The Folded Leaf (15 page)

At six o’clock when Sally got up to go, Spud told her that if she cared to come down to the gym with him some afternoon he’d show her how to box.

“Oh, I’d love to,” she said. Her eyes flew wide with pleasure at the prospect, and then she looked crestfallen. “You’re just making fun of me,” she said sadly.

“I’m not either,” Spud exclaimed. Although he had been kidding, now that she spoke about it in this way, the whole idea seemed to take on a different aspect. “I mean it,” he said.

“I’d love to,” Sally repeated. “More than anything in the whole world.”

“All right,” Spud said. “I’ll show you all I know about boxing. Here, put your hands up. Might as well give you the first lesson right now.” He took hold of both her arms, by the wrists, and moved them into position. “There,” he said. “The rest is easy.”

Whether it was or not, she didn’t have a chance to find out, for there were no more lessons. The next day Spud met her on the steps of University Hall and she looked right at him without speaking. He came home to the rooming house where he and Lymie were living, slammed his books around in a fury, and said the hell with her, the hell with all women.

Lymie asked Sally about it, the next time he saw her, and she had no idea what he was talking about. She hadn’t seen Spud, she said. Really she hadn’t! It was just that she was so nearsighted. She couldn’t recognize her own grandmother six feet away, without glasses on. And that was why she hadn’t spoken to him.

Spud wouldn’t believe this at first, and after he did believe it he couldn’t seem to get over his feeling that somehow (even though Sally hadn’t recognized him) he had been snubbed. He refused to see or have anything more to do with her.

L
ymie went down two flights of stairs, turned left, and went on until he came to Spud’s locker. He put down the things he was carrying and turned the dial padlock until it fell open. Then he reached inside and brought out a clean towel. Farther down the row of lockers two boys were dressing. Lymie laid the towel across the bench and walked over to a door that opened into the swimming pool. There were half a dozen swimmers still in the pool. One of them was swimming back and forth, churning the water with his feet and ankles. The others were waiting their turn at the diving board. A boy with close-cropped curly blond hair did a high jackknife and then a tall freckle-faced boy tried a half gainer, which was not a success. He came up slowly and shook the water out of his eyes. The next boy placed both hands on the board, out at the very end, and then up went his legs, slowly and easily. He balanced himself for fifteen seconds, wavered, regained his balance, and dropped head first into the water. The tall diver returned to the board and Lymie could tell by the way he braced himself that he was going to try the half gainer again.

The two boys farther down the row of lockers finished dressing and slammed their locker doors shut. They saw the clean towel on the bench and their eyes turned from it to Lymie, standing with his nose pressed to the glass pane in the door. Once the towel was in their possession, no one could prove that it wasn’t theirs. As they walked toward it, Lymie glanced at them, over his shoulder. They left the towel where it was.

The diver took a running jump from the end of the springboard. A moment later, Lymie turned away from the swimming
pool and went back and sat down in front of the open locker. From his coat pocket he produced the gray envelope. For
Spud Latham
it said in Sally’s round legible handwriting. The flap was unsealed. For a second Lymie was tempted to read it; he put both the temptation and the envelope aside.

Spud came up shining from his shower, found the towel Lymie had laid out for him, and dried himself. His eyes were clear and bright and full of happiness. “That was a good scrap,” he said. “I enjoyed it. The guy was really mean, once he got started.”

Lymie reached into the locker, found Spud’s shorts, and handed them to him. “Didn’t you hear me calling time?” he asked.

Spud shook his head. “I didn’t hear anything,” he said. “I was busy keeping from getting killed.”

He sat down on the bench to dry his feet. When he had finished, his shoes and socks were waiting on the floor beside him, and the boxing trunks and jock strap that he had brought up from the shower room in his hand were hanging on a hook in the locker. It was not callousness that let him accept these attentions simply and without thinking about them. He wouldn’t have allowed anyone else to do for him the things that Lymie did. And besides, he recognized that it gave Lymie pleasure to bend over and pick up the towel where he had dropped it, and to go off to the towel room and exchange it for a clean one.

When Lymie came back, Spud was dressed and tying his tie in front of a small mirror which hung at the end of the row of lockers. “I feel wonderful,” Spud said. “What do you think we’ll have for supper?”

