He had a tough bantam body, easily detectable under the tight sweat shirt he wore. “I wrestle in the winter,” he went on. “What are you doing in the winter?”
“I don’t know, manage something else.”
“You’re a senior aren’t you?”
He knew that I was a senior. “Yeah.”
“Starting a little late to manage teams aren’t you?”
“Am I?”
“Damn right you are!” He put indignant conviction into this, pouncing on the first sprig of assertiveness in me.
“Well, it doesn’t matter.”
“Yes it matters.”
“I don’t think it does.”
“Go to hell Forrester. Who the hell are you anyway.”
I turned with an inward groan to look at him. Quack-enbush wasn’t going to let me just do the work for him like the automaton I wished to be. We were going to have to be pitted against each other. It was easy enough now to see why. For Quackenbush had been systematically disliked since he first set foot in Devon, with careless, disinterested insults coming at him from the beginning, voting for and applauding the class leaders through years of attaining nothing he wanted for himself. I didn’t want to add to his humiliations; I even sympathized with his trembling, goaded egotism he could no longer contain, the furious arrogance which sprang out now at the mere hint of opposition from someone he had at last found whom he could consider inferior to himself. I realized that all this explained him, and it wasn’t the words he said which angered me. It was only that he was so ignorant, that he knew nothing of the gypsy summer, nothing of the loss I was fighting to endure, of skylarks and splashes and petal-bearing breezes, he had not seen Leper’s snails or the Charter of the Super Suicide Society; he shared nothing, knew nothing, felt nothing as Phineas had done.
“You, Quackenbush, don’t know anything about who I am.” That launched me, and I had to go on and say, “or anything else.”
“Listen you maimed son-of-a-bitch . . .”
I hit him hard across the face. I didn’t know why for an instant; it was almost as though I were maimed. Then the realization that there was someone who was flashed over me.
Quackenbush had clamped his arm in some kind of tight wrestling grip around my neck, and I was glad in this moment not to be a cripple. I reached over, grasped the back of his sweat shirt, wrenched, and it came away in my hand. I tried to throw him off, he lunged at the same time, and we catapulted into the water.
The dousing extinguished Quackenbush’s rage, and he let go of me. I scrambled back onto the float, still seared by what he had said. “The next time you call anybody maimed,” I bit off the words harshly so he would understand all of them, “you better make sure they are first.”
“Get out of here, Forrester,” he said bitterly from the water, “you’re not wanted around here, Forrester. Get out of here.”
I fought that battle, that first skirmish of a long campaign, for Finny. Until the back of my hand cracked against Quackenbush’s face I had never pictured myself in the role of Finny’s defender, and I didn’t suppose that he would have thanked me for it now. He was too loyal to anything connected with himself—his roommate, his dormitory, his class, his school, outward in vastly expanded circles of loyalty until I couldn’t imagine who would be excluded. But it didn’t feel exactly as though I had done it for Phineas. It felt as though I had done it for myself.
If so I had little profit to show as I straggled back toward the dormitory dripping wet, with the job I had wanted gone, temper gone, mind circling over and over through the whole soured afternoon. I knew now that it was fall all right; I could feel it pressing clammily against my wet clothes, an unfriendly, discomforting breath in the air, an edge of wintery chill, air that shriveled, soon to put out the lights on the countryside. One of my legs wouldn’t stop trembling, whether from cold or anger I couldn’t tell. I wished I had hit him harder.
Someone was coming toward me along the bent, broken lane which led to the dormitory, a lane out of old London, ancient houses on either side leaning as though soon to tumble into it, cobblestones heaving underfoot like a bricked-over ocean squall—a figure of great height advanced down them toward me. It could only be Mr. Ludsbury; no one else could pass over these stones with such contempt for the idea of tripping.
The houses on either side were inhabited by I didn’t know who; wispy, fragile old ladies seemed most likely. I couldn’t duck into one of them. There were angles and bumps and bends everywhere, but none big enough to conceal me. Mr. Ludsbury loomed on like a high-masted clipper ship in this rocking passage, and I tried to go stealthily by him on my watery, squeaking sneakers.
