The Folded Leaf

by William Maxwell

  He was also struck by the fact that the dormitory, which was on the third floor, was the same temperature, or nearly so, as the rest of the house. In the daytime, Armstrong explained, the windows were kept closed, and there was heat from a couple of long radiators. At night when the windows were open, it was cold but not freezing. Spud nodded approvingly at the double-decker single beds, each with its cocoon of covers. He preferred sleeping by himself.

  Study hours began at seven-thirty. The freshmen left the living room and many upperclassmen followed them. The dart game in the basement and the ping-pong table on the sun porch were deserted. There was no more shouting in the upstairs hall. In five minutes the house quieted down in a way that “302” seldom did before midnight.

  Spud and Armstrong and two upperclassmen sat in front of the grate fire in the living room and talked. It was the time of year for arguing about basketball. Spud pretended that he was interested, but actually he was busy installing himself on the second floor, in a large corner room, with Lymie’s desk next to his. He was wondering if it wouldn’t work out better to put Lymie somewhere near by—down the hall, say, with another roommate for a change (better for Lymie, that is)—when the clock on the mantel struck eight. He got up to go, slipped his overcoat on in the front hall, tied his scarf correctly, shook hands all around, and left, very pleased with the house and the fraternal atmosphere, and rather pleased with himself.

  A week later he was asked to dinner again and this time the conversation in the living room was not about basketball but moved in a straight line. At the end of five minutes Armstrong produced a triangular pledge pin. Although Spud had been expecting it, he colored with embarrassment. It was not easy to explain, with four people looking at him, that he didn’t have the money to join a fraternity.

  “We can get around that difficulty,” Armstrong said, “if you’re willing to take a dishwasher’s job or wait table.” Then, correctly reading the look on Spud’s face, he added, “It won’t make any difference so far as your standing in the house is concerned. Also, it won’t take much time from your studies. You’d naturally spend a certain amount of time sitting around after dinner, chewing the fat. The only thing you have to worry about is the hundred dollar initiation fee.”

  Spud nodded.

  “Do you think you can manage that?” Armstrong asked.

  “I’ll have to think about it,” Spud said.

  Armstrong tried to press him, but he refused to commit himself, and his refusal was so firm that Armstrong gave way before it. “We’re not in the habit of making open bids,” he said. “And although in your case we’re willing to make an exception, I think you ought to realize that there are plenty of guys—big men on campus—who would jump at the chance.”

  Spud did realize this, but he wasn’t jumping, even so. He left, without a pledge button in his lapel, and went to the Ship’s Lantern, where Sally and Lymie were waiting for him. They sat smiling while he described his evening, and once or twice a look passed between them which Spud intercepted. It meant nothing but that they were pleased with him for being so much like himself and so unlike anybody else, probably, who had ever lived. He began to suspect that there was some kind of a secret understanding between them, from which he was excluded.

  “If you want to join it,” Sally said, “go ahead. It’s a good enough fraternity. The best there is, I guess. But of course they change. What’s good one year isn’t necessarily good the next. And I’m not sure I know what they mean by ‘good’ anyway.”

  “Wouldn’t you be proud of me?” Spud asked.

  “I am already,” Sally said. “I won’t love you any more because you’ve got a piece of fancy jewelry on your vest.”

  “You could wear it,” Spud suggested.

  “I don’t need to,” Sally said. “Everybody knows I’ve got you just where I want you.”

  “Humph,” Spud said. What he wanted was for Lymie, who had everything to lose by the arrangement, or Sally, who had nothing to gain, to decide that it was to his best interest to join a fraternity. Then he would have been sure that he didn’t want to. When Lymie said, “It’s entirely up to you,” Spud was thoroughly exasperated with both of them.

  “It isn’t entirely up to me,” he exclaimed. “I don’t know why you keep saying that. I can’t walk off and leave you with that double room on your hands. If I go, you have to go too.”

  “So far,” Lymie said, “nobody has asked me to join a fraternity.”

