It wasn’t her fault, Ferguson told himself. She was a bright, fetching girl who had been raised in a hermetically sealed dome of upper-middle-class comforts and civilities, a colorless, rational world of tidy front lawns and air-conditioned rooms, and to find herself rubbing up against the squalor and tumult of big-city life filled her with an instinctive revulsion, a physical response she was powerless to control, as if she were breathing in a bad smell and suddenly felt sick to her stomach. She couldn’t help it, Ferguson repeated to himself, and therefore she couldn’t be blamed, but what a disappointment to discover how unadventurous she was, how squeamish, how thrown by what was unfamiliar to her. Difficult. That was the word he often used to describe her to himself, and surely the hot-and-cold Linda Flagg had made life difficult for him over the past six months, but she was by no means a stupid or empty person—just afraid, that was all, afraid of the irrationality of vast, repellent cities, and no doubt afraid of boys as well, even though that pretty face of hers was a lure few boys could resist. But not vapid, not without wit and thoughtfulness, for she had a good mind and always spoke intelligently about the books they read in English class, and now that Ferguson had wrapped his hand around her elbow and was guiding her eastward along Fifty-seventh Street, he wondered if her spirits wouldn’t begin to improve once they entered the theater and settled in to watch the film. The theater was on the other side of Park Avenue, in one of the richest, least dirty neighborhoods of Manhattan, and the movie was supposed to be good, and since Linda had a taste for good books and a nose for good art, perhaps a good movie would put her in a good mood and something good could be salvaged from the rotten day they were having so far.
The movie was certainly good, so good and so absorbing that Ferguson soon forgot about rubbing Linda’s leg or trying to kiss her on the mouth, but The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner was a young man’s story and not a young woman’s story, which meant that it appealed to Ferguson more than it did to Linda, and even though she granted that it was an excellent film, she wasn’t carried away by it as Ferguson was, who felt it was one of the best films ever made, a masterpiece. After the lights came on, they walked to a Bickford’s on Lexington Avenue and ordered coffee and doughnuts at the counter (coffee was a new pleasure in Ferguson’s life, and he drank it as often as he could, not only because he liked the taste but because drinking it made him feel more grown-up—as if each sip he took of that hot brown liquid were carrying him farther and farther from the prison house of childhood), and as they sat there among the less fat, less poor, less crazy people than the ones who frequented Horn & Hardart’s, they continued to discuss the film, in particular the final sequence, the long-distance championship race at the reform school where the hero (played by a new British actor named Tom Courtenay) is supposed to win the trophy for his pompous headmaster (played by Michael Redgrave) but changes his mind at the last minute and stops, allowing the pretty-boy rich kid from the fancy school (played by James Fox) to win instead. For Ferguson, the decision to lose on purpose was a magnificent act of defiance, a thrilling gesture of revolt against authority, and it had warmed his cold and angry heart to see that brazen Fuck you depicted on screen, for by insulting the headmaster in that way, the hero had said no to the corrupt and used-up world the headmaster represented, the crumbling British system of empty rewards and arbitrary punishments and unjust class barriers, and in so doing the hero had found his honor, his strength, his manhood. Linda rolled her eyes. Nonsense, she said. In her opinion, throwing the race was a dumb move, the worst thing the hero could have done, since long-distance running was his ticket out of that hellhole of a reform school, and now he would be pushed all the way to the bottom again and have to start over from scratch, and what was the point, she asked, he had won his moral victory, but at the same time he had ruined his life, and how could anyone call that magnificent?
It wasn’t that Linda was wrong, Ferguson said to himself, but she was arguing for expediency over valor, and he hated arguments of that sort, the practical approach to life, using the system to beat the system, playing by a set of broken rules because no other rules were in place, whereas those rules needed to be smashed and reinvented, and because Linda believed in the rules of their world, their little suburban world of getting ahead and moving up and settling into a good job and marrying someone who thought the way you did and mowing the lawn and driving a new car and paying your taxes and having 2.4 children and believing in nothing but the power of money, he understood how useless it would have been to prolong the discussion. She was right, of course. But he was right, too, and suddenly he didn’t want her anymore.
Linda was henceforth expunged from the list of possibles, and with no other possibles in sight, Ferguson dug in for what promised to be a sad and lonely end to a sad and lonely year. Many years after that year, when he was well into his adulthood, he would look back on that period of his adolescence and think: Exile in the rooms of home.
* * *
HIS MOTHER WAS worried about him. Not just because of Ferguson’s increasing hostility toward his father (to whom he rarely spoke anymore, refusing to initiate conversations with him and replying to Stanley’s questions with sullen, one- and two-word answers), not just because her son persisted in trekking out to New Rochelle for bimonthly dinners with the Federmans (about which he said nothing after he returned home, claiming it was simply too grim to talk about those destroyed, grieving people), not just because he had abruptly and inexplicably given up baseball (arguing that basketball was enough for him now and that baseball had become boring, which couldn’t have been true, Rose felt, not after the season started in April and she saw how carefully Ferguson read the box scores in the morning paper, studying the numbers with the same avidity he had always shown in the past), and not just because her once popular boy seemed to have no girlfriend at the moment and was attending fewer and fewer weekend parties, but because of all those things, and especially because there was something new in Ferguson’s eyes, a look of inwardness and detachment that had never been there in all the years she had known him, and on top of those concerns about the state of her son’s emotional health, there was a piece of news she had to share with him, a piece of bad news, and therefore it became necessary for the two of them to sit down together and have a talk.
