The Folded Leaf (12 page)

When Spud turned and lay on his stomach, Lymie got up and sat down beside him on the edge of the couch, and began to read over Spud’s shoulder: …
woman will heal thy wound, stop the waste hole in thy bag of tricks. Woman is thy wealth; have but one woman, dress, undress, and fondle that woman, make use of the woman
—
woman is everything
—
woman has an inkstand of her own; dip thy pen into that bottomless inkpot
… Without looking up, Spud rolled over on his back, so that Lymie could stretch out and read in comfort. But Lymie didn’t move. His face was troubled. He started to say something and then, after a second’s hesitation, he went on reading.
Woman makes love; make love to her with the pen only, tickle her fantasies, and sketch merrily for her a thousand pictures of love in a thousand pretty ways. Woman is generous and all for one, or one for all, must pay the painter, and furnish the hairs of the brush
… At the bottom of
the page Spud looked up to see if Lymie was still reading. Lymie had been finished for some time. He was staring at Spud’s chest.

“Let’s do something else,” he said.

“Why?” Spud asked. “This is interesting.” He rolled over on his stomach again and was about to go on reading when Lymie surprised him by grabbing the book out of his hands. It sailed across the room into the blazing fire. Spud sat up and saw with a certain amount of regret that the flames were already licking at the open pages.

“What did you do that for?” he asked.

Instead of explaining, Lymie prodded at the book with the poker, so that the leaves burned faster. Pieces of charred paper detached themselves and were drawn, still glowing, up the chimney.

“You’re going to have a hell of a time explaining to Hall about his book,” Spud said.

“I’m not going to explain about it,” Lymie said. His jaw was set and Spud, realizing that Lymie was very close to tears, sank back on the couch as if nothing had happened.

After a week in which no one, so far as the boys knew, was shown through the apartment, they gave up staying there at night, and with the warm weather they stopped going to the fraternity house altogether. It took too long, and besides, they were suffering from spring fever. When they emerged from the school building at three o’clock with their ties loosened and their collars undone, they had no energy and no will. They stood around in the schoolyard watching baseball practice and leaning against each other for support. Any suggestion that anybody made always turned out to be too much trouble.

There is no telling how long it would have taken them to find out about the fraternity if Carson hadn’t wanted suddenly
to play his record of “I’ll See You in My Dreams.” The record was at the fraternity and he asked Lynch to ride down there with him. Lynch’s last report card was unsatisfactory and he wasn’t allowed out after supper on week nights, so Carson went alone. When he came around the corner of the apartment building and saw the furniture clogging the areaway, he stopped short, unable to believe his eyes.

The couch was soggy and stained from being rained on. The chairs were coming unglued. There were wrinkles in the picture of the collegian, where the water had got in behind the glass, and the grass rug gave off a musty odor. The English bulldog was missing, but Lynch was too upset to notice this. It was his victrola, the condition of his victrola, that upset him most. The felt pad on the turntable had spots of mildew, the oak veneer of the case peeled off in strips, and both the needle and the arm were rusted. When he tried to wind it, the victrola made such a horrible grinding sound that he gave up and went in search of the janitor. There was no one in the boiler room or in any of the various storerooms in the basement. He came back and tried the door of the apartment. The padlock that they had used was gone and in its place was a new Yale lock. No one came to the door.

The victrola records were warped and probably ruined, but he took them anyway and walked around to the front of the building, intending to peer in at the basement windows. They had net curtains across them and he could see nothing. He went off down the street with the records under his arm and his spirits held up by anger and the melancholy pleasure of spreading the news.

W
ith school almost over for the year and summer vacation looming ahead, the loss of a meeting place made very little difference to any of them. Spud Latham and Lymie Peters met in the corridor by Spud’s locker, after school, and went off together. Lymie had a malted milk and Spud had a milk shake and then they came out
of
the stale air of LeClerc’s and separated. Or else Lymie went home with Spud. He never asked Spud to come home with him and Spud never suggested it. So far as he was concerned, Lymie belonged at his house, and had no other home.

