The Folded Leaf (2 page)

The door was on the right, opposite the windows. In front on a raised platform was Miss Frank’s desk, which was so much larger than theirs and also movable. If she stepped out of the room, the desk alone restrained them, held them in their seats, and kept their shrill voices down to a whisper. Behind the desk and covering a part of the blackboard was a calendar for the month of October, 1923, with the four Sundays in red. Above the calendar was a large framed picture. It had been presented to the school by one of the graduating classes and there was a small metal disc on the frame to record this fact; also the subject and the artist, but the metal had tarnished; you could no longer tell what class it served as a memorial to. At certain times of the day, in the afternoon especially, the picture (“Andromache in Exile,” by Sir Edward Leighton) was partly obscured by the glass in front of it, which reflected squares of light and the shapes of clouds and buildings.

Miss Frank abandoned her pacing and stepped up to the blackboard in the front of the room. A sentence appeared, one word at a time, like a string of colored scarves being drawn from a silk hat. It was beautiful and exciting but they hardly altered the expression on their faces. They had seen the trick too
often to be surprised by it, or care how it was done. Miss Frank turned and faced the class.

“Mr. Ford, you may begin.”

“At is a preposition.”

“That’s right.”

“First
is an adjective.”

“Adjective, Mr. Ford?”

“Adverb.
First
is an adverb, object of at.”

Ford had remembered to take his book home after football practice but he had studied the wrong lesson. He had done the last four pages of the chapter on relative pronouns.

“Prepositions do not take adverbs as their object, Mr. Ford … Miss Elsa Martin?”

“First is a noun, object of
at. Men
is a noun, subject of the verb
were
—”

“Of what else?”

“Subject of the sentence.
Were
is a verb, intransitive.
Delighted
is an adjective modifying
men. When
is a conjunction—”

“What kind?”

By reversing each number and reading from right to left, the
203
on the glass of the classroom door, which was meant to be read in the corridor, could be deciphered from the inside. Carson—third row, second seat—did this over and over without being able to stop.

“Not you, Miss Martin. I can see you’ve prepared your lesson…. Mr. Wilkinson, what kind of a conjunction is
when?”

“When
is …”

Janet Martin, Elsa’s twin sister, but different, everyone said, as two sisters could possibly be, opened her blue enameled compact slyly and peered into it.

“Mr. Harris?”

“When
is …”

“Mr. Carson?”

“I know but I can’t say it.”

Miss Frank made a mark in her grade book abstractedly, with an indelible pencil.

“Very well, Mr. Carson, I’ll say it for you. But of course that means I get an ‘S’ for today’s recitation and you get an ‘F’….
When
is a conjunction introducing the subordinate clause:
when they heard what brave Oliver had done
… Miss Kromalny, suppose you tell us as simply and briefly as possible what
they
is.”

In spite of every precaution the compact closed with a snap. All over the room, heads were raised. Wide-eyed and startled, Janet Martin raised her head at exactly the same moment as the rest. She made no effort to hide the compact. There it was, in plain sight on top of her desk. But so were a dozen like it, on a dozen other desks. Miss Frank glanced from one girl to another and her frown, finding no place to alight, was dissipated among the class generally. She walked around to the front of her desk.

“That’s right, Miss Kromalny.
What
is a relative pronoun used as object of the verb
had done. Brave Oliver had done what.
Go on, please.”

“Brave
is…”

But who knows what
brave
is? Not Miss Frank. Her voice and her piercing colorless eye, her sharp knuckles all indicate fear, nothing but fear. As for the others, and especially the boys—Ford, Wilkinson, Carson, Lynch, Parkhurst, and the rest of them—it would appear that bravery is something totally outside their knowledge or experience. They look to Miss Kromalny for enlightenment.

“Brave
is an adjective modifying the proper noun Oliver.
Had
is…”

In the second row on the aisle there is a boy who could tell the class what none of them, not even Miss Kromalny, knows. But it is not his turn to be called on, and besides, he isn’t listening. His face is turned to the windows and his jaw is set. Two hunkies from the West Side are waiting for him where Foster Avenue runs under the elevated. At three o’clock he will go to his locker and get the books he needs for his homework—a Latin reader, a textbook on plane geometry—and find his way out into the open air. There will be time as he stands on the school steps, dwarfed by the huge doors and the columns that are massive and stone, to change his mind. Wilson Avenue is broad and has traffic policemen at several of the intersections. It is perfectly safe. Nothing will happen to him if he goes that way. But instead he turns up the collar of his corduroy coat and starts walking toward the elevated….

