The Folded Leaf (14 page)

“There isn’t anybody,” Spud said. “They’re all acrobats and like that. I can tell from watching you that you know a lot more than I do. And if you don’t mind showing me a few things——”

The other boy pulled his sweat shirt off, over his head. “Okay,” he said. “If you’re that crazy to box, I’d just as soon.”

Lymie tied Spud’s boxing gloves on for him and then went over to the redheaded boy, who had finished tying one glove and was trying to manage the knot in the other. When Lymie took over, the redheaded boy said, “Much obliged,” and looked past him at Spud.

“Three minute rounds,” Spud said, “and no slugging.”

“Better make it two,” the redheaded boy said.

With Spud’s pocket Ingersoll in his right hand, Lymie backed away and called “Time!” The two boxers closed in cautiously. The redheaded boy had at least twenty pounds advantage in weight, but he moved slowly. Spud walked round and round him, jabbing at him, blocking with his shoulder or his elbows, and breathing in through his mouth and out through his nose. Lymie looked down at the watch and then his eyes flew back to Spud. Once as Spud ducked, Lymie’s head also moved sidewise. The movement was very slight, almost as if Lymie were asleep and dreaming that he was fighting.

At first the boxing was scientific and careful, but toward the end of the second round, Spud let go of one. He apologized and they went on fighting. In the third round the same thing happened again and this time he didn’t apologize. Neither did the redheaded boy when he broke through Spud’s guard a minute later and sent him sprawling.

Lymie called “Time!” sharply but nobody paid any attention to him. Spud got to his feet and resumed his shuffling and dancing, but he didn’t box as well as he had before. The redheaded boy got through to him again and again—on the chin, on the side of the head, above his eye. Spud began to lose ground and eventually the two of them, still flailing at each other, ended up between the high parallel bars, to the annoyance of the boy named Armstrong, who jumped down and separated them.

“Why don’t you stay over there where you belong, Latham?” he asked.

“Oh, don’t be a sorehead,” Spud said and turned his back on him. Lymie, who had followed the fighting anxiously all the
way across the gymnasium, now untied the strings of their boxing gloves. Spud and the redheaded boy pulled their gloves off, shook hands, and went off to the showers together.

Left to himself, Lymie put his shoes on and picked up his coat, his books, the boxing gloves, and Spud’s skipping rope. As he started down the stairs he saw by the big clock on the wall that it was now five-twenty-five. The trapeze performers had also decided to call it a day. They were dropping one after another into the net, like ripe pears.

W
hen Sally left Lymie and Hope, she hurried home. It was her mother’s “day” and she was expected to help. The Forbeses lived in a two-story bungalow a little over a mile from the university campus, in a quiet neighborhood. The outside of their house was white stucco covered with a thick, three-pointed ivy. Mrs. Forbes had grown it from a slip that she had carried away from Kenilworth Castle in her purse. Between the Forbeses’ house and the Albrechts’ house on the right, there was barely room for a narrow cement driveway. The apple tree in the Forbeses’ back yard also shaded the flower garden of the economics professor and his wife whose house was on the left. The economics professor claimed the fruit that he could reach from his property, and a coolness had developed between the two families, partly as a result of this and partly because Professor Forbes, on summer evenings when the lawn needed sprinkling, very often placed the sprinkler so that most
of the water went on the sidewalk, and passersby had to make a detour through the wet grass or walk in the street.

Mrs. Forbes was “at home” the second Thursday of every month. On these occasions Professor Forbes was on duty at the front door, where he shook hands with the arriving guests, and took their hats and coats from them, and if it was raining, their umbrellas and rubbers. During the fall and winter months there was always a wood fire burning in the living room fireplace. The curtains were drawn, the lamps were lit. In the dining room there were tall lighted candles in silver candlesticks, and the table was covered with a lace tablecloth and that in turn by stacks of hand-painted plates, rows of shining teaspoons, and platters of fancy sandwiches. Sometimes the woman pouring tea at the copper samovar was Mrs. Somers, the wife of the dean of the Graduate School. Sometimes it was Mrs. Severance, Professor Severance’s mother. Or Mrs. Clark, whose husband was head of the English department. This afternoon it was Mrs. Philosophy Mathews, so-called to distinguish her from the Mrs. Mathews whose husband taught animal husbandry.

