A Separate Peace

by John Knowles

  And when he stopped and sat down among the prizes and said, “Now we’re going to have the Decathlon. Quiet everybody, our Olympic candidate Gene Forrester, is now going to qualify,” it wasn’t cider which made me in this moment champion of everything he ordered, to run as though I were the abstraction of speed, to walk the half-circle of statues on my hands, to balance on my head on top of the icebox on top of the Prize Table, to jump if he had asked it across the Naguamsett and land crashing in the middle of Quackenbush’s boathouse, to accept at the end of it amid a clatter of applause—for on this day even the schoolboy egotism of Devon was conjured away—a wreath made from the evergreen trees which Phineas placed on my head. It wasn’t the cider which made me surpass myself, it was this liberation we had torn from the gray encroachments of 1943, the escape we had concocted, this afternoon of momentary, illusory, special and separate peace.

  And it was this which caused me not to notice Brownie Perkins rejoin us from the dormitory, and not to hear what he was saying until Finny cried hilariously, “A telegram for Gene? It’s the Olympic Committee. They want you! Of course they want you! Give it to me, Brownie, I’ll read it aloud to this assembled host.” And it was this which drained away as I watched Finny’s face pass through all the gradations between uproariousness and shock.

  I took the telegram from Phineas, facing in advance whatever the destruction was. That was what I learned to do that winter.

  I HAVE ESCAPED AND NEED HELP. I AM AT CHRISTMAS LOCATION. YOU UNDERSTAND. NO NEED TO RISK ADDRESS HERE. MY SAFETY DEPENDS ON YOU COMING AT ONCE.

  (signed) YOUR BEST FRIEND,

  ELWIN LEPER LEPELLIER.

  10

  That night I made for the first time the kind of journey which later became the monotonous routine of my life: traveling through an unknown countryside from one unknown settlement to another. The next year this became the dominant activity, or rather passivity, of my army career, not fighting, not marching, but this kind of nighttime ricochet; for as it turned out I never got to the war.

  I went into uniform at the time when our enemies began to recede so fast that there had to be a hurried telescoping of military training plans. Programs scheduled to culminate in two years became outmoded in six months, and crowds of men gathered for them in one place were dispersed to twenty others. A new weapon appeared and those of us who had traveled to three or four bases mastering the old one were sent on to a fifth, sixth, and seventh to master the new. The closer victory came the faster we were shuttled around America in pursuit of a role to play in a drama which suddenly, underpopulated from the first, now had too many actors. Or so it seemed. In reality there would have been, as always, too few, except that the last act, a mass assault against suicidally-defended Japan, never took place. I and my year—not “my generation” for destiny now cut too finely for that old phrase—I and those of my year were preeminently eligible for that. Most of us, so it was estimated, would be killed. But the men a little bit older closed in on the enemy faster than predicted, and then there was the final holocaust of the Bomb. It seemed to have saved our lives.

  So journeys through unknown parts of America became my chief war memory, and I think of the first of them as this nighttime trip to Leper’s. There was no question of where to find him; “I am at Christmas location” meant that he was at home. He lived far up in Vermont, where at this season of the year even the paved main highways are bumpy and buckling from the freezing weather, and each house executes a lonely holding action against the cold. The natural state of things is coldness, and houses are fragile havens, holdouts in a death landscape, unforgettably comfortable, simple though they are, just because of their warmth.

  Leper’s was one of these hearths perched by itself on a frozen hillside. I reached it in the early morning after this night which presaged my war; a bleak, draughty train ride, a damp depot seemingly near no town whatever, a bus station in which none of the people were fully awake, or seemed clean, or looked as though they had homes anywhere; a bus which passengers entered and left at desolate stopping places in the blackness; a chilled nighttime wandering in which I tried to decipher between lapses into stale sleep, the meaning of Leper’s telegram.

