The Folded Leaf (11 page)

Lymie set the Mason jar down and tore both string and paper off the box, which contained a dozen short-stemmed red
roses. He tried to arrange them nicely in the Mason jar but the wind blew them all the same way and he caught the jar with his hand, just before it toppled. By bracing it against the headstone, in a little hollow, he could keep the jar from falling, but there was nothing he could do about the roses.

“Quit worrying with them,” Mr. Peters said. “They look all right.”

He stood with his hat in his hand, staring in a troubled way at the grave.

Lymie was embarrassed because he had no particular feeling, and he thought he ought to have. He looked down at the low mound with dead grass on it and tried to visualize his mother beneath it, in a horizontal position; tried to feel toward that spot the emotion he used to have for her. He waited, knowing that in a moment his father would ask the question he always asked when they came here.

Though Lymie could remember his mother’s voice easily enough, and how she did her hair, and what it was like to be in the same room with her, he couldn’t remember her face. He had tried too many times to remember it and now it was gone. It wouldn’t come back any more.

On the other side of the lot the ground dropped away abruptly. The cemetery ran along the end of a high bluff from which you could look off over the tops of trees to the cornfields and the flat prairie beyond. In the whole winter landscape the roses were the only color.

“Your mother has been gone five years,” Mr. Peters said, “and I still can’t believe it. It just doesn’t seem possible.”

Lymie remembered how his mother used to say his father’s name:
Lymon,
she said,
my Lymon
—proudly, and always with love.

He remembered the excitement of meeting his mother suddenly on the stairs. And the sound of her voice. And the soft side of her neck. And the imprint of her lips on the top of his head after she had kissed him. And being rocked by her sometimes, on her lap, when he had been crying. And being allowed to look at her beautiful long white kid gloves.

He remembered waking at night and realizing that she had been in his room without his knowing it—that room he remembered so clearly and that fitted his heart and mind like a glove. The bed he woke up in, and the dresser with all his clothes in it, and the blue and white wallpaper, and the light switch by the door, and the light, and next to it the framed letter which began
Dear Madam I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of
… and which ended
Yours very sincerely and respectfully Abraham Lincoln.
And the picture over his head of a fat-faced little boy and a little girl with yellow curls, both of them riding hobbyhorses. And the bear that he slept with …

“Before she died,” Mr. Peters said, “I was sitting on top of the world. I used to look around sometimes and see somebody I knew who was in a mess or having trouble of one sort or another and I’d think It’s his own damn fault.”

What became of the bear? Lymie thought. Whatever could have happened to it? Did somebody take it away?

“It didn’t occur to me that I had anything especially to be thankful for,” Mr. Peters said. “Probably if I had—” And then instead of finishing that sentence he asked the question Lymie had been waiting for: “Do you remember your mother, son?”

“Yes, Dad,” Lymie said, nodding.

He remembered the time his mother saw a mouse and screamed and jumped up on one of the dining room chairs and
from the chair to the table. She was deathly afraid of mice. And when they went to the circus at night they never could stay for the wild West show because his mother grew nervous as soon as they started loosening the ropes. But she loved lightning and thunder.

He himself used to be afraid of noises in the night, and of the shadows which the gaslight made in the hall. The gaslight flickered, and that made the shadows move. But it also guided him on that long trip down the hall from the door of his room to the door of the bathroom, which he entered quickly, being careful not to glance to the left, where there was danger, darkness, and the back stairs. He was also afraid, horribly afraid deep down inside of him, when the man leaned over and put his face in the lion’s mouth. But these were things that he had never told anybody.

“Your mother was a wonderful woman,” Mr. Peters said. “I didn’t know what I was getting when I married her. She was just young and pretty and always laughing and tying ribbons in her hair and I knew I had to have her. But that wasn’t what she was really like at all, and it was quite a while before I found out.”

