The Folded Leaf

by William Maxwell

  “We’ll stay here,” Sally said quietly.

  Lymie, who from long habit should have been sensitive to the changes in Spud’s mood, had no idea that anything was wrong. The person who is both intelligent and observing cannot at the same time be innocent. He can only pretend to be; to others sometimes, sometimes to himself. Since Lymie didn’t notice that anything was wrong with Spud, one is forced to conclude that he didn’t wish to notice it. Some impulse that he was not willing to admit even to himself must have prompted him to buy violets for Sally. They reopened an old wound that was far more serious than the cut over Spud’s eye, and one that it wasn’t possible to put clamps in.

  At the sound of the bell Spud left them and disappeared into the crowd. A moment or two later he and another fighter emerged under the white light of the reflectors. All that had happened before happened again, like a movie film being run through a second time, but it didn’t last as long. In the first round Spud did something so stupid that Lymie, watching him from the doorway, contracted his shoulders and turned away in despair.

  Spud’s opponent was an Italian boy with black hair and eyes and soft muscles. Spud was having everything his own way. The referee had just pried them apart and when the Italian boy came toward Spud again, Spud doubled up, caught the Italian boy in the pit of the stomach with his shoulder and then straightened up with a quick jerk. As if the rules had been changed suddenly and this was now a wrestling match, the Italian boy flew clear over Spud and landed flat on his back.

  The silence lasted several seconds, during which a single voice could be heard saying:

  Ice cream …

  The referee blew his whistle. Then the catcalls began, and the screaming. Pop bottles flew through the air, and the booing was like the waves of the sea.

  44

  After the radio had been turned off there was an unnatural quiet in the Lathams’ living room. Mrs. Latham was sitting on the sofa in the full glare of the overhead light. Her face was gray and blotched with suffering, and her eyes, wide open, saw only what was in her mind—terrible fantasies in which her son, her beautiful son, was brought home to her, bruised and bleeding.

  Helen crossed the room and knelt beside her. “Mother darling,” she said, “listen to me. He’s all right. It’s over now, and you mustn’t think about it, you mustn’t grieve about it any more. The cut over his eye isn’t serious. It will heal in a week’s time and nobody will ever know it was there.” She took her mother’s hands between her own and chafed them, as if they were cold.

  “He’s got a taste of it,” Mrs. Latham said quietly. “And there’s nothing anybody can do to stop him. He’ll ruin his life.”

  “Well, let him,” Helen said bitterly.

  Mrs. Latham made a slight gesture which her daughter saw and understood. The gesture meant that she was not to say anything against Spud. Jealousy welled up in her. There was no way that she could keep herself from knowing that her mother loved Spud more than she did her, and always had, and always would. But that didn’t make any difference. She would go right on looking after her mother, and making her life easier for her, and maybe some day….

  “Let him go ahead and ruin his life,” she said aloud. “Let him go on boxing until he gets his nose broken and ends up with cauliflower ears, and looking like a thug. That’s what he is anyway, so he might as well look like one.”

  Mrs. Latham shook her head.

  “If he can come home the way he did Monday night and see you in the condition you were in then,” Helen said, “and go right back and fight the next night, and the night after that, and again tonight, regardless of what it is doing to you, then I don’t care what happens to him. Almost any stranger that walked in off the street I could have more feeling for than I have for him right now. It’s a terrible thing to say but it’s true.”

  Mrs. Latham was searching for her handkerchief in the folds of her dress. Before she found it, the tears had begun to slide down her cheeks.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Helen exclaimed. “Really I am. You know I don’t mean it.” She took her own handkerchief and dried her mother’s cheeks, but there was no stopping the flow of tears, now that they had started. “Why do you wait up?” she said. “You’re exhausted and you ought to be in bed this minute. Come on. Come take your clothes off. I’ll turn the covers down for you and you can slip into bed. I’ll wait up for them.”