Mrs. Forbes herself, always serene, always handsome, stood in the living room receiving. Her guests presented a grand panoramic picture of the Liberal Arts faculty and the Graduate School. As with all such pictures (the “Coronation of Napoleon,” for example, and “Men and Women of Letters of the Nineteenth Century”) you have to have a key. A stranger would have seen a room full of middle-aged and elderly people in groups of twos, threes, and fours, with teacups in their hands, talking a little too loudly in each other’s faces. Mrs. Wentworth, whose husband was in the psychology department, and Mary Mountjoy, who taught Italian, were arguing
about the best time to transplant dahlias. The head of the classics department and a young biology instructor were listening to a businessman who had married into the faculty. The world and his office, he was saying, could develop no trouble that two Manhattans wouldn’t cure. After advancing this contention cheerfully and without opposition, he went on to assert that most people are enormously improved by liquor. The Althoffs and Helen Glover were twitting the head of the English department on his 8
A.M.
broadcasts. Mrs. Baker, who taught the modern novel (with special emphasis on Henry James) and Alice Rawlings were standing in a corner trying to get away from the fireplace. They were discussing Mrs. Baker’s Minnie, who was colored and who, after seven years of faithful service had had a major operation in August and then had declared that her boy friend was going to finance a whole year’s vacation for her. Alice Rawlings said that she had given up and was going it alone with a superb houseman-yardman Fred, on Fridays. It was his one slum day, she said. He came straight from the Wilsons and the McAvoys, and was doing his best to make her back yard resemble their estates. Kathryn Shortall was saying what a blessing it was that her husband enjoyed eating out sometimes, and Sally’s father, out in the hall, was talking to an exchange professor from the Sorbonne about Montaigne. Everyone knew everyone else and it was a good deal like progressive whist, or some game like that, since it involved a frequent change of partners. You went up to any group you felt like talking to. They opened automatically and amiably, and there you were, allowed to pick up the threads of the old conversation or start a new one.

There were several young girls, Sally among them, who came and went, bearing cups of tea and platters of sandwiches.
Though Sally had known some of her mother’s guests since childhood and was privileged to call many full professors by their nicknames, today she looked on everybody with the eyes of a stranger. There was no place for her in this world. She liked dogs, horses, sailboats, airplanes, climbing apple trees, staying up late at night, walking in the rain, driving round and round in an open car on a summer afternoon, sitting by a beach fire at night, lying on the ground and looking up at the undersides of leaves and at lightning bugs and falling stars, dividing her attention between a book that she had read many times and an apple, watching the sun go down and the moon come up, wondering what the boy she was going to marry would look like and where he was at that moment, and how long it would take him to find her…. The list was endless and made up entirely of normal human pleasures. If it had only included an appreciation of respectability, she would have been happier. Or at least she would have been spared a great many bitter arguments with her mother. The words “nice” and “proper” seemed to inflame Sally, and an attempt to consider her conduct in the light of conventional standards made her start talking furiously in a loud voice without much logic.

She loved her mother and father but she didn’t love the things they lived by—professorial dignity, scholarship, old books, old furniture, old china, and brand new amusing gossip. She liked storms, lightning and thunder, excitement; and the climate of her home was unfortunately a temperate one.

When there were too many arguments in too short a time, she took a few clothes and moved into the sorority house, where she ran into similar difficulties. She was expected to be careful of her appearance and of her friends, and to remember at all times that she belonged to the best sorority on the campus. She didn’t try to do any of these things and so there were
more arguments, especially in chapter meetings. She moved around the house in a cloud of disapproval, which had the curious effect of making her clumsy. She tripped over rugs, her feet slid out from under her on the stairs. The girls that she wanted to have like her did, actually, but they also laughed at her, because she was so enthusiastic and so like an overgrown puppy; and this hurt her pride.

