Finny sat down on a bench, struggled out of his sheep-lined winter coat, and took a deep breath of gymnasium air. No locker room could have more pungent air than Devon’s; sweat predominated, but it was richly mingled with smells of paraffin and singed rubber, of soaked wool and liniment, and for those who could interpret it, of exhaustion, lost hope and triumph and bodies battling against each other. I thought it anything but a bad smell. It was preeminently the smell of the human body after it had been used to the limit, such a smell as has meaning and poignance for any athlete, just as it has for any lover.
Phineas looked down here and there, at the exercise bar over a sand pit next to the wall, at a set of weights on the floor, at the rolled-up wrestling mat, at a pair of spiked shoes kicked under a locker.
“Same old place, isn’t it?” he said, turning to me and nodding slightly.
After a moment I answered in a quiet voice, “Not exactly.”
He made no pretense of not understanding me. After a pause he said, “You’re going to be the big star now,” in an optimistic tone, and then added with some embarrassment, “You can fill any gaps or anything.” He slapped me on the back, “Get over there and chin yourself a few dozen times. What did you finally go out for anyway?”
“I finally didn’t go out.”
“You aren’t,” his eyes burned at me from his grimacing face, “still the assistant senior crew manager!”
“No, I quit that. I’ve just been going to gym classes. The ones they have for guys who aren’t going out for anything.”
He wrenched himself around on the bench. Joking was past; his mouth widened irritably. “What in hell,” his voice bounded on the word in a sudden rich descent, “did you do that for?”
“It was too late to sign up for anything else,” and seeing the energy to blast this excuse rushing to his face and neck I stumbled on, “and anyway with the war on there won’t be many trips for the teams. I don’t know, sports don’t seem so important with the war on.”
“Have you swallowed all that war stuff?”
“No, of course I—” I was so committed to refuting him that I had half-denied the charge before I understood it; now my eyes swung back to his face. “All what war stuff?”
“All that stuff about there being a war.”
“I don’t think I get what you mean.”
“Do you really think that the United States of America is in a state of war with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan?”
“Do I really think . . .” My voice trailed off.
He stood up, his weight on the good leg, the other resting lightly on the floor in front of him. “Don’t be a sap,” he gazed with cool self-possession at me, “there isn’t any war.”
“I know why you’re talking like this,” I said, struggling to keep up with him. “Now I understand. You’re still under the influence of some medicinal drug.”
“No, you are. Everybody is.” He pivoted so that he was facing directly at me. “That’s what this whole war story is. A medicinal drug. Listen, did you ever hear of the ‘Roaring Twenties’?” I nodded very slowly and cautiously. “When they all drank bathtub gin and everybody who was young did just what they wanted?”
“Yes.”
“Well what happened was that they didn’t like that, the preachers and the old ladies and all the stuffed shirts. So then they tried Prohibition and everybody just got drunker, so then they really got desperate and arranged the Depression. That kept the people who were young in the thirties in their places. But they couldn’t use that trick forever, so for us in the forties they’ve cooked up this war fake.”
“Who are ‘they,’ anyway?”
“The fat old men who don’t want us crowding them out of their jobs. They’ve made it all up. There isn’t any real food shortage, for instance. The men have all the best steaks delivered to their clubs now. You’ve noticed how they’ve been getting fatter lately, haven’t you?”
His tone took it thoroughly for granted that I had. For a moment I was almost taken in by it. Then my eyes fell on the bound and cast white mass pointing at me, and as it was always to do, it brought me down out of Finny’s world of invention, down again as I had fallen after awakening that morning, down to reality, to the facts.
“Phineas, this is all pretty amusing and everything, but I hope you don’t play this game too much with yourself. You might start to believe it and then I’d have to make a reservation for you at the Funny Farm.”
“In a way,” deep in argument, his eyes never wavered from mine, “the whole world is on a Funny Farm now. But it’s only the fat old men who get the joke.”
“And you.”
“Yes, and me.”
“What makes you so special? Why should you get it and all the rest of us be in the dark?”
The momentum of the argument abruptly broke from his control. His face froze. “Because I’ve suffered,” he burst out.
We drew back in amazement from this. In the silence all the flighty spirits of the morning ended between us. He sat down and turned his flushed face away from me. I sat next to him without moving for as long as my beating nerves would permit, and then I stood up and walked slowly toward anything which presented itself. It turned out to be the exercise bar. I sprang up, grabbed it, and then, in a fumbling and perhaps grotesque offering to Phineas, I chinned myself. I couldn’t think of anything else, not the right words, not the right gesture. I did what I could think of.
“Do thirty of them,” he mumbled in a bored voice.
I had never done ten of them. At the twelfth I discovered that he had been counting to himself because he began to count aloud in a noncommittal, half-heard voice. At eighteen there was a certain enlargement in his tone, and at twenty-three the last edges of boredom left it; he stood up, and the urgency with which he brought out the next numbers was like an invisible boost lifting me the distance of my arms, until he sang out “thirty!” with a flare of pleasure.
The moment was past. Phineas I know had been even more startled than I to discover this bitterness in himself. Neither of us ever mentioned it again, and neither of us ever forgot that it was there.
