The Folded Leaf by William Maxwell Page B

platter which she had just taken from the top shelf of the china cupboard.
    “Hello, Lymie,” she said, when Spud introduced her. “I hope you realize you’ve come to a bad end.” Her voice was cheerful and contradicted her words. Lymie saw that she took his being there as a matter of course. Except for the color of her hair, she had almost no resemblance to Spud. Their dispositions seemed entirely different.
    “Don’t pay any attention to my sister,” Spud said. “I don’t listen to her, even. If she bothers you, tell her to go fan herself.”
    “I’m sure that Lymie doesn’t talk to his sister that way,” Mrs. Latham said. She had tied a kitchen apron around her waist and was holding a large aluminum basting spoon under the hot water faucet.
    “Lymie hasn’t got a sister, have you, Lymie?” Spud asked.
    Lymie shook his head.
    “You don’t know how much you have to be thankful for,” Spud said. “When do we eat?”
    “As soon as your father gets home,” Mrs. Latham said. “He may be a little late tonight.”
    “O
grim-look’d night,”
Spud said. “O
night with hue so black! O night which ever art when day is not! O night! O night! alack, alack, alack! I fear my Thisbe’s promise is forgot.”
    Helen got down off the stool carefully and pushed it under the kitchen table. “It’s bad enough to have you out here in the first place,” she said, “without your showing off.”
    “I wasn’t showing off,” Spud said. “That’s poetry. Shakespeare.”
    “It’s all the Shakespeare you know or ever will know,” she said, and then, turning to Lymie: “When he was in seventh grade they did a scene from A
Midsummer Night’s Dream.
You should have seen it. Spud was Pyramus and he had to make love to a freckle-faced boy named Bill McCann. They were both done up in old sheets and I’ve never seen anything so funny in all my life.”
    Lymie had a feeling that she was trying to use him as a weapon against Spud. He backed against the china closet, where he could hardly be considered more than a spectator.
    “They kept forgetting their lines,” she continued. “And the teacher had to prompt them.”
    “Is that so?” Spud exclaimed hotly. “You think you’re so smart! What about the time you got up in assembly to make a speech and gulped so loud they heard you clear in the back row?”
    “Go in the other room, all of you,” Mrs. Latham said, “and stop arguing.”
    Lymie leaned forward, ready to follow Spud and his sister out of the kitchen; to his surprise neither of them showed any signs of leaving. There was a look about Mrs. Latham, a certain firmness in her mouth, which indicated that she could mean what she said. But apparently this wasn’t one of the times.
    Spud pulled the kitchen stool out and began to teeter on it. “If you won’t let us talk about Shakespeare,” he said, “what
do
you want us to talk about?”
    “You don’t have to talk at all,” Mrs. Latham said severely. “You can get the bread knife and cut the bread and put it on the table.”
    This time Spud did as he was told.
    Lymie would have liked to take part in the confusion and bickering but he didn’t quite know how. He stayed close to the china closet until Helen came over and said, “One side. Have to get in there.” Then he moved away cautiously and stood with his elbows resting on the kitchen window sill.
    A door opened somewhere in the front of the apartment. After a second Lymie heard it close.
    “Was that your father?” Mrs. Latham asked, when Spud came back from the dining room.
    “It was,” Spud said.
    “Der Papa kommt,”
Helen said.
    “German,” Spud shouted contemptuously at her. “Who wants to talk German? If I were a Frenchman now, waiting in a shell hole, and you were a big fat Dutchman crawling toward me on your hands and knees——”
    “Germans and Dutchmen are two different nationalities,” Helen said. “Dutchmen are Hollanders. They didn’t take part in the war. They were