Praise
“The Folded Leaf is a novel of such discernment, such mature judgement and such compassion, it seems to illuminate every subject on which it touches”
New York Times
“Maxwell’s pace is unhurried. This is not an eventful novel – but its elements are under a superb, quiet control”
ADAM MARS-JONES, Observer
“One can tell from the authorial assurance, the visual thereness of the opening pages alone, that this is a novel of major quality, the fruit of real engagement with other people and the course of their lives. Painful and deeply moving”
PAUL BINDING, Independent on Sunday
“A beautifully observed rite of passage, as much about growing up as friendship, and of the effect one has on the other. Poignant yet uplifting, it proves Maxwell to be the equal of any of the contemporaries he edited in his 40-year career”
SIMON BECKETT, Yorkshire Post
“There is a Jamesian exactness to Maxwell’s limpid prose which, placed within a contemporary context, also contains the emotional self-knowledge of a Richard Ford novel”
TREVOR LEWIS, Sunday Times
“On the insecurities of Depression era America, the snobbery of fraternity house life and the agonies of sexual shyness, William Maxwell is superb. His astute, sympathetic book about adolescence ought to be warmly welcomed back into print”
DONNY O’ROURKE, Herald
“A quite unconventional novel . . . very much lived and very much seen . . . moving and absorbing”
EDMUND WILSON
About the Author
William Maxwell was born in 1908 in Illinois. He is the author of six novels and three short story collections. A New Yorker editor for forty years, he helped to shape the prose and careers of John Updike, John Cheever, John O’Hara and Eudora Welty. His novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980), won the American Book Award, and he received the 1995 PEN/Malamud Award. He lives in New York City.
Also by William Maxwell and published by Harvill
SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW
TIME WILL DARKEN IT
ALL THE DAYS AND NIGHTS: COLLECTED STORIES
THE CHÂTEAU
Other books by William Maxwell
BILLIE DYER AND OTHER STORIES
THE OUTERMOST DREAM
OVER BY THE RIVER AND OTHER STORIES
ANCESTORS
THE OLD MAN AT THE RAILROAD CROSSING
AND OTHER TALES
HEAVENLY TENANTS
THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS
BRIGHT CENTER OF HEAVEN
THE FOLDED LEAF
William Maxwell
This ebook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form (including any digital form) other than this in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Epub ISBN: 9781446418079
Version 1.0
www.randomhouse.co.uk
First published by Harper & Brothers, New York, 1945
Reissued in Great Britain by The Harvill Press, 1999
The Harvill Press, 2 Aztec Row, Berners Road, London N1 OPW
www.randomhouse.co.uk/harvillsecker
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Copyright © William Maxwell, 1945, 1959
William Maxwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 1 86046 696 6
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher
For Louise Bogan
Contents
Cover Page
Praise
About the Author
Also by William Maxwell
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Book One: The Swimming Pool
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Book Two: Partly Pride and Partly Envy
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Book Three: A Cold Country
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Book Four: A Reflection from the Sky
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Lo! in the middle of the wood,
The folded leaf is woo’d from out the bud
With winds upon the branch, and there
Grows green and broad, and takes no care,
Sun-steep’d at noon, and in the moon
Nightly dew-fed; and turning yellow
Falls, and floats adown the air.
Lo! sweeten’d with the summer light,
The full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow,
Drops in a silent autumn night.
—ALFRED TENNYSON
1833 (aet. 24)
BOOK ONE
The Swimming Pool
BOOK TWO
Partly Pride and Partly Envy
BOOK THREE
A Cold Country
BOOK FOUR
A Reflection from the Sky
1
THE blue lines down the floor of the swimming pool wavered and shivered incessantly, and something about the shape of the place—the fact that it was long and narrow, perhaps, and lined with tile to the ceiling—made their voices ring. The same voices that sounded sad in the open air, on the high school playground. “Lights! Lights!” it seemed as if they were shouting at each other across the water and from the balcony stairs.
All of them were naked, and until Mr. Pritzker appeared they could only look at the water; they couldn’t go in. They collected on the diving board, pushed and tripped each other, and wrestled halfheartedly. Those along the edge of the pool took short harmless jabs and made threats which they had no intention ever of carrying out but which helped pass the time.
