The Folded Leaf

by William Maxwell

  Lymie stood on the outer edge of the crowd, where he was not likely to get involved. The year before, in this same field, he’d lost a good coat and had the shirt torn off his back, in a mud fight between freshmen and sophomores.

  After climbing forty or fifty feet into the sky, the flames, for lack of fuel, begun to subside, and darkness gradually closed in on the field. A voice near the bonfire yelled, “To the campus!” and there was an answering roar which produced a stampede. Lymie was caught up in it before he could retire across the street. He was swept along willingly enough, his feet mingling with all the other feet set so abruptly in motion. The running stopped after two blocks and those who had no desire to be part of the mob escaped from it. The rest proceeded through the fraternity district in a shambling, almost orderly fashion, filling the street and the sidewalks, and trampling on new grass.

  When they got to the Union Building, the editor of the student daily newspaper, a tall, thin, hollow-cheeked blond boy, appeared on the steps above them and made a speech. “This is kid stuff!” he shouted. “What’s the use of it? What’s the use of destroying a lot of valuable property and getting into trouble and maybe thrown out of school?”

  The mob, which had so far not destroyed anything, answered, “Drown him!” “Throw the son of a bitch in the Styx!”

  “For what?” the thin-faced boy asked rhetorically. “For a: little fun, maybe, that will reflect on the university and do serious harm. If you want to do something, then do something constructive.”

  There was a surging forward and the boy ducked hastily into the printing office and locked the door.

  “Don’t let him get away with that!” a voice cried, and another voice screamed, “Smash the door down!” but nobody wanted to be the one to do it. The mob had no leader. Voices were heard frequently but they didn’t seem to be attached to a particular person, or at least not to anybody who was willing to appear boldly in front of the others and take charge. The mob waited, milling around outside the Union Building until some of them grew bored and went home. The rest eventually started toward the center of town, which was two miles from the campus. Their destination was the Orpheum Theater, where they would undoubtedly have interfered with the performance of some Japanese acrobats if they hadn’t been stopped.

  On the way, as they were passing through a little park, they met a student with his date, coming home from the movies. They surrounded this couple and separated them. When the boy struck out frantically, dozens of hands grabbed hold of him, tore his shirt off, gave him a black eye and a bloody mouth. They took the girl’s skirts and pulled them over her head and tied them there. Somebody tripped the boy, who was still fighting, and as he fell, they pushed the girl, unharmed, on top of him. This little unpleasantness, this token rape, seemed to give the mob confidence.

  When a streetcar appeared around a corner, twenty boys ran to meet it, and one of them managed to pull the trolley off the overhead wire. The streetcar was plunged into abrupt darkness. Before it even came to a stop, it was being rocked from side to side by a hundred hands. The motorman got out, swearing, and put the trolley back on. The boys stood off, and watched him with apparently no thought of interfering. The wooden streetcar lighted up, the motorman climbed on and clanging his bell furiously, moved forward about twenty feet before the lights went out again.

  This happened three more times and the last time they pushed a small bonfire under the car, which made a good deal of smoke and frightened the passengers. But the mob had already had enough when that happened, so they let the motorman continue and would have continued themselves except that the Dean of Men appeared miraculously in their midst. He was a slight, almost boyish man of sixty-two. His hair and his mustache were snow white. He looked kind, humorous, and fatherly, but the effect on the boys was as if a rattlesnake had materialized right in front of them on the streetcar tracks. As they backed away from him he began picking certain figures out of the crowd and addressing them by name. “Hello, Johnston … Feldcamp, are you here too?… Morrison, if I had as much trouble with physics as you seem to have, I’d be studying tonight…. Peters, I think you had better beat it for home….”

  Lymie thought so too.

