toward anything which presented itself. It turned out to be the exercise bar. I sprang up, grabbed
it, and then, in a fumbling and perhaps grotesque offering to Phineas, I chinned myself. I
couldn’t think of anything else, not the right words, not the right gesture. I did what I could think
of.
“Do thirty of them,” he mumbled in a bored voice.
I had never done ten of them. At the twelfth I discovered that he had been counting to himself
because he began to count aloud in a noncommittal, half-heard voice. At eighteen there was a
certain enlargement in his tone, and at twenty-three the last edges of boredom left it; he stood up,
and the urgency with which he brought out the next numbers was like an invisible boost lifting
me the distance of my arms, until he sang out “thirty!” with a flare of pleasure.
The moment was past. Phineas I know had been even more startled than I to discover this
bitterness in himself. Neither of us ever mentioned it again, and neither of us ever forgot that it
was there.
He sat down and studied his clenched hands. “Did I ever tell you,” he began in a husky tone,
“that I used to be aiming for the Olympics?” He wouldn’t have mentioned it except that after
what he had said he had to say something very personal, something deeply held. To do
otherwise, to begin joking, would have been a hypocritical denial of what had happened, and
Phineas was not capable of that.
I was still hanging from the bar; my hands felt as though they had sunk into it. “No, you never
told me that,” I mumbled into my arm.
“Well I was. And now I’m not sure, not a hundred per cent sure I’ll be completely, you know, in
shape by 1944. So I’m going to coach you for them instead.”
“But there isn’t going to be any Olympics in ‘44. That’s only a couple of years away. The war—
”
“Leave your fantasy life out of this. We’re grooming you for the Olympics, pal, in 1944.”
And not believing him, not forgetting that troops were being shuttled toward battlefields all over
the world, I went along, as I always did, with any new invention of Finny’s. There was no harm
in taking aim, even if the target was a dream.
But since we were so far out of the line of fire, the chief sustenance for any sense of the war was
mental. We saw nothing real of it; all our impressions of the war were in the false medium of two
dimensions-photographs in the papers and magazines, newsreels, posters—or artificially
conveyed to us by a voice on the radio, or headlines across the top of a newspaper. I found that
only through a continuous use of the imagination could I hold out against Finny’s driving
offensive in favor of peace.