“Whatever she did and whatever she thought,” Mr. Peters said, “turned out to be right.”
When he talked like this it was largely to make himself suffer (he too had trouble remembering his wife’s face, and the last years of his marriage had not been as happy as the first; there had been quarrels and misunderstandings, also that girl in the barber shop) and he did not expect Lymie to offer consolation. He took out his watch, glanced at it, and then put it back in his pocket.
The marble headstone of the small grave read:
Infant daughter of Lymon and Alma Peters
died March 14, 1919
aged 4 days
Looking at the inscription Lymie realized that he was not yet ready to go. He was suddenly filled with the remembrance of the sound of his mother’s name: Alma, everyone called her. The richness and warmth of the sound. Alma… Alma … Like the comfort he got from leaning against her thigh.
When she was away there was the terrible slowness of time. Even when she was downtown shopping or at a card party. Though he knew she would be back at five o’clock, how could he be sure that five o’clock would ever come? And when his mother and father were away once on a visit to Cincinnati, that was really a long time. And they got home and she told him that she had a paint book for him in her trunk, and then that the trunks were lost.
But what he remembered most vividly of all as he turned away from the grave was the question that used to fill his mind whenever he opened the front door: Where is she? he used to cry. Is she here? Has she come back yet? And the rooms, the front hall where she had left her gloves, the living room where her pocketbook was (on the mahogany table), and the library beyond, where she had left a small round package wrapped in white paper, all answered him. She’s here, they said. Everything is all right. She’s home.
20
In April there was trouble over the fraternity house. It began on a rainy Monday afternoon. Six of them were there. Catanzano had a sprained ankle and was enthroned on the couch. The others were trying out his crutches. Lynch was about to play a medley of songs from “No, No, Nanette” on the victrola when the janitor, who was a Belgian, walked in. He had a couple with him—a very tall man whose wrist hung down out of the sleeves of his black overcoat and a woman in a purple suit with a cheap fur neckpiece, blondined hair, blue eyes, and very red skin. She looked around critically and then said, “Fourteen dollars?”
The janitor nodded.
“Well,” the woman said, “I don’t know.” She crossed the room and would have tripped over Catanzano’s bandaged foot if he hadn’t drawn it hastily out of the way. The other boys stood still, like figures in some elaborate musical parlor game.
The man couldn’t have been more than five years older than Mark Wheeler but life had already proved too much for him. There was no color in his long thin face. The skin was drawn tight over his cheekbones. His hair was receding from his temples, and something about him—the look in his eyes, mostly—suggested a conscious determination to shed his flesh at the earliest possible moment and take refuge in his dry skeleton.
The woman was almost old enough to be his mother but there was nothing maternal or gentle about her. She went into the bathroom and came out again, inspected the only closet, discovered that there were no wall plugs, and sniffed the air, which smelled strongly of wet wool. Still undecided, she wandered back to the door.
“I’ve never lived in a basement apartment before,” she said, turning to the man, “and I’m kind of afraid of the dampness. On account of my asthma.”
“Is not damp,” the janitor said.
“Maybe not now with the heat on, but in summer I bet it’s good and damp…. What about it, Fred?”
The young man was looking at the picture of the English bulldog. “It’s up to you,” he said. “I’ll be away all day.”
“Well I guess I’ll have to think about it,” the woman said, shifting her fur. The expression on her face was like a pout, but she wasn’t pouting, actually; she was thinking. “I don’t want to move in and unpack everything and then find out that I can’t breathe,” she said. And then, turning to the janitor, “We’ll let you know.”
She looked once more at the boys without seeing them and walked out. The janitor followed, and after him the young man, who had a sudden coughing fit in the areaway and left the door wide open behind him.
Lymie Peters was the first to recover. He was standing in a draft and he sneezed. Dede Sandstrom walked over to the door and slammed it. As if a spell had been lifted, the victrola needle came to rest on the opening bars of “I Want to Be Happy,” and they all started talking at once. Their excitement, the pitch of their immature voices, the gestures which they made with their hands, and their uneasy profanity were all because of one thing which none of them dared say: Their house, their fraternity (which stood in the minds of all of them like a beautiful woman that they were too young to have) was as good as gone. If these people didn’t take it, the next ones would.