  On the way he had to pass Spud’s fraternity. He went up on the porch, opened the door, and walked in. By that time it was nearly eleven o’clock, and Spud had finished studying and was straightening his desk before he went to bed. After the Golden Gloves tournament he had set to work with two cans of paint, one turkey red, the other black. Everything in the room that could possibly be painted—the door, the window frames, the woodwork, the two study chairs, the tables, the two goosenecked student lamps, the closet curtain rod, the ceiling light fixture, and even the glass ashtray—was either one color or the other. Spud glanced at Lymie’s flushed and excited face and then at his muddy shoes. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “Spring celebration,” Lymie said. He pushed his hat on the back of his head and sank down in a chair.

  “I should think you’d have had enough of that, after what happened to you at cap-burning,” Spud said.

  “This was different,” Lymie said.

  “What happened? Where’d you go?”

  While Lymie was telling him about the riot, Spud got undressed and put his bathrobe on.

  “I don’t understand it,” he said, when Lymie had finished. “If they’d started breaking into sorority houses and throwing furniture out of the windows, the way they did once before, you’d have got yourself into a lot of trouble.”

  “I thought of that,” Lymie said.

  “Well,” Spud asked irritably, “what did you get mixed up in it for?”

  “I don’t know,” Lymie said. “I honestly don’t. Why are you staring at me like that?”

  It had suddenly flashed through Spud’s mind, while Lymie was talking, that the hundred dollars Rinehart had loaned him was really from Lymie. “Because you need to have your head examined,” he said, and rejected the idea that was disturbing him. It was not based on anything, after all, but it was just a blind guess. Rinehart said he got the money from his aunt. Besides, Lymie would never part with a hundred dollars. He was as tight as the bark on a tree.

  “I saw the bonfire,” Lymie said, “and I guess I just wanted to see what they were going to do.”

  “You’re crazy, that’s all that’s the matter with you,” Spud said. “Or else you’ve got spring fever.”

  “I’ve got something,” Lymie said, and stood up and sneezed violently three times while he was buttoning his coat.

  46

  What Lymie had was a bad cold which lasted ten days, and by the end of that period the ground was once more covered with dirty snow. He took to his bed and started dosing himself. This, instead of forestalling the cold, seemed to make it worse. The boys brought food in to him but he was alone all day in the dormitory. With no one to talk to, he slept a good deal, and one day woke up with a feeling that he was in some unnamable danger. Something, a person, a presence (he couldn’t quite imagine it but it nevertheless knew him) was waiting outside the door. In a growing uneasiness he got up and went downstairs and dressed. It took longer than usual because he was weak from staying in bed, but his cold, from that moment, began to get better.

  In April nothing stays. No purpose in the heavens and certainly no need on earth can keep the wind in any one direction. It blew from the east, from the west, and finally from the south. There were rain clouds and when it rained, thunder and lightning as well With so much uncertainty in the atmosphere it was not really surprising that again Spud was not himself. Lymie first noticed it when Spud walked past him and asked Armstrong to tie his gloves for him.

  Lymie didn’t know what the trouble was, but he was not dismayed. He had worn Spud down once before and he was sure that he could do it again. Every day between four-fifteen and four-thirty he appeared at the gymnasium and stood a few feet away from the punching bag where Spud, if he wanted his gloves tied on or any small service like th
at, wouldn’t have to go far to find him. When Spud came up from the showers, Lymie was there waiting by the locker, like a faithful hound. He made no move to open the lock, or to touch anything inside the locker that belonged to Spud. Occasionally while Spud was dressing and afterward on the way home, Lymie would say something to him, but Lymie was always careful not to put the remark in the form of a question, so there was no actual need for Spud to reply.

  One day it occurred to Lymie that if he also kept quiet, if he just gave Spud a chance, the situation might change. It did, but not in the way he had expected. Once having joined Spud in that harsh silence, he couldn’t escape from it; he had to keep still himself. He walked along, hearing the unfriendly sound of Spud’s heelplates as they struck the sidewalk, and watching the swing of Spud’s knees. Once or twice his glance went as high as Spud’s mouth, drawn in a tight line. It was all that Lymie needed to see. When they came to the corner where Spud turned off to go to the fraternity house, Lymie’s hand would rise in a half salute which did not break the silence and yet spoke eloquently. And Spud would nod and walk away.

