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  Every other Wednesday throughout the first semester, Nagle and his wife, Susan, hosted an afternoon tea at their small house on Alexander Street for Nagle’s six freshman advisees. Mrs. Nagle was a short, round brunette who taught ancient history at Rutgers and stood a full head shorter than her lean, long-faced husband. While she poured the tea, Nagle served the sandwiches, or while Nagle poured the tea, she served the sandwiches, and while Nagle sat in an armchair smoking cigarettes and talking or listening to some of his charges, Mrs. Nagle sat on the sofa talking and listening to his other charges, and so companionable and yet distantly polite were the two Nagles with each other that Ferguson sometimes wondered if they didn’t communicate in ancient Greek when they didn’t want their eight-year-old daughter, Barbara, to know what they were talking about. The idea of a formal tea had always struck Ferguson as the dullest sort of social business imaginable (he had never been to one until now), but in fact he enjoyed Nagle’s ninety-minute parties and tried not to miss them, for they offered another chance to see the professor in action, and what they told him was that Nagle was more than he appeared to be in the classroom or his office, where he never talked about politics or the war or current issues, but here in his house every other Wednesday afternoon he welcomed in his six first-year charges, who happened to be two Jewish students, two foreign students, and two black students, and when you considered that there were only twelve black freshmen in the entire class of eight hundred (only twelve!) and no more than five or six dozen Jews and perhaps half or a third that many foreigners, it seemed clear to Ferguson that Nagle had quietly taken it upon himself to look after the outsiders and make sure they didn’t drown in that forbidding, alien place, and whether he was motivated by political beliefs or a love of Princeton or simple human kindness, Robert Nagle was doing what he could to make the marginal ones feel at home.

  Nagle and Howard and Jim—in the first month of Ferguson’s new life as a discombobulated scholarship boy, a boy who had previously come to think of himself as a man and was now regressing into the anxious uncertainties of childhood, they were the ones who held him together. Howard was more than just a demon cartoonist and high-energy wit, he was a solid thinker and conscientious student with plans to major in philosophy, and because he was considerate and mostly self-contained and undemanding of Ferguson’s attentions, it was possible for Ferguson to share the room with him and not feel that his privacy was being impinged upon. That had been one of Ferguson’s greatest fears, having to live in a less than large room with someone else, which until now had happened to him only at Camp Paradise, where he had bunked in cabins with two counselors and seven other boys, but at home he had always been able to retreat into the four walls of his one-person sanctuary, even in the new house on Woodhall Crescent when Amy had been in the next room slamming doors and blasting out loud music, and the worry had been whether he would be able to read or write or even think with another person lying on a bed or sitting at a desk just six or seven feet from him. As it happened, Howard had been fretting about the same close-quarters problem, for he too had always had his own room while growing up, and in a frank conversation on the third day of Freshman Orientation Week, during which they both confessed to their fears of no solitude and too much air going from one set of lungs into the other, they worked out what they hoped would be an acceptable modus operandi. Their suitemates were a pre-med student from Vermont named Will Noyes and an 800 math wizard from Iowa named Dudley Krantzenberger, and Ferguson and Howard agreed that when the common room was empty, that is, when Noyes and Krantzenberger were in their bedroom or out of the building, one of them (Ferguson or Howard) would read-write-think-study-draw in the bedroom and the other in the common room, and when either Noyes or Krantzenberger or both was/were in the common room, Ferguson and Howard would take turns going to the library while the other remained in the bedroom. They shook hands on it, but then the semester began in earnest, and after a couple of weeks they had grown so comfortable with each other that the precautionary rules were no longer in force. They came and went as they pleased, and if they both decided to stay in at the same time, they discovered that they were able to sit in the room together for long stretches of silent work without breaking in on each other’s thoughts or contaminating the air they both breathed. Potential problems sometimes turned into genuine problems, and sometimes they didn’t. This one didn’t. By the first of October, the two occupants of the third-floor room in Brown Hall had invented eighty-one more tennis matches.

