The Folded Leaf

by William Maxwell

  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.”

  “But I thought you paid her last week,” Lymie said.

  “I was going to,” Mr. Peters said, “but I didn’t get around to it.” He glanced at the next table. “What kind of a day did you have at school?”

  “All right,” Lymie said.

  “Anything happen, specially?”

  A whistle blew faintly, Mr. Pritzker’s whistle, and for a moment the splashing surrounded Lymie and sucked him down. He decided that it wasn’t anything that would interest his father. School was one world, home was another. Lymie could and did pass back and forth between them nearly every day of his life, but it was beyond his power to bring the two together. If he tried now, his father would make an attempt at listening but his eyes would grow vague, or he would glance away for a second and hardly notice when Lymie stopped talking.

  “No,” Lymie said, “nothing happened.”

  Mr. Peters frowned. He would have liked the people at the next table to know how smart Lymie was and what good grades he got on his monthly report card.

  There was a long silence during which Lymie might as well have been studying, but he didn’t feel that he should when his father was sitting across from him, with nothing to read and nobody to talk to. When Irma reappeared with the liver and onions, it was a great relief to both of them. Mr. Peters cut a small piece of meat, stuck his fork into it, and raised it to his mouth. Just as he was about to take the meat from the fork, Irma leaned across the table and set a glass of ice water at his place. He put the fork down, broke off a piece of bread, buttered the bread carefully, and then put it on the tablecloth beside his plate. After that he raised the piece of liver to his mouth again, but instead of taking it he said thoughtfully, “Irma is a very fine girl. Too capable to be doing this kind of work. She ought to be in an office somewhere making twenty-five dollars a week.”

  Lymie, who had observed his father bending forward slightly so that he could see inside the neckline of Irma’s uniform, said nothing. The fork remained poised. After a moment Mr. Peters lowered it with the piece of liver still on it, took a drink of water, and then after a moment picked the fork up as if this time he had every intention of eating. The front door opened and a man and woman came in. Mr. Peters turned to look at the woman’s legs as she walked back through the restaurant. The liver fell off the fork, so he took a piece of fried onion and raised that halfway to his mouth.

  This comedy went on for nearly twenty minutes and then Mr. Peters signaled to Irma to take his plate away.

  “You haven’t eaten anything,” Lymie said.

  “I wasn’t hungry,” Mr. Peters said. “All I want is some coffee,” and once more there was a long silence, during which each of them searched vainly through his whole mind for something to say to the other.

  9

  Continuing the argument at the supper table, finding answers that made a monkey out of his father, Spud left the park, where he had been sitting all alone on a bench for the last hour and a half, and came to a neighborhood where the apartment houses no longer presented a continuous brick front to the street. Instead there were open spaces where the light from the street lamp shone on a cluster of shabby FOR SALE signs and signs beginning THIS CHOICE BUILDING SITE, with the rest of the lettering submerged in weeds. Sometimes there was only one three-story building to a square block, and no trees, no barberry bushes or bridal wreath to soften the hard outlines of the masonry. Here the air, although tainted with coal smoke, was freer, more like the air of open country.

  Occasionally a car drove past, changing the aspect of the street by its headlights, making everything look thin and theatrical. The people Spud overtook on foot might have been young and beautiful and willing to hand over their lives to him, or they might have been older than death. So far as he was concerned they were shadows. He walked past them without even a sidelong glance. When he came to an iron bridge he loitered for several minutes, watching the water flow underneath, and no one caught up with him, which was odd. Possibly the others—the girl with the cloth rose on her hat, the Christian Science practitioner, the young boy with a canvas bag stuffed full of handbills, the piano tuner, and the woman whose blood pressure was higher than it should have been at her age—perhaps all these people had some destination or were expected somewhere. Spud was sailing before his own anger.

  He walked on past a paint and varnish factory where, at the gate, an electric bulb shone down on the night watchman’s empty chair. Across the street stood a row of ramshackle two-story frame houses, each with the same peaked roof, the same high sagging front porch. The houses extended for two blocks. Then the future asserted itself over the past and there were more apartment buildings with vacant lots between them, more signs, more weeds growing up through unfinished foundations.

