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2) No creative writing classes. A difficult decision, but Ferguson aimed to stick with it to the end. Difficult because the Princeton undergraduate program was one of the oldest in the country, which meant he could have earned academic credit for doing what he was already doing, that is, have been rewarded for the privilege of forging on with his book, which in turn meant his course load would have been effectively lightened by one course each semester, which would have given him more time not only to write but to read, to watch films, to listen to music, to drink, to pursue girls, and to go to New York, but Ferguson was opposed to the teaching of creative writing on principle, for he was convinced that fiction writing was not a subject that could be taught, that every future writer had to learn how to do it on his or her own, and furthermore, based on the information he had been given about how those so-called workshops were run (the word inevitably made him think of a roomful of young apprentices sawing through wooden planks and hammering nails into boards), the students were encouraged to comment on one another’s work, which struck him as absurd (the blind leading the blind!), and why would he ever submit to having his work picked apart by a numskull undergraduate, his exceptionally bizarre and unclassifiable work, which would surely be frowned upon and dismissed as experimental rubbish. It wasn’t that he was against showing his stories to older, more experienced people for one-on-one criticism and discussion, but the idea of a group horrified him, and whether that horror was caused by arrogance or fear (of the dreaded punch) was less important than the fact that he finally didn’t give a rat’s ass about anyone’s work but his own, and why bother to pretend to care when he didn’t? He was still in touch with Mrs. Monroe (who had read the first twelve parts of Mulligan’s Travels, which had led to twelve kisses and no punches along with some pertinent, mind-opening comments), and if and when she wasn’t available, other trusted readers included Uncle Don, Aunt Mildred, Noah, and Amy, and if he ever found himself in a fix and couldn’t track down any of those trusted ones, he would head for the office of Professor Robert Nagle, the best literary mind in all of Princeton, and humbly ask for his help.
3) No eating club. Three-quarters of his classmates would wind up joining one, but Ferguson wasn’t interested. Similar to fraternities but not quite identical to fraternities, with the word bicker standing in for what other places called rush, they smacked of all the time-honored, backward-looking things about Princeton that left him cold, and by steering clear of the clubs and going “independent,” he would be able to avoid one of the stuffiest aspects of that stuffy place and thus feel happier about being there.
4) The ban against baseball would continue, an injunction that would include all spinoff forms of the game as well: softball, wiffleball, stickball, and playing catch with anyone at any time, even with a tennis ball or a pink rubber spaldeen or a rolled-up pair of socks. Being out of high school would help put the struggle behind him, he felt, since he would no longer be in contact with his old baseball friends, who remembered what a good and promising player he had been, and because they had been mystified by his decision to stop playing and couldn’t understand the false excuses he had given for abandoning the game, they had gone on questioning him about it all through high school. Mercifully, those questions would end now. On the other hand, now that he had escaped the halls and classrooms of Columbia High, he was about to go to one of the most sports-obsessed colleges in the country, the school that had taken on Rutgers in the first intercollegiate football game ever played in 1869, the school that just six months earlier had gone to the Final Four and come in third in the NCAA basketball tournament, the strongest finish ever for an Ivy League team, with the whole country swept up in Bill Bradley’s headline battles with Cazzie Russell of Michigan, followed by Bradley’s unprecedented fifty-eight points in the consolation-game victory for Princeton, and no doubt everyone on campus would still be rehashing those exploits when Ferguson arrived. Athletes would be everywhere, and Ferguson would naturally want to jump in and take part in various games, but those games would have to be confined to such things as half-court basketball and touch football, and in order to guard against any future temptations to participate in the sport he had vowed to shun as a memorial to Celia’s dead brother, he had given away his baseball gear at the end of August, casually handing over two bats, a pair of spikes, and the Luis Aparicio–model Rawlings glove that had been sitting on a shelf in his room for the past four years to Charlie Bassinger, the scrawny nine-year-old kid who lived next door to him on Woodhall Crescent. Take it, Ferguson had said to Charlie, I don’t need this stuff anymore, and young Bassinger, who wasn’t quite certain what his much admired almost-college-man neighbor was talking about, had looked up at Ferguson and asked, You mean for keeps, Archie? That’s right, Ferguson answered. For keeps.
