When did it happen? he asked.
Just yesterday, his mother said. When you were in New York with Uncle Don and Noah. It’s quite an amazing story.
How so?
Do you remember Mr. Schneiderman, the photographer I used to work for when I was young?
Ferguson nodded. Of course he remembered Mr. Schneiderman, that grumpy old geezer who came to dinner about once a year, the one with the white goatee who slurped his soup and once had farted at the table without even noticing it.
Well, his mother said, Mr. Schneiderman has two grown sons, Daniel and Gilbert, both of them around your father’s age, and yesterday Daniel and his wife came here for lunch, and guess what?
You don’t have to tell me.
Quite amazing, don’t you think?
I suppose.
They have two children, a thirteen-year-old boy and a nine-year-old girl, and that girl, Amy, is about the prettiest little girl I’ve ever seen. A real heartthrob, Archie.
Good for her.
Okay, sourpuss, but what happens if she winds up living in your room? Would you care?
It’ll be her room then, not mine, so why would I care?
The school year ended, and the following weekend Ferguson was sent off to a sleepaway camp in New York State. It was the first time he had left home, but he went without dread or compunction because Noah was going with him, and the fact was that he was sick of home just then, weary of all the talk about old houses that weren’t old and pretty girls who would be stealing his room, and eight weeks in the country would surely take his mind off those aggravations. Camp Paradise was situated in the northeastern quadrant of Columbia County, not far from the Massachusetts border and the foothills of the Berkshires, and his parents had chosen to send him there because Nancy Solomon knew someone who knew someone whose children had been going to that camp for years and had nothing but good things to say about it, and once Ferguson was signed up, his mother spoke to her sister, who then spoke to her husband, and Noah was signed up as well. Ferguson and his cousin left from Grand Central Station with a large contingent of fellow campers, close to two hundred boys and girls between the ages of seven and fifteen, and a couple of minutes before they boarded the train, Uncle Don took Ferguson aside and asked him to watch out for Noah, to see that he stayed out of trouble and wasn’t picked on by the other boys, and because Uncle Don had that much confidence in him, which implied that he saw something strong and trustworthy about Ferguson, Ferguson promised Uncle Don he would do everything he could to make sure Noah was protected.
Fortunately, Camp Paradise wasn’t a rough sort of place, and it didn’t take long before Ferguson understood that he could let down his guard. Discipline was lax, and unlike Boy Scout camps or religious camps, whose objective was to build character in the young, the directors of Camp Paradise held to the less exalted aim of making life as enjoyable as possible. In his first days there, as Ferguson began to adjust to the new environment, he made several interesting discoveries, among them the fact that he was the only boy in his group who lived in the suburbs. Everyone else came from New York, and he was surrounded by a multitude of city kids who had grown up in neighborhoods such as Flatbush, Midwood, Boro Park, Washington Heights, Forest Hills, and the Grand Concourse, Brooklyn boys, Manhattan boys, Queens boys, Bronx boys, the sons of middle-class and lower-middle-class schoolteachers, accountants, civil servants, bartenders, and traveling salesmen. Until then, Ferguson had assumed that private summer camps were exclusively for the children of rich bankers and lawyers, but apparently he had been wrong, and then, as the days passed and he learned the names of scores of boys and girls, first names and last names both, he understood that everyone in the camp was Jewish, from the husband and wife owners (Irving and Edna Katz) to the head counselor (Jack Feldman) to the counselor and junior counselor in his own cabin (Harvey Rabinowitz and Bob Greenberg) to every last one of the two hundred and twenty-four campers who were there for the summer. The public school he attended in Maplewood was populated by a mixture of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, but now it was all Jews and only Jews, and for the first time in his life Ferguson had been thrust into an ethnic enclave, a ghetto of sorts, but in this case a fresh-air ghetto with trees and grass and birds darting across the blue sky above him, and once he had absorbed the newness of the situation, it ceased to have any importance to him.
