The Folded Leaf (26 page)

Mr. Latham turned the motor off and said, “Well, here we are, home again.”

Reluctantly, as if they had expected to spend the night in the back seat of the car with the robe over their knees, first Lymie, then Sally, and then Spud piled out. Sally pulled at her skirt and pushed her hair back under her hat. “Do I look all right?” she asked.

“You look fine,” Spud said. The yawn that he was trying to suppress came out in his voice. She saw that he hadn’t even been looking at her, that he was too tired to care how she looked. The elm trees at the edge of the park were rocking in the damp March wind. The sky was clouded over.

“I don’t feel the least bit sleepy,” she remarked, as she followed the two boys up the walk.

Spud had forgotten his key and they waited in the vestibule
for Mr. Latham, who had stayed behind to lock the car doors. On the second landing they waited again. Lymie glanced surreptitiously at the violets on Sally’s coat. They were beginning to curl. He had never bought flowers for a girl before. Looking at them, and then at Spud, who was leaning against the wall, Lymie thought:
If anything should happen to him, if he should be killed in an accident or something, Sally would probably marry
me,
because I’m Spud’s best friend and I would cherish his memory.
… That this thought might involve a wish, he didn’t perceive. It was merely one of those mixed-up ideas that occurred to him sometimes when he was very sleepy. He put it out of his mind immediately, and didn’t remember afterward that he had ever thought it.

When Mr. Latham put his key in the door and pushed it open, Lymie saw that nothing was changed since he had been here last at Christmas time. It was one of the reasons he liked to come here. Nothing ever changed. He slipped his coat off, and his scarf, and dropped them on the chair in the hall, and then he walked into the living room. There his eyes opened wide and he stopped right where he was. The others had to move around him in order to get into the room.

Mrs. Latham was still sitting on the sofa, and in her violently altered condition Lymie recognized one of those changes which happened, so far as he could make out, only to women. His own mother, usually so loving and tender with him, at certain times used to withdraw, leaving him stranded, the center of his life a void. When she had one of her headaches, which came fairly often during the last years of her life, after his father started drinking, she retired into a darkened room and there lay motionless on her bed, with a damp cloth over her eyes, without knowing or caring what happened to Lymie. When he
got home from school he used to walk round and round the house before he went in. If the shades were drawn in her bedroom, he knew.

Helen was bending over her mother anxiously, and as the others filed in she turned and faced them with a hatred which made no distinctions; they were all included in it. Spud went up to his mother and said, “It’s all over now,” which was as near as he could come to telling her that he was sorry. When she didn’t answer, he turned away and went out into the hall. Helen bent over her mother again, as if the others (including the girl they had brought home with them, whoever
she
was) were not in the room, or were there with no right and would soon perceive this and go away.

Sally glanced over her shoulder at Spud, for help, but he seemed wholly concerned with hanging his coat in the hall closet. And Lymie, whom she was able to count on under ordinary circumstances, looked frightened and uncertain of what to do. Something was wrong, obviously. It was a scene that belonged to a house with a crepe hanging on the front door and a coffin somewhere and the odors of too many flowers. At that moment, when the only thing she could think of was flight, she felt a strong hand close over her arm. The hand propelled her, unwilling, toward the sofa. She heard a voice that she recognized as Mr. Latham’s saying firmly, insistently, “Mother, we’ve brought one of Spud’s friends home with us. This is Sally Forbes.”

Mrs. Latham’s eyes, so lost in the recesses of her own grief, focused slowly upon Sally. She raised her head with an effort and extended a frail hand. Sally took it and smiled. The eyes that looked into hers were red from weeping, and there was no reassurance in them. But something—politeness, a sense of
obligation, of responsibility toward a guest—gave Mrs. Latham the strength to take hold and manage her family again.

“You’d better take your coat off, my dear,” she said, and then, turning to Helen, “She can sleep in your room tonight, and you sleep in here.”