The record came to an end and the turntable of the victrola went round and round slower and slower until at last it stopped. Mark Wheeler and Dede Sandstrom went out and called Bud Griesenauer, who wasn’t home. His mother didn’t know where they could reach him. On their way back to the apartment they met the janitor in the areaway. Mark Wheeler walked up to him and said, “What’s the big idea?”
The janitor shrugged his shoulders. “I show the apartment, that’s all.”
“But it’s our apartment,” Dede Sandstrom said. “We pay rent on it.”
“Maybe somebody else pay more rent on it,” the janitor said, and disappeared into the boiler room.
The second indignation meeting lasted until almost dinner-time. On the way home Lymie Peters stopped in a drugstore and called Bud Griesenauer. This time he was at home. They’d all been calling him, he said. Wheeler and Hall and Carson and Lynch and everybody. And he’d called his uncle. It was probably a misunderstanding of some kind, his uncle said, and maybe the people wouldn’t rent the apartment after all. But if they did decide to take it, there was nothing anybody could do. The boys didn’t have a lease and the owner of the building naturally had a right to try to get as much money out of it as possible.
They held a special meeting the next afternoon, and it was decided that somebody should come down to the fraternity house every afternoon after school, in case the janitor showed the place to any more people; and that they should take turns staying there at night. The rest of the time they would lock the door with a padlock. They wrote days of the week on slips of paper and put them in Mark Wheeler’s hat and passed the hat around. Lymie drew the following Friday, and Spud Latham offered to stay with him.
When they arrived Friday night, Lymie had three army blankets under one arm and a coffeepot under the other. Spud carried a knapsack containing all the equipment and food necessary for a large camp breakfast.
The apartment was very warm when they got there but they built a fire in the fireplace anyway. Lymie sat on the floor in front of the fire and took off his shoes, which were wet, and loosened his tie and unbuttoned his shirt collar. Spud took all his clothes off except his shorts. Then he emptied the knapsack out on the hearth, arranging the skillet, the coffeepot, the iron grill, the plates, knives, forks, salt, and pepper so that they would all be ready and convenient the next morning. The food he put in the bathroom, on the window sill, and the blankets he spread one by one, on the couch. Every movement of his body was graceful, easy, and controlled. Lymie, who was continually being surprised by what his own hands and feet were up to, enjoyed watching him. With the firelight shining on his skin and no other light in the room, Spud looked very much like the savage that he was playing at being.
When he had finished with the couch, he stretched out on top of the blankets and there was so much harmony in the room that he said, “This is the life. No school tomorrow. Nobody to tell you when to go to bed. Plenty to eat and a good fire. Why didn’t we think of this before?”
�
��I don’t know,” Lymie said. “Why didn’t we?”
“There’s always something,” Spud said. The full implications of this remark, in spite of its vagueness, were deeply felt by both of them. Spud picked up the volume of Balzac’s stories and read for a while, lying on his back with his knees raised. Lymie continued to sit in front of the fire, facing him. The expression in his eyes was partly pride (he had never had a friend before) and partly envy, though he didn’t recognize it as that. He was comparing his own wrists, which were so thin that he could put his thumb and forefinger around one of them and still see daylight, to Spud’s, which were strong and square. The wish closest to Lymie’s heart, if he could have had it for the asking, would have been to have a well-built body, a body as strong and as beautifully proportioned as Spud’s. Then all his troubles would have been over.
When Spud turned and lay on his stomach, Lymie got up and sat down beside him on the edge of the couch, and began to read over Spud’s shoulder: … woman will heal thy wound, stop the waste hole in thy bag of tricks. Woman is thy wealth; have but one woman, dress, undress, and fondle that woman, make use of the woman—woman is everything—woman has an inkstand of her own; dip thy pen into that bottomless inkpot… Without looking up, Spud rolled over on his back, so that Lymie could stretch out and read in comfort. But Lymie didn’t move. His face was troubled. He started to say something and then, after a second’s hesitation, he went on reading. Woman makes love; make love to her with the pen only, tickle her fantasies, and sketch merrily for her a thousand pictures of love in a thousand pretty ways. Woman is generous and all for one, or one for all, must pay the painter, and furnish the hairs of the brush … At the bottom of the page Spud looked up to see if Lymie was still reading. Lymie had been finished for some time. He was staring at Spud’s chest.
