The Folded Leaf

by William Maxwell

  The trip through the Cape Cod Canal was the first genuinely romantic thing that had ever happened to Sally. Until that time, her soul had been slowly perishing of a world where everybody was too well-bred and everything made too much sense. She wanted Spud and Lymie, her two closest friends, to understand about that inland voyage now, and share it with her, but unfortunately such an experience, the essence of it, cannot be communicated. And although Spud would have been glad of a chance to give blood transfusions or walk miles through deep snowdrifts for her sake, and Lymie would have sat for days at her bedside reading to her—on this occasion neither of them was willing to remain quiet and listen. Spud yawned openly, and Lymie kept fingering the chains which held the porch swing or pushing at a wicker chair to make the swing go sidewise. His eyes had a feverish luster that was not apparent in the dark, but when he spoke his voice was pitched to his own inner excitement, which made it impossible for him to listen to anyone very long without interrupting. This restlessness, this desire for something to be continually happening, had been with him since the afternoon Spud hurt his hand. It was with Lymie when he woke in the morning and it flung him into bed exhausted at the end of each day. His cheeks grew thinner and lines which would some day be permanent appeared between his nostrils and the corners of his mouth.

  It was he, actually, who was responsible for the sudden, very violent wrestling match which made Mrs. Forbes turn on the porch light and gaze in astonishment at the tangled mass of arms and legs on the porch floor.

  “Lymie,” she exclaimed, “is that you?”

  Nothing that Spud or Sally did ever seemed to startle her.

  51

  The university outdoor band concerts began late in April. Folding chairs were distributed over the steps of the auditorium, and on the stroke of seven the bronze doors opened and the sixty-odd members of the band filed out in their blue uniforms and found places. After an interval the band leader appeared and there was polite applause. Then a hush as his baton was raised and brought forth the first very faint sounds. The repertoire at these concerts was standard: “Pomp and Circumstance,” Bizet’s “Arlesienne Suite #2,” the overture to “William Tell,” the ballet music from “Rosamunde,” and music equally familiar. The audience sat on the grass or walked about or stood in clusters. People listened to the music or not, as they pleased, and what the wind blew away didn’t matter particularly.

  The evening of the first spring concert Lymie walked over from the boarding club with Reinhart. Here and there in the crowd he saw someone he knew—a boy who had sat next to him in botany the year before, two girls who were in his German class, his physical education instructor. Ford and Frenchie deFresne were there, each with a girl. No one looking at Frenchie now, with his hair parted in the middle instead of on the side, and wearing fawn-colored flannel trousers, a brown tweed coat, a snow-white shirt, and a yellow tie, would ever have guessed that he had once been through hell because he couldn’t think of a nine letter word beginning with S and ending with N. And though the girl who stood with her arm drawn through Ford’s called him “Diver,” it was something she had picked up from the boys in his fraternity, and even they had no idea where the name originally came from.

  Bob Edwards was at the concert with his public speaking instructor, a woman who was clearly too old for him; and Geraghty was there, but alone. His new girl had stood him up for an Alpha Delt with a Packard roadster.

  Mrs. Forbes was standing under the low branch of an elm tree, near the Broad Walk. Professor Forbes was with her, and so was Professor Severance. She waved to Lymie, but the two men were deep in conversation and didn’t see him. Professor Severance had not worn a band of black cloth on his left sleeve or made any public show of mourning, and many of his students didn’t even know that his mother had died suddenly during the night. But Mrs. Lieberman saw it in his face the first day that he taught his classes again. Professor Severance looked not only older but smaller, and it was all she could do to keep from speaking to him after the hour. Now you can lecture, was what she wanted to tell him. You’ve passed over. And Yd like very much to hear what you have to say about Matthew Arnold or Swinburne or yourself …

  She was at the concert with her two sons. She smiled at Lymie and he smiled back, recognizing her vaguely. The redheaded boy with her was the boy Spud got to give him a boxing lesson, that day last fall. Hope was at the concert also, with Bernice Crawford. Lymie stopped to talk to them a moment, and then he and Reinhart walked on.

