THERE HAD BEEN no contact with his father in over a year. Ferguson rarely thought about him now, and whenever he did, he noticed that the rage he had once felt against him had subsided into a dull indifference, or perhaps into nothing, a blank in his head. He had no father. The man who had once been married to his mother had vanished into the shadows of an alternate world that no longer intersected with the world his son lived in, and if the man was not yet certifiably dead, he had gone missing a long time ago and would never be found at any time in the future.
Three days before he left for Princeton to begin his sophomore year, however, as Ferguson sat in the living room of the house on Woodhall Crescent watching a Mets game with his stepbrother, Jim, and Jim’s fiancée, Nancy, the prophet of profits unexpectedly jumped onto the TV screen in a between-innings commercial. Sporting thick sideburns with a touch of gray in them, and decked out in a natty, fashionable suit (color unknown since it was a black-and-white TV), he was announcing the opening of a new Ferguson’s outlet in Florham Park and hammering away at the low prices, the low, low prices you can afford, and come on over and check out the new RCA color televisions and the stupefying bargains that would be available next weekend when the store opened for business. How deftly and confidently he was making his pitch, Ferguson said to himself, assuring the audience how much their anguished, monotone lives would be enhanced by shopping at Ferguson’s, and for a man who had never learned how to talk, as his mother had once put it, he was doing a hell of a good job of talking now, and how relaxed and comfortable he looked in front of the camera, how pleased with himself, how perfectly in charge of the moment, and as he waved his arm and smiled, gesturing to the invisible masses to come on in and save a bundle, a quartet of unaccompanied soprano and tenor voices trilled brightly in the background: Prices never lower / Spirits never higher / At Ferguson’s, Ferguson’s, Fer-gu-son’s!
Two thoughts appeared in Ferguson’s mind after the commercial ended, the one forming so quickly after the other that they were almost simultaneous:
1) That he should stop watching baseball games on television, and 2) That his father was still hovering around the edges of his life, not yet fully effaced, still there in spite of the distance between them, and perhaps another chapter of the story still had to be written before the book could finally be closed.
* * *
UNLESS HE TOOK a crash course in ancient Greek and learned the language in a single academic year, there would be no more classes with Nagle. But Nagle was still his faculty adviser, and for reasons that had everything to do with his father, or perhaps nothing to do with his father, Ferguson continued to look to Nagle for validation and encouragement, wanting to impress the older man by doing top-quality work in his courses, by exhibiting proof of the soundness of character demanded from the participants in the Walt Whitman Scholars Program, but most of all by winning the professor’s support for the fiction he was writing, a sign that he was fulfilling the promise Nagle had seen in him after reading Eleven Moments from the Life of Gregor Flamm. At their first one-on-one conference of the fall semester, Ferguson handed Nagle a copy of the Gizmo Press edition of Mulligan’s Travels, ambivalent and fearful that he had jumped into publishing his work too soon, worried that Nagle would regard the mimeo book as the overly ambitious act of a young writer who wasn’t ready to be published, doubly worried that Nagle would read the book and find it awful, delivering another one of the punches Ferguson dreaded so much even as he longed for kisses from the people he admired, but Nagle accepted the book that first afternoon with a friendly nod and a few words of congratulations, knowing nothing about the contents, of course, but at least not condemning Ferguson for having rushed into premature publication and the inevitable regret and embarrassment that would follow from such an ill-conceived show of arrogance, and as Nagle held the book in his hands and studied the black-and-white illustration on the cover, he mentioned how good he thought the drawing was. Who’s H.S.? he asked, pointing to the abbreviated signature in the lower right-hand corner, and when Ferguson said it was Howard Small, his Princeton roommate, Nagle’s dour mien sent forth one of its unaccustomed smiles. Hard-working Howard Small, he said. Such a good student, but I had no idea he could draw so well. You boys are quite a pair, aren’t you?
