A Separate Peace Ch. 3

Chapter 3
Yes, he had practically saved my life. He had also practically lost it for me. I wouldn’t have been on that damn limb except for him. I wouldn’t have turned around, and so lost my balance, if he hadn’t been there. I didn’t need to feel any tremendous rush of gratitude toward Phineas.
The Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session was a success from the start. That night Finny began to talk abstractedly about it, as though it were a venerable, entrenched institution of the Devon School. The half-dozen friends who were there in our room listening began to bring up small questions on details without ever quite saying that they had never heard of such a club. Schools are supposed to be catacombed with secret societies and underground brotherhoods, and as far as they knew here was one which had just come to the surface. They signed up as “trainees” on the spot.
We began to meet every night to initiate them. The Charter Members, he and I, had to open every meeting by jumping ourselves. This was the first of the many rules which Finny created without notice during the summer. I hated it. I never got inured to the jumping. At every meeting the limb seemed higher, thinner, the deeper water harder to reach. Every time, when I got myself into position to jump, I felt a flash of disbelief that I was doing anything so perilous. But I always jumped. Otherwise I would have lost face with Phineas, and that would have been unthinkable.
We met every night, because Finny’s life was ruled by inspiration and anarchy, and so he prized a set of rules. His own, not those imposed on him by other people, such as the faculty of the Devon School. The Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session was a club; clubs by definition met regularly; we met every night. Nothing could be more regular than that. To meet once a week seemed to him much less regular, entirely too haphazard, bordering on carelessness.
I went along; I never missed a meeting. At that time it would never have occurred to me to say, “I don’t feel like it tonight,” which was the plain truth every night. I was subject to the dictates of my mind, which gave me the maneuverability of a strait jacket. “We’re off, pal,” Finny would call out, and acting against every instinct of my nature, I went without a thought of protest.
As we drifted on through the summer, with this one inflexible appointment every day—classes could be cut, meals missed, Chapel skipped—I noticed something about Finny’s own mind, which was such an opposite from mine. It wasn’t completely unleashed after all. I noticed that he did abide by certain rules, which he seemed to cast in the form of Commandments. “Never say you are five feet nine when you are five feet eight and a half” was the first one I encountered. Another was, “Always say some prayers at night because it might turn out that there is a God.”
But the one which had the most urgent influence in his life was, “You always win at sports.” This “you” was collective. Everyone always won at sports. When you played a game you won, in the same way as when you sat down to a meal you ate it. It inevitably and naturally followed. Finny never permitted himself to realize that when you won they lost. That would have destroyed the perfect beauty which was sport. Nothing bad ever happened in sports; they were the absolute good.
He was disgusted with that summer’s athletic program—a little tennis, some swimming, clumsy softball games, badminton. “Badminton!” he exploded the day it entered the schedule. He said nothing else, but the shocked, outraged, despairing note of anguish in the word said all the rest. “Badminton! ”
“At least it’s not as bad as the seniors,” I said, handing him the fragile racquet and the fey shuttlecock. “They’re doing calisthenics.”
“What are they trying to do?” He swatted the shuttlecock the length of the locker room. “Destroy us?” Humor infiltrated the outrage in his voice, which meant that he was thinking of a way out.
We went outside into the cordial afternoon sunshine. The playing fields were optimistically green and empty before us. The tennis courts were full. The softball diamond was busy. A pattern of badminton nets swayed sensually in the breeze. Finny eyed them with quiet astonishment. Far down the fields toward the river there was a wooden tower about ten feet high where the instructor had stood to direct the senior calisthenics. It was empty now. The seniors had been trotted off to the improvised obstacle course in the woods, or to have their blood pressure taken again, or to undergo an insidious exercise in The Cage which consisted in stepping up on a box and down again in rapid rhythm for five minutes. They were off somewhere, shaping up for the war. All of the fields were ours.
Finny began to walk slowly in the direction of the tower. Perhaps he was thinking that we might carry it the rest of the way to the river and throw it in; perhaps he was just interested in looking at it, as he was in everything. Whatever he thought, he forgot it when we reached the tower. Beside it someone had left a large and heavy leather-covered ball, a medicine ball.