5) No overtures to his father. If his father made an overture to him, he would think carefully about how he should or shouldn’t respond, but he wasn’t expecting that to happen. Their last communication had been the short note Ferguson had written to thank his father for the high school graduation present in June, and because he had been feeling especially bitter and hopeless on the afternoon the check arrived (Dana had left for Israel earlier that day), he had told his father about his plan to contribute half the money to SNCC and the other half to SANE. It was unlikely his father had been pleased.
* * *
QUALMS AND FOREBODINGS, nerves and more nerves, and if not for the soothing presences of his mother and Jim, who were both in the van with Ferguson on the morning he made his way down to the bogs and marshes of COLLEGE LIFE, he probably would have lost his breakfast and staggered out onto the dewy swards of Princeton with half of that breakfast on his shirt.
It was an intense day for the whole family. Dan and Amy were in another car traveling north to Brandeis, Ferguson and company were traveling south in one of Arnie Frazier’s white Chevy vans, which Arnie had been kind enough to let them borrow for free, and there they were cruising along the New Jersey Turnpike on that drizzly, mizzly morning, with Jim at the controls and Ferguson and his mother wedged in beside him on the front seat, the entire space in back filled up to the ceiling with the worldly possessions of the two stepbrothers, the familiar hodgepodge of bedding and pillows and towels and clothes and books and records and record players and radios and typewriters, and now that Ferguson had just finished reciting the first three of his five commandments to them, Jim was shaking his head and smiling his enigmatic Schneiderman smile, which was a smile of thought and reflection rather than a smile that verged on or even suggested laughter.
Loosen up, Archie, he said. You’re taking this much too seriously.
Yes, Archie, his mother chimed in. What’s with you this morning? We haven’t even gotten there, and already you’re thinking about how to get away.
I’m scared, that’s all, Ferguson said. Scared that I’m about to get lost in some reactionary, anti-Semitic dungeon and won’t get out alive.
Now his stepbrother laughed.
Think of Einstein, Jim said. Think of Richard Feynman. They don’t kill Jews at Princeton, Archie, they just make them walk around with yellow stars on their sleeves.
Now Ferguson laughed.
Jim, his mother said, you shouldn’t joke like that, really you shouldn’t—but a moment later she was laughing, too.
About ten percent, Jim said. That’s what I’ve been told. Which is a lot higher than the national percentage of … of what? Two percent, three percent?
Columbia is somewhere around twenty or twenty-five percent, Ferguson said.
Maybe so, Jim replied, but Columbia didn’t give you the scholarship.
* * *
BROWN HALL, AND a suite of two bedrooms on the third floor large enough to house four freshmen with a common room and bathroom in between. Brown Hall and a roommate named Small, Howard Small, a solid, chunky fellow of around five-eleven with a clear gaze and an aura of tranquil self-confidence about him, a person comfortably settled into his own patch
of ground, his own skin. A firm but not too firm or bone-crunching grip when they shook hands for the first time, and a moment later Howard was leaning forward and studying Ferguson’s face, which was an odd thing for someone to do, Ferguson thought, but then Howard asked him a question that turned the odd thing into a thing that wasn’t odd at all.
You didn’t happen to go to Columbia High School, did you? Howard asked.
Yes, Ferguson said. As a matter of fact I did.
Ah. And while you were at Columbia, you didn’t happen to play on the J.V. basketball team, did you?
I did. Just for my sophomore year, though.
I knew I’d seen you somewhere before. You played forward, right?
Left. Left forward. But you’re right. Not that I know why you’re right, but you are.
I was a benchwarmer on the West Orange J.V. that year.
Which means … how interesting … that we’ve already crossed paths twice.
