The Folded Leaf (25 page)

Between the first and second rounds Spud leaned back with his legs sprawled out in front of him and tried to relax. He felt the cold water being poured over his head and spilling down his chest. His gloved hands were taken from the ropes and
placed on his knees. One of the handlers held the elastic away from his belly and massaged his chest and solar plexus. The other bent over him, talking earnestly. Spud was too keyed up to pay any attention. All he wanted was to get back in the center of the ring. This fight and one more and he’d have the Golden Gloves. The whistle blew. Spud pushed the mouthpiece back in, with his glove, and got to his feet. The stool was removed. The handlers crawled out through the ropes and went on talking to him, from outside the ring. Then the bell. Then he was fighting.

Apparently it made no difference to the referee that he was unpopular with the crowd. He continued to move quickly in wide circles around the fighters, coming between them frequently and forcing them apart with his hands. His face was extraordinarily serene, as if he knew the outcome of each fight before it began. He saw Brannigan graze Spud’s chin with the lacing of his glove, and warned him about it, but most of the time he was looking at Spud and the expression in his eyes was sad.

Spud was certain that the first two rounds were his. He went into the third determined to win by a knockout. He could see that Brannigan’s arms were so tired that it was all he could do to lift them. He himself felt fresh as a daisy. When Brannigan finally left himself wide open, Spud had the knockout blow all aimed and ready. Brannigan fell on his knees and Spud, in his excitement and haste, before he could stop himself, hit him again.

Standing there alone in the center of the ring, after the referee had stopped the fight, Spud heard the crowd for the first time. It took him several seconds to realize that they were booing at him.

T
wo figures rose up from where they had been sitting, their view of the ring partly cut off by a large pillar, and made their way through the aisles. One of them was a girl. Her coat was thrown open and she was wearing a bunch of purple violets pinned to the collar. The young man with her was about nineteen. He carried his overcoat and a Scotch plaid muffler over one arm, and the same distress that was in the girl’s face was also in his, like a reflection from the sky.

To get from the arena to the dressing rooms it was necessary to go through a lounge which had orange wicker furniture in it. Around the green walls were framed autographed pictures of boxers and wrestlers. From the door of this room Mr. Latham had watched Spud making his way to the ring. He was there waiting when Spud came back, his blue bathrobe tied around him and the sleeves hanging empty at his sides.

Disaster was something that Mr. Latham had had to contend with all his life. It didn’t astonish him any more. But he was sorry, standing there in the doorway with a dead cigar in his mouth—that the run of bad luck was beginning now for Spud. When Spud’s eyes met his father’s for a second, Mr. Latham shook his head in sympathy and understanding.

Spud sat down on a wicker settee. His hair was soaking wet. The sweat was running down his forehead, down his chest, down the insides of his arms and legs. He had a headache and his mouth felt as if it were filled with cotton. He sat with his shoulders hunched, his wrists crossed under the folds of his bathrobe, handcuffed together by what had happened to him. The clumsy boxing gloves were resting on his bare knees. Another
fight had already started in the arena, but Spud was involved in the last one. He couldn’t get out of that moment when Brannigan had left himself wide open. From there things could have gone quite differently.
He slugged Brannigan and then he waited.
That was how it should have been, and how he kept making it be, over and over.

Although Mr. Latham seemed to be watching the fight, his look was inward. Lymie and Sally were almost close enough to speak to him before he saw them and stepped back from the doorway, so they could pass through it. When Spud saw them coming toward him across the room, he rose to his feet, ready to defend himself against both of them with his life’s blood.
They were there. They had seen it.
But then he felt Sally’s arms around him, hugging him, and he looked into her eyes and after that it was all right. That he had lost the fight with Brannigan didn’t matter in the least.

It mattered to Lymie, though. “That dirty, double-crossing referee,” he said. “You had the fight won in the first round.”

Spud turned to him and smiled. “Pulled a fast one, didn’t you?”

