When Ferguson completed the handwritten first draft of Sole Mates in early November, he had made enough progress in his typing course to do the second draft on the Smith-Corona. After he corrected that version and typed up the story again, the finished manuscript came to fifty-two double-spaced pages. It seemed incomprehensible to him that he had written so much, that somehow or other he had managed to crank out more than fifteen thousand words about a dumb pair of shoes, but after the idea came to him, one thing kept leading to another, his head kept filling up with new situations to write about, new aspects of the characters to explore and develop, and by the time he was finished more than two months of his life had been given over to the project. He felt a certain satisfaction in having done it, of course, the mere fact of having composed such a long work was something any fourteen-year-old would have felt proud of, but when he read it over for the fifth time and made the last of his final revisions, he still didn’t know if it was any good or not. Since neither one of his parents was capable of judging the story, let alone any story ever written in the history of mankind, and since Aunt Mildred and Uncle Don were in London for the fall semester (Mildred had been given a half-year sabbatical)—which meant that Noah was living full-time with his mother and was therefore inaccessible until January—and since he was too frightened to share it with the one classmate whose opinion he would have trusted, he reluctantly gave it to his English teacher, Mrs. Baldwin, who had been standing in front of ninth-grade classrooms since the 1920s and was just a year or two from retirement. Ferguson knew he was taking a risk. Mrs. Baldwin excelled at giving vocabulary quizzes and spelling tests, she was masterful at explaining how to diagram a sentence and terrifically good at clarifying the tough points of grammar and diction, but her taste in literature belonged to the fuddy-duddy school of superannuated treasures, as evinced by her enthusiasm for Bryant, Whittier, and Longfellow, those turgid, insipid has-beens who dominated the curriculum when she led the class through the wonders of nineteenth-century American verse, and while Ferguson’s dark-browed E. A. Poe was there with his obligatory black bird, there was no Walt Whitman—too profane!—and no Emily Dickinson—too obscure! To her credit, however, Mrs. Baldwin had also assigned them A Tale of Two Cities, which was his first exposure to Dickens on the page (he had once watched a movie version of A Christmas Carol on TV), and though Ferguson had gladly joined his friends in the age-old tradition of referring to the novel as A Sale of Two Titties, he had fallen hard for the book, had found the sentences ferociously energetic and surprising, an inexhaustible inventiveness that mixed horror and humor in ways he had never encountered in any other book, and he was grateful to Mrs. Baldwin for having introduced him to what he now considered to be the best novel he had ever read. That was why he decided to give her his story—because of Dickens. Too bad he couldn’t write as well as old Charles, but he was just a beginner, an amateur author with only one work to his name so far, and he hoped she would take that into account.
It wasn’t as bad as he thought it might be, but in other ways it was much worse. Mrs. Baldwin corrected his typos, spelling errors, and grammatical blunders, which not only was a help to him but proved that she had read the story with some care, and when they sat down for their after-school conference six days after he had given her the manuscript, she praised him for his perseverance and the richness of his imagination, and to be perfectly frank, she added, she was stunned that an apparently normal, well-adjusted boy should have such dark, disturbing thoughts about the world. As for the story itself, well, it was ludicrous, of course, a blatant example of the pathetic fallacy gone wrong, but even granted that a pair of shoes could think and feel and carry on conversations, what had Ferguson been trying to accomplish by inventing this comic-book world of his? There were unquestionably some touching and amusing moments, some flashes of genuine literary talent, but much of the story had offended her, and she wondered why Ferguson had chosen her to be his first reader, since he must have known she would be put off by his use of four-letter words (pigeon shit on page 17, holy shit on page 30—which she pointed out to him by tapping her finger on the lines in which those words appeared), not to mention his mockery of the police throughout, beginning with the derisory terms flatfoot and cop shoes, then deepening the insult with his portrayal of Captain Benton as a drunken, abusive sadist—didn’t Ferguson know that her father had been Maplewood chief of police when she was a girl, hadn’t she told the class enough stories about him to make that clear?—but worst of all, she said, worse than anything else was the smutty tone of the story, not just that Quine hops in and out of bed with various unsavory women before he proposes to Alice but that Alice herself is willing to sleep with him before their marriage—an institution, by the way, that Ferguson seemed to hold in absolute contempt—and then, even worse than worst of all, the fact that the sexual innuendos don’t stop with the human characters but go all the way down to the shoes themselves, what a preposterous notion that was, the erotic lives of shoes, for pity’s sake, and how could Ferguson look at himself in the mirror after writing about the pleasure a shoe feels when a foot steps into it, or the ecstasy that comes from being shined and polished, and how on earth did he ever think up the shoe orgy with Flora and Nora, that truly was the limit, and didn’t Ferguson feel the least bit ashamed of himself for dwelling on such filth?
