The Folded Leaf (4 page)

Their astonishment did not last. When he appeared in the doorway they hardly noticed him. He drew the kitchen stool out from under the enamel table and sat down and began to tie his shoes. When he finished, he straightened up suddenly. There was something that bothered him—something that he had done, or not done. Before he could remember what it was, Helen made him move so that she could get the bread knife out of the table drawer, and the whole thing passed out of his mind.

The kitchen smells, the way his mother took a long fork and tested the green beans that were cooking in a kettle on the top of the stove, the happy familiarity of all her movements, reassured him. It seemed almost like the kitchen of the house in Wisconsin. But then there was the rattle of a key in the front door, and Mr. Latham came in, looking tired and discouraged. Before Mr. Latham had even hung up his coat in the hall closet, the atmosphere of security and habit had vanished. Nothing was left but a bare uncomfortable apartment that would never be like the house they were used to. And when they sat down, the food seemed hardly worth coming to the table for.

E
vans Latham was an honest and capable man. He had worked hard all his life, and with no other thought than to provide for his family, but somehow things never turned out for him the way they should have. There was always some accident, some freak of circumstance that couldn’t possibly have been anticipated or avoided. Bad luck dogged his heels wherever he went. It was not the work of his enemies (he had none) and must therefore have been caused by a disembodied malignancy.

If bright and early some morning the Lathams had left their apartment, which was not what Mrs. Latham would have chosen anyway, and had set up some kind of temporary quarters in the park across the street, among the nursemaids and the babies in their carriages; if Mr. Latham, with advice and assistance
from the old men and the boys who gathered in the late afternoon to play touchball, had offered sacrifices—the phonograph, perhaps, or the garish ashtray; if he had then called upon all their friends, or since they had no friends, their neighbors, to join them by moonlight with faces blackened or with masks, and wearing swords or armed with shotguns and revolvers or shinny sticks or golf clubs or canes; and if, at a signal from Reverend Henry Roth of St. Mary’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, they had rushed into the deserted apartment firing guns, overturning everything under which a malignant spirit might lurk, tossing the furniture out of doors, beating against walls and windows; and if the old men and the young boys had marched nine times around the outside of the apartment building throwing torches about, shouting, screaming, beating sticks together, rattling old pans, while the nursemaids ran up and down, up and down the cellar stairs; if all this had been done properly, by people with believing hearts, it is possible that the spirit would have been driven off and that, for a time anyway, prosperity would have attended the efforts of Mr. Latham. Unfortunately this remedy, tried for centuries on one continent or another and always found helpful, never occurred to him. He went on day after day, doing the best he knew how. And it wasn’t seeing other men get rich off his ideas (oil had been found on the ranch in Montana two years after he had sold it) or any single stroke of bad luck, but the terrible succession of them, large and small, which had changed him finally, so that now he was seldom hopeful or confident the way he used to be.

When, like tonight, he was not inclined to be talkative, the others felt it and did not attempt to be cheerful in spite of him. Helen addressed an occasional remark to her mother but Mrs. Latham’s replies were not encouraging and led nowhere.

Except when he was obliged to ask for the butter or the
bread or the jelly, Spud ate in silence. Much of the time he was not even there. Mr. Latham had to ask him twice if he wanted a second helping. Spud managed to pass his plate without meeting his father’s eyes and said, “What are we going to have for dessert?”

“Baked apple,” Mrs. Latham said.

“I wish you’d make a chocolate cake sometime. You know the kind—with white icing?”

Mrs. Latham felt the earth around the Brazilian violet and then poured the water that was in her glass over it.

“When we get straightened around,” she said.

“I don’t think I want any baked apple,” Spud said. “I don’t feel hungry.”

“First time I ever knew you to make a remark like that,” Mr. Latham said. “Are your bowels clogged up?”

“No,” Spud said, “they’re not. I just don’t seem to be hungry any more. Not like I used to. I haven’t felt really hungry since we moved to Chicago.”

Mrs. Latham signaled to him to be quiet but he paid no attention to her. “It’s the atmosphere,” he said. “All this smoke and dirt.”

