Third Cause: It could be argued that the entire affair had been built on a false premise. It wasn’t that Ferguson had lied to Celia, but he had persisted in withholding the truth from her about the primacy of Artie’s death in the love-equals-divine-justice formula, and even though he felt he had largely surmounted that problem with the game of catch in Riverside Park last spring, which had evolved into one-on-one games of wiffleball with Celia throughout the summer, both in Woods Hole and on the farm in Vermont, especially during the grim weeks before his trial when those festive, laughing games had momentarily kept him from thinking about his day of reckoning in court, he still hadn’t said a word to her about any of it. The mad, six-year-long fixation had come to an end, but if he was cured now or even just partially restored to health, why hadn’t he summoned the courage to tell Celia about the abnegations he had imposed on himself as a tribute to his dead A.F. twin? Because he was scared. Because he feared she would judge him insane and want nothing to do with him anymore.
Even worse, there was his inability to tell her about his condition, to reveal the secret of his abnormal birth as the progeny of a male donkey and a female horse, the braying jack who had mounted the comely mare in a New Jersey barn one night in the summer of 1946 and had impregnated her with a mule, Ferguson the Talking Mule, who was a creature who could sire no offspring and therefore fell into the category of genetic dud, and so crushing was that truth to Ferguson, so damaging to the phallic certainties of his male self, he could never bring himself to share it with Celia, which meant that he allowed her to go through the needless exercise of taking birth-control precautions every time they went to bed together, never once telling her there was no point in inserting her diaphragm because making love with him guaranteed that she would never have to worry about becoming pregnant.
An inexcusable error. Cowardice on such a grand scale that it turned him into the one thing he had vowed never to become: dishonorable.
Rebuttal: There was no rebuttal. In Ferguson’s mind, however, the possibility that Dr. Brueler’s diagnosis had been wrong continued to give him hope. Until and unless he consulted another doctor, the inexcusable would remain excusable because there was always a small chance that birth control was necessary, and he didn’t want Celia to know the shameful truth of his condition until he was one hundred percent certain of it. All he had to do was go to another doctor and have himself tested again—but he was too afraid to go, too afraid to find out, and he kept putting it off.
Conclusion: Two and a half weeks after his father’s death, when the fire of the moment spread its flames to the Columbia campus, Celia put on a green armband and helped the cause by making sandwiches for the students inside the buildings, one of several dozen volunteers in the Ferris Booth Hall Chow Brigade. Not the red armband of the activists but the green band of sympathizers and supporters, a reasonable position for someone who took no part in campus politics and devoted all her energies to studying for her classes, but Celia had political opinions, and even if she wasn’t cut out for the front-line actions of manning barricades and occupying university buildings, those opinions were strong enough to put her on the side of the students against the administration, no matter what qualms she might have had about the students’ tactics and no matter how often she cringed when she heard a hundred or five hundred voices shouting Up against the wall, motherfucker! As Ferguson saw it, Celia was acting in accord with the fundamental principles of the Federman Bill of Rights, the same impulse that had prompted her to put down the dollar in front of the old man at the automat when she was sixteen, and now that she was nineteen, nothing had changed. She called him at his apartment on the night of the twenty-third, and as Ferguson listened to her describe what had happened at Columbia that day, the noon rally at the Sundial in the middle of the campus, the attack on the gym construction site in Morningside Park, and then the takeover of Hamilton Hall by a coalition of SDS and SAS, white students and black students working in concert to shut down the university, he started to laugh—partly out of surprise, he imagined, but mostly out of happiness. When he hung up the phone, he understood that it was the first good laugh he had produced since before the evening he had picked up the same phone and talked to Allen Blumenthal.