“Let’s do something else,” he said.
“Why?” Spud asked. “This is interesting.” He rolled over on his stomach again and was about to go on reading when Lymie surprised him by grabbing the book out of his hands. It sailed across the room into the blazing fire. Spud sat up and saw with a certain amount of regret that the flames were already licking at the open pages.
“What did you do that for?” he asked.
Instead of explaining, Lymie prodded at the book with the poker, so that the leaves burned faster. Pieces of charred paper detached themselves and were drawn, still glowing, up the chimney.
“You’re going to have a hell of a time explaining to Hall about his book,” Spud said.
“I’m not going to explain about it,” Lymie said. His jaw was set and Spud, realizing that Lymie was very close to tears, sank back on the couch as if nothing had happened.
After a week in which no one, so far as the boys knew, was shown through the apartment, they gave up staying there at night, and with the warm weather they stopped going to the fraternity house altogether. It took too long, and besides, they were suffering from spring fever. When they emerged from the school building at three o’clock with their ties loosened and their collars undone, they had no energy and no will. They stood around in the schoolyard watching baseball practice and leaning against each other for support. Any suggestion that anybody made always turned out to be too much trouble.
There is no telling how long it would have taken them to find out about the fraternity if Carson hadn’t wanted suddenly to play his record of “I’ll See You in My Dreams.” The record was at the fraternity and he asked Lynch to ride down there with him. Lynch’s last report card was unsatisfactory and he wasn’t allowed out after supper on week nights, so Carson went alone. When he came around the corner of the apartment building and saw the furniture clogging the areaway, he stopped short, unable to believe his eyes.
The couch was soggy and stained from being rained on. The chairs were coming unglued. There were wrinkles in the picture of the collegian, where the water had got in behind the glass, and the grass rug gave off a musty odor. The English bulldog was missing, but Lynch was too upset to notice this. It was his victrola, the condition of his victrola, that upset him most. The felt pad on the turntable had spots of mildew, the oak veneer of the case peeled off in strips, and both the needle and the arm were rusted. When he tried to wind it, the victrola made such a horrible grinding sound that he gave up and went in search of the janitor. There was no one in the boiler room or in any of the various storerooms in the basement. He came back and tried the door of the apartment. The padlock that they had used was gone and in its place was a new Yale lock. No one came to the door.
The victrola records were warped and probably ruined, but he took them anyway and walked around to the front of the building, intending to peer in at the basement windows. They had net curtains across them and he could see nothing. He went off down the street with the records under his arm and his spirits held up by anger and the melancholy pleasure of spreading the news.
21
With school almost over for the year and summer vacation looming ahead, the loss of a meeting place made very little difference to any of them. Spud Latham and Lymie Peters met in the corridor by Spud’s locker, after school, and went off together. Lymie had a malted milk and Spud had a milk shake and then they came out of the stale air of LeClerc’s and separated. Or else Lymie went home with Spud. He never asked Spud to come home with him and Spud never suggested it. So far as he was concerned, Lymie belonged at his house, and had no other home.
No matter how often Lymie went there, Mrs. Latham always seemed glad to see him. She treated him casually and yet managed to watch over him. When she caught him helping himself out of the icebox as if he lived there, all she said was “Lymie, there’s some fudge cake in the cakebox. Wouldn’t you rather have a piece of that?”
At mealtime there was a place for him at the dining room table, next to Spud. From the other side of the table Helen teased him because he didn’t like parsnips or because he needed a haircut, and Mr. Latham used him as an excuse to tell long stories about the heating business.
After supper Lymie and Spud studied together in Spud’s room until their minds wandered from the page and they started yawning. Then they got up and went across the street to the park and lay on the grass and stared into the evening sky and thought out loud about what the future had in store for them. Spud’s heart was fixed on a cabin in the North Woods where they (it was understood that Lymie was to be with him) could fish in the summertime and in winter set trap lines and then sit around and be warm and comfortable indoors, with the wind howling and the snow banked up higher than the windows of the cabin. Lymie chewed on a blade of grass and didn’t commit himself. It all seemed possible. Something that would require arranging, perhaps (pleasant though such a life might be, there was obviously not going to be much money in it) but perfectly possible.
