Celia smiled when he told her what the thing of utmost importance was, giving him a look that seemed to suggest she knew he was playing a joke or had something else up his sleeve and was still hiding it from her, but she was happy to be liberated from her room, she said, and what better way to pass the time than by having a catch in the park? Celia was doubly up for it because she was an athletic girl, an excellent swimmer, a decent tennis player, and a not-bad shooter of baskets, and having observed her on the tennis court a couple of times, Ferguson knew she could catch a ball and didn’t throw the way girls usually did, with the arm cocked at the elbow, but more or less as boys did, with a thrust from the shoulder of a fully extended arm. He pressed his lips against her face and thanked her for coming along. No matter how much he might have wanted to, he could never tell her why they were doing this.
As they headed for the park, mysterious bursts of sweat began spilling from Ferguson’s pores, his stomach began to throb, and it was becoming more and more difficult to fill his lungs with air. Dizzy. So dizzy that he took hold of Celia’s arm to maintain his balance as they walked down the sharp incline of West 116th Street and shuffled toward Riverside Drive. Dizzy and scared. He had made the promise to himself when he was still a boy, and since then it had been one of the burning forces in his life, a test of will and inner strength and sacrifice to a holy cause, solidarity across the chasm between the living and the dead, honoring the dead by saying no to something beautiful from this world, and to break that promise now wasn’t easy for him, it was hard, harder than anything he could think of, but it had to be done, had to be done now, for noble as his sacrifice had been, it had also been crazy, and he didn’t want to be crazy anymore.
They crossed Riverside Drive, and once their feet were touching the grass in the park, Ferguson took the ball out of his pocket.
Back up a little bit, Celia, he said to her, and after the smiling Celia had bounced back until they were standing about twelve feet apart, Ferguson raised his arm and threw her the ball.
* * *
THE SUMMER PROMISED great things for everyone in his circle. Or so it appeared when the summer began, and why mention the disasters of July and August when the chronology calls for the high hopes of June to come first in the reckoning? For Ferguson and his friends, it was a time when everyone seemed to be rushing along in the same direction, when everyone stood on the brink of doing something unheard of, some extraordinary thing that none of them had ever imagined would be possible. In far-off California, the summer of 1967 had been declared the Summer of Love. Back home on the East Coast, it began as the Summer of Exaltations.
Noah was returning to Williamstown for another season of acting (Chekhov, Pinter) and was hard at work on the script for his second little film, which would be less little than the first one had been, a sixteen-minute talkie with the working title of Tickle My Feet. On top of that, he had found himself a new girlfriend in the person of frizzy-headed, large-breasted Vicki Tremain, a fellow NYUer from the class of ’69 who had memorized more than a hundred poems by Emily Dickinson, smoked pot as compulsively as other people smoked cigarettes, and had aspirations to become the first woman to traverse the twenty-six blocks between Washington Square and the Empire State Building by walking on her hands. Or so she said. She also said she had been raped repeatedly by Lyndon Johnson over the past four years and that Marilyn Monroe wouldn’t have killed herself if she had married Henry Miller instead of Arthur Miller. Vicki was a young woman with a rich sense of humor and a keen awareness of the absurdities of life, and Noah was so bowled over by her that his legs wobbled whenever she came near him.
Amy and Luther would not be coming down to New York again. They had found an apartment in Somerville, and while Luther took supplementary courses at Harvard, Amy would be spending the next two and a half months as an assembly-line worker at the Necco factory in Cambridge. Ferguson remembered Necco wafers from his childhood, in particular the bad-weather battles he had fought with them at Camp Paradise, all the boys cooped up in the cabin and flinging those hard little disks of candy at one another as rain poured down on the roof, but then Rosenberg caught one just below the eye and Necco wafer wars were banned. An interesting choice, Ferguson said to Amy on the phone, but why factory work, and what was it all about? Politics, she said. Members of SDS had been asked to find jobs in factories that summer to help spread the anti-war movement to the working class, which was still mostly pro-war at that point. Ferguson asked whether she thought it would do any good. She had no idea, Amy said, but even if the inside-agitator stuff didn’t pan out, it would be a good experience for her, a chance to learn something about American labor conditions and the people who did the laboring. She had read a hundred books on the subject, but a summer at the Necco factory was bound to teach her a lot more. Full immersion. Hands-on, practical knowledge. Rolling up her sleeves and plunging in. Right?
Right, Ferguson said, but promise me one thing.
What?
Don’t eat too many Necco wafers.
Oh? And why is that?
They’re bad for your teeth. And don’t throw them at Luther. If properly aimed, they can be turned into deadly weapons, and Luther’s health is of great importance to me, since I want to go to a baseball game with him this summer.
All right, Archie. I won’t eat them, and I won’t throw them. I’ll just make them.