  Mrs. Latham took the handkerchief and put it to her face and then, turning her head slightly, shook with sobbing. Helen put her arms around her and clung to her, weeping too. She thought of her mother always as a tower of strength, and to see her this way now, so stricken, so helpless, was more than she could bear. It also frightened her.

  “I’m going to make you some coffee,” she said. “You stay here and be quiet.”

  She went into the bathroom and held a washcloth under the cold water faucet, wrung it out, and then came back into the living room and laid it on her mother’s face, on her eyes and her hot forehead. She did this several times before she finally went out to the kitchen and took the coffee down from the shelf of the cupboard, and began measuring it into the percolator with a big spoon.

  All they ever saw in her mother was somebody who administered to their comfort, kept their clothes picked up and in order, fed them, and made a home for them to come to, when it suited their convenience.

  When Spud was a child she had loved him, but now that he was grown, it was impossible. Nobody could love him. He was an entirely different person, ungrateful, unmanageable, ill-tempered and surly. There was no use trying to get her mother to stop caring for Spud, because she always would, but sooner or later her mother would have to realize that nothing could be done for him, and then she would give up trying.

  If anything happened to her father, they’d have to give up the apartment, probably, and she and her mother could take a smaller place. It needn’t be very luxurious. Just a couple of rooms, large enough so that they wouldn’t get under each other’s feet, and she’d work and make enough money to support them, and they could live together quietly and in peace.

  This idea had been in the back of Helen’s mind ever since the letters had stopped coming from Wisconsin. Mrs. Latham saw Helen always as a little girl, a very good, obedient child, and so, if she had known what her daughter was thinking, she would have been surprised, as one is now and then by what children do and say. The plan itself would not have appealed to her. She had every intention of keeping her family together and intact forever. But she couldn’t drink the coffee after Helen made it and brought it to her, and Helen put the cup and saucer on the table next to the sofa. There the coffee gradually grew cold.

  It was after midnight when the car drove up in front of the apartment. The windows on the second floor were still lighted but no face peered out from behind the living room curtains, and the street lamps strung at intervals through the park served only to show how deserted it was at this time of night.

  Mr. Latham turned the motor off and said, “Well, here we are, home again.”

  Reluctantly, as if they had expected to spend the night in the back seat of the car with the robe over their knees, first Lymie, then Sally, and then Spud piled out. Sally pulled at her skirt and pushed her hair back under her hat. “Do I look all right?” she asked.

  “You look fine,” Spud said. The yawn that he was trying to suppress came out in his voice. She saw that he hadn’t even been looking at her, that he was too tired to care how she looked. The elm trees at the edge of the park were rocking in the damp March wind. The sky was clouded over.

  “I don’t feel the least bit sleepy,” she remarked, as she followed the two boys up the walk.

  Spud had forgotten his key and they waited in the vestibule for Mr. Latham, who had stayed behind to lock the car doors. On the second landing they waited again. Lymie glanced surreptitiously at the violets on Sally’s coat. They were beginning to curl. He had never bought flowers for a girl before. Looking at them, and then at Spud, who was lean
ing against the wall, Lymie thought: If anything should happen to him, if he should be killed in an accident or something, Sally would probably marry me, because I’m Spud’s best friend and I would cherish his memory. … That this thought might involve a wish, he didn’t perceive. It was merely one of those mixed-up ideas that occurred to him sometimes when he was very sleepy. He put it out of his mind immediately, and didn’t remember afterward that he had ever thought it.

  When Mr. Latham put his key in the door and pushed it open, Lymie saw that nothing was changed since he had been here last at Christmas time. It was one of the reasons he liked to come here. Nothing ever changed. He slipped his coat off, and his scarf, and dropped them on the chair in the hall, and then he walked into the living room. There his eyes opened wide and he stopped right where he was. The others had to move around him in order to get into the room.