What counted most was that his days were spent in a round of pleasurable activities, not just ones he already knew, such as baseball, swimming, and ping-pong, but assorted novelties that included archery, volleyball, tug-of-war, rowing, broad-jumping, and, best of all, the miraculous sensation of paddling a canoe. He was a sturdy, athletic boy who was naturally drawn to these physical pursuits, but the good thing about Camp Paradise was that one could choose between activities, and for those not athletically inclined there was art, pottery, music, and theater instead of rugged competition with bats and balls. The only mandatory activity was swimming, two thirty-minute swim sessions per day, one before lunch and one before dinner, but everyone liked to cool off in the water, and if you weren’t an accomplished swimmer, you could splash around in the shallow end of the lake. Therefore, when Ferguson was fielding grounders at one end of the camp, Noah was drawing in the art shack at the other end of the camp, and when Ferguson was gliding across the water in his beloved canoe, Noah was busy rehearsing a play. The runty, odd-looking Noah had clung to Ferguson during the first week, nervous and unsure of himself, no doubt expecting someone to trip him or call him names, but the attack never materialized, and soon he began to settle in, making friends with some of the other boys, putting his cabinmates in stitches with his Alfred E. Neuman impersonations, and even (Ferguson was flabbergasted) acquiring a suntan in the process.
Of course there were disputes and conflicts and occasional brawls, for this was Camp Paradise and not paradise itself, but nothing out of the ordinary as far as Ferguson could tell, and the one time he came close to exchanging blows with another boy, the cause of the disagreement was so laughable that he couldn’t muster the enthusiasm to fight. It was 1956, a year in a string of many years when New York stood at the center of the baseball universe, with three teams that had dominated the sport through a decade-long run, the Yankees, Dodgers, and Giants, and except for 1948, at least one of those teams and often two of them had played in the World Series every year since the first year of Ferguson’s life. No one was neutral. Every man, woman, and child in New York and its surrounding suburbs rooted for a team, for the most part with intense devotion, and the supporters of the Yankees, Dodgers, and Giants all despised one another, which led to many useless arguments, an occasional punch in the face, and once, notoriously, a barroom shooting death. For the boys and girls of Ferguson’s generation, the longest-running argument revolved around the question of which team had the best center fielder, since all three of them were superb players, the best ones at that position anywhere in baseball, among the finest in the history of the game, and many hours were squandered by those young people in debating the virtues of Duke Snider (Dodgers), Mickey Mantle (Yankees), and Willie Mays (Giants), and so fervent were the supporters of each team that most of them would blindly defend the center fielder on his or her ball club out of pure, unflinching loyalty. Ferguson was a Dodger fan because his mother had grown up in Brooklyn as a Dodger fan and had inculcated him with a love of underdogs and hopeless causes, since the Dodgers of his mother’s childhood had been a bumbling, often pathetic team, but now they were a powerhouse, the reigning world champions, on a par with the almighty Yankees, and of the eight boys who bunked in his cabin that summer, three were for the Yankees, two were for the Giants, and three were for the Dodgers, among them Ferguson, Noah, and a boy named Mark Dubinsky. One afternoon, during the forty-five-minute rest period that followed lunch, which was usually spent reading Superman comic books, writing letters, and studying two-day-old box scores in the New York Post, Dubinsky, whose bed stood to the left of Ferguson’s (Noah’s was
