The Folded Leaf

by William Maxwell

  At the Broad Walk, Sally turned to Lymie and said, “Why don’t you—oh, I forgot. You’re going to the seminar.”

  “I don’t have to,” Lymie said.

  “Well come on and walk me home then.”

  “All right.”

  “Fine thing,” Hope said. “I beg and plead with you to come with me and you have to study. But let Sally go like this at you—” She crooked her finger, beckoning to him.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Lymie said earnestly. “I’ll go with you.”

  “You will not. If you’re going to play favorites—”

  “But I didn’t mean—” Lymie began.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, why do you have to take everything so seriously?” Hope exclaimed. “Can’t you see I was teasing you? Go on, both of you. You can come and see me in my bloomers some other day.” She smiled at them and walked off.

  She had not had to drop out of school after the appendicitis operation because the sorority made her house manager, at a modest salary. As soon as she had something that set her apart from the others, she became pleasant to live with. Now her disparaging remarks were nearly always addressed to herself and her opinions were no longer arrogant. When she stared at someone it was obvious she was worrying about unpaid house bills and didn’t know that the person she was staring at was even there.

  Sally and Lymie walked on in silence for almost a block before she lifted her head suddenly and said, “Spud’s having one of his spells again.”

  Lymie nodded.

  “I don’t know when it began or what started him off,” Sally said, “but every once in a while I catch him looking at me as if I were a perfect stranger to him. As if he were trying to size me up. We had a terrible fight last night, and then suddenly, when he was saying good night to me out on the front porch, he said, ‘Hold me, Sally, just hold me!’ It was terrible the way he said it. We sat on the front steps and leaned against each other and I held him as hard as I could for about half an hour, and when he went home he seemed a little better. He was all right, as a matter of fact, but I still don’t know what was bothering him.”

  Lymie let her talk on and on until they reached the Forbeses’ front walk. She put her hand on his sleeve then and said, “Somehow I can talk to you about Spud because I know that you feel about him almost the way I do.”

  She waved to him from the porch and then disappeared into the house. Lymie went on to “302.” He had to go through Reinhart’s room to get to his own.

  When Lymie appeared in the door, Spud was there, and so was Reinhart. Spud stopped talking abruptly. The sight of Lymie’s face, of his eyes blazing with happiness, was a too-exact, too-humiliating refutation of all that he had just been saying. There could be no question now of whose fault it was. Reinhart, sitting deep in his chair and twisting a lock of hair with his finger, would know everything.

  The silence expanded like a soap bubble; expanded and expanded until it pressed against the four walls, the floor, and the ceiling. It seemed to Spud that it took a year for the light to go out of Lymie’s eyes, for the expression on his face to change, for him to smile stiffly and walk on to the next room.

  48

  Spud took longer than usual with the wrapping of his wrists that afternoon, as if he were seeking for some kind of perfection which would automatically dispose of all his problems. The three o’clock gym classes had just been dismissed, and the aisle around him was clogged with boys opening lockers, pulling sweatshirts over their heads, stepping out of jock straps, arguing, singing, and snapping towels at each other’s buttocks. He was so accustomed to this that he hardly saw them. He closed his own locker, picked up the skipping rope and the boxing gloves, and threaded his way through the crowded aisle without touching or pushing anyone.

  As he started up the stairs he was conscious of a heavy feeling in his legs, though he had had plenty of sleep the night before. When he reached the floor above, he fought back an impulse to turn and go back down the stairs. Up till now Spud had done all his fighting with his fists and he didn’t know how to cope with a stubborn, unyielding resistance that wasn’t physical. He tried to pretend that this afternoon was like any other afternoon, to keep his eyes under control, and above all not to look for Lymie.

