A Separate Peace (7 page)

“Wait a minute,” I said, without any reason.

“It's okay. I'll oversee old Leper. I know he's not going to do it.” He was at the door.

“Wait a minute,” I said more sharply. “Wait just a minute. I'm coming.”

“No you aren't, pal, you're going to study.”

“Never mind my studying.”

“You think you've done enough already?”

“Yes.” I let this drop curtly to bar him from telling me what to do about my work. He let it go at that, and went out the door ahead of me, whistling off key.

We followed our gigantic shadows across the campus, and Phineas began talking in wild French, to give me a little extra practice. I said nothing, my mind exploring the new dimensions of isolation around me. Any fear I had ever had of the tree was nothing beside this. It wasn't my neck, but my understanding which was menaced. He had never been jealous of me for a second. Now I knew that there never was and never could have been any rivalry between us. I was not of the same quality as he.

I couldn't stand this. We reached the others loitering around the base of the tree, and Phineas began exuberantly to throw off his clothes, delighted by the fading glow of the day, the challenge of the tree, the competitive tension of all of us. He lived and flourished in such moments. “Let's go, you and me,” he called. A new idea struck him. “We'll go together, a double jump! Neat, eh?”

None of this mattered now; I would have listlessly agreed to anything. He started up the wooden rungs and I began climbing behind, up to the limb high over the bank. Phineas ventured a little way along it, holding a thin nearby branch for support. “Come out a little way,” he said, “and then we'll jump side by side.” The countryside was striking from here, a deep green sweep of playing fields and bordering shrubbery, with the school stadium white and miniature-looking across the river. From behind us the last long rays of light played across the campus, accenting every slight undulation of the land, emphasizing the separateness of each bush.

Holding firmly to the trunk, I took a step toward him,
and then my knees bent and I jounced the limb. Finny, his balance gone, swung his head around to look at me for an instant with extreme interest, and then he tumbled sideways, broke through the little branches below and hit the bank with a sickening, unnatural thud. It was the first clumsy physical action I had ever seen him make. With unthinking sureness I moved out on the limb and jumped into the river, every trace of my fear of this forgotten.

N
one of us was allowed near the infirmary during the next days, but I heard all the rumors that came out of it. Eventually a fact emerged; it was one of his legs, which had been “shattered.” I couldn't figure out exactly what this word meant, whether it meant broken in one or several places, cleanly or badly, and I didn't ask. I learned no more, although the subject was discussed endlessly. Out of my hearing people must have talked of other things, but everyone talked about Phineas to me. I suppose this was only natural. I had been right beside him when it happened, I was his roommate.

The effect of his injury on the masters seemed deeper than after other disasters I remembered there. It was as though they felt it was especially unfair that it should strike one of the sixteen-year-olds, one of the few young men who could be free and happy in the summer of 1942.

I couldn't go on hearing about it much longer. If anyone had been suspicious of me, I might have developed some strength to defend myself. But there was nothing. No one suspected. Phineas must still be too sick, or too noble, to tell them.

I spent as much time as I could alone in our room, trying to empty my mind of every thought, to forget where I was, even who I was. One evening when I was dressing for dinner in this numbed frame of mind, an idea occurred to me, the first with any energy behind it since Finny fell from the tree. I decided to put on his clothes. We wore the same size, and although he always criticized mine he used to wear them frequently, quickly forgetting what belonged to him and what to me. I never forgot, and that evening I put on his cordovan shoes, his pants, and I looked for and finally found his pink shirt, neatly laundered in a drawer. Its high, somewhat stiff collar against my neck, the wide cuffs touching my wrists, the rich material against my skin excited a sense of strangeness and distinction; I felt like some nobleman, some Spanish grandee.

But when I looked in the mirror it was no remote aristocrat I had become, no character out of daydreams. I was Phineas, Phineas to the life. I even had his humorous expression in my face, his sharp, optimistic awareness. I had no idea why this gave me such intense relief, but it seemed, standing there in Finny's triumphant shirt, that I would never stumble through the confusions of my own character again.

I didn't go down to dinner. The sense of transformation stayed with me throughout the evening, and even when I undressed and went to bed. That night I slept easily, and it was only on waking up that this illusion was gone, and I was confronted with myself, and what I had done to Finny.

Sooner or later it had to happen, and that morning it did.
“Finny's better!” Dr. Stanpole called to me on the chapel steps over the organ recessional thundering behind us. I made my way haltingly past the members of the choir with their black robes flapping in the morning breeze, the doctor's words reverberating around me. He might denounce me there before the whole school. Instead he steered me amiably into the lane leading toward the infirmary. “He could stand a visitor or two now, after these very nasty few days.”

“You don't think I'll upset him or anything?”

“You? No, why? I don't want any of these teachers flapping around him. But a pal or two, it'll do him good.”

“I suppose he's still pretty sick.”

“It was a messy break.”

“But how does he—how is he feeling? I mean, is he cheerful at all, or—”

“Oh, you know Finny.” I didn't, I was pretty sure I didn't know Finny at all. “It was a messy break,” he went on, “but we'll have him out of it eventually. He'll be walking again.”

“
Walking
again!”

“Yes.” The doctor didn't look at me, and barely changed his tone of voice. “Sports are finished for him, after an accident like that. Of course.”