At their next sit-down in the professor’s office three days later, when they were supposed to decide which courses Ferguson would be taking that semester, Nagle began by pronouncing his verdict on Mulligan’s Travels. It didn’t matter that Billy, Ron, and Noah had all warmly embraced the book, nor did it matter that Amy, Luther, and Celia had responded with enthusiastic kisses (in Celia’s case, genuine physical kisses), and forget that Uncle Don and Aunt Mildred had taken the trouble to call on the phone and shower him with flattering comments for close to an hour or that Dan and his mother and the departed Evie Monroe and the departed Mary Donohue had all told him how good they thought it was, Nagle’s opinion was the one that counted most because he was the only objective observer, the only one not tied to Ferguson by friendship or love or familial bonds, and a negative word from him would undercut and perhaps even demolish the accumulated positive words from the others.
Not bad, he said, using the phrase he tended to fall back on when he liked something rather well but with certain reservations. An advance from your previous work, he continued, tautly written, a fine and subtle music in the sentences, absorbing to read, but stark, raving mad, of course, an inventiveness bordering on mental-breakdown territory, and yet, for all that, the texts are funny when you mean for them to be funny, dramatic when you mean for them to be dramatic, and clearly you’ve read Borges by now and have learned some lessons from him about how to walk the line between what I would call fiction and speculative prose. Some silly, sophomoric ideas, I’m afraid, but that’s what you are, Ferguson, a sophomore, so we won’t dwell on the book’s weaknesses. If nothing else, you’ve convinced me you’re making progress, which suggests you’re going to continue to make more progress as time goes on.
Thank you, Ferguson said. I scarcely know what to say.
Don’t turn mute on me now, Ferguson. We still have to discuss your plans for the semester. Which brings me to the question I’ve been meaning to ask you. Have you changed your mind about registering for one of the creative writing workshops?
No, not really.
It’s a good program, you know. One of the best anywhere.
I’m sure you’re right. I just feel I’ll be happier gutting it out on my own.
I understand your reservations, but at the same time I think it would help you. And then there’s the matter of Princeton, of being a part of the Princeton community. Why, for example, haven’t you submitted any of your work to the Nassau Literary Review?
I don’t know. It never occurred to me.
Do you have anything against Princeton?
No, not at all. I love it here.
No second thoughts, then?
None whatsoever. I feel blessed.
As he went on talking to Nagle and the two of them mapped out his curriculum for the fall, Howard was in their dorm room reading The Scarlet Notebook, which Ferguson had pronounced D.O.A. one week earlier, yet another corpse expelled from my shit-infested brain, as he had said to Howard when he handed him the manuscript, but Howard was used to Ferguson’s torments and self-doubts by then and paid them no heed, confident in the strength of his own intelligence to draw his own independent conclusions, and by the time Ferguson walked into the room after his conference with Nagle, Howard had finished the book.
Archie, he said. Have you ever read Wittgenstein?
No, not yet. He’s one of many on my not-yet list.
Good. Or rather, get a load of this, mein Herr.
Howard picked up a blue book with Wittgenstein’s name on the cover, opened it to whatever page he was looking for, and read out loud to Ferguson: And it also means something to talk about “living in the pages of a book.”
How true, how true, Ferguson sa
id. And then, bringing himself to attention and giving a stiff military salute, he added: Thank you, Ludwig!
You see where I’m going with this, don’t you?
Not really.
The Scarlet Notebook. I just finished reading it about ten minutes ago.
“How I Spent My Summer Vacation.” Remember those things we had to write as kids? Well, that’s how I spent my summer vacation. Living in the pages of that monstrosity … that abortion of a book.
You know how much I loved Mulligan, right? This one is deeper and better and more original. A breakthrough. And I hope to God you let me do the cover for it.
What makes you think Billy will want to publish it?
Don’t be an idiot. Of course he’ll want to publish it. Billy discovered you, and he thinks you’re a genius, his bright-eyed baby genius, and wherever you go, that’s where he’ll want to go, too.
Now you tell me, Ferguson said, beginning to crack a smile. I just got the lowdown on Mulligan from Nagle. Good and not good. Sophomoric but fun. Written by a madman who should be put in a straitjacket. A step forward, but still a long way to go. I happen to agree with him.