  In spite of his lean, quick, well-trained body, in spite of the muscles in his arms and legs, there was a limit to Spud’s strength and he had almost found it the night he got the cut over his eye. The cut had healed long since, but it had left a scar running through his left eyebrow. Spud drew a ringer that night—a Lithuanian who had no right to compete in that amateur tournament, since he was twenty-five years old and had been boxing professionally for years. He was tall and skinny with long arms. Spud took one look at him and was scared silly. He had reason to be. The Lithuanian hit him with everything but the ring post and Spud couldn’t do anything about it. He couldn’t get past those arms. The first three minutes seemed like three hours. It was the worst fighting Spud had ever come up against. In the second round he was knocked down and had sense enough to wait until the count of nine. Then he got up and the bell saved him. At the beginning of the third round he got the cut over his left eye. The blood ran down the side of his face and some of it went into his eye, so everything he saw was filmed with red. The floor kept slipping out from under him, and it took all his strength to lift his arms. During that fight Spud discovered that you can hit a man and hit a man and hit a man and finally if he is still there and you hit him with everything you’ve got, he has to fall down or you’re licked. Fortunately the Lithuanian fell down. Spud hit him with his Sunday punch and knocked him out. If he hadn’t, Spud would have sat down right where he was. He was too tired to go on.

  Lymie was there. He was standing against the wall near (but not too near) the punching bag.

  I don’t want to hurt him any more, Spud said to himself. I just don’t want to go on hurting him…. Apparently he had no choice. He couldn’t blow up at the referee for not stopping the fight because there was no referee. He could walk up to Lymie now and say, For Christ’s sake, go away, will you? and Lymie would go away. But the next afternoon he’d be back again. And if he told Lymie to go away and not come back any more, Lymie would do that too. But he would stand outside the building waiting to walk home. Or if he wasn’t allowed to do that, then he would follow at a distance. And even if he stayed away from the gymnasium entirely he would still be waiting, no matter where he was.

  It must be something I did a long time ago, Spud thought suddenly—and don’t remember. Maybe I didn’t even know it at the time, but I must have done something to him or he wouldn’t do this to me.

  Ten minutes later while Spud was slapping half-heartedly at the punching bag, he felt a sharp, shooting pain all through his right wrist and up into his knuckles. He stopped and felt of his hand through the fingerless glove. It was okay as long as his hand was open and relaxed but it hurt when he moved his fingers. In disbelief that such a thing could happen to him, he drew his hand back, closed his fist, and hit the punching bag as hard as he could. Then he doubled up, holding his arms across his stomach.

  Of the dozen boys working out in the gymnasium that afternoon only one realized that something was wrong and came up to him. Spud recognized Lymie’s face, through a blur of pain. Lymie was staring at him, with his mouth open and his eyes filled with concern; and it was that, Spud decided suddenly, that he wanted. Somebody to be concerned about him. Somebody to understand what it would mean if he could never box again.

  His eyes met Lymie’s for the first time in weeks and he said quietly, “I hurt my hand.”

  49

  The shiny new Chrysler sedan that was parked in front of Professor Severance’s house belonged to Dr. Rogers, who had taken Hope Davison’s appendix out (unnecessarily perhaps) and who was always pinching young girls. He was inside, in the upstairs front bedroom. He had been called to attend Mrs. Severance, who had had a stroke and was lying in her huge walnut bed. He could have pinched Mrs. Severance until sh
e was black and blue and she would not have felt it. Her face was ashen gray and her breathing was terrible to listen to. It had a kind of rising-falling rhythm, like someone putting his foot on the second rung of a ladder, then stepping down one rung, then two rungs higher, then one rung down. When she got to the top of the ladder she started down. At the bottom there was an interval of perhaps twenty seconds before she started up again.

  Dr. Rogers bent over the bed and forced one of the sick woman’s eyelids open with his thumb. The eyeball was rigid. He let his hand move down to her wrist, which was lying outside the cover. His serene, pale blue eyes went round the room, resting by turns on various objects: sewing basket, sachet bag, brush and comb and oval hand mirror, small silver-framed picture of William Severance at the age of eight in a white sailor suit by the seashore. Next to this picture was a larger one of a middle-aged man, handsome and distinguished-looking, but severe. The face bore a family resemblance to Professor Severance—the shape and length of the nose especially. It was his father. From the two pictures Dr. Rogers’ eyes moved on to the large green checkbook which Mrs. Severance had been trying to balance, sitting at her desk, when the seizure occurred. Through daily use, all of Mrs. Severance’s personal things seemed to have taken on her warmth of heart, her indomitability, foolishness, and charm.

