He had saved twenty-six hundred dollars from his two summers of work for Arnie Frazier. If he cut back on buying books and records, he could probably add another fourteen hundred to his bank account by the end of the summer, which would lift the total to four thousand dollars even. His grandfather had already confided to his mother that he was planning to give him two thousand dollars as a graduation present, and if his money and his grandfather’s money were both used to pay for college, then Dan’s share would be reduced to nothing. So much for the first year, but what about the three years after that? He would continue to work during the summers, of course, but doing what and earning what were no more than question marks at that point, and even though his grandfather would probably be willing to chip in something, it would be wrong to count on it, especially now that his grandmother had come down with heart trouble and their medical bills were mounting. One year of New York if he was lucky enough to get into Columbia—and after that, what else could a sane man do but fly to Las Vegas and put everything he owned on number thirteen?
There was one far-fetched solution available to him, a roll of the dice that would solve all their money problems if the winning combination came up, but if Ferguson won the bet, he would also lose the thing he wanted most, for New York and Columbia would be off the table for good. Even worse, it would mean having to spend four more years in New Jersey, the last place in the world where he wanted to be, and not just New Jersey, but a small town in New Jersey that was no bigger than the one he lived in now, which would put him in the same situation he had been trying to run away from for most of his life. Still, if the solution presented itself to him (and there was every reason to believe it wouldn’t), he would gladly accept it and kiss the dice he had rolled.
Princeton was starting something new that year, the Walt Whitman Scholars Program, which had been funded by a 1936 alumnus named Gordon DeWitt, who had grown up in East Rutherford and had attended the public schools there, and DeWitt’s money would be paying for full scholarships to four graduates from New Jersey public high schools every year. Financial need was one of the requirements, along with academic excellence and soundness of character, and as the son of a well-heeled businessman, one would have assumed Ferguson had no right to apply, but that was not the case, for in addition to reneging on his allowance obligation to his son, Stanley Ferguson had broken the divorce agreement he had signed with his ex-wife, which stipulated that he contribute half the money needed for the boy’s upkeep, that is, to reimburse Ferguson’s mother for half of what she and her new husband spent on the food Ferguson ate and the clothes he wore as well as half his medical and dental bills, but six months into her second marriage, when no money from her ex-husband had arrived, Ferguson’s mother consulted a lawyer, who wrote a letter threatening to haul Ferguson’s father into court to make him pay what he owed, and when Ferguson’s father countered by offering a compromise—no money for his half of the boy’s upkeep, but from now on he would stop claiming his son as a dependent on his income tax returns and hand that honor over to Dan Schneiderman—the matter was settled. Ferguson himself had known nothing about this dispute, but when he told his mother and stepfather about the Walt Whitman scholarships at Princeton, explaining that he wanted to send in an application but didn’t think he fit all the requirements, they assured him he did, for even though Dan made a respectable income, the burden of sending three children to universities at the same time practically qualified Ferguson as a hardship case. As far as the law was concerned, the link between father and son had been severed. Ferguson was a minor, and because his sole financial support now came from his mother and stepfather, in the eyes of Princeton and everyone else, it was as if his father had ceased to exist. That was the good news. The bad news was that Ferguson had finally learned the truth about his father, and he was so upset by what the man had done, so angry at him for his cheapness and meanness toward the woman he had once been married to, that nothing would have satisfied Ferguson more than to slug his father in the face. The son of a bitch had disowned him, and now he wanted to disown him back.
I know I promised to have dinner with him twice a month, Ferguson said, but I don’t think I want to see him anymore. He broke his promise to you. Why can’t I break my promise to him?
You’re almost eighteen now, his mother said, and you can do anything you want. Your life belongs to you.
Fuck him.
Easy does it, Archie.
No, I mean it. Fuck him.