No matter how often Lymie went there, Mrs. Latham always seemed glad to see him. She treated him casually and yet managed to watch over him. When she caught him helping himself out of the icebox as if he lived there, all she said was “Lymie, there’s some fudge cake in the cakebox. Wouldn’t you rather have a piece of that?”

At mealtime there was a place for him at the dining room table, next to Spud. From the other side of the table Helen teased him because he didn’t like parsnips or because he needed a haircut, and Mr. Latham used him as an excuse to tell long stories about the heating business.

After supper Lymie and Spud studied together in Spud’s room until their minds wandered from the page and they started yawning. Then they got up and went across the street to the park and lay on the grass and stared into the evening sky and thought out loud about what the future had in store for them. Spud’s heart was fixed on a cabin in the North Woods where they (it was understood that Lymie was to be with him) could fish in the summertime and in winter set trap lines and then sit
around and be warm and comfortable indoors, with the wind howling and the snow banked up higher than the windows of the cabin. Lymie chewed on a blade of grass and didn’t commit himself. It all seemed possible. Something that would require arranging, perhaps (pleasant though such a life might be, there was obviously not going to be much money in it) but perfectly possible.

At nine-thirty or a quarter of ten he pulled Spud up off the grass and they went back across the street. Lymie gathered up his books and papers. As he passed by the living room door he said “Good night, everybody,” and Helen and Mr. and Mrs. Latham looked up and nodded affectionately, as if he had told them that he was going down to the drugstore on the corner and would be right back.

One day Mrs. Latham discovered that there was a button missing from his shirt after he and Spud had been doing pushups on the living room rug. They looked under all the furniture without being able to find it and then she made Lymie come into her bedroom with her while she hunted through her sewing box for another white button to sew on in place of the one he had lost. Something in the tone of her voice caught Spud’s attention. He stood still in the center of the living room and listened, with a troubled expression on his face. His mother was talking to Lymie in a scolding way that was not really scolding at all and that he had never heard her use with anybody but him. He felt a sharp stab of jealousy. It was one thing to have a friend, but another to…. He raised the sleeve of his coat and looked at it thoughtfully. A piece of brown thread dangled from the cuff where a button should have been.

“Speaking of buttons,” he said quietly.

“Oh, all right,” Mrs. Latham answered him from the bedroom.
“I’ve been meaning to fix it but I just didn’t get around to it, with all there is to do in this house. Leave it on your bed when you go to school tomorrow…. Stand still, Lymie. I don’t want to stick you…. And next time remember to save the button, do you hear? It isn’t always easy to——”

She didn’t bother to finish the sentence, but Spud’s face cleared. He was reassured. His mother still loved him the most. She had heard him two rooms away, even though he hadn’t raised his voice; and she knew exactly what button he was talking about.

Another afternoon when they got home from school, Spud was restless and wanted to go walking in the rain. They walked a long way west until they came to the Northwestern Railway tracks, where further progress was blocked by an interminable freight train. They stood and counted boxcars and coal cars and oil tankers, and the train shuddered violently once or twice and came to a dead stop. By that time they were tired of waiting for it to pass and so they turned back. The soles of their shoes were soaked through and the bottoms of their trousers were wet and kept flapping about their ankles. When they got home they hung their yellow slickers on the back porch to dry, and retired to Spud’s room with a quart of milk and a box of fig newtons. Noticing the hollows under Lymie’s eyes, Spud decided that he ought to take a nap. There was plenty of time before dinner, and he began to undo Lymie’s tie. Lymie refused, for no reason; or perhaps because Spud hadn’t given him a chance to consider whether he was tired or not. Spud got the tie off but when he tried to unbutton Lymie’s shirt, Lymie began to fight him off. He had never really fought anybody before and he fought with strength that he had no idea he possessed.

