2.3
His grandfather called it a curious interregnum, meaning a time that stood between two other times, a time of no time when all the rules about how you were supposed to live had been thrown out the window, and even though the fatherless boy understood that it couldn’t last forever, he wished it could have gone on longer than the two months he had been given, another two months on top of the first two, perhaps, or another six months, or maybe even a year. It had been good to live in that time of no school, that curious gap between one life and the next when his mother was with him from the second he opened his eyes in the morning until the second he closed them at night, for she was the only person who felt real to him anymore, the only real person left in the world, and how good it had been to share those days and weeks with her, those strange two months of eating out in restaurants and visiting empty apartments and going to the movies nearly every afternoon, so many movies watched together in the darkness of the balcony, where they could cry whenever they wanted to and not have to explain themselves to anyone. His mother called it wallowing in the mud, and by that Ferguson supposed she meant the mud of their unhappiness, but sinking into that unhappiness could be eerily satisfying, he discovered, as long as you sank into it as far as you could and weren’t afraid to drown, and because the tears kept pushing them back into the past, they had protected them from having to think about the future, but then one day his mother said it was time to start thinking about it, and the crying came to an end.
Unfortunately, school was inevitable. Much as Ferguson would have wished to prolong his freedom, it was not in his power to control such things, and once he and his mother decided to rent the apartment on Central Park West, the next order of business was to place him in a good private school. Public school was out of the question. Aunt Mildred was emphatic about that point, and in a rare instance of accord between the sisters, Ferguson’s mother followed her advice, knowing that Mildred was better informed on matters of education than she was, and why throw Archie onto the rugged asphalt of a public school playground when she could afford the expense of private school tuition? She only wanted what was best for her boy, and New York had turned into a grimmer, more dangerous city than the one she had left in 1944, with youth gangs roaming the streets of the Upper West Side armed with switchblades and deadly zip guns, just twenty-five blocks north of where her parents lived and yet another universe, a neighborhood that had been transformed by the influx of Puerto Rican immigrants in the past few years, a dirtier, poorer, more colorful place than it had been during the war, the air now charged with unfamiliar smells and sounds, a different sort of energy animating the sidewalks on Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, one had only to step outdoors to feel an undercurrent of menace and confusion, and Ferguson’s mother, who had always felt so comfortable in New York as a child and young woman, worried about her son’s safety. The second half of the curious interregnum was consequently devoted to more than just shopping for furniture and going to the movies, there were also the half dozen private schools on Mildred’s list to be looked at and discussed, the tours of classrooms and facilities, the interviews with headmasters and admissions directors, the I.Q. tests and entrance exams, and when Ferguson was accepted by Mildred’s number one choice, the Hilliard School for Boys, there was such rejoicing in the family, such a wave of warmth and enthusiasm washing over him from his grandparents and his mother and his aunt and uncle and his Great-aunt Pearl that the nearly eight-year-old fatherless boy figured school might not be such a bad way to pass the time, after all. It wasn’t going to be easy to fit in, of course, not when it was late February and the school year was almost two-thirds finished, and it wasn’t going to be fun having to wear a jacket and tie every day, but perhaps it wouldn’t be a problem, and perhaps he would begin to get used to the clothes, but even if it was a problem and he didn’t get used to the clothes, it wasn’t going to make any difference, for he was on his way to the Hilliard School for Boys whether he liked it or not.
He went there because Aunt Mildred had convinced his mother that Hilliard was one of the best schools in the city, with a long-standing reputation for academic excellence, but no one had told Ferguson that his fellow students would be among the richest children in America, the scions of privileged, old-money New York, or that he would be the only boy in his class who lived on the West Side and one of only eleven non-Christians in a school with a K-through-12 enrollment of nearly six hundred. At first, no one suspected he was anything other than a Scottish Presbyterian, an understandable error in light of the name his grandfather had been given after the Rockefeller bungle of 1900, but then one of the teachers noticed that Ferguson’s lips weren’t moving when he was supposed to be saying Jesus Christ, our Lord at morning chapel, and word eventually got out that he was one of the eleven and not one of the five hundred and seventy-six. Add in the fact that he entered the school as a latecomer, a mostly silent boy with no ties to anyone in the class, and it would appear that Ferguson’s tenure at Hilliard was doomed from the start, doomed before he even set foot in the building on his first day.
It wasn’t that anyone was unkind to him, or that anyone harassed him, or that he was made to feel unwelcome. As with every other school, there were friendly boys and neutral boys and nasty boys, but not even the nastiest among them ever taunted Ferguson for being a Jew. Hilliard might have been a stuffy, jacket-and-tie sort of place, but it also preached tolerance and the virtues of gentlemanly self-control, and any act of overt prejudice would have been dealt with harshly by the authorities. More subtly, and more confusingly, what Ferguson had to contend with was a guileless sort of ignorance that seemed to have been injected into his classmates at birth. Even Doug Hayes, the ever amiable and good-hearted Dougie Hayes, who had made a point of befriending Ferguson from the moment he arrived at Hilliard, who had been the first boy to invite him to a birthday party and had subsequently asked him over to his parents’ townhouse on East Seventy-eighth Street no fewer than a dozen times, could still ask, after having known Ferguson for nine months, what he was planning to do on Thanksgiving.
Eat turkey, Ferguson said. That’s what we do every year. My mother and I go to my grandparents’ apartment and eat turkey with stuffing and gravy.