  The nurse that Dr. Rogers had brought with him waited in her starched uniform and cap on the other side of the bed. Professor Severance stood timidly in the doorway. When he was five years old his mother had taken him to New York for a visit. They saw the Central Park zoo and the aquarium. They observed the Statue of Liberty from a little boat that went all around the harbor. They rode on the elevated railway. He learned to take his hat off in the elevators of the tall buildings, and his mother, for the crowning treat of all, took him to the toy department of a big department store where he saw all the toys that he had ever dreamed of. She had an errand to do on the floor above and she thought he saw her go, but his mind was on a little piano with real keys, and suddenly he discovered that he was alone, that his mother had abandoned him. She was only gone five minutes, and the saleswomen gathered around and tried to comfort him, but a child lost goes on crying, right down to the end of time.

  The late afternoon sun came streaming in through the open window and lay in squares on the white woodwork, on the polished floor, and on a section of wallpaper. The small yellow roses climbing up the wall seemed almost real.

  “Well,” Dr. Rogers said finally, “there’s nothing to do but wait.”

  When he picked up his black bag and left the room, the nurse remained behind. Professor Severance followed him down the stairs and the two men stood talking on the front porch for perhaps five minutes. They kept their voices down, not because there was any danger that the patient upstairs might hear them, but out of respect for the seriousness of her condition.

  The doctor got into his car and drove away, and Professor Severance went back into the house. He picked up one of the little clay figures that were on the piano in the living room—the figure of the bridegroom in a red robe, with a gold sash and green lining to his sleeves. After a moment or two Professor Severance restored the figure to the wedding procession and went out into the hall to telephone. The colored maid, coming into the dining room to set the table for dinner, heard him say, “Apparently there’s nothing … Yes … Yes … Yes, I will… Of course I will, but there’s nothing anybody can do now. We just have to wait… Yes, I will, Alice … Yes, of course …” and knew that he was talking to Mrs. Forbes.

  When he came back into the living room he sat down at the card table, in his accustomed place, and his eyes went searching, out of habit, until they found a jack of spades to go on a queen of diamonds, a nine of hearts that he could place on the ten of spades.

  In the middle of the night, some time between two o’clock and three, the lights went on at Professor Severance’s, first in one room and then in another, upstairs and then down. The houses on either side of it, all up and down the block, were dark, and so were the houses across the street, but Professor Severance’s house looked as if it were all lit up for a party, one of the parties for which his mother was famous, with fiddlers for the Virginia reel and a staggering buffet supper afterward and none of the guests as gay as or having a better time than the old lady herself.

  50

  Those who are brave enough go straight into the center of any dangerous situation and often come out alive on the other side. Most people aren’t very brave, of course, and to try and skirt around a danger looks safer than to go right into the center of it. Unfortunately it isn’t safer, because if you don’t go through the center you meet with an ambush later on, and there the chances are totally against you. But the odd thing is that if you keep walking around a danger, if you choose the indirect, cautious method, avoiding an open conflict, it will seem for a time to work.

  Spud broke a bone in his hand, that afternoon at the gymnasium, and afterward a strange happiness set in for him, and also for Lymie and Sally; the kind of happiness that people sometimes describe as “like old times come back again.” Included in this description is the knowledge that the happiness seemed, the first time, as if it would last forever, and that they now know better than to think that.

  Spud was still jealous. All that was necessary to unbalance his feelings was for him to meet Sally and Lymie coming toward him on the Broad Walk and see with his own eyes how interested they were in what they were saying to each other, before they looked up and saw him. But since he now made no effort to fight it, Spud’s jealousy didn’t last as long. Sometimes it only lasted a few minutes. If Spud was silent, Lymie stopped talking. When Spud’s face cleared, all that Lymie had been thinking burst out of him in a flood of conversation.