At first Spud was amused, and then suddenly it became a
life-and-death matter. He wasn’t quite sure how to come at Lymie because Lymie didn’t know the rules. He fought with his hands and his feet and his knees. He gouged at and he grabbed anything that he could lay hands on. Each time that Spud managed to get his arms around Lymie he twisted and fought his way free. The noise they made, banging against the furniture, climbing up on the bed and down again, drew Mrs. Latham, who stood in the doorway for a while, trying to make them stop. Neither of them paid any attention to her. The expression on Lymie’s tormented face was almost but not quite hate. Spud was calm and possessed, and merely bent on making Lymie lie still under the covers and take a nap before dinner. He pried one of Lymie’s shoes off and then the other. His trousers took much longer and were harder to manage, but in the end they came off too, and one of Lymie’s striped socks. With each loss, like a country defending itself against an invader, Lymie fought harder. He fought against being made to do something against his will, and he fought also against the unreasonable strength in Spud’s arms. He butted. He kicked. All of a sudden, with no warning, the last defense gave way. Lymie quit struggling and lay still. As in a dream he let Spud cover him with a blanket. Something had burst inside of him, something more important than any organ, and there was a flowing which was like blood. Though he kept on breathing and his heart after a while pounded less violently, there it was all the same, an underground river which went on and on and was bound to keep on like that for years probably, never stopping, never once running dry.

He watched Spud pull the shades down and leave the room without having any idea of what he had done.

“A
lastor is not antisocial,” Professor Severance said, with a puckered expression about his mouth. Apparently there was something else he would have liked to add, something which was perhaps too flippant and would have destroyed (or come dangerously close to it) his hold on the class. “Alastor understands people rather better by getting away from them than by being buffeted by them.” Heads bent over notebooks, fountain pens began to scratch. “In solitude only can we attune ourselves to the meaning of nature and the deep heart of man,” Professor Severance said, teetering slightly, and with all traces of the flippant remark, whatever it was, gone from his rather tired, his definitely middle-aged, scholar’s face. “So the poet turns from love to understand love.”

This struck Mrs. Lieberman—the small, quiet-faced, prematurely white-haired
woman sitting in the third row next to the window—as just nonsense. Her fountain pen remained idle in her hand. She was enrolled as a listener and so it didn’t matter whether she took notes during the lecture or not. She wouldn’t be called upon at some later date to fill two pages of an examination book with the house of cards that Professor Severance was now erecting, sentence by sentence.

“Alastor loves beyond the Arab maid,” he continued, “and understands human nature beyond human intercourse.” He spoke directly to Mrs. Lieberman, since she was the only person in the class who was looking at him. That he was well taken care of, there could be no doubt, she thought. But by whom? He was never without a fresh white handkerchief in his breast pocket, he never forgot his glasses. But on the other hand, Professor Severance didn’t look like a married man. There was never a flicker of complacency, and also his lectures—always beautifully phrased, models of organization, style, and diction—from time to time showed a shocking (or so it seemed to her) lack of experience.

He picked up
The Complete Poetical Works of Shelley
in order to read from it, or perhaps in order to pretend to read from it, for his eyes only occasionally skimmed the page.

Earth, ocean, air, beloved brotherhood
…

The voice in which Professor Severance read poetry was high and reedlike. The young man who sat on Mrs. Lieberman’s right, the blond athlete with the block letter sewed on the front of his white pullover, thrust one long, muscular, football player’s leg into the aisle and looked pained. In the row ahead of him, his exact human opposite—flat-chested with a long pointed face and straight dark hair that grew down on his forehead in a widow’s peak—didn’t seem to be listening either. His eyes were vacant. But when Professor Severance cleared
his throat and said, “Mr. Peters, in what other English Romantic poet do we find these same ‘incommunicable dreams,’ these ‘twilight phantasms’ that invoke a greater responsiveness to ‘the woven hymns of night and day’?” Lymie separated his legs, which were twisted together under the seat, and said, “Wordsworth?”

“Precisely!” Professor Severance exclaimed and Mrs. Lieberman decided that he must live with his mother.