  “They will ask you,” Spud said.

  Sally said nothing. She had not said anything for a minute or so, but now Lymie was aware of her silence. It had changed its quality somehow. He smiled at her, by way of conveying that she didn’t have to be tactful. He had known all along they were not going to ask him to join the fraternity. To Spud he said, “It doesn’t really matter to me where I live, and it does to you, so you’d better decide.”

  “In the first place—” Spud began.

  Lymie interrupted him. “I move this meeting be adjourned. All in favor say ‘Aye.’”

  “Aye,” Sally said, peering into her compact.

  “Motion carried,” Lymie said, and picked up the check. “Forbes, it appears that you owe me a nickel…. Latham, twenty cents, please.”

  “Fifteen,” Spud said. “Chocolate sundae is only fifteen.”

  “Twenty with nuts on it,” Lymie said.

  Spud put his right hand over his pants’ pocket and then said, “How’d you like to treat me?”

  “What would be the use of doing that?” Lymie asked.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Spud said. “I thought you might enjoy it.”

  “Fork over,” Lymie said.

  “You’re the tightest guy I ever knew,” Spud said indignantly. “Barring none.” He began systematically emptying all his pockets. There was no money in any of them.

  35

  When Reinhart offered to loan Spud a hundred dollars, he W was so surprised that it didn’t occur to him to ask questions. Even so, Reinhart felt that some explanation was necessary. “My aunt sent it to me,” he said. “She does that once in a while. I don’t happen to need it just now and I thought maybe you could use it.” Reinhart who hadn’t had a new suit in three years, who had no aunt, whose debts were as numerous as the sands of the sea.

  “As a matter of fact I could use it,” Spud said, and thought how wonderful it was that, just when you needed something very much (like a hundred dollars) along it came. For no reason. The exact amount. He was on the point of explaining to Reinhart about the fraternity, but then he remembered that Reinhart had had a bad experience with fraternities and would probably judge them all by the one he had been pledged to. “It’s really damn nice of you,” he said, letting gratitude take the place of explanations.

  Reinhart shrugged. “I’m not giving it to you. It’s a loan,” he said, twisting a lock of hair between his thumb and forefinger.

  “Even so,” Spud said. He saw the rooming house, which he had for so long been ashamed of, and Reinhart slouched down in his overstuffed chair, with new eyes. It is foolish to contend that money doesn’t make any difference. With a hundred dollars, the means of escape, in crisp clean bills in his right hand, Spud was no longer anxious to leave. After all, he had lived here for a year and a half, and these guys were his friends. When he needed help, they came across, without his even asking. Guys who did that were worth hanging on to.

  Out of a sense of obligation Spud stayed and talked to Reinhart a few minutes longer and then walked across the campus to Sally’s sorority house. She had told him that she was going home that afternoon, to get some clothes that she needed; but the hundred dollars had driven everything else out of Spud’s mind. He had no intention of telling Sally about the loan, for that would have involved matters he didn’t care to go into, such as how and when he was going to pay the money back. But he wanted to pin her down about the fraternity. He felt sure, although she had refused to influence his decision one way or the other, that she would
be pleased if he were a fraternity man. After she had admitted this, he would tell her why he was going to turn the offer down.

  He walked into the sorority house and pressed her bell, in the telephone closet. There was no answer. He pressed it a second time: one short, one long.

  “Not in,” a voice called down from upstairs.

  Spud came out of the closet and stood at the foot of the stairs. “Know where she went?” he asked.

  Hope Davison, with her hair in brown kid curlers, leaned over the banister. “Oh, hello, Spud. Don’t I look a sight? Forbes has gone out. I think I heard her bell ring a little while ago, and then I guess she went out. Anyway she isn’t here now.”

  “Was she with Lymie?” Spud asked up the stair well.

  “I don’t know,” Hope said. “If she wasn’t with you, she must have been with him. She’s always with one or the other of you.”

