“The winter loves me,” he retorted, and then, disliking the whimsical sound of that, added, “I mean as much as you can say a season can love. What I mean is, I love winter, and when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love.” I didn’t think that this was true, my seventeen years of experience had shown this to be much more false than true, but it was like every other thought and belief of Finny’s: it should have been true. So I didn’t argue.

The board walk ended and he moved a little ahead of me as we descended a sloping path toward our first class. He picked his way with surprising care, surprising in anyone who before had used the ground mainly as a point of departure, as the given element in a suspended world of leaps in space. And now I remembered what I had never taken any special note of before: how Phineas used to walk. Around Devon we had gaits of every description; gangling shuffles from boys who had suddenly grown a foot taller, swinging cowboy lopes from those thinking of how wide their shoulders had become, ambles, waddles, light trippings, gigantic Bunyan strides. But Phineas had moved in continuous flowing balance, so that he had seemed to drift along with no effort at all, relaxation on the move. He hobbled now among the patches of ice. There was the one certainty that Dr. Stanpole had given—Phineas would walk again. But the thought was there before me that he would never walk like that again.

“Do you have a class?” he said as we reached the steps of the building.

“Yes.”

“So do I. Let’s not go.”

“Not go? But what’ll we use for an excuse?”

“Well say I fainted from exertion on the way from chapel,” he looked at me with a phantom’s smile, “and you had to tend me.”

“This is your first day back, Finny. You’re no one to cut classes.”

“I know, I know. I’m going to work. I really am going to work. You’re going to pull me through mostly, but I am going to work as hard as I can. Only not today, not the first thing. Not now, not conjugating verbs when I haven’t even looked at the school yet. I want to see this place, I haven’t seen anything except the inside of our room, and the inside of chapel. I don’t feel like seeing the inside of a classroom. Not now. Not yet.”

“What do you want to see?”

He had started to turn around so that his back was to me. “Let’s go to the gym,” he said shortly.

The gym was at the other end of the school, a quarter of a mile away at least, separated from us by a field of ice. We set off without saying anything else.

By the time we had reached it sweat was running like oil from Finny’s face, and when he paused involuntary tremors shook his hands and arms. The leg in its cast was like a sea anchor dragged behind. The illusion of strength I had seen in our room that morning must have been the same illusion he had used at home to deceive his doctor and his family into sending him back to Devon.

We stood on the ice-coated lawn in front of the gym while he got ready to enter it, resting himself so that he could go in with a show of energy. Later this became his habit; I often caught up with him standing in front of a building pretending to be thinking or examining the sky or taking off gloves, but it was never a convincing show. Phineas was a poor deceiver, having had no practice.

We went into the gym, along a marble hallway, and to my surprise we went on past the Trophy Room, where his name was already inscribed on one cup, one banner, and one embalmed football. I was sure that this was his goal, to mull over these lost glories. I had prepared myself for that, and even thought of several positive, uplifting aphorisms to cheer him up. But he went by it without a thought, down a stairway, steep and marble, and into the locker room. I went along mystified beside him. There was a pile of dirty towels in a corner. Finny shoved them with a crutch. “What is all this crap,” he muttered with a little smile, “about no maids?”

The locker room was empty at this hour, row after row of dull green lockers separated by wide wooden benches. The ceiling was hung with pipes. It was a drab room for Devon, dull green and brown and gray, but at the far end there was a big marble archway, glisteningly white, which led to the pool.

Finny sat down on a bench, struggled out of his sheep-lined winter coat, and took a deep breath of gymnasium air. No locker room could have more pungent air than Devon’s; sweat predominated, but it was richly mingled with smells of paraffin and singed rubber, of soaked wool and liniment, and for those who could interpret it, of exhaustion, lost hope and triumph and bodies battling against each other. I thought it anything but a bad smell. It was preeminently the smell of the human body after it had been used to the limit, such a smell as has meaning and poignance for any athlete, just as it has for any lover.

Phineas looked down here and there, at the exercise bar over a sand pit next to the wall, at a set of weights on the floor, at the rolled-up wrestling mat, at a pair of spiked shoes kicked under a locker.

“Same old place, isn’t it?” he said, turning to me and nodding slightly.

After a moment I answered in a quiet voice, “Not exactly.”

He made no pretense of not understanding me. After a pause he said, “You’re going to be the big star now,” in an optimistic tone, and then added with some embarrassment, “You can fill any gaps or anything.” He slapped me on the back, “Get over there and chin yourself a few dozen times. What did you finally go out for anyway?”

“I finally didn’t go out.”

“You aren’t,” his eyes burned at me from his grimacing face, “still the assistant senior crew manager!”

“No, I quit that. I’ve just been going to gym classes. The ones they have for guys who aren’t going out for anything.”

He wrenched himself around on the bench. Joking was past; his mouth widened irritably. “What in hell,” his voice bounded on the word in a sudden rich descent, “did you do that for?”

“It was too late to sign up for anything else,” and seeing the energy to blast this excuse rushing to his face and neck I stumbled on, “and anyway with the war on there won’t be many trips for the teams. I don’t know, sports don’t seem so important with the war on.”

“Have you swallowed all that war stuff?”

“No, of course I—” I was so committed to refuting him that I had half-denied the charge before I understood it; now my eyes swung back to his face. “All what war stuff?”

“All that stuff about there being a war.”

“I don’t think I get what you mean.”

“Do you really think that the United States of America is in a state of war with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan?”

“Do I really think …” My voice trailed off.

He stood up, his weight on the good leg, the other resting lightly on the floor in front of him. “Don’t be a sap,” he gazed with cool self-possession at me, “there isn’t any war.”

“I know why you’re talking like this,” I said, struggling to keep up with him. “Now I understand. You’re still under the influence of some medicinal drug.”

“No, you are. Everybody is.” He pivoted so that he was facing directly at me. “That’s what this whole war story is. A medicinal drug. Listen, did you ever hear of the ‘Roaring Twenties’?” I nodded very slowly and cautiously. “When they all drank bathtub gin and everybody who was young did just what they wanted?”

“Yes.”

“Well what happened was that they didn’t like that, the preachers and the old ladies and all the stuffed shirts. So then they tried Prohibition and everybody just got drunker, so then they really got desperate and arranged the Depression. That kept the people who were young in the thirties in their places. But they couldn’t use that trick forever, so for us in the forties they’ve cooked up this war fake.”

“Who are ‘they,’ anyway?”