He could tell them things he never told anyone else, which made him a different person when he was with them, a more forthright and entertaining person than he was at home or at school, a person who could make people laugh, and perhaps that was another reason why he kept on going back there, because he knew they would want to listen to the stories he told, the amusing anecdotes about Noah, for example, someone he never tired of bringing into the conversation, his staunch fellow traveler through the thickets of life who had been given a full scholarship to the Fieldston School in Riverdale, one of the best private schools in the city, the taller, post-wire-toothed Noah who had managed to find himself a girlfriend and was directing plays at Fieldston, contemporary stuff like The Chairs and The Bald Soprano by Ionesco, older stuff like The White Devil by John Webster (what a bloodbath!), and making little movies with his Bell & Howell eight-millimeter camera. Still one of the world’s most cunning saboteurs, he accompanied Ferguson on the second of his semi-monthly meetings with his father in May 1964, not to a cheap restaurant this time but to the dreaded Blue Valley Country Club, an invitation Ferguson rashly accepted by insisting Noah be included in the party, a proposal he assumed his father would reject, but his father surprised him by agreeing to his demand, and so the appliance king and the two boys set out one Sunday afternoon for lunch at the club, and because Noah knew all about Ferguson’s struggles with his father and how much he detested that club, he mocked the place and the things it stood for by wearing a plaid tam-o’-shanter with a white pom-pom on top for the occasion, such a ludicrous, oversized headpiece that Ferguson and his father both laughed when they saw it, perhaps the only time they had laughed in unison for more than a decade, but Noah deadpanned it and didn’t crack a smile, which made a funny thing even funnier, of course, telling them this was his first visit to a golf club and he wanted to look right, since golf was a Scottish game and therefore all golfers must needs (he actually said must needs) adorn themselves with Scottish hats as they worked their way around the links. It was true that Noah got a little carried away once they arrived at the club, perhaps because he felt uncomfortable to be rubbing shoulders with what he called the filthy rich, or perhaps because he wanted to show his solidarity with Ferguson by saying out loud what Ferguson himself would never have dared to say, as when an obese man waddled by, pointed to the tam-o’-shanter, and called out, Nice hat!—to which Noah replied (with an enormous grin plastered across his face), Thanks, fatso—but Ferguson’s father was walking ten or twelve feet in front of them and missed the insult, thus sparing the boys the dressing-down that would have been given to them if he had heard it, and for once Ferguson managed to get through a day at the Blue Valley Country Club without wishing he were somewhere else.
That was one side of Noah, he told the Federmans, the zany agent provocateur and impish clown, but at bottom he was a thoughtful, serious person, and nothing proved that more than how he had behaved on the weekend Kennedy was shot. By pure happenstance, Noah had been invited to come out to New Jersey to spend a couple of days and nights with Ferguson and Amy in the new house on Woodhall Crescent. The plan was to make a movie together with his eight-millimeter camera, a silent adaptation of Ferguson’s short story What Happened?, the one about the boy who runs away from home and returns to find his parents missing, with Noah cast as the boy and Ferguson and Amy as the parents. Then, on Friday, November twenty-second, just hours before Noah was supposed to leave New York from the Port Authority bus terminal, Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas. It would have made sense for him to cancel the visit, but Noah didn’t want to, and he called to tell them to pick him up at the Irvington bus station as scheduled. They all watched television for the entire weekend, Ferguson and his stepfather sitting together at one end of the long sofa in the living room and Amy and her stepmother curled up together at the other end, Rose with her arms around Amy and Amy with her head resting on Rose’s shoulder, and Noah had the wit to take out his camera and film them, all four of them for the better part of two days, moving back and forth between their faces and the black-and-white images on the television screen, the face of Walter Cronkite, Johnson and Jackie Kennedy on the plane as the vice president was sworn in as the new president, Jack Ruby shooting Oswald in a corridor of the Dallas police station, the riderless horse and John-John’s salute on the day of the burial procession, all those public events alternating with the four people on the sofa, grim-faced Dan Schneiderman, his blank, burned-out stepson, and the two wet-eyed women watching those events on the screen, all in silence, of course, since the camera couldn’t record sound, a mass of footage that must have come to ten or twelve hours, an intolerable length that no one could have sat through from start to finish, but then Noah took the rolls of film back to New York, found a professional editor to help him, and cut those hours down to twenty-seven minutes, and the result was stupendous, Ferguson said, a national catastrophe written across the faces of those four people and the television set in front of them, a real film by a sixteen-year-old boy that was more than just a historical document but a work of art as well, or, as Ferguson expressed it, using the word he always used when describing something he loved, a masterpiece.
