“Finny, I’ve got something to tell you. You’re going to hate it, but there’s something I’ve got to
tell you.”
“My God, what energy,” he said, falling back against the pillows. “You sound like General
MacArthur.”
“I don’t care who I sound like, and you won’t think so when I tell you. This is the worst thing in
the world, and I’m sorry and I hate to tell you but I’ve got to tell you.”
But I didn’t tell him. Dr. Stanpole came in before I was able to, and then a nurse came in, and I
was sent away. The next day the doctor decided that Finny was not yet well enough to see
visitors, even old pals like me. Soon after he was taken in an ambulance to his home outside
Boston.
The Summer Session closed, officially came to an end. But to me it seemed irresolutely
suspended, halted strangely before its time. I went south for a month’s vacation in my home
town and spent it in an atmosphere of reverie and unreality, as though I had lived that month
once already and had not been interested by it the first time either.
At the end of September I started back toward Devon on the jammed, erratic trains of September,
- I reached Boston seventeen hours behind schedule; there would be prestige in that at
Devon, where those of us from long distances with travel adventures to report or invent held the
floor for several days after a vacation.
By luck I got a taxi at South Station, and instead of saying “North Station” to the driver, instead
of just crossing Boston and catching the final train for the short last leg of the trip to Devon,
instead of that I sat back in the seat and heard myself give the address of Finny’s house on the
outskirts.
We found it fairly easily, on a street with a nave of ancient elms branching over it. The house
itself was high, white, and oddly proper to be the home of Phineas. It presented a face of definite
elegance to the street, although behind that wings and ells dwindled quickly in formality until the
house ended in a big plain barn.
Nothing surprised Phineas. A cleaning woman answered the door and when I came into the room
where he was sitting, he looked very pleased and not at all surprised.
“So you are going to show up!” his voice took off in one of its flights, “and you brought me
something to eat from down South, didn’t you? Honeysuckle and molasses or something like
that?” I tried to think of something funny. “Corn bread? You did bring something. You didn’t go
all the way to Dixie and then come back with nothing but your dismal face to show for it.” His
talk rolled on, ignoring and covering my look of shock and clumsiness. I was silenced by the
sight of him propped by white hospital-looking pillows in a big armchair. Despite everything at
the Devon Infirmary, he had seemed an athlete there, temporarily injured in a game; as though
the trainer would come in any minute and tape him up. Propped now before a great New England
fireplace, on this quiet old street, he looked to me like an invalid, house-bound.