The Folded Leaf (6 page)

“I’m not either getting fat … Why do you say things like that?”

“What’s this right here … feel it?”

“Don’t be silly, that’s just my …”

Lymie got up noiselessly and closed the door of his room. It made very little difference. The woman’s voice would have
penetrated through stone. For a while after he had undressed and got into bed, he lay curled on his right side, listening. Then he began to think about the house where he was born. It was a two-story Victorian house with a mansard roof and trellises with vines growing up them—a wistaria and a trumpet vine. The house was set back from the street and there was an iron fence around the front yard, and in one place a picket was missing. As a child he seldom went through the front gate, unless he was with some grown person. Bending down to go through the hole in the fence gave him a sense of coming to a safe and secret place.

The odd thing was that now, when he went back to the house in his mind, and tried to walk through it, he made mistakes. It was sometimes necessary for him to rearrange rooms and place furniture exactly before he could remember the house the way it used to be.

The house had a porch running along two sides of it, and the roof sloped down so that it included the second story. The front door opened into a hall, with the stairs going up, and then the door to the library, the door to the living room. Beyond the living room was the dining room, and beyond the dining room was the kitchen. The stairs turned at the landing, and upstairs there was another hall. The door to his room, the door to the guest room, the door to his mother and father’s room, and the door to the sewing room all opened off this upstairs hall. And there was a horsehair sofa where he sat sometimes in his nightgown, when there was company and he wanted to listen to what was going on downstairs. The sofa scratched his legs. There was also a bookcase in the upstairs hall, with his books in it, and a desk, and over the desk was a picture of a boy with a bow and arrow and a gas jet that was left burning all night.
The bathroom was at the end of a long corridor and up one step. When you got to the end of the corridor you turned right if you wanted to go into the bathroom, and left if you wanted to go into the back hall, where the clothes hamper was, and the door to the maid’s room, and the back stairs. The back stairs used to frighten him even in the daytime, and at night he never dared look to the left, as he reached the end of the corridor.

About the bathroom he was confused. Sometimes the washbowl was in one place and sometimes it was in another. The tub was large and had claws for feet, he was sure. But was it at the far end of the room, under the window? Or was that where the toilet was?

He gave up trying to establish the arrangement of the bathroom and thought instead of the butler’s pantry, which he had completely forgotten before. It was between the dining room and the kitchen. The butler’s pantry was where the door to the cellar stairs was. You opened this door and the stairs went down to the furnace room, which was dark and full of cobwebs. And there was no railing.

There was also a door that opened off the kitchen, and another stairs which led to the cellar where his mother kept all kinds of fruit in jars on open shelves.

The discovery of these two sets of stairs, both of which he had totally forgotten, pleased Lymie. He thought about them for a minute or two and then suddenly the house went out of his mind, leaving no trace. He was back in his own bed, and it was the utter absolute silence that kept him from sleeping.

M
rs. Latham was still awake when Spud came in. She called to him softly from her bedroom. “Is that you, son?” It couldn’t have been anyone else and it was really another question altogether that she was asking him. When he answered, the sound of his voice satisfied her apparently. “Turn out the light in the hall,” she said. “And sleep well.”

“Same to you,” Spud said.

With his tongue he touched the cut on the inside of his cheek. There was a slight taste in his mouth which was blood. His shirt was torn all the way down his back. His hair was full of dirt and leaves. He was glad his mother hadn’t waited up for him. It would upset her if she knew he had been fighting.

He tried not to make a sound going through Helen’s room but he miscalculated the position of a small rocking chair and fell over it. Picking himself up he was as conscious of his sister’s irritation as if she had spoken out loud, but there was no sound from the bed, not even the creaking of springs.

When Spud got his clothes off he was too tired to do anything but crawl in between the covers. Too tired and too happy. For the first time the room seemed his. It was a nice room, better than he had thought. It had all these windows.
The blond boy began to give way, to defend himself. Foot by foot they fought their way across the open space in the shrubbery, their breathing and the impact of their fists the only sound, their bodies the whole field of vision. When the blond boy, stepping backward, tripped and lost his balance, Spud fell on top of him.
Carlson, his name was: Verne Carlson. So he must have been a Swede. He was not especially different from a lot of guys in Wisconsin. Guys like Logan Anderson or Bob Trask, who think they are a
lot tougher than they really are. But on the other hand (Spud yawned) not bad when you get to know them.

