rehearsal: after you hit the water you made big splashes with your hands, to scatter the flaming
oil which would be on the surface.

So to Phineas I said, “I’m too busy for sports,” and he went into his incoherent groans and
jumbles of words, and I thought the issue was settled until at the end he said, “Listen, pal, if I
can’t play sports, you’re going to play them for me,” and I lost part of myself to him then, and a
soaring sense of freedom revealed that this must have been my purpose from the first: to become
a part of Phineas.

Chapter 7

Brinker Hadley came across to see me late that afternoon. I had taken a shower to wash off the
sticky salt of the Naguamsett River—going into the Devon was like taking a refreshing shower
itself, you never had to clean up after it, but the Naguamsett was something else entirely. I had
never been in it before; it seemed appropriate that my baptism there had taken place on the first
day of this winter session, and that I had been thrown into it, in the middle of a fight.

I washed the traces off me and then put on a pair of chocolate brown slacks, a pair which Phineas
had been particularly critical of when he wasn’t wearing them, and a blue flannel shirt. Then,
with nothing to do until my French class at five o’clock, I began turning over in my mind this
question of sports.

But Brinker came in. I think he made a point of visiting all the rooms near him the first day.
“Well, Gene,” his beaming face appeared around the door. Brinker looked the standard
preparatory school article in his gray gabardine suit with square, hand-sewn-looking jacket
pockets, a conservative necktie, and dark brown cordovan shoes. His face was all straight lines—
eyebrows, mouth, nose, everything—and he carried his six feet of height straight as well. He
looked but happened not to be athletic, being too busy with politics, arrangements, and offices.
There was nothing idiosyncratic about Brinker unless you saw him from behind; I did as he
turned to close the door after him. The flaps of his gabardine jacket parted slightly over his
healthy rump, and it is that, without any sense of derision at all, that I recall as Brinker’s salient
characteristic, those healthy, determined, not over-exaggerated but definite and substantial
buttocks.

“Here you are in your solitary splendor,” he went on genially. “I can see you have real influence
around here. This big room all to yourself. I wish I knew how to manage things like you.” He
grinned confidingly and sank down on my cot, leaning on his elbow in a relaxed, at-home way.

It didn’t seem fitting for Brinker Hadley, the hub of the class, to be congratulating me on
influence. I was going to say that while he had a roommate it was frightened Brownie Perkins,
who would never impinge on Brinker’s comfort in any way, and that they had two rooms, the
front one with a fireplace. Not that I grudged him any of this. I liked Brinker in spite of his
Winter Session efficiency; almost everyone liked Brinker.

But in the pause I took before replying he started talking in his lighthearted way again. He never
let a dull spot appear in conversation if he could help it.