The swimming class was nearly always the same. First the roll call, then a fifteen-minute period of instruction in the backstroke or the flutter kick or breathing, and finally a relay race. Mr. Pritzker picked out two boys and let them choose their own teams. They did it seriously, going down through the class and pointing to the best swimmers, to the next best, and in diminishing order after that. But actually it was the last one chosen that mattered. Whichever side had to take Lymie Peters, lost. Lymie couldn’t swim the Australian crawl. Week after week the relay began in the greatest excitement and continued back and forth from one end of the pool to the other until it was Lymie’s turn. When he dived in and started his slow frantic side stroke, the race died, the place grew still.
Since he was not any good at sports, the best Lymie could do was to efface himself. In gym class, on the days when they played outdoor baseball, he legged it out to right field and from that comparatively safe place watched the game. Few balls ever went out there and the center fielder knew that Lymie couldn’t catch them if they did. But in swimming class there was no place to retire to. He stood apart from the others, a thin, flat-chested boy with dark hair that grew down in a widow’s peak on his forehead, and large hesitant brown eyes. He was determined when the time came to do his best, and no one held it against him that he always decided the race. On the other hand, they never bothered to cover up that fact.
This day two things happened which were out of the ordinary. Mr. Pritzker brought something with him which looked like a basketball only larger, and there was a new boy in the class. The new boy had light hair and gray eyes set a trifle too close together. He was not quite handsome but his body, for a boy’s body, was very well made, with a natural masculine grace. Occasionally people turn up—like the new boy—who serve as a kind of reminder of those ideal, almost abstract rules of proportion from which the human being, however faulty, is copied. There were boys in the class who were larger and more muscular, but when the new boy stepped into the line which formed at the edge of the pool, the others seemed clumsy, their arms and legs too long or their knees too large. They glanced at him furtively, appraising him. He looked down at the tile floor or past them all into space.
Mr. Pritzker opened his little book. “Adams,” he began. “Anderson . . . Borgstedt . . . Catanzano . . . de Fresne . . .”
The new boy’s name was Latham.
Mr. Pritzker, separated from the rest by his size and by his age, by the fact that he alone wore a swimming suit and carried a whistle on a string around his neck, outlined the rules of water polo. Lymie Peters was bright enough when it came to his studies but in games he was overanxious. The fear that he might find himself suddenly in the center of things, the game depending on his action, numbed his mind. He saw the words five men on a side; saw them open out like the blue lines along the floor of the swimming pool and come together again.
Eventually it was his turn to slip into the water, but instead of taking part in the shouting and splashing, instead of fighting over the ball with the others, he stayed close to the side of the pool. He went through intense but meaningless motions as the struggle drew near and relaxed only slightly when it withdrew (the water flying outward in spray and the whistle interrupting continually) to the far end of the pool. Once every sixty seconds the minute hand on the wall clock moved forward with a perceptible jerk, which was registered on Lymie’s brain. Time, the slow passage of time, was all that he understood, his only hope until that moment when, without warning, the ball came straight toward him. He looked around wildly but there was no one in his end of the pool. From the far end a voice yelled, “Catch it, Lymie!” and he caught it.
What happened after that was entirely out of his control. The splashing surrounded him and sucked him down. With arms grabbing at him, with thighs around his waist, he went down, down where there was no air. His lungs expanding filled his chest and he clung in blind panic to the ball. After the longest time the arms let go, for no reason. The thighs released him and he found himself on the surface again, where there was light and life. The ball was flipped out of his hands.
“What’d you hang onto it for?” a boy named Carson asked. “Why didn’t you let go?”
Lymie saw Carson’s face, enormous in the water in front of him.
“If that new guy hadn’t pulled them off of you, you’d of drowned,” Carson said.
In sudden overwhelming gratitude, Lymie looked around for his deliverer, but the new boy was gone. He was somewhere in that fighting and splashing at the far end of the pool.
2
MISS FRANK, pacing the outside aisle between the last row of seats and the windows, could, by turning her eyes, see the schoolyard and the wall of three-story apartment houses that surrounded it. The rest of them, denied her freedom of movement, fidgeted. Without realizing it they slid farther and farther down in their seats. Their heads grew heavy. They wound their legs around the metal column that supported the seat in front of them. This satisfied their restlessness but only for a minute or two; then they had to find some new position. In the margins of their textbooks, property of the Chicago Public School System, they drew impossible faces or played ticktacktoe. And all the while that Miss Frank was making clear the distinction between participles and gerunds, their eyes went round and round the room, like sheep in a worn-out pasture.
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 had happened to step out of the room, the desk alone would have 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 swallow’s 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 Water town. 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.
3
THE 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 de Fresne 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, he 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.
4
THE 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.
