by John Knowles
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 thinking 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’v
e 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.
6
Peace had deserted Devon. Although not in the look of the campus and village; they retained much of their dreaming summer calm. Fall had barely touched the full splendor of the trees, and during the height of the day the sun briefly regained its summertime power. In the air there was only an edge of coolness to imply the coming winter.
But all had been caught up, like the first fallen leaves, by a new and energetic wind. The Summer Session—a few dozen boys being force-fed education, a stopgap while most of the masters were away and most of the traditions stored against sultriness—the Summer Session was over. It had been the school’s first, but this was its one hundred and sixty-third Winter Session, and the forces reassembled for it scattered the easygoing summer spirit like so many fallen leaves.
The masters were in their places for the first chapel, seated in stalls in front of and at right angles to us, suggesting by their worn expressions and careless postures that they had never been away at all.
In an apse of the church sat their wives and children, the objects during the tedious winter months of our ceaseless, ritual speculation (Why did he ever marry her? What in the world ever made her marry him? How could the two of them ever have produced those little monsters?). The masters favored seersucker on this mild first day, the wives broke out their hats. Five of the younger teachers were missing, gone into the war. Mr. Pike had come in his Naval ensign’s uniform; some reflex must have survived Midshipman’s School and brought him back to Devon for the day. His face was as mild and hopeless as ever; mooning above the snappy, rigid blouse, it gave him the air of an impostor.
Continuity was the keynote. The same hymns were played, the same sermon given, the same announcements made. There was one surprise; maids had disappeared “for the Duration,” a new phrase then. But continuity was stressed, not beginning again but continuing the education of young men according to the unbroken traditions of Devon.
I knew, perhaps I alone knew, that this was false. Devon had slipped through their fingers during the warm overlooked months. The traditions had been broken, the standards let down, all rules forgotten. In those bright days of truancy we had never thought of What We Owed Devon, as the sermon this opening day exhorted us to do. We had thought of ourselves, of what Devon owed us, and we had taken all of that and much more. Today’s hymn was Dear Lord and Father of Mankind Forgive Our Foolish Ways; we had never heard that during the summer either. Ours had been a wayward gypsy music, leading us down all kinds of foolish gypsy ways, unforgiven. I was glad of it, I had almost caught the rhythm of it, the dancing, clicking jangle of it during the summer.
Still it had come to an end, in the last long rays of daylight at the tree, when Phineas fell. It was forced on me as I sat chilled through the chapel service, that this probably vindicated the rules of Devon after all, wintery Devon. If you broke the rules, then they broke you. That, I think, was the real point of the sermon on this first morning.
After the service ended we set out seven hundred strong, the regular winter throng of the Devon School, to hustle through our lists of appointments. All classrooms were crowded, swarms were on the crosswalks, the dormitories were as noisy as factories, every bulletin board was a forest of notices.
We had been an idiosyncratic, leaderless band in the summer, undirected except by the eccentric notions of Phineas. Now the official class leaders and politicians could be seen taking charge, assuming as a matter of course their control of these walks and fields which had belonged only to us. I had the same room which Finny and I had shared during the summer, but across the hall, in the large suite where Leper Lepellier had dreamed his way through July and August amid sunshine and dust motes and windows through which the ivy had reached tentatively into the room, here Brinker Hadley had established his headquarters. Emissaries were already dropping in to confer with him. Leper, luckless in his last year as all the others, had been moved to a room lost in an old building off somewhere in the trees toward the gym.
After morning classes and lunch I went across to see Brinker, started into the room and then stopped. Suddenly I did not want to see the trays of snails which Leper had passed the summer collecting replaced by Brinker’s files. Not yet. Although it was something to have this year’s dominant student across the way. Ordinarily he should have been a magnet for me, the center of all the excitement and influences in the class. Ordinarily this would have been so—if the summer, the gypsy days, had not intervened. Now Brinker, with his steady wit and ceaseless plans, Brinker had nothing to offer in place of Leper’s dust motes and creeping ivy and snails.
