The Folded Leaf

by William Maxwell

  Professor Severance’s eyebrows flew upwards and then settled again, into their usual repose.

  “My niece lives in Virginia,” he said. “I think you’re safe enough, Mr. Peters. For the time being.”

  “Let me show you her picture,” Mrs. Severance said. She reached across Mansfield Park and took a small framed photograph and handed it to Lymie. The photograph was tinted slightly, and he saw by the head and shoulders that Mrs. Severance’s granddaughter had been even younger, probably about thirteen when the picture was taken. Compared to Sally she was not very interesting.

  “It’s very nice,” he said, rather as if he had been asked to admire an antique gold bracelet or an amethyst ring.

  “She lives just outside of Charlottesville in a beautiful old house that William’s brother has bought there, with box hedges and holly trees and I don’t know—I can’t remember how many rooms with fireplaces in them. But anyway, she’s coming for a visit in the spring. I’ll see that you meet her.”

  The colored woman appeared in the doorway to the dining room and said, “Dinner is served.”

  “All right, Hattie,” Professor Severance said, nodding.

  Mrs. Severance placed the picture on the table and reached for her cane. With some difficulty she lifted her heavy bulk from the sofa. Then, leaning on the cane and with one hand through Lymie’s arm, she stalked slowly toward the dining room.

  The dining room table was large enough for eight people. Only three places were set, far apart, on a white damask cloth, the corners of which almost touched the floor. Between the two silver candlesticks in the center of the table was a crystal bowl filled with yellow and lavender stock. The air was heavy from the odor of the flowers, and Lymie had an uneasy feeling as he held Mrs. Severance’s chair out for her and helped her dispose of the cane, that there were more people in the room than just the three of them. Even after he sat down, the feeling persisted (The fear of death, could it have been, standing patiently behind Mrs. Severance’s chair? And behind her son’s, the fear of being left alone with his decks of cards, his never-finished game of solitaire?) until the swinging door to the pantry flew open and the colored woman reappeared with a fourteen-pound turkey on an enormous blue china platter.

  “I hope you’re hungry,” Mrs. Severance said. “It always exasperates me so when people don’t eat.”

  No one saw or was conscious of the figure behind Lymie’s chair.

  37

  When Spud appeared at “302” that night there was a pledge button in his lapel. Freeman and Amsler noticed it and withdrew from him as if he had contracted some fatal disease. They told Reinhart, who came into Spud’s room with a puzzled expression on his face and stood watching Spud pack. He had emptied out his dresser drawers and his clothes covered the tops of both desks. Reinhart handed him a pile of shirts, when he saw that Spud was ready for them, and then a handful of socks, rolled up tight in the shape of an egg. There was absolutely no reason for Spud to avoid Reinhart’s eyes. Unless he was drunk, Reinhart never made any comment, never offered advice. Nevertheless Spud took the things without looking at him.

  A big suitcase and a canvas duffelbag held all of Spud’s earthly possessions. When he had finished packing, the room was tidy but it had a disturbed air and seemed larger than usual. Reinhart took the suitcase, Spud the duffelbag, which was full of books and soiled clothes, and very heavy. They passed by several open doors but no one spoke to them, no head was raised. At the front porch of the fraternity house Reinhart stopped and put the suitcase down. When Spud asked him to come in, he shook his head. “I’ll be seeing you,” he said, and went off down the walk.

  The brothers were expecting Spud and gathered around him in a cluster at the front door and said, “Congratulations, boy. We’re glad to have you with us!” One after another gave him (their little fingers interlocking) the pledge grip.

  Armstrong wasn’t there. He had taken his girl to a movie, and one of the other boys led Spud upstairs to his room. It was not the corner one, as he had hoped, but it was a large square room, with three windows, a comfortable chair for reading, two study tables, two dressers, green curtains, and plain cream-colored walls. His roommate turned out to be a boy named Shorty Stevenson, who was majoring in economics and wore glasses.

