The Folded Leaf Read Online Free Page B

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 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 withno 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 he hesitated. All remembrance of what he was about to do with them seemed to deserthim. 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