A Separate Peace

Brinker Hadley, next door, always awoke like an express train. There was a gathering rumble through the wall, as Brinker reared up in bed, coughed hoarsely, slammed his feet on the floor, pounded through the freezing air to the closet for something in the way of clothes, and thundered down the hall to the bathroom. Today, however, he veered and broke into our room instead.

“Ready to sign up?” he shouted before he was through the door. “You ready to en—Fi

“You ready to en—what?” pursued Fi

“Fi

“Sure,” confirmed Fi

“So,” Brinker curled his lip at me, “your little plot didn’t work so well after all.”

“What’s he talking about?” said Fi

“Just talking,” I said shortly. “What does Brinker ever talk about?”

“You know what I’m talking about well enough.”

“No I don’t.”

“Oh yes you do.”

“Are you telling me what I know?”

“Damn right I am.”

“What’s he talking about,” said Fi

The room was bitterly cold. I stood trembling in front of Phineas, still holding his crutches in place, unable to turn and face Brinker and this joke he had gotten into his head, this catastrophic joke.

“He wants to know if I’ll sign up with him,” I said, “enlist.” It was the ultimate question for all seventeen-year-olds that year, and it drove Brinker’s insinuations from every mind but mine.

“Yeah,” said Brinker.

“Enlist!” cried Fi

“Well I just thought—last night after the railroad work—”

“You thought you might sign up?” he went on, looking carefully away.

Brinker drew one of his deep senatorial breaths, but he found nothing to say. We three stood shivering in the thin New Hampshire morning light, Fi

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “It was just something Brinker happened to say last night, that’s all.”

“I said,” Brinker began in an unusually guarded voice, glancing quickly at Phineas, “I said something about enlisting today.”

Fi

“You can’t get that cast wet, can you?” asked Brinker.

“No, I’ll keep it outside the curtain.”

“I’ll help,” said Brinker.

“No,” said Fi

“How can you manage all right?” Brinker persisted aggressively.

“I can manage all right,” Fi

I could hardly believe it, but it was too plainly printed in the closed expression of his face to mistake, too discernible beneath the even tone of his voice: Phineas was shocked at the idea of my leaving. In some way he needed me. He needed me. I was the least trustworthy person he had ever met. I knew that; he knew or should know that too. I had even told him. I had told him. But there was no mistaking the shield of remoteness in his face and voice. He wanted me around. The war then passed away from me, and dreams of enlistment and escape and a clean start lost their meaning for me.

“Sure you can manage the shower all right,” I said, “but what difference does it make? Come on. Brinker’s always … Brinker’s always getting there first. Enlist! What a nutty idea. It’s just Brinker wanting to get there first again. I wouldn’t enlist with you if you were General MacArthur’s eldest son.”

Brinker reared back arrogantly. “And who do you think I am!” But Fi

“First cousin,” said Brinker over his chin, “once removed.”

“He wouldn’t enlist with you,” Fi

“Well,” I qualified in an undertone, “he really is Madame Chiang Kai-shek.”

“Well fan my brow,” cried Fi

And as far as the history of the Class of 1943 at the Devon School is concerned, this was the only part of our conversation worth preserving. Brinker Hadley had been tagged with a nickname at last, after four years of creating them for others and eluding one himself. “Yellow Peril” Hadley swept through the school with the speed of a flu epidemic, and it must be said to his credit that Brinker took it well enough except when, in its inevitable abbreviation, people sometimes called him “Yellow” instead of “Peril.”

But in a week I had forgotten that, and I have never since forgotten the dazed look on Fi

So the war swept over like a wave at the seashore, gathering power and size as it bore on us, overwhelming in its rush, seemingly inescapable, and then at the last moment eluded by a word from Phineas; I had simply ducked, that was all, and the wave’s concentrated power had hurtled harmlessly overhead, no doubt throwing others roughly up on the beach, but leaving me peaceably treading water as before. I did not stop to think that one wave is inevitably followed by another even larger and more powerful, when the tide is coming in.

“I like the winter,” Fi

“Well, it doesn’t like you.” Wooden plank walks had been placed on many of the school paths for better footing, but there were icy patches everywhere on them. A crutch misplaced and he could be thrown down upon the frozen wooden planking, or into the ice-encrusted snow.

Even indoors Devon was a nest of traps for him. The school had been largely rebuilt with a massive bequest from an oil family some years before in a peculiar style of Puritan grandeur, as though Versailles had been modified for the needs of a Sunday school. This opulent sobriety betrayed the divided nature of the school, just as in a different way the two rivers that it straddled did. From the outside the buildings were reticent, severe straight lines of red brick or white clapboard, with shutters standing sentinel beside each window, and a few unassuming white cupolas placed here and there on the roofs because they were expected and not pretty, like Pilgrim bo

But once you passed through the Colonial doorways, with only an occasional fan window or low relief pillar to suggest that a certain muted adornment was permissible, you entered an extravaganza of Pompadour splendor. Pink marble walls and white marble floors were enclosed by arched and vaulted ceilings; an assembly room had been done in the ma