In the third part, he turns left. It is a gorgeous afternoon in late spring, and the fields on either side of him are crammed with wildflowers, two hundred birds are singing in the crystalline air, and as Flute contemplates the various ways in which life has been both kind and cruel to him, he comes to the realization that most of his problems have been caused by himself, that he is responsible for having made his life such a dull and unadventurous one, and if he means to live life to the fullest, he should spend more time with other people and stop taking so many solitary walks.
* * *
WHY DO YOU give your characters such odd names? Nagle asked.
I don’t know, Ferguson said. Probably because the names tell the reader those characters are in a story, not the real world. I like stories that admit they’re stories and don’t pretend to be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.
Gregor. A reference to Kafka, I suppose.
Or Gregor Mendel.
A brief smile flitted across the long, sad countenance. Nagle said: But you’ve read Kafka, haven’t you?
The Trial, The Metamorphosis, and about ten or twelve other stories. I’m trying to take it slowly because I like him so much. If I sat down and barreled through all the Kafka I still haven’t read, then there’d be no new Kafka to look forward to, and that would be sad.
Hoarding your pleasures.
That’s it. You’re given just one bottle, and if you drink it down all at once, you won’t have a chance to drink from the bottle again.
In your application, you say you want to be a writer. What do you think about the work you’ve done so far?
Most of it is bad, revoltingly bad. A few things are a little better, but that doesn’t mean they’re good.
And what’s your opinion of the two stories you sent us?
So-so.
Then why send them?
Because they’re the most recent ones, and also because they’re the longest ones I’ve written.
Off the top of your head, give me the names of five writers not named Kafka who’ve had the greatest impact on you.
Dostoyevsky. Thoreau. Swift. Kleist. Babel.
Kleist. Not many high school boys are reading him these days.
My mother’s sister is married to a man who wrote a biography of Kleist. He’s the person who gave me the stories.
Donald Marx.
You know him?
I know of him.
Five is too small a number. I feel I’ve left out some of the most important names.
I’m sure of that. Dickens for one, right? And Poe, definitely Poe, and perhaps Gogol, not to speak of the moderns. Joyce, Faulkner, Proust. You’ve probably read them all.
Not Proust. The others, yes, but I still haven’t gotten around to Ulysses. I’m planning to read it this summer.
And Beckett?
Waiting for Godot, but nothing else so far.
And Borges?
Not a word.
What fun awaits you, Ferguson.
At this point, I’ve barely even made it to the beginning. Other than a few plays by Shakespeare, I still haven’t read anything written before the eighteenth century.
You mentioned Swift. What about Fielding, Sterne, and Austen?
No, not yet.
And what is it about Kleist that attracts you so much?
The speed of his sentences, the propulsion. He tells and tells but doesn’t show much, which everyone says is the wrong way to go about it, but I like the way his stories charge forward. It’s all very intricate, but at the same time it feels as if you’re reading a fairy tale.
You know how he died, don’t you?
He shot himself in the mouth when he was thirty-four. After he’d killed a woman friend in a double-suicide pact.
Tell me, Ferguson, what would happen if you were accepted by Princeton but turned down for the scholarship? Would you come here anyway?
It all depends on what Columbia says.
That’s your first choice.
Yes.
May I ask why?
Because it’s in New York.
Ah, of course. But you’d come here if we gave you the scholarship.
Absolutely. It’s all about the money, you see, and even if I do get into Columbia, I’m not sure my family could afford to send me there.
Well, I don’t know what the committee will decide, but I just want to tell you that I enjoyed reading your stories and think they’re much better than so-so. Mr. Flute is still searching for another second road, I believe, but Gregor Flamm is a lovely surprise, an excellent piece of work for someone your age, and with a few small revisions in the third and fifth parts, I’m sure you could publish it somewhere. But don’t. That’s what I wanted to say to you, my one word of advice. Hold off for a while, don’t rush to get yourself into print, keep working, keep growing, and before long you’ll be ready.
Thank you. No, not thank you—but yes, as in yes, you’re right, even if you could be wrong, about not being so-so, I mean, but it means so much to … Christ, I don’t know what I’m saying anymore.
Don’t say anything, Ferguson. Just stand up from that chair, shake my hand, and go home. It’s been a privilege to meet you.
* * *
SIX WEEKS OF uncertainty followed. All through March and halfway into April, Robert Nagle’s words blazed in Ferguson’s mind, the excellent piece of work and the privilege to meet you kept him warm through the chilly days of late winter and early spring, for he realized that Nagle was the first stranger, the first neutral person, the first utterly indifferent outsider who had ever read his work, and now that the best literary mind in all of Princeton had judged his stories to be worthy, the young author wished he could stop going to school and spend ten hours a day sitting in his room with the new work that was taking shape in his head, a multipart epic called Mulligan’s Travels, which was sure to be the best thing he had ever done, the great leap forward at last.
