4 3 2 1

  Four days after that, on December twenty-third, Ferguson’s father left on a two-week trip to southern California to visit his brothers and their families. It was the first pause he had taken from work in years, the last one dating all the way back to December 1954, when he and Ferguson’s mother had gone to Miami Beach for a ten-day winter vacation. This time, Ferguson’s mother didn’t go with him. Nor did she accompany Ferguson’s father to the airport to say good-bye to him on the day he left. Ferguson had heard his mother bad-mouth her brothers-in-law often enough to understand that she had no interest in seeing them, but still, there must have been more to it than that, for once his father was gone, she looked more agitated than usual, preoccupied, morose, unable, for the first time in memory, to follow what he was saying when he talked to her, and so deep was her distraction that Ferguson wondered if she wasn’t brooding about the state of her marriage, which seemed to have taken some definitive turn with his father’s solo departure to Los Angeles. Perhaps the bathtub wasn’t merely cold anymore. Perhaps it was frigid now, on the point of freezing over into a block of ice.

  The carbon copy of his story had been sent back by Noah as promised, and since it showed up in Maplewood before his father left for California, Ferguson had given it to him on the off chance that he might read it on the trip. His mother had read it weeks earlier, of course, on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, curled up on the couch in the living room with her shoes off and smoking half a pack of Chesterfields as she worked her way through the fifty-two typed pages, telling him afterward that she thought it was just wonderful, one of the best things I’ve ever read, which was to be expected, he supposed, since she would have delivered the same verdict if he had copied out last month’s shopping list and passed it off as an experimental poem, but far better to have your mother on your side than not, especially with a father who seemed to be on no side at all. Now that Sole Mates had passed through the hands of Aunt Mildred, Uncle Don, and Noah, he figured it was time to screw up his courage (a phrase he loved for its double, contradictory meanings) and show it to Amy Schneiderman, the one person in Maplewood whose opinion he could trust—and therefore the person he had been most terrified to approach, since Amy was too honest to pull any punches, and a punch from her would have flattened him.

  In some ways, if not in many ways, Ferguson thought of Amy Schneiderman as a female version of Noah Marx. A more attractive version, to be sure, in that she was a girl and not a bug-eyed, muscleless boy, but she was smart in the way Noah was smart, the same kind of lit-up person he was, all ablaze and crackling with spirit, and over the years Ferguson had come to realize how much he depended on them both, as if the two of them were a pair of butterfly wings he wore on his back to keep himself aloft, he who could be so heavy at times, so earthbound, and yet, in the case of the more attractive Amy, the physical attraction was not so great as to plant any amorous thoughts in Ferguson’s head, and therefore she was still just a friend, albeit an essential friend, his most important comrade in the ever-expanding war against suburban dullness and mediocrity, and how fortunate it was that she, of all the people in the world, should be the one to occupy his old room, a narrative caprice in the story of their lives, perhaps, but it had formed a bond between them, a peculiar kind of closeness that they both took for granted now, for not only did Amy breathe the same air he had breathed in that house, she spent her nights in the same bed he had slept in when he lived there, a bed his mother had deemed too small for his room in the new house and had consequently given to Amy’s less than wealthy parents before they moved in. That was more than five years ago now, late summer 1956, and although Amy was supposed to have started the fifth grade in September, two days before the school year began she fell off a horse on a riding trail in the South Mountain Reservation and broke her hip, and by the time the injury healed, it was already the middle of October, and so her parents decided to have her repeat the fourth grade instead of plunging her into a new school six weeks behind the other children in her class. That was how she and Ferguson wound up in the same grade together, the two of them born just three months apart but destined to have slightly different trajectories in school, but then the broken hip intervened, and their trajectories became identical, beginning with that first year when they were fellow members of Miss Mancini’s fourth-grade class and continuing on through their last two years at Jefferson Elementary School and then all three years at Maplewood Junior High—always in the same classes together, always competing against each other, and because there had never been any romantic entanglements to divide them with the inevitable misunderstandings and hurt feelings that come with romance, always friends.