  Mrs. Latham was still sitting on the sofa, and in her violently altered condition Lymie recognized one of those changes which happened, so far as he could make out, only to women. His own mother, usually so loving and tender with him, at certain times used to withdraw, leaving him stranded, the center of his life a void. When she had one of her headaches, which came fairly often during the last years of her life, after his father started drinking, she retired into a darkened room and there lay motionless on her bed, with a damp cloth over her eyes, without knowing or caring what happened to Lymie. When he got home from school he used to walk round and round the house before he went in. If the shades were drawn in her bedroom, he knew.

  Helen was bending over her mother anxiously, and as the others filed in she turned and faced them with a hatred which made no distinctions; they were all included in it. Spud went up to his mother and said, “It’s all over now,” which was as near as he could come to telling her that he was sorry. When she didn’t answer, he turned away and went out into the hall. Helen bent over her mother again, as if the others (including the girl they had brought home with them, whoever she was) were not in the room, or were there with no right and would soon perceive this and go away.

  Sally glanced over her shoulder at Spud, for help, but he seemed wholly concerned with hanging his coat in the hall closet. And Lymie, whom she was able to count on under ordinary circumstances, looked frightened and uncertain of what to do. Something was wrong, obviously. It was a scene that belonged to a house with a crepe hanging on the front door and a coffin somewhere and the odors of too many flowers. At that moment, when the only thing she could think of was flight, she felt a strong hand close over her arm. The hand propelled her, unwilling, toward the sofa. She heard a voice that she recognized as Mr. Latham’s saying firmly, insistently, “Mother, we’ve brought one of Spud’s friends home with us. This is Sally Forbes.”

  Mrs. Latham’s eyes, so lost in the recesses of her own grief, focused slowly upon Sally. She raised her head with an effort and extended a frail hand. Sally took it and smiled. The eyes that looked into hers were red from weeping, and there was no reassurance in them. But something—politeness, a sense of obligation, of responsibility toward a guest—gave Mrs. Latham the strength to take hold and manage her family again.

  “You’d better take your coat off, my dear,” she said, and then, turning to Helen, “She can sleep in your room tonight, and you sleep in here.”

  The atmosphere in the living room changed immediately. Mr. Latham’s face cleared. He felt in the breast pocket of his coat and brought out a cigar. Lymie went up to Mrs. Latham and kissed her on the cheek. There was no answering pat, but tonight he didn’t expect it, and wasn’t alarmed when she merely said, “Good evening, Lymie.”

  Spud came back from the hall and tugged at his sleeve. “You can sleep with me,” he said.

  They had already turned toward the hall when the ax fell.

  “I think Lymie had better go to his own home tonight,” Mrs. Latham said.

  “The bed’s big enough,” Spud said. “We’ve slept together in it lots of times.”

  “You need your rest,” Mrs. Latham said.

  Lymie wasted no time picking up his scarf and overcoat. He saw that Spud was looking at him apologetically, and so he said, “I’ll call you in the morning…. Good night, everybody!” and closed the door behind him.

  On the way down the stairs he remembered the feeling he had had the first afternoon that he came home with Spud. It was a kind of premonition, he realized. Everything that he had thought would happen then was happening now. He had been wrong only about the time.

  45

  During the early part of April there was a week of undeniable spring. It was in the air first, before the ground or the bare trees gave any sign of it; and its effect generally was to make people miss appointments and forget what it was that they had been about to say. Along with the marriage of the earth and the sun, other strange influences were at work—the renewal of grass, the northward migration of birds, the swelling of buds on the trees.

  Classroom windows were flung open, and instructors in economics and bacteriology and political science raised their voices above the sound of power lawn mowers. They spoke to empty seats, to a collection of figures that looked alive but were actually made of pieces of colored paper pasted over a framework of sticks, to ears that had no hearing, to minds that, masquerading in leaves and flowers, were even now on their way to the forest, up the mountainside, down to the seashore, where, according to ancient custom, certain rites were about to be performed which would make the earth fertile and green.

