The Folded Leaf

by William Maxwell

  When the blackness lifted, I was still there on my knees beside the tub. The razor was still in my right hand. I raised it and more blood flowed into the tub.

  There is, for every person to discover, a limit, an end to his will, a wall before which he stands and has to say “This wall I can’t climb over.” At five o’clock, with the light showing gray in the bathroom window, I got up and acknowledged the fact that I was through. It had seemed so easy before I started, and it had proved to be so hard. I was too tired to cut any more. Some acts, particularly acts of violence, are not possible to certain people. Even when you try with all your strength, they just don’t come off.

  My white pajamas were soaked with blood. I picked up a bathtowel and wound it around my neck and then I started for my own room. Before I got there the front door opened and I heard singing. It was somebody coming home drunk, singing “Mary Ann McCarthy she went out to gather clams …” I went to the head of the stairs and waited there until Reinhart, lurching and stumbling and grabbing at the banister for support, looked up and saw me. “Want to pee, Lymie?” he said. “Do you have to peel” Then his mouth fell open and he said, “Oh, my Christ, what have you done to yourself?”

  56

  “Iexpect Lymie has told you about me,” Mr. Dehner said X pleasantly. “My name is Alfred Dehner. I have the antique shop downstairs, and I’m his landlord, so to speak.”

  Lymie had never mentioned Mr. Dehner to his father, and Mr. Peters didn’t like effeminate men. Instead of shaking hands he merely nodded.

  “I just wanted to say how sorry I am. So shocking, wasn’t it? Such an awful way to choose. Gas would have been much simpler, but probably he didn’t think about it. And if he’d come downstairs and put his head in the oven I certainly would have heard him. I’m a very light sleeper. Have been for years. I fall asleep all right but then I wake up along about two o’clock and stay awake until daylight. And just before it’s time to get up I fall asleep again. I said to Dick Reinhart this morning, ‘Just when you think you’re safe,’ I said, ‘and that everything has happened to you that can happen, that’s the time to look out.’ Lymie’s always seemed like such a nice quiet boy. Not at all the sort that you’d expect to—although I must say, the first time I saw him, when I opened the front door and he was standing there, I had a feeling. Something told me that he—but that’s the way life is. Always the unexpected. I’ve been horribly upset by all this. My nerves aren’t strong, you know. I’m full of luminal right this minute. It isn’t habit-forming, the doctor says, but probably if you took a lot of it, over a long period of time, it might be. I’m expecting some ladies who are interested in a piecrust table that I found in the top of an old barn. It had to be refinished, of course, and when I first got it, it smelled of sheep manure, but it’s a very fine piece. I don’t expect you’re interested in antique furniture. So few men are. If you want anything, you’ll let me know, won’t you. I’ll be downstairs…. Come, Pooh-Bah.”

  The spaniel sniffed suspiciously at Mr. Peters’ pants leg, growled once, and then padded off after his master. Left to himself, Mr. Peters stood in the center of the room. He observed with satisfaction how neat it was. All the nagging he had done was evidently not in vain; Lymie had learned to pick up his things.

  In a straight row at the back of the closet were a pair of rubbers and several pairs of scuffed shoes which couldn’t belong to anybody but Lymie. I could have been a better father to him, Mr. Peters thought, looking at the shoes. J could have stayed home oftener, and I could have been more patient. I could have spent more time with him, taken him to the movies occasionally, and gone to concerts and museums with him.

  While Mr. Peters was accusing himself, he heard a slight noise and turned around.

  “There’s something I want to tell you,” Spud said. “I didn’t know the money Lymie loaned me was from him.”

  Though Mr. Peters had only met Spud once, he recognized him immediately.

  “I should have known it was from Lymie, but I didn’t,” Spud said.

  “How much was it?” Mr. Peters asked.

  “A hundred dollars.”