She organized it for a Thursday, which happened to be Angie Bly’s day off, and with Ferguson’s father not expected to return home until ten or ten-thirty, there would be ample time for both a one-on-one dinner and a long conversation afterward. Wary of starting off the post-dinner tête-à-tête by confronting Ferguson with intrusive questions about himself, which likely would have caused him to clam up and leave the table, Rose held him there by breaking the bad news first, the sad bad news about Amy’s mother, Liz, who had just been diagnosed with cancer, a particularly wretched form of cancer that was going to end her life within a matter of months, perhaps even weeks, pancreatic cancer, no hope, no cure, nothing but pain and certain death ahead of her, and at first it was difficult for Ferguson to absorb what his mother was saying, since Amy hadn’t so much as breathed a syllable to him about her mother’s condition, which was altogether bizarre, given that Amy was his close friend and confided in him about all manner of frets and fears and anxious uncertainties, so before Ferguson could begin to delve into the words pancreatic cancer, he had to find out how his mother had been made privy to this information, which Mrs. Schneiderman’s own daughter seemed to know nothing about. Dan told me, his mother said, which only deepened her son’s confusion, for why would a man share such news with a friend before talking to his own child, but then Ferguson’s mother explained that Dan wanted to tell both his children at the same time, feeling that Jim and Amy together would be able to handle the news better than Jim and Amy alone, and therefore he was waiting for Jim to come down from Boston tomorrow afternoon before he spoke to either one of them. Liz had been in the hospital for several days, she added, but both children had been told she was in Chicago visit
ing her mother.
Poor Amy, Ferguson thought. She had been in conflict with her mother for years, and now that her mother was going to die, the unfinished business between them would never be resolved. How hard it would be on her, so much harder than having to cope with the early death of someone you had always been on good terms with, someone you had adored without reservation, for at least then you could carry the memory of that person inside you with an ongoing tenderness, even happiness, an awful, aching sort of happiness, whereas Amy would never be able to think about her mother without feeling regret. Such a perplexing woman, Mrs. Schneiderman, such an odd presence to Ferguson from the day he met her as a young boy, a muddle of contradictory strengths and weaknesses that encompassed the virtues of a good brain, skillful management of the household, insightful opinions on political matters (she had majored in history at Pembroke), and relentless devotion to her husband and two children, but at the same time there was something nervous and frustrated about Mrs. Schneiderman, a feeling that she had missed out on doing what she was supposed to have done in life (a career of some sort, perhaps, a job that would have been important enough to turn her into an influential person), and because she had settled for the less exalted job of housewife, she seemed determined to prove to the world that she was smarter than everyone else, knew more than everyone else, not just about some things but about all things, and the fact was that she did know an astonishing amount across an enormous range of subjects, she was without question the most deeply informed human being Ferguson had ever encountered, but the problem with being a know-it-all of the nervous, frustrated variety was that you found it impossible not to correct people when they said something you knew to be wrong, which happened again and again with Mrs. Schneiderman, for she was the only person in the room who knew how many milligrams of Vitamin A were in an average-sized raw carrot, she was the only person who knew how many electoral votes Roosevelt had won in the 1936 presidential election, she was the only person who knew the horsepower differential between a 1960 Chevy Impala and a 1961 Buick Skylark, and even though she was always right, it could be maddening to be around her for any length of time, for one of Mrs. Schneiderman’s deficits was that she talked too much, and Ferguson often wondered how her husband and two children could stand to live under the bombardment of all those words, that ceaseless yammering which failed to make any distinction between important things and unimportant things, talk that could impress you with its intelligence and perspicacity or else bore you half to death with its utter meaninglessness, as when Ferguson and Amy were sitting in the backseat of the Schneidermans’ car one night on the way to the movies and Mrs. Schneiderman went on for half an hour describing to her husband how she had rearranged the clothes in his bedroom bureau drawers, patiently marching him through the entire series of decisions she had made to arrive at her new system, why long-sleeved shirts belonged in one place, for example, and short-sleeved shirts belonged in another, why black socks had to be separated from blue socks, which in turn had to be separated from the white socks he wore when playing tennis, why his more numerous sleeveless undershirts had to sit on top of and not below his V-neck undershirts, why boxer shorts had to sit to the right of jockey shorts and not to the left, and on and on, one inconsequential detail piled upon another inconsequential detail, and by the time they reached the movie theater, after living inside those bureau drawers for half an hour, one half of one of the precious twenty-four hours that comprise a day, Amy was digging her fingers into Ferguson’s arm—unable to scream, and therefore screaming in code with her clenched, dug-in fingers. It wasn’t that her mother was an inadequate or uncaring mother, Ferguson said to himself. If anything, she cared too much, loved too much, had too much faith in her daughter’s golden future, and the curious effect of that too much, Ferguson realized, was that it could generate the same resentments as not enough, especially when the too much was so strong that it blurred the boundaries between parent and child and became a pretext for meddlesome interference, and because the one thing Amy wanted above all else was breathing room, she pushed back hard whenever she began to feel suffocated by her mother’s persistent involvement in the smallest aspects of her life—from questions about her homework assignments to lectures on the proper method of brushing her teeth, from probing interrogations about the dalliances of her school friends to criticisms of the way she did her hair, from warnings about the perils of alcohol to quiet, monotonous harangues about not tempting boys by wearing too much lipstick. She’s driving me straight to the funny farm, Amy would tell Ferguson, or: She thinks she’s the captain of the mind police and has a right to be in my head, or: Maybe I should get myself pregnant so she can worry about something real, and Amy fought back by accusing her mother of bad faith, of having it in for her while pretending to be on her side, and why couldn’t she just let her alone in the same way she let Jim alone, and again and again they clashed, and if not for her even-tempered, amiable father—her fun-loving father—who was continually trying to make peace between them, the intense flare-ups between Amy and her mother would have escalated into an all-out permanent war. Poor Mrs. Schneiderman. She had lost her daughter’s love because she had loved her unwisely. Then, taking that thought one step further, Ferguson said to himself: Pity the fate of unloved parents after they’re buried in the ground—and pity their children as well.