Lymie remembered the tray of the high chair coming over his head and being lifted out of it when he choked. And later, when he was old enough to sit at the table in a chair with two big books on it. And taking iron through a glass straw. And sometimes having to take cod-liver oil. And the square glass shade that hung down over the round dining room table, with the red-and-green beaded fringe. And the fireplace with the tapestry screen in front of it during the summertime. And the Japanese garden with putty for the shores of the little lake, grass seed growing, and carrot tops sprouting with little green leaves, and a peculiar, unpleasant smell. And the real garden
outside, beyond the grape arbor. And around in front the two palms in their wooden tubs on either side of the front walk….

“Whatever she did and whatever she thought,” Mr. Peters said, “turned out to be right.”

When he talked like this it was largely to make himself suffer (he too had trouble remembering his wife’s face, and the last years of his marriage had not been as happy as the first; there had been quarrels and misunderstandings, also that girl in the barber shop) and he did not expect Lymie to offer consolation. He took out his watch, glanced at it, and then put it back in his pocket.

The marble headstone of the small grave read:

Looking at the inscription Lymie realized that he was not yet ready to go. He was suddenly filled with the remembrance of the sound of his mother’s name:
Alma,
everyone called her. The richness and warmth of the sound.
Alma
…
Alma
… Like the comfort he got from leaning against her thigh.

When she was away there was the terrible slowness of time. Even when she was downtown shopping or at a card party. Though he knew she would be back at five o’clock, how could he be sure that five o’clock would ever come? And when his mother and father were away once on a visit to Cincinnati, that was really a long time. And they got home and she told him that she had a paint book for him in her trunk, and then that the trunks were lost.

But what he remembered most vividly of all as he turned
away from the grave was the question that used to fill his mind whenever he opened the front door:
Where is she?
he used to cry.
Is she here? Has she come back yet?
And the rooms, the front hall where she had left her gloves, the living room where her pocketbook was (on the mahogany table), and the library beyond, where she had left a small round package wrapped in white paper, all answered him.
She’s here,
they said.
Everything is all right. She’s home.

I
n April there was trouble over the fraternity house. It began on a rainy Monday afternoon. Six of them were there. Catanzano had a sprained ankle and was enthroned on the couch. The others were trying out his crutches. Lynch was about to play a medley of songs from “No, No, Nanette” on the victrola when the janitor, who was a Belgian, walked in. He had a couple with him—a very tall man whose wrist hung down out of the sleeves of his black overcoat and a woman in a purple suit with a cheap fur neckpiece, blondined hair, blue eyes, and very red skin. She looked around critically and then said, “Fourteen dollars?”

The janitor nodded.

“Well,” the woman said, “I don’t know.” She crossed the room and would have tripped over Catanzano’s bandaged foot if he hadn’t drawn it hastily out of the way. The other boys stood still, like figures in some elaborate musical parlor game.

The man couldn’t have been more than five years older than Mark Wheeler but life had already proved too much for him.
There was no color in his long thin face. The skin was drawn tight over his cheekbones. His hair was receding from his temples, and something about him—the look in his eyes, mostly—suggested a conscious determination to shed his flesh at the earliest possible moment and take refuge in his dry skeleton.

The woman was almost old enough to be his mother but there was nothing maternal or gentle about her. She went into the bathroom and came out again, inspected the only closet, discovered that there were no wall plugs, and sniffed the air, which smelled strongly of wet wool. Still undecided, she wandered back to the door.

“I’ve never lived in a basement apartment before,” she said, turning to the man, “and I’m kind of afraid of the dampness. On account of my asthma.”

“Is not damp,” the janitor said.

“Maybe not now with the heat on, but in summer I bet it’s good and damp…. What about it, Fred?”

The young man was looking at the picture of the English bulldog. “It’s up to you,” he said. “I’ll be away all day.”

“Well I guess I’ll have to think about it,” the woman said, shifting her fur. The expression on her face was like a pout, but she wasn’t pouting, actually; she was thinking. “I don’t want to move in and unpack everything and then find out that I can’t breathe,” she said. And then, turning to the janitor, “We’ll let you know.”