“Wednesday, veal birds.”

“I could eat a steer,” Spud said, “without half trying.”

Lymie buried his head in the locker, searching for Spud’s big black notebook, and heard him say, “What’s this, a communication from the dean’s office?” and realized that he had discovered the gray envelope.

“It’s for you,” Lymie said.

Spud tore the envelope open and glanced at the note inside. “Here,” he said, and tossed the note at Lymie.
Dear Spud,
it said,
Were having an informal house dance on the Saturday after Homecoming. Would you care to come? Sincerely yours, Sally Forbes.
Lymie folded the note, slipped it back in the torn envelope, and laid it on the bench. Homecoming was the twenty-fifth. The dance would be the second of November.

“What do you think?” Spud asked. “Do you figure I ought to go?”

“If it were me,” Lymie said slowly (for he would have liked to be asked to the dance himself), “I’d go. You’ll probably have a good time.”

“Has Hope asked you yet?”

Lymie shook his head.

“Why hasn’t she?” Spud asked.

“Maybe she’s got somebody else in mind that she wants to ask,” Lymie said. “Or she may be waiting to see whether you decide to come or not.”

“We’ll go together,” Spud said suddenly. “And we’ll tear the place down, shall we?”

“All right,” Lymie said. “Anything you say.”

He tossed the towel into the locker and closed it. On their way out of the gymnasium they stopped at the drinking fountain. Lymie held the lever down for Spud, who drank and drank. “Aah,” he said as he straightened up. “That’s better. I was dry as a bone.”

“You’re always dry as a bone,” Lymie said. He bent down to
the stream of water for a second only, and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

In the front corridor they swerved from their path and went over to the scales. Lymie put his own books on the tile floor and took Spud’s leather notebook from him. Spud planted himself firmly on the scales. The needle flew up to a hundred and fifty-seven pounds. He stepped down and Lymie took his place. This time the needle rose more slowly and wavered at a hundred and nine.

“Would you look at that!” Lymie exclaimed. “I’ve gained a pound and a quarter. It must be from skipping rope. It must be the exercise.”

“Give me my notebook,” Spud said. “You’re cheating.”

Without the notebook the scales declined to a hundred and seven and three-quarters. Lymie stepped down, his face shadowed by disappointment.

He and Spud were outside, almost at the front walk, when he remembered his own books. He ran back into the building for them, though he knew that Spud would wait. And when he had picked up the books, he hurried out again.

There were very few moments in the day when Lymie had Spud all to himself, and the last two summers they had been separated six days out of the week by their summer jobs in Chicago. Even on Sundays, when Lymie went to the beach to be with Spud, he had to share him with other people and pretend that he didn’t mind when Spud rowed off in a boat with six other life guards, or lorded it over everybody on the beach from a high wooden perch where Lymie (although occasional marks of favor were bestowed on him) couldn’t sit. There were so many things Spud liked to do that Lymie couldn’t do with him, such as boxing, or playing football, or learning to fly an
airplane, and Lymie spent a good deal of time watching from the sidelines, and waiting for Spud to come back to him. Oddly enough, Spud always did.

Before they went off to college, Lymie assumed that they would both belong to a fraternity, as a matter of course, but Mr. Latham put his foot down. It would take all the money he could scrape together, he said, if Spud was going to have four more years of schooling. For him to live in a fraternity and pay dues and have a lot of extra expenses, unless he could find some way to make the money himself, was out of the question. Lymie didn’t want to belong to a fraternity if Spud couldn’t and so when Bob Edwards, who had graduated the year before and was a Sigma Chi at the university, invited them both to stay at his fraternity house during Rushing Week, they wrote and declined the invitation.

The following September Lymie and Spud, Frenchie deFresne, and Ford all sat together on the train going down to the university, which was located in a small town something over a hundred miles from Chicago. Frenchie had been captain of the football team in his senior year, and he was staying at the Sigma Chi house. Ford had invitations from the Sigma Chis, the Delts, and the Phi Gams, and he was staying at the Psi U house. Mr. Ford had been a Psi U, and so his son was prepared to be one too.