He picked it up. “Now this, you see, is everything in the world you need for sports. When they discovered the circle they created sports. As for this thing,” embracing the medicine ball in his left arm he held up the shuttlecock, contaminated, in his outstretched right, “this idiot tickler, the only thing it’s good for is eeny-meeny-miney-mo.” He dropped the ball and proceeded to pick the feathers out of the shuttlecock, distastefully, as though removing ticks from a dog. The remaining rubber plug he then threw out of sight down the field, with a single lunge ending in a powerful downward thrust of his wrist. Badminton was gone.
He stood balancing the medicine ball, enjoying the feel of it. “All you really need is a round ball.”
Although he was rarely conscious of it, Phineas was always being watched, like the weather. Up the field the others at badminton sensed a shift in the wind; their voices carried down to us, calling us. When we didn’t come, they began gradually to come down to us.
“I think it’s about time we started to get a little exercise around here, don’t you?” he said, cocking his head at me. Then he slowly looked around at the others with the expression of dazed determination he used when the object was to carry people along with his latest idea. He blinked twice, and then said, “We can always start with this ball.”
“Let’s make it have something to do with the war,” suggested Bobby Zane. “Like a blitzkrieg or something.”
“Blitzkrieg,” repeated Finny doubtfully.
“We could figure out some kind of blitzkrieg baseball,” I said.
“We’ll call it blitzkrieg ball,” said Bobby.
“Or just blitzball,” reflected Finny. “Yes, blitzball.” Then, with an expectant glance around, “Well, let’s get started,” he threw the big, heavy ball at me. I grasped it against my chest with both arms. “Well, run!” ordered Finny. “No, not that way! Toward the river! Run!” I headed toward the river surrounded by the others in a hesitant herd; they sensed that in all probability they were my adversaries in blitzball. “Don’t hog it!” Finny yelled. “Throw it to somebody else. Otherwise, naturally,” he talked steadily as he ran along beside me, “now that we’ve got you surrounded, one of us will knock you down.”
“Do what!” I veered away from him, hanging on to the clumsy ball. “What kind of a game is that?”
“Blitzball!” Chet Douglass shouted, throwing himself around my legs, knocking me down.
“That naturally was completely illegal,” said Finny. “You don’t use your arms when you knock the ball carrier down.”
“You don’t?” mumbled Chet from on top of me.
“No. You keep your arms crossed like this on your chest, and you just butt the ball carrier. No elbowing allowed either. All right, Gene, start again.”
I began quickly, “Wouldn’t somebody else have possession of the ball after—”
“Not when you’ve been knocked down illegally. The ball carrier retains possession in a case like that. So it’s perfectly okay, you still have the ball. Go ahead.”
There was nothing to do but start running again, with the others trampling with stronger will around me. “Throw it!” ordered Phineas. Bobby Zane was more or less in the clear and so I threw it at him; it was so heavy that he had to scoop my throw up from the ground. “Perfectly okay,” commented Finny, running forward at top speed, “perfectly okay for the ball to touch the ground when it is being passed.” Bobby doubled back closer to me for protection. “Knock him down,” Finny yelled at me.
“Knock him down! Are you crazy? He’s on my team!”
“There aren’t any teams in blitzball,” he yelled somewhat irritably, “we’re all enemies. Knock him down!”
I knocked him down. “All right,” said Finny as he disentangled us. “Now you have possession again.” He handed the leaden ball to me.
“I would have thought that possession passed—”
“Naturally you gained possession of the ball when you knocked him down. Run.”
So I began running again. Leper Lepellier was loping along outside my perimeter, not noticing the game, taggling along without reason, like a porpoise escorting a passing ship. “Leper!” I threw the ball past a few heads at him.
Taken by surprise, Leper looked up in anguish, shrank away from the ball, and voiced his first thought, a typical one. “I don’t want it!”
“Stop, stop!” cried Finny in a referee’s tone. Everybody halted, and Finny retrieved the ball; he talked better holding it. “Now Leper has just brought out a really important fine point of the game. The receiver can refuse a pass if he happens to choose to. Since we’re all enemies, we can and will turn on each other all the time. We call that the Lepellier Refusal.” We all nodded without speaking. “Here, Gene, the ball is of course still yours.”
“Still mine? Nobody else has had the ball but me, for God sakes!”
“They’ll get their chance. Now if you are refused three times in the course of running from the tower to the river, you go all the way back to the tower and start over. Naturally.”