  The morning after Ferguson’s father left for California, Sunday, December twenty-fourth, the day before the holiday neither one of their families celebrated, Ferguson called Amy at ten-thirty and asked if he could come over to her house. He had something to give her, he said, and if she wasn’t too busy, he would like to give it to her right away. No, she said, she wasn’t busy, just lounging around in her pajamas reading the paper, trying not to think about the essay they were supposed to be writing over winter vacation. It was a fifteen-minute walk from his house to her house, a trip he had made on foot many times in the past, but the weather was ugly that morning, a fine drizzle falling with the temperature at thirty-one or thirty-two degrees, snow weather without any snow, but foggy, windy, and wet, so Ferguson said he would ask his mother to drive him there. In that case, Amy said, why didn’t they both come for brunch? Jim had bagged out on them about ten minutes earlier and was still in New York with friends, but the food had been bought, there was enough to feed ten starving people, and it would be a pity to waste it. Just a minute, she said, as she put down the phone and yelled out to her parents, asking if Archie and Mrs. Ferguson could come over and share our grub with us (Amy had a weakness for quaint idioms), and twenty seconds later she picked up the phone again and said: It’s fine. Come between twelve-thirty and one.

  Thus, the manuscript of Sole Mates was finally put in Amy’s hands, and as Ferguson sat in his old room with the girl who spent her nights sleeping in his old bed, the two of them talked while the adults prepared the meal in the kitchen directly below them, first of all about their current love dramas (Ferguson pining for a girl named Linda Flagg, who had turned him down when he’d asked her out to the movies on Friday, and Amy pinning her hopes on a boy named Roger Saslow, who had yet to call her but had hinted he would, assuming she had read the hint correctly), then about big brother Jim, an MIT freshman who had been one of the stalwarts of the Columbia High School basketball team in his junior and senior years, and how upset he was, Amy said, about Jack Molinas and the college point-shaving scandal, dozens of games fixed over the past few seasons by bribing players with a few hundred bucks while Molinas and his gambler pals cashed in big with tens of thousands a week. Everything in this country was fixed, Amy said. TV quiz shows, college basketball games, the stock market, political elections, but Jim was too pure to understand that. Maybe so, Ferguson said, but Jim was pure only because he saw the best in people, which was a good quality, he felt, one of the things he most admired about Amy’s brother, and no sooner did Ferguson say the word admire than the conversation shifted to another subject—the essays they had to write for the school-wide competition in January. The topic was The Person I Most Admire, and everyone had to participate, every seventh, eighth, and ninth grader, with prizes going to the best three essays in each of the three grades. Ferguson asked Amy if she had chosen anyone yet.

  Of course I have. It’s getting late, you know. We have to hand them in on January third.

  Don’t make me guess. I’m bound to get it wrong.

  Emma Goldman.

  The name rings a bell, but I don’t know much about her. Just about nothing, in fact.

  I didn’t either, but then my Uncle Gil gave me her autobiography as a present, and now I’m in love with her. She’s one of the greatest women who ever lived. (A brief pause.) And
what about you, Mr. Ferguson? Any ideas yet?

  Jackie Robinson.

  Ah, Amy said, the baseball player. But not just any baseball player, right?

  The man who changed America.

  Not a bad choice, Archie. Go for it.

  Do I need your permission?

  Of course you do, silly.

  They both laughed, and then Amy jumped to her feet and said: Come on, let’s go downstairs. I’m famished.

  * * *

  ON TUESDAY, FERGUSON went outside to retrieve the mail and found a hand-delivered letter sitting in the box—no stamp, no address, just his name written across the front. The message was succinct:

  Dear Archie,

  I hate you.

  Love, Amy

  P.S. I’ll return the ms. tomorrow. I need one more ride with Hank and Frank before I let go.

  His father returned to Maplewood on January fifth. Ferguson was expecting him to say something about the story, if only to apologize for not having read it, but he said nothing, and when he continued to say nothing over the days that followed, Ferguson assumed he had lost it. Since Amy had returned the original typescript by then, the loss of the copy was of little importance. What counted was how little his father seemed to care about that matter of little importance, and because Ferguson resolved never to speak to him about it unless his father spoke to him about it first, it grew into a matter of great importance, of greater and greater importance as time went on.

