The Folded Leaf (16 page)

“Suits me,” he said.

“How much is it?” Lymie asked.

“Well, I tell you,” the man said thoughtfully, “I’ve been getting fifteen for it, for one person, a charming young man who graduated last spring. But it’s really worth more than that: It’s a good-sized room, as you can see, and I don’t know that I can afford to rent it for any less than—my coal bills are really outlandish, you know, and so is the electric light. And of course you get hot water and all. Suppose I say eighteen dollars for the two of you?”

“A week?” Lymie asked anxiously.

“Oh dear no. I wouldn’t dream of asking eighteen dollars a week. Not for a room like this. Not with all this dreadful furniture in it anyway. Eighteen dollars a month. Nine dollars apiece for each of you. I think you’ll find, if you look around, that that’s as good as you’ll do any place. A room this size, and with a decent light and all. There’s nothing the matter with it really. The only thing you may not like is living with so many people. There are eleven people living on this floor now—all of them students, of course—and somehow, I don’t know what it is exactly, but whenever you get too many people under one roof, it always seems to lead to violence.”

They decided to take the room.

That night after they had finished unpacking, they went out for a walk. There was a full moon, the biggest they could ever remember seeing. They were both aware that the world had grown larger, and that they had money to spend (though not a great deal) and that no one would inquire how they spent it. They had escaped from their families, from the tyranny of home. Feeling a need to celebrate all this they turned into a drugstore and ordered vanilla ice cream with hot fudge sauce. It was so wonderful when it came that they made up their minds to have ice cream with fudge sauce every night of the school year.

T
he antique dealer’s name was Alfred Dehner. He occupied a large bedroom on the first floor, next to the kitchen, and slept in a four-poster bed with a soiled white canopy. There was
no bathroom downstairs, so he used the one on the second floor and kept his toothbrush and tooth powder, his Victorian shaving mug, brush, and straight-edged razor, a cake of castile soap, iodine, and bicarbonate of soda in the medicine chest over the washstand. Although the boys stole from each other continually, they never touched his toilet articles.

Within a week after Lymie and Spud had moved in, they discovered that Mr. Dehner had jacked up the price of their room—two boys had occupied it the year before, not one, and they had only paid fifteen dollars a month. What Mr. Dehner had said about violence, however, proved to be true. The genteel atmosphere created by the antique furniture ended at the foot of the stairs. On the second floor the boys came and went from the shower naked or with a towel around their hips, and anybody who felt like singing did, at the top of his lungs. The boys seldom stayed in their own rooms but wandered aimlessly all evening long, looking for somebody who would let them copy his rhetoric theme, somebody who would loan them four bits till Friday, somebody to practice jujitsu, somebody to pester. Six or seven of them would crowd into a single room and sit around on the floor, talking about football or baseball or girls. Occasionally when the racket was louder than usual, one of the boys would look up from the serial in
Collier’s
that he was reading and yell “Study hours!” but it never had the slightest effect. It was not intended to. It was just a remark, or perhaps even an excuse to start a fight.

Fights developed all the time, out of nothing at all—over a fountain pen that had been borrowed and then returned without any ink in it, over how many yards had been gained by a certain end run against the University of Illinois two years before, over who broke a string in the house tennis racquet. It was
nothing to come home and find two figures in the upstairs hall, rolling over and over, grunting, gouging at each other, and kicking the floor with their heels. Mostly the fighting was good-natured but sometimes it was in earnest. If you wanted to stay and watch, you could. If you didn’t, you stepped over the bodies and went on to your own room.

In the wintertime there was no heat in the radiators after ten o’clock. As the study rooms got colder the boys put on more clothes—sweaters, bathrobes, overcoats, and mufflers, until finally they had to go to bed to get warm. The dormitory was on the top floor, under the mansard roof. There was no heat in it, and the windows were left wide open from September until late in June.