“We didn’t know we were coming,” Sally said. “I just couldn’t stand it any more. You don’t know what it was like having to wait for the next day’s paper, and not being able to concentrate on anything for more than two minutes. I thought I was going crazy. So this morning Lymie and I looked up the train schedule and cut all our classes and came.”

“What did your mother say?”

“She didn’t say anything. She didn’t know we were coming. I told Hope to call her after the train left.”

Spud glanced uneasily at his father, while she was talking. When she finished he said, “Dad, this is Sally Forbes.”

Sally took her hand away from Spud and put it in his. They smiled at each other and were, from that moment, friends.

“What happened to your eye?” Lymie asked.

“I got a bad cut,” Spud said.

“When?”

“Last night. It bled all through the last round. After it was over they put some clamps in it.”

“I’m glad I wasn’t here,” Sally said.

“I would just as soon have been somewhere else myself,” Spud said. “That guy Brannigan, he kept trying to open it up but he didn’t touch it once.” His face lengthened. He was back in that moment when Brannigan left himself wide open. There was no hurry now.

“Don’t worry,” Sally said, with her cheek against his. “Don’t even think about it.”

Spud brought his arms out from under the bathrobe, and folded them around her.

“It seems as if you’d been away for years,” she said sadly.

“Five days,” Spud said. “It seemed like a long time to me too.” He felt something soft and drew away from her. It was the violets. They had touched his bare chest. “Where’d you get the flowers?”

“Lymie bought them for me,” Sally said. “He thought I ought to have some violets. I said this wasn’t any symphony concert we were going to but he bought them anyway. And then we had dinner at a place called the Tip-Top Inn, where they have pictures of nursery rhymes on the walls, and an orchestra—all for eighty cents.”

“It’s across from the Art Institute,” Lymie explained.

Spud took his arms away from Sally and appeared to be concerned with the lacing of his gloves. “I have to go back in
there,” he said, jerking his head toward the arena. “As soon as this fight is over.”

Sally looked at him in bewilderment but he avoided her eyes.

“I’ll get something out of it anyway,” he said, “even if it’s only third place. You better go back to your seats.” His tone was harsh. He might have been speaking to strangers.

“We’ll stay here,” Sally said quietly.

Lymie, who from long habit should have been sensitive to the changes in Spud’s mood, had no idea that anything was wrong. The person who
is
both intelligent and observing cannot at the same time be innocent. He can only pretend to be; to others sometimes, sometimes to himself. Since Lymie didn’t notice that anything was wrong with Spud, one is forced to conclude that he didn’t wish to notice it. Some impulse that he was not willing to admit even to himself must have prompted him to buy violets for Sally. They reopened an old wound that was far more serious than the cut over Spud’s eye, and one that it wasn’t possible to put clamps in.

At the sound of the bell Spud left them and disappeared into the crowd. A moment or two later he and another fighter emerged under the white light of the reflectors. All that had happened before happened again, like a movie film being run through a second time, but it didn’t last as long. In the first round Spud did something so stupid that Lymie, watching him from the doorway, contracted his shoulders and turned away in despair.

Spud’s opponent was an Italian boy with black hair and eyes and soft muscles. Spud was having everything his own way. The referee had just pried them apart and when the Italian boy came toward Spud again, Spud doubled up, caught the Italian boy in the pit of the stomach with his shoulder and then
straightened up with a quick jerk. As if the rules had been changed suddenly and this was now a wrestling match, the Italian boy flew clear over Spud and landed flat on his back.

The silence lasted several seconds, during which a single voice could be heard saying:

Ice cream
…

The referee blew his whistle. Then the catcalls began, and the screaming. Pop bottles flew through the air, and the booing was like the waves of the sea.

A
fter the radio had been turned off there was an unnatural quiet in the Lathams’ living room. Mrs. Latham was sitting on the sofa in the full glare of the overhead light. Her face was gray and blotched with suffering, and her eyes, wide open, saw only what was in her mind—terrible fantasies in which her son, her beautiful son, was brought home to her, bruised and bleeding.

