A Separate Peace (17 page)

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.”

“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.

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.