The atmosphere in the living room changed immediately. Mr. Latham’s face cleared. He felt in the breast pocket of his coat and brought out a cigar. Lymie went up to Mrs. Latham and kissed her on the cheek. There was no answering pat, but tonight he didn’t expect it, and wasn’t alarmed when she merely said, “Good evening, Lymie.”

Spud came back from the hall and tugged at his sleeve. “You can sleep with me,” he said.

They had already turned toward the hall when the ax fell.

“I think Lymie had better go to his own home tonight,” Mrs. Latham said.

“The bed’s big enough,” Spud said. “We’ve slept together in it lots of times.”

“You need your rest,” Mrs. Latham said.

Lymie wasted no time picking up his scarf and overcoat. He saw that Spud was looking at him apologetically, and so he said, “I’ll call you in the morning…. Good night, everybody!” and closed the door behind him.

On the way down the stairs he remembered the feeling he had had the first afternoon that he came home with Spud. It was a kind of premonition, he realized. Everything that he had thought would happen then was happening now. He had been wrong only about the time.

D
uring the early part of April there was a week of undeniable spring. It was in the air first, before the ground or the bare trees gave any sign of it; and its effect generally was to make people miss appointments and forget what it was that they had been about to say. Along with the marriage of the earth and the sun, other strange influences were at work—the renewal of grass, the northward migration of birds, the swelling of buds on the trees.

Classroom windows were flung open, and instructors in economics and bacteriology and political science raised their voices above the sound of power lawn mowers. They spoke to empty seats, to a collection of figures that looked alive but were actually made of pieces of colored paper pasted over a framework of sticks, to ears that had no hearing, to minds that, masquerading in leaves and flowers, were even now on their way to the forest, up the mountainside, down to the seashore, where, according to ancient custom, certain rites were about to be performed which would make the earth fertile and green.

The university tennis courts were weeded and rolled and marked with new tape. All morning and all afternoon tennis balls bounced and were struck back. The scoring
(thirty-forty
…
love-five… deuce it is)
was added to the other spring sounds.

With all the windows open and the sunlight streaming in, the men’s gymnasium was like a pavilion. The trapeze performers set up their apparatus outside on the grass, and there was a constant clatter of spiked shoes as baseball players came in and went out of the building. The empty football stadium (capacity seventy thousand) was taken over by thin, tense-faced runners,
hurdlers, and high jumpers. Botany classes filed out of science buildings two by two. They were on their way out to the edge of town where, in the cold running water of the drainage ditch, spirogyra and chlodophora were to be found. The girls had charge of the green laboratory jars. The boys took off their shoes and their bright-colored socks, rolled their trousers above the knee, and waded in slowly, their bare feet searching for soft places in the gravel bottom. They came out of the water bearing slimy specimens in their hands and in their eyes the sorrowful realization of all that they had lost by starting to school at the age of six.

On the south campus two gardeners swept the cement bottom of the lily pond and then stood and watched it fill with clean water. The apple trees in the university orchards were sprayed, according to the latest methods. Lambs that had been born in March in the big university barns were now let out to pasture. Dogs were seen in pairs on the Broad Walk, and one of them made an obstinate attempt to attend Professor Forbes’s lecture on St. Anselm and his logical proof of the existence of God.

The nights were languid and soft with a tropical odor that had its origin in the thawing corn fields outside of town. Nobody could study. The brick terraces of Tudor and southern colonial fraternity houses were crowded long after supper with boys looking at the moon. Under lunary influence many of them went off and drank spiked beer. Although the university authorities had forbidden serenading, between ten-thirty and eleven o’clock shadows collected in the shrubbery outside sorority houses. There was a campus policeman but he couldn’t be everywhere at once. Young male voices, not always on pitch, rose to darkened second-story windows. The serenaders
sang the university anthem, “When Day Is Done” and various plagiarisms on “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.” Then with applause following them, they moved off down the street, unmolested. Around midnight, mattresses and blankets and pillows were hauled out onto flat roofs. Boys who were so fortunate as to belong to a fraternity fell asleep with the moon shining on their faces. And boys who had had to be content with living in rooming houses awoke, morning after morning, with the sun in their eyes.

