The Folded Leaf (17 page)

Lymie blushed.

“It’s so discouraging to get your own words thrown back at you twenty or thirty times,” Professor Severance went on. “I feel as if I were lecturing to a class of parrots. It’s all on account of those miserable notebooks, of course. Some day I’m going to collect them all and throw them out of the window.”

“You might as well throw the students with them,” Professor Forbes said.

“Some of them are too large,” Professor Severance said, “and too athletic.”

“What about
my
examination paper?” Sally said, leering at him. “Wasn’t it original, Sevvy?”

Professor Severance cleared his throat and then beamed at her affectionately. “Yes, my dear,” he said, “almost wholly original. My one—ah—hesitation about it was that there seemed to be an insufficient acquaintance with the subject matter of the course.”

“There,” Sally said, turning to her mother, “you see?”

“Only too plainly, I’m afraid,” Mrs. Forbes said. She excused herself and left the room.

A heavy silence descended. Sally was embarrassed by her mother’s remark, and Professor Forbes had come to depend so on his wife’s small talk that he had none of his own to offer. Politeness prevented Professor Severance from continuing the subject they had been discussing when Sally and Lymie appeared—Spenser’s indebtedness to the
Orlando Furioso
—since it would probably have no interest for them.

Lymie’s eyes wandered around the room. The ceiling was low and sloped down to the long bookcases on two sides. There were Holbein prints on the walls and a colored map of Paris. Professor Forbes’s desk was placed near two small front windows. Next to it was a large table with a lamp on it, and more books piled helter-skelter, some of them in danger of sliding off onto the floor. Lymie’s glance came to rest on a large Chinese lacquer screen.

“That’s a beautiful thing, isn’t it?” Professor Severance said. “It’s all very well about not coveting your neighbor’s wife and his she-asses and his camels but when it comes to
objets d’art,
I find myself wavering sometimes.” He got up and crossed the room so that he could examine the screen more closely. “Modern?” he inquired, over his shoulder.

“My brother-in-law sent it to us,” Professor Forbes said noncommittally.

“The one who travels so much?” Professor Severance asked.

Professor Forbes nodded. “He got it in a hock shop in Manila.”

“It’s very beautiful,” Professor Severance said.

The lacquer screen had three panels. On one side, the side facing the room, were white flowers which were like roses but larger and stiffer. Peonies, Lymie decided. The flowers were in square blue vases and the vases rested on carved teakwood stands, against a yellow background. Professor Severance folded the screen, turned it around, and opened it. On the reverse was a company of Chinese horsemen charging at an angle across all three panels.

The fat-rumped horsemen rode over pink flames and blue curlicues representing smoke. Their long, loose sleeves whipped from their elbows. Their tunics divided, revealing
mail leggings and bare feet. The air was thick with arrows. Some of the horsemen rode with their lances set, their shoulders braced for the shock; others with daggers upraised, knees digging into their horses’ sides. Here and there a rider twisted or rose in the saddle, and one of them hung from the stirrups with a spear coming out through the center of his back. Their faces were brick-red or deathly pale. All had identical thinly drawn mustaches and chin tufts, and expressions denoting fierceness or cruelty or cunning. The only calm face belonged to a severed head that had rolled under the feet of the horses and was gazing upward serenely toward heaven. The galloping horses shared in the frenzy of the riders. There were fat white horses, dappled horses, gold horses with the heads of dragons, ivory horses with gold manes and hoofs and tails, blue horses, pink horses, horses with scales and frantic, fishlike faces.

“I’d like to have known the man who made this,” Professor Severance said. “The one who had the idea of putting still life on one side—those wonderfully placid white flowers—and warriors on the other.”

“I assume it is a traditional juxtaposition,” Professor Forbes said.

“No doubt, but somebody must have thought of it for the first time. The mutual attraction of gentleness and violence, don’t you see, Mr. Peters? The brutal body and the calm philosophic mind.”

“Don’t talk to me about philosophic minds,” Mrs. Forbes said. She came in carrying a tray with a silver teapot on it, teacups, a silver sugar and creamer, slices of lemon, and bread and butter cut paper-thin. “If I ever marry again it’s going to be to a plumber. I’ve been trying for two days to get a man to come look at the hot water heater in the basement.”