He figured there would be thousands of applicants, the top boys from around the state, all-county athletes in football and basketball, class presidents and debating club champions, science prodigies with double 800s on their SATs, such sterling candidates that he himself wouldn’t have the smallest chance of making the first cut, but he sent in his application anyway, along with two of his stories and a list of people who had offered to write letters of recommendation for him: Mrs. Monroe; his French teacher, Mr. Boldieu; and his current English teacher, Mr. MacDonald. He wanted to be a lion, but if it turned out that fate had chosen him to become a tiger, he would make every effort to wear his stripes proudly. Black and orange instead of powder blue and white. F. Scott Fitzgerald instead of John Berryman and Jack Kerouac. Did any of it really matter? Princeton might not have been New York, but it was only an hour away by train, and the one advantage Princeton had over Columbia was that Jim had applied there for graduate work in physics. He was sure to be accepted, which Ferguson was not, but one could nevertheless dream, and how pleasant it was to imagine the two of them spending the next four years together in that woodsy world of books and fellowship as the ghost of Albert Einstein flitted among the trees.
After his conversation with his mother and Dan in late November, Ferguson wrote a long letter to his father in which he explained why he wanted to suspend their twice-a-month dinners. He didn’t quite come out and say he never wanted to see him again, for it still wasn’t clear to Ferguson if that was his position or not, though he suspected it was, but he was only seventeen, and he lacked the courage and confidence to issue life-altering ultimatums about the future, which he hoped would be a long one, and who knew what turns his relationship with his father would take in the years ahead? What he did bring up, however, and what constituted the heart of the letter, was how distressed he was to have learned that his father had removed him as a dependent on his income tax returns. It felt as if he had been erased, he wrote, as if his father were trying to forget the past twenty years of his life and pretend they had never happened, not only his marriage to Ferguson’s mother but the fact that he had a son, whom he had now given over entirely to the care of Dan Schneiderman. But putting all that aside, Ferguson continued, after devoting two full pages to the subject, the dinners they had together had become infinitely depressing to him, and why go on with the dreary charade of making lifeless small talk with each other when the truth was that neither of them had anything to say anymore, and how sad it was to sit together in those grimy places looking at the clock and counting the minutes until the torture was over, and wouldn’t it be better to take a pause for a while and reflect on whether they wanted to start up again at some future point or not?
His father wrote back three days later. It wasn’t the answer Ferguson wanted, but at least it was something. Okay, Archie, we’ll give it a rest for now. I hope you’re doing well. Dad.
Ferguson wasn’t going to reach out to him again. He had decided that much, and if his father wasn’t willing to court him and try to win him back, then that would be the end of it.
He mailed off his applications to Columbia, Princeton, and Rutgers in early January. In mid-February, he took a day off from school and went to New York for his interview at Columbia. He was already familiar with the campus, which had always reminded him of a fake Roman city, with the two massive libraries confronting each other in the middle of the small campus, Butler and Low, each one a hulking granite structure in the classical style, elephants lording it over the less vo
luminous brick buildings around them, and once he found his way to Hamilton Hall, he went upstairs to the fourth floor and knocked. The interviewer was an economics professor named Jack Shelton, and what a jolly man he was, cracking jokes throughout the conversation and even making fun of stuffy, sclerotic Columbia, and when he learned of Ferguson’s ambition to become a writer, he ended their talk by handing the Columbia High School senior several issues of the Columbia College literary magazine. Flipping through them half an hour later as he rode downtown on the IRT express, Ferguson chanced upon a line of poetry that amused him greatly: A steady fuck is good for you. He laughed out loud when he read it, happy to realize that Columbia couldn’t have been as stuffy as all that, for not only was the line funny, it was true.
The following week, he made his first visit to Princeton, where he doubted many students published poems with the word fuck in them, but the campus was much larger and more attractive than Columbia’s, bucolic splendor to compensate for the fact that it wasn’t in New York but in a small New Jersey town, Gothic architecture as opposed to classical architecture, impressively subtle, near-perfect landscaping filled with carefully tended shrubs and tall, thriving trees, but somewhat antiseptic, as if the vast plot of land on which Princeton stood had been converted into a giant terrarium, smelling of money in the same way the Blue Valley Country Club did, a Hollywood version of the ideal American university, the northernmost southern school, as someone had once said to him, but who was he to complain about anything, and why should he ever want to complain if he happened to win a free pass to walk on those grounds as a Walt Whitman Scholar?