Mr. Latham stabbed at a couple of string beans with his fork. “Perhaps you’d better move back to Wisconsin,” he said sharply. “I seem to remember that you ate well enough when we lived there.”

“I would if I could,” Spud said.

“There’s nobody stopping you,” Mr. Latham said.

Mrs. Latham frowned. “Please, Evans,” she said. “Eat your supper.”

“Well,” he said, turning to her, “it’s very annoying to come home at the end of a hard day and find all of you glum and dissatisfied.”

“If you call this home,” Spud said.

“It’s the best I can provide for you,” Mr. Latham said to him. “And until you learn to accept it gracefully, maybe you better not come to the table.”

Spud put his napkin beside his plate, kicked his chair back, and left the room. A moment later they heard the front door slam. Helen and her mother looked at each other. Mr. Latham, carefully avoiding their glances, picked up the carving knife and fork and cut himself a small slice of lamb, near the bone.

T
wo pictures stood side by side on Lymie Peters’ dresser. The slightly faded one was of a handsome young man with a derby hat on the back of his head and a large chrysanthemum in his buttonhole. The other was of a woman with dark hair and large expressive dark eyes. The picture of the young man was taken in 1897, shortly after Mr. Peters’ nineteenth birthday. The high stiff collar and the peculiarly tied, very full four-in-hand were bound to have their humorous aspect twenty-six years later. The photograph of Mrs. Peters was not a good likeness. It had been made from another picture, an old one. She had a black velvet ribbon around her throat, and her dress, of some heavy material that could have been either satin or velvet, was cut low on the shoulders. The photographer had retouched the face, which was too slender in any case, and too young. Instead of helping Lymie to remember what his mother had looked like, the picture only confused him.

He had come into the bedroom not to look at these pictures but to see what time it was by the alarm clock on the table beside his bed. The room was small, dark, and in considerable disorder. The bed was unmade. A pair of long trousers hung upside down by the cuffs from the top drawer of the dresser, and the one chair in the room was buried under layers of soiled clothes. On the floor beside the window was a fleece-lined bedroom slipper. There was fluff under the bed and a fine gritty dust on everything. The framed reproduction of Watts’ “Hope” which hung over the dresser was not of Lymie’s choosing. During the last five years Mr. Peters and Lymie had lived first in cheap hotels and then in a series of furnished kitchenette apartments, all of them gloomy like this one.

The grandfather’s clock in the hall and the oriental rug on the floor in Lymie’s room had survived from an earlier period. The rug was worn thin and curled at the corners, but when Lymie turned the light on, the childlike design of dancing animals—dogs, possibly, or deer, worked in with alternating abstract patterns—was immediately apparent, and the colors shone. The grandfather’s clock remained at twenty-five minutes past five no matter what time it was, but the alarm clock was running and it was seven-twenty.

Lymie went into the bathroom and moved the pieces of his father’s safety razor, the rusted blade, the shaving brush, and the tube of shaving soap, from the washstand to the window sill. He let the hot water run a moment, full force, to clean out the bowl, and then he washed his face and hands and ran a wet comb through his unruly hair. The arrangement was that if his father didn’t come home by seven-thirty, Lymie was to go to the Alcazar Restaurant on Sheridan Road and eat by himself.

At exactly seven-thirty-one he let himself out of the front
door of the apartment building. The other boys in the block had had their dinner and were outside. Milton Kirshman was bouncing a rubber ball against the side wall of the building. The others were in a cluster about Gene Halloway’s new bicycle. They nodded at Lymie, as he went by. The bicycle was painted red and silver and had an electric headlight on it which wouldn’t light. A slight wind blew the leaves westward along the sidewalk, and there were clouds coming up over the lake.

The Alcazar Restaurant was on Sheridan Road near Devon Avenue. It was long and narrow, with tables for two along the walls and tables for four down the middle. The decoration was
art moderne,
except for the series of murals depicting the four seasons, and the sick ferns in the front window. Lymie sat down at the second table from the cash register, and ordered his dinner. The history book, which he propped against the catsup and the glass sugar bowl, had been used by others before him. Blank pages front and back were filled in with maps, drawings, dates, comic cartoons, and organs of the body; also with names and messages no longer clear and never absolutely legible. On nearly every page there was some marginal notation, either in ink or in very hard pencil. And unless someone had upset a glass of water, the marks on page 177 were from tears.