Still, it was difficult for Ferguson to understand why his mother was telling him about Mrs. Schneiderman’s illness, the fatal illness that not even Jim and Amy knew anything about at that point, and once he had said all the things one says at such a moment, how terrible, how unfair, how cruel to be cut down in the middle of your life, he asked his mother why she was giving him this advance warning. There was something presumptuous and furtive about it, he said, it made him feel as if they were whispering behind the Schneidermans’ backs, but no, his mother replied, not at all, she was telling him now so he wouldn’t be shocked when Amy broke the news to him, he would be prepared for the blow and be able to take it calmly, which would help him be a better friend to Amy, who was going to need his friendship now more than ever, and not just now but almost certainly for a long time to come. That made some sense, Ferguson supposed, but not a lot of sense, by no means enough sense, and because his mother was usually sensible when she talked about complicated situations like this one, he wondered if she wasn’t hiding something from him, holding back part of the story even as she divulged other parts of it, above all a plausible account that would explain the words Dan told me, for why had Dan Schneiderman chosen to confide in her about his wife’s cancer in the first place? They were old friends, yes, acquaintances of more than twenty years, but not close friends, as far as Ferguson could tell, not close in the way he and Amy had become close, and yet Amy’s father had gone to Ferguson’s mother in his hour of greatest trouble and unburdened himself to her, which was an act that first of all required a deep level of mutual trust, but also the kind of intimacy that could exist only between the closest of close friends.
They went on talking about Mrs. Schneiderman for a few more minutes, not wanting to say anything unkind about her but both agreeing that she had never figured out the right approach to take with her daughter and that her biggest problem was not knowing when to back off (Rose’s words) or butt out (Ferguson’s words), and then, almost imperceptibly, the troubled relations between Amy and her mother turned into a discussion about the difficulties between Ferguson and his father, and once they arrived at that subject, which was where Rose had been subtly pushing the conversation since the beginning, she startled her son by asking him an unexpectedly blunt question—Tell me, Archie, why have you turned against your father?—which so discombobulated him that he couldn’t think fast enough to invent a false answer. Exposed and defenseless, with no will to evade the truth anymore, he blurted out the whole petty business about the missing copy of Sole Mates and how burned up he was that nearly six months had gone by and his father still hadn’t said a word to him about i
t.
He’s too embarrassed, his mother said.
Embarrassed? What kind of an excuse is that? He’s a man, isn’t he? All he has to do is speak up and tell me what happened.
Why don’t you ask him?
It’s not my job to ask him. It’s his job to tell me.
You’re being awfully hard, aren’t you?
He’s the hard one, not me. He’s so hard and so wrapped up in himself that he’s turned this family into a nightmare.
Archie …
All right, maybe not a nightmare. A disaster area. And this house—it’s like living inside one of his goddamn deep freezers.
Is that how it feels to you?
Cold, Ma, so cold, especially between you and him, and I wish to hell you hadn’t let him talk you into shutting down your studio. You should be taking photographs, not wasting your time on bridge.
Whatever problems your father and I might be having are entirely separate from what’s been happening between you and your father. You need to give him another chance, Archie.
I don’t think so.
Well, I know so, and if you come upstairs with me, I’ll show you why.
With that mysterious request, Ferguson and his mother stood up from the table and left the dining room, and since Ferguson had no idea where his mother was intending to go, he followed her up the stairs to the second floor, where they turned left and entered his parents’ bedroom, a room he rarely went into anymore, and then he watched his mother open the door of the closet where his father kept his clothes, disappear inside, and reemerge a few moments later holding a large cardboard box in her arms, which she carried to the middle of the room and put down on top of the bed.