Jim had completed his masters in physics at Princeton and would be marrying Nancy Hammerstein in early June. They had already signed a lease on a two-bedroom apartment in South Orange, a third-floor flat in the building that stood on the corner of South Orange Avenue and Ridgewood Road, one of the rare apartment buildings in a town largely made up of one-family houses, and they would be moving in after they returned from their camping-trip honeymoon in the Berkshires. Jim had been offered a job teaching physics at West Orange High School and Nancy would be teaching history at Montclair High, but they had chosen to live in South Orange because Jim still had many friends there, and with babies on the not-too-distant horizon, it made sense to be in the same town as the future grandparents of those children. What a thought that was, Ferguson said to himself: he an uncle, Amy an aunt, and his mother and her father bouncing a pair of grandkids on their knees.
Howard was going back to the farm in Vermont, not to milk cows and repair barbed-wire fences as he had in the past but to put his four semesters of ancient Greek to good use by translating the written fragments and recorded utterances of Democritus and Heraclitus into English, the two pre-Socratic thinkers who were commonly referred to as the Laughing Philosopher and the Weeping Philosopher. Howard had discovered an amusing passage in an early text by John Donne that he was planning to insert as an epigraph to the project: Now among our wise men, I doubt not but many would be found who would laugh at Heraclitus weeping, none which weep at Democritus laughing. But even as Howard wrestled with his versions of D. (Action begins with boldness: chance rules the end) and H. (The way up and the way down are one and the same), he was pursuing his T.M. project as well, the work of illustrating the sixty best tennis matches he and Ferguson had come up with over the past two years, for Howard was one of those fluky beings who felt at home with both words and images and was happiest when living in both realms simultaneously, and beyond those jobs of translating and drawing, his chief objective that summer was to spend as many hours as he could with Mona Veltry, his childhood friend from Brattleboro who in recent months had been elevated to the status of girlfriend, lover, intellectual companion, and possible future wife. Before saying good-bye to each other at Princeton on the day following the last day of finals, Howard had extracted a promise from Ferguson to come to Vermont for two long visits that summer, perhaps even three.
Billy was closing in on the end of his long, four-hundred-page novel and was planning to release The Souls of Inanimate Things by mid-August. Ron and Peg Pearson were expecting their first child, and Ron, Ann, and Lewis, who had been talking about the idea for over a year, had fo
und a wealthy backer in Ann’s mother’s first husband’s ex-wife to help them launch a new publishing house, Tumult Books, a small press that would bring out six or seven books a year, standard-dimension hardcovers with sewn bindings and traditional typography printed by the same presses that churned out books for other New York publishers. Mimeo was far from dead, but alternative solutions were slowly becoming available because some of the penniless writers from lower Manhattan had figured out where the pennies were.
As for Celia, she too would be summering in Massachusetts along with Noah, Amy, and Luther, not with them in a literal sense but bound for the village of Woods Hole at the tip of Cape Cod’s western peninsula to work as an intern at the Marine Biological Laboratory. Not rats, as Noah had forecast back in the fall, but mollusks and plankton, and although Celia was technically too young for such a position, her Barnard biology professor, Alexander Mestrovic, had been so impressed by her intelligence and innate feel for the micro-nuances of cellular life that he had urged her to accompany him to Massachusetts for the genetics research project he would be participating in there, hoping the opportunity to observe the professors and advanced graduate students go about their business would acclimate her to the rigors of lab work, which in turn would help prepare her for a future in science. Celia was reluctant to go. She wanted to find a job in the city and live with Ferguson over the summer, which was precisely what he wanted as well, but no, he said, she couldn’t turn Mestrovic down, his invitation was an honor of such magnitude that she would regret not going for the rest of her life, and fear not, he added, he had access to a car and would be spending much time in Vermont and Massachusetts over the coming months, visiting Howard, Noah, Amy, and Luther in Newfane, Williamstown, and Somerville, and Woods Hole would be the prime destination on all his jaunts north, he would visit her as often as she could stand it, and please, he said to her, don’t be ridiculous, you have to accept, and so she did accept, and one morning smack in the middle of the Six-Day War, she kissed Ferguson good-bye and off she went.
There was little question that he would be lonely, but it wouldn’t be an unbearable loneliness, he felt, not with the chance to see her a couple of times every month, not with the extended visits to Howard’s farm, and now that his last little book was behind him, the slate was blank again. More than eight months had been put into dreaming up those peculiar meditations on household objects and the imagined lives they had led before he picked them off the street, the nutty excursus on the broken toaster and whether a broken toaster could still be called a toaster if it could no longer function as a toaster and if not whether it needed to be given another name, reflections on lamps, mirrors, rugs, and ashtrays along with stories about the imagined people who had owned them and used them before they wound up in his apartment, such a daunting if not pointless thing to have done, and now there was one more little book for Billy to make two hundred copies of and hand out to their friends. The last chapter of the Gizmo Period, as Ferguson would later come to think of it, three small works of dubious merit, no doubt flawed and stunted but never lackluster or predictable, at times even effulgent, so perhaps not the out-and-out failures he often took them to be, and because Billy and the others were behind what he did, perhaps good enough to have established him as someone with a possible future, the potential for a possible future, in any case, and having spent the past two-plus years composing that trio of frantic warm-up exercises, Ferguson understood that the first phase of his apprenticeship had come to an end. He needed to move on to something else now. Above all, he said to himself, he needed to slow down and start telling stories again, to work his way back into a world populated by minds other than his own.