At one o’clock on Friday afternoon (the twenty-sixth), he decided to suspend work on his novel for the rest of the day and head crosstown to check out what was happening at Columbia. It was too late to call Celia, who was undoubtedly with her fellow sandwich makers in the Chow Room at Ferris Booth Hall, but it wasn’t going to be difficult to find her, and once he managed to tear her away from her platters of ham, bologna, and precut slices of packaged bread, they could walk around the campus together and see what was going on. As the crosstown bus traveled up Madison Avenue, he fell into the same conversation he seemed to have with himself every time he went to Morningside Heights: What if he had gone to Columbia instead of Princeton? And if he had gone there, how would his life have been different from the one he was leading now? No Brooklyn College for one thing. No East Eighty-ninth Street for another. No walking in on his grandfather’s porn movie for yet another. No ten thousand dollars, no Nagle, and no Howard Small—which would have meant no barroom fight in Vermont, no trial, no miraculous rescue by Aunt Mildred, no imaginary tennis matches, and no romance between Howard and Amy, which had turned into a hot romance that showed no signs of cooling off anytime soon. The same three books with Gizmo, however, although the second and third would have been slightly different books. And the same roles for Mary Donohue, Evie Monroe, and Celia. But if he had gone to Columbia, would he be sitting in one of the occupied buildings with the protesting students now or would his life have put him on this same crosstown bus that was traveling along the northern edge of Central Park on its way to Morningside Heights?
The situation had altered since the twenty-third. The black-white alliance had broken apart, but four more buildings had been taken over by students, and the chairman of SDS, the acknowledged leader of the rebellion, happened to be one of Ferguson’s old friends from high school, Mark Rudd. Yes, Mike Loeb was part of it too—Amy’s ex-tormentor, ergo Ferguson’s ex-friend—but according to what Celia had heard, Loeb was just another one of the SDSers taking part in meetings at Mathematics Hall, whereas Rudd was in charge, the SDS spokesman and instigator-in-chief, and he and Ferguson had always gotten along well, sitting in many of the same English, French, and history classes together, going out on double dates with their almost identically named girlfriends, Dana and Diana, and cutting school together one morning to run off to New York, where they visited the Stock Exchange on Wall Street in order to see capitalism in action, and how fitting and oddly funny it was that Mark, who had taught him how to drive a standard-shift car in the spring of their junior year, which had allowed Ferguson to operate Arnie Frazier’s Chevy van and spend another summer as a mover of large, heavy objects, was now leading a student rebellion and had his picture in the paper every day.
As it happened, Ferguson didn’t quite make it to Columbia that afternoon. The number 4 crosstown bus traveled from the East Side to the West Side along 110th Street, alternatively known as Cathedral Parkway in the blocks between Central Park West and Riverside Drive, and when the bus reached the corner of Broadway and 110th, Ferguson jumped off and began walking north toward the campus on 116th Street, but in order to get to where he was going, he first had to go by the block where Celia lived, West 111th between Broadway and Amsterdam, and curiously enough, as he passed 111th and plodded on toward the next corner, he unexpectedly caught sight of Celia herself, Celia in a flowing blue skirt and pink blouse, about half a block ahead of him and also walking north, no doubt on her way to the Chow Room at Ferris Booth Hall. The fact that Celia wasn’t alone did not disturb him, even though the person she was with was not one of her Barnard roommates but a man, in this case a twenty-two-year-old man named Richard Smolen, whom Ferguson recognized as one of the Columbia pre-med students he had talked to back in October when Ce
lia had been setting up interviews for him as an aid to writing his novel, and because Smolen was from New Rochelle and had played on baseball and basketball teams with Artie as a boy, Celia had known him all her life, and why would Ferguson feel the slightest envy or apprehension to discover that Celia was walking uptown with an old friend? He quickened his pace in order to catch up with them, but before he could get within shouting distance, Celia and Richard Smolen stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, threw their arms around each other, and began to kiss. It was a passionate kiss, a prolonged kiss, a lustful kiss of pure and uncontrollable desire, and from all Ferguson could gather as he stood on the sidewalk not twenty feet from where they were embracing, it was a kiss of love.