The boys who hung out at LeClerc’s had broad shoulders, or if they didn’t, the padding in their coats took care of it. They wore plus fours as a rule, but some of them wore plus eights. Their legs were well shaped. Their bow ties were real and not attached to a piece of black elastic, like Lymie’s. The little caps that clung to the backs of their heads matched the herringbone or the basket weave of their very light, their almost white suits. They had at their disposal a set of remarks which they could use over and over again, and the fact that there were a great many things in the world about which they had no knowledge and no experience did not trouble them.
The year before, they went to a Greek confectionery half a block up the street. Although the food in the school lunch-room was cheaper and more nourishing, so many of them insisted on eating at Nick’s at noon that getting in and out of the door could only be achieved through force of character. You had to brace yourself and then shove and squirm and have friends make a place for you so that, together, you could elbow your way up to the counter. Once there, if you were lucky or if you had the kind of voice that outshouts other voices, you might come away with a bottle of milk and a ham sandwich or a cinnamon bun. But in the spring something (the same instinct, could it have been, that governs the migrations of starlings?) caused them to abandon the Greek confectionery and settle in LeClerc’s, which was even smaller. Here every afternoon were to be found all the girls who never made the honor society or served as Senior Sponsors or took part in dramatics or played the viola; and yet who were, Lymie couldn’t help noticing, so much better looking than the ones who did.
In the late afternoon LeClerc’s was seldom overcrowded. If Lymie had pushed the door open and walked in, nobody would have indicated any surprise at seeing him. Mark Wheeler would have said “Hi there,” over the heads of several people, and Peggy Johnston, who was in his division room, would probably have smiled at him. Her smile seemed to mean more than it did actually, but there were others. There were undoubtedly three or four groups he could have stood on the outside of, without anybody’s minding it. After all, that was how it was done. Ray Snyder and Irma Hartnell and Lester Adams had all had to stand around on the outside before they were taken in. But Lymie didn’t try.
He was too proud perhaps and at the same time too uncertain of himself. The fact that his legs were too thin for him to wear knickers may have had something to do with it; or that he had no set of remarks. Also, the one time that he had screwed up his courage to ask a girl for a date, she had refused him. Considering how popular Peggy Johnston was, he should have asked her at least two days before he did. She said she was awfully sorry but she was going to the Edgewater Beach Hotel that night with Bob Edwards, and Lymie believed her. It wasn’t that he doubted her word. But deep down inside of him he knew what would have happened if he hadn’t waited, and it was that, more than anything else, which made him keep on going until he was safely past LeClerc’s.
5
MRS. LATHAM reached up and turned on the bridge lamp at her elbow, though it was still daylight outside, and the lamplight fell upon her lap, which was overflowing with curtain material. There were piles of it on the sofa and on the floor around her, and it was hard to believe all this white net could hang from the four living room windows that now were bare and looked out on a park.
She sat with her back not quite touching the back of the big upholstered chair and her head bent over her sewing. In shadow her face was expressive and full of character but when the light shone directly on it, although the features remained the same, it seemed wan. It was the face of a woman who might be unwell. Her soft brown hair had very little gray in it and was done on top of her head in a way that had been fashionable when she was a girl. Anyone coming into the room and seeing her there in the pale yellow light would have found her very sympathetic, very appealing. Without having the least idea what was in her mind as she raised the spool to her lips and bit through the white cotton thread, he would have felt sure that she had been through a great deal; that she had given herself heart and soul to undertakings which ought to have turned out well but hadn’t always; and that she was still, in all probability, an innocent person.
Near the center of the park—it was no more than an open field with young elm trees set at monotonous intervals around the edge—boys were playing touchball. Their voices penetrated to the living room, through the closed windows. Mrs. Latham may or may not have heard them; she did not commit herself. A bakery truck passed in the street, and several cars, one of them choking and sputtering. The sound of footsteps on the cement walk caused Mrs. Latham to raise her head and listen. Whoever it was that she was expecting, this couldn’t have been the one, for she went back to her sewing immediately and did not even bother to look out.
In spite of the solid row of front windows, the living room was dark. It was the fault of the wallpaper and of the furniture, which had obviously been acquired over many years, at no great expense, and perhaps even accidentally. There was barely enough of it here and there in the room to make it livable. A plain grayish-blue rug covered most of the floor. The sofa and the chair Mrs. Latham sat in were upholstered in a subdued green. There was a phonograph and three wooden chairs, none of them wholly comfortable. The table was mission, with a piece of Chinese embroidery for a runner, and a pottery lamp with a brown shade. Also a round ashtray with cigar bands glued in a garish wheel to the underside of the glass, and a small brass bowl. The bowl was for calling cards. It had nothing in it now but a key (to a trunk possibly, or to the storeroom in the basement) and thumbtacks. On the shelf under the table were two books, an album partly filled with snapshots and a somewhat larger one containing views in color of the Wisconsin Dells.
