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  Then he turned fifteen, and at the birthday dinner held in his honor at the Waverly Inn in Manhattan, a celebration that included his parents, his grandparents, Aunt Mildred, Uncle Don, and Noah, Ferguson was given a present or presents by each of the families in his family, a check for a hundred dollars from his mother and father, another check for a hundred dollars from his grandmother and grandfather, and three separate packages from the Marx contingent, a boxed set of Beethoven’s late string quartets from Aunt Mildred, a hardcover book from Noah entitled The Funniest Jokes in the World, and four paperback books by nineteenth-century Russian authors from Uncle Don, works that Ferguson knew by reputation but had not yet taken the trouble to read: Fathers and Sons by Turgenev, Dead Souls by Gogol, Three Novellas by Tolstoy (Master and Man, The Kreutzer Sonata, The Death of Ivan Ilyich), and Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky. It was the last of those titles that put a stop to Ferguson’s crude fantasies about becoming the next Clarence Darrow, for reading Crime and Punishment changed him, Crime and Punishment was the thunderbolt that crashed down from heaven and cracked him into a hundred pieces, and by the time he put himself together again, Ferguson was no longer in doubt about the future, for if this was what a book could be, if this was what a novel could do to a person’s heart and mind and innermost feelings about the world, then writing novels was surely the best thing a person could do in life, for Dostoyevsky had taught him that made-up stories could go far beyond mere fun and diversion, they could turn you inside out and take off the top of your head, they could scald you and freeze you and strip you naked and thrust you out into the blasting winds of the universe, and from that day forward, after flailing about for his entire boyhood, lost in an ever-thickening miasma of bewilderment, Ferguson finally knew where he was going, or at least knew where he wanted to go, and not once in all the years that followed did he ever go back on his decision, not even in the hardest years, when it looked as though he might fall off the edge of the earth. He was just fifteen years old, but already he had married himself to an idea, and for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, young Ferguson meant to pledge his troth to that idea until the end of his born days.

  * * *

  THE SUMMER MOVIE project was off. Noah’s maternal grandmother had died back in November, and now that his mother had come into a bit of extra money, she decided to spend a portion of it on furthering her son’s education. Without consulting Noah, she enrolled him in a summer-long program for foreign high school students in Montpellier, France—eight weeks of total immersion in the French language, at the end of which, if the booklet about the program was to be believed, he would return to New York speaking with the fluency of a home-grown, snail-eating Frog. Three days after Ferguson finished reading Crime and Punishment, Noah called to announce the change in plans, cursing his mother for having pulled a fast one on him, but what could he do about it, he said, he was too young to be the master of his own life, and for now the mad queen still called the shots. Ferguson covered his disappointment by telling Noah how lucky he was, that if he were in his shoes he’d jump at the chance to go, and as for their own pair of shoes, well, too bad, but the fact was they still had no camera and hadn’t even begun to outline the script, so no harm done, and just think of what was waiting for him in France—Dutch girls, Danish girls, Italian girls, a harem of high school beauties all to himself, since not many boys went to those programs, and with little competition standing in his way, he was sure to have the time of his life.

  Ferguson would miss Noah, of course, miss him badly, for summer had always been the season when they could be together every day, all day every day for eight full weeks, and a summer without his grouchy harpist cousin-friend would scarcely feel like summer anymore—just a long stretch of time marked by hot weather and a new kind of loneliness.