  I reached the town at dawn, and encouraged by the returning light, and coffee in a thick white cup, I accepted a hopeful interpretation. Leper had “escaped.” You didn’t “escape” from the army, so he must have escaped from something else. The most logical thing a soldier escapes from is danger, death, the enemy. Since Leper hadn’t been overseas the enemy must have been in this country. And the only enemies in this country would be spies. Leper had escaped from spies.

  I seized this conclusion and didn’t try to go beyond it. I suppose all our Butt Room stories about him intriguing around the world had made me half-ready to half-believe something like this. I felt a measureless relief when it occurred to me. There was some color, some hope, some life in this war after all. The first friend of mine who ever went into it tangled almost immediately with spies. I began to hope that after all this wasn’t going to be such a bad war.

  The Lepellier house was not far out of town, I was told. There was no taxi, I was also told, and there was no one, I did not need to be told, who would offer to drive me out there. This was Vermont. But if that meant austerity toward strangers it also meant mornings of glory such as this one, in which the snow, white almost to blueness, lay like a soft comforter over the hills, and birches and pines indestructibly held their ground, rigid lines against the snow and sky, very thin and very strong like Vermonters.

  The sun was the blessing of the morning, the one celebrating element, an aesthete with no purpose except to shed radiance. Everything else was sharp and hard, but this Grecian sun evoked joy from every angularity and blurred with brightness the stiff face of the countryside. As I walked briskly out the road the wind knifed at my face, but this sun caressed the back of my neck.

  The road led out along the side of a ridge, and after a mile or so I saw the house that must be Leper’s, riding the top of the slope. It was another brittle-looking Vermont house, white of course, with long and narrow windows like New England faces. Behind one of them hung a gold star which announced that a son of the house was serving the country, and behind another stood Leper.

  Although I was walking straight toward his front door he beckoned me on several times, and he never took his eyes from me, as though it was they which held me to my course. He was still at this ground-floor window when I reached the door and so I opened it myself and stepped into the hallway. Leper had come to the entrance of the room on the right, the dining room.

  “Come in here,” he said, “I spend most of my time in here.”

  As usual there were no preliminaries. “What do you do that for, Leper? It’s not very comfortable, is it?”

  “Well, it’s a useful room.”

  “Yes, I guess it’s useful, all right.”

  “You aren’t lost for something to do in dining rooms. It’s in the living room where people can’t figure out what to do with themselves. People get problems in living rooms.”

  “Bedrooms too.” It was a try toward relieving the foreboding in his manner; it only worked to deepen it.

  He turned away, and I followed him into an under-furnished dining room of high-backed chairs, rugless floor, and cold fireplace. “If you want to be in a really functional room,” I began with false heartiness, “you ought to spend your time in the bathroom then.”

  He looked at me, and I noticed the left side of his upper lip lift once or twice as though he was about to snarl or cry. Then I realized that this had nothing to do with his mood, that it was involuntary.

  He sat down at the head of the table in the only chair with arms, his father’s chair I supposed. I took off my coat and sat in a place at the middle of the table, with my back to the fireplace. There at least I could look at the sun rejoicing on the snow.

  “In here you never wonder what’s going to happen. You know the meals will come in thr
ee times a day for instance.”

  “I’ll bet your mother isn’t too pleased when she’s trying to get one ready.”

  Force sprang into his expression for the first time. “What’s she got to be pleased about!” He glared challengingly into my startled face. “I’m pleasing myself!” he cried fervently, and I saw tears trembling in his eyes.

  “Well, she’s probably pleased.” Any words would serve, the more irrelevant and superficial the better, any words which would stop him; I didn’t want to see this. “She’s probably pleased to have you home again.”

  His face resumed its dull expression. The responsibility for continuing the conversation, since I had forced it to be superficial, was mine. “How long’ll you be here?”

  He shrugged, a look of disgust with my question crossing his face. The careful politeness he had always had was gone.

