The Folded Leaf (21 page)

Georgiana Binkerd looked like her father except that he had been a large rawboned man and she was a small thin woman with pale selfish blue eyes that bulged slightly behind her rimless glasses. She had had infantile paralysis as a child and one leg was several inches shorter than the other and had no flesh on it. She was thrown off balance at every step and she walked with a nervous lurching which both Mr. Peters and Lymie, as they held the vestibule doors open for her, ignored. When they reached the cab, she turned to Lymie and put her clawlike hands on his shoulders and kissed him.

“Good-by, my dear! I wish you were my own child,” she said, and with some awkwardness got her crippled body into the taxi.

Mr. Peters stepped in after her and closed the door from the
inside. “The Union Station,” he said, leaning forward and addressing the driver. From the tone of his voice one would have thought that it was he who had a train to make, not Miss Binkerd. She let it pass.

“Good-by, God bless you!” she called to Lymie, and he called back “Good-by, Cousin Georgiana,” from the curbing. Though he continued to wave until the cab turned the corner, his mind was not on her but on her baum marten neckpiece, which was very lifelike. The cab turned south on Sheridan Road, then east for two blocks at Devon Avenue, then south again. Mr. Peters’ mind was on the thick roll of American Express traveler’s checks which he knew to be in Miss Binkerd’s black leather purse.

“I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed this visit with you, Lymon,” she said, swaying with the movement of the cab.

“It’s been mighty nice having you,” Mr. Peters said. His hand went toward the pocket where he kept his cigarettes, but he checked himself in time. “I’ve enjoyed every minute of it,” he said. “And Lymie has too.”

“He looks like his mother,” Miss Binkerd said.

Mr. Peters nodded.

“I never saw Alma but the once, when I came for your mother’s funeral,” Miss Binkerd said. “But I remember her. She was a fine woman.”

“She was indeed,” Mr. Peters said. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“It makes me cough,” Miss Binkerd said.

Mr. Peters’ hand withdrew from his pocket.

“There’s one thing I’d like to say to you,” Miss Binkerd announced impressively. “And that is, you deserve a great deal of credit for the way you’ve brought up your son all alone without any help.”

“Thank you,” Mr. Peters said.

“I watched him all through luncheon. He has very good manners. He could go among people anywhere and know what to do. The only thing that isn’t as all right as it might be is his posture.”

“I know,” Mr. Peters said gloomily. “I nag him about it but it doesn’t seem to do any good. He just won’t stand up straight. Also, he’s not strong, as you can see. He needs to be outdoors more. I’ve thought some lately of joining a country club if I can lay my hands on the money to do it. Golf is very good exercise and I could probably manage to play with him every week end during the summer months. It would do him a world of good, if I could only arrange it.”

The sudden hard light that came into Miss Binkerd’s eyes was not a reflection from her glasses. She had had a great deal of experience with remarks which could, if followed up, lead to a direct request for financial assistance.

“Lymie’s a very nice boy the way he is,” she said. “I wouldn’t try to change him if I were you.”

“Oh I don’t,” Mr. Peters said hastily. “I just meant that—”

“I’ve never been sold on country clubs. Cousin Will Binkerd belongs to one and I hear that the men drink in the locker rooms.”

“Lymie wouldn’t be likely to do that,” Mr. Peters said. “He’s not the type.”

“No, I can see he isn’t,” Miss Binkerd said. “But even so. With boys you can’t ever be sure. The quiet, well-behaved ones often cause their parents the most misery and heartache before they’re through.”

Mr. Peters suspected that this remark was directed obliquely at him, although as a boy he had not been conspicuously quiet or well-behaved.

“When Lymie was little,” he said, “he used to have a terrible
temper, and also he was very jealous. Especially of his mother. If he thought she was paying too much attention to some other child, he’d fly into a rage and she couldn’t do a thing with him. Now that he’s grown he never gives me the slightest trouble, except that I can’t teach him the value of money. Slips right through his fingers.”