The night sky was split wide open by a flash of lightning and then another paler one. If it rained it would probably get the window sill and the floor wet but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now.
The blond boy was tired. He got his legs around Spud’s waist and then didn’t have the strength to cut off Spud’s wind. They lay that way, locked and not moving, until a sudden jerk pried the heavy legs apart and Spud rolled free.
He twisted around in the bed until he found the place he was looking for.
The blond boy made a grab for him and missed and grabbed again, but Spud knew what he was doing. He waited and saw his chance and pinned the blond boy’s shoulders to the ground. Give up? he asked. Do you give up? The blond boy lay there panting, his eyes closed, his face streaked with sweat and dirt, and didn’t answer.
Spud wanted to stay awake until he heard the sound of rain but his eyelids closed of their own accord and it didn’t seem worth while opening them. Somewhere down the block a car started up and there were voices, people saying good night. And then his mother’s voice saying … and the voice of the woman who passed him on the sidewalk…. No, that was what his mother said. Sleep well, she said. He flexed his fingers, sighed, and was almost gone when he remembered something. The splashing and the shouting in the pool. But that wasn’t it. It wasn’t while they were playing water polo, it was afterward. It was that skinny kid who….

O
f the many ways of knowing people, the eye’s appraisal is surely the most complete; but Spud Latham’s eyes, which saw only enemies, would never have perceived that the boy ahead of him was not like the others. Spud’s eyes were bandaged now and for guidance he had to depend on his right hand, which was resting on a naked shoulder. The shoulder was very thin. The boy ahead of Spud (whoever it was) would have been no great help in a fight, but then this wasn’t a fight exactly. The shoulder stiffened when there was danger, and when the danger was safely past, the shoulder relaxed. With a kind of wonder Spud felt the fragile collarbone moving, and the tendons, and made up his mind to follow trustingly.

The initiation should have been held in a long hut under the darkest trees in a forest, but that couldn’t be managed;
there are no forests, strictly speaking, anywhere near Chicago. The fraternity had engaged a suite of rooms on the fourth floor of a North Side residential hotel. The committee in charge had come early, bringing with them the paraphernalia for the initiation. They had unfortunately no masks, no slit gongs, no bullroarer. No one had told them about these things. But they had bananas, limburger cheese, a ball of kitchen string, French dressing, soured milk, tartar sauce, oysters, and a quart milk bottle full of stale tea. Because they were obliged to perform in one evening a ritual that, done properly, requires from two to three months, they yanked the shades down and hurriedly pushed the furniture out of the way. It would have saved them embarrassment later and also some expense if they had rolled up the rugs, which were a bloody shade of red, but they didn’t think about it. Dede Sandstrom tore an old sheet of his mother’s into strips that could be used for blindfolds. The other boys cut several lengths of string and on the end of each one they fastened an oyster.

Shortly after seven o’clock the pledges appeared, one at a time, in the hotel lobby. Their pockets were stuffed with chocolate bars, Life Savers, candy, and chewing gum. Their faces were scrubbed and shining, and they were dressed as for a Friday night date at the Edgewater Beach Hotel. This was a Wednesday—Wednesday, the twenty-fifth of January. The elevator boy delivered them, one at a time, at the fourth floor, where they parted from him reluctantly as though from a friend and made their way along the corridor, reading the room numbers. Lynch’s hand sought his striped bow tie, lest it be at an angle, and two minutes later, at almost the same spot, Carson felt his wavy hair, plastered to his skull with water. Catanzano, caught off guard by a Florentine mirror, reassured himself by stretching his bull neck and squaring his heavy shoulders. In
spite of the red arrows painted on the wall opposite the elevator shaft, Lymie Peters went the wrong way and had to retrace his steps. His face was flushed and he had a stitch in his side, from running. He had left home in what he thought was plenty of time, but then he had lingered in front of a butcher shop on Sheridan Road between Albion and Northshore Avenues. The shop was closed for the night and the floor was strewn with fresh sawdust, and in a row facing the plate-glass door stood a plaster sow and four little pigs. Caught in a timeless pink light they looked out at Lymie and he looked in at them until the big round clock on the wall of the butcher shop released him from this trap for children and sent him running down the street.

