“Yes, I think so.”
“Thank God.”
“What?”
“I said that’s good.”
“Yes, I guess it is. I guess that’s good, all right.”
After dinner that night Brinker came to our room to pay us one of his formal calls. Our room had
by this time of year the exhausted look of a place where two people had lived too long without
taking any interest in their surroundings. Our cots at either end of the room were sway-backed
beneath their pink and brown cotton spreads. The walls, which were much farther off white than
normal, expressed two forgotten interests: Finny had scotch-taped newspaper pictures of the
Roosevelt-Churchill meeting above his cot (“They’re the two most important of the old men,” he
had explained, “getting together to make up what to tell us next about the war”). Over my cot I
had long ago taped pictures which together amounted to a barefaced lie about my background—
weepingly romantic views of plantation mansions, moss-hung trees by moonlight, lazy roads
winding dustily past the cabins of the Negroes. When asked about them I had acquired an accent
appropriate to a town three states south of my own, and I had transmitted the impression, without
actually stating it, that this was the old family place. But by now I no longer needed this vivid
false identity; now I was acquiring, I felt, a sense of my own real authority and worth, I had had
many new experiences and I was growing up.
“How’s Leper?” said Brinker as he came in.
“Yeah,” said Phineas, “I meant to ask you before.”
“Leper? Why he’s—he’s on leave.” But my resentment against having to mislead people seemed
to be growing stronger every day. “As a matter of fact Leper is ‘Absent Without Leave,’ he just
took off by himself.”
“Leper?” both of them exclaimed together.
“Yes,” I shrugged, “Leper. Leper’s not the little rabbit we used to know any more.”
“Nobody can change that much,” said Brinker in his new tough-minded way.
Finny said, “He just didn’t like the army, I bet. Why should he? What’s the point of it anyway?”
“Phineas,” Brinker said with dignity, “please don’t give us your infantile lecture on world affairs
at this time.” And to me, “He was too scared to stay, wasn’t he?”
I narrowed my eyes as though thinking hard about that. Finally I said, “Yes, I think you could
put it that way.”