If it was love, one could only assume they had just emerged from Celia’s apartment, where they had spent the past however many hours rolling around on Celia’s bed, and now that they had put their clothes back on and were walking north to Columbia to make sandwiches for the students in the occupied buildings, the afterglow of their lust binge was burning so brightly that they couldn’t keep their hands off each other and were still hungry for more.
Ferguson turned around and began walking south.
Epilogue: He didn’t call, and she didn’t call until Monday—to tell him about Smolen (which was old news to him by then) and to call it quits. A silent weekend, during which he concluded that he was to blame for the disaster and that Smolen wasn’t the cause of his troubles so much as a symptom of them, and because he had been dishonest with her from the start, he deserved to be dumped. Celia the beautiful. Celia and the manifold deliriums of touching Celia and folding her body into his. But sex wasn’t enough. It seemed unimaginable to have arrived at that thought, but sex wasn’t enough, and nearly everything else about them had been wrong. He had willed himself to love her, but he had never loved anything but the idea of loving her, which wasn’t love but a form of gross and unforgivable stupidity, so let her go off with her handsome pre-med boy, he said to himself, let her walk with her future heart specialist and current heartthrob back into the whirlwind at Columbia, for the fire was still spreading, and the time had come for Ferguson to let her whirl out of his life and go to the next place without him.
* * *
IN THE MONTHS that followed, no more central characters in The Ferguson Story dropped dead on tennis courts or anywhere else, and no more loves were found or lost or even contemplated. A slow, dreary summer with his novel as he began writing the second of the two parts, locked up in his studio apartment for most of the day with no one to see at night except for Billy and Joanna down the block and Noah, who was in town working as an actor in his first professional film, but Noah was both busy and exhausted and had little time for him except on the weekends. Everyone else was gone, either camped out in family bungalows or rented shacks in upstate New York and New England or following the low-budget trail through various cities and countrysides in western Europe. As always, Howard was at his aunt and uncle’s farm in Vermont, but this time Amy was with him, and the two of them were already discussing plans for life after college, which would begin in just one year, and assuming Howard managed to avoid the draft, they were both thinking about graduate school, Howard in philosophy and Amy in American history, the ideal choice being Columbia, where they could live together in an apartment on Morningside Heights and become citizens of New York. Again and again, Howard and Amy asked Ferguson to visit them in Vermont, and again and again Ferguson invented an excuse not to make the trip. Vermont was a haunted place for him, he said, and he still didn’t know if he was quite ready to go back there, or he was too wrapped up in his novel to think of leaving New York, or he had come down with a summer cold and wasn’t up to traveling, but even as he said those things (which were partly true) the greater truth was that now that he had lost Celia, Amy was in his thoughts again, the eternally lost and beloved Amy who had never wanted him and never would, and to expose himself to the spectacle of her happiness with his unofficial brother-in-law was more than he could have handled just then. It wasn’t that he had stopped thinking about Celia that summer, but she climbed into his head less often than he had imagined she would, and as the first hot month turned into the second hot month, he was beginning to feel almost glad they were no longer together, as if a spell had been broken and he was back to being himself and not some fabricated or deluded vision of himself, whereas Artie was with him again in the summer heat, Artie’s death and his father’s death, those were the memories he dwelled on most as he sat in his hot little room bleeding out the words of his book, and once the matter of his inheritance had been settled at the end of April (not a standard bequest, as it turned out, but the funds from a life insurance policy that circumvented the need to pay any death taxes), he had taken the five thousand dollars from Dan and now watched in morbid wonder as month by month the ninety-five thousand inched its way back to the original one hundred thousand. Invisible money, Dan had said. Ferguson called it ghost money.