Spud Latham was the last to come, and he was several minutes late. This tardiness was intentional. His clothes had changed since last October. He wore plus eights, like Mark Wheeler and Ray Snyder, whom he counted among his innumerable enemies. He knew that they hated him (or at least that they didn’t like his attitude) and he stood and faced the door of Room 418 with his jaw set, waiting for somebody to make a false move. When there was only silence he grew impatient, raised his fist, and rapped on the door with his bare knuckles.

“Who’s there?”

The voice that spoke through the closed door was hollow and sinister.

Spud answered according to previous instructions: “Neophyte wishing admission to the Isle of Thura.”

“Shut your eyes, neophyte, and face the other way on pain of deadly punishment.”

The door was opened behind his back. Hands blindfolded him, and other hands pulled him roughly into the room, where
they stripped him and disfigured his body with Carter’s drawing ink and tincture of iodine. He submitted to this without protest, but then his coming here at all was an act of submission. Along with Spud’s need for enemies was also the need to have friends, to be accepted by the right people.

He was pushed into the straggling line of naked, blindfolded neophytes, between Lymie Peters and Carson. After Carson came Lynch, with his bow tie retied around his bare neck. Then Ford, Catanzano, and deFresne—each with his right hand on the shoulder of the boy ahead of him. They were driven round and round the room, walking, running, hopping on one leg, and squatting duck-fashion until their knees went soft. They were driven over and under chairs, into the next room and out again, to the sound of paddles slapping, feet stomping, voices shouting, the whoosh of a broom descending (on whose buttocks?) and other often inexplicable noises.

During most of the time this was going on, Spud had only one idea in his mind: If anything happened to the boy ahead of him, if he were hurt in any way, every son-of-a-bitch and bastard in the place would answer for it.

The members of the initiation committee were enjoying themselves thoroughly. They had once undergone this same abuse and so it satisfied their sense of justice. But the real reason for their pleasure was probably more obscure. They were re-enacting, without knowing it, a play from the most primitive time of man. In this play the men of the village had a grudge against the nearly grown boys, or were afraid of them perhaps. In retaliation for some crime which the boys had committed or were about to commit (possibly some crime which the men themselves had once committed against men who were older than they) the boys of the village were torn from the arms of their mothers, rounded up, and made to undergo
a period of intense torture. This torture may even have been a symbolic substitution for punishment by death. At all events it kept the committee busy from twenty minutes after seven until a quarter of eleven.

The neophytes were only kept in line half an hour. The more refined torment had to be administered singly. Carson wrestled for a long time with temptation. Lynch had to scramble like an egg, and Ford ate a square meal. DeFresne wore the skin off the end of his nose pushing a penny along the red carpet. And Catanzano, who was the biggest of the pledges and played guard on the football team, had to do as many push-ups as he could and then ten more. With the third he felt a hand on the small of his back. The hand pushed down cruelly whenever he pushed up. After a time he collapsed and lay still, not minding the catcalls and the obscene noises. He was a wop. His natural place was with the excluded. He was surprised to be here at all.

The fact that Lymie Peters was no good at games and that he never was seen in LeClerc’s should have been enough to keep him from being pledged also, but Mark Wheeler had decided it would be a good thing for the fraternity to have somebody whose grades they could point to, if they ever got called up before the principal, and Mark Wheeler had persuaded the others. Having done that much for Lymie, he now knocked him off his feet with a frying pan. Bob Edwards made Lymie read a section of the classified telephone directory with the hot end of a cigarette directly under his nose. The others were fairly considerate. Lymie without his clothes on looked more delicate than he actually was, and they were afraid of injuring him. Also they were waiting for Frenchie deFresne. They wanted to see if they could make Frenchie cry.