One morning in the midst of the long waiting period, as Ferguson sat in the kitchen brooding about lions and tigers and the odds of ending up as an ant in the big ant factory known as Rutgers, situated in the world-renowned metropolis of New Brunswick, New Jersey, his mother walked into the room with that day’s Star-Ledger, plopped it down on the breakfast table in front of him, and said, Get a load of this, Archie. Ferguson looked, and what he saw was so unexpected, so outside the realm of what seemed possible, so egregiously wrong and ridiculous, that he had to look at it three more times before he could begin to assimilate the news. His father had married again. The prophet of profits had hitched himself to forty-one-year-old Ethel Blumenthal, widow of the late Edgar Blumenthal and mother of two children, sixteen-year-old Allen and twelve-year-old Stephanie, and as Ferguson looked down at the photograph of his grinning father and the not unpresentable second Mrs. Ferguson, he saw that she bore a certain resemblance to his mother, especially in her height and shape and the darkness of her hair, as if his father had gone out looking for a new version of the original model, but the replacement was only half as pretty and had a guarded look in her eyes, something sad and shut off and perhaps a little cold, whereas Ferguson’s mother’s eyes were a port of refuge for everyone who came near her.
He supposed he should have been outraged that his father had never introduced him to this woman, who was technically his stepmother now, and deeply offended that he had not been invited to the wedding, but Ferguson was neither one of those things. He was relieved. The story was over, and Stanley Ferguson’s son, who no longer had to pretend he felt any filial attachment to the man who had sired him, looked at his mother and shouted, Adios, papa—vaya con Dios!
Three weeks after that, on the same day in three different parts of the country—New York City, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a small town in New Jersey—the youngest members of the mingled, mixed-up tribe opened their mailboxes and found the letters they had been waiting for. Except for the one no to Noah, it was a clean sweep of yeses for all of th
em, an unprecedented triumph that put the Schneiderman-Ferguson-Marx quartet in the enviable position of being able to choose where they wanted to go for the next four years of their lives. In addition to NYU, Noah could attend City College or the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Jim could go west to Caltech, south to Princeton, or stay where he was at MIT. In addition to Barnard and Brandeis, Amy’s options included Smith, Pembroke, and Rutgers. As for Ferguson, the ants had come through for him as expected, but so had the two jungle beasts, as not expected, and when he looked over at the exultant Amy, who was throwing her letters around the kitchen and laughing her head off, he stood up and said to her, in his best imitation of her grandfather’s accent: Ve valtz together now, ja liebchen? Then he walked over to where she was standing, wrapped his arms around her, and kissed her smack on the lips.
Walt Whitman Scholar.
In spite of the heartening letter from Columbia, New York would have to wait. The money made it imperative for him to go to Princeton, but beyond the money there was the distinction of having won the scholarship, which was unquestionably the biggest thing that had ever happened to him, a gigantic feather in his cap, as Dan had put it, and even for the hardened, undemonstrative Ferguson, who was normally so shy about his accomplishments that he would rather have left the room than open his mouth and brag about himself, the Princeton scholarship was different, a thing so big that it felt good to carry it around with him and let others see it, and when word got out at school that he was one of the four anointed ones, he soaked up the compliments without feeling embarrassed or making any of his usual self-deprecatory remarks, he was greedy for the adulation, he enjoyed being at the center of a world that was suddenly revolving around him, admired and envied and talked about by everyone, and even though he had wanted to move to New York in September, the thought of becoming a Walt Whitman Scholar at Princeton was more than enough to live on for now.
Two months went by, and the day after he graduated from high school, Ferguson received a letter from his father. In addition to a short note congratulating him on the scholarship (which had been announced in the Star-Ledger), the envelope contained a check for one thousand dollars. Ferguson’s first impulse was to tear it up and mail the pieces back to his father, but then he thought better of it and decided to deposit the check in his account. Once it cleared, he would write out two checks for five hundred dollars each, one of them to SANE (National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy) and the other one to SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). There was no sense in tearing up money when it could be put to good use, and why not give it away to the ones who were fighting against the imbecilities and injustices of the messed-up world he lived in?
