Tumult Books, the legitimate, non-mimeo press that had been launched by Ron, Lewis, and Anne in the spring, released its first batch of publications on November fourth: two collections of poems (one by Lewis, the other by Anne), Ron’s translations of Pierre Reverdy, and Billy’s 372-page epic, Crushed Heads. The angel of the enterprise, Anne’s mother’s first husband’s ex-wife, an effusive woman in her mid-forties named Trixie Davenport, threw a large party at her Lexington Avenue duplex to celebrate the event, and Ferguson, along with nearly everyone else he knew, was invited to the Saturday night bash. He had never felt comfortable in crowds, the crush of too many bodies crammed together in enclosed spaces tended to make him dizzy and mute, but that night was different for some reason, perhaps because he felt so good for Billy after all the years he had put into writing his book, or perhaps because he found it amusing to see the scruffy, impoverished, downtown poets and painters mixing with the East Side swells, but whether it was for one of those reasons or both of them, he felt glad to be there that night, standing next to the beautiful, somewhat intimidated Celia, who wasn’t much of a crowd person herself, and as Ferguson turned around and surveyed that packed and noisy scene, he saw John Ashbery alone in a corner puffing on a Gitane, Alex Katz sipping a glass of white wine, Harry Mathews shaking the hand of a tall, redheaded woman in a blue dress, Norman Bluhm laughing as he put someone in a pretend hammerlock, and there was dapper, frizzy-haired Noah standing with voluptuous, frizzy-haired Vicki Tremain, and there was Howard talking to none other than Amy Schneiderman, who had come down to New York for the weekend, and ten minutes after Ferguson arrived, there was Ron Pearson elbowing his way toward him, and a moment later Ron was putting his arm around his shoulder and guiding him out of the room because he wanted to talk to him about something.
They made their way upstairs, walked down a corridor, turned left down another corridor, and slipped into an empty room with a couple of thousand books in it and six or seven paintings hanging on one of the walls. Something turned out to be a business proposition, if a minute, bound-to-be-unprofitable operation such as Tumult Books could be called a business. As Ron explained it, the triumvirate in charge of running the press had voted to include Ferguson on next year’s list by gathering together his three Gizmo titles and publishing them as a single book. According to their calculations, it would come out to around 250 or 275 pages, and they could have it ready sometime in the next eight to twelve months. What did he say to that?
I don’t know, Ferguson said. Do you think those books are good enough?
We wouldn’t be making the offer if we thought they were bad, Ron said. Of course they’re good enough.
And what about Billy? Doesn’t he have to give his permission?
He already has. Billy’s all in behind it. He’s with us now, and he wants you to be with us, too.
What a guy. I grapple with my groots and shoot down the grovelers and medicine men with my trusted blunderbuss. No one has ever written a cooler sentence than that.
I should also mention the money.
What money?
We’re trying to act like real publishers, Archie.
I don’t understand.
A contract, an advance, royalties. Surely you’ve heard of those things.
Vaguely. In some other world where I don’t happen to live.
Three books in one book, published in an edition of three thousand copies. We thought a two-thousand-dollar advance would have a nice asymmetrical ring to it.
Don’t joke, Ron. Two thousand would save me. No more begging on street corners, no more handouts from people who can’t afford to hand out money, no more midnight sweats. Please tell me you’re not pulling my leg.
Ron smiled one of his thin, minimal smiles and sat down in a chair. The standard procedure is to get half when you sign the contract, he continued, and the other half when the book is published, but if you need the full amount up front, I’m sure that can be arranged.
How can you be sure?
Because, Ron said, pointing to a Mondrian on the opposite wall, Trixie can do anything she wants.
Yes, Ferguson replied, as he turned around and looked at the canvas, I suppose she can.
There’s just one last thing to discuss. A title, an overall title for the three books. There’s no rush, but Anne came up with one at the meeting that we all thought was pretty funny. Funny because you’re still so shockingly young and new to the world that we sometimes ask ourselves if you still wear diapers.
Only at night, but I don’t need them during the day anymore.
Mr. Sloppy Pants walks around in clean undies now.
Most of the time, in any case. And what did Anne suggest?
Collected Works.
Ah. Yes, it’s pretty funny all right, but also … what’s the word I’m looking for?… a bit funereal. As if I’d been embalmed and was about to set off on a one-way trip to the past tense. I think I’d prefer something a little more hopeful.
It’s your book. You’re the one who gets to decide.
How about Prolusions?
As in those early works by Milton?
That’s right. “A literary composition of a preliminary or preparatory nature.”
We know what the word means, but will anyone else know?
If they don’t, they can look it up.
Ron removed his glasses, rubbed down the lenses with a handkerchief, and then put them back on. After a small pause, he shrugged and said: I’m with you, Archie. Let them look it up.