Twice without even knowing it. Once for the home game and once for the away game. And just like you, I stopped playing after that one season. But I was a talentless oaf, truly awful and inept. Whereas you were pretty good, as I remember it, maybe even very good.
Not bad. But the point was: Did I want to go on thinking about jockstraps or turn my full attention to panties and bras?
They both smiled.
Not a difficult choice, then.
No, utterly painless.
Howard walked over to the window and gestured toward the campus. Look at this place, he said. It reminds me of the Duke of Earl’s country retreat, or one of those mental hospitals for the insanely rich. P.U. the magnificent, thank you for letting me in here, and thank you for these sumptuous grounds. But please explain one thing to me. Why are there so many black squirrels prancing around out there? In my experience, squirrels have always been gray, but here at Princeton they’re all black.
Because they’re part of the decorating scheme, Ferguson said. You remember the Princeton colors, don’t you?
Orange … and black.
That’s right, orange and black. Once we start seeing some orange squirrels, we’ll know why the black ones are there.
Howard laughed at Ferguson’s mildly funny, mildly stupid joke, and because he laughed, the nerve-knot in Ferguson’s stomach began to unclench a little bit, for even if P.U. turned out to be a hostile or disappointing place, he was going to have a friend there, or so it seemed to him when he heard his roommate laugh, and how fortunate he was to have met that friend in the first minutes of the first hour on the first day.
As they went about the business of unpacking their bundles, boxes, and bags, Ferguson was informed that Howard had started life on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and had been turned into a bridge-and-tunnel boy at age eleven when his father was appointed dean of students at Montclair State, and how curious it was to learn that they had spent the past seven years living within a few miles of each other and yet had intersected only glancingly those two times on the hardwood floors of their high school gyms. Testing each other out in the way strangers tend to do when they have been arbitrarily thrown together in the same cell, they quickly learned that they shared many likes and dislikes but not all or even most, both preferring the Mets to the Yankees, for one thing, but as of two years ago Howard had become a staunch vegetarian (he was morally opposed to the slaughter of animals) while Ferguson was an unthinking, bred-in-the-bone carnivore, and although Howard indulged in cigarette smoking from time to time, Ferguson regularly consumed between ten and twenty Camels a day. Books and writers were all over the map (Howard had read little contemporary American poetry or European fiction; Ferguson was more and more immersed in both of them), but their taste in films was eerily congruent, and when they both judged their favorite comedy of the 1950s to be Some Like It Hot and their favorite thriller to be The Third Man, Howard blurted out in a sudden rush of enthusiasm, Jack Lemmon and Harry Lime!, and an instant later he was sitting down at his desk, grabbing hold of a pen, and drawing a cartoon of a tennis match between a lemon and a lime. Ferguson watched in wonder as his prodigious roommate dashed off the sketch—the longer, bumpier lemon with arms and legs and a tennis racket in its right hand playing against the smaller, rounder, smoother lime with similar arms, legs, and racket, each one with a face that resembled the Lemmon and Lime originals (Jack L. and Orson W.), and then Howard added a net, a ball flying through the air, and the cartoon was done. Ferguson looked down at his watch. Three minutes from the first stroke to the last. No more than three minutes, perhaps even two.
Good God, Ferguson said. You really can draw, can’t you?
Lemmon versus Lime, Howard said, ignoring the compliment. It’s pretty funny, don’t you think?
Not just pretty funny. Very funny.
We might be onto something here.
Without a doubt, Ferguson said, as he tapped his finger against Howard’s pen and said, William Penn, and then tapped his finger against the drawing and said, versus Patti Page.
Ah, but of course! There’s no end to it, is there?
They kept it up for the next several hours, all through the unpacking and settling in, all through lunch in the dining hall, all through the afternoon as they wandered around the campus together and straight into dinner, by which time they had come up with forty or fifty more pairings. From beginning to end, they never stopped laughing, and so hard did they laugh at times and now and then for long intervals of time that Ferguson asked himself if he had ever laughed so hard at anything since the day he was born. Laughter to the point of tears. Laughter to the point of suffocation. And what a good sport it was for overcoming the fears and trembles of a young traveler who had just left home and found himself standing at the border crossing between the written past and the unwritten future.