“He comes by it honestly,” Miss Binkerd said. This time there was no doubt whom the remark was directed toward. She peered out of the window of the taxi and said, “Is that the Edge water Beach Hotel?”

Mr. Peters said that it was.

There was a silence which lasted for perhaps a minute and a half, and didn’t seem to bother Miss Binkerd in the least. Mr. Peters, casting around uneasily in his mind for some way of ending it, said, “I wish we could have seen more of you—not just between trains.”

“I know,” she said. “Next time I’ll pay you a real visit, Lymon. But it’s a long trip and I’m not as young as I once was, and it’s hard for me to get around. I could have taken the sleeper from Kansas City to St. Louis, and not had to change stations. But I haven’t seen Lymie since he was a year old, and Mother was curious to know how you were getting along.”

“Well, you tell her we’re getting along just fine,” Mr. Peters said.

“I will,” Miss Binkerd said, nodding. “I’ll tell her. And she’ll probably ask if you’re still as handsome as you used to be. In that case I can fib a little.”

She laughed and leaned back, happy that she had at last repaid him for calling her a spider when they were children, thirty-five years before.

T
he faces Spud saw around him were healthy, handsome, and intelligent but not too intelligent. There were no freaks in Armstrong’s fraternity, nobody that you would ever need to be ashamed of.

The dining room walls were of solid oak paneling. The drapes were a plain dark red. There were six tables, and Armstrong sat at the head of one of them, with Spud on his right. Two boys from Chicago, a boy from Bloomington, another from Gallup, New Mexico, and a boy from Marietta, Ohio, filled out the table. The Chicago boys were talking about the new dance band at the Drake Hotel, where they had celebrated New Year’s Eve. They may have been bragging when they talked about how drunk they had got, but in any case they weren’t ashamed of it. They spoke with the natural, easy assurance of people who know that they are, socially speaking, the best; and that everywhere they go the best of everything will be reserved as a matter of course for them. Their attitude toward Spud could be gauged by the fact that they remembered to use his name each time that they spoke to him, by their polite interest in his description of the winter carnival at his home town in Wisconsin, and even by the way they offered him the rolls before they helped themselves. It was clear that he also belonged among the best people, otherwise Armstrong would never have asked him to dinner.

While the four student waiters cleared the tables after the main course, there was singing. First the university anthem, then a football song, then the fraternity sweetheart song, which was full of romantic feeling and required humming in
places. Spud would have liked to join in but he didn’t know the words and he also felt that, being a guest, he ought not to. He sat stiffly with his hands in his lap.

Between the salad and the dessert they sang again. They sang a long drawn-out dirty ballad which began:

and ended with the old black bull, all tired out, going slowly back up the mountain. And then a song that somebody had put to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic:”

Forty-one spoons struck forty-one glass tumblers in unison, twice.

The voices soared out the refrain.

The dessert was peach ice cream with chocolate cake on the side. It looked to Spud like the cake his mother made, and he bit into it hopefully. He was disappointed, but he ate it anyway.

A signal from Armstrong produced the simultaneous scraping of forty-two chairs. The boys hung back, hugging the wall until he and Spud were out of the dining room, and then closed in behind. Instead of going back into the living room, Armstrong took Spud on a tour of the two upper floors of the house. Spud was favorably impressed by the two bathrooms, each with a long row of washbowls, which made it unlikely that anybody would have to wait in line to shave; and by the study rooms. They opened off the long upstairs hallway, instead of one out of the other; there wouldn’t be a steady traffic through them, the way there was through the rooms at “302.” Each study room door had a padlock on it. At the rooming house Spud’s favorite ties had a way of disappearing. They were not always in good condition when he found them, and two or three he had never been able to locate, though he suspected Howard. Padlocks were the only solution to the problem, obviously, and they were not, in Spud’s mind, incompatible with brotherly love.

He was also struck by the fact that the dormitory, which was on the third floor, was the same temperature, or nearly so, as the rest of the house. In the daytime, Armstrong explained, the windows were kept closed, and there was heat from a couple of long radiators. At night when the windows were open, it was cold but not freezing. Spud nodded approvingly at the double-decker single beds, each with its cocoon of covers. He preferred sleeping by himself.

