Free The Folded Leaf by William Maxwell Page A

Saturday and Sunday calcimining the walls a sickly green. The woodwork, the floor, and the brick fireplace were scrubbed with soap and water, but there was nothing much that they could do about the pipes on the ceiling, and they decided not to bother with curtains even though small boys peered in the windows occasionally and had to be chased away.
    The apartment was furnished with a worn grass rug, a couch, a bookcase, and three uncomfortable chairs from the Edwards’ attic. Carson brought an old victrola which had to be wound before and then again during every record, and sometimes it made terrible grinding noises. Mark Wheeler contributed a large framed picture of a handsome young collegian with his hair parted in the middle, enjoying his own fireside, his pennants, and the smoke that curled upward from the bowl of his long-stemmed clay pipe. The title of the picture was “Pipe-Dreams” and they gave it the place of honor over the mantel. The only other picture they were willing to hang in the apartment was of an ugly English bulldog looking out through a fence. This had been given to Mr. and Mrs. Snyder twenty-two years before, as a wedding present. The glass was underneath the slats in the fence and they were real wood, varnished and joined at the top and bottom to the picture frame.
    To get to the fraternity from school the boys had to take a southbound Clark Street car and get off and wait on a windystreet corner, by a cemetery, until a westbound Montrose Street car came along. It was usually dark when they reached the apartment and a grown person would have found the place dreary and uninviting, but they had a special love for it, from the very beginning. This was partly because it had to be kept secret. They could talk about it safely in LeClerc’s but not at school, in their division rooms, where the teacher might overhear them and report it to the principal. And partly because they knew instinctively that sooner or later the apartment would be taken away from them. They were too young to be allowed to have a place of their own, and so they lived in it as intensely and with as much pleasure as small children live in the houses which they make for themselves on rainy days, out of chairs and rugs, a fire screen, a footstool, a broomstick, and the library table.
    Sometimes the boys came in a body, after school; sometimes by two and threes. Carson and Lynch were almost always there, and when Ray Snyder came it was usually with Bud Griesenauer or Harry Hall. Catanzano and deFresne came together, as a rule, and Bob Edwards and Mark Wheeler. Lymie Peters attached himself to any group or any pair of friends he could find, and once Spud Latham turned up with a blond boy from Lake View High School, who kept tossing his hair out of his eyes. He didn’t think much of the apartment and made Spud go off with him somewhere on his bicycle. Later, without being exactly unpleasant to Spud, they managed to convey to him that he had made a mistake in bringing an outsider to the fraternity house, and after that, when Spud came, which was not very often, he came alone. Ford also came alone. As a result of his refusing to jump off a stepladder blindfolded he was now known as “Steve Brodie” and sometimes “Diver” and he had stopped going to LeClerc’s.
    The fraternity house was a place to try things. Catanzano and deFresne smoked their first cigars there and were sick afterwards, out in the areaway. Ray Snyder fought his way through “I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls” on the ukulele, and Harry Hall appeared one day with a copy of Balzac’s
Droll Stories
which he had swiped from the bookcase at his grandfather’s. It was referred to as the dirty book, and somebody was always off in a corner or stretched out on the couch reading it.
    One afternoon when Carson and Lynch walked in they found Dede Sandstrom and a fat-cheeked girl named Edith Netedu side by side on the couch, with an ashtray and a box of Pall Malls between them.