“What is
done,
Mr.—ah—Mr. Charles Latham?”

Caught between two dangers, the one he had walked into deliberately and this new, this unexpected peril, Spud clenched and unclenched his hands. He had all of a sudden too many enemies. If he turned his attention to one, another would get him from behind. His mouth opened but no sound came out of it.

“I could have sworn that Mr. Latham was with us at the beginning of the hour. Excuse me while I mark him absent.”

The class was given time to titter.

“Miss Janet Martin, what is
done?”

The blood drained slowly from Spud’s face. His sight and then his hearing returned. With an effort he pulled himself up into his seat. Now that he was sitting straight, no one bothered to look at him. He had had his moment and was free until the end of the hour. He could think about anything he pleased. He couldn’t go back and attend to the hunkies under the elevated because they weren’t there now. They never had been, actually.
He had invented them, because he was homesick and bored and there was no one to take it out on. But it was all right for him to think about Wisconsin—about the tall, roomy, old-fashioned, white frame house the Lathams had lived in, with thirteen-foot ceilings and unreliable plumbing and a smell that was different from the smell of other houses and an attic and swallows’ nests under the eaves and a porch, a wide open porch looking out over the lake. Or he could think about the other lake, on the other side of town. Or about the sailboats, in summer, passing the church point. Or about the railway station, with the morning train coming in from Milwaukee and the evening train from Watertown. Or about the post office and the movie theater and the jail. Or—it was all the same, really—he could think about Pete Draper and Spike Wilson and Walter Putnam; about old Miss Blair and the Rimmerman girls; about Arline Mayer and Miss Nell E. Perth, who taught him in first grade, and Abie Ordway, who was colored; about Mr. Dietz in the freight office, whose wife ran off with a traveling man, and his son Harold; about the Presbyterian minister and Father Muldoon and Fred Jarvis, the town cop, and Monkey Friedenberg and the Drapers’ old white bulldog that rolled in dead fish whenever he found some and had rheumatism and was crazy….

After a minute or two Spud’s eyes came to rest on the mournful figure of Andromache. The class went on without him. When they had finished the sentence about brave Oliver, they opened their books to page 32 and the paragraph dealing with the subjunctive.

T
he ringing, brief but terrible, reverberated throughout all the corridors at five minutes before the hour. After the first bell no one, not even Miss Frank, could prevent them from talking out loud or from yawning openly. They were permitted to stand in the aisles and stretch. The girls could pry open their compacts and, without fear of being reprimanded, apply spit to their bangs and rouge to their thin young cheeks. The boys could poke each other. Hurrying from the school library—second floor at the front of the building—to an algebra class or a civics class or gymnasium or hygiene or Spanish 2B or commercial geography, Adams could step on Catanzano’s heels, and if deFresne saw a friend climbing the stairs ahead of him, he could quietly insert a ruler between the familiar legs and so make them trip and sprawl. The relief this afforded was only partial and temporary. By the ringing of the second bell, they were once more in their seats. The door was again on the right, the windows on the left—unless, as occasionally happened, they were reversed—and the calendar hanging behind the teacher’s desk at the front of the room. The picture, of course, had been changed. It was sometimes King Lear’s daughter Cordelia, in white, taking leave of her two evil sisters; sometimes the chariot race from
Ben-Hur.
Or it might be some old monotonous ruin like the Parthenon, the temple at Paestum, the Roman Forum—they hardly noticed which, once they had settled down and become resigned to another hour of inactivity.

The ringing at five minutes to three in the afternoon was different. Although it was no louder than the others, it produced a nervous explosion, a discharge of every ounce of boredom,
restlessness, and fidgeting stored up during the long school day. Classrooms were emptied and this time they did not fill up again. The doors of lockers were opened, revealing pictures of movie stars, football players, cartoons, and covers of
College Humor.
Books were tossed in blindly. Caps, plaid woolen scarves, and autographed yellow slickers were taken out.

They all had something to do, some place to go.