Blitzball was the surprise of the summer. Everybody played it; I believe a form of it is still popular at Devon. But nobody can be playing it as it was played by Phineas. He had unconsciously invented a game which brought his own athletic gifts to their highest pitch. The odds were tremendously against the ball carrier, so that Phineas was driven to exceed himself practically every day when he carried the ball. To escape the wolf pack which all the other players became he created reverses and deceptions and acts of sheer mass hypnotism which were so extraordinary that they surprised even him; after some of these plays I would notice him chuckling quietly to himself, in a kind of happy disbelief. In such a nonstop game he also had the natural advantage of a flow of energy which I never saw interrupted. I never saw him tired, never really winded, never overcharged and never restless. At dawn, all day long, and at midnight, Phineas always had a steady and formidable flow of usable energy.
Right from the start, it was clear that no one had ever been better adapted to a sport than Finny was to blitzball. I saw that right away. Why not? He had made it up, hadn’t he? It needn’t be surprising that he was sensationally good at it, and that the rest of us were more or less bumblers in our different ways. I suppose it served us right for letting him do all the planning. I didn’t really think about it myself. What difference did it make? It was just a game. It was good that Finny could shine at it. He could also shine at many other things, with people for instance, the others in our dormitory, the faculty; in fact, if you stopped to think about it, Finny could shine with everyone, he attracted everyone he met. I was glad of that too. Naturally. He was my roommate and my best friend.

Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him. It is the moment when his emotions achieve their most powerful sway over him, and afterward when you say to this person “the world today” or “life” or “reality” he will assume that you mean this moment, even if it is fifty years past. The world, through his unleashed emotions, imprinted itself upon him, and he carries the stamp of that passing moment forever.
For me, this moment—four years is a moment in history—was the war. The war was and is reality for me, I still instinctively live and think in its atmosphere. These are some of its characteristics: Franklin Delano Roosevelt is the President of the United States, and he always has been. The other two eternal world leaders are Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin. America is not, never has been, and never will be what the songs and poems call it, a land of plenty. Nylon, meat, gasoline, and steel are rare. There are too many jobs and not enough workers. Money is very easy to earn but rather hard to spend, because there isn’t very much to buy. Trains are always late and always crowded with “servicemen.” The war will always be fought very far from America and it will never end. Nothing in America stands still for very long, including the people, who are always either leaving or on leave. People in America cry often. Sixteen is the key and crucial and natural age for a human being to be, and people of all other ages are ranged in an orderly manner ahead of and behind you as a harmonious setting for the sixteen-year-olds of this world. When you are sixteen, adults are slightly impressed and almost intimidated by you. This is a puzzle, finally solved by the realization that they foresee your military future, fighting for them. You do not foresee it. To waste anything in America is immoral. String and tinfoil are treasures. Newspapers are always crowded with strange maps and names of towns, and every few months the earth seems to lurch from its path when you see something in the newspapers, such as the time Mussolini, who had almost seemed one of the eternal leaders, is photographed hanging upside down on a meathook. Everyone listens to news broadcasts five or six times every day. All pleasurable things, all travel and sports and entertainment and good food and fine clothes, are in the very shortest supply, always were and always will be. There are just tiny fragments of pleasure and luxury in the world, and there is something unpatriotic about enjoying them. All foreign lands are inaccessible except to servicemen; they are vague, distant, and sealed off as though behind a curtain of plastic. The prevailing color of life in America is a dull, dark green called olive drab. That color is always respectable and always important. Most other colors risk being unpatriotic.
It is this special America, a very untypical one I guess, an unfamiliar transitional blur in the memories of most people, which is the real America for me. In that short-lived and special country we spent this summer at Devon when Finny achieved certain feats as an athlete. In such a period no one notices or rewards any achievements involving the body unless the result is to kill it or save it on the battlefield, so that there were only a few of us to applaud and wonder at what he was able to do.
One day he broke the school swimming record. He and I were fooling around in the pool, near a big bronze plaque marked with events for which the school kept records—50 yards, 100 yards, 220 yards. Under each was a slot with a marker fitted into it, showing the name of the record-holder, his year, and his time. Under “100 Yards Free Style” there was “A. Hopkins Parker—1940-53.0 seconds.”
“A. Hopkins Parker?” Finny squinted up at the name. “I don’t remember any A. Hopkins Parker.”
“He graduated before we got here.”