  With his right hand and wrist held immobile between two splints, there was no point in Spud’s going to the gymnasium. He and Lymie and Sally sat in the Ship’s Lantern until suppertime, or if Sally was busy, Spud went home with Lymie to the rooming house. He even stayed all night there once. In the morning a hand shaking Lymie’s shoulder wakened him, and for a moment he didn’t know whose hand it was. But then he opened his eyes and saw Spud sitting up in bed, and happiness flowed back into him like sunlight entering a room.

  Spud wanted to be at the fraternity house for breakfast. They got up quietly without waking anybody and went downstairs. Lymie sat in his bathrobe and slippers, with his legs drawn up under him, and watched Spud dress. Every move that he made delighted Lymie. The way Spud rubbed the sleep out of his eyes with his uninjured hand, the majestic way that he put one foot on a chair and then the other, for Lymie to tie his shoelaces were pleasures so familiar and so long denied. When Spud went off to the bathroom, Lymie followed and pulled the lid of the toilet down and sat on it. He was amused at the violence with which Spud soused his face with soap and water, and he enjoyed knowing that in a moment Spud, with his head bent over the washbowl, would reach out blindly for the towel that he knew Lymie would have ready for him.

  Washing and dressing required only a few minutes, and no amount of observation and delight could in any way prolong them. Back in Lymie’s room, Spud turned to the closet and shook his head.

  “It’s a mess, isn’t it?” Lymie agreed.

  “I don’t see how you stand it,” Spud said.

  “I don’t know either,” Lymie said. “I guess I just didn’t see it. I haven’t any eight o’clock class today. I’ll come back right after breakfast and clean it up.”

  Spud looked at the closet regretfully—he would have enjoyed straightening it himself—and then at his watch. “I have to be going,” he said.

  Lymie went to the head of the stairs with him, leaned over the railing, and watched Spud make his way like a hero between two drop-leaf tables. Lymie waited until he heard the front door close, and then he went back to his room. He was too happy and grateful to go back to bed, and it was too early to get dressed. He walked up and down with his hands clasped together, thinking. He was n
ot grateful to Spud so much as he was grateful to life itself. Because you are born, he thought, and you learn to eat and walk and talk, and you go to school, thinking that that’s all there is, and then suddenly everything is full of meaning and you know that you were not born merely to grow up and earn a living. You were born to …

  On the back of a chair he saw a sweater. He picked it up, held it out in front of him, and smiled. The shape and size identified it beyond question, among all the navy blue sweaters in the world. In a sudden access of feeling he buried his face in it. He didn’t do anything about the closet.

  That night, after supper, the three of them met in front of the Forbeses’ house and played football by the light of a street lamp.

  Neither Sally nor Lymie could hold Spud alone but they tackled him together. Sally grabbed the upper part of his body and Lymie dived for his legs. Even so, and handicapped as he was by an injured hand, Spud often got away from them.

  When they had worn themselves out, they went up on the porch and sat in the swing and talked about places they’d like to go to, if they had plenty of money and nothing to worry about, like school or earning a living. Sally thought it would be nice to take a long ocean voyage to India or China. The nearest she had ever come to it, she said, was the trip from Boston to New York, on the night boat, which left Boston at five o’clock on a summer afternoon. Her mother and father were with her, but she had a stateroom all to herself. Around one o’clock she woke up, after being asleep for hours, and decided that the boat was pitching and tossing. When people were seasick (and at that moment she felt very queer) they got up and walked on deck. When she got outside, she found that they weren’t out in the ocean at all; they were going through the Cape Cod Canal, and the boat was moving along steadily and quietly as if it were on a millpond. That was when she was twelve years old, and she could still remember the sound the bottom of the boat made, scraping, and the little shacks along the sides of the canal. The shacks were so close that you could almost reach down and pick the geraniums that were blooming in window boxes. Men with lanterns called up to her from the towpath, the captain shouted from the bridge, and there was a little dog that barked and also a girl with a baby in her arms—a wonderful baby that was wide awake at one o’clock in the morning.