* * *
THE SCHOOL HAD more than twenty-one hundred students, just over seven hundred per grade, and in that factory of secondary public education that served the towns of Maplewood and South Orange, there was a mix of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, a largely middle-class population with a chunk from the blue-collar laboring class and another chunk from the upper strata of white-collar wealth, boys and girls whose families had come to America from England, Scotland, Italy, Ireland, Poland, Russia, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Greece, and Hungary, but not a single Asian family and only twenty-four students of color in the entire school, making it one of the many one-color high schools in Essex County, and even at that late date, nineteen and twenty years after the liberation of the death camps at the end of the Second World War, traces of anti-Semitism lingered on in the two towns, mostly in the form of whispers, silences, and unwritten exclusions at places such as the Orange Lawn Tennis Club, but sometimes it was worse than that, and neither Ferguson nor Amy ever forgot the cross that was burned on the front lawn of one of their Jewish friends from Maplewood the year they turned ten.
More than two-thirds of the seven hundred–plus students in their class would go on to attend college, some at the best private colleges in the country, some at mediocre private colleges along the eastern seaboard, some at state-run colleges in New Jersey, and for the boys who didn’t attend college there was the army and Vietnam, and after that, if there was an after that, work as mechanics and gas pumpers at garages and filling stations, careers as bakers and long-distance truck drivers, fitful or steady employment as plumbers, electricians, and carpenters, twenty-year stints in the police department, the fire department, and the sanitation department, or else shooting for the jackpot in high-risk trades such as gambling, extortion, and armed robbery. For the girls who didn’t attend college, there was marriage and motherhood, secretarial school, nursing school, beautician school, dental technician school, work in offices, restaurants, and travel agencies, and the chance to spend the rest of their lives within ten miles of the town where they were born.
There were some exceptions, however, some girls who would not be going on to college and would not be staying put either, some girls with altogether different pasts and futures from the home-grown New Jersey girls Ferguson had been studying all his life, and one such figure happened to turn up in his English class on the first day of his first year as a high school student, a dark-haired, dark-skinned girl who was neither pretty nor not pretty but singularly arresting to Ferguson’s eyes, all coiled into herself like an unafraid animal trapped in a zoo, calmly observing the observers through the bars, wondering which one would be brave enough to feed her, and when Mrs. Monroe began the session by pointing her finger at each of the twenty students and asking them to give their names and introduce themselves to the other members of the class, he heard the dark-haired girl speak with what he took to be a British accent, and without pausing to reflect on the matter Ferguson made up his mind to pursue her, not only because a girl from somewhere else was automatically more desirable than a local girl from the Jersey suburbs but because it had been exactly seven days since Amy had rebuffed him in the backyard and he was free, disgustingly free to pursue any girl who crossed his path. Fortunately, Amy was not in his English class that year, which meant her eyes would not be looking at him as he looked at the dark-haired girl and plotted how to approach her, woo her, and win her over, and with no Amy around to spy on his intentions, he could make those intentions as transparent as he wished.
Dana Rosenbloom. Not British but South African. The second of four daughters born to Maurice and Gladys Rosenbloom in Johannesburg, currently residing in the United States because Dana’s prosperous, factory-owning father was not only a capitalist entrepreneur but a socialist, a man so opposed to the apartheid government that had been ruling the country since 1948 that he had actively worked against it, and by engaging in those subversive activities he had offended the South African legal authorities to such an extent that they had wanted to put him in prison, a place that would not have been good for Maurice Rosenbloom’s health or the morale of his family, so off the six of them went, hightailing it out of South Africa to London, leaving behind their factory, their house in Johannesburg, their cars, their cats, their horse, their country house, their boat, and the better part of their money. From everything to nearly nothing, and with Dana’s sixty-two-year-old father too frail to work anymore, her much younger mother, whom Ferguson guessed to be somewhere in her mid-forties, had taken it upon herself to support the family in London, a task she had accomplished by rising to a position of great prominence at Harrods department store within three years, and having risen as far as she could go at Harrods, she had accepted a more important position for double the salary at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York. Thus the Rosenblooms landed on American soil in the spring of 1962, and thus they found their way to a large, creaking house on Mayhew Drive in South Orange, New Jersey, and thus Dana Rosenbloom wound up sitting two desks over from Ferguson in Mrs. Monroe’s tenth-grade English class at Columbia High School.
