It probably would have been better for all of us if someone like Brinker had been the first to go.
He could have been depended upon to take a loud dramatic departure, so that the school would
have reverberated for weeks afterward with Brinker’s Last Words, Brinker’s Military Bearing,
Brinker’s Sense of Duty. And all of us, influenced by the vacuum of his absence, would have felt
the touch of war as a daily fact.
But the disappearing tail of Leper’s cap inspired none of this. For a few days the war was more
unimaginable than ever. We didn’t mention it and we didn’t mention Leper, until at last Brinker
found a workable point of view. One day in the Butt Room he read aloud a rumor in a newspaper
about an attempt on Hitler’s life. He lowered the paper, gazed in a visionary way in front of him,
and then remarked, “That was Leper, of course.”
This established our liaison with World War II. The Tunisian campaign became “Leper’s
liberation”; the bombing of the Ruhr was greeted by Brinker with hurt surprise: “He didn’t tell us
he’d left the ski troops”; the torpedoing of the Scharnhorst: “At it again.” Leper sprang up all
over the world at the core of every Allied success. We talked about Leper’s stand at Stalingrad,
Leper on the Burma Road, Leper’s convoy to Archangel; we surmised that the crisis over the
leadership of the Free French would be resolved by the appointment of neither de Gaulle nor
Giraud but Lepellier; we knew, better than the newspapers, that it was not the Big Three but the
Big Four who were running the war.
In the silences between jokes about Leper’s glories we wondered whether we ourselves would
measure up to the humblest minimum standard of the army. I did not know everything there was
to know about myself, and knew that I did not know ft; I wondered in the silences between jokes
about Leper whether the still hidden parts of myself might contain the Sad Sack, the outcast, or
the coward. We were all at our funniest about Leper, and we all secretly hoped that Leper, that
incompetent, was as heroic as we said.
Everyone contributed to this legend except Phineas. At the outset, with the attempt on Hitler’s
life, Finny had said, “If someone gave Leper a loaded gun and put it at Hitler’s temple, he’d
miss.” There was a general shout of outrage, and then we recommended the building of Leper’s
triumphal arch around Brinker’s keystone. Phineas took no part in it, and since little else was
talked about in the Butt Room he soon stopped going there and stopped me from going as well—
”How do you expect to be an athlete if you smoke like a forest fire?” He drew me increasingly
away from the Butt Room crowd, away from Brinker and Chet and all other friends, into a world
inhabited by just himself and me, where there was no war at all, just Phineas and me alone
among all the people of the world, training for the Olympics of 1944.
Saturday afternoons are terrible in a boys’ school, especially in the winter. There is no football
game; it is not possible, as it is in the spring, to take bicycle trips into the surrounding country.
Not even the most grinding student can feel required to lose himself in his books, since there is
Sunday ahead, long, lazy, quiet Sunday, to do any homework.
And these Saturdays are worst in the late winter when the snow has lost its novelty and its shine,
and the school seems to have been reduced to only a network of drains. During the brief thaw in
the early afternoon there is a dismal gurgling of dirty water seeping down pipes and along