I didn’t go in. In any case I was late for my afternoon appointment. I never used to be late. But today I was, later even than I had to be. I was supposed to report to the Crew House, down on the banks of the lower river. There are two rivers at Devon, divided by a small dam. On my way I stopped on the footbridge which crosses the top of the dam separating them and looked upstream, at the narrow little Devon River sliding toward me between its thick fringe of pine and birch.
As I had to do whenever I glimpsed this river, I thought of Phineas. Not of the tree and pain, but of one of his favorite tricks, Phineas in exaltation, balancing on one foot on the prow of a canoe like a river god, his raised arms invoking the air to support him, face transfigured, body a complex set of balances and compensations, each muscle aligned in perfection with all the others to maintain this supreme fantasy of achievement, his skin glowing from immersions, his whole body hanging between river and sky as though he had transcended gravity and might by gently pushing upward with his foot glide a little way higher and remain suspended in space, encompassing all the glory of the summer and offering it to the sky.
Then, an infinitesimal veering of the canoe, and the line of his body would break, the soaring arms collapse, up shoot an uncontrollable leg, and Phineas would tumble into the water, roaring with rage.
I stopped in the middle of this hurrying day to remember him like that, and then, feeling refreshed, I went on to the Crew House beside the tidewater river below the dam.
We had never used this lower river, the Naguamsett, during the summer. It was ugly, saline, fringed with marsh, mud and seaweed. A few miles away it was joined to the ocean, so that its movements were governed by unimaginable factors like the Gulf Stream, the Polar Ice Cap, and the moon. It was nothing like the fresh-water Devon above the dam where we’d had so much fun, all the summer. The Devon’s course was determined by some familiar hills a little inland; it rose among highland farms and forests which we knew, passed at the end of its course through the school grounds, and then threw itself with little spectacle over a small waterfall beside the diving dam, and into the turbid Naguamsett.
The Devon School was astride these two rivers.
At the Crew House, Quackenbush, in the midst of some milling oarsmen in the damp main room, spotted me the instant I came in, with his dark expressionless eyes. Quackenbush was the crew manager, and there was something wrong about him. I didn’t know exactly what it was. In the throng of the winter terms at Devon we were at opposite extremities of the class, and to me there only came the disliked edge of Quackenbush’s reputation. A clue to it was that his first name was never used—I didn’t even know what it was—and he had no nickname, not even an unfriendly one.
“Late, Forrester,” he said in his already-matured voice. He was a firmly masculine type; perhaps he was disliked only because he had matured before the rest of us.
“Yes, sorry, I got held up.”
“The crew waits for no man.” He didn’t seem to
think this was a funny thing to say. I did, and had to chuckle.
“Well, if you think it’s all a joke . . .”
“I didn’t say it was a joke.”
“I’ve got to have some real help around here. This crew is going to win the New England scholastics, or my name isn’t Cliff Quackenbush.”
With that blank filled, I took up my duties as assistant senior crew manager. There is no such position officially, but it sometimes came into existence through necessity, and was the opposite of a sinecure. It was all work and no advantages. The official assistant to the crew manager was a member of the class below, and the following year he could come into the senior managership with its rights and status. An assistant who was already a senior ranked nowhere. Since I had applied for such a nonentity of a job, Quackenbush, who had known as little about me as I had about him, knew now.
“Get some towels,” he said without looking at me, pointing at a door.
“How many?”
“Who knows? Get some. As many as you can carry. That won’t be too many.”
Jobs like mine were usually taken by boys with some physical disability, since everyone had to take part in sports and this was all disabled boys could do. As I walked toward the door I supposed that Quackenbush was studying me to see if he could detect a limp. But I knew that his flat black eyes would never detect my trouble.
Quackenbush felt mellower by the end of the afternoon as we stood on the float in front of the Crew House, gathering up towels.
“You never rowed did you.” He opened the conversation like that, without pause or question mark. His voice sounded almost too mature, as though he were putting it on a little; he sounded as though he were speaking through a tube.
“No, I never did.”
“I rowed on the lightweight crew for two years.”