That same evening, Ferguson locked himself in his room and cried for the first time since he had moved out of the old-old house. Dana Rosenbloom had left for Israel earlier that day, and because her parents were moving back to London for yet another fresh start, it was more than likely he would never see her again. He had pleaded with her not to go, explaining that he had been wrong about many things and wanted another chance to prove himself to her, and after she told him her mind was made up and nothing could stop her, he had impulsively asked her to marry him, and because Dana understood that it wasn’t a joke, that Ferguson meant every word he was saying, she told him he was the love of her life, the one man she would ever care about with her whole heart, and then she kissed him for the last time and walked away.
The next morning, he started working for Arnie Frazier again. Mr. College was back in the moving business, and as he sat in the van listening to Richard Brinkerstaff talk about his childhood in Texas and the whorehouse in his little town where the madam was so cheap she recycled used condoms by dousing them in warm water and then unrolling them onto the ends of broomsticks to dry out in the sun, Ferguson understood that the world was made of stories, so many different stories that if they were all gathered together and put into a book, the book would be nine hundred million pages long. The summer of Watts and the American invasion of Vietnam had begun, and neither Ferguson’s grandmother nor Amy’s grandfather would live to see it to the end.
5.1
He had been assigned a room on the tenth floor of Carman Hall, the newest dormitory on campus, but once Ferguson unpacked his bags and put away his things, he walked over to an adjacent dormitory a few yards to the north, Furnald Hall, and rode the elevator to the sixth floor, where he stood in front of Room 617 for a few moments, and then he went downstairs, walked east along the brick pathway that ran alongside Butler Library and headed for a third dormitory building, John Jay Hall, where he rode the elevator up to the twelfth floor and stood in front of Room 1231 for a few moments. Federico García Lorca had lived in those two rooms during the months he spent at Columbia in 1929 and 1930. Six-seventeen Furnald and 1231 John Jay were the work sites where he had written “Poems of Solitude at Columbia University,” “Return to the City,” “Ode to Walt Whitman” (New York of filth / New York of wires and death), and most of the other poems collected in Poet in New York, a book that was ultimately published in 1940, four years after Lorca was beaten, murdered, and thrown into a mass grave by Franco’s men. Holy ground.
Two hours later, Ferguson walked over to Broadway and West 116th Street and met up with Amy at Chock Full o’Nuts, home of the heavenly coffee that was reputed to be so good that not even Rockefeller’s money could buy a better brand (according to the TV commercial). Chock Full o’Nuts was the same company that employed Governor Rockefeller’s friend Jackie Robinson as vice president and director of personnel, and after Amy and Ferguson had mused on those weird, entangled facts for a couple of minutes—ubiquitous Nelson Rockefeller, whose family owned coffee plantations in South America, and post-baseball Jackie Robinson, whose hair had turned white even though he was still relatively young, and a chain of eighty New York coffee shops with mostly black people working in them—Amy put her arm around Ferguson’s shoulder, drew him toward her, and asked him how it felt to be in college now, a free man at last. Jolly good, my love, positively ripping, he said, as he kissed Amy on her neck, ear, and eyebrow—except for one small detail, which had nearly caused him to be punched in the face one hour after he arrived on campus. He was referring to the Columbia tradition of forcing incoming freshmen to wear powder-blue beanies during Orientation Week (with the class year stitched onto the front, in this case the laughable ’69), which in Ferguson’s opinion was a revolting custom that should have been abolished decades ago, a throwback to the humiliating initiations of rich-boy undergraduate life in the nineteenth century, and there he was, Ferguson said, minding his own business as he trundled through the quad on his way from here to there, with the name tag identifying him as a freshman pinned to his chest, when he was confronted by two upperclassmen, so-called monitors whose job was to help first-year underlings find their way around campus, but those short-haired hulks in the tweed jackets and ties, who must have been linemen on the varsity football team, were not interested in helping Ferguson find his way but in stopping him to ask why he wasn’t wearing his beanie, sounding more like unfriendly cops than friendly students, and Ferguson bluntly told them it was upstairs in his room and he had no intention of wearing it anytime that day or any other day that week, at which point one of the cops called him a puke and ordered him to go back to his room and fetch it. Sorry, Ferguson said, if you want it so much, you’ll have to fetch it yourself, a response that so irked the monitor that for a moment Ferguson thought he was about to haul off and flatten him, but the other cop told his friend to calm down, and rather than prolong the confrontation, Ferguson simply walked away.
Your first lesson in the anthropology of male-college kinship groups, Amy said. The world you belong to now is split into three tribes. The frat boys and the jocks, who make up about a third of the population, the grinds, who make up another third, and the pukes, who make up the last third. You, dear Archie, I’m glad to say, are a puke. Even though you used to be a jock.
 
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