The Folded Leaf

T
he blue lines down the floor of the swimming pool wavered and shivered incessantly, and something about the shape of the place—the fact that it was long and narrow, perhaps, and lined with tile to the ceiling—made their voices ring. The same voices that sounded sad in the open air, on the high school playground. “Lights! Lights!” it seemed as if they were shouting at each other across the water and from the balcony stairs.

All of them were naked, and until Mr. Pritzker appeared they could only look at the water; they couldn’t go in. They collected on the diving board, pushed and tripped each other, and wrestled halfheartedly. Those along the edge of the pool took short harmless jabs and made threats which they had no intention ever of carrying out but which helped pass the time.

The swimming class was nearly always the same. First the roll call, then a fifteen-minute period of instruction in the backstroke or the flutter kick or breathing, and finally a relay race. Mr. Pritzker picked out two boys and let them choose their own teams. They did it seriously, going down through the class and pointing to the best swimmers, to the next best, and in diminishing order after that. But actually it was the last one chosen that mattered. Whichever side had to take Lymie Peters lost. Lymie couldn’t swim the Australian crawl. Week after week the relay began in the greatest excitement and continued back and forth from one end of the pool to the other until it was Lymie’s turn. When he dived in and started his slow frantic side stroke, the race died, the place grew still.

Since he was not any good at sports, the best Lymie could do was to efface himself. In gym class, on the days when they played outdoor baseball, he legged it out to right field and from that comparatively safe place watched the game. Few balls ever went out there and the center fielder knew that Lymie couldn’t catch them if they did. But in swimming class there was no place to retire to. He stood apart from the others, a thin, flat-chested boy with dark hair that grew down in a widow’s peak on his forehead, and large hesitant brown eyes. He was determined when the time came to do his best, and no one held it against him that he always decided the race. On the other hand, they never bothered to cover up that fact.

This day two things happened which were out of the ordinary. Mr. Pritzker brought something with him which looked like a basketball only larger, and there was a new boy in the class. The new boy had light hair and gray eyes set a trifle too close together. He was not quite handsome but his body, for a boy’s body, was very well made, with a natural masculine grace.
Occasionally people turn up—like the new boy—who serve as a kind of reminder of those ideal, almost abstract rules of proportion from which the human being, however faulty, is copied. There were boys in the class who were larger and more muscular, but when the new boy stepped into the line which formed at the edge of the pool, the others seemed clumsy, their arms and legs too long or their knees too large. They glanced at him furtively, appraising him. He looked down at the tile floor or past them all into space.

Mr. Pritzker opened his little book. “Adams,” he began. “Anderson … Borgstedt… Catanzano … deFresne …”

The new boy’s name was Latham.

Mr. Pritzker, separated from the rest by his size and by his age, by the fact that he alone wore a swimming suit and carried a whistle on a string around his neck, outlined the rules of water polo. Lymie Peters was bright enough when it came to his studies but in games he was overanxious. The fear that he might find himself suddenly in the center of things, the game depending on his action, numbed his mind. He saw the words
five men on a side;
saw them open out like the blue lines along the floor of the swimming pool and come together again.

Eventually it was his turn to slip into the water, but instead of taking part in the shouting and splashing, instead of fighting over the ball with the others, he stayed close to the side of the pool. He went through intense but meaningless motions as the struggle drew near and relaxed only slightly when it withdrew (the water flying outward in spray and the whistle interrupting continually) to the far end of the pool. Once every sixty seconds the minute hand on the wall clock moved forward with a perceptible jerk, which was registered on Lymie’s brain. Time, the slow passage of time, was all that he understood, his only
hope until that moment when, without warning, the ball came straight toward him. He looked around wildly but there was no one in his end of the pool. From the far end a voice yelled, “Catch it, Lymie!” and he caught it.

What happened after that was entirely out of his control. The splashing surrounded him and sucked him down. With arms grabbing at him, with thighs around his waist, he went down, down where there was no air. His lungs expanding filled his chest and he clung in blind panic to the ball. After the longest time the arms let go, for no reason. The thighs released him and he found himself on the surface again, where there was light and life. The ball was flipped out of his hands.

“What’d you hang onto it for?” a boy named Carson asked. “Why didn’t you let go?”

Lymie saw Carson’s face, enormous in the water in front of him.

“If that new guy hadn’t pulled them off of you, you’d of drowned,” Carson said.

In sudden overwhelming gratitude, Lymie looked around for his deliverer, but the new boy was gone. He was somewhere in that fighting and splashing at the far end of the pool.

M
iss Frank, pacing the outside aisle between the last row of seats and the windows, could, by turning her eyes, see the schoolyard and the wall of three-story apartment houses that surrounded it. The rest of them, denied her freedom of
movement, fidgeted. Without realizing it they slid farther and farther down in their seats. Their heads grew heavy. They wound their legs around the metal column that supported the seat in front of them. This satisfied their restlessness but only for a minute or two; then they had to find some new position. In the margins of their textbooks, property of the Chicago Public School System, they drew impossible faces or played ticktacktoe. And all the while Miss Frank was making clear the distinction between participles and gerunds, their eyes went round and round the room, like sheep in a worn-out pasture.