  “Well, if you’re on furlough you must know when you have to be back.” I said this in what I thought of at the time as my older voice, a little businesslike and experienced. “The army doesn’t give out passes and then say ‘Come back when you’ve had enough, hear?’ ”

  “I didn’t get any pass,” he groaned; with the sliding despair of his face and his clenched hands, that’s what it was; a groan.

  “I know you said,” I spoke in short, expressionless syllables, “that you ‘escaped.’ ” I no longer wanted this to be true, I no longer wanted it to be connected with spies or desertion or anything out of the ordinary. I knew it was going to be, and I no longer wanted it to be.

  “I escaped!” the word surging out in a voice and intensity that was not Leper’s. His face was furious, but his eyes denied the fury; instead they saw it before them. They were filled with terror.

  “What do you mean, you escaped?” I said sharply. “You don’t escape from the army.”

  “That’s what you say. But that’s because you’re talking through your hat.” His eyes were furious now too, glaring blindly at me. “What do you know about it, anyway?” None of this could have been said by the Leper of the beaver dam.

  “Well I—how am I supposed to answer that? I know what’s normal in the army, that’s all.”

  “Normal,” he repeated bitterly. “What a stupid-ass word that is. I suppose that’s what you’re thinking about, isn’t it? That’s what you would be thinking about, somebody like you. You’re thinking I’m not normal, aren’t you? I can see what you’re thinking—I see a lot I never saw before”—his voice fell to a querulous whisper—“you’re thinking I’m psycho.”

  I gathered what the word meant. I hated the sound of it at once. It opened up a world I had not known existed—“mad” or “crazy” or “a screw loose,” those were the familiar words. “Psycho” had a sudden mental-ward reality about it, a systematic, diagnostic sound. It was as though Leper had learned it while in captivity, far from Devon or Vermont or any experience we had in common, as though it were in Japanese.

  Fear seized my stomach like a cramp. I didn’t care what I said to him now; it was myself I was worried about. For if Leper was psycho it was the army which had done it to him, and I and all of us were on the brink of the army. “You make me sick, you and your damn army words.”

  “They were going to give me,” he was almost laughing, everywhere but in his eyes which continued to oppose all he said, “they were going to give me a discharge, a Section Eight discharge.”

  As a last defense I had always taken refuge in a scornful superiority, based on nothing. I sank back in the chair, eyebrows up, shoulders shrugging. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about. You just don’t make any sense at all. It’s all Japanese to me.”

  “A Section Eight discharge is for the nuts in the service, the psychos, the Funny Farm candidates. Now do you know what I’m talking about? They give you a Section Eight discharge, like a dishonorable discharge only worse. You can’t get a job after that. Everybody wants to see your discharge, and when they see a Section Eight they look at you kind of funny—the kind of expression you’ve got on your face, like you were looking at someone with their nose blown off but don’t want them to know you’re disgusted—they look at you that way and then they say, ‘Well, there doesn’t seem to be an opening here at present.’ You’re screwed for life, that’s what a Section Eight discharge means.”

  “You don’t have to yell at me, there’s nothing wrong with my hearing.”

  “Then that’s tough shit for you, Buster. Then they’ve got you.”

  “Nobody’s got me.”

  “Oh they’ve got you all right.”

  “Don’t tell me who’s got me and who hasn’t got me. Who do you think you’re talking to? Stick to your snails, Lepellier.”

  He began to laugh again. “You always were a lord of the manor, weren’t you? A swell guy, except when the chips were down. You always were a savage underneath. I always knew that only I never admitted it. But in the last few weeks,” despair broke into his face again, “I admitted a hell of a lot to myself. Not about you. Don’t flatter yourself. I wasn’t thinking about you. Why the hell should I think about you? Did you ever think about me? I thought about myself, and Ma, and the old man, and pleasing them all the time. Well, never mind about that now. It’s you we happen to be talking about now. Like a savage underneath. Like,” now there was the blind confusion in his eyes again, a wild slyness around his mouth, “like that time you knocked Finny out of the tree.”