A white South African with the swart complexion of a North African, Eastern European origins layered upon older, deeper origins in Middle Eastern deserts, the exotic Jewess of Germanic and Nordic literature, the gypsy girl of nineteenth-century operas and Technicolor films, Esmeralda, Bathsheba, and Desdemona rolled into one, the black fire of crinkled, unruly hair burning like a crown on her head, slender limbs and narrow hips, a slight slouch to the shoulders and upper neck as she scratched out her notes in class, languid movements, never rushed or frazzled, calm, mild and calm, not the Levantine temptress she appeared to be but a solid girl with warm, affectionate impulses, in many ways the most ordinary girl Ferguson had ever been attracted to, not beautiful in the way Linda Flagg was beautiful, not brilliant in the way Amy was brilliant, but older and more poised than either one of them because of what she and her family had been through, older than Ferguson himself, an untormented sensualist with enough experience and daring to make her receptive to his early advances, and before long he understood that she was crazy about him and would never hack him to pieces as Amy sometimes did, the disputatious Schneiderman who burst out laughing when Ferguson pulled out a pipe and lit it after dinner one evening during the Year of Many Dinners before their parents were married, the pipe he had bought to smoke while writing because he thought all writers were meant to smoke pipes when they sat at their desks and wrote, and how thoroughly she had mocked him for that, calling him a pretentious oaf and the silliest boy who had ever lived, words that Dana Rosenbloom never would have spoken to him or anyone else, and so he courted the dark-eyed newcomer from Johannesburg and London and won her over, not because he knew what he was doing when it came to the art of seduction but because she had fallen for him and wanted to be seduced.
He wasn’t in love with her, he would never be in love with her, right from the start he understood that Dana would never be the grand passion he was looking for, but his body needed to be touched, he craved intimacy with someone, and Dana touched him and kissed him well, so well and so often that the physical pleasures obtained by her caresses all but obliterated the need for a grand passion at that point in his life. A little passion with a lot of touching and kissing was enough for now, and when they broke through to bare-skin, all-out sex in the winter of their junior year, it was more than enough to satisfy him.
Wordless animal sex with the gypsy girl who loved him, communication by looks and gestures and touch, few verbal exchanges about anything but the most trivial matters, not a meeting of minds as with Amy or the future girl of his dreams but a meeting of bodies, an understanding between bodies, a lack of inhibition that was so new to Ferguson that he sometimes trembled when he thought about what they did to each other in the empty rooms where they managed to be alone together, skin burning with happiness, sweat flowing from their pores as they slathered each other with kisses, and how kind she was to him, how accepting of his funks an
d self-indulgent despairs, how unconcerned that he loved her less than she loved him, but they both knew their connection was no more than a temporary business, that America was his place and not hers and for now she was just biding her time until graduation and her eighteenth birthday, when she would be heading off to Israel to live on a kibbutz between the Sea of Galilee and the Golan Heights, that was all she wanted, no college, no books, no big ideas, just planting her body in a place with other bodies and doing whatever she had to do in order to belong to a country that would never kick her out.
Inevitably, there were times when he felt bored with her, disengaged because she cared so little about the things that were most important to him, and all through the years they were in school together he wobbled and drifted, set his sights on other girls, took up with other girls during the summers when Dana visited her relatives in Tel Aviv, but he couldn’t ever break with her entirely, her sweetness kept luring him back, the sweetness of her good heart was irresistible, and the sex was necessary, the one thing that blotted out all other things for the minutes or hours it lasted and seemed to make him understand why he had been born and what it meant to belong to the world, the beginning of erotic life, the beginning of real life, and none of that would have been possible with any other girl in the school, the Linda Flaggs and Nora McGintys and Debbie Kleinmans were all militant virgins, professional maidens locked up in iron chastity belts, and therefore, even if his affections wavered from time to time, he knew how lucky he was to have found Dana Rosenbloom and would never let go of her until he had to, for beyond giving herself to him Dana had also given him her family, and Ferguson had come to love that family, love the very idea that such a family could exist, and every time he stepped into their house and was engulfed by the Rosenbloomian aura, he felt so happy to be there he didn’t want to leave.
