“There. You should have worn that all day, just that. That has real taste. The rest of your outfit
was just gilding that lily of a sweat shirt.”
“Glad to hear you like it.”
“Not at all,” he replied ambiguously, reaching for a pair of crutches which leaned against the
desk.
I took the sight of this all right, I had seen him on crutches the year before when he broke his
ankle playing football. At Devon crutches had almost as many athletic associations as shoulder
pads. And I had never seen an invalid whose skin glowed with such health, accenting the sharp
clarity of his eyes, or one who used his arms and shoulders on crutches as though on parallel
bars, as though he would do a somersault on them if he felt like it. Phineas vaulted across the
room to his cot, yanked back the spread and then groaned. “Oh Christ, it’s not made up. What is
all this crap about no maids?”
“No maids,” I said. “After all, there’s a war on. It’s not much of a sacrifice, when you think of
people starving and being bombed and all the other things.” My unselfishness was responding
properly to the influences of 1942. In these past months Phineas and I had grown apart on this; I
felt a certain disapproval of him for grumbling about a lost luxury, with a war on. “After all,” I
repeated, “there is a war on.”
“Is there?” he murmured absently. I didn’t pay any attention; he was always speaking when his
thoughts were somewhere else, asking rhetorical questions and echoing other people’s words.
I found some sheets and made up his bed for him. He wasn’t a bit sensitive about being helped,
not a bit like an invalid striving to seem independent. I put this on the list of things to include
when I said some prayers, the first in a long time, that night in bed. Now that Phineas was back it
seemed time to start saying prayers again.
After the lights went out the special quality of my silence let him know that I was saying them,
and he kept quiet for approximately three minutes. Then he began to talk; he never went to sleep
without talking first and he seemed to feel that prayers lasting more than three minutes were
showing off. God was always unoccupied in Finny’s universe, ready to lend an ear any time at
all. Anyone who failed to get his message through in three minutes, as I sometimes failed to do
when trying to impress him, Phineas, with my sanctity, wasn’t trying.
He was still talking when I fell asleep, and the next morning, through the icy atmosphere which
one window raised an inch had admitted to our room, he woke me with the overindignant shout,
“What is all this crap about no maids!” He was sitting up in bed, as though ready to spring out of
it, totally and energetically awake. I had to laugh at this indignant athlete, with the strength of
five people, complaining about the service. He threw back his bedclothes and said, “Hand me my
crutches, will you?”
Until now, in spite of everything, I had welcomed each new day as though it were a new life,
where all past failures and problems were erased, and all future possibilities and joys open and