  As for Jim, he was adjusting to a new set of circumstances as well, feeling his way as a first-year graduate student in the roughly competitive Department of Physics, acclimating himself to life with a roommate in an off-campus apartment, no less frazzled than his stepbrother was during that early period in black squirrel heaven, but still they managed to have dinner together every Tuesday night, either spaghetti at the apartment with Jim’s fellow MIT-graduate roommate, Lester Patel from New Delhi, or hamburgers at a crowded little place on Nassau Street called Bud’s, along with an hour and a half of one-on-one basketball at Dillon Gym every ten days or so, where Ferguson always lost to the slightly taller, slightly more talented Schneiderman, but not by such embarrassing scores that it wasn’t worth the effort. One evening about two weeks after the start of classes, Jim dropped by Brown Hall for an impromptu visit with Ferguson and Howard, and when Howard pulled out the list of tennis matches they had done so far and showed Jim some of the drawings that went with them (Claude Rains on one side of the net as a cluster of isolate droplets, Muddy Waters on the other side up to his waist in goo), Jim laughed as hard as Ferguson and Howard had laughed on the morning they’d cooked up the game, and to see him doubled over and in stitches like that said something good about Jim’s character, Ferguson felt, just as passing the Horn & Hardart Initiation Exam had said something good about Celia’s character, for in each case the reaction had proved that the person in question was a kindred spirit, someone who appreciated the same screwball juxtapositions and unpredictable yokings of like and unlike that Ferguson did, for the unhappy truth was that not everyone was enamored of Horn & Hardart’s or the poetic grandeur of automated, nickel-in-the-slot cuisine, and not everyone laughed or even smiled at the tennis matches, as Ferguson and Howard had observed with Noyes and Krantzenberger, who one by one had looked at the pairings with blank faces, not understanding that they were supposed to be funny, not capable of grasping the droll doubleness that occurred when a thing-word also posed as a name-word and that putting two of those thing-names together could hoist you into a realm of unexpected mirth, no, the whole venture had fallen flat for their sober, literal-minded suitemates, whereas Jim was in a lather of extreme jollification, clutching his sides and telling them he hadn’t laughed so hard in years, and once again Ferguson found himself looking at the old punch-kiss problem, which appeared to be intractable, since the what couldn’t speak for itself except by being itself and therefore was forever at the mercy of the who, and given that there was always just one what and many whos, the whos inevitably had the last word, even when they were wrong in their judgments, not just about big things such as books and the design of eighty-story buildings but about small things such as a random list of harmless, silly jokes.

  * * *

  THE COURSES NOT taught by Nagle were not as engaging as Classical Literature in Translation, but they were good enough, and between the work of settling into his new surroundings and the work for those courses, which included a freshman requirement in prosody and composition along with Introduction to French Literature with Lafargue, the European Novel from 1857 to 1922 with Baker, and American History I with McDowell, there was little time left over in the first month for him to think about poor Mulligan, and what time there was he squandered on trips to New York.

  His grandfather had gone down to Florida for the fall and winter, which gave Ferguson free access to the apartment whenever he wanted it, and with the apartment came the luxury of being entirely and bracingly
alone. The rooms on West Fifty-eighth Street also provided him with the further indulgence of being able to make free telephone calls, since his grandfather had explicitly told him to use the phone whenever his mouth felt the itch and not to worry about the cost. The offer implied a certain degree of moderation, of course, an understanding that Ferguson would not lose control of himself and saddle his grandfather with excessive long-distance charges, which eliminated the possibility of calling Dana in Israel, for example (something he might have done anyway if he had known her number), but as it was he managed to stay in touch with various others on the domestic front, all of them women, the women he loved or had loved or might start to love later or soon or now.

  Stepsister Amy had thrown herself into the anti-war movement at Brandeis, which had drawn all the most interesting people on campus, she said, among them a senior named Michael Morris, who had been one of the Freedom Summer volunteers in Mississippi last year, and Ferguson could only hope that this one would be better for her than the slob she had given her heart to in high school, duplicitous Loeb of the manifold deceptions and broken promises. Had that been an innocent mistake on Amy’s part, he wondered, or, having rejected her future stepbrother on the night of the fireflies in the backyard of the old house, was she destined to fall for the wrong man again and again? Be careful, he said to her. This Morris seems to be a good fellow, but don’t jump into it until you know who he really is. Ferguson in his self-appointed role as the new Miss Lonelyhearts, dispensing advice on matters he knew nothing about. A subtle form of unconscious revenge, perhaps, for much as he cared about Amy, the scald of her old rejection still stung from time to time, and he had never been able to tell her how badly she had hurt him.

  His mother had found a job with the Hammond Map Company in Maplewood, a long-term assignment to take pictures for a series of New Jersey calendars and agendas they were planning to start publishing in 1967, that is, one year from now in the fall of 1966, New Jersey Notables, New Jersey Landscapes, New Jersey Historic Sites, and two editions of New Jersey Architecture (one for public buildings and one for private houses), which had been swung through the intervention of one of Dan’s commercial clients, and Ferguson felt this was excellent news for several reasons, first of all because of the extra cash that would be coming into the household (a source of perpetual worry) but most of all because he wanted his mother to be busy with something again after his father had recklessly pulled the plug on her studio, and with no kids to look after at home anymore, why not do this, which was bound to be satisfying work for her and enliven her days, however far-fetched the notion of New Jersey calendars and weekly planners might have been.

  The person he had once called Mrs. Monroe and now addressed as Evie, the short form of Evelyn she was known by to her friends, was back at C.H.S. doing her stuff in front of her several English classes and overseeing the new crop of editors in charge of the student literary magazine, but things had taken a rocky turn for her in early September when her boyfriend of the past three years, a political journalist at the Star-Ledger named Ed Southgate, had abruptly called off their affair and gone back to his wife, and Evie was down and feeling too much pain for her own good, spending the late weekend hours with a glass of scotch in her hand listening to scratchy blues records by Bessie Smith and Lightnin’ Hopkins, and hell, Ferguson kept thinking to himself as the trees changed color and leaves started falling to the ground, how that woman’s big soul could ache. Whenever he called her, he did what he could to pull her out of the doldrums and take her mind off the departed Ed because there was no point in looking back anymore, he felt, nothing for it but to jostle her out of her booze-hole by poking fun at Ed-ness, deadness, and despair, telling her not to worry because he, Ferguson, her former student, was coming to the rescue, and if she didn’t want to be rescued she should lock the doors of her house or get out of town, because he was coming whether she liked it or not, and all at once the two of them would be laughing and the cloud would lift just long enough for her to start talking about other things besides sitting alone in the downstairs parlor with a bottle of scotch, the loveless nights in her half of the two-family house where she lived on a block of tall, undulating shade trees in East Orange, the half-house Ferguson had visited eight or ten times during the summer and knew well enough by now to have learned that it was one of the few places in the world where he felt utterly and only himself, and every time he called her he would think about those summer visits and the one night when they both drank too much and were on the verge of going to bed together when the doorbell rang and the little boy from across the street asked if his mother could borrow a cup of sugar.

