A Separate Peace.pdf - Southwest High School

77figures for his own enlightenment. Forgetful of us and the athletic programing Finny now putinto motion, he strolled here and there, sometimes at the start of the ski jump competition,blowing an appropriate call, more often invoking the serene order of Haydn, or a high, remote,arrogant Spanish world, or the cheerful, lowdown carelessness of New Orleans.The hard cider began to take charge of us. Or I wonder now whether it wasn't cider but ourown exuberance which intoxicated us, sent restraint flying, causing Brinker to throw thefootball block on the statue of the Headmaster, giving me, as I put on the skis and slid downthe small slope and off the miniature ski jump a sensation of soaring flight, of hurtling high andfar through space; inspiring Phineas, during one of Chet's Spanish inventions, to climb onto thePrize Table and with only one leg to create a droll dance among the prizes, springing andspinning from one bare space to another, cleanly missing Hazel Brewster's hair, never marringby a misstep the pictures of Betty Grable. Under the influence not I know of the hardest ciderbut of his own inner joy at life for a moment as it should be, as it was meant to be in his nature,Phineas recaptured that magic gift for existing primarily in space, one foot conceding briefly togravity its rights before spinning him off again into the air. It was his wildest demonstration ofhimself, of himself in the kind of world he loved; it was his choreography of peace.And when he stopped and sat down among the prizes and said, "Now we're going to havethe Decathlon. Quiet everybody, our Olympic candidate Gene Forrester, is now going toqualify," it wasn't cider which made me in this moment champion of everything he ordered, torun as though I were the abstraction of speed, to walk the half-circle of statues on my hands, tobalance on my head on top of the icebox on top of the Prize Table, to jump if he had asked itacross the Naguamsett and land crashing in the middle of Quackenbush's boathouse, to acceptat the end of it amid a clatter of applause—for on this day even the schoolboy egotism ofDevon was conjured away—a wreath made from the evergreen trees which Phineas placed onmy head. It wasn't the cider which made me surpass myself, it was this liberation we had tornfrom the gray encroachments of 1943, the escape we had concocted, this afternoon ofmomentary, illusory, special and separate peace.And it was this which caused me not to notice Brownie Perkins rejoin us from thedormitory, and not to hear what he was saying until Finny cried hilariously, "A telegram forGene? Ifs the Olympic Committee. They want you! Of course they want you! Give it to me,Brownie, I'll read it aloud to this assembled host." And it was this which drained away as Iwatched Finny's face pass through all the gradations between uproariousness and shock.I took the telegram from Phineas, facing in advance whatever the destruction was. That waswhat I learned to do that winter.I HAVE ESCAPED AND NEED HELP. I AM AT CHRISTMAS LOCATION. YOU UNDERSTAND. NO NEED TORISK ADDRESS HERE. MY SAFETY DEPENDS ON YOU COMING AT ONCE.(signed) YOUR BEST FRIEND,