Think of body parts, Howard said, and a moment or two later Ferguson answered: Legs Diamond versus Learned Hand. A few moments after that, Howard volleyed back with: Edith Head versus Michael Foot.
Think of sloshy bodies, Ferguson said, H-two-O in any one of its various states, and Howard answered: John Ford versus Larry Rivers, Claude Rains versus Muddy Waters. After several moments of concentrated thought, Ferguson matched those two with two of his own: Bennett Cerf versus Toots Shor, Veronica Lake versus Dick Diver.
Do fictional characters count? Howard asked.
Why not? As long as we know who they are, they’re just as real as real people. Anyway, since when did Harry Lime stop being a fictional character?
Whoops, I forgot about old Harry. In that case, let me offer you C. P. Snow versus Uriah Heep.
Or two other English gentlemen: Christopher Wren versus Christopher Robin.
Smashing. Now think of kings and queens, Howard said, and after a long pause Ferguson answered: William of Orange versus Robert Peel. Almost at once, Howard came back with: Vlad the Impaler versus Charles the Fat.
Think of Americans, Ferguson said, and over the next hour and a half they produced:
Cotton Mather versus Boss Tweed.
Nathan Hale versus Oliver Hardy.
Stan Laurel versus Judy Garland.
W. C. Fields versus Audrey Meadows.
Loretta Young versus Victor Mature.
Wallace Beery versus Rex Stout.
Hal Roach versus Bugs Moran.
Charles Beard versus Sonny Tufts.
Myles Standish versus Sitting Bull.
On it went, and on they went with it, but when they finally returned to their room after dinner and sat down to make a list of the pairings, more than half of what they had come up with had already flown out of their heads.
We’ll have to keep better records, Howard said. If nothing else, we’ve learned that brainstorms grow from highly flammable materials, and unless we walk around with a pen or a pencil at all times, we’re bound to forget most of what we’ve done.
For every one we forget, Ferguson said, we’ll always be able to invent another. Think crustacean, for example, cast out your net for a litt
le while, and suddenly you have Buster Crabbe versus Jean Shrimpton.
Nice.
Or sounds. A sweet peep in the forest, a loud roar in the jungle, and there you are with Lionel Trilling versus Saul Bellow.
Or crime fighters with secretaries and girlfriends whose names go with addresses.
You’ve lost me.
Think Perry Mason and Superman, and what you get is Della Street versus Lois Lane.
Good. Awfully good. But then take a stroll on the beach, and before you know it you’re looking at George Sand … versus Lorna Doone.
That’s going to be a fun one to draw. An hourglass playing tennis with a cookie.
Yes, but what about Veronica Lake versus Dick Diver? Think of the possibilities.
Delicious. It’s so sexy, it’s almost obscene.
* * *
NAGLE WAS HIS faculty adviser. Nagle was the professor who taught him Classical Literature in Translation, the course that was doing more for the growth of Ferguson’s mind than any other course he was taking. And almost surely Nagle was the person who had argued most strenuously on his behalf for the scholarship, and even though Nagle never would have talked about what he had done, Ferguson sensed that Nagle had hopes for him and was taking a special interest in his progress, and that was crucial to Ferguson’s inner equilibrium in that time of transition and potential disarray, for Nagle’s hopes were the difference between feeling estranged and feeling he might have belonged there, and when he handed in his first paper of the term, five pages on the reunion scene between Odysseus and Telemachus in the sixteenth book of The Odyssey, Nagle returned it to him with a cryptic note scrawled at the bottom of the last page, Not bad, Ferguson—keep it up, which Ferguson understood to be the laconic professor’s way of telling him he had done a good job, a less than superlative job, perhaps, but a good job for all that.