  “Thanks,” Spud said, and a second later she heard the front door slam.

  During the first block, while he was calmly walking along, he beat Lymie to a pulp three times. With his bare hands he smashed Lymie’s nose and closed his eyes and knocked his teeth in and made him spit blood. In the second block he hit Lymie in the stomach and knocked the wind out of him. Lymie crumpled, gasping, and Spud hit him again, on the way down. Lymie cried for mercy, begged for it, but Spud lifted him to his feet again and stood there a minute looking at him, at the guy that he had trusted, the guy that he had always thought was, of all the people he knew, his friend. He hit Lymie square on the chin with his bare knuckles, but he didn’t feel a thing. All that he was conscious of was the change in Lymie’s face. Lymie’s eyes seemed to become glazed and then he seemed to wilt. In the following block Lymie came to, groaning. Spud knocked him down four more times and after that he made Lymie train with him every day. He made him drink lots of milk and fruit juices and eat fresh vegetables and get plenty of sleep and take exercise, and pretty soon Lymie began to put on weight. His chest filled out and his arms began to have some muscle and the first thing anybody knew, Lymie was a good boxer, quick and intelligent. He got to be a little better still, and soon he was the same size Spud was. Then Spud took him on one day and beat the piss out of him….

  When Spud appeared on the top floor of the gymnasium Lymie was there, waiting for him. At the first sight of Lymie, Spud realized that it was no use. No matter how long Lymie trained, he would never be big enough for anybody to haul off and hit.

  36

  Professor Severance lived with his mother in a large white clapboard house which had been built in the ‘eighties and was not far from the Forbeses’ house. When Lymie rang the bell at six-thirty that same evening, a colored woman in a maid’s uniform opened the door to him and took his coat and muffler. Then Professor Severance appeared and shook hands with him warmly. For the first few seconds Lymie missed the wooden desk and the low lecture platform. Being able to look straight into Professor Severance’s eyes made him feel shy, and in the presence of a stranger. Through the double doorway he could see into a long brightly lighted living room, where an old woman sat waiting on a high-backed horsehair sofa.

  It was a beautiful room, furnished with taste and with the help of money. The antique sofas and chairs, the little rosewood tables had been polished to a satiny texture. Against one wall was a square concert grand piano with the lid down, and on it were dozens of tiny painted clay figures—a Chinese wedding procession with men carrying banners, men bearing lanterns and spears, and horsemen riding behind the two palanquins of the bride and groom. Japanese prints hung at intervals around the room: a Hiroshige snow scene, the Hokusai great blue-and-white frothy wave on the point of breaking, two portraits of eighteenth century Japanese actors, a girl wading in blue water with her skirts tucked up to her knees; a group of women seated in a fragile black boat. In the bay window a card table had been set up with a bridge lamp shining on it, and cards laid out in rows, for solitaire.

  For all its calm and elegance, the room was a battlefield. The card table, where Professor Severance had been sitting when Lymie arrived, and the copy of Mansfield Park, lying now on the table next to the sofa with a carved wooden paper knife in it, were sometimes the weapons with which Professor Severance and his mother attacked each other, sometimes the fortifications behind which they retired, when one or the other was momentarily victorious. The smoke of stale quarrels hung on the air. Professor Severance led Lymie over to the horsehair sofa and said, “Mother, this is Mr. Peters.”

  “How do you do?” the old woman said, in a voice that was clearer and stronger than Lymie had expected. Looking down at her, at the massive head and yellowish white hair and the colorless lips, Lymie thought how much like a St. Bernard she looked, except that the eyes were not only sad but sick as well. Even so, they managed a sudden yellow gleam that charmed him. Mrs. Severance sat, large and shapeless, in a gray silk dress with her long-fringed silk shawl slipping from her shoulders. A carved cane leaned against the corner of the sofa.

