A Separate Peace

by John Knowles

  “Well. He hasn’t changed into Snow White.”

  “That’s too bad,” the strained laughter was back in his voice, “Snow White with Brinker’s face on her. There’s a picture,” then he broke into sobs.

  “Leper! What is it? What’s the matter, Leper? Leper!”

  Hoarse, cracking sobs broke from him; another ounce of grief and he would have begun tearing his country-store clothes. “Leper! Leper!” This exposure drew us violently together; I was the closest person in the world to him now, and he to me. “Leper, for God sakes, Leper.” I was about to cry myself. “Stop that, now just stop. Don’t do that. Stop doing that, Leper.”

  When he became quieter, not less despairing but too exhausted to keep on, I said, “I’m sorry I brought up Brinker. I didn’t know you hated him so much.” Leper didn’t look capable of such hates. Especially now, with his rapid plumes of breath puffing out as from a toiling steam engine, his nose and eyes gone red, and his cheeks red too, in large, irregular blotches—Leper had the kind of fragile fair skin given to high, unhealthy coloring. He was all color, painted at random, but none of it highlighted his grief. Instead of desperate and hate-filled, he looked, with his checkered outfit and blotchy face, like a half-prepared clown.

  “I don’t really hate Brinker, I don’t really hate him, not any more than anybody else.” His swimming eyes cautiously explored me. The wind lifted a sail of snow and billowed it past us. “It was only—” he drew in his breath so sharply that it made a whistling sound—“the idea of his face on a woman’s body. That’s what made me psycho. Ideas like that. I don’t know. I guess they must be right. I guess I am psycho. I guess I must be. I must be. Did you ever have ideas like that?”

  “No.”

  “Would they bother you if you did, if you happened to keep imagining a man’s head on a woman’s body, or if sometimes the arm of a chair turned into a human arm if you looked at it too long, things like that? Would they bother you?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Maybe everybody imagines things like that when they’re away from home, really far away, for the first time. Do you think so? The camp I went to first, they called it a ‘Reception center,’ got us up every morning when it was pitch black, and there was food like the kind we throw out here, and all my clothes were gone and I got this uniform that didn’t even smell familiar. All day I wanted to sleep, after we got to Basic Training. I kept falling asleep, all day long, at the lectures we went to, and on the firing range, and everywhere else. But not at night. Next to me there was a man who had a cough that sounded like his stomach was going to come up, one of these times, it sounded like it would come up through his mouth and land with a splatter on the floor. He always faced my way. We did sleep head to foot, but I knew it would land near me. I never slept at night. During the day I couldn’t eat this food that should have been thrown away, so I was always hungry except in the Mess Hall. The Mess Hall. The army has the perfect word for everything, did you ever think of that?”

  I imperceptibly nodded and shook my head, yes-and-no.

  “And the perfect word for me,” he added in a distorted voice, as though his tongue had swollen, “psycho. I guess I am. I must be. Am I, though, or is the army? Because they turned everything inside out. I couldn’t sleep in bed, I had to sleep everywhere else. I couldn’t eat in the Mess Hall, I had to eat everywhere else. Everything began to be inside out. And the man next to me at night, coughing himself inside out. That was when things began to change. One day I couldn’t make out what was happening to the corporal’s face. It kept changing into faces I knew from somewhere else, and then I began to think he looked like me, and then he . . .” Leper’s voice had thickened unrecognizably, “he changed into a woman, I was looking at him as close as I’m looking at you and his face turned into a woman’s face and I started to yell for everybody, I began to yell so that everyone would see it too, I didn’t want to be the only one to see a thing like that, I yelled louder and louder to make sure everyone within reach of my voice would hear—you can see there wasn’t anything crazy in the way I was thinking, can’t you, I had a good reason for everything I did, didn’t I—but I couldn’t yell soon enough, or loud enough, and when somebody did finally come up to me, it was this man with the cough who slept in the next cot, and he was holding a broom because we had been sweeping out the barracks, but I saw right away that it wasn’t a broom, it was a man’s leg which had been cut off. I remember thinking that he must have been at the hospital helping with an amputation when he heard my yell. You can see there’s logic in that.” The crust beneath us continued to crack and as we reached the border of the field the frigid trees also were cracking with the cold. The two sharp groups of noises sounded to my ears like rifles being fired in the distance.