  By ten o’clock Spud had finished putting his clothes away and he sat down at his new desk. His pencils, blotter, fountain pen, ruler, and ink were in their usual exact arrangement. His chemistry book was open before him, at the next day’s assignment. The only thing that disturbed his sense of order was the boy who sat studying quietly, four feet away. Shorty Stevenson had on a maroon-colored bathrobe over green and orange striped pajamas. Lymie’s bathrobe was blue and he always wore white pajamas.

  In a sudden reversal of feeling Spud wanted to empty all the bureau drawers and start packing again. This isn’t right, any of it, he said to himself.

  He began to think about Lymie coming home to the bare ugly room on the other side of town. He saw the boys meeting him—Reinhart or Colter or Howard, maybe, or Freeman—at the head of the stairs, and telling him what had happened. Spud saw Lymie trying to pretend that it didn’t matter, that he wasn’t upset by it; and then a few minutes later, undressing and getting ready for bed and going up the stairs alone.

  For the first time it crossed Spud’s mind that he could have waited. He should have stayed there until Lymie got home from Professor Severance’s. Or at least left a note for Lymie. It was that, he decided, that was causing him all this uneasiness. And in the next second he recognized that it had nothing to do with Lymie but only with himself; that he was frightened. He didn’t like strangers and never had liked them.

  All he had to do was to repack his things. But what would Shorty Stevenson think if he got up now and started taking shirts and socks and underwear out of the dresser and putting them back in an empty suitcase?

  In a kind of slow panic Spud took his watch off, wound it, and placed it on the desk next to his chemistry book. Then he switched the goosenecked student lamp on and began to read. Sometimes his lips moved, shaping words and formulae. And sometimes his mind veered off toward things that had nothing to do with chemistry: Why was he here where he didn’t want to be? Who made him do it?

  They were both reasonable questions.

  38

  When Lymie managed through Reinhart to loan Spud a hundred dollars, so that he could join the fraternity if he wanted to, Lymie believed that he was acting under a wholly unselfish impulse. But if that was true, why wasn’t Spud happy afterward? Why didn’t the unselfish act (it had taken Lymie two long dreary summers to save that hundred dollars) lead to some good? From that which is genuinely good, good only ought to flow; not misery and misunderstanding.

  The next morning when Spud awoke he was still lost, still unsure what he wanted to do. He was afraid to tell Armstrong that he had changed his mind. Armstrong would think he was crazy. They had given him all the time in the world to decide, and there was no way for them to know that he had done it all in a rush. The best thing to do, he decided finally, was to get Lymie into the fraternity as soon as possible.

  He asked Lymie to dinner on guest night and Lymie came. He was all dressed up but with his shoes scuffed as usual, and the shirt he was wearing was not entirely clean. Lymie would never understand, Spud thought sadly looking across the table at him, how things like that counted against you. Lymie’s feelings were deeply hurt, from the look in his eyes, and from the care that he took to make everything seem natural between them. But that, Spud decided, they could straighten out later, after Lymie had moved into the fraternity house. Spud didn’t know quite how to suggest this to Armstrong but he figured that as soon as Armstrong and the rest of the brothers saw how bright Lymie was, they’d take him into the living room and pledge him.

  After dinner Spud showed Lymie over the house. Lymie admired Spud’s room and asked to be shown where he slept in the dorm. When Spud pressed him for his approval he said reluctantly that the
house was very nice and that he liked the fellows very much. Spud revealed his plans, and Lymie shook his head. It was a fine idea, he said, but he was sure that they wouldn’t ask him to join the fraternity.

  He was invited for two guest nights in a row, and then he came and went casually. Sometimes he was at the fraternity house for a meal when the boys were on their ordinary behavior. They came down to the dining room helter-skelter, some of them without ties and their shirt collars open, and fought over second helpings and sang off key deliberately. Sometimes he and Spud studied together in Spud’s room, of an evening. The boys in the fraternity were friendly toward Lymie, and accepted him, but as an outsider, a foreigner with all the proper credentials. Their attitude was a good enough indication of what he could expect, socially, the rest of his life. If he had been the kind of person who mixes easily and makes a good first impression, he wouldn’t have walked past the plate glass window of LeClerc’s pastry shop, years before, when he was in high school. Nor would he have felt the need of a special entrance to the iron fence that surrounded the yard outside his own house, when he was a child. He would have used the front gate, like other people.