“But he must be able to,” I burst out, “if his leg's still there, if you aren't going to amputate it—you aren't, are you?—then if it isn't amputated and the bones are still there, then it must come back the way it was, why wouldn't it? Of course it will.”

Dr. Stanpole hesitated, and I think glanced at me for a moment. “Sports are finished. As a friend you ought to help him face that and accept it. The sooner he does the better off he'll be. If I had the slightest hope that he could do more than walk I'd be all for trying for everything.
There is no such hope. I'm sorry, as of course everyone is. It's a tragedy, but there it is.”

I grabbed my head, fingers digging into my skin, and the doctor, thinking to be kind, put his hand on my shoulder. At his touch I lost all hope of controlling myself. I burst out crying into my hands; I cried for Phineas and for myself and for this doctor who believed in facing things. Most of all I cried because of kindness, which I had not expected.

“Now that's no good. You've got to be cheerful and hopeful. He needs that from you. He wanted especially to see you. You were the one person he asked for.”

That stopped my tears. I brought my hands down and watched the red brick exterior of the infirmary, a cheerful building, coming closer. Of course I was the first person he wanted to see. Phineas would say nothing behind my back; he would accuse me, face to face.

We were walking up the steps of the infirmary, everything was very swift, and next I was in a corridor being nudged by Dr. Stanpole toward a door. “He's in there. I'll be with you in a minute.”

The door was slightly ajar, and I pushed it back and stood transfixed on the threshold. Phineas lay among pillows and sheets, his left leg, enormous in its white bindings, suspended a little above the bed. A tube led from a glass bottle into his right arm. Some channel began to close inside me and I knew I was about to black out.

“Come on in,” I heard him say. “You look worse than I do.” The fact that he could still make a light remark pulled me back a little, and I went to a chair beside his bed. He seemed to have diminished physically in the few days which had passed, and to have lost his tan. His eyes studied me as though I were the patient. They no longer had
their sharp good humor, but had become clouded and visionary. After a while I realized he had been given a drug. “What are
you
looking so sick about?” he went on.

“Finny, I—” there was no controlling what I said, the words were instinctive, like the reactions of someone cornered. “What happened there at the tree? That goddam tree, I'm going to cut down that tree. Who cares who can jump out of it. What happened, what happened? How did you fall, how could you fall off like that?”

“I just fell,” his eyes were vaguely on my face, “something jiggled and I fell over. I remember I turned around and looked at you, it was like I had all the time in the world. I thought I could reach out and get hold of you.”

I flinched violently away from him. “To drag me down too!”

He kept looking vaguely over my face. “To get hold of you, so I wouldn't fall off.”

“Yes, naturally.” I was fighting for air in this close room. “I tried, you remember? I reached out but you were gone, you went down through those little branches underneath, and when I reached out there was only air.”

“I just remember looking at your face for a second. Awfully funny expression you had. Very shocked, like you have right now.”

“Right now? Well, of course, I
am
shocked. Who wouldn't be shocked, for God sakes. It's terrible, everything's terrible.”

“But I don't see why you should look so
personally
shocked. You look like it happened to you or something.”

“It's almost like it did! I was right there, right on the limb beside you.”

“Yes, I know. I remember it all.”

There was a hard block of silence, and then I said quietly,
as though my words might detonate the room, “Do you remember what made you fall?”

His eyes continued their roaming across my face. “I don't know, I must have just lost my balance. It must have been that. I did have this idea, this feeling that when you were standing there beside me, y—I don't know, I had a kind of feeling. But you can't say anything for sure from just feelings. And this feeling doesn't make any sense. It was a crazy idea, I must have been delirious. So I just have to forget it. I just fell,” he turned away to grope for something among the pillows, “that's all.” Then he glanced back at me, “I'm sorry about that feeling I had.”

I couldn't say anything to this sincere, drugged apology for having suspected the truth. He was never going to accuse me. It was only a feeling he had, and at this moment he must have been formulating a new commandment in his personal decalogue: Never accuse a friend of a crime if you only have a feeling he did it.

And I thought we were competitors! It was so ludicrous I wanted to cry.

If Phineas had been sitting here in this pool of guilt, how would he have felt, what would he have done?

He would have told me the truth.

I got up so suddenly that the chair overturned. I stared at him in amazement, and he stared back, his mouth breaking into a grin as the moments passed. “Well,” he said at last in his friendly, knowing voice, “what are you going to do, hypnotize me?”

“Finny, I've got something to tell you. You're going to hate it, but there's something I've got to tell you.”

“My God, what energy,” he said, falling back against the pillows. “You sound like General MacArthur.”

“I don't care who I sound like, and you won't think so
when I tell you. This is the worst thing in the world, and I'm sorry and I hate to tell you but I've got to tell you.”

But I didn't tell him. Dr. Stanpole came in before I was able to, and then a nurse came in, and I was sent away. The next day the doctor decided that Finny was not yet well enough to see visitors, even old pals like me. Soon after he was taken in an ambulance to his home outside Boston.

The Summer Session closed, officially came to an end. But to me it seemed irresolutely suspended, halted strangely before its time. I went south for a month's vacation in my home town and spent it in an atmosphere of reverie and unreality, as though I had lived that month once already and had not been interested by it the first time either.

At the end of September I started back toward Devon on the jammed, erratic trains of September, 1942. I reached Boston seventeen hours behind schedule; there would be prestige in that at Devon, where those of us from long distances with travel adventures to report or invent held the floor for several days after a vacation.