A Separate Peace (9 page)

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.”

He had a tough bantam body, easily detectable under the tight sweat shirt he wore. “I wrestle in the winter,” he went on. “What are you doing in the winter?”

“I don't know, manage something else.”

“You're a senior aren't you?”

He knew that I was a senior. “Yeah.”

“Starting a little late to manage teams aren't you?”

“Am I?”

“Damn right you are!” He put indignant conviction into this, pouncing on the first sprig of assertiveness in me.

“Well, it doesn't matter.”

“Yes it matters.”

“I don't think it does.”

“Go to hell Forrester. Who the hell are you anyway.”

I turned with an inward groan to look at him. Quack-enbush wasn't going to let me just do the work for him like the automaton I wished to be. We were going to have to be pitted against each other. It was easy enough now to see why. For Quackenbush had been systematically disliked since he first set foot in Devon, with careless, disinterested insults coming at him from the beginning, voting for and applauding the class leaders through years of attaining nothing he wanted for himself. I didn't want to add to his humiliations; I even sympathized with his trembling, goaded egotism he could no longer contain, the furious arrogance which sprang out now at the mere hint of opposition from someone he had at last found whom
he could consider inferior to himself. I realized that all this explained him, and it wasn't the words he said which angered me. It was only that he was so ignorant, that he knew nothing of the gypsy summer, nothing of the loss I was fighting to endure, of skylarks and splashes and petal-bearing breezes, he had not seen Leper's snails or the Charter of the Super Suicide Society; he shared nothing, knew nothing, felt nothing as Phineas had done.

“You, Quackenbush, don't know anything about who I am.” That launched me, and I had to go on and say, “or anything else.”

“Listen you maimed son-of-a-bitch . . .”

I hit him hard across the face. I didn't know why for an instant; it was almost as though I were maimed. Then the realization that there was someone who was flashed over me.

Quackenbush had clamped his arm in some kind of tight wrestling grip around my neck, and I was glad in this moment not to be a cripple. I reached over, grasped the back of his sweat shirt, wrenched, and it came away in my hand. I tried to throw him off, he lunged at the same time, and we catapulted into the water.

The dousing extinguished Quackenbush's rage, and he let go of me. I scrambled back onto the float, still seared by what he had said. “The next time you call anybody maimed,” I bit off the words harshly so he would understand all of them, “you better make sure they are first.”

“Get out of here, Forrester,” he said bitterly from the water, “you're not wanted around here, Forrester. Get out of here.”

I fought that battle, that first skirmish of a long campaign, for Finny. Until the back of my hand cracked against Quackenbush's face I had never pictured myself in
the role of Finny's defender, and I didn't suppose that he would have thanked me for it now. He was too loyal to anything connected with himself—his roommate, his dormitory, his class, his school, outward in vastly expanded circles of loyalty until I couldn't imagine who would be excluded. But it didn't feel exactly as though I had done it for Phineas. It felt as though I had done it for myself.

If so I had little profit to show as I straggled back toward the dormitory dripping wet, with the job I had wanted gone, temper gone, mind circling over and over through the whole soured afternoon. I knew now that it was fall all right; I could feel it pressing clammily against my wet clothes, an unfriendly, discomforting breath in the air, an edge of wintery chill, air that shriveled, soon to put out the lights on the countryside. One of my legs wouldn't stop trembling, whether from cold or anger I couldn't tell. I wished I had hit him harder.

Someone was coming toward me along the bent, broken lane which led to the dormitory, a lane out of old London, ancient houses on either side leaning as though soon to tumble into it, cobblestones heaving underfoot like a bricked-over ocean squall—a figure of great height advanced down them toward me. It could only be Mr. Ludsbury; no one else could pass over these stones with such contempt for the idea of tripping.

The houses on either side were inhabited by I didn't know who; wispy, fragile old ladies seemed most likely. I couldn't duck into one of them. There were angles and bumps and bends everywhere, but none big enough to conceal me. Mr. Ludsbury loomed on like a high-masted clipper ship in this rocking passage, and I tried to go stealthily by him on my watery, squeaking sneakers.

“Just one moment, Forrester, if you please.” Mr. Ludsbury's voice was bass, British, and his Adam's apple seemed to move as much as his mouth when he spoke. “Has there been a cloudburst in your part of town?”

“No, sir. I'm sorry, sir, I fell into the river.” I apologized by instinct to him for this mishap which discomforted only me.

“And could you tell me how and why you fell into the river?”

“I slipped.”

“Yes.” After a pause he went on. “I think you have slipped in any number of ways since last year. I understand for example that there was gaming in my dormitory this summer while you were living there.” He was in charge of the dormitory; one of the dispensations of those days of deliverance, I realized now, had been his absence.