“Just one moment, Forrester, if you please.” Mr. Ludsbury’s voice was bass, British, and his Adam’s apple seemed to move as much as his mouth when he spoke. “Has there been a cloudburst in your part of town?”
“No, sir. I’m sorry, sir, I fell into the river.” I apologized by instinct to him for this mishap which discomforted only me.
“And could you tell me how and why you fell into the river?”
“I slipped.”
“Yes.” After a pause he went on. “I think you have slipped in any number of ways since last year. I understand for example that there was gaming in my dormitory this summer while you were living there.” He was in charge of the dormitory; one of the dispensations of those days of deliverance, I realized now, had been his absence.
“Gaming? What kind of gaming, sir?”
“Cards, dice,” he shook his long hand dismissingly, “I didn’t inquire. It didn’t matter. There won’t be any more of it.”
“I don’t know who that would have been.” Nights of black-jack and poker and unpredictable games invented by Phineas rose up in my mind; the back room of Leper’s suite, a lamp hung with a blanket so that only a small blazing circle of light fell sharply amid the surrounding darkness; Phineas losing even in those games he invented, betting always for what should win, for what would have been the most brilliant successes of all, if only the cards hadn’t betrayed him. Finny finally betting his icebox and losing it, that contraption, to me.
I thought of it because Mr. Ludsbury was just then saying, “And while I’m putting the dormitory back together I’d better tell you to get rid of that leaking icebox. Nothing like that is ever permitted in the dormitory, of course. I notice that everything went straight to seed during the summer and that none of you old boys who knew our standards so much as lifted a finger to help Mr. Prud’homme maintain order. As a substitute for the summer he couldn’t have been expected to know everything there was to be known at once. You old boys simply took advantage of the situation.”
I stood there shaking in my wet sneakers. If only I had truly taken advantage of the situation, seized and held and prized the multitudes of advantages the summer offered me; if only I had.
I said nothing, on my face I registered the bleak look of a defendant who knows the court will never be swayed by all the favorable evidence he has. It was a schoolboy look; Mr. Ludsbury knew it well.
“There’s a long-distance call for you,” he continued in the tone of the judge performing the disagreeable duty of telling the defendant his right. “I’ve written the operator’s number on the pad beside the telephone in my study. You may go in and call.”
“Thank you very much, sir.”
He sailed on down the lane without further reference to me, and I wondered who was sick at home.
But when I reached his study—low-ceilinged, gloomy with books, black leather chairs, a pipe rack, frayed brown rug, a room which students rarely entered except for a reprimand—I saw on the pad not an operator’s number from my home town, but one which seemed to interrupt the beating of my heart.
I called this operator, and listened in wonder while she went through her routine as though this were just any long-distance call, and then her voice left the line and it was pre-empted, and charged, by the voice of Phineas. “Happy first day of the new academic year
!”
“Thanks, thanks a lot, it’s a—you sound—I’m glad to hear your—”
“Stop stuttering, I’m paying for this. Who’re you rooming with?”
“Nobody. They didn’t put anyone else in the room.”
“Saving my place for me! Good old Devon. But anyway, you wouldn’t have let them put anyone else in there, would you?” Friendliness, simple outgoing affection, that was all I could hear in his voice.
“No, of course not.”
“I didn’t think you would. Roommates are roommates. Even if they do have an occasional fight. God you were crazy when you were here.”
“I guess I was. I guess I must have been.”
“Completely over the falls. I wanted to be sure you’d recovered. That’s why I called up. I knew that if you’d let them put anybody else in the room in my place, then you really were crazy. But you didn’t, I knew you wouldn’t. Well, I did have just a trace of doubt, that was because you talked so crazy here. I have to admit I had just a second when I wondered. I’m sorry about that, Gene. Naturally I was completely wrong. You didn’t let them put anyone else in my spot.”
