Five o’clock. He picked up the phone and dialed Hallie’s number in Massachusetts, but no one answered after fourteen rings, not even Hallie’s roommate to tell him Hallie was out for the evening and wouldn’t be back until eleven or twelve.
Hallie’s blue eyes looking at him as he looked at her crawling toward him on the bed. Hallie’s fierce little white body pressing up against him. Tell me some of the things you like best, she had once asked him, and he had answered her with a silly, punning joke: The seals in Central Park, the ceiling in Grand Central Station, and the convenience of using self-sealing envelopes. Sí, sí, sí, she had responded. Or perhaps she was saying See, see, see.
At times she laughed so hard that her face turned red.
If he wasn’t going to live in Rochester anymore, where did he want to go? Massachusetts to begin with. South Hadley, Massachusetts, to talk things out with her and come up with some kind of plan. Perhaps rent an apartment somewhere in the neighborhood and work on Villon while she went to school. Or else do that for a while as he decompressed and learned how to become human again and then fly off to Paris with her over Christmas break. Or else wander around Europe on his own and see as much as he could in a month or two months or four months. No, not four months. That would be too long, he wouldn’t be able to stand it. A little apartment in Amherst or some other town. That might be a good solution for the time being, and then off to Europe together for a couple of months after she graduated in June. Anything was possible. By dipping into his grandmother’s fund whenever the urge came over him, all things would be possible this year.
Six o’clock. Scrambled eggs, ham, and two slices of buttered toast for dinner—along with four glasses of red wine.
Luy qui buvoit du meilleur et plus chier
Et ne deust il avoir vaillant ung pigne
Seven o’clock. He was sitting at his desk now and looking at those two lines from Villon’s Testament. Roughly meaning: He who drank the best and most expensive wines / And didn’t have enough to buy a comb. Or: And couldn’t afford the price of a comb. Or: And didn’t have the cash to buy a comb. Or: And lacked the dough to spring for a comb. Or: And was too broke to splurge on a comb. Or: And didn’t have the bread to pop for a comb.
Nine o’clock. He called Massachusetts again. Twenty rings this time, but again there was no answer.
It wasn’t just a new love but a new kind of love, a new way of being with someone that translated into a new way of being himself, a better way because of who and what and how she was with him, the way of being himself he had always aspired to but had never managed to accomplish in the past. No more bouts of morose introspection, no more journeys into the bogs of brooding self-torment, no more turning against himself, which was a weakness that had always made him less than he should have been. GUINNESS GIVES YOU STRENGTH said the signs on the walls in bars. Hallie gave him strength. GUINNESS IS GOOD FOR YOU said the signs on the walls in bars. There was no doubt that Hallie Doyle was good for him.
A quarter to eleven. Ferguson went into the bedroom, wound the clock, and set the alarm for six A.M. Then he returned to the living room, picked up the phone, and called Hallie again.
There was no answer.
* * *
IN THE APARTMENT directly below Ferguson’s, Charlie Vincent turned off the television, stretched his arms, and rose from the couch. The tenant upstairs was climbing into bed, the good-looking boy who had been sleeping with the pretty blonde all through the summer, such nice, friendly kids they were, always with a pleasant word on the stairs or in front of the mailboxes, but now the girl was gone and the boy was sleeping alone again, which was too bad in a way, since he had enjoyed listening to the bed shake upstairs and hearing the boy’s grunts and the girl’s yelps and moans, such good sounds they were, so satisfying to the ear and every other part of him, always wishing he could have been upstairs in the bed with them, not as he was now but in the old body he used to have when he was young and pretty himself, the years, the years, how many long years ago had that been, and even if he couldn’t go upstairs to be with them or watch them from a chair in a corner of their room, listening to them and imagining them had been almost as good, and now that the boy was alone there was something good about that, too, such a lovely boy with his broad shoulders and sympathetic eyes, what he wouldn’t give to hold that naked boy in his arms and cover his body with kisses, so Charlie Vincent turned off the television and shuffled from the living room to his bedroom in order to listen to the bed creak as the boy tossed around on the mattress and settled in for the night. It was dark in the room now. Charlie Vincent took off his clothes, lay down on the bed, and thought about the boy as he fiddled with himself until his breath grew short and the warmth spread through him and the job was done. Then, for the fifty-third time since that morning, he lit one of his long, unfiltered Pall Malls and began to puff …
7.2
7.3
7.4
Aunt Mildred saved him from the worst of it. Pulling strings, asserting her authority as chairman of the English Department, cutting through spool after spool of red tape, threatening to quit in protest if the director of admissions didn’t bend to her will, arguing her case over two hour-long meetings with the newly installed, anti-war president Francis F. Kilcoyne, a man known for his compassion and high moral principles, Professor Adler wrangled a spot for Ferguson as a fully matriculating student at Brooklyn College one week before the first semester of his junior year began.