The girls who were not amused by her behavior were appalled by it. No room that she walked into was ever quite large enough, nothing was safe in her apologetic hands. She didn’t mean to drop Emily Noyes’ bottle of Chanel No. 5 or split open the seams of Joyce Brenner’s white evening dress which she had asked to try on, but the result in each case was disastrous. The girls snatched fragile things from her if she showed any sign of picking them up, and the girl she bumped into hurrying around a corner of the upstairs hall took to her bed, with cold compresses on her head. It seemed to her that all girls were made of glass and she alone was of flesh and blood and constantly cutting herself on them. She gave up trying to please them.

Though she was undeniably a tomboy, there was nothing masculine about her appearance. She was a recognizable feminine type which the Greeks represented as a huntress with a crescent moon in the center of her forehead, a silver bow in her left hand, a quiver of arrows slung over one shoulder, and her skirts caught up so that her long thighs would be free and unhampered. During the annual festival which the Romans held in her honor, hunting dogs were crowned with garlands and wild beasts were not molested. Wine was brought forth and there was a feast consisting of roasted kid, cakes served piping hot on plates of leaves, and apples still hanging in clusters on the bough. It was not a type generally admired or often found in the university in the year 1927.

The one girl whom she made friends with, Hope Davison, was also a nonconformist, though of a different kind. She did nothing to call attention to herself, she had no sneak dates, and she never broke house rules. But she had a way of looking at people as if she saw through them, and didn’t think too much of what was there. Her stare was, more often than not, unconscious, but the other girls in the sorority suffered from it, and from her remarks, which were more candid sometimes than there was any need for. After a year they had devised no adequate way of dealing with her or with Sally.

When Sally’s nose was shiny, well it was shiny. Anybody who didn’t like shiny noses could look the other way. The belt of Sally’s red coat was sometimes missing for days. The left pocket had been ripped and not very expertly sewed up again. The lining was moth-eaten, and the coat itself had, on at least one occasion, been fished out of the waste basket where Mrs. Forbes had put it. Sally went on wearing it, partly because she loved it and partly because it was an offense to every self-respecting member of her sorority. Some of the girls threatened to burn the coat if she didn’t stop wearing it, but this threat was never carried out. It would have been dangerous, and they knew it.

Sally and Hope had appeared together in Lymie Peters’ freshman rhetoric class, the beginning day of the spring semester. The girls took the two empty seats beside him, and when the instructor didn’t bother to alphabetize the class, they stayed there. By the end of the first week they were borrowing theme paper from Lymie. After the second week Sally and Lymie changed seats so that he was in the middle. Often when the class was over, all three of them would retire to a confectionery called the Ship’s Lantern, which was long and narrow and pitch dark when they walked into it out of the sunlight.
Sometimes they studied, but more often they sat and exposed their minds to each other while they made a mess out of melted ice cream and paper straws, cigarette ashes, and the dregs of Coca-Cola.

One afternoon soon after the semester had started, Spud and Lymie met Sally coming out of the campus bookstore. She spoke to Lymie and he would have said “Hi” in return and walked on, but a sharp poke in the small of his back stopped him. After the introduction had been managed there was an awkward silence and Spud suggested that they go somewhere and have a Coke. This seemed to Lymie a very silly idea, since it was almost twenty minutes of six. Sally accepted the invitation, to his surprise, and all three of them went to the Ship’s Lantern. Spud found an empty booth in the back and maneuvered Sally into the seat beside him. Lymie sat across from them. Lymie had never seen Spud in such a state of foolish excitement. He gave his imitation of an overstimulated horse, and of the flew-flew bird that swims backward to keep the water out of its eyes. He also found an occasion to exclaim: “O
grim-look’d night! O night with hue so black!”
and to demonstrate that it is possible to swallow a lighted cigarette without pain or even discomfort.

Sally was amused and delighted by everything he said. She was also very quiet, for her. Occasionally her eyes met Spud’s for a second, but then she looked away immediately at his tie, or at the handkerchief folded and tucked so carefully in his coat pocket, or at his broad-knuckled hands. Her own, with their chewed-off fingernails, she kept out of sight under the table.