  There were moments when Spud felt that everything he was doing was wrong, that he had no reason to be jealous of Lymie. The way Sally looked at him and the way she talked about him when he wasn’t present made it perfectly clear that, so far as she was concerned, Lymie was merely a part of Spud. That was the way Spud himself felt when he was able to think at all straight—as if he had in Lymie a sort of twin, more intelligent and more thoughtful, that he could tell things to.

  In German class he and Lymie sat side by side, four days a week, without speaking. When Spud had no paper, Lymie took a sheet out of his notebook and handed it to him, ready to take it back if Spud decided to refuse the offer and write on the bare desk top instead. At such times, Spud longed to lean over and whisper, “How’d we ever get started this way, when you’re the best friend I’ve got. The only one, when you get right down to it. Sally is something different…” But he had never been able to say things like that, and besides, Miss Blaiser was at the blackboard writing: (I) When do strong verbs change their stem vowel? (2) Give the meanings and principal parts of beginnen, beissen, binden, bleiben, finden, gefallen, laufen, lesen, nehmen, rufen, schlafen, schliessen, schreiben, sehen….

  There were also times when Spud would have been willing to leave the fraternity house and move back with Lymie, if the brothers had given him the slightest excuse. Instead of treating him as they did the freshmen, they acted as if he were already initiated. He had no pledge duties, he was never called down in front of the fireplace and paddled on Monday nights, nothing was ever said to him about his attitude or about the right fraternity spirit. Without a grievance he couldn’t act, and the brothers wouldn’t give him one. He looked everywhere and the nearest to an enemy that he could find was Lymie, who was also his only friend.

  One afternoon Spud cut his chemistry class and walked across the campus to the rooming house. He wanted to talk to somebody and he decided to spill everything to Reinhart. When he arrived at “302,” Reinhart’s room was empty. Spud looked at the schedule of classes tacked to the wall above the desk and saw that Reinhart had no classes the rest of the afternoon. He sat down in the sagging, overstuffed chair to wait.

  He had only been there a few minutes when Mr. Dehner’s spaniel caught his scent in the front hall and raced to the stairs. He threw himself on Spud, who picked him up, tossed him almost to the ceiling, and caught him on the way down. The dog squirmed in Spud’s hands, rolled his bloodshot eyes ecstatically, and wagged his stump of a tail. When Spud put him down, he backed off and with his head turned slightly made a queer sound that was half whimper and half bark.

  “Well,” a familiar penetrating voice said, “if it isn’t Mr. Latham! How that poor dog has missed you.”

  Spud turned and saw Mr. Dehner standing in the doorway with a dust mop in his hand.