There were only five people in the English seminar the night of the annual spring celebration. The air that came in through the open windows was too soft to blow papers about, but minds were not, of course, immune to it. Of the five people, four were graduate students with a Ph.D. oral examination to face, and no time to admire the moon or make love on the damp ground. The fifth was Lymie Peters. The scowling bitter face of Dr. Johnson looked down at them from the wall and approved of their industry, but the bust of Shakespeare was noncommittal.

A faint faraway sound was heard a little after nine o’clock. It might or might not have been cheering. One of the graduate students looked up from his barricade of books, took his glasses off, and announced the true cause of the disturbance. The others listened a moment and then all five went on reading. From time to time they also made crabbed, half-legible notes concerning the date of
Tottel’s Miscellany
or the lavish use of similes in
Euphues and His England.
The cheering grew louder and more distinct.

Lymie, having finished the section of Dorothy Wordsworth’s
Journals
recommended by Professor Severance, closed the book and restored it to the shelf where he had found it. He was ready
to go home now and review separable and inseparable German prefixes. When he got outside the building, he saw that the sky to the south was pink from the glare of an enormous bonfire. The rooming house lay in one direction, excitement was in the other. Lymie started home, but he turned suddenly, hesitated, and then began to retrace his steps. Within half a block he was running.

The bonfire was in a muddy open field north of the stadium, and the field itself was swarming with dark figures. The boys nearest the fire stood out clearly. The firelight kept passing over their faces and hands. Others came out of the surrounding darkness, bringing fuel, and then went back again. Behind their movements there seemed to be some as yet unannounced purpose, some act of violence which would flare up all of a sudden and make the flames turn pale by comparison with it.

Lymie stood on the outer edge of the crowd, where he was not likely to get involved. The year before, in this same field, he’d lost a good coat and had the shirt torn off his back, in a mud fight between freshmen and sophomores.

After climbing forty or fifty feet into the sky, the flames, for lack of fuel, begun to subside, and darkness gradually closed in on the field. A voice near the bonfire yelled, “To the campus!” and there was an answering roar which produced a stampede. Lymie was caught up in it before he could retire across the street. He was swept along willingly enough, his feet mingling with all the other feet set so abruptly in motion. The running stopped after two blocks and those who had no desire to be part of the mob escaped from it. The rest proceeded through the fraternity district in a shambling, almost orderly fashion, filling the street and the sidewalks, and trampling on new grass.

When they got to the Union Building, the editor of the
student daily newspaper, a tall, thin, hollow-cheeked blond boy, appeared on the steps above them and made a speech. “This is kid stuff!” he shouted. “What’s the use of it? What’s the use of destroying a lot of valuable property and getting into trouble and maybe thrown out of school?”

The mob, which had so far not destroyed anything, answered, “Drown him!” “Throw the son of a bitch in the Styx!”

“For what?” the thin-faced boy asked rhetorically. “For a: little fun, maybe, that will reflect on the university and do serious harm. If you want to do something, then do something constructive.”

There was a surging forward and the boy ducked hastily into the printing office and locked the door.

“Don’t let him get away with that!” a voice cried, and another voice screamed, “Smash the door down!” but nobody wanted to be the one to do it. The mob had no leader. Voices were heard frequently but they didn’t seem to be attached to a particular person, or at least not to anybody who was willing to appear boldly in front of the others and take charge. The mob waited, milling around outside the Union Building until some of them grew bored and went home. The rest eventually started toward the center of town, which was two miles from the campus. Their destination was the Orpheum Theater, where they would undoubtedly have interfered with the performance of some Japanese acrobats if they hadn’t been stopped.

On the way, as they were passing through a little park, they met a student with his date, coming home from the movies. They surrounded this couple and separated them. When the boy struck out frantically, dozens of hands grabbed hold of him, tore his shirt off, gave him a black eye and a bloody mouth. They took the girl’s skirts and pulled them over her head and
tied them there. Somebody tripped the boy, who was still fighting, and as he fell, they pushed the girl, unharmed, on top of him. This little unpleasantness, this token rape, seemed to give the mob confidence.