4 3 2 1
Still and all, life was getting better, and once his father moved out of the house on July second, Ferguson was impressed by how quickly his mother adjusted to their new circumstances. Everything was suddenly different, and the limitations of the monthly allowance forced her to abandon most of the comforts and all of the luxuries that had come from being married to a man with money: the services of Angie Bly for one thing (which had relieved her of tiresome domestic chores such as cooking and cleaning the house), the Blue Valley Country Club for another (no longer possible under the circumstances, which abruptly put an end to the pleasures of golf), but most of all the free-and-easy spending on clothes and shoes, the twice-weekly hairdresser appointments, the pedicures and massages, the bracelets and necklaces bought on impulse and then seldom worn afterward, all the trappings of the so-called good life she had been leading for the past ten years and which she gave up—or so it appeared to Ferguson—without a moment’s regret. She spent that first summer of pre-divorce separation working in the backyard garden, taking care of the house, and cooking in the kitchen, cooking up a storm in the kitchen, which led to such abundant and delicious dinners for her son after he came home from work that he spent the better part of his days at his father’s store thinking about what his mother would be feeding him at home that night. She rarely went out and rarely talked to anyone on the phone besides her mother in New York, but there were many visits that summer from her friend Nancy Solomon, the loyal comrade of her earliest childhood, who began to remind Ferguson of one of those next-door neighbors in a TV sitcom, the funny-looking fellow housewife who was always available to drop in for a cup of coffee and a long chat, and after Ferguson had gone upstairs to read or work on his new story or write another letter to Amy, nothing made him happier than to hear the women laughing in the kitchen below. His mother was laughing again. The dark circles under her eyes were slowly erasing themselves, and bit by bit she was beginning to look like her old self—or perhaps her new self, since the old one had vanished so long ago that Ferguson could barely even remember it.
Dan Schneiderman and his children returned from Europe at the end of August. In the sixty-two days since their departure, Ferguson had written Amy fourteen letters, half of which had managed to find her in the right place at the right time, while the other half continued to languish unclaimed in various American Express offices across Italy and France. He hadn’t dared to talk about love in any of those letters, since it would have been presumptuous and unfair of him to put her on the spot, to ask a question she wouldn’t have been able to answer to his face, but the letters had been full of affectionate and sometimes highly emotional declarations of undying friendship, and again and again he had told her that he missed her, that he longed to see her again, and that the little world he lived in was an exceedingly empty place when she wasn’t in it. From her end, Amy had sent off five letters and eleven picture postcards, all of which arrived safely in New Jersey, and though the cards from London, Paris, Florence, and Rome were necessarily short (and riddled with exclamation marks!!), the letters were long and mostly talked about how she was adjusting to her mother’s death, which seemed to change from day to day and sometimes even from hour to hour, with some tolerable moments, some painful moments, and weirdly enough some altogether good moments when she didn’t think about it at all, but when she did think about her mother it was hard not to feel guilty, she wrote, that was the most difficult thing to accept, the unending guilt, because a part of her knew she would be better off without her mother in her life, and to admit to that feeling was a terrible admission of her own rottenness. Ferguson responded to that grim, self-hating letter with further news about his parents’ separation and impending divorce, telling her that not only was he glad it was happening but that he was thrilled to know he would never have to spend another night under the same roof with his father and that he didn’t feel the least bit guilty about it. We feel what we feel, he wrote, and we’re not responsible for our feelings. For our actions, yes, but not for what we feel. You never did anything wrong to your mother. You argued with her sometimes, but you were a good daughter, and you mustn’t torture yourself for what you’re feeling now. You’re innocent, Amy, and you have no right to feel guilty about things you haven’t done.
Half of what he wrote to her that summer was lost, but those sentences happened to be in one of the letters that wound up reaching her—in London, just one day before she flew back to New York with her father and brother.
The day after they returned, the three Schneidermans came to the house for dinner. It was the first of many dinners Ferguson’s mother would cook for them throughout that first year of high school, the two and three and sometimes even four dinners a week that were mostly just with Dan and Amy after Jim went off to college again, and because Ferguson still had no idea that his mother and Amy’s father were anything more to each other than the good friends of the Dan told me era back in the spring, he interpreted those invitations as gestures of kindness and goodwill, a sympathetic reaching out to a family in mourning, father and daughter still too distracted by their grief to handle the business of shopping and cooking for themselves, their household a chaos of unmade beds and unwashed dishes now that Liz was no longer around to maintain domestic order, but on top of the generosity there were personal motives as well, Ferguson realized, for his mother was alone now and had been alone since the beginning of the summer, her life suspended between a dead past and a blank, unknowable future, and why wouldn’t she welcome the company of pleasant Dan Schneiderman and his daughter, Amy, who brought words and feelings and affection into the house, and surely those dinners were good for all of them during that transitional period of post-burial melancholy and imminent divorce, not least for Ferguson himself, who found those sit-downs at the kitchen table to be one of the strongest arguments yet advanced to support his theory that life was indeed getting better.