  “Have you come back to us? I was saying just the other day to Colter I think it was, or maybe it was Geraghty. I said, ‘Some day Mr. Latham will be back. You wait and see. He’s not the fraternity type. And if he saw the way Mr. Peters keeps that room—’ My dear boy, you ought to go and look at it. Just like the town dump. I’m terribly fond of Mr. Peters. He’s so sensitive and all, but I declare I don’t know how he finds his books when he wants to study. He must have some sixth sense…. Be quiet, Pooh-Bah! … I had a cousin—she was my mother’s cousin, actually, who always used to pray to St. Anthony when she lost anything. She lived right around the corner from a church so it was very convenient. She found ever so many things that way. A garnet brooch, and the key to her safety deposit box, and my mother’s seed pearls. We used to go running to her the minute anything turned up missing, and I must say she got results, even though it was pure superstition. Mr. Peters is not religious, is he? Nobody is religious any more. It doesn’t seem to be fashionable. But it probably will come back, just like Victorian walnut. And then the churches won’t hold them all. The intellectual types will drop Spengler and Einstein and take up St. Thomas Aquinas. For all I know they may be at him already. I must ask Mr. Peters. He’s the student of the house. He looks like a student, doesn’t he? So flat-chested. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he were tubercular. You don’t think there is anything seriously the matter with him do you, Mr. Latham? I’d hate to have somebody in the house who was—you know. But probably he has lungs like a jack rabbit and will outlive all of us. I used to watch the two of you coming up the walk together. So comic, the combination. One all brains and no brawn, the other all brawn and—but grades aren’t everything, are they, Mr. Latham? And people with brains so often seem to end up teaching school. That’s undoubtedly what will happen to Mr. Peters—he’s been very absent-minded lately—unless some kind fate intervenes. You never had any courses under old Professor Larkin, did you? No, of course you didn’t. He died when you were in rompers, poor man. He was an authority on Chaucer or Milton, I don’t remember which it was, and terribly absent-minded. He was famous for it. He once took a letter that he wanted to mail and left it on the hall table and went with the lamp, plug and all, out to the mailbox. They say that really happened. I don’t know why absent-mindedness should go with teaching, but apparently there’s some connection. Probably teachers don’t want to be teaching any more than I want to keep roomers. They just wake up some morning and find themselves on a platform holding forth about Amenhotep III or heredity and environment. I do hope you’re not planning to devote yourself to that sort of thing. You’re not cut out for it, you know. You’ve taught Pooh-Bah to sit up and speak nicely for his biscuit, and he rolls over when you tell him to, which is certainly more than he does for me. But I don’t feel that you belong on the faculty somehow, and I don’t know that I would want you to if you could. It’s a very questionable life. Safe, up to a point. But there’s too much emphasis on expediency. And except for a few professors who have relatives that die and leave them a little something, everybody is so poor. Mr. Peters I don’t worry about. He looks like the kind of person who would some day inherit a small legacy. But you, my boy, you belong in the wicked world. Don’t worry if there are people who are brighter than you are. They’ll never get to the top. There’ll always be some well-connected person above them. Over the last five thousand years the human mind has had every possible chance to make something of itself and so far—” Mr. Dehner crossed the room and threw open the window and shook the mop violently several times. “So far,” he repeated, turning his head to avoid the lint that blew back in the open window, “it has failed.” He closed the window with a bang. “Now my dear boy, don’t look at me like that. I can see by your eyes just what you’re thinking: ‘What does that old fool know about it anyway?’ And you’re quite right. The answer is nothing. Nothing but what I see going on around me every day.”

  He went off mopping carelessly under desks and around chairs and humming:

  Old Heidelberg, dear Heidelberg

  Thy sons will ne’er forget …


  47

  When Professor Severance did not appear, his class in Romantic poetry waited the customary five minutes for a full professor and then walked out. Lymie, Sally, and Hope did not separate until they were outside, and then only after considerable discussion. Lymie had a freakish black felt hat on—they were a sudden campus fad—and he pulled the hat, which was too small for him, down over one eyebrow, cocked the brim up in front, and said, “Now where are we going?”

  “I’ve got a three o’clock gym class,” Hope said. “I’m going back to the house and put my bloomers on. If you’d care to see me in a pair of bloomers, Lymie, you can hang around downstairs. It won’t take me a minute to change.”

  “I think I’d rather go to the English seminar,” Lymie said.

  “Suit yourself.”

  “Well,” he said, hesitating. “I don’t have to see you in your bloomers to know what you would look like. I can imagine them.”

  “You may think you can,” Hope said. “But I was never so surprised in my life as I was the first time I put them on. Forbes, are you coming?”

  “I’ve got to go home,” Sally said. “Mother’s making me a new dress and I promised her I’d—”

  “Do you have to do that today?” Hope asked. “I was thinking, if you and Lymie went to the Ship’s Lantern I could meet you there before gym and we could do our French lesson together.”

  “Well,” Sally said, “I’d rather, actually, but the thing is, Mother is expecting me. Also I want to wear the dress.”

  “Such selfish, disagreeable people,” Hope said cheerfully.