They must have known that Whitman was a man who had no interest in women, he said to himself, as he completed his tour of the campus, a man who believed in love between men and men, but old Walt had spent the last nineteen years of his life just down the road in Camden, which made him New Jersey’s own national monument, and even if his work was both astonishingly good and astonishingly bad, the best of it was the best poetry ever written in this part of the world, and bravo to Gordon DeWitt for having put Walt’s name on his scholarships for New Jersey boys rather than the name of some dead politician or Wall Street pooh-bah, which was precisely what DeWitt had been for the past twenty years.
There were three interviewers this time, not one, and even though Ferguson was properly dressed for the occasion (white shirt, jacket, and tie) and had reluctantly given in when his mother and Amy had begged him to get a haircut before going down there, he felt nervous and out of place in front of those men, who were no less friendly to him than the Columbia professor had been and asked all the questions he was expecting to be asked, but when the hour-long interrogation finally ended, he walked out of the room feeling he had made a botch of it, cursing himself for having mixed up the titles of books by William James and his brother Henry for one thing, and, even worse, having garbled Sancho Panza into Poncho Sanza for another, and in spite of having corrected those errors the instant the words had flown out of his mouth, they were the blunders of a true and thorough idiot, he felt, and not only was he convinced he would come in dead last among all the candidates for the scholarship, he was disgusted with himself for having performed so badly under pressure. For some reason, or reasons, or no reason that anyone but the three men who had talked to him could understand, the committee did not share his opinion, and when he was asked to return for a second interview on March third, Ferguson was perplexed—but also, for the first time, beginning to wonder if there wasn’t some cause for hope.
It was a curious way to spend his eighteenth birthday, decking himself out in a jacket and tie again and traveling down to Princeton for a one-on-one conversation with Robert Nagle, a classics professor who had published translations of plays by Sophocles and Euripides and a book-length study of the pre-Socratics, a man in his early forties with a long, sad face and a watchful, no-nonsense look in his eyes, the best literary mind in all of Princeton according to Ferguson’s high school English teacher, Mr. MacDonald, who had gone to Princeton himself and was rooting hard for Ferguson to win the scholarship. Nagle was not a man to waste his breath chatting about irrelevant things. The first interview had been filled with questions about Ferguson’s academic achievements (good but not spectacular), his work as a moving man during the summers, why he had stopped playing competitive sports, his feelings about his parents’ divorce and his mother’s remarriage, and what he hoped to accomplish by studying at Princeton and not somewhere else, but Nagle ignored those matters and seemed to be interested only in the two stories Ferguson had included with his application and in finding out which writers he had read and hadn’t read and which ones he cared about most.
The first story, Eleven Moments from the Life of Gregor Flamm, was the longest piece Ferguson had written in the past three years, twenty-four typed pages that had been composed between early September and mid-November, two and a half months of steady work during which he had put aside his notebooks and ancillary projects to concentrate on the task he had set for himself, which was to tell the story of someone’s life without telling it as a continuous story, simply jumping in at various disjointed moments to investigate an action, a thought, or an impulse, and then hopping on to the next one, and in spite of the gaps and silences left between the isolate parts, Ferguson imagined the reader would stitch them together in his mind so that the accumulated scenes would add up to something that resembled a story, or something more than just a story—a long novel in miniature. A six-year-old in the first episode, Gregor looks into a mirror to examine his own face and comes to the conclusion that he wouldn’t be able to recognize himself if he saw himself walking down the street, then the seven-year-old Gregor is at Yankee Stadium with his grandfather, standing up with the crowd to applaud a double hit by Hank Bauer and feeling a wet, slithery something land on his bare right forearm, a gob of human spit, a thick lozenge of phlegm that makes him think of a raw oyster creeping along his skin, no doubt an expectoration launched by someone sitting in the upper deck, and beyond the disgust Gregor feels as he wipes it off with his handkerchief and then throws the handkerchief away, there is the conundrum of trying to figure out whether the person who spat on him did it on purpose or not, whether he was aiming for Gregor’s arm and hit his target or whether it was chance that propelled the spit to land where it did, an important distinction in Gregor’s mind, since an intentional hit would postulate a world in which nastiness and evil are the governing forces, a world in which invisible men attack unknown boys for no reason but to indulge in the pleasure of harming others, whereas an accidental hit would postulate a world in which unfortunate things happen but no one is to blame, and further on there is the twelve-year-old Gregor discovering the first pubic hair that has sprouted on his body, the fourteen-year-old Gregor watching his best friend drop dead before his eyes, killed by something called a brain aneurysm, the sixteen-year-old Gregor lying naked in bed with the girl who has helped him lose his virginity, and then, in the final episode, the seventeen-year-old Gregor sitting alone on top of a hill, studying the clouds as they pass overhead, asking himself whether the world is real or nothing more than a projection of his mind, and if it is real, how will his mind ever be able to encompass it? The story concludes: And then he walks down the hill, thinking about the pain in his stomach and whether eating lunch will make him feel better or worse. It is one o’clock in the afternoon. The wind is blowing from the north, and the sparrow that was sitting on the telephone wire is gone.