  Sally wasn’t with her mother and father, and Lymie assumed that she must be with Spud. He kept searching for them in the crowd and finding people who looked almost but not quite like them. The back of a girl’s head or the slope of a boy’s shoulders would be almost right but the carriage would be wrong or the girl would turn and he would see what he had known all along—that the girl was not Sally, not even like Sally.

  He caught a glimpse of his logic instructor, a Welshman with wavy hair, and, later on, of his last year’s rhetoric instructor with a woman who looked as if she might be his wife. Though dogs were not allowed on the campus, there were several of varying sizes and breeds, who pursued each other earnestly through the legs of the crowd.

  The music out of doors was like a part of the weather. At one moment it sounded strong and clear and touched the hearts of those who were listening to it. The next moment it was scattered, lost on the largeness of the evening. Lymie had almost forgotten that Reinhart was with him when a remark, heard above the brasses and the clarinets, made him turn and ask, “What can’t you stand any longer?”

  “I don’t know whether I ought to tell you,” Reinhart said.

  “Why not?” Lymie asked, with his eyes on a chain of migratory birds that were flying very high.

  Reinhart shook his head. “It might make trouble.”

  “If it’s something I ought to know—” Lymie said.

  “Sometimes it’s all I can do to keep from taking a poke at him. I’d probably get the shit beat out of me but it would be worth it. I’d feel better afterward. But anyway, I can’t stand to see you following him around and getting kicked in the teeth whenever he feels like it.”

  Lymie looked at Reinhart oddly but said nothing.

  “What the hell do you see in a guy like that?”

  “A lot,” Lymie said.

  “I suppose you must,” Reinhart said. “But if you feel that way about him, somebody ought to tell you something.”

  “What?” Lymie asked.

  “You want to know?”

  Lymie nodded.

  “He’s jealous of you. He’s so jealous of you he can’t stand the sight of you. He comes over to the house sometimes when you’re at the library and he sits in my room and talks for an hour at a time about how much he hates you.”

  As a rule, Lymie’s face gave him away. When he was embarrassed, he blushed to the roots of his hair. When he was frightened, he showed it. Now nothing showed.

  “I guess I should have realized it,” he said, and changed the subject.

  The concert ended at eight o’clock with the playing of the university anthem. As the crowd began to drift toward the streets that led away from the campus, Reinhart tried to persuade Lymie to go to a movie with him, but Lymie said that he had to study, so they walked back to “302.” Lymie went straight to his own room. He was loosening his necktie when Reinhart came in, sat down in the Morris chair, and lit a cigarette. He was in the habit of going from room to room during the evening, and Lymie was not compelled by politeness—since there was no pretense of it in the rooming house—to make conversation. He sat down at his littered desk and cleared a place in front of him. He knew that Reinhart was waiting for him to turn around, but instead he opened a book and pretended to read. Reinhart finished his cigarette and then got up and went on to Pownell’s room. Five minutes later he was back.

  “You’re not sore at me, are you?” he asked hesitantly.

  “Why should I be?” Lymie said.

  “For telli
ng you about Spud.”

  “No,” Lymie said. “You did me a favor. Besides, I would have found it out sooner or later.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Reinhart said, and wandered back to Pownell’s room.

  A few minutes later he was back again. This time he didn’t come in but lingered in the doorway. “Look, bud,” he said, “I feel sorry about what I did. I shouldn’t have told you. I know damn well I shouldn’t. Now that I’ve made trouble between you two guys, I’m going out in a few minutes and get drunk.” He turned away from the doorway and then came back one last time. “Why don’t you come with me?” he asked. “You don’t have to drink if you don’t want to. Stay sober and keep an eye on me, because I’m going to need it.” He saw by the expression on Lymie’s face that he was getting ready to frame an excuse, and before Lymie could open his mouth, Reinhart said, “Never mind,” and disappeared.