The Martin twins met at their lockers—second floor near the head of the center stairs—and parted again almost immediately. Elsa and her friend Hope Davison put on smocks and went down to the assembly hall where, with large brushes and buckets of paint, the stagecraft class was creating the seacoast of Illyria. Janet Martin went down the corridor to another stairway and out a side door of the building. When she appeared, Harry Hall left the cement pillar he was leaning against and came to meet her.

Carson and Lynch went to a movie on Western Avenue. It was called “The Downward Path” and a large sign outside the movie theater said no one under eighteen would be admitted. Carson and Lynch were only sixteen but they were large for their age. They stood and looked at the stills outside. Necking parties and girls half dressed, confronting their parents or the police. The blonde woman in the ticket booth accepted their two dimes without interest.

Rose Kromalny, whose family did not understand about art and music, waited for Miss Frank, to walk home with her.

The three boys who were trying out for assistant football manager met in Mr. Pritzker’s office at one end of the gymnasium and tried not to look at one another.

The crack R.O.T.C. squad, consisting of Cadet Corporal Cline and Cadets Helman, Pierce, Krasner, Beckert, Millard,
Richardson, and Levy, appeared in the schoolyard, in uniform, and commenced drilling. As always, there were those who stayed to watch.

There was a Junior Council meeting in Room 302 and a meeting of the business staff of
The Quorum
in 109. The Senior Sponsors held a brief meeting in the back of the assembly hall. The orchestra, as usual, practiced in 211. They had two new pieces: Mozart’s “Minuet in E Flat” and the “Norwegian Rustic March” by Grieg.

Spud Latham, who had nothing to do and was in no hurry to go home since it wasn’t home that he’d find when he got there, stood in front of his wooden locker and twiddled the dial. He was in the throes of another daydream. The school principal, on looking back over Spud’s grades, had discovered that there had been some mistake; that they should all have been S’s, not C’s and D’s. So he had the pleasure of coming home and announcing to his incredulous family that he was valedictorian of his class and the brightest student in the history of the school.

The pointer slipped by the last number of the combination and he had to work it over again. The second time he was successful. The locker flew open. His English grammar landed on the floor beside his gym shoes. He reached for his corduroy coat and, forgetting both the Latin reader and the textbook on plane geometry, closed the door of the locker. While he was moving the dial he glanced over his shoulder and saw a boy in a leather jerkin. The boy was waiting for him, apparently. For a moment Spud thought it was somebody he’d never seen before, but then he remembered. In the swimming pool when they were playing water polo. The kid who didn’t have sense enough to let go of the ball….

Spud turned quickly and walked away.

T
he way home from school led Lymie Peters past LeClerc’s pastry shop. Without turning his head he looked in and saw Mark Wheeler in a coonskin coat, although the weather was mild, and Bea Crowley and Sylvia Farrell, who were trying to make a brown-and-white fox terrier sit up and beg for peanut brittle. And Bob Edwards, and Peggy Johnston, standing next to him in a dark red dress with a wide black patent leather belt. And Janet Martin and Harry Hall, sitting side by side, their hands almost touching, on a dead radiator.

There were a lot of others at LeClerc’s that afternoon. Lester Adams, Barbara Blaisdell or a girl who looked like Barbara Blaisdell, Bud Griesenauer, and Elwyn Glazer were standing in one little group. Beyond their group was another one. A third group was over by the counter. In the eleven or twelve steps that it took Lymie to pass the shop window, he saw them all, including Mrs. LeClerc with her dark skin and her polished black hair. Other parts of his long walk home were accomplished miraculously, without his hearing or perceiving a single detail of all that was going on around him. He made his way blindly across busy intersections. Streetcars, taxicabs, and double-decker busses passed unseen before his eyes. Signboards, filling stations, real estate offices he ignored. He went under the elevated and came out again without knowing it. But LeClerc’s was something else again. The girls in LeClerc’s were like wonderful tropical birds, like parrots and flamingos, like the green jungle fowl of Java, the ibis, the cockatoo, and the crested crane. They may possibly have realized this themselves. At all events, their voices were harsh and their laughter unkind. They parted their hair in the middle sometimes,
sometimes on the side, and encouraged it to fall in a single point on their cheeks. Their dresses were simple and right for school, but came nevertheless from Marshall Field’s or Mandel Brothers, never the Boston Store or The Fair. And their eyes, framed in mascara, knew everything.