Helen crossed the room and knelt beside her. “Mother darling,” she said, “listen to me. He’s all right. It’s over now, and you mustn’t think about it, you mustn’t grieve about it any more. The cut over his eye isn’t serious. It will heal in a week’s time and nobody will ever know it was there.” She took her mother’s hands between her own and chafed them, as if they were cold.

“He’s got a taste of it,” Mrs. Latham said quietly. “And there’s nothing anybody can do to stop him. He’ll ruin his life.”

“Well, let him,” Helen said bitterly.

Mrs. Latham made a slight gesture which her daughter saw and understood. The gesture meant that she was not to say anything against Spud. Jealousy welled up in her. There was no way that she could keep herself from knowing that her mother loved Spud more than she did her, and always had, and always would. But that didn’t make any difference. She would go right on looking after her mother, and making her life easier for her, and maybe some day….

“Let him go ahead and ruin his life,” she said aloud. “Let him go on boxing until he gets his nose broken and ends up with cauliflower ears, and looking like a thug. That’s what he is anyway, so he might as well look like one.”

Mrs. Latham shook her head.

“If he can come home the way he did Monday night and see you in the condition you were in then,” Helen said, “and go right back and fight the next night, and the night after that, and again tonight, regardless of what it is doing to you, then I don’t care what happens to him. Almost any stranger that walked in off the street I could have more feeling for than I have for him right now. It’s a terrible thing to say but it’s true.”

Mrs. Latham was searching for her handkerchief in the folds of her dress. Before she found it, the tears had begun to slide down her cheeks.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Helen exclaimed. “Really I am. You know I don’t mean it.” She took her own handkerchief and dried her mother’s cheeks, but there was no stopping the flow of tears, now that they had started. “Why do you wait up?” she said. “You’re exhausted and you ought to be in bed this minute. Come on. Come take your clothes off. I’ll turn the covers down for you and you can slip into bed. I’ll wait up for them.”

Mrs. Latham took the handkerchief and put it to her face
and then, turning her head slightly, shook with sobbing. Helen put her arms around her and clung to her, weeping too. She thought of her mother always as a tower of strength, and to see her this way now, so stricken, so helpless, was more than she could bear. It also frightened her.

“I’m going to make you some coffee,” she said. “You stay here and be quiet.”

She went into the bathroom and held a washcloth under the cold water faucet, wrung it out, and then came back into the living room and laid it on her mother’s face, on her eyes and her hot forehead. She did this several times before she finally went out to the kitchen and took the coffee down from the shelf of the cupboard, and began measuring it into the percolator with a big spoon.

All
they
ever saw in her mother was somebody who administered to their comfort, kept their clothes picked up and in order, fed them, and made a home for them to come to, when it suited their convenience.

When Spud was a child she had loved him, but now that he was grown, it was impossible. Nobody could love him. He was an entirely different person, ungrateful, unmanageable, ill-tempered and surly. There was no use trying to get her mother to stop caring for Spud, because she always would, but sooner or later her mother would have to realize that nothing could be done for him, and then she would give up trying.

If anything happened to her father, they’d have to give up the apartment, probably, and she and her mother could take a smaller place. It needn’t be very luxurious. Just a couple of rooms, large enough so that they wouldn’t get under each other’s feet, and she’d work and make enough money to support them, and they could live together quietly and in peace.

This idea had been in the back of Helen’s mind ever since the letters had stopped coming from Wisconsin. Mrs. Latham saw Helen always as a little girl, a very good, obedient child, and so, if she had known what her daughter was thinking, she would have been surprised, as one is now and then by what children do and say. The plan itself would not have appealed to her. She had every intention of keeping her family together and intact forever. But she couldn’t drink the coffee after Helen made it and brought it to her, and Helen put the cup and saucer on the table next to the sofa. There the coffee gradually grew cold.

It was after midnight when the car drove up in front of the apartment. The windows on the second floor were still lighted but no face peered out from behind the living room curtains, and the street lamps strung at intervals through the park served only to show how deserted it was at this time of night.