The point was, the grace of it was, that it had nothing to do with sports. For I wanted no more of sports. They were barred from me, as though when Dr. Stanpole said, “Sports are finished” he had been speaking of me. I didn’t trust myself in them, and I didn’t trust anyone else. It was as though football players were really bent on crushing the life out of each other, as though boxers were in combat to the death, as though even a tennis ball might turn into a bullet. This didn’t seem completely crazy imagination in 1942, when jumping out of trees stood for abandoning a torpedoed ship. Later, in the school swimming pool, we were given the second stage in that 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.

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.

“I’ll bet you knew all the time Finny wouldn’t be back this fall. That’s why you picked him for a roommate, right?”

“What?” I pulled quickly around in my chair, away from the desk, and faced him. “No, of course not. How could I know a thing like that in advance?”

Brinker glanced swiftly at me. “You fixed it,” he smiled widely. “You knew all the time. I’ll bet it was all your doing.”

“Don’t be nutty, Brinker,” I turned back toward the desk and began moving books with rapid pointlessness, “what a crazy thing to say.” My voice sounded too strained even to my own blood-pounded ears.

“Ah-h-h. The truth hurts, eh?”

I looked at him as sharply as eyes can look. He had struck an accusing pose.

“Sure,” I gave a short laugh, “sure.” Then these words came out of me by themselves, “But the truth will out.”

His hand fell leadenly on my shoulder. “Rest assured of that, my son. In our free democracy, even fighting for its life, the truth will out.”

I got up. “I feel like a smoke, don’t you? Let’s go down to the Butt Room.”

“Yes, yes. To the dungeon with you.”

The Butt Room was something like a dungeon. It was in the basement, or the bowels, of the dormitory. There were about ten smokers already there. Everyone at Devon had many public faces; in class we looked, if not exactly scholarly, at least respectably alert; on the playing fields we looked like innocent extroverts; and in the Butt Room we looked, very strongly, like criminals. The school’s policy, in order to discourage smoking, was to make these rooms as depressing as possible. The windows near the ceiling were small and dirty, the old leather furniture spilled its inwards, the tables were mutilated, the walls ash-colored, the floor concrete. A radio with a faulty connection played loud and rasping for a while, then suddenly quiet and insinuating.

“Here’s your prisoner, gentlemen,” announced Brinker, seizing my neck and pushing me into the Butt Room ahead of him, “I’m turning him over to the proper authorities.”

High spirits came hard in the haze of the Butt Room. A slumped figure near the radio, which happened to be playing loud at the moment, finally roused himself to say, “What’s the charge?”

“Doing away with his roommate so he could have a whole room to himself. Rankest treachery.” He paused impressively. “Practically fratricide.”

With a snap of the neck I shook his hand off me, my teeth set, “Brinker …”

He raised an arresting hand. “Not a word. Not a sound. You’ll have your day in court.”

“God damn it! Shut up! I swear to God you ride a joke longer than anybody I know.”

It was a mistake; the radio had suddenly gone quiet, and my voice ringing in the abrupt, releasing hush galvanized them all.

“So, you killed him, did you?” A boy uncoiled tensely from the couch.

“Well,” Brinker qualified judiciously, “not actually killed. Finny’s hanging between life and death at home, in the arms of his grief-stricken old mother.”

I had to take part in this, or risk losing control completely. “I didn’t do hardly a thing,” I began as easily as it was possible for me to do, “I—all I did was drop a little bit … a little pinch of arsenic in his morning coffee.”

“Liar!” Brinker glowered at me. “Trying to weasel out of it with a false confession, eh?”

I laughed at that, laughed uncontrollably for a moment at that.

“We know the scene of the crime,” Brinker went on, “high in that … that funereal tree by the river. There wasn’t any poison, nothing as subtle as that.”

“Oh, you know about the tree,” I tried to let my face fall guiltily, but it felt instead as though it were being dragged downward. “Yes, huh, yes there was a small, a little contretemps at the tree.”

No one was diverted from the issue by this try at a funny French pronunciation.

“Tell us everything,” a younger boy at the table said huskily. There was an unsettling current in his voice, a genuinely conspiratorial note, as though he believed literally everything that had been said. His attitude seemed to me almost obscene, the attitude of someone who discovers a sexual secret of yours and promises not to tell a soul if you will describe it in detail to him.