The Folded Leaf

by William Maxwell

  60

  In the middle of the night, Reinhart cried out in his sleep, and the sound was so sudden and so terrible that it woke every boy in the dormitory at “302.” They lay in their beds shivering and waiting for it to happen again.

  On the other side of town, Lymie was also awake. It was the eighth night that he had spent in the hospital, and something (the anti-tetanus serum?) had made him break out in a rash. His whole body itched. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t even lie still but kept moving his arms and legs against the sheets for relief. After a while he turned on the light and read, and while he was reading he noticed a slight rigidness in his lower jaw. He put his book down and waited for it to go away and it didn’t. Instead it grew worse. He tried not to get excited; like the rash, it could be a reaction from the serum. But the doctor hadn’t said that his jaw would stiffen, and it was possible that the serum hadn’t worked. They might not have given him enough of it, or they might have given it to him after it was too late…. He didn’t want to die of lockjaw; he didn’t want to die at all. He lay absolutely still, with the light on, wanting to cry out for help and not knowing where help would come from.

  The truth is that Lymie had never wanted to die, never at any time. The truth is nothing like as simple or as straightforward a thing as Lymie believed it to be. It masquerades in inversions and paradoxes, is easier to get at in a lie than in an honest statement. If pursued, the truth withdraws, puts on one false face after another, and finally goes underground, where it can only be got at in the complex, agonizing absurdity of dreams.

  When Lymie awoke at daybreak the rigidness in his jaw had begun to go away. He realized that, just before he woke, he had been dreaming. He was in a place by the sea, and there were houses, and he made his way along the street, searching for a particular house, which he couldn’t find. He was looking for No. 28. He stopped people and they gave him directions which turned out to be incorrect, and the street numbers changed in front of his eyes, but finally he found the house he was looking for—No. 28—and then those numbers changed too, while he was looking at them.

  61

  The stiffness was entirely gone when the nurse came in at six-thirty to wash Lymie’s face and hands. Though he had hardly slept all night long, he felt like singing. He was alive and he knew that he was going to live for a long time. He knew there were things he had not cared enough about, that he had taken for granted, that he would have missed if he had died. He wanted to get well and go back to school and study and walk under the big trees on the campus. He wanted to look into the faces of people that he didn’t know and might never see again, hear rain in the night, and sleep, and turn in his sleep and have dreams. Good or bad, it didn’t matter. The worst dream imaginable was better than nothing at all, no active mind, no waking up ever.

  In the middle of the morning the nurse came in with a bowl of wildflowers—purple wood violets, Dutchman’s breeches, jack-in-the-pulpit, trilium, and hepaticas. They had been dug up, dirt, roots, and all, and planted in a shallow blue bowl. They looked as if they had never been disturbed, as if they had grown that way, all in a cluster on the forest’s floor.

  “Who brought them to me?” Lymie asked.

  The nurse didn’t know. They had been left at the desk downstairs and there wasn’t any card.

  Lymie asked her to put the bowl of wildflowers on the night table beside his bed. While he was looking at them, his eyelids closed and he fell asleep. When he woke he went on looking at the wildflowers with all the strength of his eyes, and the narrow world he had lived in so long began to grow larger and wider. The world began to take on its own true size.

  He slept on and off all day. That evening as it was beginning to get dark, he heard running footsteps in the corridor outside his room and then Sally put her head around the screen. She was out of breath.

  “Well,” she said, panting, “I finally made it. They wouldn’t let me past the desk, so I sneaked in the ambulance entrance. How are you feeling?”

  “I’m fine,” Lymie said.

  “You look a little peaked,” Sally said. “And you’ve certainly got no business to be lying in bed on a day like today.”

  She came and sat on the edge of the bed and took his hand in hers. Then she turned her head and listened. There was no sound in the corridor. “Oh, Lymie!” she said, smiling down at him. Neither of them spoke for a minute or two. He was thinking how much she looked like a South Sea Islander, and she was trying not to look at the gauze dressings on his wrists and throat, and thinking that there are people for whom life just isn’t going to be too easy, and that probably he was one of them and maybe she herself was another.

  Putting her hand in the pocket of her red coat, she said, “Here’s a letter for you.”

  Lymie took the envelope that she tossed to him. On it was written For Lymon Peters Jr. Courtesy of bearer. He pulled the letter out and read it.

  Dear Lymie: I feel so important—I have just hired a janitor and fired a waiter. I suppose you would say the waiter was being abused, but really, Lymie, he was impossible—came when he pleased and was late then, sassed the cook and snooted me. So it is “check” for Mr. D. Evarts. I also have just completed 31 lines of blank verse for Professor Severance. It is very putrid blank verse but it is blank verse and I love it with a mothers love. I started out to ask you, Lymon, if you would care to come to our spring house dance? May twenty-eight. Reply by courier.

  Faithfully,

  Hope

  When he had finished reading, he turned, frowning slightly, and looked out of the window. He’d have to wear a turtleneck sweater instead of a white shirt, and everybody there would know why he was wearing it… If Hope had the courage to ask him, if she wanted him, knowing that he….

  The pear tree was in full bloom.

  “I have another message for you,” Sally said. “Mother wants to know if you’d like to come and stay at our house for a week or so after you leave this dump.”

  “I’d like to very much,” Lymie said.

  “Then that’s settled.”

  “What’s settled?” a stern voice asked, and Sally glanced at the screen in alarm, but it was only Spud. He came in and sat down on the other side of the bed. He had moved back to the fraternity house, but every morning before he went to his first class, he came to the hospital. Today was the first day that he had come twice. The bandage and the splints had been removed from his right hand, and he held it out for Lymie to see, flexing the fingers slowly and then doubling up his fist.

  “Do you want to know why my mother is so fond of you, Lymie?” Sally asked. “It’s because she’s sure that you are going to be a professor. She says she knew it the very first time you came to our house. You walked in, she says, and all you saw was the books.”

  “Doesn’t your mother think I’m going to be a professor?” Spud asked.

  “No,” Sally said. “And you’d better not be, if you know what’s good for you.”

  There were footsteps in the hall but they went on past.

  Sally also knew who had sent the bowl of wildflowers. Mrs. Lieberman had stopped her after class and asked about Lymie.

  “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” Sally said. “Do you know her? Do you know who she is?”

  He shook his head.

  “She asked me to bring you to see her, and I said I would.”

  “That was very nice of her,” Lymie said, turning to look at the flowers. The violets had closed for the night.

  “She seemed like a nice woman,” Sally said.

  Spud walked over and examined the flowers closely. “They’re just like the kind that grow in Wisconsin,” he said.

  When he came back he sat on the bed again, beside Sally this time. She took his hand in hers and Lymie’s hand in her other hand, and with her eyes shining with mischief she said, “Well, here we all are!”

  “You guys,” Spud said disparagingly, and made Lymie raise his knees, so that he and Sally could go on a camping trip up and down the c
over.

  It was some time before the nurse came in and put an end to this childish game.

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  PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT

  by Philip Roth

  Philip Roth’s classic novel with a new afterword by the author for the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition that is “simply one of the two or three funniest works in American fiction” (Chicago Sun-Times).

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  Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:

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  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, OCTOBER 1996

  Copyright © 1945, 1959 by William Maxwell

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Maxwell, William

  The folded leaf / by William Maxwell.—1st Vintage International

  ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-48497-0

  I. Title.

  PS3525.A9464F6 1996

  813′.54—dc20 96-5454

  CIP

  This edition contains certain slight revisions made by the author.

  Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/

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