Study hours began at seven-thirty. The freshmen left the living room and many upperclassmen followed them. The dart game in the basement and the ping-pong table on the sun
porch were deserted. There was no more shouting in the upstairs hall. In five minutes the house quieted down in a way that “302” seldom did before midnight.

Spud and Armstrong and two upperclassmen sat in front of the grate fire in the living room and talked. It was the time of year for arguing about basketball. Spud pretended that he was interested, but actually he was busy installing himself on the second floor, in a large corner room, with Lymie’s desk next to his. He was wondering if it wouldn’t work out better to put Lymie somewhere near by—down the hall, say, with another roommate for a change (better for Lymie, that is)—when the clock on the mantel struck eight. He got up to go, slipped his overcoat on in the front hall, tied his scarf correctly, shook hands all around, and left, very pleased with the house and the fraternal atmosphere, and rather pleased with himself.

A week later he was asked to dinner again and this time the conversation in the living room was not about basketball but moved in a straight line. At the end of five minutes Armstrong produced a triangular pledge pin. Although Spud had been expecting it, he colored with embarrassment. It was not easy to explain, with four people looking at him, that he didn’t have the money to join a fraternity.

“We can get around that difficulty,” Armstrong said, “if you’re willing to take a dishwasher’s job or wait table.” Then, correctly reading the look on Spud’s face, he added, “It won’t make any difference so far as your standing in the house is concerned. Also, it won’t take much time from your studies. You’d naturally spend a certain amount of time sitting around after dinner, chewing the fat. The only thing you have to worry about is the hundred dollar initiation fee.”

Spud nodded.

“Do you think you can manage that?” Armstrong asked.

“I’ll have to think about it,” Spud said.

Armstrong tried to press him, but he refused to commit himself, and his refusal was so firm that Armstrong gave way before it. “We’re not in the habit of making open bids,” he said. “And although in your case we’re willing to make an exception, I think you ought to realize that there are plenty of guys—big men on campus—who would jump at the chance.”

Spud did realize this, but he wasn’t jumping, even so. He left, without a pledge button in his lapel, and went to the Ship’s Lantern, where Sally and Lymie were waiting for him. They sat smiling while he described his evening, and once or twice a look passed between them which Spud intercepted. It meant nothing but that they were pleased with him for being so much like himself and so unlike anybody else, probably, who had ever lived. He began to suspect that there was some kind of a secret understanding between them, from which he was excluded.

“If you want to join it,” Sally said, “go ahead. It’s a good enough fraternity. The best there is, I guess. But of course they change. What’s good one year isn’t necessarily good the next. And I’m not sure I know what they mean by ‘good’ anyway.”

“Wouldn’t you be proud of me?” Spud asked.

“I am already,” Sally said. “I won’t love you any more because you’ve got a piece of fancy jewelry on your vest.”

“You could wear it,” Spud suggested.

“I don’t need to,” Sally said. “Everybody knows I’ve got you just where I want you.”

“Humph,” Spud said. What he wanted was for Lymie, who had everything to lose by the arrangement, or Sally, who had nothing to gain, to decide that it was to his best interest to join
a fraternity. Then he would have been sure that he didn’t want to. When Lymie said, “It’s entirely up to you,” Spud was thoroughly exasperated with both of them.

“It isn’t entirely up to me,” he exclaimed. “I don’t know why you keep saying that. I can’t walk off and leave you with that double room on your hands. If I go, you have to go too.”

“So far,” Lymie said, “nobody has asked me to join a fraternity.”

“They will ask you,” Spud said.

Sally said nothing. She had not said anything for a minute or so, but now Lymie was aware of her silence. It had changed its quality somehow. He smiled at her, by way of conveying that she didn’t have to be tactful. He had known all along they were not going to ask him to join the fraternity. To Spud he said, “It doesn’t really matter to me where I live, and it does to you, so you’d better decide.”