There were many stories about Noah, but also about Amy and Jim, about his mother and grandparents, about Arnie Frazier and their near crack-up on the New Jersey Turnpike, about Dana Rosenbloom and her family, about his talks with Mr. Rosenbloom, and about his friendship with Mike Loeb, Amy’s boyfriend, then ex-boyfriend, then boyfriend redux, who not only knew who Emma Goldman was and had read her autobiography, Living My Life, but was the only person in the school who had also read Alexander Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. Beefy Mike Loeb, budding anti-Soviet Marxist radical, who believed in the movement, in organizing, in mass action, and consequently took a dim view of Ferguson’s interest in Thoreau, who was all about the individual, the solitary man of conscience acting out of moral principle but with no theoretical foundation for attacking the system, for rebuilding society both from the bottom up and the top down, an excellent writer, yes, but what a pinched and prudish fellow he was, and so frightened of women he probably went to his grave a virgin (Celia, fourteen at the time, snickered when Ferguson repeated those words), and even if his idea of civil disobedience had been picked up by Gandhi, King, and others in the civil rights movement, passive resistance wasn’t enough, sooner or later it would come down to armed struggle, and that was why Mike preferred Malcolm X to M. L. King and had taped a poster of Mao to his bedroom wall.
No, Ferguson replied, when Artie’s parents asked if he agreed with this boy, but that was what made their conversations so instructive, he said, because every time Mike challenged him he would have to think harder about what he believed in himself, and how could you ever learn anything if you only talked to people who thought exactly as you did?
Then there was Mrs. Monroe, his favorite subject of all, the one person who made life as a high school student bearable, and the great good luck to have had her as his English teacher for both his sophomore and junior years, the young and spirited Evelyn Monroe, just twenty-eight when Ferguson entered her class for the first time, the vibrant antidote to the dowdy, reactionary, anti-modernist Mrs. Baldwin, Monroe née Ferrante, a tough Italian girl from the Bronx who rode off to Vassar on a full scholarship, formerly married to jazz saxophonist Bobby Monroe, frequenter of Village hangouts, friend of musicians, artists, actors, and poets, the hippest teacher ever to grace the halls of Columbia High School, and what separated her from all the other teachers Ferguson had ever had was that she looked upon her students as fully formed, independent human beings, young grown-ups rather than large children, which had the effect of making them all feel good about themselves when they sat in her class and listened to her talk about the books she had assigned, Mr. Joyce, Mr. Shakespeare, Mr. Melville, Miss Dickinson, Mr. Eliot, Miss Eliot, Miss Wharton, Mr. Fitzgerald, Miss Cather, and all the rest, and there wasn’t a single student in either one of the two classes Ferguso
n took with her who didn’t adore Mrs. Monroe, but no one more than Ferguson himself, who showed her every one of the stories he wrote throughout high school, even in the last year when she wasn’t his teacher anymore, not that she was a better judge than Uncle Don or Aunt Mildred were, he supposed, but he felt she was more honest with him than they were, more detailed in her criticisms and at the same time more encouraging, as if it were a foregone conclusion that he had been born to do this and no other choice was possible.
She kept a sign posted above the blackboard, a sentence from the American poet Kenneth Rexroth that she had copied out in letters large enough to be read by someone in the back row, and because Ferguson often found himself looking at the sign during class, he later calculated that he must have read it several thousand times during the years he studied with her: AGAINST THE RUIN OF THE WORLD, THERE IS ONLY ONE DEFENSE: THE CREATIVE ACT.
Mrs. Federman said: Every young person needs a Mrs. Monroe, Archie, but not every young person gets one.
What a frightening thought, Ferguson said. I don’t know what I’d do without her.
* * *
NEW YORK KEPT pulling at him, and Ferguson continued to go there as often as he could on his free Saturdays, sometimes alone, sometimes with Dana Rosenbloom, sometimes with Amy, sometimes with Amy and Mike Loeb, sometimes just with Mike Loeb, and sometimes with all three of them together, where he (and they) would link up with Noah on the weekends when young Groucho was camping out in the Village with his father and Mildred, or just with his father if Uncle Don and Aunt Mildred happened to be living apart again. Density, immensity, complexity, as Ferguson once put it when asked why he preferred the city to the suburbs, a sentiment shared by all five members of his little gang, and except for Dana, who had already made up her mind about where she wanted to go after high school, the other four decided they should all stay in New York for college. That meant Columbia for the three boys and Barnard for Amy, assuming they were accepted there, which seemed likely or more than just a long shot because of their strong records, but even though three of them managed to get in, only one of them wound up moving to Morningside Heights the following September. Noah, the rejected applicant, had brought the defeat upon himself by cultivating a new habit in the summer after his junior year, and so fond did he become of smoking pot that he temporarily lost interest in school, which caused his grades and test scores to crash in the first semester of his senior year, and Columbia, which was his father’s alma mater, the place where everyone in his family hoped he would be spending the next four years, turned him down. Noah laughed it off. He would be going to NYU instead, which would allow him to stay in New York as planned, and even though it was universally recognized as a worse college than Columbia, with a mediocre undergraduate program for listless, unmotivated students, NYU would give him the chance to study filmmaking, a subject not offered to Columbia undergraduates, and besides, he said, he would be living downtown in the coolest part of the city rather than in that shithole slum wedged between Harlem and the Hudson River.
