealous. Especially of his mother. If he thought she was paying too much attention to some other child, he’d fly into a rage and she couldn’t do a thing with him. Now that he’s grown he never gives me the slightest trouble, except that I can’t teach him the value of money. Slips right through his fingers.”

  “He comes by it honestly,” Miss Binkerd said. This time there was no doubt whom the remark was directed toward. She peered out of the window of the taxi and said, “Is that the Edge water Beach Hotel?”

  Mr. Peters said that it was.

  There was a silence which lasted for perhaps a minute and a half, and didn’t seem to bother Miss Binkerd in the least. Mr. Peters, casting around uneasily in his mind for some way of ending it, said, “I wish we could have seen more of you—not just between trains.”

  “I know,” she said. “Next time I’ll pay you a real visit, Lymon. But it’s a long trip and I’m not as young as I once was, and it’s hard for me to get around. I could have taken the sleeper from Kansas City to St. Louis, and not had to change stations. But I haven’t seen Lymie since he was a year old, and Mother was curious to know how you were getting along.”

  “Well, you tell her we’re getting along just fine,” Mr. Peters said.

  “I will,” Miss Binkerd said, nodding. “I’ll tell her. And she’ll probably ask if you’re still as handsome as you used to be. In that case I can fib a little.”

  She laughed and leaned back, happy that she had at last repaid him for calling her a spider when they were children, thirty-five years before.

  34

  The faces Spud saw around him were healthy, handsome, and intelligent but not too intelligent. There were no freaks in Armstrong’s fraternity, nobody that you would ever need to be ashamed of.

  The dining room walls were of solid oak paneling. The drapes were a plain dark red. There were six tables, and Armstrong sat at the head of one of them, with Spud on his right. Two boys from Chicago, a boy from Bloomington, another from Gallup, New Mexico, and a boy from Marietta, Ohio, filled out the table. The Chicago boys were talking about the new dance band at the Drake Hotel, where they had celebrated New Year’s Eve. They may have been bragging when they talked about how drunk they had got, but in any case they weren’t ashamed of it. They spoke with the natural, easy assurance of people who know that they are, socially speaking, the best; and that everywhere they go the best of everything will be reserved as a matter of course for them. Their attitude toward Spud could be gauged by the fact that they remembered to use his name each time that they spoke to him, by their polite interest in his description of the winter carnival at his home town in Wisconsin, and even by the way they offered him the rolls before they helped themselves. It was clear that he also belonged among the best people, otherwise Armstrong would never have asked him to dinner.

  While the four student waiters cleared the tables after the main course, there was singing. First the university anthem, then a football song, then the fraternity sweetheart song, which was full of romantic feeling and required humming in places. Spud would have liked to join in but he didn’t know the words and he also felt that, being a guest, he ought not to. He sat stiffly with his hands in his lap.

  Between the salad and the dessert they sang again. They sang a long drawn-out dirty ballad which began
:

  Oh the old black bull came down from the mountain

  … Houston… John Houston …

  and ended with the old black bull, all tired out, going slowly back up the mountain. And then a song that somebody had put to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic:”

  Mary Ann McCarthy she… went out to gather clams

  Mary Ann McCarthy she… went out to gather clams

  Mary Ann McCarthy SHE … went out to gather clams

  But she didn’t get a …

  Forty-one spoons struck forty-one glass tumblers in unison, twice.

  … clam

  GLO-ry, gl-ory, hal-le-lu-jah

  The voices soared out the refrain.

  GLO-ry, gl-ory, hal-le-lu-jah

  GLO-ry, gl-ory, hal-le-lu-jah

  For she didn’t get a …

  (clink, clink)

  … clam

  The dessert was peach ice cream with chocolate cake on the side. It looked to Spud like the cake his mother made, and he bit into it hopefully. He was disappointed, but he ate it anyway.

  A signal from Armstrong produced the simultaneous scraping of forty-two chairs. The boys hung back, hugging the wall until he and Spud were out of the dining room, and then closed in behind. Instead of going back into the living room, Armstrong took Spud on a tour of the two upper floors of the house. Spud was favorably impressed by the two bathrooms, each with a long row of washbowls, which made it unlikely that anybody would have to wait in line to shave; and by the study rooms. They opened off the long upstairs hallway, instead of one out of the other; there wouldn’t be a steady traffic through them, the way there was through the rooms at “302.” Each study room door had a padlock on it. At the rooming house Spud’s favorite ties had a way of disappearing. They were not always in good condition when he found them, and two or three he had never been able to locate, though he suspected Howard. Padlocks were the only solution to the problem, obviously, and they were not, in Spud’s mind, incompatible with brotherly love.