  The university tennis courts were weeded and rolled and marked with new tape. All morning and all afternoon tennis balls bounced and were struck back. The scoring (thirty-forty … love-five… deuce it is) was added to the other spring sounds.

  With all the windows open and the sunlight streaming in, the men’s gymnasium was like a pavilion. The trapeze performers set up their apparatus outside on the grass, and there was a constant clatter of spiked shoes as baseball players came in and went out of the building. The empty football stadium (capacity seventy thousand) was taken over by thin, tense-faced runners, hurdlers, and high jumpers. Botany classes filed out of science buildings two by two. They were on their way out to the edge of town where, in the cold running water of the drainage ditch, spirogyra and chlodophora were to be found. The girls had charge of the green laboratory jars. The boys took off their shoes and their bright-colored socks, rolled their trousers above the knee, and waded in slowly, their bare feet searching for soft places in the gravel bottom. They came out of the water bearing slimy specimens in their hands and in their eyes the sorrowful realization of all that they had lost by starting to school at the age of six.

  On the south campus two gardeners swept the cement bottom of the lily pond and then stood and watched it fill with clean water. The apple trees in the university orchards were sprayed, according to the latest methods. Lambs that had been born in March in the big university barns were now let out to pasture. Dogs were seen in pairs on the Broad Walk, and one of them made an obstinate attempt to attend Professor Forbes’s lecture on St. Anselm and his logical proof of the existence of God.

  The nights were languid and soft with a tropical odor that had its origin in the thawing corn fields outside of town. Nobody could study. The brick terraces of Tudor and southern colonial fraternity houses were crowded long after supper with boys looking at the moon. Under lunary influence many of them went off and drank spiked beer. Although the university authorities had forbidden serenading, between ten-thirty and eleven o’clock shadows collected in the shrubbery outside sorority houses. There was a campus policeman but he couldn’t be everywhere at once. Young male voices, not always on pitch, rose to darkened second-story windows. The serenaders sang the university anthem, “When Day Is Done” and various plagiarisms on “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.” Then with applause following them, they moved off down the street, unmolested. Around midnight, mattresses and blankets and pillows were hauled out onto flat roofs. Boys who were so fortunate as to belong to a f
raternity fell asleep with the moon shining on their faces. And boys who had had to be content with living in rooming houses awoke, morning after morning, with the sun in their eyes.

  There were only five people in the English seminar the night of the annual spring celebration. The air that came in through the open windows was too soft to blow papers about, but minds were not, of course, immune to it. Of the five people, four were graduate students with a Ph.D. oral examination to face, and no time to admire the moon or make love on the damp ground. The fifth was Lymie Peters. The scowling bitter face of Dr. Johnson looked down at them from the wall and approved of their industry, but the bust of Shakespeare was noncommittal.

  A faint faraway sound was heard a little after nine o’clock. It might or might not have been cheering. One of the graduate students looked up from his barricade of books, took his glasses off, and announced the true cause of the disturbance. The others listened a moment and then all five went on reading. From time to time they also made crabbed, half-legible notes concerning the date of Tottel’s Miscellany or the lavish use of similes in Euphues and His England. The cheering grew louder and more distinct.

  Lymie, having finished the section of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals recommended by Professor Severance, closed the book and restored it to the shelf where he had found it. He was ready to go home now and review separable and inseparable German prefixes. When he got outside the building, he saw that the sky to the south was pink from the glare of an enormous bonfire. The rooming house lay in one direction, excitement was in the other. Lymie started home, but he turned suddenly, hesitated, and then began to retrace his steps. Within half a block he was running.

  The bonfire was in a muddy open field north of the stadium, and the field itself was swarming with dark figures. The boys nearest the fire stood out clearly. The firelight kept passing over their faces and hands. Others came out of the surrounding darkness, bringing fuel, and then went back again. Behind their movements there seemed to be some as yet unannounced purpose, some act of violence which would flare up all of a sudden and make the flames turn pale by comparison with it.