  Then there was Celia, a call every Friday evening or Saturday afternoon to his new friend, for no other purpose than to prove how seriously he was taking the job of being her friend, and he kept on calling because she always seemed happy when he did. Their early conversations had a tendency to meander over several or many unconnected subjects, but they seldom lagged, and Ferguson enjoyed listening to her earnest, intelligent voice as they zigzagged from the sociology of high school cliques to the war in Vietnam, from worried complaints about her numb, debilitated parents to wistful ruminations about the possibility of orange squirrels, but soon enough she was talking more and more about her preparations for the SATs, which would eliminate any more Saturday outings for the time being, and then, in late September, she announced that she had started seeing a boy named Bruce, who was apparently about to be turned into something that resembled a boyfriend, which jolted Ferguson when she told him about it and went on jolting him for a day or two after that, but once he calmed down he reasoned that it was probably for the best, since she had made too strong an impression on him during the day they had spent together in New York, and with no other girls anywhere in the picture just then, he might have made an impetuous lunge at her the next time they were together, something he would have regretted, something that could have ruined their chances down the road, and better that this Bruce person should be standing between them now, for high school romances rarely lasted beyond the end of high school, and next year she would be in college if things went as planned, as undoubtedly they would, and after that the whole situation would be different again.

  Meanwhile, in the downtown blocks around Washington Square, Noah was sinking his teeth into the meaty pleasures of his newly independent life, his liberation from the claustrophobic confines of his mother’s apartment on West End Avenue and the peace-and-quarrel cycles of his father’s demented marriage to his neurasthenic stepmother. As he put it to Ferguson one day as he showed him around his dormitory, his small, two-by-four room was the next best thing to camping out in the Montana wilderness. I’m no longer hemmed in, Arch, he said, I feel like an emancipated slave who’s lit out for the territories, and although Ferguson worried that he was smoking too much pot and too many cigarettes (close to two packs a day), his eyes were clear and he generally seemed to be in good form, even as he coped with the loss of his girlfriend, Carole, who had dumped him before going off to live under her own big skies in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

  Two weeks into the first semester, Noah reported that NYU was much less demanding than Fieldston and that he could do his daily stint of work in about the same time it took to consume a five-course dinner. Ferguson wondered when Noah had last sat down to a five-course dinner, but he got the point, and he couldn’t help admiring his cousin for being so relaxed about the business of college, which in his own case had nearly provoked a nervous breakdown. So there was young Mr. Marx, a new man in his old surroundings, stomping around the cobbled lanes of his West Village turf, going to jazz clubs and movies at the Bleecker Street Cinema, writing down story ideas for films as he sat in the Caffè Reggio and drank his sixth cup of espresso that day, and there he was making friends with young poets and painters from the Lower East Side, and when Noah began introducing Ferguson to some of those people, Ferguson’s world expanded in ways that would ultimately reconfigure the landscape of h
is life, for those early encounters were the first steps toward discovering what kind of life would be possible for him in the future, and again, as always, Noah was the one to thank for steering him in the right direction. However opposed he might have been to the workshops at Princeton, Ferguson knew there was much to be gained by talking to other writers and artists, and because most of the downtown fledglings he met through Noah were three and four and five years older than he was, they were already publishing their work in little magazines and organizing group shows in tumbledown lofts and storefronts, which meant they were miles ahead of him at that point, and therefore Ferguson listened carefully to what they said. Most of them wound up teaching him something, even the ones he didn’t take to personally, but the smartest one in his opinion turned out to be the one he liked best, a poet named Ron Pearson, who had come to New York from Tulsa, Oklahoma, four years earlier and had graduated from Columbia in June, and one evening at Ron’s cramped little railroad flat on Rivington Street, as Ferguson and Noah and two or three others sat on the floor with Ron and his wife, Peg (he was already married!), the conversation spun around from Dada to anarchism, from twelve-tone music to Nancy and Sluggo porn cartoons, from traditional forms in poetry and painting to the role of chance in art, and suddenly John Cage was mentioned, a name that was only dimly recognizable to Ferguson, and when Ron learned that their new friend from the Jersey swamps had never read a word of Cage’s writings, he jumped to his feet, walked over to the bookcase, and pulled out a hardcover copy of Silence. You have to read this, Archie, he said, or else you’ll never learn how to think about anything except what other people want you to think.