He sat down and studied his clenched hands. “Did I ever tell you,” he began in a husky tone, “that I used to be aiming for the Olympics?” He wouldn’t have mentioned it except that after what he had said he had to say something very personal, something deeply held. To do otherwise, to begin joking, would have been a hypocritical denial of what had happened, and Phineas was not capable of that.
I was still hanging from the bar; my hands felt as though they had sunk into it. “No, you never told me that,” I mumbled into my arm.
“Well I was. And now I’m not sure, not a hundred per cent sure I’ll be completely, you know, in shape by 1944. So I’m going to coach you for them instead.”
“But there isn’t going to be any Olympics in ’44. That’s only a couple of years away. The war—”
“Leave your fantasy life out of this. We’re grooming you for the Olympics, pal, in 1944.”
And not believing him, not forgetting that troops were being shuttled toward battlefields all over the world, I went along, as I always did, with any new invention of Finny’s. There was no harm in taking aim, even if the target was a dream.
But since we were so far out of the line of fire, the chief sustenance for any sense of the war was mental. We saw nothing real of it; all our impressions of the war were in the false medium of two dimensions—photographs in the papers and magazines, newsreels, posters—or artificially conveyed to us by a voice on the radio, or headlines across the top of a newspaper. I found that only through a continuous use of the imagination could I hold out against Finny’s driving offensive in favor of peace.
And now when we were served chicken livers for dinner I couldn’t help conceiving a mental picture of President Roosevelt and my father and Finny’s father and numbers of other large old men sitting down to porterhouse steak in some elaborate but secluded men’s secret society roo
m. When a letter from home told me that a trip to visit relatives had been canceled because of gas rationing it was easy to visualize my father smiling silently with knowing eyes—at least as easy as it was to imagine an American force crawling through the jungles of a place called Guadalcanal—“Wherever that is,” as Phineas said.
And when in chapel day after day we were exhorted to new levels of self-deprivation and hard work, with the war as their justification, it was impossible not to see that the faculty were using this excuse to drive us as they had always wanted to drive us, regardless of any war or peace.
What a joke if Finny was right after all!
But of course I didn’t believe him. I was too well protected against the great fear of boys’ school life, which is to be “taken in.” Along with everyone else except a few professional gulls such as Leper, I rejected anything which had the smallest possibility of doubt about it. So of course I didn’t believe him. But one day after our chaplain, Mr. Carhart, had become very moved by his own sermon in chapel about God in the Foxholes, I came away thinking that if Finny’s opinion of the war was unreal, Mr. Carhart’s was at least as unreal. But of course I didn’t believe him.
And anyway I was too occupied to think about it all. In addition to my own work, I was dividing my time between tutoring Finny in studies and being tutored by him in sports. Since so much of learning anything depends on the atmosphere in which it is taught, Finny and I, to our joint double amazement, began to make flashing progress where we had been bumblers before.
Mornings we got up at six to run. I dressed in a gym sweat suit with a towel tucked around my throat, and Finny in pajamas, ski boots and his sheep-lined coat.
A morning shortly before Christmas vacation brought my reward. I was to run the course Finny had laid out, four times around an oval walk which circled the Headmaster’s home, a large rambling, doubtfully Colonial white mansion. Next to the house there was a patriarchal elm tree, against the trunk of which Finny leaned and shouted at me as I ran a large circle around him.
This plain of snow shone a powdery white that morning; the sun blazed icily somewhere too low on the horizon to be seen directly, but its clean rays shed a blue-white glimmer all around us. The northern sunshine seemed to pick up faint particles of whiteness floating in the air and powdering the sleek blue sky. Nothing stirred. The bare arching branches of the elm seemed laid into this motionless sky. As I ran the sound of my footfalls was pitched off short in the vast immobile dawn, as though there was no room amid so many glittering sights for any sound to intrude. The figure of Phineas was set against the bulk of the tree; he shouted now and then, but these sounds too were quickly absorbed and dispelled.
And he needed to give no advice that morning. After making two circuits of the walk every trace of energy was as usual completely used up, and as I drove myself on all my scattered aches found their usual way to a profound seat of pain in my side. My lungs as usual were fed up with all this work, and from now on would only go rackingly through the motions. My knees were boneless again, ready any minute to let my lower legs telescope up into the thighs. My head felt as though different sections of the cranium were grinding into each other.
Then, for no reason at all, I felt magnificent. It was as though my body until that instant had simply been lazy, as though the aches and exhaustion were all imagined, created from nothing in order to keep me from truly exerting myself. Now my body seemed at last to say, “Well, if you must have it, here!” and an accession of strength came flooding through me. Buoyed up, I forgot my usual feeling of routine self-pity when working out, I lost myself, oppressed mind along with aching body; all entanglements were shed, I broke into the clear.
After the fourth circuit, like sitting in a chair, I pulled up in front of Phineas.
“You’re not even winded,” he said.
“I know.”
“You found your rhythm, didn’t you, that third time around. Just as you came into that straight part there.”
“Yes, right there.”
“You’ve been pretty lazy all along, haven’t you?”
“Yes, I guess I have been.”