The opposite wall of the living room was broken by a fireplace of smooth green tile made to look like bricks. The gas log had at one time or other been used, but it was not lit now. At either end of the mantelpiece were two thin brass candlesticks, each holding a battered blue candle. Between them hung a framed sepia engraving of an English cottage at twilight. The cottage had a high thatched roof and was surrounded by ancient willow trees. The only other picture in the room hung at eye level above the sofa. It was a color print of a young girl, her head wound round with a turban, a sweet simpering expression on her face, and (surprisingly) one breast exposed.
Beyond the living room was the hall, with the front door bolted and chained, and then a rickety telephone stand. On the right was a door with a full-length mirror set into it, and another door that opened into Mr. and Mrs. Latham’s bedroom. The hall opened into the dining room, which had two large windows looking out on a blank wall (this was not the apartment Mrs. Latham would have chosen if they’d had all the money in the world) and was a trifle too narrow for anyone to pass easily between the table and the sideboard at mealtime. In the center of the dining room table, on a crocheted doily, was a small house plant, a Brazilian violet which showed no sign of blooming.
After the dining room came the kitchen, and right beside it a bedroom—a girl’s room by the look of the dressing table and the white painted bed. On the dressing table there was a letter. The room had a single window and French doors at the far end. The curtains must have been intended originally for some other room than this, since they did not quite reach the window sill. They were organdy and had ruffles. The glass in the French doors was covered with white net.
It was easy to guess that the door in the hall, the one with the mirror set into it, would, if opened, have revealed a closet. But these two French doors were tightly shut and without the help of Mrs. Latham there would have been no telling what lay beyond them. When the street lamps were turned on outside, something prompted her to stand up, brush the threads from her lap, and walk back here. She put her hand on a glass knob and turned it slowly. The door opened, revealing a boy’s body lying fully clothed except for shoes, on a cot that was too small for it. The positon—knees bent awkwardly, right arm dangling in space—seemed too inert for sleep. It looked rather as if he had a short time before been blindfolded and led out here to meet a firing squad. But such things seldom happen on a sleeping porch, which this clearly was, and besides, there was no wound.
6
WHEN Mrs. Latham spread a blanket over Spud he turned and lay on his back. His face, freed for the time being of both suspicion and misery, was turned toward the ceiling.
It was too bad, Mrs. Latham thought as she bent over him, it was a great pity that they had to leave Wisconsin where they knew everybody and the children had so many friends. But at least Evans had been able to find another job. That wasn’t always easy for a man his age. And in time he’d probably get a raise, like they promised him, and be making the same salary he had been making before. The children were still young. They’d have to learn to make new friends, and be adaptable.
She raised one of the windows a few inches and then closed the door behind her softly.
It was nearly six when Spud awoke. He drew the blanket around his shoulders without wondering where it had come from. For a moment he was quite happy. Then the room identified itself by its shape in the dark, and with a heavy sigh he turned on his side and lay with his hands pressed palm to palm, between his knees.
The light went on in the next room and he saw his sister Helen through the curtained doors. She seemed to be at a great distance. Remote and dreamlike, she was reading a letter.
The letter was probably from Pete Draper’s brother Andy, Spud thought. “Gump” they called him. For three years now he had had a case on Helen, but his family didn’t want him to marry her because she wasn’t a Catholic. Every Friday night along about seven-thirty Andy used to appear at the front door of the house in Wisconsin, with his dark blue suit on, and his hair slicked down with water. Sometimes he’d take Helen to a movie and sometimes they went to a basketball game. Once when Spud was coming home from a Boy Scout meeting on his bicycle, he saw them walking along the edge of the lake, and Andy had his arm around Helen. He was an awfully serious guy. Not like Pete. The night before they left Wisconsin, Helen sat out on the front porch talking to Andy for a long time. Spud was in bed but he wasn’t asleep yet. Nobody was asleep in the whole house. His father and mother were in their room, and his mother was packing. He could hear her taking things out of the closet and opening and closing dresser drawers, and he kept tossing and turning in bed, and wondering what it was going to be like when they got to Chicago. His window was right over the porch and he could hear Andy and Helen talking. Several minutes would pass with no sound except the creak of the porch swing. Then they’d begin again, their voices low and serious. Spud thought once that Andy was crying but he couldn’t be sure. And at a quarter to twelve his father came down, in his bathrobe, and sent Andy home.