Ferguson walked back into the party feeling stunned and weightless, as if his head were no longer attached to his body. When he tried to tell Celia the good news, the din of voices circling around them was so intense that she couldn’t hear what he was saying to her. Never mind, Ferguson said, as he squeezed her hand and kissed her on the neck, I’ll tell you later. Then he looked out at the throng of vertical people gathered in the room and saw that Howard and Amy were still talking to each other, standing quite close now, each one leaning into the other and entirely absorbed in their conversation, and as he watched how his stepsister and former roommate were looking at each other it dawned on Ferguson that they could be turning into an item, that with Mona and Luther both gone and no doubt forever gone for both of them, it made sense for Howard and Amy to be exploring the possibilities, and how curious it would be if Howard wound up inserting himself into the tangled, mixed-up tribe of overlapping clans and lineages to become an honorary member of the Schneiderman-Adler-Ferguson-Marx traveling vaudeville team, which would turn his friend into an unofficial brother-in-law, and what an honor that would be, Ferguson said to himself, welcoming Howard into the inner circle and giving him advice on how to duck when Amy started throwing Necco wafers at his head, the extraordinary Amy Schneiderman, the girl he had wanted so badly that it still hurt to think about what might have happened but never did.
* * *
HE HAD ENOUGH money to live on for a year, and for the first five months of that year Ferguson managed to hold himself together by sticking to his plan. Only four things mattered to him now: writing his book, loving Celia, loving his friends, and going back and forth to Brooklyn College. It wasn’t that he had stopped paying attention to the world, but the world was no longer simply falling apart, the world had caught fire, and the question was: What to do or not to do when the world was on fire and you didn’t have the equipment to put out the flames, when the fire was in you as much as it was around you, and no matter what you did or didn’t do, your actions would change nothing? Stick to the plan by writing the book. That was the only answer Ferguson could come up with. Write the book by replacing the real fire with an imaginary fire and hope the effort would add up to something more than nothing. As for the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam, as for Lyndon Johnson’s abdication, as for the murder of Martin Luther King: watch them as carefully as he could, take them in as deeply as he could, but other than that, nothing. He wasn’t going to fight on the barricades, but he would cheer for the
ones who did, and then he would return to his room and write his book.
He understood how shaky that position was. The arrogance of it, the selfishness of it, the art above all else flaw in his thinking, but if he didn’t hold fast to his argument (which probably wasn’t an argument so much as an instinctive reflex), he would be giving in to a counterargument that posited a world in which books were no longer necessary, and what moment could be more important for the writing of books than a year when the world was on fire—and you were on fire with it?
Then came the first of the two big blows that crashed down on him that spring.
At nine o’clock in the evening on April sixth, two days after the murder of Martin Luther King, as real fires were burning in half the cities in America, the telephone rang in Ferguson’s apartment on East Eighty-ninth Street. Someone named Allen Blumenthal wanted to talk to Archie Ferguson, and was that Archie Ferguson on the line now? Yes, Ferguson said, trying to remember where he had heard the name Allen Blumenthal, which seemed to set off a distant bell in some far corner of his memory … Blumenthal … Blumenthal … and then the jolt of recognition arrived at last: Allen Blumenthal, the son of Ethel Blumenthal, the woman his father had been married to for the past three years, Ferguson’s unknown stepbrother, sixteen at the time of the wedding and therefore nineteen now, just two years younger than Ferguson—Celia’s age.
You know who I am, don’t you? Blumenthal asked.
If you’re the Allen Blumenthal I think you are, Ferguson said, then you’re my stepbrother. (A pause to let the magnitude of the word sink in.) Hello, stepbrother.
Blumenthal didn’t laugh at Ferguson’s mild but friendly joke, nor did he waste any time in getting down to business. At seven o’clock that morning, while playing a round of prework tennis on an indoor court at the South Mountain Tennis Center with his boyhood friend Sam Brownstein, Ferguson’s father had collapsed and died of a heart attack. The funeral would be held the day after tomorrow at Temple B’nai Abraham in Newark, and Blumenthal was calling on his mother’s behalf to invite Ferguson to attend the service, which would be officiated by Rabbi Prinz, and then to accompany the family to the cemetery in Woodbridge for the burial, after which (if Ferguson was so inclined) he could join them at the house in Maplewood. What should Blumenthal tell his mother? Yes or no?
Yes, Ferguson said. Of course I’ll be there.
Stanley was such a wonderful guy, the unknown stepbrother said, as his voice began to wobble into another register. I can’t believe this has happened.
Ferguson heard the air catch in Blumenthal’s throat, and suddenly the boy was sobbing …
There were no tears for Ferguson, however. For a long time after he hung up the phone, he couldn’t feel anything but an immense weight bearing down on his head, a ten-ton stone immobilizing him all the way down to his ankles and the soles of his feet, and then bit by bit the weight turned inward and was supplanted by horror, horror crawling up through his body and humming in his veins, and after the horror, an invasion of darkness, darkness within him and around him and a voice in his head telling him the world was no longer real.
Fifty-four. And not one glimpse of him since that grotesque TV commercial eighteen months ago. Prices never lower, spirits never higher. Imagine: dropping dead at fifty-four.