  Fortunately, the one-hundred-dollar check was not the only present his parents had given him for his fifteenth birthday. He had also gained the right to travel to New York on his own, a new liberty he intended to exercise as often as possible, for the beautiful but dreary town of Maplewood had been built for the sole purpose of making people want to get out of it, and with another, larger world suddenly available to him, Ferguson was out of it nearly every Saturday that spring. There were two ways to travel to Manhattan from where he lived: by the 107 bus, which set off every hour from the depot in Irvington and took you to the Port Authority building at Eighth Avenue and Fortieth Street, or by the four-car train run by the Erie Lackawanna Railroad, which left from the station in Maplewood and stopped at the terminus in Hoboken, where there were two further options for finishing off the trip to the city: underground on the Hudson tube or above ground over the water on the Hudson ferry. Ferguson preferred the train-ferry solution, not only because he could walk to the station in about ten minutes (whereas going to the depot in Irvington required someone to give him a lift) but because he loved the train, which was one of the oldest trains still in use anywhere in America, with cars that had been built in 1908, dark green metal hulks that evoked the early days of the industrial revolution, and inside the car the antiquated wicker seats and the seat backs that could be flipped in either direction, the low-speed anti-express that rattled and lurched and sang forth a ruckus of screams as the wheels churned over the rusty tracks, such happiness to be sitting in one of those cars alone, looking out the window at the gruesome, deteriorating landscape of northern New Jersey, the swamps and rivers and iron drawbridges against a background of crumbling brick buildings, remnants of the old capitalism, some of it still functioning, some of it in ruins, so ugly that Ferguson found it inspiring in the same way nineteenth-century poets had found inspiration from the ruins on Greek and Roman hills, and when he wasn’t looking out the window at the collapsed world around him he was reading his book of the moment instead, the Russian novels that were not written by Dostoyevsky, Kafka for the first time, Joyce for the first time, Fitzgerald for the first time, and then standing on the deck of the ferry if the weather was anywhere close to decent, the wind in his face, the engine vibrating in the soles of his feet, the seagulls circling above him, such an ordinary trip when all was said and done, a trip made by thousands of commuters every morning from Monday to Friday, but this was Saturday, and to the fifteen-year-old Ferguson it was pure romance to be traveling toward lower Manhattan in this way, the best of all good things he could possibly be doing—not just leaving home behind, but going to this, to all this.

  Seeing Noah. Talking to Noah. Arguing with Noah. Laughing with Noah. Going to movies with Noah. On Perry Street Saturdays, lunch in the apartment with Aunt Mildred and Uncle Don, then out with Noah and off to wherever they had decided to go, which was often nowhere, the two of them ambling through the streets of the West Village as they gawked at pretty girls and discussed the fate of the universe. Everything had been decided now. Ferguson was going to write books, Noah was going to direct films, and therefore they mostly talked about books and films and the numerous projects they would work on together over the years. Noah was a different Noah from the one Ferguson had met as a small boy, but he still had that aggravating side to him, what Ferguson thought of as his wise-ass, Marx Brothers side, his rambunctious displays of exuberant anarchism, which would burst forth in nonsensical exchanges with greengrocers (Hey, buddy, what’s with this eggplant stuff—I don’t see no egg there) or waitresses in coffee shops (Sweetheart, before you give us our check, kindly rip it up so we won’t have to pay) or movie-house cashiers standing in their glass boxes (Tell me one good thing about the film that’s playing or I’ll cut you out of my will), provocative gibberish that only proved what a pest he could be, but that was the price you paid for being Noah’s friend, feeling amused and embarrassed by him at the same time, as if you were walking around with an obstreperous toddler, and then, without warning, he would do an abrupt about-face and start talking about Albert Camus’s Reflections on the Guillotine, and after you told him you still hadn’t read a word of Camus, he wo
uld rush into a bookstore and steal one of his novels for you, which of course you couldn’t accept, and consequently you would be put in the awkward position of having to tell him to reenter the store and put the book back on the shelf, which of course made you feel like a sanctimonious prig, but still he was your friend, the best friend you had ever had, and you loved him.