  “Sit here beside me,” the old woman said, patting the horsehair seat. “I want to talk to you. My son tells me you’re a friend of Sally Forbes. You’re in love with her, aren’t you? It’s all right. You don’t have to blush like that. She’s a darling girl. I’ve known her ever since she was born. She’ll make you a good wife, I’m sure, though she’s not as pretty as her mother was. Her mother was a real beauty. I always wanted her to marry William. I’ve never forgiven her for marrying Professor Forbes instead.”

  “My mother is of the opinion that everybody should get married,” Professor Severance explained with a crisp smile. “The sooner the better.”

  “The sooner the better,” Mrs. Severance said, nodding. “Look at William. Hell be forty-three next June and he gets more trying to live with every day of his life.”

  “I don’t believe that’s true,” Professor Severance said mildly. “I should have said that I’m probably quite considerate, even-tempered, and in fact very little trouble to anybody.”

  Instead of answering him, Mrs. Severance asked Lymie how old he was, and he told her.

  “Nineteen … Think of it!” she exclaimed. “I would have said he was fifteen at the most, wouldn’t you, William?”

  “No, I think he looks somewhere between eighteen and nineteen.”

  “At the most, fifteen,” Mrs. Severance repeated. Then to her son, as if Lymie had suddenly vanished from the room, “Your students get younger and younger. When we first moved here, there weren’t any that were fifteen years old. Or if there were, I don’t remember them.”

  “But Mr. Peters isn’t that young, Mother,” Professor Severance said patiently. “He’s just told you that he was nineteen.”

  “You’re too young to be away from home,” Mrs. Severance said, shaking her head at Lymie. “I feel quite certain of it. I dare say your mother feels the same way.”

  “My mother is dead,” Lymie said.

  The old woman’s face took on a look of almost total blankness, as if she were listening to footsteps in the upstairs hall, or in some empty corridor of her mind. Then she looked at Lymie and smiled. “What a pity!” she exclaimed, reaching out toward him. “I’m so sorry!” Her clasp was warm and friendly. “What thin hands he has,” she said, turning to her son. “They’re as small and thin as a girl’s.”

  Professor Severance rested his head on the back of his chair and half closing his eyes, said, “I’ve been trying most of my life to convince my mother, or to suggest rather—for the suggestion by itself, adequately conveyed, would probably be enough—that it isn’t polite to make personal remarks.”

  “Oh, pshaw!” Mrs. Severance exclaimed. “Mr. Peters is not offended, are you, Mr. Peters?”

  Lymie shook his head.

  “Besides,” the old woman said, “I only say what I think, which is a compliment.”

  Professor Severance cleared his throat. The sound was noncommittal.

  “William also tells me that you like poetry,” she said. “Why don’t you
become a professor? It’s a very pleasant life. So safe. Nothing to worry about as long as you live. You don’t make any money, of course, but I can tell just by looking at you that you’ll never make much money anyway. You’re not the type. If I were you I wouldn’t try. Settle down here and teach. William will tell you just how to go about it.”

  “Yes,” Professor Severance said, nodding. “It’s very simple. And I’m sure Mr. Peters would make an excellent, perhaps even an inspired, teacher, but he may prefer to be a poet instead.”

  “What nonsense,” Mrs. Severance said. Twisting in irritation, she gathered the fringes of her shawl into a rope which she laid across her knees. “You can’t starve in a garret these days. There aren’t any. They’ve all been converted into apartments that cost thirty-five or forty dollars a month. Besides, you mustn’t pay any attention to what William says. His students probably have a certain amount of respect for him, because he’s read so much, but he’s only a child, I assure you, in spite of all those books in his study. I’m sure that in many ways you are older than he is, Mr. Peters. Far older.” She looked down at the large pink cameo which was pinned on the front of her dress and straightened it. “If this attachment between you and Sally Forbes doesn’t work out,” she said suddenly, “I wish you’d let me know. Because I have a granddaughter coming along, a dear sweet girl, and you might like her even better. She’s fifteen now—just your age.”