Not once in all the years of their struggles and silences had Ferguson ever wished for such a thing or imagined it could happen. His nonsmoking, nondrinking, eternally fit and athletic father was going to live to an advanced old age, and somehow or other, at some point in the decades still to come, he and Ferguson would have found a way to purge the rancor that had grown between them, but that assumption had been based on the certainty that there were many more years ahead of them, and now there were no more years, there was not even a day or an hour or the smallest fraction of a second.
Three years of unbroken silence. That was the worst part of it now, those three years and no chance to undo the silence anymore, no deathbed farewells, no premonitory illness to prepare him for the blow, and how strange it was that ever since he had signed the contract for his book Ferguson had been thinking more and more about his father again (because of the money, he suspected, proof that there were people in the world willing to give him money for the no-account work of writing make-believe stories), and in the past month or so Ferguson had even been considering the possibility of sending his father a copy of Prolusions when the book was published in order to show him that he was getting by, getting along on his own terms, and also (perhaps) as an opening-round gesture that might have led to some future reconciliation, wondering if his father would respond or not, wondering if he would toss out the book or sit down and write him a letter, and if he did respond, then writing back to him and arranging to meet somewhere to have it out once and for all, honest and open with each other for the first time, no doubt cursing and shouting at each other throughout most of it, and whenever Ferguson played out that scene in his head, it generally wound up in a bloody fistfight, with the two of them pounding each other until they were too tired to hold up their arms anymore. It was also possible that he might not have sent the book in the end, but at least he had been thinking about it, and surely that meant something, surely that was a sign of hope, for even punches would have been better than the blank standoff of the past three years.
Going to the synagogue. Going to the cemetery. Going to the house in Maplewood. The nullity and futility of it all: meeting Ethel and her children for the first time, and the discovery that they were real people with arms and legs and faces and hands, the distraught widow doing what she could to hold herself upright through the ordeal, not the cold person of the wedding photograph in the Star-Ledger but a thoughtful, unpretentious woman who had fallen for his father and married him, almost certainly a patient, giving wife, perhaps in some ways a better wife for his father than the fast-moving, independent Rose had been, and after receiving a kiss on the cheek from their mother, shaking hands with Allen and Stephanie, who clearly had loved Stanley more than Stanley’s biological son ever had, Allen finishing his first year at Rutgers and intending to major in economics, which must have pleased his father, a sensible boy with his head in the real world, unlike the disappointing real son who mostly dwelled on the moon, and beyond his father’s second family, Ferguson found himself with members of his first family as well, the aunts and uncles from California, Joan and Millie, Arnold and Lew, not seen since the early days of Ferguson’s childhood, and what struck him most about those long-lost relatives was the curious fact that while the brothers did not look terribly alike, each in his different way bore a strong resemblance to his father.
For some reason, Ferguson stayed on in the house longer than he should have, the old Castle of Silence where he had been held prisoner for seven years and had written the story about the shoes, for the most part standing alone in a corner of the living room and not saying much to the several dozen strangers who were there, neither wanting to be there himself nor willing to leave, accepting condolences from various men and women after they were informed that he was Stanley’s son, nodding thanks, shaking hands, but still too stunned to do anything more than agree with them about how shocked and stunned they were by his father’s sudden, shocking death. His aunts and uncles made an early exit, the weeping, overwrought Sam Brownstein and his wife, Peggy, headed for the door, but even after most of the other guests filed out toward the end of the afternoon, Ferguson still wasn’t ready to call Dan and ask to be picked up (he was planning to spend the night at the house on Woodhall Crescent) because the reason why he had stayed so long he now understood was to have a chance to talk to Ethel in private, and when she walked up to him a couple of minutes later and asked if they could go off somewhere together to talk alone, he was comforted to know that she had been thinking the same thought as well.
It was a sad conversation, one of the saddest conversations in the history of his life so far, sitting with his unknown stepmother in the TV nook of the newly r
efurbished basement as they shared what they knew about the enigma that had been Stanley Ferguson, a man Ethel admitted had been all but unreachable to her, and how sorry Ferguson felt for that woman as he watched her convulse in tears, then pull herself together for a while, then collapse again, the shock of it, she kept saying, the shock of a fifty-four-year-old man running at full speed into a brick wall of death, the second husband she had buried in the past nine years, Ethel Blumberg, Ethel Blumenthal, Ethel Ferguson, for two decades a sixth-grade teacher in the Livingston public schools, mother of Allen and Stephanie, and yes, she said, it made perfect sense that they had adored Stanley because Stanley had been exceedingly good to them, for after much study on the subject of Stanley Ferguson she had come to the conclusion that he was generous and kind to strangers but closed off and impenetrable with the ones he should have been most intimate with, his wife and children, in this case his one child, Archie, since Allen and Stephanie were no more than distant outsiders to him, a pair of children equivalent to the son and daughter of a third cousin or the man who washed his car, which had made it easy for him to be kind and generous to them, but what about you, Archie, Ethel asked, and why did so much resentment build up between the two of you over the years, so much bitterness that Stanley refused to allow me to meet you and blocked you from our wedding, even though he kept on saying he had nothing against you and was—to use his words—content to wait it out.