He didn’t know how to answer her. Until Mrs. Baldwin started hammering him with her criticisms, he had assumed they would be talking about the mechanics of fiction writing, technical matters such as structure, pace, and dialogue, the importance of using one word instead of three or four words, how to avoid needless digressions and drive the story forward, the small but essential things he was still trying to figure out for himself, but it had never occurred to him that Mrs. Baldwin would attack him on what seemed to be moral grounds, calling into question the very substance of what he had written and condemning it as indecent. Whether she approved of the story or not, it was his work, and he was free to write whatever he wanted, to use the word shit if he felt it was necessary, for example, since people in the real world said that word a hundred times a day, and even if he was still a virgin, he had learned enough about sex to know that you didn’t have to be married in order to do it, that human lust paid little or no heed to the laws of matrimony, and as for the sexual life of shoes, how could she not see how funny it was, funny in such an absurd, innocent way that anyone reading those passages would have to be half-dead not to crack a smile, and fuck her, Ferguson said to himself, she had no right to be reproaching him like this, and yet in spite of his resistance her words were doing the job she had intended them to do, they were scalding his insides and peeling off his skin, and so dazed was he by the assault that he didn’t have the strength to defend himself, and when he was finally able to speak, he could get no more than two words out of his mouth, two mumbled words that surely ranked as the most pathetic words he had ever spoken:
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry, too, Mrs. Baldwin said. I know you think I’m being hard on you, but it’s for your own good, Archie. I’m not saying your story is obscene, not when you compare it to some of the books they’ve been publishing these past few years, but it’s vulgar and distasteful, and I just want to know what you were thinking when you wrote it. Did you have anything in mind, or were you simply trying to shock people with a bunch of off-color jokes?
Ferguson didn’t want to be there anymore. He wanted to stand up and leave the room and never have to look at Mrs. Baldwin’s wrinkled face and watery blue eyes again. He wanted to quit school and run away from home and ride the rails like a Depression hobo, begging for meals at kitchen doors and writing dirty books in his spare time, a man beholden to no one, laughing as he spat in the face of the world.
I’m waiting, Archie, Mrs. Baldwin said. Don’t you have anything to say for yourself?
You want to know what was in my mind, is that it?
Yes, what you were thinking.
I was thinking
about slavery, Ferguson said. About how some people were actually owned by other people and had to do what they were told from the minute they were born until the minute they died. Hank and Frank are slaves, Mrs. Baldwin. They come from Africa—the shoe factory—then they’re put in chains and shipped to America on a boat—the shoe box, the truck ride to Madison Avenue—and then they’re sold off to their master at a slave auction.
But the shoes in your story like being shoes. You’re not going to tell me that slaves liked being slaves, are you?
No, of course not. But slavery lasted for hundreds of years, and how many times did the slaves rise up and revolt, how many times did slaves kill their masters? Almost never. Slaves did the best they could under bad conditions. They even told jokes and sang songs when they were able to. That’s the story of Hank and Frank. They have to serve the will of their master, but that doesn’t mean they don’t try to make the most of what they have.
None of this comes through in the writing, Archie.
I didn’t want to make it too obvious. Maybe that’s a problem, or maybe you just missed it, I don’t know. In any case, that’s what I had in mind.