When Ferguson asked her how she had managed to pull off such an incredible stunt, Mildred said: I told them the truth, Archie.
The truth being that he had come to the defense of a black friend under threat from a white bigot and had been exonerated for his actions in court, which would suggest that his Walt Whitman Scholarship at Princeton had been revoked unfairly and he deserved a place at Brooklyn, not only because his grade point average ranked him in the top ten percent of his class but because the loss of the scholarship would bar him from continuing at Princeton for lack of funds, and if he was not enrolled in another college by the beginning of the fall semester, he would lose his student deferment on top of losing his scholarship and find himself subject to the military draft. As an opponent of the war in Vietnam, he would refuse to join the army if called upon to serve, which likely would result in a prison term for resisting the Selective Service laws, and wasn’t it Brooklyn College’s duty to save this promising young man from such a dark and pointless outcome?
It had never occurred to him that his aunt had it in her to take such a forceful stand about anything, least of all about him or anyone else in the family, but on August twenty-first, less than an hour after calling DeWitt’s office and being told the great man was traveling abroad, he had turned to Aunt Mildred out of desperation—not because he was expecting her to do anything for him but because he needed advice, and with Nagle off on a Mediterranean island sifting through pre-Hellenic pottery shards, she was the only one who could give it to him. Uncle Don picked up the phone that day on the fourth ring. Mildred was out doing some errands, he said, and wasn’t expected back for another hour or so, but Ferguson couldn’t wait an hour, his insides were jammed up with dread and disbelief as he continued to swallow down the words of DeWitt’s letter, so he barfed out the whole thing to Don, who was shocked and outraged and sufficiently furious to tell Ferguson that DeWitt should be drawn and quartered for what he had done, but even in those early moments of the crisis, when Ferguson was still in no condition to think, Don was feeling his way toward a solution, wondering how to finagle an opening that would get Ferguson into another college before time ran out on them, meaning it was his idea to begin with, but once Mildred returned to the apartment and talked to Don, it quickly became her idea as well, and when she called back Ferguson forty-five minutes later, she told him not to worry because she was going to handle everything.
It made all the difference to have her on his side. The hot and cold Aunt Mildred, the kind and cruel Aunt Mildr
ed, the inconstant, not-so-friendly sister of her sister Rose, the somewhat encouraging but mostly distracted stepmother of Don’s son Noah, the goodwilled but essentially unengaged aunt of her only nephew now seemed to be telling her sister’s son that she cared about him far more than he had ever suspected. She had told Ferguson how she had managed to get him into Brooklyn College, but when he asked her why she had bothered to go to all that trouble for him in the first place, the ferocity of her answer startled him: I have tremendous faith in you, Archie. I believe in your future, and over my dead body was I going to allow anyone to take that future away from you. Let Gordon DeWitt go fry an egg. We’re people of the Book, and people of the Book have to stick together.
Queen Esther. Mother Courage. Mother Jones. Sister Kenny. Aunt Mildred.