  Mr. Peters was shocked. A hundred dollars was a lot of money. Lymie couldn’t have managed that on his allowance. He must have dipped into his savings…. The boy seemed to be waiting for reassurance, and so Mr. Peters said, “That’s something Lymie hasn’t told me about. But I’m sure that if he gave you the money, he wanted you to have it. You pay him back when you can.”

  “I will,” Spud said, nodding. There was something about Mr. Peters—not his appearance so much as his choice of words—which reminded Spud of his own father. The silence between them was a comfortable one.

  “Will you have a cigar?” Mr. Peters asked, reaching for his vest pocket.

  Spud shook his head, but he was pleased. No grown man had ever offered him a cigar before. He watched Mr. Peters bite the end off of his and spit it in the wastebasket, and felt that he was on solid ground at last. Mr. Peters would never do some strange awful thing without letting you know beforehand.

  “Have you seen him?” Spud asked suddenly.

  “I saw him yesterday and again this morning,” Mr. Peters said, searching for matches. Spud whipped out a package that he was obliged to carry as a pledge in a fraternity house. “Much obliged,” Mr. Peters said. “He was sleeping both times. The doctor gave him morphine. He’s in pretty bad shape, and of course he isn’t a very strong boy to begin with, but they seem to think hell pull through all right. I’m more worried about his mental condition than anything else. When he was younger, if I could have afforded it, I would have sent him to a military school. I wish I had anyway. It would have been good for him in lots of ways. The drilling, I mean, and the discipline. When Lymie was a child he used to have a terrible temper. You wouldn’t think that now, would you? But if anybody teased him he’d fly into a rage. It was funny to see him sometimes—how anything so small could get so angry. Sometimes he looked almost as if he were ready to commit murder. After his mother died, I never had any more trouble with him, except that I can’t teach him the value of—You wouldn’t know by any chance whether he joined the Hospital Association this year? I’m sure he did because I told him to, and sent him the money, but at the dean’s office they say they haven’t any record of it.”

  “No,” Spud said, “I’m very sorry but I don’t know,” and with no warning, he turned on his heel and left the room.

  Mr. Peters stared after him and shook his head. First that business about the money, which the dean didn’t know about. And the look of suffering in the boy’s face. And what happened to his hand, that it was all bandaged up? Something was wrong somewhere. Nice boy, too. And probably not used to being mixed up in a thing like this. Probably very upset by it, like everyone else….

  Mr. Peters had always felt that he knew all there was to know about his son, and now suddenly it seemed as if he didn’t know anything. Not even as much as the dean or this Latham boy, although there were probably things that they didn’t know either…. He took a last look around, through layers of cigar smoke. What the room knew, it was not saying.

  Mr. Dehner was waiting at the foot of the stairs with a folded sheet of paper in his hand. “I hate to bother you,” he said, “when you have so much on your mind. But there’s a small matter I’d like to discuss with you. I’ve been put to considerable trouble and expense by what happened the night before last. And I know that you’ll want to do the right thing.”

  Mr. Peters glanced at the paper and saw that it was an itemized bill. “I’ll attend to it,” he said, and put the bill in his inside coat pocket. He started for the door, and Mr. Dehner followed him.

  “There’s one thing more. When Lymie is out of the hospital perhaps it would be better for everyone concerned if he found somewhere else to live. I can’t have things like that going on in my house. I’m sorry but I just can’t. The other boys would move out and it would give the place a bad name.”

  Mr. Peters waited until
the front door had closed behind him, and then he drew the bill out of his pocket and looked at it.

  To plumber on acct stopped-up tub and washbowl…………………$25.00

  New razor…………………$10.00

  Bathroom rug…………………$ 4.00

  Bathtowel…………………$ 2.00

  Total…………………$41.00

  There was no charge for the iodine.

  57

  When Lymie awoke it was late afternoon and he saw his father sitting in the chair by the window.

  “Well, sport—” Mr. Peters said quietly and Lymie smiled at him. Neither of them said anything more for a moment. Mr. Peters drew the chair over by the bed. His hands trembled more noticeably than usual.