By the way Helen tossed the letter on the bed, without bothering to fold it and put it back in the envelope, Spud could tell that his sister was not satisfied. Something she wanted to be in the letter wasn’t in it, probably, but whatever it was, he’d never find out. She didn’t trust him any more than he trusted her.
There was six years’ difference between Spud’s age and his sister’s, and in order to feel even kindness toward her, he had to remember what she had been like when he was very small—how she looked after him all day long, defending him from ants and spiders and from strange dogs, how she stood between him and all noises in the night. Now, without either kindness or concern, he watched her dispose of her hat and coat in the closet, and brush her hair back from her forehead. His mother would have brushed her hair in the dark, so as not to waken him. Or if she needed a light to see by, she would have turned on the little lamp beside the bed, not the harsh overhead light. Helen never spared him. She didn’t believe in sparing people.
The glare of the light raised Spud to a sitting position. He threw the blanket to one side, put his stockinged feet over the edge of the bed, and stretched until both shoulder blades cracked. The air that came in through the open window was damp and heavy, and smelled of rain. He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand, yawned once or twice, and bending down, found his shoes. Having got that far, all remembrance of what he was about to do with them seemed to desert him. He picked one of them up and stared at it as if by some peculiar mischance his life (and death) were inseparably bound up with this right shoe. When the light went off in the next room, the shoe dropped through his fingers. He yawned, shook his head feebly, and fell back on the bed. There he lay with his eyes open, unmoving, until Mrs. Latham came to the door and called him.
After she was gone he managed to sit up all over again, to put both shoes on, and to stand. Like a sailor wakened at midnight and obliged to make his way in a sleepy stupor up lurching ladders to the deck of the ship (or like the ship itself, pursuing blindly its charted course) Spud passed from room to room of the apartment until he found himself in front of the washstand. He splashed cold water on his face and reached out with his eyes shut until his hand came in contact with a towel. It was hanging on the rack marked SISTER but before he discovered that fact the damage had been done. He folded the towel, now damp and streaked with dirt, and put it back in what he imagined was the same way it had been before. Then he combed his hair earnestly, made a wild tormented face at himself in the bathroom mirror, and said, “Oh fuss!” so loudly that his mother and Helen heard him in the kitchen and stopped talking.
Their astonishment did not last. When he appeared in the doorway they hardly noticed him. He drew the kitchen stool out from under the enamel table and sat down and began to tie his shoes. When he finished, he straightened up suddenly. There was something that bothered him—something that he had done, or not done. Before he could remember what it was, Helen made him move so that she could get the bread knife out of the table drawer, and the whole thing passed out of his mind.
The kitchen smells, the way his mother took a long fork and tested the green beans that were cooking in a kettle on the top of the stove, the happy familiarity of all her movements, reassured him. It seemed almost like the kitchen of the house in Wisconsin. But then there was the rattle of a key in the front door, and Mr. Latham came in, looking tired and discouraged. Before Mr. Latham had even hung up his coat in the hall closet, the atmosphere of security and habit had vanished. Nothing was left but a bare uncomfortable apartment that would never be like the house they were used to. And when they sat down, the food seemed hardly worth coming to the table for.
7
EVANS LATHAM was an honest and capable man. He had worked hard all his life, and with no other thought than to provide for his family, but somehow things never turned out for him the way they should have. There was always some accident, some freak of circumstance that couldn’t possibly have been anticipated or avoided. Bad luck dogged his heels wherever he went. It was not the work of his enemies (he had none) and must therefore have been caused by a disembodied malignancy.