“No, I didn’t let them.”
“I could shoot myself for thinking you might. I really knew you wouldn’t.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“And I spent my money on a long-distance call! All for nothing. Well, it’s spent, on you too. So start talking, pal. And it better be good. Start with sports. What are you going out for?”
“Crew. Well, not exactly crew. Managing crew. Assistant crew manager.”
“Assistant crew manager!”
“I don’t think I’ve got the job—”
“Assistant crew manager!”
“I got in a fight this after—”
“Assistant crew manager!” No voice could course with dumfoundment like Finny’s. “You are crazy!”
“Listen, Finny, I don’t care about being a big man on the campus or anything.”
“Whaaat?” Much more clearly than anything in Mr. Ludsbury’s study I could see his face now, grimacing in wide, obsessed stupefaction. “Who said anything about whoever they are!”
“Well then what are you so worked up for?”
“What do you want to manage crew for? What do you want to manage for? What’s that got to do with sports?”
The point was, the grace of it was, that it had nothing to do with sports. For I wanted no more of sports. They were barred from me, as though when Dr. Stanpole said, “Sports are finished” he had been speaking of me. I didn’t trust myself in them, and I didn’t trust anyone else. It was as though football players were really bent on crushing the life out of each other, as though boxers were in combat to the death, as though even a tennis ball might turn into a bullet. This didn’t seem completely crazy imagination in 1942, when jumping out of trees stood for abandoning a torpedoed ship. Later, in the school swimming pool, we were given the second stage in that rehearsal: after you hit the water you made big splashes with your hands, to scatter the flaming oil which would be on the surface.
So to Phineas I said, “I’m too busy for sports,” and he went into his incoherent groans and jumbles of words, and I thought the issue was settled until at the end he said, “Listen, pal, if I can’t play sports, you’re going to play them for me,” and I lost part of myself to him then, and a soaring sense of freedom revealed that this must have been my purpose from the first: to become a part of Phineas.
7
Brinker Hadley came across to see me late that afternoon. I had taken a shower to wash off the sticky salt of the Naguamsett River—going into the Devon was like taking a refreshing shower itself, you never had to clean up after it, but the Naguamsett was something else entirely. I had never been in it before; it seemed appropriate that my baptism there had taken place on the first day of this winter session, and that I had been thrown into it, in the middle of a fight.
I washed the traces off me and then put on a pair of chocolate brown slacks, a pair which Phineas had been particularly critical of when he wasn’t wearing them, and a blue flannel shirt. Then, with nothing to do until my French class at five o’clock, I began turning over in my mind this question of sports.
But Brinker came in. I think he made a point of visiting all the rooms near him the first day. “Well, Gene,” his beaming face appeared around the door. Brinker looked the standard preparatory school article in his gray gabardine suit with square, hand-sewn-looking jacket pockets, a conservative necktie, and dark brown cordovan shoes. His face was all straight lines—eyebrows, mouth, nose, every-thing—and he carried his six feet of height straight as well. He looked but happened not to be athletic, being too busy with politics, arrangements, and offices. There was nothing idiosyncratic about Brinker unless you saw him from behind; I did as he turned to close the door after him. The flaps of his gabardine jacket parted slightly over his healthy rump, and it is that, without any sense of derision at all, that I recall as Brinker’s salient characteristic, those healthy, determined, not over-exaggerated but definite and substantial buttocks.
“Here you are in your solitary splendor,” he went on genially. “I can see you have real influence around here. This big room all to yourself. I wish I knew how to manage things like you.” He grinned confidingly and sank down on my cot, leaning on his elbow in a relaxed, at-home way.
It didn’t seem fitting for Brinker Hadley, the hub of the class, to be congratulating me on influence. I was going to say that while he had a roommate it was frightened Brownie Perkins, who would never impinge on Brinker’s comfort in any way, and that they had two rooms, the front one with a fireplace. Not that I grudged him any of this. I liked Brinker in spite of his Winter Session efficiency; almost everyone liked Brinker.
