The Folded Leaf (29 page)

Spud broke a bone in his hand, that afternoon at the gymnasium, and afterward a strange happiness set in for him, and also for Lymie and Sally; the kind of happiness that people sometimes describe as “like old times come back again.” Included in this description is the knowledge that the happiness seemed, the first time, as if it would last forever, and that they now know better than to think that.

Spud was still jealous. All that was necessary to unbalance his feelings was for him to meet Sally and Lymie coming toward him on the Broad Walk and see with his own eyes how interested they were in what they were saying to each other, before they looked up and saw him. But since he now made no effort to fight it, Spud’s jealousy didn’t last as long. Sometimes it only lasted a few minutes. If Spud was silent, Lymie stopped talking. When Spud’s face cleared, all that Lymie had been thinking burst out of him in a flood of conversation.

With his right hand and wrist held immobile between two splints, there was no point in Spud’s going to the gymnasium. He and Lymie and Sally sat in the Ship’s Lantern until suppertime, or if Sally was busy, Spud went home with Lymie to the rooming house. He even stayed all night there once. In the morning a hand shaking Lymie’s shoulder wakened him, and for a moment he didn’t know whose hand it was. But then he opened his eyes and saw Spud sitting up in bed, and happiness flowed back into him like sunlight entering a room.

Spud wanted to be at the fraternity house for breakfast. They got up quietly without waking anybody and went downstairs. Lymie sat in his bathrobe and slippers, with his legs drawn up under him, and watched Spud dress. Every move that he made delighted Lymie. The way Spud rubbed the sleep out of his eyes with his uninjured hand, the majestic way that he put one foot on a chair and then the other, for Lymie to tie his shoelaces were pleasures so familiar and so long denied. When Spud went off to the bathroom, Lymie followed and pulled the lid of the toilet down and sat on it. He was amused at the violence with which Spud soused his face with soap and water, and he enjoyed knowing that in a moment Spud, with his head bent over the washbowl, would reach out blindly for the towel that he knew Lymie would have ready for him.

Washing and dressing required only a few minutes, and no amount of observation and delight could in any way prolong them. Back in Lymie’s room, Spud turned to the closet and shook his head.

“It’s a mess, isn’t it?” Lymie agreed.

“I don’t see how you stand it,” Spud said.

“I don’t know either,” Lymie said. “I guess I just didn’t see it. I haven’t any eight o’clock class today. I’ll come back right after breakfast and clean it up.”

Spud looked at the closet regretfully—he would have enjoyed straightening it himself—and then at his watch. “I have to be going,” he said.

Lymie went to the head of the stairs with him, leaned over the railing, and watched Spud make his way like a hero between two drop-leaf tables. Lymie waited until he heard the front door close, and then he went back to his room. He was too happy and grateful to go back to bed, and it was too early to get dressed. He walked up and down with his hands clasped
together, thinking. He was not grateful to Spud so much as he was grateful to life itself. Because you are born, he thought, and you learn to eat and walk and talk, and you go to school, thinking that that’s all there is, and then suddenly everything is full of meaning and you know that you were not born merely to grow up and earn a living. You were born to …

On the back of a chair he saw a sweater. He picked it up, held it out in front of him, and smiled. The shape and size identified it beyond question, among all the navy blue sweaters in the world. In a sudden access of feeling he buried his face in it. He didn’t do anything about the closet.

That night, after supper, the three of them met in front of the Forbeses’ house and played football by the light of a street lamp.

Neither Sally nor Lymie could hold Spud alone but they tackled him together. Sally grabbed the upper part of his body and Lymie dived for his legs. Even so, and handicapped as he was by an injured hand, Spud often got away from them.