  3.1

  There was pain. There was fear. There was confusion. Two virgins deflowering each other with no more than the dimmest understanding of what they were up to, prepared only in the sense that Ferguson had managed to procure a box of condoms and that Amy, anticipating the blood that would inevitably flow out of her, had put a dark brown bath towel over the bottom sheet of her bed—a precaution inspired by the enduring power of old legends and which in fact proved unnecessary. Joy to begin with, the ecstatic sensation of being entirely naked with each other for the first time since their long-forgotten mattress romp as small children, the chance to touch every square centimeter of the other’s body, the delirium of bare skin pressing against bare skin, but once they were fully aroused, the difficulty of advancing to the next step, the anxiety of entering another person for the first time, of being entered by another person for the first time, Amy tensing up in those first instants because it hurt so much, Ferguson feeling wretched for causing that hurt and therefore slowing down and ultimately withdrawing altogether, after which there was a three-minute time-out, and then Amy grabbed hold of Ferguson and instructed him to begin again, saying, Just do it, Archie, don’t worry about me, just do it, and so Ferguson did it, knowing he couldn’t not worry about her but also knowing that the line had to be crossed, that this was the moment they had been given, and in spite of the inner bruising that must have made her feel as if she were being torn apart, Amy laughed when it was over, laughed her big laugh and said, I’m so happy, I think I could die.

  What a strange weekend it was, never once leaving the apartment as they sat on the sofa and watched Johnson being sworn in as the new president, watched Oswald being carted off to jail in his bloodied T-shirt, protesting to the cameras that he was nothing but a patsy, a word that Ferguson would forever associate with the frail young man who either killed or didn’t kill Kennedy on his own, watched a brief respite from the news when an orchestra played the dirge from Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, watched the funeral procession through the streets of Washington on Sunday as Amy choked up at the sight of the riderless horse, and watched Jack Ruby slip into the Dallas police station and shoot Oswald in the stomach. Unreal city. The line from Eliot kept exploding in Ferguson’s head throughout those three days as he and Amy gradually ate up the food in the kitchen, the eggs, the lamb chops, the sliced turkey, the packages of cheese, the cans of tuna fish, the boxes of breakfast cereal and cookies, Amy smoking more than he had ever seen her smoke and Ferguson smoking with her for the first time since they had met, the two of them sitting on the sofa together and stubbing out their Luckys in unison, then throwing their arms around each other and kissing, unable to stop themselves from committing the sacrilege of kissing at such a solemn moment, from leaving the sofa every three or four hours for another visit to the bedroom, shedding their clothes and climbing onto the bed again, both of them sore now, not just Amy but Ferguson as well, but they couldn’t stop themselves, the pleasure was always stronger than the pain, and grim as it was to be there on such a miserable weekend, it was the biggest, most important weekend of their young lives.

  The pity was that no more chances came their way for the next two months. Ferguson kept going to New York every Saturday, but Amy’s apartment was never empty long enough for them to return to the bedroom. One of her parents was always around, often both of her parents, and with nowhere else for them to go, the only solution was for the Schneidermans to leave town again—which they didn’t. That was why Ferguson accepted his cousin’s invitation to go on the skiing trip to Vermont in late January. Not that he had any interest in skiing, which he had tried once and felt no need to try again, but when Francie told him that the only house they had been able to rent for the weekend was a sprawling old place with five bedrooms, Ferguson thought there might be some hope. Plenty of room, Francie said, which explained why she had thought of calling him, and if he wanted to bring along a friend, there would be room for that person as well. Do girlfriends count as friends? Ferguson asked. Of course they do! Francie said, and from the way she replied to his question, from the spontaneous enthusiasm of that ringing Of course, Ferguson naturally supposed she understood he was telling her that he and Amy were a couple now and wanted to sleep in the same bedroom, for Francie had been married at eighteen, after all, just one year older than Amy was now, and if anyone knew about thwarted teenage lust, it had to be his twenty-seven-year-old cousin, who had been his favorite cousin ever since he was in diapers. Amy was dubious about Ferguson’s optimistic reading of Francie’s Of course, knowing how far the two of them had strayed from the accepted rules of sexual conduct, which not only didn’t allow for intercourse between unmarried teenagers but considered it to be a positive scandal, but still, she said, she had never been to Vermont, had never been on skis, and what could be better than a weekend in the snow with Archie? As for the other business, they would just have to see who was right and who was wrong, and if it turned out she was right, that didn’t mean there couldn’t be some late-night room-hopping for a silent crawl into someone else’s bed. They left on a cold Friday afternoon, as Amy and Ferguson wedged themselves into a cramped blue station wagon with Francie, her husband, Gary, and the two Hollander children, six-year-old Rosa and four-year-old David, and it was a lucky thing for the big ones that the little ones slept for most of the five hours it took them to reach Stowe.

