Seventy-four slowly written and rewritten pages between mid-June and mid-September, and two weeks after he started riding the subway back and forth to Brooklyn again, his collected works were published by Tumult Books. After such a hard summer, Prolusions sprang up out of the earth as unexpectedly as the first crocus in early spring. A flash of purple bursting through the mud and blackened snow on the chilly ground, a beautiful spear of color in an otherwise colorless world, for the dust jacket of Prolusions was indeed purple, the shade of purple called mauve, the color Ferguson and Ron had selected out of the numerous colors available to them, an austerely designed typographical cover with his name and the title in black bordered by a thin white rectangle, a glancing nod to the Gallimard covers in France, elegant, so very elegant, Ferguson thought, and when he held a copy of the book in his hands for the first time, he experienced something he had not been prepared for: a thunderbolt of exaltation. Not dissimilar to the exaltation he had felt after winning the Walt Whitman Scholarship, he realized, but with this difference: the scholarship had been taken away from him, but the book would always be his, even if no more than seventeen people ever read it.
There were reviews. For the first time in his life, he was bussed and slapped in public, thirteen times over the next four months by his reckoning, long, medium, and short reviews in newspapers, magazines, and literary quarterlies, five satisfying tongue kisses, a friendly pat on the back, three punches to the face, one knee to the balls, one execution by firing squad, and two shrugs. Ferguson was both a genius and an idiot, both a wonder boy and a supercilious oaf, both the best thing that had happened this year and the worst thing that had happened this year, both brimming with talent and utterly devoid of it. Nothing had changed since the Hank-Frank rumpus with Mrs. Baldwin and the contravening opinions of Aunt Mildred and Uncle Don half a century ago, the push and pull of positive and negative, the endless standoff in the courtrooms of judgment, but try as he did to ignore both the good and the bad that were said about him, Ferguson had to admit that the stings went on stinging long after the kisses had worn off, that it was harder to forget being attacked as “a frantic, out-of-control hippie who doesn’t believe in literature and wants to destroy it” than it was to remember being praised as “a bright new kid on the block.” Fuck it, he said to himself, as he filed away the reviews in the bottom drawer of his desk. If and when he ever published another book, he would stop up his ears with candle wax, cover his eyes with a blindfold, strap his body to the mast of a ship, and then ride out the storm until the Sirens could no longer touch him.
Not long after the book came out, Mary Donohue came back in. Celia had been gone for five months at that point, and the solitary, sex-starved Ferguson was more than interested to hear from Joanna that her sister had recently broken up with her boyfriend of the past eighteen months, and if Ferguson had any wish to see Mary again, Joanna would be more than happy to invite both of them to dinner one night in the coming days or weeks. Mary was all done with Michigan now and was back in New York studying law at NYU, fifteen or twenty pounds slimmer, according to Joanna, and she was asking him because Mary had asked her, and if Ferguson was willing, it appeared Mary would be willing, too, and so it was that Ferguson and Mary started seeing each other again, that is, started sleeping together again as in the old days back in the summer of 1966, and no, it wasn’t love, it would never be love, but in some ways it was even better than love, friendship, friendship pure and simple, with immense quantities of admiration on both sides, and so deeply had Ferguson come to trust Mary by the second month of their second affair that she was the one he chose to unburden himself to about Celia, opening up for the first time about the Artie business, the baseball business, and the shameful diaphragm business, telling her what he had never been able to tell anyone else, and when he had marched to the end of that wretched tale of silence and deceit, he turned away from her, looked at the wall, and said: What’s wrong with me?
Being young, Mary replied. That’s the only thing that was ever wrong with you. You were young, and you thought the thoughts of an undeveloped young person with a big heart and an overdeveloped case of youthful idealism. Now you’re not so young anymore, and you’ve stopped thinking that way.
Is that all?
That’s all. Except for the other thing, which has nothing to do with being young. You should have told her, Archie. What you did was … how can I say this without hurting your feelings…?