to the right), brought up the old question once again, telling Ferguson how staunchly he had argued for Snider over Mantle in a discussion with two Yankee fans that morning, fully expecting Dodger-fan Ferguson to take his side, but Ferguson didn’t do that, for much as he worshipped the Duke, he said, Mantle was a better player, and on top of that Mays was even better than Mantle, only by a whisker, perhaps, but clearly better, and why would Dubinsky persist in deluding himself about the facts? Ferguson’s answer was so unexpected, so tranquil in its assertions, so thorough in its demolition of Dubinsky’s belief in the power of faith over reason that Dubinsky took offense, violent offense, and a moment later he was standing over Ferguson’s bed and yelling at the top of his voice, calling Ferguson a traitor, an atheist, a communist, and a two-timing fraud, and maybe he should bash him in the gut to teach him a lesson. As Dubinsky clenched his fists, preparing to pounce on Ferguson, Ferguson sat up and told him to take it easy. You can think what you want, Mark, he said, but I’m entitled to my opinion, too. No, you’re not, Dubinsky answered, still beside himself, not if you’re a Dodger-man you’re not. Ferguson had no interest in fighting Dubinsky, who was not normally prone to such hotheaded behavior, but that afternoon it seemed he was longing for a fight, that something about Ferguson had gotten under his skin and he wanted to break their friendship to pieces, and as Ferguson sat on his bed, pondering whether he could talk his way out of it or whether he would indeed be compelled to stand up and fight, Noah suddenly butted in. Boys, boys, he said, speaking in a deep, darkly funny Father-knows-best voice, stop this senseless quarreling at once. We all know who the best center fielder is, don’t we? Ferguson and Dubinsky both turned and looked at Noah, who was lying on his bed with his elbow on the pillow and his head propped up in his hand. Dubinsky said: All right, Harpo, let’s hear it—but it better be the right answer. Now that he had their attention, Noah paused for a moment and smiled, a goofy yet inordinately beatific smile that lodged itself in Ferguson’s memory and was never lost, recalled again and again as he passed from childhood to adolescence and into his adulthood, a lightning bolt of pure, wild-eyed whimsy that revealed the true heart of the nine-year-old Noah Marx for the second or two it lasted, and then Noah ended the confrontation by saying: I am.
For the first month, Ferguson never thought about how happy he was in that place. He was too immersed in what he was doing to stop and reflect on his feelings, too caught up in the now to be able to see past it or behind it, living in the moment, as his counselor Harvey had said about performing well in sports, which was perhaps the real definition of happiness, not knowing you were happy, not caring about anything except being alive in the now, but then parents’ visiting day was suddenly looming, the Sunday that marked the midpoint of the eight-week session, and in the days before that Sunday arrived, Ferguson was startled to discover that he wasn’t looking forward to seeing his parents again, not even his mother, whom he had thought he would miss terribly but hadn’t, had missed only in some intermittent and painful flashes, and especially not his father, who had been erased from his mind for the past month and no longer seemed to count for him. Camp was better than home, he realized. Life among friends was richer and more fulfilling than life with parents, which meant that parents were less important than he had previously supposed, a heretical, even revolutionary idea that gave Ferguson much to think about as he lay in his bed at night, and then visiting day was upon him, and when he saw his mother step out of the car and begin walking in his direction, he unexpectedly found himself fighting back tears. How ridiculous. How perfectly embarrassing to behave like that, he thought, and yet what could he do about it except run into her arms and let her kiss him?
Something was wrong, however. Uncle Don was supposed to have driven up to the camp with Ferguson’s parents, but he wasn’t with them, and when Ferguson asked his mother why Noah’s father wasn’t there, she gave him a tense look and said she would explain later. Later occurred about an hour after that, when his parents drove him across the Massachusetts border for lunch at a Friendly’s restaurant in Great Barrington. As usual, it was his mother who did the talking, but for once his father looked attentive and engaged, following her words as closely as Ferguson did, and given what she had to say, what the circumstances demanded she say, it didn’t surprise Ferguson that his mother looked more rattled than at any time in recent memory, her voice quavering as she spoke, wanting to spare her son the worst of it but at the same time unable to soften the blow without distorting the truth, for the truth was what mattered now, and even if Ferguson was only nine years old, it was imperative that he hear the whole story, with nothing left out.