  “The next time you do a thing like that—” he began.

  “There isn’t going to be any next time,” Lymie said, his voice low and rather indistinct. Mr. Peters leaned forward so that he wouldn’t miss anything, but Lymie had finished. He lay perfectly still with his arms outside the covers.

  “Well, anyway,” Mr. Peters said. Sitting by the open window he had prepared this speech, and he felt obliged to deliver it, even though there seemed now to be no need. “I want you to remember that there are other people in the world, people who are very fond of you, and you have no right to hurt them, do you hear? You can’t go on acting as if you had nobody to live for but yourself.”

  Lymie, who had not so far as he knew been living for himself, said nothing. His eyes moved toward the window. Just outside it there was a pear tree which was coming into bloom.

  “There’s something I wish you’d do for me,” he said slowly.

  “What is it?”

  “There’s a night nurse … I don’t need her and I wish you’d tell them not to let her in here.”

  “Anything else?” Mr. Peters asked.

  “No,” Lymie said.

  The day nurse came in with a box of flowers. She took the cover off and Lymie saw that they were long-stemmed red roses. There was a card tucked in among the waxed green leaves. The roses were from Mrs. Forbes.

  When the nurse carried them off to put them in water, Mr. Peters stood by the bed, ready to go and yet not able to. He had decided not to say anything to Lymie about the Hospital Association. They could straighten that out later. Or about the itemized bill, which was outrageous. At least four times what any of those things could have cost. When he got home he’d cut the total in half and send the man a check.

  “It wouldn’t have hurt you to leave some word for me, son,” Mr. Peters said suddenly. “You could have written me a line or two and I wouldn’t have felt nearly as bad.”

  Lymie looked up at his father. To lie, to make up a kind excuse, required effort and he wasn’t up to it yet.

  “Why didn’t you?” Mr. Peters asked.

  “I didn’t think about it,” Lymie said.

  He simply spoke the truth, but for a long time afterward, for nearly a year, Mr. Peters held it against him. With that one remark the distance which had always been between them stretched out and became a vast tract, a desert country.

  58

  In desert country the air is never still. You raise your eyes and see a windmill a hundred yards away, revolving in the sunlight, without any apparent beginning and for years to come without any end. It may seem to slow up and stop but that is only because it is getting ready to go round and round again, faster and faster, night and day, week in, week out. The end that is followed immediately by a beginning is neither end nor beginning. Whatever is alive must be continuous. There is no life that doesn’t go on and on, even the life that is in water and in stones. Listen and you hear children’s voices, a dog’s soft padded steps, a man hammering, a man sharpening a scythe. Each of them is repeated, the same sound, starting and stopping like a windmill.

  From where you are, the windmill makes no sound, and if you were blind would not be there. A man mowing grass must be accompanied by the sound of a lawn mower to be believed. If you have discovered him with the aid of a pair of binoculars then you have also discovered that reality is almost never perceived through one of the senses alone. Withdraw the binoculars and where is the man mowing grass? You have to look to the mind for confirmation of his actuality, which may account for the inward look on the faces of the blind, the strained faces of the deaf who are forever recovering from impressions which have come upon them too suddenly with no warning sound.

  But who is not, in one way or another, for large sections of time, blind or deaf or both? Mr. Peters passed the Forbeses’ house on his way to the hospital and Mrs. Forbes saw him, without knowing who he was, when she glanced out of her living room windows. She saw him returning an hour later and, even so, failed to perceive that for the first time in many years he had tried to speak from his heart and had failed. A person really blind might have heard it in his step, a deaf person could have seen it in the way he turned his face to the sun. All that Mrs. Forbes saw was a man getting old and heavy before his time.

  The desert is the natural dwelling place not only of Arabs and Indians but also of people who can’t speak when they want to and of those others who, like Lymie Peters, have nothing more to say, people who have stopped justifying and explaining, stopped trying to account for themselves or their actions, stopped hoping that someone will come along and love them and so make sense out of their lives.