When they had worn themselves out, they went up on the porch and sat in the swing and talked about places they’d like to go to, if they had plenty of money and nothing to worry about, like school or earning a living. Sally thought it would be nice to take a long ocean voyage to India or China. The nearest she had ever come to it, she said, was the trip from Boston to New York, on the night boat, which left Boston at five o’clock on a summer afternoon. Her mother and father were with her, but she had a stateroom all to herself. Around one o’clock she woke up, after being asleep for hours, and decided that the boat was pitching and tossing. When people were seasick (and at that moment she felt very queer) they got up and walked on deck. When she got outside, she found that they
weren’t out in the ocean at all; they were going through the Cape Cod Canal, and the boat was moving along steadily and quietly as if it were on a millpond. That was when she was twelve years old, and she could still remember the sound the bottom of the boat made, scraping, and the little shacks along the sides of the canal. The shacks were so close that you could almost reach down and pick the geraniums that were blooming in window boxes. Men with lanterns called up to her from the towpath, the captain shouted from the bridge, and there was a little dog that barked and also a girl with a baby in her arms—a wonderful baby that was wide awake at one o’clock in the morning.

The trip through the Cape Cod Canal was the first genuinely romantic thing that had ever happened to Sally. Until that time, her soul had been slowly perishing of a world where everybody was too well-bred and everything made too much sense. She wanted Spud and Lymie, her two closest friends, to understand about that inland voyage now, and share it with her, but unfortunately such an experience, the essence of it, cannot be communicated. And although Spud would have been glad of a chance to give blood transfusions or walk miles through deep snowdrifts for her sake, and Lymie would have sat for days at her bedside reading to her—on this occasion neither of them was willing to remain quiet and listen. Spud yawned openly, and Lymie kept fingering the chains which held the porch swing or pushing at a wicker chair to make the swing go sidewise. His eyes had a feverish luster that was not apparent in the dark, but when he spoke his voice was pitched to his own inner excitement, which made it impossible for him to listen to anyone very long without interrupting. This restlessness, this desire for something to be continually happening,
had been with him since the afternoon Spud hurt his hand. It was with Lymie when he woke in the morning and it flung him into bed exhausted at the end of each day. His cheeks grew thinner and lines which would some day be permanent appeared between his nostrils and the corners of his mouth.

It was he, actually, who was responsible for the sudden, very violent wrestling match which made Mrs. Forbes turn on the porch light and gaze in astonishment at the tangled mass of arms and legs on the porch floor.

“Lymie,” she exclaimed, “is that
you?”

Nothing that Spud or Sally did ever seemed to startle her.

T
he university outdoor band concerts began late in April. Folding chairs were distributed over the steps of the auditorium, and on the stroke of seven the bronze doors opened and the sixty-odd members of the band filed out in their blue uniforms and found places. After an interval the band leader appeared and there was polite applause. Then a hush as his baton was raised and brought forth the first very faint sounds. The repertoire at these concerts was standard: “Pomp and Circumstance,” Bizet’s “Arlesienne Suite #2,” the overture to “William Tell,” the ballet music from “Rosamunde,” and music equally familiar. The audience sat on the grass or walked about or stood in clusters. People listened to the music or not, as they pleased, and what the wind blew away didn’t matter particularly.

The evening of the first spring concert Lymie walked over from the boarding club with Reinhart. Here and there in the crowd he saw someone he knew—a boy who had sat next to him in botany the year before, two girls who were in his German class, his physical education instructor. Ford and Frenchie deFresne were there, each with a girl. No one looking at Frenchie now, with his hair parted in the middle instead of on the side, and wearing fawn-colored flannel trousers, a brown tweed coat, a snow-white shirt, and a yellow tie, would ever have guessed that he had once been through hell because he couldn’t think of a nine letter word beginning with S and ending with N. And though the girl who stood with her arm drawn through Ford’s called him “Diver,” it was something she had picked up from the boys in his fraternity, and even they had no idea where the name originally came from.

Bob Edwards was at the concert with his public speaking instructor, a woman who was clearly too old for him; and Geraghty was there, but alone. His new girl had stood him up for an Alpha Delt with a Packard roadster.

Mrs. Forbes was standing under the low branch of an elm tree, near the Broad Walk. Professor Forbes was with her, and so was Professor Severance. She waved to Lymie, but the two men were deep in conversation and didn’t see him. Professor Severance had not worn a band of black cloth on his left sleeve or made any public show of mourning, and many of his students didn’t even know that his mother had died suddenly during the night. But Mrs. Lieberman saw it in his face the first day that he taught his classes again. Professor Severance looked not only older but smaller, and it was all she could do to keep from speaking to him after the hour.
Now you can lecture,
was what she wanted to tell him.
You’ve passed over. And Yd like
very much to hear what you have to say about Matthew Arnold or Swinburne or yourself
…

She was at the concert with her two sons. She smiled at Lymie and he smiled back, recognizing her vaguely. The redheaded boy with her was the boy Spud got to give him a boxing lesson, that day last fall. Hope was at the concert also, with Bernice Crawford. Lymie stopped to talk to them a moment, and then he and Reinhart walked on.

