A Separate Peace

  Finny had no way of knowing this, because it all happened so far ahead of him scholastically. In class he generally sat slouched in his chair, his alert face following the discussion with an expression of philosophical comprehension, and when he was forced to speak himself the hypnotic power of his voice combined with the singularity of his mind to produce answers which were often not right but could rarely be branded as wrong. Written tests were his downfall because he could not speak them, and as a result he got grades which were barely passing. It wasn’t that he never worked, because he did work, in short, intense bouts now and then. As that crucial summer wore on and I tightened the discipline on myself Phineas increased his bouts of studying.

  I could see through that. I was more and more certainly becoming the best student in the school; Phineas was without question the best athlete, so in that way we were even. But while he was a very poor student I was a pretty good athlete, and when everything was thrown into the scales they would in the end tilt definitely toward me. The new attacks of studying were his emergency measures to save himself. I redoubled my effort.

  It was surprising how well we got along in these weeks. Sometimes I found it hard to remember his treachery, sometimes I discovered myself thoughtlessly slipping back into affection for him again. It was hard to remember when one summer day after another broke with a cool effulgence over us, and there was a breath of widening life in the morning air—something hard to describe—an oxygen intoxicant, a shining northern paganism, some odor, some feeling so hopelessly promising that I would fall back in my bed on guard against it. It was hard to remember in the heady and sensual clarity of these mornings; I forgot whom I hated and who hated me. I wanted to break out crying from stabs of hopeless joy, or intolerable promise, or because these mornings were too full of beauty for me, because I knew of too much hate to be contained in a world like this.

  Summer lazed on. No one paid any attention to us. One day I found myself describing to Mr. Prud’homme how Phineas and I had slept on the beach, and he seemed to be quite interested in it, in all the details, so much so that he missed the point: that we had flatly broken a basic rule.

  No one cared, no one exercised any real discipline over us; we were on our own.

  August arrived with a deepening of all the summertime splendors of New Hampshire. Early in the month we had two days of light, steady rain which aroused a final fullness everywhere. The branches of the old trees, which had been familiar to me either half-denuded or completely gaunt during the winter terms at Devon, now seemed about to break from their storms of leaves. Little disregarded patches of ground revealed that they had been gardens all along, and nondescript underbrush around the gymnasium and the river broke into color. There was a latent freshness in the air, as though spring were returning in the middle of the summer.

  But examinations were at hand. I wasn’t as ready for them as I wanted to be. The Suicide Society continued to meet every evening, and I continued to attend, because I didn’t want Finny to understand me as I understood him.

  And also I didn’t want to let him excel me in this, even though I knew that it didn’t matter whether he showed me up at the tree or not. Because it was what you had in your heart that counted. And I had detected that Finny’s was a den of lonely, selfish ambition. He was no better than I was, no matter who won all the contests.

  A French examination was announced for one Friday late in August. Finny and I studied for it in the library Thursday afternoon; I went over vocabulary lists, and he wrote messages—je ne give a damn pas about le francais, les filles en France ne wear pas les pantelons—and passed them with great seriousness to me, as aide-mémoire. Of course I didn’t get any work done. After supper I went to our room to try again. Phineas came in a couple of minutes later.

  “Arise,” he began airily, “Senior Overseer Charter Member! Elwin ‘Leper’ Lepellier has announced his intention to make the leap this very night, to qualify, to save his face at last.”

  I didn’t believe it for a second. Leper Lepellier would go down paralyzed with panic on any sinking troopship before making such a jump. Finny had put him up to it, to finish me for good on the exam. I turned around with elaborate resignation. “If he jumps out of that tree I’m Mahatma Gandhi.”

  “All right,” agreed Finny absently. He had a way of turning clichés inside out like that. “Come on, let’s go. We’ve got to be there. You never know, maybe he will do it this time.”

  “Oh, for God sake.” I slammed closed the French book.

  “What’s the matter?”

  What a performance! His face was completely questioning and candid.

  “Studying!” I snarled. “Studying! You know, books. Work. Examinations.”

  “Yeah . . .” He waited for me to go on, as though he didn’t see what I was getting at.

  “Oh for God sake! You don’t know what I’m talking about. No, of course not. Not you.” I stood up and slammed the chair against the desk. “Okay, we go. We watch little lily-liver Lepellier not jump from the tree, and I ruin my grade.”

  He looked at me with an interested, surprised expression. “You want to study?”

  I began to feel a little uneasy at this mildness of his, so I sighed heavily. “Never mind, forget it. I know, I joined the club, I’m going. What else can I do?”

  “Don’t go.” He said it very simply and casually, as though he were saying, “Nice day.” He shrugged, “Don’t go. What the hell, it’s only a game.”

  I had stopped halfway across the room, and now I just looked at him. “What d’you mean?” I muttered. What he meant was clear enough, but I was groping for what lay behind his words, for what his thoughts could possibly be. I might have asked, “Who are you, then?” instead. I was facing a total stranger.

  “I didn’t know you needed to study,” he said simply, “I didn’t think you ever did. I thought it just came to you.”

  It seemed that he had made some kind of parallel between my studies and his sports. He probably thought anything you were good at came without effort. He didn’t know yet that he was unique.

  I couldn’t quite achieve a normal speaking voice. “If I need to study, then so do you.”

  “Me?” He smiled faintly. “Listen, I could study forever and I’d never break C. But it’s different for you, you’re good. You really are. If I had a brain like that, I’d—I’d have my head cut open so people could look at it.”

  “Now wait a second . . .”

  He put his hands on the back of a chair and leaned toward me. “I know. We kid around a lot and everything, but you have to be serious sometime, about something. If you’re really good at something, I mean if there’s nobody, or hardly anybody, who’s as good as you are, then you’ve got to be serious about that. Don’t mess around, for God’s sake.” He frowned disapprovingly at me. “Why didn’t you say you had to study before? Don’t move from that desk. It’s going to be all A’s for you.”

  “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 cou
ldn’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.

  5

  None 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 t
he 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.”