Better, of course, did not mean good, possibly not even close to good. It simply meant that things were less bad than they had been before, that the overall condition of his life had improved, but given what happened at the first dinner with the Schneidermans in late August, things still hadn’t improved as much as Ferguson would have hoped. He had not been with Amy for more than two months, and therefore the contours of her face had grown less and less familiar to him, and as he studied her across the table as the five of them tucked into his mother’s pot roast, he understood that the beauty of Amy’s eyes had something to do with her eyelids, that the folds in her eyelids were different from the folds in most other people’s eyelids, and because of that her eyes seemed both poignant and innocent, a rare combination he had never seen in anyone else, young eyes that would go on being young even after she herself had become old, and that was why he had fallen for her, he suspected, the moment of revelation had occurred when he saw those eyes gush forth tears at her mother’s funeral, he had been so moved by those weeping eyes that he could no longer think of her as just a friend, suddenly it was love, the in-love sort of love that surpassed all other forms of love, and he wanted her to love him back in the same way he now loved her. After dessert, he took her out into the backyard for a one-on-one conversation while the three others continued to sit around the table talking. It was one of those warm and muggy late-summer New Jersey nights, the thick air dotted with the blinks and pulsing flashes of a hundred fireflies, the same creatures he and Amy had captured on summer nights when they were children, putting them in clear glass jars and walking around with those glowing shrines of light in their hands, and now they were walking around in the same backyard talking about Amy’s trip to Europe and the end of Ferguson’s parents’ marriage and the letters they had written to each other in July and August. Ferguson asked if she had received the last one, the one he had sent to London ten days earlier, and when she said yes, he asked if she understood what he had been trying to tell her. I think so, Amy said. I’m not sure it helps, but maybe it will start to help at some point, the not-being-re
sponsible-for-our-feelings stuff, I’m really going to have to chew on that for a while, Archie, since I still can’t help feeling responsible for what I feel.
That was when Ferguson put his right arm around her shoulder and said: I love you, Amy. You know that, don’t you?
Yes, Archie, I know that. And I love you, too.
Ferguson stopped walking, turned to face her, and then put his left arm around her as well. As he pulled her body up against his, he said: I’m talking about real love, Schneiderman, all-out, forever-and-ever love, the biggest love of all time.
Amy smiled. A moment later, she put her arms around him, and as her long bare arms came into contact with his bare arms, Ferguson’s legs started to buckle.
I’ve been thinking about this for months, she said. Whether we should try it or not. Whether we’re meant to be in love with each other or not. I’m so tempted, Archie, but I’m scared. If we try and it doesn’t work out, we probably won’t be friends anymore, at least not the way we are now, which is the best friends in the world, close in the way brothers and sisters can be close, that’s how I’ve always thought of us, as brother and sister, and every time I try to imagine kissing you, it feels like incest to me, something wrong, something I know I would regret, and I don’t want to lose what we have, it would kill me not to be your sister anymore, and would it be worth losing all the good things we have together for a few kisses in the dark?
Ferguson was so crushed by what she said that he disentangled his arms from hers and took two steps back. Brother and sister, he said, with anger mounting in his voice, what nonsense!
But it wasn’t nonsense, and when Amy’s father and Ferguson’s mother were married eleven months and four days after the night of that first dinner, the two friends officially became brother and sister, and even though the word step was factored into the designation, they were henceforth members of the same family, and the two bedrooms they slept in until the end of high school stood side by side in the same second-floor hallway of their new family house.
4.1
The housing policy set forth in the Barnard College Student Handbook stated that all out-of-town freshmen were required to live in one of the on-campus dormitories, whereas freshmen from New York could choose between living in a dormitory and living at home with their parents. Independent Amy, who had no desire to stay with her parents and no desire to share a room with someone in an over-regulated dormitory, outfoxed the system by claiming her parents had moved from West Seventy-fifth Street to a bigger apartment on West 111th Street, a much bigger apartment that was in fact occupied by four students who were not freshmen, a sophomore and a junior from Barnard and a junior and a senior from Columbia, and when Amy moved into that immense place with the long corridors and ancient plumbing fixtures and beveled glass doorknobs, she became the sole occupant of the fifth bedroom. Her parents went along with the deception because Amy had shown them the numbers, which proved that it was cheaper to pay one-fifth of the two-hundred-and-seventy-dollar apartment rent than to live in a dormitory, and also because, and especially because, they knew it was time for their willful daughter to leave home. A little more than a year had passed since the cookout in the Fergusons’ backyard, and now the Schneidermans’ daughter and the Fergusons’ son had been granted their most ardent wish: a room with a lock on the door and a chance to fall asleep together in the same bed whenever they wanted to.
