I jerked the jug to my mouth and took a huge gulp of cider in relief, and the violence latent in the
day drifted away; perhaps the Naguamsett carried it out on the receding tide. Brinker strode
through the swirl of boys to Phineas. “I formally declare,” he bellowed, “that these Games are
open.”
“You can’t do that,” Finny said rebukingly. “Who ever heard of opening the Games without the
sacred fire from Olympus?”
Sensing that I must act as the Chorus, I registered on my face the universally unheard-of quality
of the Games without fire. “Fire, fire,” I said across the damp snow.
“We’ll sacrifice one of the prizes,” said Phineas, seizing the Iliad. He sprinkled the pages with
cider to make them more inflammable, touched a match to them, and a little jet of flame curled
upward. The Games, alight with Homer and cider, were open.
Chet Douglass, leaning against the side of the Prize Table, continued to blow musical figures for
his own enlightenment. Forgetful of us and the athletic programing Finny now put into motion,
he strolled here and there, sometimes at the start of the ski jump competition, blowing an
appropriate call, more often invoking the serene order of Haydn, or a high, remote, arrogant
Spanish world, or the cheerful, lowdown carelessness of New Orleans.
The hard cider began to take charge of us. Or I wonder now whether it wasn’t cider but our own
exuberance which intoxicated us, sent restraint flying, causing Brinker to throw the football
block on the statue of the Headmaster, giving me, as I put on the skis and slid down the small
slope and off the miniature ski jump a sensation of soaring flight, of hurtling high and far
through space; inspiring Phineas, during one of Chet’s Spanish inventions, to climb onto the
Prize Table and with only one leg to create a droll dance among the prizes, springing and
spinning from one bare space to another, cleanly missing Hazel Brewster’s hair, never marring
by a misstep the pictures of Betty Grable. Under the influence not I know of the hardest cider but
of his own inner joy at life for a moment as it should be, as it was meant to be in his nature,
Phineas recaptured that magic gift for existing primarily in space, one foot conceding briefly to
gravity its rights before spinning him off again into the air. It was his wildest demonstration of
himself, of himself in the kind of world he loved; it was his choreography of peace.
And when he stopped and sat down among the prizes and said, “Now we’re going to have the
Decathlon. Quiet everybody, our Olympic candidate Gene Forrester, is now going to qualify,” it
wasn’t cider which made me in this moment champion of everything he ordered, to run as
though I were the abstraction of speed, to walk the half-circle of statues on my hands, to balance
on my head on top of the icebox on top of the Prize Table, to jump if he had asked it across the
Naguamsett and land crashing in the middle of Quackenbush’s boathouse, to accept at the end of
it amid a clatter of applause—for on this day even the schoolboy egotism of Devon was conjured
away—a wreath made from the evergreen trees which Phineas placed on my head. It wasn’t the
cider which made me surpass myself, it was this liberation we had torn from the gray
encroachments of 1943, the escape we had concocted, this afternoon of momentary, illusory,
special and separate peace.