  I said nothing, and Leper, having said so much, went on to say more, to speak above the wind and crackings as though his story would never be finished. “Then they grabbed me and there were arms and legs and heads everywhere and I couldn’t tell when any minute—”

  “Shut up!”

  Softer, more timidly, “—when any minute—”

  “Do you think I want to hear every gory detail! Shut up!

  I don’t care! I don’t care what happened to you, Leper. I don’t give a damn! Do you understand that? This has nothing to do with me! Nothing at all! I don’t care!”

  I turned around and began a clumsy run across the field in a line which avoided his house and aimed toward the road leading back into the town. I left Leper telling his story into the wind. He might tell it forever, I didn’t care. I didn’t want to hear any more of it. I had already heard too much. What did he mean by telling me a story like that! I didn’t want to hear any more of it. Not now or ever. I didn’t care because it had nothing to do with me. And I didn’t want to hear any more of it. Ever.

  11

  I wanted to see Phineas, and Phineas only. With him there was no conflict except between athletes, something Greek-inspired and Olympian in which victory would go to whoever was the strongest in body and heart. This was the only conflict he had ever believed in.

  When I got back I found him in the middle of a snowball fight in a place called the Fields Beyond. At Devon the open ground among the buildings had been given carefully English names—the Center Common, the Far Common, the Fields, and the Fields Beyond. These last were past the gym, the tennis courts, the river and the stadium, on the edge of the woods which, however English in name, were in my mind primevally American, reaching in unbroken forests far to the north, into the great northern wilderness. I found Finny beside the woods playing and fighting—the two were approximately the same thing to him—and I stood there wondering whether things weren’t simpler and better at the northern terminus of these woods, a thousand miles due north into the wilderness, somewhere deep in the Arctic, where the peninsula of trees which began at Devon would end at last in an untouched grove of pine, austere and beautiful.

  There is no such grove, I know now, but the morning of my return to Devon I imagined that it might be just over the visible horizon, or the horizon after that.

  A few of the fighters paused to yell a greeting at me, but no one broke off to ask about Leper. But I knew it was a mistake for me to stay there; at any moment someone might.

  This gathering had obviously been Finny’s work. Who else could have inveigled twenty people to the farthest extremity of the school to throw snowballs at each other? I could just picture him, at the end of his ten o’clock class, organizing it with the easy authority which always came into his manner when he had an idea which was particularly preposterous. There they all were now, the cream of the school, the lights and leaders of the senior class, with their high I.Q.’s and expensive shoes, as Brinker had said, pasting each other with snowballs.

  I hesitated on the edge of the fight and the edge of the woods, too tangled in my mind to enter either one or the other. So I glanced at my wrist watch, brought my hand dramatically to my mouth as though remembering
something urgent and important, repeated the pantomime in case anybody had missed it, and with this tacit explanation started briskly back toward the center of the school. A snowball caught me on the back of the head. Finny’s voice followed it. “You’re on our side, even if you do have a lousy aim. We need somebody else. Even you.” He came toward me, without his cane at the moment, his new walking cast so much smaller and lighter that an ordinary person could have managed it with hardly a limp noticeable. Finny’s coordination, however, was such that any slight flaw became obvious; there was an interruption, brief as a drum beat, in the continuous flow of his walk, as though with each step he forgot for a split-second where he was going.

  “How’s Leper?” he asked in an offhand way.

  “Oh Leper’s—how would he be? You know Leper—” The fight was moving toward us; I stalled a little more, a stray snowball caught Finny on the side of the face, he shot one back, I seized some ammunition from the ground and we were engulfed.