But in the pause I took before replying he started talking in his lighthearted way again. He never let a dull spot appear in conversation if he could help it.
“I’ll bet you knew all the time Finny wouldn’t be back this fall. That’s why you picked him for a roommate, right?”
“What?” I pulled quickly around in my chair, away from the desk, and faced him. “No, of course not. How could I know a thing like that in advance?”
Brinker glanced swiftly at me. “You fixed it,” he smiled widely. “You knew all the time. I’ll bet it was all your doing.”
“Don’t be nutty, Brinker,” I turned back toward the desk and began moving books with rapid pointlessness, “what a crazy thing to say.” My voice sounded too strained even to my own blood-pounded ears.
“Ah-h-h. The truth hurts, eh?”
I looked at him as sharply as eyes can look. He had struck an accusing pose.
“Sure,” I gave a short laugh, “sure.” Then these words came out of me by themselves, “But the truth will out.”
His hand fell leadenly on my shoulder. “Rest assured of that, my son. In our free democracy, even fighting for its life, the truth will out.”
I got up. “I feel like a smoke, don’t you? Let’s go down to the Butt Room.”
“Yes, yes. To the dungeon with you.”
The Butt Room was something like a dungeon. It was in the basement, or the bowels, of the dormitory. There were about ten smokers already there. Everyone at Devon had many public faces; in class we looked, if not exactly scholarly, at least respectably alert; on the playing fields we looked like innocent extroverts; and in the Butt Room we looked, very strongly, like criminals. The school’s policy, in order to discourage smoking, was to make these rooms as depressing as possible. The windows near the ceiling were small and dirty, the old leather furniture spilled its innards, the tables were mutilated, the walls ash-colored, the floor concrete. A radio with a faulty connection played loud and rasping for a while, then suddenly quiet and insinuating.
“Here’s your prisoner, gentlemen,” announced Brinker, seizing my neck and pushing me into the Butt Room ahead of him, “I’m turning him over to the proper authorities.”
High spirits came hard
in the haze of the Butt Room. A slumped figure near the radio, which happened to be playing loud at the moment, finally roused himself to say, “What’s the charge?”
“Doing away with his roommate so he could have a whole room to himself. Rankest treachery.” He paused impressively. “Practically fratricide.”
With a snap of the neck I shook his hand off me, my teeth set, “Brinker . . .”
He raised an arresting hand. “Not a word. Not a sound. You’ll have your day in court.”
“God damn it! Shut up! I swear to God you ride a joke longer than anybody I know.”
It was a mistake; the radio had suddenly gone quiet, and my voice ringing in the abrupt, releasing hush galvanized them all.
“So, you killed him, did you?” A boy uncoiled tensely from the couch.
“Well,” Brinker qualified judiciously, “not actually killed. Finny’s hanging between life and death at home, in the arms of his grief-stricken old mother.”
I had to take part in this, or risk losing control completely. “I didn’t do hardly a thing,” I began as easily as it was possible for me to do, “I—all I did was drop a little bit . . . a little pinch of arsenic in his morning coffee.”
“Liar!” Brinker glowered at me. “Trying to weasel out of it with a false confession, eh?”
I laughed at that, laughed uncontrollably for a moment at that.
“We know the scene of the crime,” Brinker went on, “high in that . . . that funereal tree by the river. There wasn’t any poison, nothing as subtle as that.”
“Oh, you know about the tree,” I tried to let my face fall guiltily, but it felt instead as though it were being dragged downward. “Yes, huh, yes there was a small, a little contretemps at the tree.”
No one was diverted from the issue by this try at a funny French pronunciation.
“Tell us everything,” a younger boy at the table said huskily. There was an unsettling current in his voice, a genuinely conspiratorial note, as though he believed literally everything that had been said. His attitude seemed to me almost obscene, the attitude of someone who discovers a sexual secret of yours and promises not to tell a soul if you will describe it in detail to him.