He was writing a book about death, and on some days he felt the book was trying to kill him. Every sentence was a struggle, every word in every sentence could have been a different word, and as with all the other things he had written in the past three years, he was turning out roughly four pages for every page he kept. Still and all, he had one hundred and twenty-two finished pages by the beginning of the summer, and half the story had been told. A plague of suicides that is now coming to the end of its third month, during which the city of R. has buried twenty-one of its children, an alarming number for a provincial town of ninety-four thousand inhabitants, and Dr. Noyes has been in the thick of it from the start, working with two dozen fellow doctors, a dozen psychiatrists, and close to thirty priests and ministers to ward off the next suicide, but in spite of their intense collective effort, which entails long interviews and counseling sessions with every young person in the city, nothing they do provides the smallest bit of help, and by now the doctor is questioning whether the countless hours they are putting in to end the scourge have only prolonged it, whether isolating a problem and holding it up to public view month after month after month doesn’t keep the problem alive rather than solve it, thereby tempting the vulnerable ones to solve their own problems in ways they might not have thought of on their own, and so the children of R. go on killing themselves as before, and bit by bit the staunch Dr. Noyes is coming undone. That was where Ferguson had left off when he took his final exams and wrote his end-of-the-term course papers in June, and as he felt his way back into the story during the early weeks of the summer, he already knew how it was going to end, but helpful as it was to know that, knowing was not doing, and getting to the end would mean little unless he managed to do it right. The problems facing the young people of Noyes’s city are at once eternal and of the moment, a combination of biological destiny and contingent historical facts. The adolescent upheavals of first loves and broken loves, the daily fear of being singled out for expulsion by the herd, the fear of pregnancy, the trauma of real pregnancy and too-early motherhood, the thrills of excess (driving too fast, drinking too much), ennui, contempt for parents, adults, and everyone in charge, melancholy, loneliness, and the pain of the world (Weltschmerz) pressing on the heart even as sunlight pours down upon them—the old, never-ending torments of being young—but for the ones most at risk, the seventeen- and eighteen-year-old boys, there is the threat of Vietnam looming before them the instant they leave school, the incontestable reality of the American moment, for few high school graduates go on to college from the blue-collar city of R., where the end of high school means the beginning of adult life, and now that sixty-four coffins containing the bodies of dead U.S. soldiers have been shipped back home and buried in local cemeteries over the past three years, now that the limbless and eyeless older brothers of those boys have landed in the wards of the nearby V.A. hospital in W., the patriotic fervor that swept through R. in the summer of 1965 has turned to revulsion and dread by the spring of 1968, and the war being fought by the
American government on the other side of the world is no longer a war any of those boys is willing to fight in. To die for nothing as their brothers did, as their cousins did, as their friends’ brothers did seems to mock the principles of life itself, and why were they born, they ask themselves, and what are they doing on this earth if it is only to give away their lives for nothing before they have even begun to live? Some maim themselves by shooting off fingers and toes in order to flunk their army physicals, but others prefer the less bloody solution of gassing themselves to death in idling cars enclosed within their parents’ locked garages, and as often as not, if the boy happens to have a girlfriend, the girl and the boy will be sitting in the car together, wrapped in each other’s arms as the fumes slowly carry out their work. In the beginning, Noyes is appalled by these senseless deaths and does everything he can to stop them, but as time goes on his thoughts start moving in a different direction, and by the fourth or fifth month, he is infected by the contagion himself. What Ferguson was proposing to do with the story after that was to follow Noyes through the various steps that will lead him to take his own life at the end of the book, the enormous sympathy he develops for the young people in his charge, the conversations with more than two hundred and fifty boys and girls that convince him the city is not going through a medical crisis but a spiritual crisis, that the question is not death or a desire for death but a loss of hope in the future, and once Noyes understands that they are all living in a world without hope, Ferguson was planning to put him together with one of the young people he has been counseling for the past months, a seventeen-year-old girl named Lily McNamara, whose twin brother Harold has already killed himself, and the no longer married and childless Dr. Noyes will take Lily into his house for a week or a month or half a year and try to talk the plain, stubborn, inarticulate girl into giving up her thoughts of death. It will be his last stand, a last effort to push back his own desire to succumb, and when he fails to turn her back to life, he will follow her into the garage, shut the doors and windows, and then climb into the car with her and turn on the ignition …