He wrote nothing during the first three weeks of summer vacation. There was Jim and Nancy’s wedding in Brooklyn on June tenth, there were the splendid days with Celia in Woods Hole from the sixteenth to the eighteenth, but mostly he walked around the city and killed time, making an effort to keep his eyes fixed on the things in front of him as the still unanswered letter from Dana Rosenbloom sat in his pocket. New York was crumbling. The buildings, the sidewalks, the benches, the storm drains, the lampposts, the street signs were all cracked or broken or falling apart, hundreds of thousands of young men were fighting in Vietnam, the boys of Ferguson’s generation were being shipped off to be killed for reasons no one had fully or adequately justified, the old men in charge had lost hold of the truth, lies were the accepted currency of American political discourse now, and every roach-infested, piss-poor coffee joint up and down the length of Manhattan had a neon sign in the window that read: THE BEST CUP OF COFFEE IN THE WORLD.
Dana was married, six months pregnant, and both happy and fulfilled according to her letter. Ferguson was glad for her. Knowing what he now knew about himself, it was clear that she had done well to avoid marrying a man incapable of fathering children, but much as he wanted to write back to congratulate her, other parts of her letter had disturbed him, and he was still searching for a way to answer her. The exultant tone of her comments about the war, the smug certainties of military conquest, the tribalism of Hebrew warriors vanquishing their myriad foes. The West Bank, Sinai, East Jerusalem, all under Israeli control now, and yes, it had been a great and surprising victory, and of course they were feeling proud of themselves, but no good would come of it if Israel persisted in occupying those territories, Ferguson felt, it would only lead to more trouble down the road, but Dana couldn’t see that, perhaps no one in Israel could look at the situation from the outside, they had been trapped inside their fear for so long and now they were dancing inside their newly won power, and because Ferguson didn’t want to upset Dana with his opinions, which could have been wrong opinions for all he knew, he kept putting off the letter he wanted to write.
Six days after he returned from Woods Hole, he went out for another one of his rambles through the city, and as he walked past a vacant lot cluttered with abandoned refrigerators, headless dolls, and smashed-up high chairs, an unbidden phrase surged up in his mind, four words that came to him as if from nowhere and then continued to repeat themselves as he went on walking, the capital of ruins, and the more he thought about those words, the more convinced he became that they were the title of his next piece of work, a novel this time, his first attempt at a novel, a grave and pitiless book about the broken country he lived in, a descent into a much darker register than anything that had come before it, and even as he walked along the sidewalk that afternoon, it was beginning to take shape inside him, the story of a doctor named Henry Noyes, whose name was stolen from pre-med student William Noyes, Ferguson’s freshman-year suitemate at Brown Hall, but a name that was pronounced as if it were the word noise and yet broke down into the words no and yes when you separated the second and third letters was the inevitable choice, the only choice that answered the needs of the story. The Capital of Ruins. It would take Ferguson two years to finish that two-hundred-and-forty-six-page novel, but one day before he set off for Howard’s farm in Vermont, on June 30, 1967, he sat down and wrote the first version of the first paragraph of what he would come to regard as his first real book.
He remembered the first outbreak thirty-five years ago, the rash of inexplicable suicides that had stunned the city of R. during the winter and spring of 1931, that terrible stretch of months when close to two dozen young people between the ages of fifteen and twenty had put an end to their own lives. He had been young then himself, just fourteen years old, a freshman in high school, and he would never forget hearing the news that Billy Nolan was dead, never forget the tears that had poured out of him when he was told that beautiful Alice Morgan had hanged herself in the attic of her house. Most of them hanged themselves thirty-five years ago, leaving behind no note or explanation, and now it was starting again, four deaths in March alone, but this time the young people were killing themselves by asphyxiation, gassing themselves to death as they sat in idling cars parked inside locked garages. He knew there would be more deaths, that more young people
would vanish before the epidemic came to an end, and he took those disasters personally, for he was a doctor now, general practitioner Henry J. Noyes, and three of the four newly dead children had been his patients, Eddie Brickman, Linda Ryan, and Ruth Mariano, and he had brought all three of them into the world with his own hands.
* * *
THEY WERE ALL supposed to gather at Howard’s farm between five and six o’clock on Saturday, July first. Celia would be coming from Woods Hole in the used Chevy Impala her parents had bought for her in May, Schneiderman and Bond from Somerville in the 1961 Skylark the Waxmans had given Luther as a going-away present when he left for his freshman year of college, and Ferguson from the house on Woodhall Crescent, where he had to go early that morning to fetch the old Pontiac. The plan was to spend Saturday night at the farm, eat breakfast there the following morning, and then drive over to Williamstown to watch Noah strut the boards as Konstantin in the Sunday matinee of The Seagull. After that, Celia would return to Woods Hole, Amy and Luther would return to Somerville, and Ferguson, Howard, and Mona Veltry would go back to the farm. Ferguson had an open invitation to remain there as long as he wished. He imagined he would stick around for about two weeks, but nothing was definite, and perhaps he would camp out there for the rest of the month, with trips to Woods Hole on the weekends.