  39

  As soon as Spud moved out of “302” the closet in his and Lymie’s room, which had always seemed ample, contracted. It was too small even for Lymie’s clothes. It was also very disorderly. Lymie made an effort to straighten it occasionally, though his idea of order was not Spud’s. He didn’t really mind confusion, but he was afraid that Spud might come over to see him and be upset because the closet wasn’t the way he had always kept it. Day after day passed and Spud didn’t show up. The closet became a catchall. Shoes, bedroom slippers, rubbers, a battered felt hat that belonged to nobody, wire coat hangers, a box of stale Nabiscos, shirts, underwear, socks, handkerchiefs, a suitcase, a crinkled necktie … all this and more was in the pile on the closet floor. The closet became indistinguishable from all the others on the second floor of the rooming house. When Lymie undressed at night, he hung his trousers upside down, by the cuffs in a dresser drawer. In the morning he left his pajamas where he stepped out of them.

  He saw Spud every afternoon at the gymnasium. One day when Spud found somebody to box with, he brought his gloves over for Lymie to tie, as usual, but he stood looking past Lymie at the trapeze net. Lymie observed that his eyes had a cold glitter in them. When he finished tying the gloves, Spud walked away. At first Lymie thought that Spud must be sore at somebody else, since he himself had done nothing. But from that moment, Spud avoided looking at Lymie or speaking to him. Although Lymie was bewildered, he kept on coming to the gymnasium, day after day. The fact that he still had access to Spud’s hands was a comfort to him. It was at least something. Afterward, while Spud was below in the shower room, he waited by the open locker. When Spud had finished dressing he managed, without either looking at Lymie or speaking to him, to indicate that he was ready to go. It would have been easy for him to hunt up Armstrong and walk home with him, instead of with Lymie, but he didn’t. They weighed themselves in the front hall, and then, as they walked away from the gymnasium, Lymie usually made some careful, almost natural remark, to which Spud didn’t reply.

  Lymie went to bed every night at ten o’clock, as usual, but he had trouble getting to sleep. He was conscious of the cold all around the edges of the bed. Wherever he put out a hand or a bare foot, it was icy cold and it remained that way.

  If you take a puppy away from the litter you can keep it from whimpering at night by bedding it down with an alarm clock and a hot water bottle. Deceived by the warmth, it will accept the ticking of the clock for the beating of its mother’s heart. Lymie learned to make similar sad substitutions. The other pillow, the one Spud had slept on, at Lymie’s back warmed him almost as quickly as a living body. By an effort of the imagination, his own arm, thrown lightly across his chest, became Spud’s arm, and then he could sleep.

  But it was sleep of a different kind, restless and uneasy. The dreams that came to him were troubled, even the ones that began in happiness and security. Usually when he awoke he could remember only certain threads—fragments of what had frightened him. But there was one dream that remained intact in his mind. He was standing on a street corner with Mrs. Latham. They were looking at a circus parade and they just had time, after the calliope had passed, to run to the next corner and see the parade all over again, coming back. Only this time the circus animals swerved and marched up onto the sidewalk, so that he was crowded back against a high wire netting which stretched between the sidewalk and the street. He left Mrs. Latham standing there and went into a large hotel, and downstairs to the men’s room, where he urinated. When he came back the parade was over and Mrs. Latham was gone. He asked several people about her and one man pointed to a railway trestle, which was enclosed, with five stories built on top of the level where the trains ran. She was up there. Somebody, a man, a man with an evil face, had grabbed hold of her, while he was in the hotel, and had taken her away and now she was in trouble and it was his fault. He should never have left her alone on the street corner while the parade was passing by.