  Between nine and nine-thirty, Colter and then Howard passed through Lymie’s room without stopping. At twenty minutes of ten, Freeman came in and ransacked Lymie’s closet for a sport coat which he had wanted to wear to the concert. He had gone through every other closet on the second floor without any luck, and so he thought he might as well try Lymie’s. Lymie turned around and watched him. The sport coat wasn’t there.

  At ten o’clock Lymie undressed and went upstairs to bed. He was going to see Spud later. Beyond that he had no plan and yet he acted as if he had one, and as if it were essential to this plan that the other boys who lived at the rooming house should be in bed and asleep before he carried it out. The door swung open and closed, time after time. He thought he kept track of the boys who came in and got into their beds, but he miscounted. Reinhart and Pownell went out together, shortly after ten, and neither of them had come in when Lymie got up at midnight and slipped downstairs again.

  Instead of getting dressed he put on a clean pair of pajamas and took his winter overcoat out of the closet. When he had combed his hair in front of the mirror he put the coat on, buttoned it, and left the house. It was a soft spring night and the moon, no longer full, was on its way down the sky. The houses Lymie passed were nearly all dark. Now and then a single harsh light burned in an upstairs room. In any other town a light in an upstairs window at that hour would have meant that someone was sleepless or sick. Here it was because a head was still bent over a book, a hand writing slowly. The campus was deserted. The massive familiar buildings were enjoying the peace and the silence in the corridors never allowed them in the daytime. The front door of Spud’s fraternity house was unlocked, the brothers had no fear of being robbed by outsiders. There was a light in the front hall. Both the living room and the dining room were dark. The brothers had either gone out or up to bed, leaving the odor of stale cigarette smoke behind them.

  Lymie went up four flights of stairs, with his right hand moving against the plaster wall, guiding him. The door which led to the dormitory had a pane of frosted glass in it, and groaned when Lymie pushed it open. He stood still, with his heart pounding, but no voice challenged him from the dark, no springs creaked suspiciously. Spud had shown him months before where he slept, and as soon as his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness Lymie made his way through the forest of double-deckers and found Spud asleep in his single lower, near the open window.

  Lymie, who was always watching the others, who slipped into the water when it was his turn but never took part in the shouting and splashing, now for the first time watched himself. He was in the center of the stage at last, with an important part to play: he was the devoted friend, to whom a grave injury has been done.

  52

  Spud raised himself on one elbow and looked at Lymie without speaking. There was a second when Lymie was sure that he was about to fall back on the bed without ever knowing that anybody had awakened him. Instead he got up noiselessly and followed Lymie downstairs. At the door of Spud’s room Lymie stepped aside. The door was padlocked and he didn’t know the combination.

  When they got inside Spud closed the door and went to his closet for a bathrobe; he had been sleeping naked. As Lymie took his coat off it occurred to him for the first time that Reinhart might have been mistaken. The whole thing could have been something that Reinhart had imagined, and the expression in Spud’s eyes, the clouded look, might be due to the fact that his sleep had been broken. Lymie stared at the gray iris, the dark pupil, and then at the curve of the eyelids. There was no doubt about it, the expression was hate.

  “There is something I have to tell you,” he said.

  Spud nodded.

  “I went to the band concert with Dick Reinhart. He said you were jealous of me on account of Sally.”

  Spud’s expression did not change.

  “What I came over to tell you, you have to believe,” Lymie said. “I’m not in love with Sally and she isn’t in love with me. She doesn’t love anyone but you and never has.”

  Spud nodded again, but it was not the kind of nod that means agreement.

  “You believe me, don’t you?” Lymie asked. “You have to believe me because what I’m saying is the truth.”

  To his horror he saw that Spud was smiling.