If bright and early some morning the Lathams had left their apartment, which was not what Mrs. Latham would have chosen anyway, and had set up some kind of temporary quarters in the park across the street, among the nursemaids and the babies in their carriages; if Mr. Latham, with advice and assistance from the old men and the boys who gathered in the late afternoon to play touchball, had offered sacrifices—the phonograph, perhaps, or the garish ashtray; if he had then called upon all their friends, or since they had no friends, their neighbors, to join them by moonlight with faces blackened or with masks, and wearing swords or armed with shotguns and revolvers or shinny sticks or golf clubs or canes; and if, at a signal from Reverend Henry Roth of St. Mary’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, they had rushed into the deserted apartment firing guns, overturning everything under which a malignant spirit might lurk, tossing the furniture out of doors, beating against walls and windows; and if the old men and the young boys had marched nine times around the outside of the apartment building throwing torches about, shouting, screaming, beating sticks together, rattling old pans, while the nursemaids ran up and down, up and down the cellar stairs; if all this had been done properly, by people with believing hearts, it is possible that the spirit would have been driven off and that, for a time anyway, prosperity would have attended the efforts of Mr. Latham. Unfortunately this remedy, tried for centuries on one continent or another and always found helpful, never occurred to him. He went on day after day, doing the best he knew how. And it wasn’t seeing other men get rich off his ideas (oil had been found on the ranch in Montana two years after he had sold it) or any single stroke of bad luck, but the terrible succession of them, large and small, which had changed him finally, so that now he was seldom hopeful or confident the way he used to be.
When, like tonight, he was not inclined to be talkative, the others felt it and did not attempt to be cheerful in spite of him. Helen addressed an occasional remark to her mother but Mrs. Latham’s replies were not encouraging and led nowhere.
Except when he was obliged to ask for the butter or the bread or the jelly, Spud ate in silence. Much of the time he was not even there. Mr. Latham had to ask him twice if he wanted a second helping. Spud managed to pass his plate without meeting his father’s eyes and said, “What are we going to have for dessert?”
“Baked apple,” Mrs. Latham said.
“I wish you’d make a chocolate cake sometime. You know the kind—with white icing?”
Mrs. Latham felt the earth around the Brazilian violet and then poured the water that was in her glass over it.
“When we get straightened around,” she said.
“I don’t think I want any baked apple,” Spud said. “I don’t feel hungry.”
“First time I ever knew you to make a remark like that,” Mr. Latham said. “Are your bowels clogged up?”
“No,” Spud said, “they’re not. I just don’t seem to be hungry any more. Not like I used to. I haven’t felt really hungry since we moved to Chicago.”
Mrs. Latham signaled to him to be quiet but he paid no attention to her. “It’s the atmosphere,” he said. “All this smoke and dirt.”
Mr. Latham stabbed at a couple of string beans with his fork. “Perhaps you’d better move back to Wisconsin,” he said sharply. “I seem to remember that you ate well enough when we lived there.”
“I would if I could,” Spud said.
“There’s nobody stopping you,” Mr. Latham said.
Mrs. Latham frowned. “Please, Evans,” she said, “eat your supper.”
“Well,” he said, turning to her, “it’s very annoying to come home at the end of a hard day and find all of you glum and dissatisfied.”
“If you call this home,” Spud said.
“It’s the best I can provide for you,” Mr. Latham said to him. “And until you learn to accept it gracefully, maybe you better not come to the table.”
Spud put his napkin beside his plate, kicked his chair back, and left the room. A moment later they heard the front door slam. Helen and her mother looked at each other. Mr. Latham, carefully avoiding their glances, picked up the carving knife and fork and cut himself a small slice of lamb, near the bone.
8
TWO pictures stood side by side on Lymie Peters’ dresser. The slightly faded one was of a handsome young man with a derby hat on the back of his head and a large chrysanthemum in his buttonhole. The other was of a woman with dark hair and large expressive dark eyes. The picture of the young man was taken in 1897, shortly after Mr. Peters’ nineteenth birthday. The high stiff collar and the peculiarly tied, very full four-in-hand were bound to have their humorous aspect twenty-six years later. The photograph of Mrs. Peters was not a good likeness. It had been made from another picture, an old one. She had a black velvet ribbon around her throat, and her dress, of some heavy material that could have been either satin or velvet, was cut low on the shoulders. The photographer had retouched the face, which was too slender in any case, and too young. Instead of helping Lymie to remember what his mother had looked like, the picture only confused him.
He had come into the bedroom not to look at these pictures but to see what time it was by the alarm clock on the table beside his bed. The room was small, dark, and in considerable disorder. The bed was unmade. A pair of long trousers hung upside down by the cuffs from the top drawer of the dresser, and the one chair in the room was buried under layers of soiled clothes. On the floor beside the window was a fleece-lined bedroom slipper. There was fluff under the bed and a fine gritty dust on everything. The framed reproduction of Watts’ “Hope” which hung over the dresser was not of Lymie’s choosing. During the last five years Mr. Peters and Lymie had lived first in cheap hotels and then in a series of furnished kitchenette apartments, all of them gloomy like this one.