This is it, Archie, she said, lighting an unfiltered Chesterfield and blowing a bluish-gray cloud of smoke across the Formica table. Don and Mildred have split up. Their marriage is over. I wish I could give you the reason, but Mildred won’t tell me. She’s so ravaged, she hasn’t stopped crying for the past ten days. I don’t know if Don has fallen for someone else or if things just cracked up on their own, but Don is out of the picture now, and there’s no chance they’ll get back together. I’ve talked to him a couple of times, but he won’t tell me anything either. Just that he and Mildred are finished, that he never should have married her in the first place, that everything was wrong from the start. No, he’s not going back to Noah’s mother. What he’s planning to do is move to Paris. He’s already cleared out his stuff from the Perry Street apartment, and he’s set to leave before the end of the month. Which brings me to Noah. Don wants to spend some time with him before he takes off, so his ex-wife, and by that I mean his first ex-wife, his ex-wife Gwendolyn, has come to the camp today to fetch Noah and drive him back to New York. That’s right, Archie, Noah is leaving. I know how close the two of you have become, what good friends you are now, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I called that woman, Gwendolyn Marx, and told her that no matter what’s happened between Don and Mildred, I wanted our boys to stay in touch, that it would be a pity if their friendship suffered because of it, but she’s a hard person that one, Archie, bitter and angry, with a heart made of ice, and she said she wouldn’t consider it. And after his father leaves for Paris, I asked, will Noah be coming back to camp? Out of the question, she said. Well, at least give the boys a chance to say good-bye to each other on Sunday, I said, and she said, get this, she said: What for? I was burning by then, about as angry as I’ve ever been in my life, and I shouted at her: How can you ask that question? And she calmly answered: I need to protect Noah from emotional scenes; his life is hard enough as it is. I don’t know what to tell you, Archie. The woman is out of her mind. And there’s my sister doped up on tranquilizers, weeping her heart out on the bed. And Don has walked out on her, and Noah has been taken from you, and frankly, kid, it’s one hell of a beautiful mess, isn’t it?
The second month at Camp Paradise was the month of the empty bed. The bare mattress on the metal springs to the right of where Ferguson continued to sleep, the bed of the now absent Noah, and every day Ferguson asked himself if they would ever see each other again. Cousins for a year and a half, and now cousins no more. An aunt who had married an uncle, and now married no more, with the uncle living on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, where he could no longer be with his boy. Everything solid for a time, and then the sun comes up one morning and the world begins to melt.
Ferguson went home to Maplewood at the end of August, said good-bye to his room, said good-bye to the ping-pong table in the backyard, said good-bye to the broken screen door in the kitchen, and the following week he and his parents moved into their new house on the other side of town. The era of life on a grander scale had begun.
2.1
For as long as he could remember, Ferguson had been looking at the drawing of the girl on the White Rock bottle. That was the brand of seltzer his mother bought on her twice-weekly trips to the A&P, and since his father was a firm believer in the virtues of seltzer water, there had always been a bottle of White Rock sitting on the ta
ble at dinner. Ferguson had therefore studied the girl hundreds of times, keeping the bottle near him in order to look at the black-and-white image of her half-naked body on the label, that enticing, serenely elegant girl with the small bare breasts and the white loincloth draped around her hips falling open to reveal the entire length of her right leg, the foregrounded leg that was curled under her as she leaned forward on her hands and knees and gazed into a pool of water from her perch on the jutting rock, which fittingly bore the words White Rock, and the curious, altogether unlikely thing about the girl was that two diaphanous wings were protruding from her back, which meant that she was more than human, a goddess or an enchanted being of some sort, and because her limbs were so slender and she gave the impression of being so small, she still qualified as a girl and not yet a full-grown woman, regardless of her breasts, which were the tiny, budding breasts of a twelve- or thirteen-year-old, and with her neatly pinned-up hair exposing the bare, luminous skin of her neck and shoulders, she was just the kind of girl a boy could entertain serious thoughts about, and when that boy turned a little older, say twelve or thirteen, the White Rock girl could easily evolve into a full-blown erotic charm, a summons to a world of fleshly passion and fully awakened desires, and once that happened to Ferguson, he made sure that his parents weren’t looking at him when he looked at the bottle.