  Someone knocked me down; I pushed Brinker over a small slope; someone was trying to tackle me from behind. Everywhere there was the smell of vitality in clothes, the vital something in wool and flannel and corduroy which spring releases. I had forgotten that this existed, this smell which instead of the first robin, or the first bud or leaf, means to me that spring has come. I had always welcomed vitality and energy and warmth radiating from thick and sturdy winter clothes. It made me happy, but I kept wondering about next spring, about whether khaki, or suntans or whatever the uniform of the season was, had this aura of promise in it. I felt fairly sure it didn’t.

  The fight veered. Finny had recruited me and others as allies, so that two sides fighting it out had been taking form. Suddenly he turned his fire against me, he betrayed several of his other friends; he went over to the other, to Brinker’s side for a short time, enough to ensure that his betrayal of them would heighten the disorder. Loyalties became hopelessly entangled. No one was going to win or lose after all. Somewhere in the maze Brinker’s sense of generalship disappeared, and he too became as slippery as an Arab, as intriguing as a eunuch. We ended the fight in the only way possible; all of us turned on Phineas. Slowly, with a steadily widening grin, he was driven down beneath a blizzard of snowballs.

  When he had surrendered I bent cheerfully over to help him up, seizing his wrist to stop the final treacherous snowball he had ready, and he remarked, “Well I guess that takes care of the Hitler Youth outing for one day.” All of us laughed. On the way back to the gym he said, “That was a good fight. I thought it was pretty funny, didn’t you?”

  • • •

  Hours later it occurred to me to ask him, “Do you think you ought to get into fights like that? After all, there’s your leg—”

  “Stanpole said something about not falling again, but I’m very careful.”

  “Christ, don’t break it again!”

  “No, of course I won’t break it again. Isn’t the bone supposed to be stronger when it grows together over a place where it’s been broken once?”

  “Yes, I think it is.”

  “I think so too. In fact I think I can feel it getting stronger.”

  “You think you can? Can you feel it?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Thank God.”

  “What?”

  “I said that’s good.”

  “Yes, I guess it is. I guess that’s good, all right.”

  • • •

  After dinner that night Brinker came to our room to pay us one of his formal calls. Our room had by this time of year the exhausted look of a place where two people had lived too long without taking any interest in their surroundings. Our cots at either end of the room were sway-backed beneath their pink and brown cotton spreads. The walls, which were much farther off white than normal, expressed two forgotten interests: Finny had scotch-taped newspaper pictures of the Roosevelt-Churchill meeting above his cot (“They’re the two most important of the old men,” he had explained, “getting together to make up what to tell us next about the war”). Over my cot I had long ago taped pictures which together amounted to a barefaced lie about my background—weepingly romantic views of plantation mansions, moss-hung trees by moonlight, lazy roads winding dustily past the cabins of the Negroes. When asked about them I had acquired an accent appropriate to a town three states south of my own, and I had transmitted the impression, without actually stating it, that this was the old family place. But by now I no longer needed this vivid false identity; now I was acquiring, I felt, a sense of my own real authority and worth, I had had many new experiences and I was growing up.

  “How’s Leper?” said Brinker as he came in.

  “Yeah,” said Phineas, “I meant to ask you before.”

  “Leper? Why he’s—he’s on leave.” But my resentment against having to mislead people seemed to be growing stronger every day. “As a matter of fact Leper is ‘Absent Without Leave,’ he just took off by himself.”

  “Leper?” both of them exclaimed together.

  “Yes,” I shrugged, “Leper. Leper’s not the little rabbit we used to know any more.”

  “Nobody can change that much,” said Brinker in his new tough-minded way.

  Finny said, “He just didn’t like the army, I bet. Why should he? What’s the point of it anyway?”

  “Phineas,” Brinker said with dignity, “please don’t give us your infantile lecture on world affairs at this time.” And to me, “He was too scared to stay, wasn’t he?”

  I narrowed my eyes as though thinking hard about that. Finally I said, “Yes, I think you could put it that way.”