  There are things in the desert which aren’t to be found anywhere else. You can see a hundred miles in every direction, when you step out of your front door, and at night the stars are even brighter than they are at sea. If you cannot find indoors what you should find, then go to the window and look at the mountains, revealed after two days of uncertainty, of no future beyond the foothills which lie in a circle around the town. If it is not actually cold, if you aren’t obliged to hug the fire, then go outside, by all means, even though the air is nervous, and you hear wind in the poplars, a train, a school bell, a fly—all sounds building toward something which may not be good. For reassurance there is also a car horn, a spade striking hard ground, a dog barking, and an unidentifiable bird in the Chinese elm. For further comfort there is the gardener, an old Spaniard, squatting on his haunches near the house next door. He is cleaning out the winter’s rubbish and rotting leaves from the fishpond. While you sit on your haunches watching him, he will catch, in a white enamel pan, the big goldfish and the five little ones that have as yet no color. Day after day he tends this garden for a woman who is always coming back but who never arrives. Patience is to be learned from him. His iris blooms, his roses fade, his potted pink geraniums stare out of the windows of the shutup house. It is possible that he no longer believes in the woman’s coming, but nevertheless, from time to time, he empties the goldfish pool and puts fresh water in it.

  If the sound of somebody chopping wood draws you out of the front gate and into the empty lot across the road, you will find blue lupines growing and see blankets airing on a clothesline, and you can talk to the man who is adding a room onto his adobe house. A great deal is to be learned from him. Also from the man chopping wood, who knows even now that there is a thunderstorm coming over the mountains, brought on by the uneasy wind in the poplars.

  If you go and live for a while in desert country it is possible that you may encounter some Spanish boys, barefoot, wearing blue denim overalls. It is important that you who have moral standards but no word for addressing a stranger and conveying instantaneous approval and liking, no word to indicate a general warmth of heart; who sleep alone if you can and have lost all memory of a common table and go to tremendous lengths to keep your bones from mingling with the bones of other people—it is vitally important that you meet the little Spanish boys.

  If you speak to them too abruptly they may run away, or they may even turn into statues; and how to give them back their freedom and release them from their fright is something that you alone can solve. One of them will have patches on the seat of his overalls, which have come down to h
im from many older brothers with some of their animal magic still left. When he is sent for water, his brothers are there to protect him. All through the day he wears their magic, until night, when his brothers are with him actually, crosswise in the bed, or curled against him on a hard pallet on the floor.

  One of the little Spanish boys will use expressions which were current in the time of Cervantes. Another will have a gray cotton sweat shirt with Pop-Eye the Sailor on the back—the mark of the world and its cheapness upon him, innocent though he is of any world beyond this desert valley. And there will be another who is not innocent but born knowing the worst, though perhaps not where to find it. And two others will have Indians for ancestors and, for reasons that are hidden from them but urgent, will do things in a way that is different from the way that the others, the pure Spanish, the Mexicans, chose. Even the sleep of the little boys with Indian blood is different, being (in all probability) full of dancing and dreams which turn out to be prophecies.

  The little Spanish boys have a word—primo, meaning cousin—which they use to convey their liking for strangers, their willingness to share the clothes on their back, the food on their table, their fire if they have one. This same uncritical love is offered frequently to goats, burros, dogs, and chickens, and it will be extended to you.

  59

  There was a screen between Lymie’s bed and the door, and for a second he didn’t know who it was that had come. He saw Reinhart first, and then coming behind him into the room someone else. Lymie was too weak to sit up but he made a slight movement with his hands which Reinhart saw. He moved to one side so that Spud could get past him and backed out of the room. Spud came and sat on the edge of the bed. Neither he nor Lymie spoke. They looked at each other with complete knowledge at last, with full awareness of what they meant to each other and of all that had ever passed between them. After a moment Spud leaned forward slowly and kissed Lymie on the mouth. He had never done this before and he was never moved to do it again.