  He thought he saw her at one of the windows high up on the trestle but it might not have been Mrs. Latham. There were many windows and people kept appearing at them, sinister people. The woman he saw, the one who appeared to be in such distress, might have been somebody else. The woman he saw in the street, later, was Mrs. Latham. She had disguised herself with a red wig, so that she looked much younger and like the women who used to come to see his father, the women whose voices were too loud and whose dresses kept coming up over their knees. He knew her, even so, but he couldn’t go to her. She went up to an elderly man who was walking with his wife and put her arms around him and begged him to save her, but the man didn’t understand, and his wife interfered, and people gathered around them in the street, so that there was no hope, even before the man with the evil face came down once more from the high trestle.

  Whether the man took her away or what happened to her, Lymie didn’t know because he found himself in a stony field. The field stretched as far as the eve could see, and he was still there, walking and walking, when the morning light awakened him.

  40

  During the last days of February, after a heavy snow, the thermometer went down to zero at night and rose only a few degrees in the daytime. The wind was from the north and nothing, not even a coonskin coat, was adequate protection against it.

  The boys at “302” slept with their overcoats spread over the foot of their beds, and woke in the night and complained bitterly of the cold. Amsler, who had been sleeping alone, moved into Lymie’s bed. Though Lymie had every reason to be grateful for human warmth, he waited until Amsler was asleep and then withdrew shivering to the farthest edge of the bed. For an hour and a half he lay there, not daring to move. Then he slipped out of bed and crept downstairs and spent the rest of the night in Reinhart’s big chair, with two coats spread over him. At six o’clock, stiff with cold, and lightheaded from lack of sleep, he went into his own room and sat down at the desk. Whatever it is that keeps you away, he wrote, 50 that we aren’t able to talk to each other like we used to, I think it’s time we did something about it. If I’ve done anything to offend you, I’m sorry. You haven’t done anything to me. And even if you had it wouldn’t make any difference. Since my mother died you’re the only person who has meant very much to me …

  That afternoon, when Professor Severance started writing questions on the blackboard, the two seats on either side of Lymie were still vacant. Twenty minutes after the examination had begun, the classroom door opened and Sally tiptoed in and took her seat in the second row, next to Lymie. Her cheeks were red with cold. She looked at the questions on the board and then, in a slightly dazed way, at the blank examination book on the arm of her seat.

  She barely nodded to Lymie. “The old English madrigal,” she wrote, “was an amatory poem to be sung by three or more voices.” The musical implications, Professor Severance had
once said, were not to be lost sight of. Fortunately, she hadn’t lost sight of them.

  It was some time before Sally discovered the large question mark on Lymie’s blotter. She shook her silver fountain pen, which had become clogged, and wrote “Hope” on the edge of her own blotter. Lymie had to wait until they emerged from the room where the examination was being held, for further enlightenment.

  “The weirdest thing,” Sally exclaimed as she closed the door behind her. “Hope had an exam in botany this morning, and she wasn’t prepared for it—I was over at the house for supper last night, but I’ve been living at home. She told me she was going to tell Mrs. Sisson that she had appendicitis, and spend the morning in bed. And this noon I met Bernice Crawford and she said that Mrs. Sisson had called Dr. Rogers—you know that bald-headed little man with the goatee, the one that’s always pinching people. Girls, I mean. I don’t think he pinches boys. But anyway, he rushed Hope off to the hospital and took her appendix out before lunch. That’s why I was late. I went to see her. She was still under the anesthetic, but they said she was coming along all right. Only there was nothing wrong with her, and she can’t afford an operation. My God, Lymie, the things people get themselves into!”

  “Maybe she really did have appendicitis,” Lymie said.

  “In a pig’s ear!”

  The door opened and Lymie moved to one side, so that two girls could get past.

  “What are you looking so bedraggled about?” Sally asked.

  “Who, me?” Lymie asked. “I feel fine.”

  “You don’t look it. Maybe you’d better have your appendix out too.”

  “I can’t,” Lymie said. “I forgot to join the Hospital Association.”

  “Well then, you’d better not,” Sally said.

  He brought out the note and said, “Would you mind giving this to Spud?”