What that aura was seemed to elude any precise definition, although Ferguson made numerous attempts over the years to understand what made it so distinctive, so unlike any other household he had entered before. A mixture of the posh and the humdrum, he sometimes thought, but one in which the poshness was never tainted by the humdrumness and the humdrum was never influenced by the posh. The elegant, beautifully controlled British manners of the parents flourishing side by side with the anarchic tendencies of the children, yet neither camp seemed to resent the other, and an air of peacefulness seemed to hover around the house at all times, even when the two youngest daughters were shouting at each other in the living room. One snapshot: the tall, slim, aristocratic Mrs. Rosenbloom in one of the Chanel and Dior suits she wore to her office at Saks Fifth Avenue patiently talking about birth control to her eldest daughter, Bella, who had gone beatnik since her arrival in America and was listening patiently to her mother as she adjusted her black turtleneck sweater and brushed on black eyeliner, which slowly transformed her into a raccoon. A second snapshot: the smallish, somewhat emaciated Mr. Rosenbloom with his silk ascot and gray goatee discoursing on the virtues of good penmanship to his youngest daughter, Leslie, a scrawny nine-year-old with scabs on her knees and a pet hamster named Rodolfo sleeping in a pocket of her dress. Such was the Rosenbloomian aura, or one or two of its transient emanations, and when Ferguson considered the turmoil those people had gone through together, when he thought about what it must have been like to lose everything and have to start all over again in another part of the world, and then have to start over again for a second time in yet another part of the world, he wondered if he had ever met a braver, more resilient family than this one. That was the aura, too: We’re alive, and from now on it’s live and let live, and may the gods turn their backs on us and butt out of our affairs for good.
There was much to learn from Mr. Rosenbloom, Ferguson decided, and because Dana’s sixty-six-year-old father no longer worked and spent most of his days at home reading books and smoking cigarettes, Ferguson began stopping in to see him from time to time, most often immediately after school when the late-afternoon light would flow into the living room and cast complex, crisscrossing shadows on the floor and furniture, and there they would sit, the young man and the old man in that half-dark, half-bright room, talking about nothing in particular, rambling around among politics and the peculiarities of American life, occasionally discussing a book or a film or a painting, but the bulk of it was Mr. Rosenbloom telling stories about the past, frivolous, charming anecdotes about storm-tossed voyages on steamship liners to Europe, the bons mots he had uttered as a young man, the shock of delight that coursed through him when he took the first sip of his first martini, references to gramophone records, the wireless, and rolled-up silk stockings sliding off women’s legs, nothing of any consequence, nothing of any depth, but fascinating to listen to, and how rarely he talked about his troubles in South Africa, Ferguson noticed, and when he did say something there was never any rancor in his voice, none of the anger or indignation that might have been expected from a man in exile, and that was why Ferguson was so drawn to Mr. Rosenbloom and took such pleasure in his company—not because he was a man who had suffered but because he was a man who had suffered and could still crack jokes.
Mr. Rosenbloom never read any of Ferguson’s stories, never even glanced at a single word Ferguson had written, but of all people he was the one who came up with the solution to a problem that had vexed Ferguson for many months and no doubt would have gone on plaguing him for years.
Archie, the old man said one afternoon. A nice name for everyday use, but not a very good name for a novelist, is it?
No, Ferguson said. It’s tragically inappropriate.
And Archibald isn’t much better, is it?
No, not any better at all. Worse.
So what are you going to do when you start publishing your work?
If I ever do start publishing, you mean.
Well, let’s assume that you will. Do you have any alternatives in mind?
Not really.
Not really, or not at all?
Not at all.
Hmmm, Mr. Rosenbloom said, as he lit up a cigarette and looked off into the shadows. After a long pause he asked: What about your middle name? Do you have one?
Isaac.
Mr. Rosenbloom exhaled a large plume of smoke and repeated the two syllables he had just heard: Isaac.
It was my grandfather’s name.
Isaac Ferguson.
Isaac Ferguson. As in Isaac Babel and Isaac Bashevis Singer.
A fine Jewish name, don’t you think?
Not so much the Ferguson part, but definitely the Isaac part.
Isaac Ferguson, novelist.
Archie Ferguson the man, Isaac Ferguson the writer.
Not bad, I’d say. What do you say?
Not bad at all.
Two people in one.
Or one person in two. Either way, it’s good. Either way, that’s the name I’ll use to sign my work: Isaac Ferguson. If I ever manage to get published, of course.
Don’t be so modest. When you manage to get published.
Six months after that conversation, as the two of them sat in the house discussing the differences between the light of South African afternoons and the light of New Jersey afternoons, Mr. Rosenbloom stood up from his chair, walked to the far end of the room, and came back with a book in his hand.
Maybe you should read this, he said, as he gently let the book fall from his hand into Ferguson’s hand.
It was Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country: A Story of Comfort in Desolation. Published by Jonathan Cape, Thirty Bedford Square, London.
Ferguson thanked Mr. Rosenbloom and promised to return the book within the next three or four days.