The problem was that whenever turned out to be a sticky concept, more an idealized possibility than a workable proposition, and with one of them still stuck in Montclair and the other caught in the whirl of confusions and adjustments that come with the start of college life, they wound up sharing that bed less often than they had expected. There were the weekends, of course, and they took advantage of them whenever they could, which was most weekends in September, October, and early November, but the freedoms of the summer had been curtailed, and only once in all that time was Ferguson able to make one of his weeknight dashes into the city. They continued to talk about the things they had always talked about, which that fall included such matters as the Warren Commission Report (true or false?), the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley (long live Mario Savio!), and the victory of the bad Johnson over the infinitely worse Goldwater (not three cheers but two, perhaps one), but then Amy was invited on a weekend outing to Connecticut and they had to cancel their plans, which was followed by another cancellation the next week (a touch of the flu, she said, although she wasn’t in the apartment when he called her on Saturday night and again on Sunday afternoon), and bit by bit Ferguson sensed that she was slipping away from him. His old fears returned, the black ruminations of last winter when he thought she might have to leave New York, conjuring up the other people she would come to know in those imagined other places, the other boys, the other loves, and why should it be any different in her home city? She was living in a new world now, and he belonged to the old world she had left behind. Just thirty-six blocks to the north, and yet the customs were entirely different up there, and the people spoke another language.
It wasn’t that she seemed bored with him or loved him any less, it wasn’t that her body stiffened up when he touched her or that she wasn’t happy with him in the new bed in the new apartment, it was simply that she seemed distracted now, unable to focus her attention on him as she had in the past. After those two missed weekends, he managed to arrange a visit to the empty apartment on the Saturday after Thanksgiving (her roommates had all gone home for the holiday), and as they sat in the kitchen together drinking wine and smoking cigarettes, he noticed that Amy was looking out the window instead of looking at him, and rather than ignore it and go on with what he was saying, he stopped in midsentence and asked her if something was wrong, and that was when it happened, that was when Amy turned her head back in his direction, looked him in the eyes, and pronounced the seven small words that had been forming in her mind for close to a month: I think I need a break, Archie.
They were only seventeen years old, she said, and it was beginning to feel as if they were married, as if they had no future anymore except to go on being together, and even if they did wind up together in the long run, it was too soon to lock themselves into that commitment now, they would feel smothered, trapped by promises they might not be able to keep, and before long they would start to resent each other, and why not take a deep breath and just relax for a little while?
Ferguson knew he was being dumb, but there was only one question his dumb heart could think of asking: Are you saying you don’t love me anymore?
You haven’t been listening to me, Archie, Amy said. All I’m saying is that we need more air in the room. I want us to keep the doors and windows open.
Which means that you’ve fallen for someone else.
Which means that someone has his eye on me and I’ve flirted with him a couple of times. It’s nothing serious, believe me. In fact, I’m not even sure I like him. But the point is that I don’t want to feel guilty about it, and I have been feeling guilty because I don’t want to hurt you, and then I ask myself: What’s wrong with you, Amy? You’re not married to Archie. You’re not even halfway through your first year of college, and why shouldn’t you have a chance to explore a little, to kiss another boy if you want to, maybe even to go to bed with another boy if you feel like it, to do the kinds of things people are supposed to do when they’re young?
Because it would kill me, that’s why.
It isn’t forever, Archie. All I’m asking for is a time-out.
* * *
THEY WENT ON talking for more than an hour, and then Ferguson left the apartment and drove back to Montclair. Four and a half months would go by before he saw Amy again, four and a half dreary months of no kissing, no touching, and no talking to the one person he most wanted to kiss and touch and talk to, but Ferguson managed to weather that time without going to pieces because he was convinced that he and Amy had not come to the end, that the long and complicated journey they had embarked on together had mere
ly run into its first detour, a rockslide that had fallen onto their path and had forced them to head off into the woods, where they had momentarily lost sight of each other, but sooner or later they would find the road again and continue on their way. He was convinced of this because he had taken Amy at her word, for Amy was the one person he had ever known who didn’t lie, who couldn’t lie, who always told the truth no matter what the circumstances, and when she’d said that she wasn’t dumping him or sending him into permanent exile, that all she was asking for was a break, a pause to open the windows and air out the room, Ferguson had believed her.
The strength of that belief kept him going through those empty, Amy-less months, and he hunkered down and tried to make the best of them, refusing to succumb to the temptations of self-pity, which had been so attractive to him at earlier stages of his adolescence (the loss of Anne-Marie Dumartin, the injury to his hand), striving for a tougher, more resolute approach to the conundrums of pain (the pain of disappointment, the pain of living in Mr. Martino’s world of shit), girding himself to absorb blows now rather than crumbling under their force, standing his ground rather than running away, digging in for what he now understood would be a long siege of trench warfare. Late November 1964 to mid-April 1965: a time of no sex and no love, a time of inwardness and disembodied solitude, a time of forcing himself, at long last, to grow up, to have done with everything that still connected him to his childhood.