  Francie had named her daughter after Ferguson’s mother, even though the names were not identical. The injunction against giving children the names of living parents, grandparents, and relatives was a law that even nonpracticing Jews still followed, which accounted for the one-letter difference between Rose and Rosa, a subtle point that Gary the lawyer had come up with in order to outflank the traditionalists in his family, but nevertheless the name was there for everyone to see, Rosa in honor of Rose, and with that gesture Francie and Gary were telling the world they had turned their backs on Arnold Ferguson, who had broken apart the family with the crime he had committed against his brother, and henceforth their loyalties would be shifted over to that brother, victim Stanley and his wife, Rose, whom Francie had loved from the moment she first set eyes on her as a young girl. It wasn’t easy for Francie to take that step, to denounce her father when she still felt so close to her mother, brother, and sister, but Gary’s contempt for his father-in-law was so strong, his disgust at the man’s moral weakness and dishonesty was so absolute, that Francie had little choice but to go along with her husband. They had already been married for two years when the robbery t
ook place, living in northwestern Massachusetts as Gary finished his undergraduate work at Williams, one of the three “baby couples” in his class, and the twenty-year-old Francie was already pregnant with her own first baby, who was born several months after her father’s involvement in the warehouse cleanout came to light. The rest of the family had all moved to California by then, not just her parents but the docile young Ruth as well, who had just finished high school and was enrolled in a secretarial course in L.A., and even Jack, who dropped out of Rutgers in his last year to join them, a decision Francie and Gary urged him not to make, which led to Jack telling them both to fuck off, and by the time Rosa was born, only Francie’s mother and sister made the trip back east to hold the child in their arms. Jack said he was too busy to come, and the disgraced Arnold Ferguson couldn’t come, because he could never come back east again.

  Francie had suffered, then, no more or no less than anyone else in the family, perhaps, but each one had suffered in his or her own way, and as far as Ferguson could tell, Francie’s suffering had turned her into a quieter, less ebullient person than she had once been, a duller version of her former self. On the other hand, she was getting older now, already past the point of what Ferguson liked to call a fully grown grown-up, and even if her marriage seemed to be a good one, there was no question that Gary could be pompous and overbearing at times, more and more given to long, blowhard monologues about the decline and fall of Western civilization, especially now that he had been with his father’s firm for the past couple of years and was starting to earn big-man lawyer money, which must have worn her down to some degree, not to mention motherhood, which wore down everyone, even a caring and affectionate mother like Francie, who lived for her children in the same way Aunt Joan had once lived for hers. No, Ferguson said to himself, as the station wagon headed north through the gathering darkness, he mustn’t exaggerate. Even if life had kicked her around a little bit, Francie was still the same old Francie, the same magic cousin of his early boyhood, somewhat hobbled now, he supposed, burdened as she was by the memory of her father’s betrayal, but how happy she had sounded when he accepted her invitation for the weekend, and how generous of her to have included Amy with that surprising Of course!, and now that they were all sitting in the car together, Ferguson in the back with the two sleeping children and Francie up front between Gary and Amy, he could see his cousin’s still beautiful face in the rearview mirror every time the headlights of a passing car shone into it, and one of those times, about halfway through the trip, when she glanced up and saw that he was looking at her, she turned around, stretched out her left arm, and took hold of his hand, which she then gave a long, hard squeeze. Everything okay? she asked. You’re awfully quiet back there.