You don’t have to give it back, Mr. Rosenbloom said, as he sat down in his chair again. It’s for you, Archie. I don’t need it anymore.
Ferguson opened the book and saw that there was an inscription on the first page that read: 23 September 1948. Many Happy Birthdays, Maurice—Tillie and Ben. Under the two signatures, written out in thick block letters, th
ere were two more words: HOLD FAST.
* * *
IF HE WASN’T going to take money from his father, then it was out of the question to spend another summer working in one of his stores. At the same time, if Ferguson wouldn’t take money from his father, then he would have to start earning money of his own, but two-month summer jobs were hard to come by in that part of the world, and he didn’t know where to look for one. Now that he was sixteen, he supposed he could go back to Camp Paradise and work as a waiter there, but he would earn nothing except for the tips the parents handed out on the last day of the summer, which would amount to a paltry two hundred dollars or so, and besides, Ferguson was finished with camp and never wanted to go back, the mere thought of setting foot on the ground where he had seen Artie Federman die was enough to make him see the death again, see it again and again until it was Ferguson himself who was emitting the faint little Oh that came from Artie’s mouth, Ferguson himself who was falling down on the grass, Ferguson himself who was dead, and it simply wouldn’t be possible to go there, not even if the salary for camp waiters was four hundred dollars a meal.
In the spring of his sophomore year, with his mother’s wedding already announced for early August and no solution in sight, Jim put Ferguson in touch with one of his old high school friends, a two-hundred-and-thirty-pound ex–football tackle named Arnie Frazier, who had flunked out of Rutgers in his freshman year and was running a moving business in Maplewood and South Orange. The fleet consisted of one white Chevy van, and the operation was an under-the-table affair transacted on a strict cash-only basis, with no insurance, no bonded employees, no formal business structure, and no taxes paid because no income was declared. Even though Ferguson wouldn’t be old enough to drive until next March, Frazier took him on as a shotgun man to replace his current sidekick, who had been drafted into the army and would be heading off to Fort Dix at the end of June. Jim’s friend would have preferred a full-time, year-round worker, but Jim was Frazier’s friend because he had once rescued Frazier’s twin sister from a touchy situation at a high school party (decking a drunken lacrosse player who was pawing her in a corner of the room), and Frazier felt he owed Jim and couldn’t say no. That was how Ferguson got his foot in the door and began his career as a moving man, which lasted for all three of his high school summers from 1963 to 1965, since his services were required again the next year when the new shotgun man was forced to quit because of a herniated disk in his lower back and again the third year when the fleet expanded to two vans and Frazier was in urgent need of a second driver. It was strenuous work at times, and every year when Ferguson started up again half the muscles in his body would be excruciatingly sore for the first six or seven days, but he found manual work to be a good counterbalance to the mental work of writing, for not only did it keep him in good physical shape and serve a legitimate purpose (moving people’s belongings from one place to another), it allowed him to think his own thoughts rather than have to give his thoughts to someone else, which was the case with most nonmanual work, helping someone else make money with your brains while getting as little as possible for it in return, and even if Ferguson’s salary was low, every job ended with five- and ten- and sometimes twenty-dollar bills being shoved into his hand, and because work was abundant during those years before the millions burned on Vietnam wrecked the national economy, he wound up earning close to two hundred tax-free dollars every week. So Ferguson spent those three summers lugging beds and sofas up and down narrow staircases, delivering antique mirrors and Louis XV escritoires to interior decorators in New York, moving college students in and out of their dorm rooms on campuses in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, hauling old refrigerators and broken-down air conditioners to the town dump, and in the process he met many people who never would have brushed up against his life if he had been sitting in an office or making ice cream cones for noisy children at Gruning’s. More than that, Arnie treated him well and seemed to respect him, and while it was true that Ferguson’s twenty-one-year-old boss voted for Goldwater in the ’64 election and wanted to drop nuclear bombs on Hanoi, it was also true that the same Arnie Frazier hired two black men when the second van was bought and the crew expanded to four, and the last summer Ferguson worked for him brought the inestimable bonus of riding around every day with one of those black men, Richard Brinkerstaff, a broad, big-bellied giant who would look through the windshield of the van as Ferguson drove them to their next destination, carefully absorbing the passing landscapes of empty suburban roads and potholed city streets and crowded industrial highways, and again and again in the same tone of voice, whether he was talking about something that delighted him or saddened him or repelled him, he would point his finger at the little girl playing with her collie on the front lawn of her house or the disheveled wino staggering through the intersection at Bowery and Canal and say: How sweet it is, Archie. How sweet it is.