At nine-thirty or a quarter of ten he pulled Spud up off the grass and they went back across the street. Lymie gathered up his books and papers. As he passed by the living room door he said “Good night, everybody,” and Helen and Mr. and Mrs. Latham looked up and nodded affectionately, as if he had told them that he was going down to the drugstore on the corner and would be right back.
One day Mrs. Latham discovered that there was a button missing from his shirt after he and Spud had been doing pushups on the living room rug. They looked under all the furniture without being able to find it and then she made Lymie come into her bedroom with her while she hunted through her sewing box for another white button to sew on in place of the one he had lost. Something in the tone of her voice caught Spud’s attention. He stood still in the center of the living room and listened, with a troubled expression on his face. His mother was talking to Lymie in a scolding way that was not really scolding at all and that he had never heard her use with anybody but him. He felt a sharp stab of jealousy. It was one thing to have a friend, but another to…. He raised the sleeve of his coat and looked at it thoughtfully. A piece of brown thread dangled from the cuff where a button should have been.
“Spea
king of buttons,” he said quietly.
“Oh, all right,” Mrs. Latham answered him from the bedroom. “I’ve been meaning to fix it but I just didn’t get around to it, with all there is to do in this house. Leave it on your bed when you go to school tomorrow…. Stand still, Lymie. I don’t want to stick you…. And next time remember to save the button, do you hear? It isn’t always easy to——”
She didn’t bother to finish the sentence, but Spud’s face cleared. He was reassured. His mother still loved him the most. She had heard him two rooms away, even though he hadn’t raised his voice; and she knew exactly what button he was talking about.
Another afternoon when they got home from school, Spud was restless and wanted to go walking in the rain. They walked a long way west until they came to the Northwestern Railway tracks, where further progress was blocked by an interminable freight train. They stood and counted boxcars and coal cars and oil tankers, and the train shuddered violently once or twice and came to a dead stop. By that time they were tired of waiting for it to pass and so they turned back. The soles of their shoes were soaked through and the bottoms of their trousers were wet and kept flapping about their ankles. When they got home they hung their yellow slickers on the back porch to dry, and retired to Spud’s room with a quart of milk and a box of fig newtons. Noticing the hollows under Lymie’s eyes, Spud decided that he ought to take a nap. There was plenty of time before dinner, and he began to undo Lymie’s tie. Lymie refused, for no reason; or perhaps because Spud hadn’t given him a chance to consider whether he was tired or not. Spud got the tie off but when he tried to unbutton Lymie’s shirt, Lymie began to fight him off. He had never really fought anybody before and he fought with strength that he had no idea he possessed.
At first Spud was amused, and then suddenly it became a life-and-death matter. He wasn’t quite sure how to come at Lymie because Lymie didn’t know the rules. He fought with his hands and his feet and his knees. He gouged at and he grabbed anything that he could lay hands on. Each time that Spud managed to get his arms around Lymie he twisted and fought his way free. The noise they made, banging against the furniture, climbing up on the bed and down again, drew Mrs. Latham, who stood in the doorway for a while, trying to make them stop. Neither of them paid any attention to her. The expression on Lymie’s tormented face was almost but not quite hate. Spud was calm and possessed, and merely bent on making Lymie lie still under the covers and take a nap before dinner. He pried one of Lymie’s shoes off and then the other. His trousers took much longer and were harder to manage, but in the end they came off too, and one of Lymie’s striped socks. With each loss, like a country defending itself against an invader, Lymie fought harder. He fought against being made to do something against his will, and he fought also against the unreasonable strength in Spud’s arms. He butted. He kicked. All of a sudden, with no warning, the last defense gave way. Lymie quit struggling and lay still. As in a dream he let Spud cover him with a blanket. Something had burst inside of him, something more important than any organ, and there was a flowing which was like blood. Though he kept on breathing and his heart after a while pounded less violently, there it was all the same, an underground river which went on and on and was bound to keep on like that for years probably, never stopping, never once running dry.
The Folded Leaf Page 9