The first and most important thing to be said about going to Brooklyn College was that the tuition was free. In a rare display of political wisdom, the city fathers of New York had declared that the boys and girls of the five boroughs were entitled to an education at an annual cost of no dollars, which not only helped advance the principles of democracy and proved how the greater good might be served when municipal tax revenues were put into the correct hands, it offered tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and over the years millions of New York boys and girls the opportunity to receive an education most of them would not otherwise have been able to afford, and Ferguson, who could no longer afford the high cost of Princeton, thanked those long-dead city fathers every time he strode up the concrete steps of the Flatbush Avenue subway station and walked onto the Midwood campus. More than that, it was a good college, an excellent college. A minimum high school average of 87 was required for admission along with passing a stringent entrance exam, which meant there was no one in any of his classes who had performed under a B+ level, and with most of them in the 92-to-96 range, Ferguson was surrounded by highly intelligent people, many of them smart enough to qualify as brilliant. Princeton had had its share of brilliant students as well, but also a certain percentage of deadwood legacy boys, whereas Brooklyn consisted of both boys and girls (thankfully) and carried no dead wood. Everyone came from the city, of course, roughly twice the number of students as at Princeton, where the undergraduate population had come from every part of the country, but Ferguson was a die-hard New Yorker now and staunchly pro-city, and just as he had relished the companionship of his New York friends at Camp Paradise when he was a boy, he took pleasure in being with his high-strung, argumentative fellow New Yorkers at B.C., where the student body might have been less geographically diverse than at Princeton but was more humanly diverse in its teeming jumble of ethnicities and cultural backgrounds, with hordes of Catholics and Jews, a refreshing number of black and Asian faces, and since most of them were the grandchildren of Ellis Island immigrants, the odds were better than even that they were the first ones in their families ever to attend college. On top of that, the campus was a model of sound architectural design, not at all what Ferguson had been expecting, a cozy twenty-six acres as compared to the five hundred acres at Princeton, but just as attractive to his eyes, with elegant Georgian buildings filling the landscape instead of imposing Gothic towers, grassy quadrangles studded with elms, and a lily pond and garden to visit in the lulls between classes, with no dormitories, no eating clubs, and no football madness. It was an altogether different way of going to college, with anti-war politics replacing sports as the principal obsession on campus, the demands of academic work pushing out most extracurricular pastimes, and, best of all, the chance to go home to his apartment on East Eighty-ninth Street when his work for the day was done.
The subway rides from Yorkville in Manhattan to Midwood in Brooklyn and then back again every Monday through Thursday were so long that Ferguson managed to do most of the reading for his courses while sitting on the train. He didn’t register for Aunt Mildred’s class on the Victorian novel because he thought his presence in the room might be a burden on her, but when Uncle Don came back as a guest lecturer in the spring to teach his biennial one-semester course on the art of biography, Ferguson signed up for it. Don delivered a dense, rapid-fire mini-lecture at the start of each class and then opened things up for general discussion, a somewhat awkward, scattershot kind of teacher, Ferguson supposed, but never dull or ponderous, always up to the challenge of thinking on his feet, both humorous and deadpan as he was under most circumstances elsewhere, and what a range of books he had them read that spring, Plutarch, Suetonius, Augustine, Vasari, Montaigne, Rousseau, and Dr. Johnson’s bizarre, sexed-up chum James Boswell, who confessed in his journals that he would interrupt his writing in midsentence to go out into the London streets and make rumpty-rumpty with as many as three different whores in a single night, but the most enthralling part of that class for Ferguson was finally reading Montaigne for the first time, and now that he had been exposed to the Frenchman’s intractable, lightning-bolt sentences, he had found a new master to accompany him on his own travels through the Land of Ink.