I’m glad you told me this. It doesn’t change my opinion of the story, but at least I know you were trying to do something serious. I dislike it with all my heart, you understand, dislike it all the more because some of it is so good, and because I’m such an old woman now, I suppose I’ll always dislike what you do—but keep writing, Archie, and don’t listen to me. You don’t need advice, you just need to keep at it. As your dear friend Edgar Allan Poe once wrote to an aspiring author: Be bold—read much—write much—publish little—keep aloof from the little wits—and fear nothing.
* * *
HE DIDN’T TELL her about the final pages of the story or what he had been thinking when Alice puts Hank and Frank in the closet. If Mrs. Baldwin had missed the secret references to slavery, how could she have understood that the closet is a concentration camp and that Hank and Frank are no longer black Americans at that point but European Jews in the Second World War, wasting away in captivity until they are finally burned to death in the incinerator-crematorium? It wouldn’t have done any good to tell her that, nor was there any reason to talk about friendship, which was the true subject of the story as far as he was concerned, because that would have meant having to talk about Artie Federman, and he had no desire to share his grief with Mrs. Baldwin. She could have been right about not making those things visible enough for a reader to detect them, but then again she could have been blind, so rather than put the story away and stop thinking about it, he corrected the errors Mrs. Baldwin had circled on the manuscript and typed up yet another version, this time using carbon paper in order to make a second copy, which he airmailed to Aunt Mildred and Uncle Don the following afternoon. Twelve days after that, he received a letter from London, which in fact was two letters in a single envelope, a separate response from each of them, both favorable and enthusiastic, neither one of them blind to the things his teacher had failed to notice. What a puzzle, he said to himself, as a great surge of happiness swept through him, for even if his aunt and uncle had pronounced Sole Mates to be a good story, their verdict did nothing to change the fact that Mrs. Baldwin still thought it was a bad story. The same manuscript perceived differently by different pairs of eyes, different hearts, different brains. It was no longer a question of one person being punched while another person was being kissed, it was the same person being punched and kissed at the same time, for that was how the game worked, Ferguson realized, and if he meant to go on showing his story to other people in the future, he would have to prepare himself to be punched as often as he was kissed, or punched ten times for every kiss, or a hundred times with no kiss at all.
Rather than mail the story directly back to Ferguson, Uncle Don had sent it to Noah with instructions to return the manuscript to his cousin when he had finished reading it. Early one Saturday morning, about a week after the letters had arrived from London, the telephone rang in the kitchen as Ferguson was polishing off his breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast, and there was Noah on the other end of the line, spitting out words like tommy-gun bullets, saying he had to talk fast because his mother had stepped out to do some shopping and would probably kill him if she walked in and caught him on a long-distance call, especially a call to Ferguson, who was not to be contacted under any circumstances from the sanctuary of her apartment, not only because he wasn’t Noah’s real cousin but because he was tied by blood to the bitch-devil (yes, Noah said, she was out of her mind, everyone knew that, but he was the one who had to live with her), and yet once he finished that breathless prologue of his, Noah immediately began to slow the pace of his delivery, and before long he was talking at normal speed, which was fast but not outrageously fast, and sounding like someone with all the time in the world to settle in for a nice lengthy chat.
Well, pisshead, he began. You’ve really done it this time, haven’t you?
Done what? Ferguson replied, feigning ignorance, since he was more or less certain that Noah was referring to the story.
An odd little thing called Sole Mates.
You’ve read it?
Every word. Three times.
And?
Fantastic, Archie. Just fucking, flat-out fantastic. To tell the truth, I didn’t know you had it in you.
To tell the truth, I didn’t either.
I’m thinking we should turn it into a movie.
Very funny. And how do we do that without a camera?
An insignificant detail. We’ll remedy that problem in due course. Anyway, we don’t have time to work on it now. Because of school, for one thing, and the distance between New York and New Jersey, and assorted maternal impediments I won’t go into today. But there’s always the summer. I mean, we’re finished with camp now, aren’t we? We’re too old for it, and after what happened to Artie, well, I don’t think I could ever go back there.