  Not every Saturday was a Perry Street Saturday, however. On the weekends Noah spent with his mother on the Upper West Side, it wasn’t always possible for Ferguson to see him, so he made other arrangements for those blackout Saturdays, twice traveling into New York with a Maplewood friend named Bob Smith (yes, there was such a person as Bob Smith), once by himself to visit his grandparents, and several times with Amy, as in Amy Ruth Schneiderman, who was especially keen on looking at art, and because Ferguson had recently discovered how much he enjoyed looking at art himself, they spent those Saturdays walking through museums and galleries, not just the big ones everyone went to, the Met, the Modern, the Guggenheim, but smaller ones such as the Frick (Ferguson’s favorite) and the midtown photography center, all of which kept them talking for hours afterward, Giotto, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Chardin, Manet, Kandinsky, Duchamp, so much to take in and think about, seeing nearly everything for the first time, again and again the destabilizing jolt of the first time, but the most memorable experience they shared together didn’t happen in a museum but in the more confined space of a gallery, the Pierre Matisse Gallery in the Fuller Building on East Fifty-seventh Street, where they saw an exhibition of recent sculptures, paintings, and drawings by Alberto Giacometti, and so pulled in were they by those mysterious, tactile, lonely works that they stayed for two hours, and when the rooms began to empty out, Pierre Matisse himself (Henri Matisse’s son!) noticed the two young people in his gallery and walked over to them, all smiles and good humor, happy to see that two new converts had been made that afternoon, and much to Ferguson’s surprise, he stood there and talked to them for the next fifteen minutes, telling them stories about Giacometti and his studio in Paris, about his own transplantation to America in 1924 and the founding of his gallery in 1931, about the tough years of the war when so many European artists were destitute, great artists like Miró and so many others, and how they wouldn’t have survived without help from their friends in America, and then, on an impulse, Pierre Matisse led them to a back room of the gallery, an office with desks and typewriters and bookcases, and one by one he took down from the shelves of those bookcases a dozen or so catalogues from past exhibitions by Giacometti, Miró, Chagall, Balthus, and Dubuffet and handed them to the two astonished teenagers, saying, You two children are the future, and maybe these will help with your education.

  They walked out of there wordless and agape, carrying their gifts from Henri Matisse’s son as they propelled themselves along Fifty-seventh Street, walking quickly because they were the future, because their bodies were demanding that they walk quickly after such an encounter, after being blessed by an act of such unexpected kindness, and so they walked down the crowded, sunlit street as fast as two walkers could walk without breaking into a run, and after a couple of hundred yards Amy finally interrupted the silence and declared that she was hungry, famished was the word she used, as she often did, since Amy could never be merely hungry as other people were, she was starved or ravenous, she could eat an elephant or a flock of penguins, and now that she was talking about filling up her belly with some tasty chow, Ferguson realized that he could go for some food himself, and given that they were walking down Fifty-seventh Street, he proposed that they head for the Horn & Hardart automat between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, not just because it was close but because on an earlier trip to the city he and Amy had both decided that the Horn & Hardart automat was the most splendid eating spot in all of New York.

  Not that the bland, inexpensive food served there could be categorized as splendid, the bowls of Yankee bean soup, the Salisbury steaks with mashed potatoes doused in gravy, the thick slabs of blueberry pie, no, it was the place itself that lured them in, the amusement park atmosphere of that vast emporium of chrome and glass, the novelty of eating automated food, twentieth-century American efficiency in its craziest, most delightful incarnation, wholesome, hygienic cuisine for the hungry masses, and how enjoyable it was to go to the cashier and load up with a pile of nickels and then walk around looking at the dozens of offerings in their glassed-in receptacles, windows barricading tiny rooms of food, each one an individual portion made especially for you, and once you had chosen your ham-and-cheese sandwich or slice of pound cake, you would insert the appropriate number of nickels into the slot and the window would open, and just like that the sandwich was yours, a solid, dependable, freshly made sandwich, but before you left to start searching for a table there was the further enjoyment of seeing how quickly the empty receptacle filled up with another sandwich, a sandwich identical to the one you had just bought for yourself, for there were people back there, men and women in white uniforms who took care of the nickels and replenished the empty containers with more food, what a job that must have been, Ferguson thought, and then the quest for an unoccupied table, carrying your meal or snack around and among the motley crowd of New Yorkers eating and drinking their automated food and beverages, many of them old men who sat there for hours every day consuming cup after cup of slowly drunk coffee, the old men from the vanished left still arguing after forty years about where the revolution had gone wrong, the stillborn revolution that had once seemed imminent and now was no more than a memory of what had never been.