Reprehensible.
Yes, that’s the word for it. Reprehensible.
I wanted to marry her, you see, or at least I thought I wanted to marry her, and if I’d told her we would never be able to have children, she probably would have turned me down.
Still. It was wrong not to say anything about it.
Well, I’ve told you, haven’t I?
It’s not the same with me.
Oh? And why is that?
Because you don’t want to marry me.
Who knows if I do or don’t? Who knows if you do or don’t? Who knows anything?
Mary laughed.
At least you can stop taking the Pill now, Ferguson continued.
You’re not the only man in New York, you know. What happens if I stumble out one night, bump into Señor Magnifico, and get swept off my feet?
Just don’t tell me about it, that’s all I ask.
In the meantime, Archie, you should go to another doctor—just to make sure.
I know, Ferguson said, I know I should, and I will, someday soon, of course I’ll go, someday soon, I promise.
* * *
NINETEEN SIXTY-NINE WAS the year of the seven conundrums, the eight bombs, the fourteen refusals, the two broken bones, the number two hundred and sixty-three, and the one life-changing joke.
1) Four days after Richard Nixon was installed as the thirty-seventh president of the United States, Ferguson wrote the last sentence of The Capital of Ruins. The first draft was done, the long-labored-over first draft, which had been through so many revisions by then that it probably could have counted as the ninth or tenth draft, but Ferguson still wasn’t satisfied with the manuscript, not fully satisfied at any rate, feeling there was more work to be done before he could declare it finished, so he held on to the book for another four months, tinkering and refining, cutting and adding, replacing words and sharpening sentences, and when he sat down to type up the final, final version in early June, he was in the middle of his final exams at Brooklyn College and almost ready to graduate.
There was only one publisher Ferguson knew, only one publisher he wanted to publish with, and now that he had completed his novel, how pleasant it would have been to hand over the manuscript to his friends at Tumult Books, who again and again had told him they would go on publishing his work forever. But things had changed in the past several months, and the still developing young company, which had brought out twelve books since its birth in the summer of 1967, was on the verge of extinction. The twice-married Trixie Davenport, the sole financial backer of the small but not invisible press, had married for a third time in April, and her new husband, Victor Krantz, who seemed to have no visible occupation beyond managing Trixie’s investments, was not a lover of art (except for the art produced by dead painters such as Mondrian and Kandinsky) and advised the Tumult angel to stop throwing her money away on “useless causes” such as Tumult Books. Thus the plug was pulled. All contracts for future books were canceled, copies not already in bookstores or in the distributor’s warehouse were to be remaindered, and those not remaindered were to be pulped. In the nine months since it had been published, Prolusions had sold 806 copies. Not so many, perhaps, but by Tumult standards a decent showing, the fourth-best seller on the list after Anne’s book of erotic poems (1,486), Billy’s Crushed Heads (1,141), and Bo’s racy diaries about downtown queer life after dark (966). In late May, Ferguson bought one hundred copies of his own book for two dollars each, stored the boxes in the basement of the house on Woodhall Crescent, and then returned to New Y
ork that same evening to attend a crowded party at Billy’s place, where all who had worked for or published with Tumult Books along with their wives, husbands, girlfriends, and boyfriends gathered to curse the name of Victor Krantz and get themselves snockered. Even sadder, now that Joanna was pregnant again and Billy was working as a furniture mover to bring more money into the household, there was the inevitable moment when Billy stood up on a chair in the middle of the party and announced the end of Gizmo Press, but at least, Billy said, shouting drunkenly as the veins bulged in his neck, at least I’m going to carry on until I’ve published all the books and pamphlets I promised I would, because I’m A Person Who Honors His Commitments!, a pointed reference to the pulled plugs at Tumult, and everyone applauded and praised Billy for being a man of his word as Joanna stood next to him with tears rolling down her cheeks and Mary stood next to Joanna with her arm around her sister’s shoulder, and then Mary took out a handkerchief and started dabbing off the tears from Joanna’s face, and Ferguson, who was standing close by and watching the scene carefully, loved Mary for doing that.