I agree. No more camp.
So we’ll spend the summer making the movie. Now that you’ve turned yourself into a writer, I suppose you’ll be giving up all that sports nonsense.
Only baseball. But I’m still doing basketball. I’m on a team, you know, a ninth-grade team sponsored by the West Orange Y. We play other Y teams around Essex County twice a week, once on Wednesday night and once on Saturday morning.
I don’t get it. If you want to go on being a jock, why quit baseball? It’s your best sport.
Because of Artie.
What does Artie have to do with it?
He was the best player we’ve ever seen, wasn’t he? And he was also my friend. Not so much your friend, but my friend, my good friend. Now Artie’s dead, and I want to go on thinking about him, it’s important to me to have him in my thoughts as much as possible, and the best way to do that, I realized, was to give up something in his honor, something I care about, something important to me, so I chose baseball, baseball because that was Artie’s best sport, too, and from now on, whenever I see other people playing baseball, or whenever I think about why I’m not playing baseball myself, I’ll think about Artie.
You’re a strange person, do you know that?
I guess. But even if I am, what can I do about it?
Nothing.
That’s right. Nothing.
So play basketball. Join a summer league if you want to, but as long as you’re down to just one sport, you’ll have lots of time to work on the movie.
Agreed. Assuming we manage to get hold of a camera.
We’ll get it, don’t worry. The important thing is that you’ve written your first masterpiece. The door has opened, Archie, and there’ll be many more to come—a whole lifetime of masterpieces.
Let’s not get carried away. I’ve written one thing, that’s all, and who knows if I’ll ever come up with another idea. Besides, I still have my plan.
Not that. I thought you’d dropped it ages ago.
Not really.
Listen to me, pisshead. You??
?re never going to be a doctor—and I’m never going to be a strong man in the circus. You don’t have a math and science brain, and I don’t have a single muscle in my body. Ergo, no Doctor Ferguson—and no Noah the Magnificent.
How can you be so sure?
Because the idea came to you from a book, that’s why. A stupid novel you read when you were twelve years old and which I had the misfortune to read myself because you insisted it was so good, which it isn’t, and if you looked at it again I’m sure you’d finally see that it isn’t what you thought it was, that it isn’t any damned good at all. Idealistic young doctor blows up contaminated sewer system in order to rid town of disease, idealistic young doctor loses his ideals for money and a posh address, formerly idealistic not-so-young doctor regains his ideals and thus saves his soul. Hogwash, Archie. Just the kind of crap to move an idealistic young boy like yourself, but you’re not a young boy anymore, you’re a strapping fellow with a man’s dick yowling between your legs and a head that can produce literary masterpieces and God knows what else, and you’re telling me you’re still in thrall to that abomination of a book whose title escapes me now because I’ve done everything in my power to forget it?
The Citadel.
That’s it. And now that you’ve reminded me, never say it again in my presence. No, Archie, a person doesn’t become a doctor because he’s read a book. He becomes a doctor because he needs to become a doctor, and you don’t need to become a doctor, you need to become a writer.
I thought this was going to be a short call. You haven’t forgotten about your mother, have you?
Damnit. Of course I have. Gotta go, Arch.
Your father’s coming back in a couple of weeks. We’ll get together then, okay?
You bet. We’ll talk Shoe to each other with thick brogan brogues—and figure out how to steal a camera.
* * *
ON DECEMBER NINETEENTH, three days after Ferguson’s conversation with Noah, the New York Times reported that American G.I.s had entered the war zone in South Vietnam and were now taking part in tactical operations with instructions to shoot if fired upon. Along with a shipment of forty helicopters, four hundred American combat troops had arrived in South Vietnam one week earlier. Additional aircraft, ground vehicles, and amphibious ships were on the way. In all, there were now two thousand Americans in uniform in South Vietnam, instead of the officially reported 685 members of the military advisory group.