“Gaming? What kind of gaming, sir?”

“Cards, dice,” he shook his long hand dismissingly, “I didn't inquire. It didn't matter. There won't be any more of it.”

“I don't know who that would have been.” Nights of black-jack and poker and unpredictable games invented by Phineas rose up in my mind; the back room of Leper's suite, a lamp hung with a blanket so that only a small blazing circle of light fell sharply amid the surrounding darkness; Phineas losing even in those games he invented, betting always for what
should
win, for what would have been the most brilliant successes of all, if only the cards hadn't betrayed him. Finny finally betting his icebox and losing it, that contraption, to me.

I thought of it because Mr. Ludsbury was just then saying, “And while I'm putting the dormitory back together I'd better tell you to get rid of that leaking icebox. Nothing
like that is ever permitted in the dormitory, of course. I notice that everything went straight to seed during the summer and that none of you old boys who knew our standards so much as lifted a finger to help Mr. Prud'homme maintain order. As a substitute for the summer he couldn't have been expected to know everything there was to be known at once. You old boys simply took advantage of the situation.”

I stood there shaking in my wet sneakers. If only I had truly taken advantage of the situation, seized and held and prized the multitudes of advantages the summer offered me; if only I had.

I said nothing, on my face I registered the bleak look of a defendant who knows the court will never be swayed by all the favorable evidence he has. It was a schoolboy look; Mr. Ludsbury knew it well.

“There's a long-distance call for you,” he continued in the tone of the judge performing the disagreeable duty of telling the defendant his right. “I've written the operator's number on the pad beside the telephone in my study. You may go in and call.”

“Thank you very much, sir.”

He sailed on down the lane without further reference to me, and I wondered who was sick at home.

But when I reached his study—low-ceilinged, gloomy with books, black leather chairs, a pipe rack, frayed brown rug, a room which students rarely entered except for a reprimand—I saw on the pad not an operator's number from my home town, but one which seemed to interrupt the beating of my heart.

I called this operator, and listened in wonder while she went through her routine as though this were just any long-distance call, and then her voice left the line and it
was pre-empted, and charged, by the voice of Phineas. “Happy first day of the new academic year!”

“Thanks, thanks a lot, it's a—you sound—I'm glad to hear your—”

“Stop stuttering, I'm paying for this. Who're you rooming with?”

“Nobody. They didn't put anyone else in the room.”

“Saving my place for me! Good old Devon. But anyway, you wouldn't have let them put anyone else in there, would you?” Friendliness, simple outgoing affection, that was all I could hear in his voice.

“No, of course not.”

“I didn't think you would. Roommates are roommates. Even if they do have an occasional fight. God you were crazy when you were here.”

“I guess I was. I guess I must have been.”

“Completely over the falls. I wanted to be sure you'd recovered. That's why I called up. I knew that if you'd let them put anybody else in the room in my place, then you really
were
crazy. But you didn't, I knew you wouldn't. Well, I did have just a
trace
of doubt, that was because you talked so crazy here. I have to admit I had just a
second
when I wondered. I'm sorry about that, Gene. Naturally I was completely wrong. You didn't let them put anyone else in my spot.”

“No, I didn't let them.”

“I could shoot myself for thinking you might. I really knew you wouldn't.”

“No, I wouldn't.”

“And I spent my money on a long-distance call! All for nothing. Well, it's spent, on you too. So start talking, pal. And it better be good. Start with sports. What are you going out for?”

“Crew. Well, not exactly crew. Managing crew. Assistant crew manager.”

“Assistant
crew
manager!”

“I don't think I've got the job—”

“Assistant crew
manager!
”

“I got in a fight this after—”

“
Assistant crew manager!
” No voice could course with dumfoundment like Finny's. “You
are
crazy!”

“Listen, Finny, I don't care about being a big man on the campus or anything.”

“Whaaat?” Much more clearly than anything in Mr. Ludsbury's study I could see his face now, grimacing in wide, obsessed stupefaction. “Who said anything about whoever
they
are!”

“Well then what are you so worked up for?”

“What do you want to manage crew for? What do you want to
manage
for? What's that got to do with sports?”

The point was, the grace of it was, that it had nothing to do with sports. For I wanted no more of sports. They were barred from me, as though when Dr. Stanpole said, “Sports are finished” he had been speaking of me. I didn't trust myself in them, and I didn't trust anyone else. It was as though football players were really bent on crushing the life out of each other, as though boxers were in combat to the death, as though even a tennis ball might turn into a bullet. This didn't seem completely crazy imagination in 1942, when jumping out of trees stood for abandoning a torpedoed ship. Later, in the school swimming pool, we were given the second stage in that rehearsal: after you hit the water you made big splashes with your hands, to scatter the flaming oil which would be on the surface.