“You mean that record has been up there the whole time we’ve been at Devon and nobody’s busted it yet?” It was an insult to the class, and Finny had tremendous loyalty to the class, as he did to any group he belonged to, beginning with him and me and radiating outward past the limits of humanity toward spirits and clouds and stars.
No one else happened to be in the pool. Around us gleamed white tile and glass brick; the green, artificial-looking water rocked gently in it shining basin, releasing vague chemical smells and a sense of many pipes and filters; even Finny’s voice, trapped in this closed, high-ceilinged room, lost its special resonance and blurred into a general well of noise gathered up toward the ceiling. He said blurringly, “I have a feeling I can swim faster than A. Hopkins Parker.”
We found a stop watch in the office. He mounted a starting box, leaned forward from the waist as he had seen racing swimmers do but never had occasion to do himself—I noticed a preparatory looseness coming into his shoulders and arms, a controlled ease about his stance which was unexpected in anyone trying to break a record. I said, “On your mark—Go!” There was a complex moment when his body uncoiled and shot forward with sudden metallic tension. He planed up the pool, his shoulders dominating the water while his legs and feet rode so low that I couldn’t distinguish them; a wake rippled hurriedly by him and then at the end of the pool his position broke, he relaxed, dived, an instant’s confusion and then his suddenly and metallically tense body shot back toward the other end of the pool. Another turn and up the pool again—I noticed no particular slackening of his pace—another turn, down the pool again, his hand touched the end, and he looked up at me with a composed, interested expression. “Well, how did I do?” I looked at the watch; he had broken A. Hopkins Parker’s record by.7 second.
“My God! So I really did it. You know what? I thought I was going to do it. It felt as though I had that stop watch in my head and I could hear myself going just a little bit faster than A. Hopkins Parker.”
“The worst thing is there weren’t any witnesses. And I’m no official timekeeper. I don’t think it will count.”
“Well of course it won’t count.”
“You can try it again and break it again. Tomorrow. We’ll get the coach in here, and all the official timekeepers and I’ll call up The Devonian to send a reporter and a photographer—”
He climbed out of the pool. “I’m not going to do it again,” he said quietly.
“Of course you are!”
“No, I just wanted to see if I could do it. Now I know. But I don’t want to do it in public.” Some other swimmers drifted in through the door. Finny glanced sharply at them. “By the way,” he said in an even more subdued voice, “we aren’t going to talk about this. It’s just between you and me. Don’t say anything about it, to … anyone.”
“Not say anything about it! When you broke the school record!”
“Sh-h-h-h-h! ” He shot a blazing, agitated glance at me.
I stopped and looked at him up and down. He didn’t look directly back at me. “You’re too good to be true,” I said after a while.
He glanced at me, and then said, “Thanks a lot” in a somewhat expressionless voice.
Was he trying to impress me or something? Not tell anybody? When he had broken a school record without a day of practice? I knew he was serious about it, so I didn’t tell anybody. Perhaps for that reason his accomplishment took root in my mind and grew rapidly in the darkness where I was forced to hide it. The Devon School record books contained a mistake, a lie, and nobody knew it but Finny and me. A. Hopkins Parker was living in a fool’s paradise, wherever he was. His defeated name remained in bronze on the school record plaque, while Finny deliberately evaded an athletic honor. It was true that he had many already—the Winslow Galbraith Memorial Football Trophy for having brought the most Christian sportsmanship to the game during the 1941-1942 season, the Margaret Duke Bonaventura ribbon and prize for the student who conducted himself at hockey most like the way her son had done, the Devon School Contact Sport Award, Presented Each Year to That Student Who in the Opinion of the Athletic Advisors Excels His Fellows in the Sportsmanlike Performance of Any Game Involving Bodily Contact. But these were in the past, and they were prizes, not school records. The sports Finny played officially—football, hockey, baseball, lacrosse—didn’t have school records. To switch to a new sport suddenly, just for a day, and immediately break a record in it—that was about as neat a trick, as dazzling a reversal as I could, to be perfectly honest, possibly imagine. There was something inebriating in the suppleness of this feat. When I thought about it my head felt a little dizzy and my stomach began to tingle. It had, in one word, glamour, absolute schoolboy glamour. When I looked down at that stop watch and realized a split second before I permitted my face to show it or my voice to announce it that Finny had broken a school record, I had experienced a feeling that also can be described in one word—shock.