Sally wasn’t with her mother and father, and Lymie assumed that she must be with Spud. He kept searching for them in the crowd and finding people who looked almost but not quite like them. The back of a girl’s head or the slope of a boy’s shoulders would be almost right but the carriage would be wrong or the girl would turn and he would see what he had known all along—that the girl was not Sally, not even like Sally.

He caught a glimpse of his logic instructor, a Welshman with wavy hair, and, later on, of his last year’s rhetoric instructor with a woman who looked as if she might be his wife. Though dogs were not allowed on the campus, there were several of varying sizes and breeds, who pursued each other earnestly through the legs of the crowd.

The music out of doors was like a part of the weather. At one moment it sounded strong and clear and touched the hearts of those who were listening to it. The next moment it was scattered, lost on the largeness of the evening. Lymie had almost forgotten that Reinhart was with him when a remark, heard above the brasses and the clarinets, made him turn and ask,
“What
can’t you stand any longer?”

“I don’t know whether I ought to tell you,” Reinhart said.

“Why not?” Lymie asked, with his eyes on a chain of migratory birds that were flying very high.

Reinhart shook his head. “It might make trouble.”

“If it’s something I ought to know—” Lymie said.

“Sometimes it’s all I can do to keep from taking a poke at him. I’d probably get the shit beat out of me but it would be worth it. I’d feel better afterward. But anyway, I can’t stand to see you following him around and getting kicked in the teeth whenever he feels like it.”

Lymie looked at Reinhart oddly but said nothing.

“What the hell do you see in a guy like that?”

“A lot,” Lymie said.

“I suppose you must,” Reinhart said. “But if you feel that way about him, somebody ought to tell you something.”

“What?” Lymie asked.

“You want to know?”

Lymie nodded.

“He’s jealous of you. He’s so jealous of you he can’t stand the sight of you. He comes over to the house sometimes when you’re at the library and he sits in my room and talks for an hour at a time about how much he hates you.”

As a rule, Lymie’s face gave him away. When he was embarrassed, he blushed to the roots of his hair. When he was frightened, he showed it. Now nothing showed.

“I guess I should have realized it,” he said, and changed the subject.

The concert ended at eight o’clock with the playing of the university anthem. As the crowd began to drift toward the streets that led away from the campus, Reinhart tried to persuade Lymie to go to a movie with him, but Lymie said that he had to study, so they walked back to “302.” Lymie went straight to his own room. He was loosening his necktie when Reinhart came in, sat down in the Morris chair, and lit a cigarette. He
was in the habit of going from room to room during the evening, and Lymie was not compelled by politeness—since there was no pretense of it in the rooming house—to make conversation. He sat down at his littered desk and cleared a place in front of him. He knew that Reinhart was waiting for him to turn around, but instead he opened a book and pretended to read. Reinhart finished his cigarette and then got up and went on to Pownell’s room. Five minutes later he was back.

“You’re not sore at me, are you?” he asked hesitantly.

“Why should I be?” Lymie said.

“For telling you about Spud.”

“No,” Lymie said. “You did me a favor. Besides, I would have found it out sooner or later.”

“That’s what I thought,” Reinhart said, and wandered back to Pownell’s room.

A few minutes later he was back again. This time he didn’t come in but lingered in the doorway. “Look, bud,” he said, “I feel sorry about what I did. I shouldn’t have told you. I know damn well I shouldn’t. Now that I’ve made trouble between you two guys, I’m going out in a few minutes and get drunk.” He turned away from the doorway and then came back one last time. “Why don’t you come with me?” he asked. “You don’t have to drink if you don’t want to. Stay sober and keep an eye on me, because I’m going to need it.” He saw by the expression on Lymie’s face that he was getting ready to frame an excuse, and before Lymie could open his mouth, Reinhart said, “Never mind,” and disappeared.