  “He panicked.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “He must be out of his mind,” said Brinker energetically, “to do a thing like that. I’ll bet he cracked up, didn’t he? That’s what happened. Leper found out that the army was just too much for him. I’ve heard about guys like that. Some morning they don’t get out of bed with everybody else. They just lie there crying. I’ll bet something like that happened to Leper.” He looked at me. “Didn’t it?”

  “Yes. It did.”

  Brinker had closed with such energy, almost enthusiasm, on the truth that I gave it to him without many misgivings. The moment he had it he crumbled. “Well I’ll be damned. I’ll be damned. Old Leper. Quiet old Leper. Quiet old Leper from Vermont. He never could fight worth a damn. You’d think somebody would have realized that when he tried to enlist. Poor old Leper. What’s he act like?”

  “He cries a lot of the time.”

  “Oh God. What’s the matter with our class anyway? It isn’t even June yet and we’ve already got two men sidelined for the Duration.”

  “Two?”

  Brinker hesitated briefly. “Well there’s Finny here.”

  “Yes,” agreed Phineas in his deepest and most musical tone, “there’s me.”

  “Finny isn’t out of it,” I said.

  “Of course he is.”

  “Yes, I’m out of it.”

  “Not that there’s anything to be out of!” I wondered if my face matched the heartiness of my voice. “Just this dizzy war, this fake, this thing with the old men making . . .” I couldn’t help watching Finny as I spoke, and so I ran out of momentum. I waited for him to take it up, to unravel once again his tale of plotting statesmen and deluded public, his great joke, his private toe hold on the world. He was sitting on his cot, elbows on knees, looking down. He brought his wide-set eyes up, his grin flashed and faded, and then he murmured, “Sure. There isn’t any war.”

  It was one of the few ironic remarks Phineas ever made, and with it he quietly brought to a close all his special inventions which had carried us through the winter. Now the facts were re-established, and gone were all the fantasies, such as the Olympic Games for a.d. 1944, closed before they had ever been opened.

  • • •

  There was little left at Devon any more which had not been recruited for the war. The few stray activities and dreamy people not caught
up in it were being systematically corralled by Brinker. And every day in chapel there was some announcement about qualifying for “V-12,” an officer-training program the Navy had set up in many colleges and universities. It sounded very safe, almost like peacetime, almost like just going normally on to college. It was also very popular; groups the size of LST crews joined it, almost everyone who could qualify, except for a few who “wanted to fly” and so chose the Army Air Force, or something called V-5 instead. There were also a special few with energetic fathers who were expecting appointments to Annapolis or West Point or the Coast Guard Academy or even—this alternative had been unexpectedly stumbled on—the Merchant Marine Academy. Devon was by tradition and choice the most civilian of schools, and there was a certain strained hospitality in the way both the faculty and students worked to get along with the leathery recruiting officers who kept appearing on the campus. There was no latent snobbery in us; we didn’t find any in them. It was only that we could feel a deep and sincere difference between us and them, a difference which everyone struggled with awkward fortitude to bridge. It was as though Athens and Sparta were trying to establish not just a truce but an alliance—although we were not as civilized as Athens and they were not as brave as Sparta.

  Neither were we. There was no rush to get into the fighting; no one seemed to feel the need to get into the infantry, and only a few were talking about the Marines. The thing to be was careful and self-preserving. It was going to be a long war. Quackenbush, I heard, had two possible appointments to the Military Academy, with carefully prepared positions in V-12 and dentistry school to fall back on if necessary.

  I myself took no action. I didn’t feel free to, and I didn’t know why this was so. Brinker, in his accelerating change from absolute to relative virtue, came up with plan after plan, each more insulated from the fighting than the last. But I did nothing.

  • • •

  One morning, after a Naval officer had turned many heads in chapel with an address on convoy duty, Brinker put his hand on the back of my neck in the vestibule outside and steered me into a room used for piano practice near the entrance. It was soundproofed, and he swung the vaultlike door closed behind us.