  In the scene that Lymie had imagined, lying awake in bed on the other side of town, Spud had said to him, I don’t hate you, Lymie old socks. I couldn’t hate you. But there is so often a discrepancy between real life and the life of the imagination, and people tend not to allow for it, or at least not sufficiently. It hadn’t occurred to Lymie that Spud would turn away, instead of speaking, and find a chair, and sit down with one leg crossed over the other and one fleece-lined slipper dangling in space. Spud was thoroughly awake now and his eyes were thoughtful, but the thought, whatever it was, remained locked inside of him.

  Lymie saw that words were not enough. It would take some action, as yet unplanned but rising like a shadow behind him. On a sudden impulse he went toward Spud and knelt down and clasped Spud’s knees. The movement came naturally to Lymie but it was also one of the oldest human gestures.

  “Please listen to me,” Lymie said. “Because if you don’t, you’ll be very sorry.”

  Spud had never read the Iliad and he was not moved by the pressure of Lymie’s hands or the bright tears in his eyes. He had seen tears before and he himself never shed them.

  When Spud lowered his eyes to his hands, Lymie looked at them too—at the tight bandage and the two splints on Spud’s right hand, and the five fingers coming out of the gauze. When he is able to box again, Lymie thought, someone else will tie his gloves on for him. I no longer have access to any part of him.

  There was a strange but not very long silence between them, and then Lymie got up from the floor, put his coat on, and turned the collar up around his throat. As he started for the door, Spud stood up too and followed him out into the hall. They went down the hall side by side, as if they were still on good terms with each other.

  A door opened and Armstrong came out in his pajamas and bathrobe. His hair was rumpled. He had been studying late and he looked tired and sleepy. He glanced at Spud and then at Lymie, with interest. There had been a time when, if Armstrong had shown any knowledge of his existence, Lymie would have been pleased. Now when Armstrong said, “What are you doing up at this hour of the night?” Lymie didn’t even bother to answer.

  Spud followed him down the stairs and out onto the porch. The moon was going down behind the brick fraternity house across the street. Spud’s face had relaxed and he looked almost kind. With this almost kindness Lymie would have no part. It seemed so unnatural, and so sad, to be separating for the last time. At the foot of the steps he turned and said, “I forgive you everything!” but that didn’t work either, perhaps because when you really forgive someone, wholly and completely, your heart feels very much lighter and nothing like this happened to him.

  53

  Mr. Peters sat waiting in the outer office of the Dean of Men. His topcoat, neatly folded, lay on the chair beside him, and his gray fedora was on top of the coat. His eyes we
re bloodshot and he looked as if he hadn’t slept well. Though he made no effort to attract attention to himself, the secretary to whom he had given his name managed to whisper it to the girl who was standing by the filing cabinet, and she in turn told the assistant dean, when he came out of his office to use the files. All three of them looked at Mr. Peters out of the corners of their eyes. They might as well have stared at him openly. He knew what they were whispering about.

  He glanced at the clock on the wall, which said quarter after three, and compared it with his own gold watch. The clock was a minute fast. At twenty minutes of ten that morning he walked into his cubbyhole of an office, sat down with his hat on, reached into the top drawer of his desk, where he kept some aspirin, and took two, without any water. He lit a cigarette to take the taste out of his mouth, and as he put it down on the edge of the desk, the phone rang. He picked it up without having the slightest premonition of what was in store for him. “Mr. Lymon Peters?” the operator asked, and he said, “Yes, this is Lymon Peters speaking.” “One moment please,” the operator said, and then he heard a different voice. “Mr. Peters? Calkins speaking. George S. Calkins, Dean of Men at the University of… Can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” Mr. Peters said into the mouthpiece, and felt a cold sweat breaking out on his forehead. Lymie must have got into some kind of a scrape…. Mr. Peters hoped fervently that it wasn’t a girl. If Lymie had got some nice girl in a family way….

  “Hardly hear you,” the voice said. “Must be a bad connection … Operator?” The phone went dead for about thirty seconds and when Mr. Peters heard the voice again it was much louder. “Mr. Peters, I have something pretty upsetting to tell you. It’s about your son.”