treasures. Newspapers are always crowded with strange maps and names of towns, and every
few months the earth seems to lurch from its path when you see something in the newspapers,
such as the time Mussolini, who had almost seemed one of the eternal leaders, is photographed
hanging upside down on a meathook. Everyone listens to news broadcasts five or six times every
day. All pleasurable things, all travel and sports and entertainment and good food and fine
clothes, are in the very shortest supply, always were and always will be. There are just tiny
fragments of pleasure and luxury in the world, and there is something unpatriotic about enjoying
them. All foreign lands are inaccessible except to servicemen; they are vague, distant, and sealed
off as though behind a curtain of plastic. The prevailing color of life in America is a dull, dark
green called olive drab. That color is always respectable and always important. Most other colors
risk being unpatriotic.
It is this special America, a very untypical one I guess, an unfamiliar transitional blur in the
memories of most people, which is the real America for me. In that short-lived and special
country we spent this summer at Devon when Finny achieved certain feats as an athlete. In such
a period no one notices or rewards any achievements involving the body unless the result is to
kill it or save it on the battlefield, so that there were only a few of us to applaud and wonder at
what he was able to do.
One day he broke the school swimming record. He and I were fooling around in the pool, near a
big bronze plaque marked with events for which the school kept records—50 yards, 100 yards,
220 yards. Under each was a slot with a marker fitted into it, showing the name of the record-
holder, his year, and his time. Under “100 Yards Free Style” there was “A. Hopkins Parker—
1940 - 53.0 seconds.”
“A. Hopkins Parker?” Finny squinted up at the name. “I don’t remember any A. Hopkins
Parker.”
“He graduated before we got here.”
“You mean that record has been up there the whole time we’ve been at Devon and nobody’s
busted it yet?” It was an insult to the class, and Finny had tremendous loyalty to the class, as he
did to any group he belonged to, beginning with him and me and radiating outward past the
limits of humanity toward spirits and clouds and stars.
No one else happened to be in the pool. Around us gleamed white tile and glass brick; the green,
artificial-looking water rocked gently in it shining basin, releasing vague chemical smells and a
sense of many pipes and filters; even Finny’s voice, trapped in this closed, high-ceilinged room,
lost its special resonance and blurred into a general well of noise gathered up toward the ceiling.
He said blurringly, “I have a feeling I can swim faster than A. Hopkins Parker.”
We found a stop watch in the office. He mounted a starting box, leaned forward from the waist
as he had seen racing swimmers do but never had occasion to do himself—I noticed a
preparatory looseness coming into his shoulders and arms, a controlled ease about his stance
which was unexpected in anyone trying to break a record. I said, “On your mark—Go!” There
was a complex moment when his body uncoiled and shot forward with sudden metallic tension.