While Lymie read about the Peace of Paris, signed on the thirtieth of May, 1814, between France and the Allied powers, his right hand managed again and again to bring food up to his mouth. Sometimes he chewed, sometimes he swallowed whole the food that he had no idea he was eating. The Congress of Vienna met, with some allowance for delays, early in November of the same year, and all the powers engaged in the war on either side sent plenipotentiaries. It was by far the most splendid
and important assembly ever convoked to discuss and determine the affairs of Europe. The Emperor of Russia, the King of Prussia, the kings of Bavaria, Denmark, and Wurttemberg, all were present in person at the court of the Emperor Francis I in the Austrian capital. When Lymie put down his fork and began to count them off, one by one, on the fingers of his left hand, the waitress, whose name was Irma, thought he was through eating and tried to take his plate away. He stopped her. Prince Metternich (his right thumb) presided over the Congress, and Prince Talleyrand (the index finger) represented France.

A party of four, two men and two women, came into the restaurant, all talking at once, and took possession of the center table nearest Lymie. The women had shingled hair and short tight skirts which exposed the underside of their knees when they sat down. One of the women was fat. The other had the face of a young boy but disguised by one trick or another (rouge, lipstick, powder, wet bangs plastered against the high forehead, and a pair of long pendent earrings) to look like a woman of thirty-five, which as a matter of fact she was. The men were older. They laughed more than there seemed any occasion for, while they were deciding between soup and shrimp cocktail, and their laughter was too loud. But it was the women’s voices, the terrible not quite sober pitch of the women’s voices which caused Lymie to skim over two whole pages without knowing what was on them. Fortunately he realized this and went back. Otherwise he might never have known about the secret treaty concluded between England, France, and Austria, when the pretensions of Prussia and Russia, acting in concert, seemed to threaten a renewal of the attack. The results of the Congress were stated clearly at the
bottom of page 67 and at the top of page 68, but before Lymie got halfway through them, a coat that he recognized as his father’s was hung on the hook next to his chair. Lymie closed the book and said, “I didn’t think you were coming.”

“I got held up,” Mr. Peters said. He put his leather brief case on a chair and then sat down across the table from Lymie. The odor on his breath indicated that he had just left a prospective client somewhere (on North Dearborn Street, perhaps, in the back room of what appeared to be an Italian
pizzeria
but was actually a speakeasy); his bloodshot eyes and the slight trembling of his hands were evidence that Mr. Peters drank more than was good for him.

Time is probably no more unkind to sporting characters than it is to other people, but physical decay unsustained by respectability is somehow more noticeable. Mr. Peters’ hair was turning gray and his scalp showed through on top. He had lost weight also; he no longer filled out his clothes the way he used to. His color was poor, and the flower had disappeared from his buttonhole. In its place was an American Legion button.

Apparently he himself was not aware that there had been any change. He straightened his tie self-consciously and when Irma handed him a menu, he gestured with it so that the two women at the next table would notice the diamond ring on the fourth finger of his right hand. Both of these things, and also the fact that his hands showed signs of the manicurist, one can blame on the young man who had his picture taken with a derby hat on the back of his head, and also sitting with a girl in the curve of the moon. The young man had never for one second deserted Mr. Peters. He was always there, tugging at Mr. Peters’ elbow, making him do things that were not becoming in a man of forty-five.

“I won’t have any soup, Irma,” Mr. Peters said. “I’m not very hungry. Just bring me some liver and onions.” He turned to Lymie. “Mrs. Botsford come?”

Lymie shook his head. “Maybe she’s sick.”

“She always calls the office when she’s sick,” Mr. Peters said. “More than likely she’s quit. It’s a long way to come and she may have found somebody on the South Side to work for. If she
has
quit, she’ll get in touch with me. She’s got four weeks’ wages coming to her.”