Noah to Washington Square, Mike to the uptown grid at West 116th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, and Ferguson and his stepsister to colleges beyond the borders of the city. Amy’s decision had everything to do with Mike. They had already broken up once before, when he cheated on her with a girl named Moira Oppenheim in the middle of their junior year, but after a protracted separation that had ended with groveling gestures of contrition from Mike, Amy had given him another chance, and now, just four months later, he had gone off and done it again, betraying her with the same Moira Oppenheim no less, the mousey little tramp who wouldn’t take no for an answer, and Amy was fed up, furious, and finished with Mike for good. The letters from the colleges she had applied to landed in the mailbox on Woodhall Crescent the following week. Yes from Barnard and yes from Brandeis, her first and second choices, and because she wanted to be nowhere near Mike Loeb or ever have to look at his fat face and bloated body again, she said no to New York and yes to Waltham, Massachusetts, convinced that the one would be just as good as the other and relieved that she had no second thoughts about her decision. The pig had humiliated her and broken her heart, and Ferguson agreed that she would be better off going somewhere else, and just to prove how much he was on her side, he offered to give her the Pontiac they owned together when she left for Massachusetts in the fall and to cut off his friendship with Mike Loeb right now, starting this minute.
Ferguson’s situation was more complicated than hers. He had been accepted by Columbia and wanted to go to Columbia, and even if he had been forced to share a dormitory room with Mike Loeb, he still would have wanted to go to Columbia, but there was the question of money to think about, the unanswerable question of who was going to pay for it. He could have backed down and gone to his father, who no doubt would have come through for him, however reluctant he might have been about it, knowing in the end that it was his responsibility to cough up for his son’s education, but Ferguson refused even to consider that as an option. His mother and Dan knew where he stood on that point, had always known from the beginning, and even though they thought his position was bullheaded and self-defeating, they respected him for it and didn’t try to change his mind, for his mother had withdrawn from the battle, the days of fighting to patch things up between Ferguson and his father were done, and after the shabby trick his father had pulled on her about the sale of the old house, Rose understood that her boy’s decision not to accept any money from Stanley was a way of defending her—a highly emotional and unreasonable one, perhaps, but also an act of love.
Ferguson sat down with his mother and stepfather to discuss these matters in November of his senior year. The time was approaching to send off his college applications, and while Dan told him not to worry, that the money would be there for him no matter what the cost, Ferguson had his doubts. He figured a year of college would come to about five or six thousand dollars (tuition, room and board, books, clothes, supplies, travel money, and a small monthly allotment of pocket cash), which would come to a total of twenty to twenty-five thousand dollars by the time he made it through the full four years. The same held true for Amy—twenty to twenty-five thousand over the next four years. Jim would be graduating from MIT just as Amy and Ferguson were graduating from high school, which would eliminate the need to pay for a third tuition, but Jim was applying to graduate school in physics, and even though he was bound to get in somewhere that would give him a fellowship along with a stipend for living expenses, the stipend wouldn’t be enough to cover everything, and therefore Dan would have to go on forking out another thousand or fifteen hundred dollars a year for Jim, which would bring the overall disbursement of cash for sustaining two Schneidermans and one Ferguson in institutions of higher learning to roughly eleven, twelve, or thirteen thousand dollars per annum. On average, Dan earned thirty-two thousand dollars a year—which explained why Ferguson had his doubts.
There was the extra money from Liz’s life insurance policy, but the one hundred and fifty thousand dollars paid out to Dan in the summer of 1962 was down to seventy-eight thousand by the end of November 1964. Twenty thousand of the seventy-two thousand already spent had gone into paying off the double mortgage on the old-old house, then selling that house and buying the new one with cash, which had put his mother and stepfather in the good position of owning 7 Woodhall Crescent outright, with no bank breathing down their necks, with nothing more to pay but the property taxes and the water bill. Another ten thousand of the seventy-two thousand already spent had gone into the house as well, for painting, repairs, and improvements, which would only make the house more valuable if they ever chose to sell it. Still, another forty-eight thousand dollars had vanished since the marriage on cars, restaurant dinners, vacations, and drawings by Giacometti, Miró, and Philip Guston. Much as Ferguson hated his father’s tightness with money, he was also somewhat alarmed by how freely his stepfather scattered it around him, for if Dan’s income was too small to cover the t
uitions, then the seventy-eight thousand left from the insurance money would be their only recourse, and according to Ferguson’s calculations that sum would be reduced to just over or under thirty thousand by the time he and Amy finished college, and far less than that if Dan and his mother kept on spending as they had over the past two years. For that reason, Ferguson wanted to take as little as possible from them—nothing if he could. It wasn’t that he felt anyone was about to starve to death, but it frightened him to think that one day in the not-too-distant future, when his mother was less than young, and perhaps in less than good health after a lifetime of smoking her daily packs of Chesterfields, she and Dan might find themselves in a rough spot.