  So Ferguson and Amy went into the Horn & Hardart automat toward the close of that resplendent afternoon to have a bite to eat, to browse through the thin, densely illustrated catalogues of past exhibitions at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, and to discuss what they both felt had been a good day, all in all a very good day. He needed more days like this one, Ferguson said to himself, more good days to counteract the effect of so many rough days in the past few months, which had been the days of no baseball for one thing, a decision that had so confused his friends that he had stopped trying to explain himself to them, for the experiment in self-denial was turning out to be much harder to stick to than he had thought, giving up something he had loved so thoroughly for so many years, a thing so thoroughly a part of him that his body sometimes ached to hold a bat in his hands again, to put on his glove and have a catch with someone, to feel his spikes digging into the dirt as he ran to first base, but he couldn’t back down now, he would have to keep the promise he had made or else admit to himself that Artie’s death had meant nothing, had taught him nothing, which would have turned him into someone so weak and unheroic that he might as well have asked to be turned into a dog, an abject, groveling mutt who begged for scraps and licked up his own vomit from the floor, and if not for his weekly escapes into the city, which kept him far from the ball fields where his friends played every Saturday, who knows if he wouldn’t have given in and allowed himself to become that dog?

  Worse still, the spring of no baseball was also the spring of no love. Ferguson had thought he was smitten with Linda Flagg, but after pursuing her throughout the fall and winter, determined to win the affections of Maplewood’s most enticing and enigmatic heartthrob, who by turns had encouraged him and rebuffed him, had let him kiss her and not let him kiss her, had given him hope and wrenched that hope away from him, Ferguson had come to the conclusion that not only did Linda Flagg not love him but that he didn’t love her. The moment of revelation occurred on a Saturday in early April. After weeks of effort, Ferguson had finally persuaded her to accompany him on one of his trips to Manhattan. The plan was simple: lunch at the automat, a crosstown walk to Third Avenue, and then a couple of hours in the dark watching The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, a film that Jim Schneiderman had been urging him to see, and if, during the course of the film, Ferguson was able to hold Linda’s hand, or kiss Linda on the mouth, or run his hand up and down Linda’s leg, so much the better. It turned ou
t to be a gloomy day, dank with drizzles and intermittent downpours, colder than they would have wished, darker than seemed normal for that time of year, but nothing about early spring was ever normal, Ferguson said, as they walked to the station under opened umbrellas and dodged the puddles forming on the sidewalk, and he was sorry about the rain, he continued, but it wasn’t really his fault, since he had written a letter to Zeus last week asking for sunny weather, and how could he have known they were in the middle of a month-long postal strike on Mount Olympus? Linda laughed at the inane remark, or else laughed because she was feeling no less jittery and hopeful than he was, which seemed to suggest they were off to a promising start, but then they boarded the Erie Lackawanna for Hoboken, and Ferguson understood that nothing was going to go right that day. The train was dirty and uncomfortable, Linda said, the view was depressing, it was too wet to take the ferry (even though the sky was beginning to clear), the Hudson tube was even dirtier and more uncomfortable than the train, the automat was interesting but scary, what with all the derelicts shuffling in and out, the three-hundred-pound black woman sitting alone at that table over there talking to herself about baby Jesus and the end of the world, the half-blind, whiskery old man reading a rumpled, three-day-old newspaper with a magnifying glass, the ancient couple just next to them dipping old, used-up tea bags into cups of hot water, everyone who came in here was either poor or crazy, and what kind of city was this that allowed crazy people to wander around the streets, she said, and you, Archie, what makes you think New York is so much better than everywhere else when in fact it’s so disgusting?