On Billy’s advice, Ferguson found himself a literary agent to handle the business of setting him up with a new publisher. Her name was Lynn Eberhardt, and needless to say she was Billy’s agent as well (not because Billy had finished another book but because she was hoping to sign up Crushed Heads with a paperback house now that Tumult had stopped breathing), and Ferguson was heartened by her response to The Capital of Ruins, which she called a brilliant anti-war novel in the letter she wrote accepting him as a client, and then, two days later on the phone, described it as a Bergman movie transplanted to America and rendered into words. Ferguson had mixed feelings about Bergman’s films (he liked some and didn’t like others), but he understood that Lynn considered it to be a high compliment and thanked her for her generous remark. Lynn was young and enthusiastic, a small, pretty woman with blond hair and bright rouged lips who had struck out on her own about one year earlier, and as a young, independent agent with no former clients in her stable, she was on a mission to find the best of the new young writers, and at twenty-two years and three months old, Ferguson was nothing if not young. Then she started sending out the manuscript to the New York publishers on her list, and one by one the rejections started coming in. It wasn’t that any of those publishers thought Ferguson’s book was bad or unworthy or didn’t show signs of what one of them called “a remarkable talent,” but the unanimous judgment was that The Capital of Ruins was so flagrantly uncommercial that even if they paid an advance of fifty dollars or no advance at all, they would have a hard time earning back the costs of printing the book. By the end of the year, after traveling through the mailrooms and offices of fourteen publishing companies, the manuscript had received fourteen rejection letters.
Fourteen straight punches, and every one of them hurt.
Don’t worry, Lynn said. I’ll think of something.
2) The four youngest members of the tangled-up clan graduated from their respective colleges in early June, Amy from Brandeis, Howard from Princeton, Noah from NYU, and Ferguson from his rural retreat near the Flatbush subway stop in Midwood, and now that the commencement exercises were over, all four of them had commenced their journeys into the future.
After spending the bulk of his adolescence and all of his youth preparing for a life in film, Noah had bushwhacked Ferguson and the others by reversing course and declaring his intention to stick to the theater from now on. Film acting was a mug’s game, he said, a stop-and-start mechanized sham that couldn’t compare to the real sham of performing in front of a live audience with no retakes or editor’s scissors to save your skin. He had directed three little films of his own and had acted in three others, but now he was saying good-bye to celluloid and heading off to study three-dimensional acting and directing at the Yale School of Drama. Why more school? Ferguson asked him. Because I need more training, Noah said, but if it turns out that I don’t, I’ll quit the program, come back to New York, and move in with you. It’s an awfully small place, Ferguson said. I know that, Noah answered, but you won’t mind sleeping on the floor, will you?
More school for Noah, as not expected, and more school for Amy and Howard, as already promised and planned. Columbia for both of them, along with the splendors of unmarried conjugal life as Amy worked for a Ph.D. in American history, but Howard had backed off from philosophy and would be studying in the Classics Department, where he could delve ever more deeply into the gnomic utterances of the pre-Socratics and not have to waste his time on the doltish Anglo-American analyticals currently in fashion. Wittgenstein yes, but Quine gave him a headache, he said, and reading Strawson was like chewing glass. Ferguson understood how much Howard adored his old Greeks (the Nagle influence had been profound, far more lasting on Howard than it had been on him), but Ferguson couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed by his friend’s decision, for it seemed to him that Howard was better suited to art than to scholarship, and he wanted him to push on dangerously with his pens and pencils and try to make a go of it with his drawings, living off the hand that was already more skilled than the professional hand of Amy’s father, and after the covers he had done for Billy and the cartoons he had published in the Princeton Tiger and the sidesplitting tennis matches and the dozens of other marvels he had zipped out over the years, Ferguson at last confronted Howard and asked him why school and not art? Because, his old roommate said, art is too easy for me, and I’m never going to get any better at it than I am now. I’m looking for something that will test me, a discipline to push me beyond where I think I can go. Does that make sense, Archie? Yes, it made sense, perhaps a good deal of sense, but still Ferguson was disappointed.
