Chapter 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 bin 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, Tm 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.

By luck I got a taxi at South Station, and instead of saying “North Station” to the driver, instead of just crossing Boston and catching the final train for the short last leg of the trip to Devon, instead of that I sat back in the seat and heard myself give the address of Finny’s house on the outskirts.

We found it fairly easily, on a street with a nave of ancient elms branching over it. The house itself was high, white, and oddly proper to be the home of Phineas. It presented a face of definite elegance to the street, although behind that wings and ells dwindled quickly in formality until the house ended in a big plain barn.

Nothing surprised Phineas. A cleaning woman answered the door and when I came into the room where he was sitting, he looked very pleased and not at all surprised.

“So you are going to show up! ” his voice took off in one of its flights, “and you brought me something to eat from down South, didn’t you? Honeysuckle and molasses or something like that? ” I tried to think of something funny. “Corn bread? You did bring something. You didn’t go all the way to Dixie and then come back with nothing but your dismal face to show for it. ” His talk rolled on, ignoring and covering my look of shock and clumsiness. I was silenced by the sight of him propped by white hospital-looking pillows in a big armchair. Despite everything at the Devon Infirmary, he had seemed an athlete there, temporarily injured in a game; as though the trainer would come in any minute and tape him up. Propped now before a great New England fireplace, on this quiet old street, he looked to me like an invalid, house-bound.

“I brought … Well I never remember to bring anyone anything. ” I struggled to get my voice above this self-accusing murmur. “I’ll send you something. Flowers or something. ”

“Flowers! What happened to you in Dixie anyway? ”

“Well then, ” there was no light remark anywhere in my head, “I’ll get you some books. ”

“Never mind about books. I’d rather have some talk. What happened down South? ”

“As a matter of fact, ” I brought out all the cheerfulness I could find for this, “there was a fire. It was just a grass fire out behind our house. We … took some brooms and beat it. I guess what we really did was fan it because it just kept getting bigger until the Fire Department finally came. They could tell where it was because of all the flaming brooms we were waving around in the air, trying to put them out. ”

Finny liked that story. But it put us on the familiar friendly level, pals trading stories. How was I going to begin talking about it? It would not be just a thunderbolt. It wouldn’t even seem real.

Not in this conversation, not in this room. I wished I had met him in a railroad station, or at some highway intersection. Not here. Here the small window panes shone from much polishing and the walls were hung with miniatures and old portraits. The chairs were either heavily upholstered and too comfortable to stay awake in or Early American and never used. There were several square, solid tables covered with family pictures and random books and magazines, and also three small, elegant tables not used for anything. It was a compromise of a room, with a few good “pieces’” for guests to look at, and the rest of it for people to use.

But I had known Finny in an impersonal dormitory, a gym, a playing field. In the room we shared at Devon many strangers had lived before us, and many would afterward. It was there that I had done it, but it was here that I would have to tell it I felt like a wild man who had stumbled in from the jungle to tear the place apart.

I moved back in the Early American chair. Its rigid back and high armrests immediately forced me into a righteous posture. My blood could start to pound if it wanted to; let it. I was going ahead. “I was dunking about you most of the trip up. ”

“Oh yeah? ” He glanced briefly into my eyes.

“I was thinking about you … and the accident. ”

“There’s loyalty for you. To think about me when you were on a vacation. ”

“I was thinking about it … about you because—I was thinking about you and the accident because I caused it. ”

Finny looked steadily at me, his face very handsome and expressionless. “What do you mean, you caused it? ” his voice was as steady as his eyes.

My own voice sounded quiet and foreign. “I jounced the limb. I caused it. ” One more sentence. “I deliberately jounced the limb so you would fall off. ”

He looked older than I had ever seen him. “Of course you didn’t. ”

“Yes I did. I did! ”

“Of course you didn’t do it. You damn fool. Sit down, you damn fool. ”

“Of course I did! ”

I’m going to hit you if you don’t sit down. ”

“Hit me! ” I looked at him. “Hit me! You can’t even get up! You can’t even come near me! ”

“I’ll kill you if you don’t shut up. ”

“You see! Kill me! Now you know what it is! I did it because I felt like that! Now you know yourself! ”

“I don’t know anything. Go away. I’m tired and you make me sick. Go away. ” He held his forehead wearily, an unlikely way.

It struck me then that I was injuring him again. It occurred to me that this could be an even deeper injury than what I had done before. I would have to back out of it, I would have to disown it. Could it be that he might even be right? Had I really and definitely and knowingly done it to him after all? I couldn’t remember, I couldn’t think. However it was, it was worse for him to know it. I had to take it back.

But not here. “You’ll be back at Devon in a few weeks, won’t you? ” I muttered after both of us had sat in silence for a while.

“Sure, I’ll be there by Thanksgiving anyway. ”

At Devon, where every stick of furniture didn’t assert that Finny was a part of it, I could make it up to him.

Now I had to get out of there. There was only one way to do it; I would have to make every move false. “I’ve had an awfully long trip, ” I said, “I never sleep much on trains. I guess I’m not making too much sense today. ”

“Don’t worry about it. ”

“I think I’d better get to the station. I’m already a day late at Devon. ”

“You aren’t going to start living by the rules, are you? ”

I grinned at him. “Oh no, I wouldn’t do that, ” and that was the most false thing, the biggest lie of all.