“You didn’t even know anything about yourself.”
“I don’t guess I did, in a way.”
“Well,” he gathered the sheepskin collar around his throat, “now you know. And stop talking like a Georgia cracker—‘don’t guess I did’!” Despite this gibe he was rather impersonal toward me. He seemed older that morning, and leaning quietly against that great tree wrapped in his heavy coat, he seemed smaller too. Or perhaps it was only that I, inside the same body, had felt myself all at once grown bigger.
We proceeded slowly back to the dormitory. On the steps going in we met Mr. Ludsbury coming out.
“I’ve been watching you from my window,” he said in his hooting voice with a rare trace of personal interest. “What are you up to, Forrester, training for the Commandos?” There was no rule explicitly forbidding exercise at such an hour, but it was not expected; ordinarily therefore Mr. Ludsbury would have disapproved. But the war had modified even his standards; all forms of physical exercise had become conventional for the Duration.
I mumbled some abashed answer, but it was Phineas who made the clear response.
“He’s developing into a real athlete,” he said matter-of-factly. “We’re aiming for the ’44 Olympics.”
Mr. Ludsbury emitted a single chuckle from deep in his throat, then his face turned brick red momentarily and he assumed his customary sententiousness. “Games are all right in their place,” he said, “and I won’t bore you with the Eton Playing Fields observation, but all exercise today is aimed of course at the approaching Waterloo. Keep that in your sights at all times, won’t you.”
Finny’s face set in determination, with the older look I had just detected in him. “No,” he said.
I don’t believe any student had ever said “No” flatly to Mr. Ludsbury before. It flustered him uncontrollably. His face turned brick red again, and for a moment I thought he was going to run away. Then he said something so rapid, throaty, and clipped that neither of us understood it, turned quickly and strode off across the quadrangle.
“He’s really sincere, he thinks there’s a war on,” said Finny in simple wonder. “Now why wouldn’t he know?” He pondered Mr. Ludsbury’s exclusion from the plot of the fat old men as we watched his figure, reedy even in his winter wraps, move away from us. Then the light broke. “Oh, of course!” he cried. “Too thin. Of course.”
I stood there pitying Mr. Ludsbury for his fatal thinness and reflecting that after all he had always had a gullible side.
9
This was my first but not my last lapse into Finny’s vision of peace. For hours, and sometimes for days, I fell without realizing it into the private explanation of the world. Not that I ever believed that the whole production of World War II was a trick of the eye manipulated by a bunch of calculating fat old men, appealing though this idea was. What deceived me was my own happiness; for peace is indivisible, and the surrounding world confusion found no reflection inside me. So I ceased to have any real sense of it.
This was not shaken even by the enlistment of Leper Lepellier. In fact that made the war seem more unreal than ever. No real war could draw Leper voluntarily away from his snails and beaver dams. His enlistment seemed just another of Leper’s vagaries, such as the time he slept on top of Mount Katahdin in Maine where each morning the sun first strikes United States territory. On that morning, satisfying one of his urges to participate in nature, Leper Lepellier was the first thing the rising sun struck in the United States.
Early in January, when we had all just returned from the Christmas holidays, a recruiter from the United States ski troops showed a film to the senior class in the Renaissance Room. To Leper it revealed what all of us were seeking: a recognizable and friendly face to the war. Skiers in white shrouds winged down virgin slopes, silent as angels, and then, realistically, herringboned up again, but herring-bon
ed in cheerful, sunburned bands, with clear eyes and white teeth and chests full of vigor-laden mountain air. It was the cleanest image of war I had ever seen; even the Air Force, reputedly so high above the infantry’s mud, was stained with axle grease by comparison, and the Navy was vulnerable to scurvy. Nothing tainted these white warriors of winter as they swooped down their spotless mountain-sides, and this cool, clean response to war glided straight into Leper’s Vermont heart.
“How do you like that!” he whispered to me in a wondering voice during these scenes. “How do you like that!”
“You know, I think these are pictures of Finnish ski troops,” Phineas whispered on the other side, “and I want to know when they start shooting our allies the Bolsheviks. Unless that war between them was a fake too, which I’m pretty sure it was.”
After the movie ended and the lights came on to illuminate the murals of Tuscany and the painted classical galleries around us, Leper still sat amazed in his folding chair. Ordinarily he talked little, and the number of words which came from him now indicated that this was a turning point in his life.
“You know what? Now I see what racing skiing is all about. It’s all right to miss seeing the trees and the countryside and all the other things when you’ve got to be in a hurry. And when you’re in a war you’ve got to be in a hurry. Don’t you? So I guess maybe racing skiers weren’t ruining the sport after all. They were preparing it, if you see what I mean, for the future. Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.” Finny and I had stood up, and Leper looked earnestly from one to the other of us from his chair. “Take the housefly. If it hadn’t developed all those split-second reflexes it would have become extinct long ago.”
“You mean it adapted itself to the fly swatter?” queried Phineas.
“That’s right. And skiing had to learn to move just as fast or it would have been wiped out by this war. Yes, sir. You know what? I’m almost glad this war came along. It’s like a test, isn’t it, and only the things and the people who’ve been evolving the right way survive.”