At night, in the deepest quiet, bare feet would pad across the floor and a conversation started downstairs would go on gathering momentum until everyone in the dorm was awake and taking part in it. Sometimes two or three people in a row would stop when they came to Lymie’s bed and shake him gently and say, “Want to pee, Lymie?… Do you have to pee?” Sometimes the door would fly open and a voice would cry “Fire! Fire! Steve Rush is on fire!” and ten or eleven boys would leap from their beds and rush to the second floor bathroom for water. If the fire spread, Freeman or Pownell also had to be put out. Usually Rush’s bed was the only one that got soaked. He was a sound sleeper and also he had a mean streak in him and could be counted on to emerge from the dorm screaming and cursing and ready to kill anybody he could lay his hands on.

The noise and the confusion bothered Spud, who was used to quiet when he studied, but Lymie felt at home in the rooming house as soon as he sat down at his desk and wrote “Lymon
Peters Jr., 302 South Street,” in all his books. His desk faced one window, Spud’s faced the other. When Lymie was studying, he seldom saw the boys who walked through continually on their way to some other room. When they tripped over the sill and started swearing, he looked up sometimes and smiled.

If there was no other sound, if peace descended on the second floor for five minutes, somebody was sure to start making faces at the dog and the dog would whine and bark and race around wildly until Mr. Dehner came running to the foot of the stairs.

“Are you teasing that poor animal again?” he would shriek up at them with his hand on the banister. “Really, such cruelty, such lack of any decent human feeling! If you don’t stop it I’m going to call the dean’s office! I give you my word! I’m going to call the dean’s office and I’m going to ask to speak to the dean!”

Mr. Dehner’s voice was shrill and penetrating, and his accent was not Middle Western. The r’s were slurred. The a’s were broad and for some reason they seemed to carry better than the flat kind. Whenever Mr. Dehner started talking loudly, Lymie put down his book and listened. Mr. Dehner was nearly always agitated about something—or, as it turned out nine times out of ten, about nothing. His voice would rise higher and higher, as if he were at last in real trouble, and Lymie would tiptoe to the head of the stairs, lean over, and discover that Mr. Dehner was talking to a couple of faculty wives about Paul Revere silver, or telling them how to take alcohol rings off the tops of tables with spirits of camphor.

The boys called him “Maggie” behind his back, but they liked him. They liked anything that was odd or extreme. They thought it was fine that Colter knew how to call pigs; that Fred Howard was a Christer and spent all his spare time at the Wesley Foundation; that Amsler’s mother drove over from Evansville
once a week just to see that he was getting enough to eat; and that Freeman every now and then at dinner took out six of his upper front teeth and tossed them into the water pitcher.

Far from holding it against Lymie that he was so thin, they bragged about him to strangers. Geraghty, who was a premedic, used to come into Lymie’s room at night and make him take off his shirt. It was as good as having a skeleton, he said; he could find and name every bone in Lymie’s body.

The boys took a brief dislike for Spud until he persuaded Reinhart and Pownell to go to the gym with him one afternoon and box. They nicknamed him “The Killer” and from that time on, he had his place in the gallery of freaks; he belonged.

Most of the boys ate at a mixed boarding club which was three blocks from the rooming house. The weekly meal tickets were five dollars and if you wanted a date of a certain kind, the boarding club was an easy place to get it. The boys from “302” ate at the same two tables breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Sometimes Lymie and Spud were separated when there was only one chair vacant at each table but usually they ate together.

In a fraternity house this would have been spotted almost instantly. One of the brothers would have said, “It’s time to break that up.” Spud and Lymie would not have been allowed even to walk to the campus together without someone stepping between them. At “302” nobody cared.

Sometimes, while Lymie sat at his desk with a book open in front of him, Spud got himself into trouble (the crime was unspecified) and Lymie took the blame for it and gladly and willingly spent the rest of his life in prison so that Spud could go free. Then they were in a lifeboat, with only enough food and water for one person, and Lymie, waiting until Spud was asleep, slipped noiselessly over the side into the cold sea. Then they were fighting, back to back, with swords, forcing the ring of
their enemies slowly toward the little door through which one of them could escape if the other went on fighting….