As for Ferguson himself, there had never been any question of more school. Enough was enough, he announced to the other members of the clan, and sometime late that spring he found himself a job, which was precisely the sort of job his father would have disapproved of, a job that was no doubt causing him to turn over in his grave now, but Fritz Mangini, the smartest and most reliable of Ferguson’s friends at Brooklyn College, had a father who ran a contracting company, and one of the services that company contracted for was painting apartments, and when Fritz told Ferguson his father was looking for another painter to join the crew that summer, Ferguson met with Mr. Mangini in his office on Desbrosses Street in lower Manhattan and was hired. It wasn’t a regular five-day-a-week job as most jobs were but a job-to-job situation with pauses in between, which would suit his purposes well, he figured, working for a week or two and then not working for a week or two, and the periods when he was on would generate enough money for him to eat and pay the rent during the periods when he was off. Now that he had graduated from college, he therefore was both a writer and a housepainter, but because he had just finished his first novel and was not yet prepared to begin something else (his brain was exhausted and he had run out of ideas), he was mostly a housepainter.
Amy would be marching forward with no obstacles in front of her, but the plans of the three others were contingent on what happened to them during and after their army physicals, which were scheduled to take place that summer, Howard’s in mid-July, Noah’s in early August, and Ferguson’s in late August. In the event they were called up, Howard and Noah had each decided to follow Luther Bond’s example and go north to Canada, but Ferguson, who was more stubborn and hotheaded than they were, had decided he would be willing to risk going to prison. The pro-war faction had names for people like them—draft dodgers, cowards, traitors to their country—but the three friends would not have objected to fighting for America in a war they felt to be just, since none of them was a pacifist who believed in opposing all wars, they were opposed only to this war, and in that they considered it to be morally indefensible, not just a political blunder but an act of criminal madness, they were enjoined by their patriotic duty to resist taking part in it. Howard’s father, Noah’s father, and Ferguson’s stepfather had all been soldiers in World War II, and thei
r sons and stepson admired them for having fought in the battle against fascism, which they considered to have been a just war, but Vietnam was something different, and how comforting it was for everyone in the large, tangled-up tribe to know that the three veterans of that other war stood by their sons and stepson in opposing this war.
The Battle of Hamburger Hill, Operation Apache Snow in the A Shau Valley, and the Battle of Binh Ba in Phuoc Tuy Province. Those were some of the names and places drifting back from Vietnam in the weeks before and after the three of them graduated from college, and as they prepared for their visits to the draft board in Newark (Howard) and the one on Whitehall Street in Manhattan (Noah and Ferguson), both Howard and Noah consulted doctors about imaginary ailments they hoped would earn them a classification of either 4-F (unfit for military service) or 1-Y (fit for military service, but only in cases of utmost urgency), which would spare them from having to move to Canada. Howard suffered from allergies to dust, grass, ragweed, goldenrod, and other airborne pollens during the spring and summer (hay fever), but his sympathetic, anti-war doctor wrote a letter declaring that he also suffered from asthma, a chronic disease that might or might not have warranted Howard a medical exemption. Noah went armed with a letter as well, a statement from the anti-war psychoanalyst he had been visiting twice a week for the past six months attesting to his patient’s neurotic fear of open spaces (agoraphobia), which in times of undue stress blossomed into full-blown paranoia, and which, when coupled with his latent homosexual tendencies, made it impossible for him to function normally in all-male environments. When Noah pulled out the letter and showed it to Ferguson, he shook his head and laughed. Look at me, Archie, he said. I’m a danger to society. An out-and-out lunatic.