You shouldn’t listen to Nagle, Archie. He’s a brilliant professor—of Greek. We both love him, but he isn’t qualified to judge your work. He’s stuck back there, and you’re what’s going to happen next. Not tomorrow maybe, but definitely the day after tomorrow.
So began Ferguson’s second year in black squirrel heaven, with a pep talk from his roommate, Howard Small, who was just as important a friend to him now as Noah and Jim were, an indispensable part of what was keeping him alive, and however exaggerated Howard’s comments about his work might have been, he was correct to assume that Billy would want to publish his new book, and because Joanna was seven-and-a-half months pregnant and too close to having her baby to type up the stencils, Billy did the job himself, so that one week before little Molly Best came into the world on November ninth, Ferguson’s second little book was in print.
It was a better year than the first one had been, with fewer anxieties and inner stumbles, with a more solid sense of belonging to the place where fortune had willed him to be, the year of Anglo-Saxon poems and Chaucer and the gorgeous, alliterative verses of Sir Thomas Wyatt (… as she fleeth afore / Fainting I follow…), the year of protesting the Vietnam War by joining in the demonstrations against Dow Chemical at the Engineering Quad with Howard and his other friends from the Woodrow Wilson Club to denounce the manufacturer of napalm, of settling into his more amply decorated New York weekend apartment and strengthening his friendships with Billy, Joanna, Ron, and Bo Jainard, of appearing as an extra in Noah’s first film, a seven-minute short entitled Manhattan Confidential in which Ferguson could be glimpsed at a back table in a low-life bar reading Spinoza in French, and the year of working on The Souls of Inanimate Things, a sequence of thirteen meditations on the objects in his apartment that he finished at the end of May. It was also the year when his grandfather died the strange and ignominious death that no one in the family wanted to talk about, the culmination of a week-long gambling binge in Las Vegas during which he lost over ninety thousand dollars at roulette and then suffered a heart attack while making love (or trying to make love) to two twenty-year-old hookers in his room. In the seventeen months since his wife’s death, Benjy Adler had blown more than three hundred and fifty thousand dollars and was put in his grave as a pauper by the Jewish burial society run by the Workmen’s Circle, an organization he had joined in 1936, back in the days when he had been reading the novels of Jack London and still thought of himself as a socialist.
* * *
THEN THERE WAS Celia, first and last there was Celia, for that was the year when Ferguson fell in love, and the most perplexing thing about it was that no one but his mother saw in her what he did. Rose judged her to be a magnificent girl, but all the others were confused. Noah called her a gawky stalk from Westchester, the female version of her ghosty-boy brother but with darker skin and a more attractive face, a Barnard geek who would spend her life in a white lab coat studying rats. Jim thought she was good-looking but too young for Ferguson, not yet fully evolved. Howard admired her intelligence but wondered if she wasn’t too conventional for Ferguson, a bourgeois goody-good who would never understand how little he cared about what everyone else seemed to care about. Amy weighed in with a single word: Why? Luther called her a work in progress, and Billy said: Archie, what are you doing?
Did he know what he was doing? He thought he did. He had thought so when Celia put down the dollar bill in front of the old man at Horn & Hardart’s. He had thought so when she insisted on no more fake-brother stuff while walking from Grand Central to the automat. And he had thought so when she dropped his book to the floor and declared she wanted to kiss him.
How many kisses had followed that first kiss over the ensuing months? Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. And the unexpected discovery on the night of October twenty-second, when they lowered themselves onto the mattress in Ferguson’s room and made love for the first time, that Celia was no longer a virgin. There had been the aforementioned Bruce in the spring of her last year of high school, and there had been two American travelers on her tour of Europe with her cousin Emily, an Ohioan in Cork and a California boy in Paris, but rather than feel disappointed by the knowledge that he wasn’t her first one, Ferguson was heartened by it, encouraged that she was adventurous and open and had a carnal appetite strong enough to push her into taking risks.