“Plumbing,” Professor Severance said reproachfully, “is pure deductive reasoning.”

“With a leak in it,” Mrs. Forbes said.

He turned the screen around so that the flowers were showing as before. Then he sat down and with a curious intentness watched Mrs. Forbes arranging the cups and saucers on the tray.

“Sugar?” she asked, turning to Lymie. “Lemon?”

“No thank you,” he said, both times.

“A purist,” Mrs. Forbes said. She poured Professor Severance’s tea without asking him how he liked it.

T
he night of the sorority dance it took Spud over an hour to dress. He and Lymie stood under the shower by turns, soaping themselves all over and washing the soap off again time after time, as if by this symbolical means they were getting rid of certain adolescent fears which had to do with women. Spud handed Lymie the soap and the nailbrush, and bent over with his hands braced against his knees. Lymie understood what was expected of him. He scrubbed until the skin from the base of Spud’s neck to the end of his spine was red and glowing, and then turned around and submitted his own back to the same rough treatment.

When they were partly dressed, Spud got out the shoe polish and a rag and made Lymie stand with one foot on a chair, and then the other. Spud’s shoes, already polished, were waiting
with wooden shoe trees in them on the closet floor. He put them on, after he had finished with Lymie’s, and tied the laces in a double knot. Then he attempted to cut his fingernails, which were thick and very tough. He could manage the fingers of his left hand without much difficulty but when he switched over, the nail scissors felt awkward and wrong. He made an impatient face, and Lymie took the scissors from him and finished the job.

Five whole minutes were consumed in picking out a tie for Spud, who had any number of them that he was especially fond of. The choice narrowed down finally to a blue bow tie with white polka dots and a knitted four-in-hand. Spud forced Lymie to pick out the one he thought Spud ought to wear, and Lymie chose the four-in-hand. Spud wore the bow tie, after explaining to Lymie all the reasons why it was better for this occasion, for a dance, than Lymie’s choice. The bow tie had to be tied three times before the result was acceptable, and between the second and third attempt Spud decided that his collar was wrinkled, and changed to another white shirt. At nine o’clock he finished arranging the handkerchief in his breast pocket and was satisfied, or nearly satisfied, with what he saw in the mildewed mirror over his dresser. Lymie, who had been waiting for twenty minutes, said “Come on, let’s go.” A sudden wave of excitement carried both of them down the stairs, through the clutter in the front hall, and outside. The night air was crisp and cool, the November sky was blossoming with stars.

The sorority house was on the other side of the campus. From “302” the shortest way was through the university forestry, a narrow strip of woods which had sidewalks running through it and which at night was lighted at frequent intervals by street lamps. When the two boys emerged from the wood
they were on the campus. The walk led them toward a series of new red brick Georgian buildings, each with dozens of false chimneys outlined against the starry sky. On the other side of the campus they passed a large unfinished building that was still under scaffolding—the new dormitory for men. As they came near the sorority house, they heard music.

“In Wisconsin,” Spud said, “my sister used to go to dances at the lake club. She was fifteen and I was only nine or ten. They had dances every Saturday night. Sometimes my mother and father drove over in the car and watched, but I had to be in bed, because the dances didn’t start until after nine o’clock. And I used to lie there on the screen porch and listen to the dance music. I used to wish I was older so I could be over there across the lake, like my sister. I used to wonder sometimes if I was ever going to be old enough to go to the lake club dances. Time seemed too slow then. One day lasted a lot longer than a week seems to now.” Lymie put his right hand inside the pocket of Spud’s coat, a thing he often did when they were walking together. Spud’s fingers interlaced with his.

“Just when I was almost old enough to start going to the lake club dances,” Spud continued, “we moved to Chicago. I don’t know whether they still have them any more or not. I guess they probably do. They were nice. You could see the clubhouse through the trees, all lighted up with Japanese lanterns. And the music came over the water, the dance music. It was very plain. I used to lie awake listening to it.”

Curtains were drawn across every window of the sorority house, upstairs and down. The two small lights on either side of the front door seemed brighter than usual. As Lymie and Spud turned in at the front walk, they could hear the orchestra playing “Oh, Katarina” rapturously. While they stood by the
front door trying to make up their minds whether, since this was not like any ordinary evening, they ought to ring the bell, a boy came up the walk whistling, opened the door, and walked in. They went in after him.