Spud spent at least an hour every evening tidying up the room. He lined up his shoes and Lymie’s in a straight row on the floor of the closet. Then he rehung several pairs
of
trousers so that the creases were straight, and made sure that Lymie hadn’t concealed the vest of one suit inside the coat of another. The objects on top of his desk—his pencils, his blotter, his fountain pen, ruler, and bottle of ink—had to be in an exact arrangement, and the desk and bureau drawers in order. Otherwise there was no use in his trying to concentrate on calculus or German grammar.

Not all of this tidying was love of order. Spud’s conscience wouldn’t let him go to a movie on a week night or read detective story magazines; that wasn’t what he had come down to college for. But he managed to put off studying until he had done everything else he could think of, and what with visitors and playing with the dog and other unforeseen interruptions, very often he would read two or three pages, yawn, and discover that it was ten o’clock, time to put the book down and get ready for bed.

He and Lymie were always the first ones to go up to the dorm. In the big icy-cold bed they clung to each other, shivering like puppies, until the heat of their bodies began to penetrate through the outing flannel of their pajamas and their heavy woolen bathrobes. Lymie slept on his right side and Spud curled against him, with his fists in the hollow of Lymie’s back. In five minutes the whole bed was warmed and Spud was sound asleep. It took Lymie longer, as a rule. He lay there, relaxed and drowsy, aware of the cold outside the covers, and of the warmth coming to him from Spud, and Spud’s odor, which was not stale or sweaty or like the odor of any other person.
Then he moved his right foot until the outer part of the instep came in contact with Spud’s bare toes, and from this one point of reality he swung out safely into darkness, into no sharing whatever.

T
he first afternoon that Sally brought Lymie home with her, she led him upstairs to Professor Forbes’s study, where her father and mother were sitting with Professor Severance. Mrs. Forbes was darning socks. A pair of tortoise-shell glasses rested insecurely on the bridge of her nose. She had Sally’s eyes, hair, and coloring but she was more self-contained. Her hair was parted in the middle and came down over her temples in two raven’s wings. Her smile was charming but also rather ambiguous.

“I’m glad you decided to put in an appearance, Lymie,” she said. “I was beginning to wonder about you. Some of the people Sally talks about don’t exist, I’m sure. They couldn’t…. This is Mr. Severance.”

“Mr. Peters and I are already acquainted,” Professor Severance said, nodding. “We see each other every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at two.”

“And that’s my Pop,” Sally said.

Professor Forbes rose and held out his hand. He was a tall, black-haired, black-eyed man with thick lips showing through his beard. He offered a box containing cigarettes and Lymie shook his head.

“Did you notice the tree as you came in?” Mrs. Forbes asked.

“Which tree?” Sally asked.

“The one between the curbing and the walk.”

“No,” Sally said, “what about it?”

“Your father ran into it today.”

“No!” Sally exclaimed. “How could he? It’s at least four feet from the driveway.”

“He did it,” Mrs. Forbes said triumphantly. “Don’t ask me how…. My husband is learning to drive,” she explained for Lymie’s benefit. “He’s had several lessons and today he took the car out alone, after lunch, and as he was coming back he turned into the driveway and knocked almost all the bark off one side of that huge tree!”

“You’re exaggerating,” Professor Forbes said, without removing his cigarette from between his lips. “The whole story is a gross exaggeration.” The cigarette ashes drifted down on the front of his smoking jacket.

“I’m not exaggerating,” Mrs. Forbes said. “I went out and looked at it.”

“What about the Albrechts’ bay window?” Sally asked.

“The Albrechts’ bay window is still intact,” Mrs. Forbes said.

Professor Severance shook with laughter.

“Couldn’t we change the subject?” Professor Forbes asked irritably.

Mrs. Forbes looked at him over her glasses. “Maybe we’d better,” she said, raising her eyebrows.

“How’s Mrs. Sevvy?” Sally asked.

“Better, thank you.” Professor Severance abruptly regained his composure. “She’s still in bed though. The doctor said another day or two wouldn’t hurt her.”

“Mr. Severance’s mother is a most remarkable woman,” Mrs. Forbes said, turning to Lymie. “She’s seventy-three and serves
the best food and gives the gayest parties of any woman in town. I hope you meet her sometime.”

Professor Severance said, “I’ve been wanting to tell you, Mr. Peters, how much I enjoyed reading your examination paper.”