He loved her body. He found her naked body so beautiful that he could barely speak the first time she took off her clothes and lay down beside him. The impossible smoothness and warmth of her skin, her slender arms and legs, the curving cheeks of her round, clutchable ass, her small, upright breasts and dark, pointed nipples, he had never known anyone as beautiful as she was, and what the others couldn’t understand was how happy it made him to be with her, to run his hands over the body of the person he now loved more than any person he had ever loved. If the others couldn’t get that, too bad for them, but Ferguson wasn’t about to ask the minstrel boys to unpack their violins and lay it on thick with the schmaltz. One violin was enough, and as long as Ferguson could hear the music it was playing, he would go on listening to it by himself.
More important than the others or what the others thought was the simple fact of the two of them, and now that they had advanced to the next stage, there was the ever more urgent need to understand precisely what was going on. Was his burgeoning love for Celia still connected to Artie’s death, he asked himself, or had her brother finally been dropped from the equation? That was how it had started, after all, back in the days of the New Rochelle dinners when the world had split in half and the arithmetic of the gods had provided him with a formula to glue it together again: fall in love with his dead friend’s sister, and henceforth the earth would continue to revolve around the sun. The mad calculations of an overheated adolescent mind, of an angry, grieving mind, but however irrational the numbers might have been, he had hoped he would eventually fall for her, and if and when he did, he had also hoped she would fall for him, and now that both of those things had happened, he didn’t want Artie to be involved in it anymore, for the things that had happened had mostly happened on their own, starting with the day in New York when he saw a compassionate girl pull a dollar from her purse and give it to a broken-down old man, with that same girl one year later standing in the light of his apartment and overpowering him with the force of her beauty, with twenty-four letters from foreign countries stashed away in a wooden box, with an excited girl dropping his book to the floor and wanting to kiss him, none of which had anything to do with Artie, and yet now that he and Celia had fallen for each other, Ferguson had to admit that it felt good and right that she was the one he was with and no one else, even if something in him cringed at the thought of that good and right, because now that he loved Celia he understood how sick his desire for her had been in the first place, to look upon a living, breathing
person and turn her into a symbol of his campaign to rectify the injustices of the world, what had he been thinking, for God’s sake, and how much better it would be if Artie were out of it for good now. No more ghosts, Ferguson said to himself. The dead boy had brought him together with Celia, but now that he had done his job, it was time for him to go away.
Never a word to her about any of that, and as 1966 turned into 1967 it was remarkable how little they talked about her brother, how determined they both were to avoid the subject and get on with the business of being just two so the invisible third would not be standing between them or floating above them, and as the months rolled on and their connection tightened and Ferguson’s friends gradually came round and began to accept her as a permanent part of the landscape, he realized there was one necessary act still in front of him before the spell could be broken. It was spring by then, and having celebrated their double March birthdays on the third and sixth of the month, they were now twenty and eighteen years old, and one Saturday afternoon in the middle of May, one week after Ferguson had written the final paragraph of The Souls of Inanimate Things, he traveled across town to Morningside Heights, where Celia was ensconced in her dormitory room at Brooks Hall working on two end-of-the-year term papers, which meant that weekend would be different from most other weekends and would not include their customary walks and talks and nighttime explorations in Ferguson’s bed, but he had called Celia at ten o’clock that morning and asked if he could “borrow her” for thirty or forty minutes later in the day, and no, he said, not for that, although he dearly wished it could be that, but rather to do something for him that would be both simple and unstrenuous and yet, at the same time, of utmost importance to their future happiness together. When she asked him what that thing was, he said he would tell her later.
Why so mysterious, Archie?
Because, he said. Just because, that’s why.
As he traveled along the edge of Central Park on the crosstown bus, his right hand was in the pocket of his spring jacket, and the fingers of that hand were wrapped around a pink rubber ball, which he had bought that morning at a candy and cigarette store on First Avenue, a commonplace pink rubber ball manufactured by the Spalding Company and widely referred to in New York as a spaldeen. That was Ferguson’s mission on that bright afternoon in the middle of May: to walk into Riverside Park with Celia and have a catch with her, to renounce the vow he had taken in the silent depths of his misery six years ago and have done with his obsession at last.