There were a dozen boys standing in the front hall. Armstrong was among them. Lymie had never seen him anywhere except at the gymnasium and he wondered what would happen now if Armstrong, in his double-breasted dark blue suit, were to brace himself and do a handstand on the polished floor. He showed no signs of wanting to. He looked detached, very much at ease, very sure of himself. He recognized Spud with a slight flicker of surprise and spoke to him. Spud nodded coldly and went on to the coatroom, with Lymie in his wake.

All the hooks in the coatroom were taken and there were piles of coats on the floor. Spud took two of the coats off their hooks, dropped them on the floor, and hung his coat and Lymie’s where they had been hanging. Then he combed his hair in front of the mirror in the lavatory, straightened his butterfly bow tie, and squared his shoulders until his coat collar came to rest against his neck. With his hand in the small of Lymie’s back, pushing him, he came out into the hall once more.

On the opposite side of the stairs from the coatroom was another closet, the same size, where the house telephone was, and a set of electric bells which rang in the study rooms upstairs. Lymie pressed the ones marked
Davison: two long, one short
and Forbes:
one short, one long.
Then he came out into the hall again and stood next to Spud at the foot of the stairs. He had managed, during the walk across the campus, to mar the polish on his shoes. His long thin wrists hung down out of his sleeves, and his cowlick, that he had spent so much time plastering
down with water, was sticking straight up. He stood stiffly with his back to the wide gilt mirror and didn’t discover any of these flaws in his appearance.

Armstrong had gone now. His girl had come down the stairs in a white dress and he was dancing with her in the long living room, which was swept bare of rugs and furniture. The light everywhere downstairs was softened. There were yellow chrysanthemums on the white mantelpiece, and lighted candles. Oak leaves concealed the chandeliers. The dancers swung past each other performing intricate steps, their eyes half closed, their heads sometimes touching.

To pass the time while they were waiting, the boys in the front hall drew handkerchiefs out of their hip pockets and mopped their foreheads, or produced silver cigarette cases with an air of boredom, of disdain.

Lymie was expecting Hope and Sally to come down the stairs together, but Hope came first and alone. She was wearing a brown flowered chiffon dress that Lymie, who knew nothing about women’s clothes, realized instantly was not right for her. It was not at all like the dresses the other girls were wearing.

Spud pulled Lymie’s pants leg up a couple of inches in order to embarrass him, and although the effort succeeded, Hope didn’t notice. She handed Lymie a small enamel compact, a lipstick, a tiny lace handkerchief, and said gravely, “Put these in your pocket.” As they moved toward the entrance to the living room, the music ended. The couples stopped dancing and waited, in the subdued light. The girls were smiling with their eyes, or chattering. The boys reached inside their coats and drew their shirt sleeves up. Then, remembering where they were, they looked bored. The chaperons were in an alcove off the living room, playing bridge. The orchestra—a piano player,
a drummer, saxophone, clarinet, trumpet, and slide trombone—was in another alcove partially concealed by potted palms. They made tentative noises with their instruments and then were silent. The dancers moved across the floor toward the dining room, toward the punch bowl, which was under the eye of Mrs. Sisson, the housemother. So far it had not been spiked. Lymie and Hope moved into a corner where they would not be noticed.

“People ought to dress up oftener,” Hope said. “I’ve just decided that. It makes them nicer to live with. I stood in the upstairs hall and watched the girls go down.” The girls whose fathers had not retired from business, she meant; the girls who could have new clothes whenever they wanted them. Aloud she said, “They looked so lovely, so unlike themselves,” and raised her chin slightly, for she knew how she looked. She had seen herself in a full-length mirror in Bernice Crawford’s room. Bernice had said, “You can’t wear that, Davison. It doesn’t look right on you!” and had offered to loan her a black dress with gold clips and a narrow gold belt, but the black dress was too tight. As Hope drew it off over her head she prayed that Lymie, who was always absent-minded anyway, would forget to come; that she herself would have an attack of appendicitis and be rushed to the hospital; that something, some merciful intervention would save her from having to go down the stairs. She decided to leave a note for Lymie and sneak out the back way, down the fire escape, and spend the rest of the evening in the Ship’s Lantern, but it was already too late. Her bell rang, two longs and one short, as she was reaching into her closet for a coat.