  I sprang out of the chair. “You stupid crazy bastard—”

  Still laughing, “Like that time you crippled him for life.”

  I shoved my foot against the rung of his chair and kicked. Leper went over in his chair and collapsed against the floor. Laughing and crying he lay with his head on the floor and his knees up, “. . . always were a savage underneath.”

  Quick heels coming down the stairs, and his mother, large, soft, and gentle-looking, quivered at the entrance. “What on earth happened? Elwin!”

  “I’m terribly—it was a mistake,” I listened objectively to my own voice, “he said something crazy. I forgot myself—I forgot that he’s, there’s something the matter with his nerves, isn’t there? He didn’t know what he was saying.”

  “Well, good heaven, the boy is ill.” We both moved swiftly to help up the chuckling Leper. “Did you come here to abuse him?”

  “I’m terribly sorry,” I muttered. “I’d better get going.”

  Mrs. Lepellier was helping Leper toward the stairs. “Don’t go,” he said between chuckles, “stay for lunch. You can count on it. Always three meals a day, war or peace, in this room.”

  And I did stay. Sometimes you are too ashamed to leave. That was true now. And sometimes you need too much to know the facts, and so humbly and stupidly you stay. That was true now too.

  It was an abundant Vermont lunch, more like a dinner, and at first it had no more reality than a meal in the theater. Leper ate almost nothing, but my own appetite deepened my disgrace. I ate everything within reach, and then had to ask, face aflame with embarrassment, for more to be passed to me. But that led to this hard-to-believe transformation: Mrs. Lepellier began to be reconciled to me because I liked her cooking. Toward the end of the meal she became able to speak to me directly, in her high but gentle and modulated voice, and I was so clumsy and fumbling and embarrassed that my behavior throughout lunch amounted to one long and elaborate apology which, when she offered me a second dessert, I saw she had accepted. “He’s a good boy underneath,” she must have thought, “a terrible temper, no self-control, but he’s sorry, and he is a good boy underneath.” Leper was closer to the truth.

  She suggested he and I take a walk after lunch. Leper now seemed all obedience, and except for the fact that he never looked at his mother, the ideal son. So he put on some odds and ends of clothing, some canvas and woolen and flannel pulled on to form a patchwork against the cutting wind, and we trailed out the back door into the splendor of the failing sunshine. I did not have New England in my bones; I was a guest in this
country, even though by now a familiar one, and I could never see a totally extinguished winter field without thinking it unnatural. I would tramp along trying to decide whether corn had grown there in the summer, or whether it had been a pasture, or what it could ever have been, and in that deep layer of the mind where all is judged by the five senses and primitive expectation, I knew that nothing would ever grow there again. We roamed across one of these wastes, our feet breaking through at each step the thin surface crust of ice into a layer of soft snow underneath, and I waited for Leper, in this wintery outdoors he loved, to come to himself again. Just as I knew the field could never grow again, I knew that Leper could not be wild or bitter or psycho tramping across the hills of Vermont.

  “Is there an army camp in Vermont?” I asked, so sure in my illusion that I risked making him talk, risked even making him talk about the army.

  “I don’t think there is.”

  “There ought to be. That’s where they should have sent you. Then you wouldn’t have gotten nervous.”

  “Yeah.” A half chuckle. “I was what they call ‘nervous in the service.’ ”

  Exaggerated laughter from me. “Is that what they call it?”

  Leper didn’t bother to make a rejoinder. Before there had always been his polite capping of remarks like this: “Yes, they do, that’s what they call it”—but today he glanced speculatively at me and said nothing.

  We walked on, the crust cracking uneasily under us. “Nervous in the service,” I said. “That sounds like one of Brinker’s poems.”

  “That bastard!”

  “You wouldn’t know Brinker these days the way he’s changed—”

  “I’d know that bastard if he’d changed into Snow White.”