  A big Irishwoman in a black coat came toward Spud on the wrong side of the walk. She was feeling the effects of liquor and self-pity, and the least people could do, it seemed to her, was to get out of her way. Spud came straight on. At the very last moment her truculence turned to panic and she stepped off the sidewalk. But he was not, as she had thought, a blind man, so she shouted after him: “Damn kids! Think they own the earth …”

  Spud turned and looked back, seeing the drunken woman for the first time. He shook his head and walked on. The members of his own family—his father, his mother, and his sister—all were against him; it was not surprising that, without knowing how or why, he should bring on himself the ill will of strangers.

  At Christiana Avenue the sidewalk gave out abruptly and rather than continue through mud and have to clean his shoes when he got home, Spud turned south. After one long block, Christiana Avenue also gave out, and he turned back east again, zigzagging until he found another bridge and a street that brought him to the western edge of the park. In the park at the drinking fountain Spud found what all day long he had been searching for.

  The other boy was astride a bicycle and apparently deep in conversation with two girls. He looked up as Spud walked past. Neither gave any sign of recognition. The other boy balanced himself on his bicycle with the front wheel turning this way and that, and his right foot resting against the cement base of the drinking fountain. His straight blond hair was parted in the middle and trained back like an Arrow collar ad, but it kept falling forward, and he had a nervous habit of tossing his head back.

  Spud sat down on a bench near a young maple tree and crossed his legs so that his right ankle rested on his left knee. The girls giggled, which was to be expected, and when they bent over the drinking fountain, the blond boy made the water spurt up in their faces. After having this ancient trick played on them, they decided to turn the water on for each other, but the blond boy promised, and crossed his heart to die, and said honestly, until at last they gave him one more chance. Spud could have told them what would happen. He knew also that the argument by the drinking fountain was for his benefit. If the blond boy had been sure of himself, he wouldn’t have wasted valuable time spurting water on girls and pretending to run over their feet with the front wheel of his bicycle.

  Tilting his head back until he could look up at a street lamp that was directly behind him, Spud ignored the whole performance. His throat was dry and he could feel his heart pounding inside his shirt. He watched the moth millers beating against the glass globe, which was large and round and made the yellow leaves of the maple glow with light.

  After a while the two girls (whether in real or mock anger there was no telling) walked away. Left to himself, the blond boy circled once around the drinking fountain and then rode past Spud so slowly that the bicycle wavered and nearly fell. Spud waited until he tossed his hair back, and then said quietly, “
Why don’t you get a violin?”

  The blond boy didn’t answer. He rode on about fifteen feet, made a sudden swift turn, came back, and stopped directly in front of Spud. One foot was on a pedal, the other resting on the sidewalk. “I don’t like your attitude,” he said.

  Spud cleared his throat and spat carefully, so that it just missed the front wheel of the blond boy’s bicycle. The wheel was withdrawn a few inches.

  “You looking for trouble?”

  “If I saw some,” Spud said, “I don’t know as I’d get up and walk away from it.”

  They were in position now, their moves as fixed and formal as the sexual dancing of savages.

  “Because if you’re really looking for trouble,” the blond boy said, “I’d be only too happy to beat the shit out of you.”

  “You and how many other Swedes?”

  That did it apparently, for the blond boy let go of his bicycle, which fell with a clatter, and Spud rose from the bench to meet him. They stood sizing each other up. The blond boy was taller than Spud, thicker through the waist, and larger boned. They each waited for the sudden twitch, the false movement which would release their arms and set them slugging at one another. They could not fight until the willingness to fight, rising inside them like mercury in a glass, reached a certain point; and that, rather than what they said or did or any ability to discriminate between a disparaging remark which could with dignity be allowed to pass and an insult which must be challenged if one is to maintain honor, cast the decision.

  “There’s a better place over there,” the blond boy said, pointing to a dark clump of shrubbery.