She looked once more at the boys without seeing them and walked out. The janitor followed, and after him the young man, who had a sudden coughing fit in the areaway and left the door wide open behind him.

Lymie Peters was the first to recover. He was standing in a draft and he sneezed. Dede Sandstrom walked over to the door and slammed it. As if a spell had been lifted, the victrola
needle came to rest on the opening bars of “I Want to Be Happy,” and they all started talking at once. Their excitement, the pitch of their immature voices, the gestures which they made with their hands, and their uneasy profanity were all because of one thing which none of them dared say: Their house, their fraternity (which stood in the minds of all of them like a beautiful woman that they were too young to have) was as good as gone. If these people didn’t take it, the next ones would.

The record came to an end and the turntable of the victrola went round and round slower and slower until at last it stopped. Mark Wheeler and Dede Sandstrom went out and called Bud Griesenauer, who wasn’t home. His mother didn’t know where they could reach him. On their way back to the apartment they met the janitor in the areaway. Mark Wheeler walked up to him and said, “What’s the big idea?”

The janitor shrugged his shoulders. “I show the apartment, that’s all.”

“But it’s our apartment,” Dede Sandstrom said. “We pay rent on it.”

“Maybe somebody else pay more rent on it,” the janitor said, and disappeared into the boiler room.

The second indignation meeting lasted until almost dinner-time. On the way home Lymie Peters stopped in a drugstore and called Bud Griesenauer. This time he was at home. They’d all been calling him, he said. Wheeler and Hall and Carson and Lynch and everybody. And he’d called his uncle. It was probably a misunderstanding of some kind, his uncle said, and maybe the people wouldn’t rent the apartment after all. But if they did decide to take it, there was nothing anybody could do. The boys didn’t have a lease and the owner of the building naturally had a right to try to get as much money out of it as possible.

They held a special meeting the next afternoon, and it was decided that somebody should come down to the fraternity house every afternoon after school, in case the janitor showed the place to any more people; and that they should take turns staying there at night. The rest of the time they would lock the door with a padlock. They wrote days of the week on slips of paper and put them in Mark Wheeler’s hat and passed the hat around. Lymie drew the following Friday, and Spud Latham offered to stay with him.

When they arrived Friday night, Lymie had three army blankets under one arm and a coffeepot under the other. Spud carried a knapsack containing all the equipment and food necessary for a large camp breakfast.

The apartment was very warm when they got there but they built a fire in the fireplace anyway. Lymie sat on the floor in front of the fire and took off his shoes, which were wet, and loosened his tie and unbuttoned his shirt collar. Spud took all his clothes off except his shorts. Then he emptied the knapsack out on the hearth, arranging the skillet, the coffeepot, the iron grill, the plates, knives, forks, salt, and pepper so that they would all be ready and convenient the next morning. The food he put in the bathroom, on the window sill, and the blankets he spread one by one, on the couch. Every movement of his body was graceful, easy, and controlled. Lymie, who was continually being surprised by what his own hands and feet were up to, enjoyed watching him. With the firelight shining on his skin and no other light in the room, Spud looked very much like the savage that he was playing at being.

When he had finished with the couch, he stretched out on top of the blankets and there was so much harmony in the room that he said, “This is the life. No school tomorrow.
Nobody to tell you when to go to bed. Plenty to eat and a good fire. Why didn’t we think of this before?”

“I don’t know,” Lymie said. “Why didn’t we?”

“There’s always something,” Spud said. The full implications of this remark, in spite of its vagueness, were deeply felt by both of them. Spud picked up the volume of Balzac’s stories and read for a while, lying on his back with his knees raised. Lymie continued to sit in front of the fire, facing him. The expression in his eyes was partly pride (he had never had a friend before) and partly envy, though he didn’t recognize it as that. He was comparing his own wrists, which were so thin that he could put his thumb and forefinger around one of them and still see daylight, to Spud’s, which were strong and square. The wish closest to Lymie’s heart, if he could have had it for the asking, would have been to have a well-built body, a body as strong and as beautifully proportioned as Spud’s. Then all his troubles would have been over.