One of the Psi U’s met him on the station platform and took his bag. Frenchie was surrounded by five upperclassmen, three of them letter men in football. Lymie and Spud saw him a few minutes later riding off in a rattletrap open car without fenders or top, and with signs painted all over it.

They checked their suitcases in the station and took a tiny streetcar which bounced and jounced and eventually went
right through the heart of the campus. Lymie and Spud got off there and looked around. The buildings seemed very large, the stretch of green lawn interminable. Before they found a place to live that they liked, they walked up and down several of the streets bordering on the campus. Even without the sign
ROOMS FOR BOYS
in the front window, it was easy to tell which houses had rooms for students and which were private homes. The rooming houses invariably needed a coat of paint. There were no shrubs or flower beds around them, and the grass, when there was any, was sickly from too much overhanging shade.

Spud would have turned in at the first one they came to, but Lymie stopped him. They kept on walking until they found themselves in a slightly better neighborhood. At the first sight of the house with the mansard roof, Lymie said, “There’s the place we’re going to live!” It was painted white, and set well back from the street; and it had fretwork porches which ran around the front and sides of the house, on two stories, like the decks of a river steamboat.

They went up on the porch and twisted the Victorian doorbell, which gave out a hollow peal. Inside the house a dog started barking. Through the frosted glass landscape in the front door they could make out the shapes of furniture crowded into the front hall, as if the people who lived here were just moving in. They heard the dog quite plainly then, and a man’s voice saying, “Pooh-Bah, for pity’s sake, it’s only the doorbell!”

The door swung open and they were confronted by a middle-aged man with gray hair and horn-rimmed glasses which hung on a black ribbon.

“Yes?” he said.

“We’re looking for a room,” Lymie explained.

The words were drowned out by the barking of the dog, a
black and white spaniel trying frantically to work his way between the man’s legs.

“Excuse me, just a moment,” he said, and grabbed the dog by the collar. “Pooh-Bah,
will
you be quiet? I’ll have to get a switch and whip you, do you hear? I’ll whip you good!” Then with an expression of extreme agitation on his face, the man turned back to Lymie and Spud. “He must have thought you were the postman. Two separate rooms, did you say? Or do you want a room together?”

“We want to room together,” Lymie said.

“Well,” the man said, backing away from the door, “come in and let me show you what I…. Stop it, Pooh-Bah. I won’t have this continual yiping and carrying on. These are two young gentlemen who are interested in a room, do you understand? Now one more bark out of you and I’ll shut you up in the kitchen.”

Single file they threaded their way through the spinning wheels and drop-leaf tables, the marble-topped washstands, the Boston rockers, andirons, horsehair sofas, chairs, and whatnots that cluttered the front hall.

“I hope you don’t mind all this,” the man said, waving at a collection of glass hats, hens, and hands. “My sign is being repainted just now so there’s no way, probably, that you’d know it from the outside, but I’m in the antique business. The first floor is my shop, as you can see. I try to keep it tidy but people bring me things and suddenly there isn’t room to breathe.”

By the time they reached the foot of the stairs, the dog had stopped sniffing at Spud’s trousers and was making overtures of friendship. Spud bent down and scratched his ear.

The rooms on the second floor opened one out of another, and no two of them seemed to be on the same level. The windows
were large and the ceilings high, but the rooms themselves were cut up into odd unnatural shapes, apparently after the house was built.

“I have only two vacancies at the moment,” the man said, “and one of them is too small for you, I feel sure. It’s hardly more than a cubbyhole. But this one—” He threw open a door “—if you don’t object to a north exposure and that Chinese gas station across the street, is quite respectable.”

The room had two large windows and was furnished with two study tables, two unsightly wooden chairs, two cheap dressers, a Morris chair with a cigarette burn in the upholstery, and a small empty bookcase. The curtains were limp, and the rag rug was much too small for the floor; it was also coming unsewed in several places. Lymie looked from the pink and blue flowered wallpaper to the shades, which were green and had cracks in them. It was not the room they had imagined for themselves. It was not at all like the college room in the picture of the young collegian smoking a long-stemmed clay pipe. Spud looked inquiringly at Lymie, and then walked over to the closet with the dog following at his heels. The closet was a fair-sized one.