The Folded Leaf Read online

  Acclaim for WILLIAM MAXWELL

  “He has a magic way with words…. Among the past half-century’s few unmistakably great novelists.”

  —Village Voice

  “Maxwell’s [fiction] honors the physical world with verisimilitude, human experience with emotional fidelity and the English language with consummate craft.”

  —Wall Street Journal

  “No comparison does [Maxwell] justice…. [In] his fictional worlds … we often encounter an intimacy so intense it literally gives us goose bumps.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “[He] holds an almost legendary place in the American literary world.”

  —Newsday

  “Maxwell is one of our finest writers…. and like all great writers he deals in truth: an uncompromising vision of the way we are and why.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “Maxwell has so cool and sharp an eye…. a wise observer of ordinary human behavior… a writer of impeccable English prose.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “Mr. Maxwell writes with such clear-eyed sympathy for his characters that the reader is constantly made aware of the larger redemptive patterns that subsume their individual problems.”

  —The New York Times

  “One of American literature’s best-kept secrets.”

  —New York magazine

  “Mr. Maxwell’s work is thoroughly balanced, gentle and humane…. His powers of description are remarkable.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Rare sensitivity, telling detail and bare, graceful prose.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “No one else currently writing can capture as [Maxwell] does a sense of life in the balance, of a moment appreciated…. The beauty of some sentences is like a stab of light.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Maxwell is … a novelist intrigued by the nuances of social form and a strongly visual writer fascinated by the way things look and feel…. His work [has grown] into an act of the imagination that [can] encompass a world of time and thought beyond the immediacy of recollection. By transfiguring the past in the crucible of art, he has held it in trust for the future.”

  —The New Republic

  “His characters are so well drawn you want to know more and more about them. His writing is simple and direct, poignant without being sentimental.”

  —Houston Post

  WILLIAM MAXWELL

  The Folded Leaf

  William Maxwell was born in 1908, in Lincoln, Illinois. When he was fourteen his family moved to Chicago and he continued his education there and at the University of Illinois. After a year of graduate work at Harvard he went back to Urbana and taught freshman composition, and then turned to writing. He has published six novels, three collections of short fiction, an autobiographical memoir, a collection of literary essays and reviews, and a book for children. For forty years he was a fiction editor at The New Yorker. From 1969 to 1972 he was president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He has received the Brandeis Creative Arts Award Medal and, for So Long, See You Tomorrow, the American Book Award and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in 2000.

  Books by WILLIAM MAXWELL

  All the Days and Nights:

  The Collected Stories (1995)

  Billie Dyer and Other Stories (1992)

  The Outermost Dream (1989)

  So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980)

  Over by the River and Other Stories (1977)

  Ancestors (1971)

  The Old Man at the Railroad Crossing (1966)

  The Chateau (1961)

  Stories (1956) (with Jean Stafford, John Cheever,

  and Daniel Fuchs)

  Time Will Darken It (1948)

  The Heavenly Tenants (1946)

  The Folded Leaf (1945)

  They Came Like Swallows (1937)

  Bright Center of Heaven (1934)

  for Louise Bogan

  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)

  CONTENTS

  BOOK ONE

  The Swimming Pool

  BOOK TWO

  Partly Pride and Partly Envy

  BOOK THREE

  A Cold Country

  BOOK FOUR

  A Reflection from the Sky

  BOOK ONE

  The Swimming Pool

  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 gl
anced 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 … deFresne …”

  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 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 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….