  “Okay,” Spud said.

  They walked into an open space among the bushes, took off their coats, their ties, unbuttoned their shirt collars, and rolled up their sleeves as if they were about to inspect each other’s vaccination marks. There was a moment when they stood helplessly. Then the mercury began to rise again. The blond boy tossed the hair out of his eyes and shifted his balance, and Spud knew as definitely as if it had been announced over the radio what was coming. He ducked just in time.

  No longer was it necessary to imagine two bohunks waiting under the elevated. He had an enemy now, a flesh and blood Swede with a cruel mouth and murder in his pale blue eyes. The Swede got through Spud’s guard and landed one on the end of his chin. It only made Spud feel stronger, more sure of himself. All the rancor against his father for uprooting him, all his homesickness, his fear of Miss Frank’s sarcasm, his contempt for the dressy boys who sat around him in the classrooms at school, his dislike for girls who painted their faces and for the other kind who knew their lessons and were superior, his resentment at being almost but not quite poor, at having to go through his sister’s bedroom to get to his own—everything flowed out through his fists. At each impact he was delivered of some part of his accumulated misery and he began to feel larger than life size.

  10

  Janet Martin with her hair in curlers and her face scrubbed clean of rouge and powder and lipstick was not so different from her sister Elsa, after all. In the dark they talked across the narrow space that separated their two beds, and yawned, and broke the sudden silences with more talk. Their voices grew drowsy and the things they had to say to each other more intimate.

  Carson and Lynch, in spite of what they had seen in the movie house on Western Avenue, fell into a dreamless sleep the moment their heads touched the pillow.

  At quarter after eleven Lymie Peters was still awake.

  On the way home from the Alcazar Restaurant Mr. Peters had stopped in at a cigar store and made a telephone call, the results of which were obviously satisfactory. As soon as they got back to the apartment he went out to the tiny kitchen and from one of the cupboards he produced two green demijohns, one containing alcohol, the other a little less than half full of distilled water. Then he made a trip to the linen closet, where he kept the glycerin and also a very small bottle containing oil of juniper. When alcohol, juniper drops, and glycerin had been added to the distilled water, in proper proportion, Mr. Peters took the bottle in his hands and shook it vigorously up and down, from side to side in wide sweeping arcs. After a time his arms grew tired and he called Lymie, who came and took turns swinging the demijohn.

  To Lymie the word party had once meant birthday presents wrapped in white tissue paper, ice cream in the shape of a dove or an Easter lily, and games like London Bridge and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. Now it meant a telephone call from the corner cigar store and the shades drawn to the window sills. The women who came to see his father had bobbed hair that more often than not was hennaed, they smoked cigarettes, their voices were raucous and hard, and their dresses kept coming up over their knees.

  If he walked into the living room they usually made a fuss over him, and asked him to come and sit beside them on the sofa. Sometimes they straightened his necktie and slicked his hair down and asked him how many girls he had and if he knew why the chicken crossed the road. He did, actually, but he pretended that he didn’t. No matter what he said, they always burst out laughing, and apparently it was about something which wasn’t exactly the thing they were talking about, some joke that Lymie wasn’t old enough to understand. He didn’t stay long. He didn’t want to, particularly, and he waited for his father to give him that look which meant it would be a good idea if Lymie said good night and went back to his own room.

  Tonight, when the doorbell rang, Lymie raised his head and listened. He was prepared for what was coming. It had happened many times before. But nevertheless the expression on his thin pointed face was of anxiety. He heard his father’s footsteps in the front hall. Mr. Peters was pressing the buzzer that released the vestibule door. A moment after he turned the double lock, a voice broke out on the stairs, a woman’s voice, and when she reached the landing, Mr. Peters joined in, both of them talking loudly.

  “Whee I’m out of breath. Lymon, the next apartment you move into better be on the second floor before I develop heart trouble from climbing the stairs.”

  “You’re getting fat, that’s all that’s the matter with you.”

  “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.

  11

  Mrs. 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.