So it was that a bad thing had been transformed into a good thing. A knockout punch from Gordon DeWitt that theoretically should have flattened him, but just as Ferguson was beginning to fall, a dozen people jumped into the ring and caught him in their arms before his body hit the canvas, Aunt Mildred first and most significantly as the strongest of the body catchers, but also quick-thinking Uncle Don, and one by one all the others who gathered around him when they were told about the punch, Celia, his mother and Dan, Noah, Jim and Nancy, Billy and Joanna, Ron and Peg, and Howard, who talked to Nagle the morning after Ferguson’s ex–academic adviser returned to Princeton, and then Nagle himself, who wrote an uncommonly warm letter after Howard broke the disturbing news to him about the scholarship, offering to help in any way he could and suggesting that perhaps Susan could swing something for him at Rutgers, how much that letter meant to Ferguson, Nagle reaching out to him as a friend and taking his side over DeWitt’s, and the long telephone conversation with Amy and Luther in Montreal, coupled with the alarming turn that led to Howard’s breakup with Mona Veltry, a fierce verbal spat about which one of them had been responsible for leading the group to Tom’s Bar and Grill, each one blaming the other until they lost control of themselves and their big love died as rapidly as a sick flower dies with the first frost, and then, no more than days after that, Luther abruptly put an end to it with Amy, pushing her out the door and demanding that she go back to America, and there was Ferguson’s dazed and grieving stepsister telling him that Luther had done it for her own good, and Please, Archie, she said, my dear, crazy brother, don’t do anything stupid like running off to Canada, just hold your ground and hold your breath and pray that something good turns up, which was precisely what happened because of Mother Courage Mildred, and despite the havoc he lived through in those days of uncertainty, Ferguson felt so deeply loved by the people he loved that winning the Walt Whitman Scholarship turned out to have done less for his morale than losing it.
* * *
THE WORLD WAS churning. All things everywhere were in flux. The war was boiling in his blood, Newark was a dead city on the other side of the river, lovers were going up in flames, and now that Ferguson had been granted his reprieve, he was back inside his book about Dr. Noyes and the dead children of R. Two hours starting at six o’clock every morning from Monday to Thursday, and then as many hours as possible from Friday to Sunday, in spite of the ever-mounting load of schoolwork, which he had to plow through diligently in order to repay his debt to Mildred, who would have been disappointed in him if he slacked off and failed to do well. Montaigne; Leibniz; Leopardi; and Dr. Noyes. The world was falling apart, and the only way not to fall apart with it was to keep his mind fixed on his work—to roll out of bed every morning and get down to business, whether the sun chose to come up that day or not.
The free tuition was a blessing, but there were still a number of money problems to be dealt with, and for the first weeks of the fall semester Ferguson struggled to come up with a plan
that would not include help from his mother and stepfather. The scholarship had covered room and board as well as tuition, which had allowed him to stuff his face at no charge three times a day five days a week, five days that could have been seven days if he hadn’t insisted on spending the other two days in New York, but now that he was in the city and only in the city, he had to pay for all his meals and groceries, which was something he could no longer afford to do, not after shelling out five thousand dollars to the Brattleboro lawyer and being left with just over two thousand in the bank. He figured he could muddle along on about four thousand a year, which would provide him with enough crumbs to sustain a lowly sort of church mouse existence, but two thousand wasn’t four thousand, and he still had only half of what he would need. True to form, Dan offered to make up the difference with a monthly allowance, which Ferguson reluctantly agreed to because he had no choice in the end, knowing the only alternative was to take a part-time job somewhere (assuming he could find one), which would make it impossible to go on with his book. He said yes because he had to say yes, but just because he was thankful to Dan for the two hundred dollars a month, that didn’t require him to feel happy about the arrangement.
In early November, help came from an unexpected source, which directly or indirectly could be traced back to his own past but at the same time had nothing to do with him. Others were responsible for giving him the money he needed, money he hadn’t earned but had nevertheless worked for without any intention of earning money, for just as a writer couldn’t know whether he was about to be mauled or embraced, he couldn’t know whether the hours he spent at his desk would lead to something or nothing. All along, Ferguson had assumed nothing, and therefore he had never spoken the words writing and money in the same breath, thinking only sellouts and Grub Street hacks dreamed about money while doing their work, thinking money would always have to come from somewhere else in order to feed his compulsion for filling up white rectangles with row after row of descending black marks, but at the preposterously unadvanced age of twenty Ferguson learned that always did not mean always but just most of the time, and at those rare times when the somber expectations of always were proved to be wrong, the only proper response was to thank the gods for their random act of benevolence and then return to the somber expectations of always, even if one’s first encounter with the principle of most of the time thundered in the bones with the force of a holy benediction.