To keep silent about this amazing happening deepened the shock for me. It made Finny seem too unusual for—not friendship, but too unusual for rivalry. And there were few relationships among us at Devon not based on rivalry.
“Swimming in pools is screwy anyway,” he said after a long, unusual silence as we walked toward the dormitory. “The only real swimming is in the ocean.” Then in the everyday, mediocre tone he used when he was proposing something really outrageous, he added, “Let’s go to the beach.”
The beach was hours away by bicycle, forbidden, completely out of all bounds. Going there risked expulsion, destroyed the studying I was going to do for an important test the next morning, blasted the reasonable amount of order I wanted to maintain in my life, and it also involved the kind of long, labored bicycle ride I hated. “All right,” I said.
We got our bikes and slipped away from Devon along a back road. Having invited me Finny now felt he had to keep me entertained. He told long, wild stories about his childhood; as I pumped panting up steep hills he glided along beside me, joking steadily. He analyzed my character, and he insisted on knowing what I disliked most about him (“You’re too conventional,” I said). He rode backward with no hands, he rode on his own handlebars, he jumped off and back on his moving bike as he had seen trick horseback riders do in the movies. He sang. Despite the steady musical undertone in his speaking voice Finny couldn’t carry a tune, and he couldn’t remember the melody or the words to any song. But he loved listening to music, any music, and he liked to sing.
We reached the beach late in the afternoon. The tide was high and the surf was heavy. I dived in and rode a couple of waves, but they had reached that stage of power in which you could feel the whole strength of the ocean in them. The second wave, as it tore toward the beach with me, spewed me a little ahead of it, encroaching rapidly; suddenly it was immeasurably bigger than I was, it rushed me from the control of gravity and took control of me itself; the wave threw me down in a primitive plunge without a bottom, then there was a bottom, grinding sand, and I skidded onto the shore. The wave hesitated, balanced there, and then hissed back toward the deep water, its tentacles not quite interested enough in me to drag me with it.
I made my way up on the beach and lay down. Finny came, ceremoniously took my pulse, and then went back into the ocean. He stayed in an hour, breaking off every few minutes to come back to me and talk. The sand was so hot from the all-day sunshine that I had to brush the top layer away in order to lie down on it, and Finny’s progress across the beach became a series of high, startled leaps.
The ocean, throwing up foaming sun-sprays across some nearby rocks, was winter cold. This kind of sunshine and ocean, with the accumulating roar of the surf and the salty, adventurous, flirting wind from the sea, always intoxicated Phineas. He was everywhere, he enjoyed himself hugely, he laughed out loud at passing sea gulls. And he did everything he could think of for me.
We had dinner at a hot dog stand, with our backs to the ocean and its now cooler wind, our faces toward the heat of the cooking range. Then we walked on toward the center of the beach, where there was a subdued New England strip of honky-tonks. The Boardwalk lights against the deepening blue sky gained an ideal, starry beauty and the lights from the belt of honky-tonks and shooting galleries and beer gardens gleamed with a quiet purity in the clear twilight.
Finny and I went along the Boardwalk in our sneakers and white slacks, Finny in a light blue polo shirt and I in a T-shirt. I noticed that people were looking fixedly at him, so I took a look myself to see why. His skin radiated a reddish copper glow of tan, his brown hair had been a little bleached by the sun, and I noticed that the tan made his eyes shine with a cool blue-green fire.
“Everybody’s staring at you,” he suddenly said to me. “It’s because of that movie-star tan you picked up this afternoon … showing off again.”
Enough broken rules were enough that night. Neither of us suggested going into any of the honky-tonks or beer gardens. We did have one glass of beer each at a fairly respectable-looking bar, convincing, or seeming to convince the bartender that we were old enough by a show of forged draft cards. Then we found a good spot among some sand dunes at the lonely end of the beach, and there we settled down to sleep for the night. The last words of Finny’s usual nighttime monologue were, “I hope you’re having a pretty good time here. I know I kind of dragged you away at the point of a gun, but after all you can’t come to the shore with just anybody and you can’t come by yourself, and at this teen-age period in life the proper person is your best pal.” He hesitated and then added, “which is what you are,” and there was silence on his dune.
It was a courageous thing to say. Exposing a sincere emotion nakedly like that at the Devon School was the next thing to suicide. I should have told him then that he was my best friend also and rounded off what he had said. I started to; I nearly did. But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.