The other story, Right, Left, or Straight Ahead?, was written in December and consisted of three separate episodes, each one about seven pages long. A man named Lazlo Flute is out taking a walk in the country. He comes to a crossroads and must choose between the three possibilities of going left, right, or straight ahead. In the first chapter, he goes straight ahead and runs into trouble when he is attacked by a pair of thugs. Beaten and robbed, left for dead by the side of the road, he eventually regains consciousness, climbs back to his feet, and stagg
ers on for another mile or so until he comes to a house, knocks on the door, and is let in by an old man, who inexplicably apologizes to Flute and begs his forgiveness. The man leads Flute to the kitchen sink and helps wash the blood off his face, still rattling on about how sorry he is and what a terrible thing he has done, but sometimes, he says, my imagination runs away from me and I just can’t help myself. He takes Flute into another room, a small study at the far end of the house, and points to a pile of handwritten pages on the desk. Take a look if you want, he says, and when the battered hero picks up the manuscript, he sees that it is an account of the things that have just happened to him. Such vicious characters, the old man says, I don’t know where they came from.
In the second part, Flute turns right instead of going straight ahead. He has no memory of what happened to him in the first chapter, and because the new episode starts with a blank slate, the fresh beginning seems to offer the hope that something less awful will happen to him this time, and indeed, after walking a mile and a half down the road to the right, he comes upon a woman standing beside a broken-down car, or what appears to be a broken-down car, for why would she be standing there in the middle of the countryside if the car worked, but as Flute approaches her, he sees that none of the tires is flat, the hood is not up, and the radiator is not spewing forth clouds of steam into the air. Still, there must be a problem of one sort or another, and as the unmarried Flute draws closer to the woman, he sees that she is exceptionally attractive, or at least to his eyes she is, and therefore he jumps at the chance to help her, not just because he wants to help her but because an opportunity has presented itself to him and he wants to make the most of it. When he asks her what the trouble is, she says she thinks the battery is dead. Flute opens the hood and sees that one of the cables has come loose, so he reconnects the cable and tells her to get back into the car and give it a try, which she does, and when the car starts up with the first turn of the key, the beautiful woman gives Flute a big smile, blows him a kiss, and promptly drives off, departing so quickly that he doesn’t even have time to jot down her license plate number. No name, no address, no number, and no way ever to reconnect with the enchanting specter who bolted in and out of his life in a matter of minutes. Flute walks on, sickened by his own stupidity, wondering why his chances in life always seem to slip through his fingers, tempting him with the promise of better things and yet always disappointing him in the end. Two miles later, the thugs from the first chapter reappear. They jump out from behind a hedge and try to wrestle Flute to the ground, but this time he fights back, kneeing one of them in the groin and poking the other one in the eye, and he manages to get away, running down the road as the sun sets and night begins to fall, and just when it is becoming difficult to make out much of anything, he comes to a bend in the road and sees the woman’s car again, parked next to a tree this time, but the woman is gone, and when he calls out to her and asks where she is, no one answers. Flute runs off into the night.