Oh, Dougie said. I had no idea.
Why not? Ferguson answered. Isn’t that what you do?
Of course. I just didn’t know your people celebrated Thanksgiving.
My people?
You know. Jewish people.
Why wouldn’t we celebrate Thanksgiving?
Because it’s kind of an American thing, I guess. The Pilgrims. Plymouth Rock. All those English guys with the funny black hats who came over on the Mayflower.
Ferguson was so bewildered by Dougie’s comment that he didn’t know what to say. Until that moment, it had never occurred to him that he might not be an American, or, more precisely, that his way of being an American was any less authentic than the way Dougie and the other boys were American, but that was what his friend seemed to be asserting: that there was a difference between them, an elusive, indefinable quality that had to do with black-hatted English ancestors and the length of time spent on this side of the ocean and the money to live in four-story townhouses on the Upper East Side that made some families more American than others, and in the end the difference was so great that the less American families could barely be considered American at all.
No doubt his mother had chosen the wrong school for him, but in spite of that perplexing conversation about Jewish dining habits on national feast days, not to mention other perplexing moments both before and after his talk with Dougie H., Ferguson never felt any desire to leave Hilliard. Even if he failed to grasp the peculiar customs and beliefs of the world he had entered, he did his best to comply with them, and not once did he blame his mother or Aunt Mildred for having sent him there. He had to be somewhere, after all. The law said that every child under the age of sixteen had to go to school, and as far as he was concerned, Hilliard wa
s no better or no worse than any other penitentiary for the young. It wasn’t the school’s fault that he did so badly there. In those bleak early days following Stanley Ferguson’s death, young Ferguson had concluded that he was living in an upside-down universe of infinitely reversible propositions (day = night, hope = despair, power = weakness), which meant that when it came to the question of school he was now obliged to fail rather than succeed, and given how good it felt not to care anymore, to court failure as a matter of principle and will himself into the comforting arms of humiliation and defeat, it was all but certain that he would have failed just as gloriously anywhere else.
His teachers found him lazy and unmotivated, indifferent to authority, distracted, stubborn, shockingly undisciplined, a human puzzle. The boy who had answered every question on the entrance exam correctly, who had won over the admissions director with his sweet nature and precocious insights, the late-in-the-year add-on who was supposed to bring home top marks in every subject earned only one Excellent on his first report card, which was issued in April of his second-grade year. The subject was gym. A grade of Good for reading, writing, and penmanship (he had tried to do worse, but he was still a beginner at masking his talents), Satisfactory in music (he couldn’t resist belting out the Negro spirituals and Irish folk songs that Mr. Bowles taught them, even though he struggled to stay in tune), and Poor in everything else, which included math, science, art, social studies, comportment, citizenship, and attitude. The next and final report card, which was issued in June, was almost identical to the first, the only difference being his grade in math, which descended from Poor to Fail (he had perfected the art of giving wrong answers to arithmetic questions by then, three out of every five on average, but he still couldn’t bring himself to misspell more than a tenth of his words). Under normal circumstances, Ferguson would not have been asked back for the following year. His work had been so hideously subpar as to suggest profound psychological trouble, and a school like Hilliard was not accustomed to carrying dead weight, at least not when the flunker came from a non-legacy family, legacy meaning a third- or fourth- or fifth-generation boy whose father wrote out a check every year or sat on the board of trustees. They were willing to give Ferguson another chance, however, for they understood that his circumstances were anything but normal. Mr. Ferguson had died in the middle of the school year, a sudden, violent death that had sent the boy spinning into the nether zones of grief and disintegration, and surely he deserved a little more time to pull himself together. He had too much potential for them to give up on him after just three and a half months, and therefore they informed Ferguson’s mother that her son would have one more year to prove himself. If he could turn it around by then, he would no longer be on probation. If not, well, that would be that, and good luck to him wherever he happened to land.
Ferguson hated himself for having disappointed his mother, whose life was hard enough without having to fret about his rotten performance at school, but there were more important issues at stake than trying to please her or bending over backward to impress the family with a report card full of Excellents and Very Goods. He knew that life would have been simpler for him and everyone else if he had toed the line and done what was expected of him. How easy and thoroughly uncomplicated it would have been to stop giving wrong answers on purpose, to begin paying attention again and make everyone proud of him for being such a conscientious boy, but Ferguson had embarked on a grand experiment, a secret investigation into the most fundamental matters concerning life and death, and he couldn’t turn back now, he was traveling down a rough and perilous road, alone among the rocks and twisting mountain paths, in danger of falling off the precipice at any moment, but until enough information had been gathered to provide him with conclusive results, he would have to go on putting himself at risk—even if it meant being expelled from the Hilliard School for Boys, even if it meant turning himself into a disgrace.
The question was: Why had God stopped talking to him? And if God was silent now, did that mean He would be silent forever or eventually start talking to him again? And if He never talked again, could it mean that Ferguson had deluded himself and God had never been there in the first place?
For as long as he could remember, the voice had been in his head, talking to him whenever he was alone, a quiet, measured voice that was at once reassuring and commanding, a baritone murmur bearing the verbal emanations of the great invisible spirit who ruled the world, and Ferguson had always felt comforted by that voice, protected by that voice, which told him that as long as he kept up his end of the bargain all would go well for him, his end being an eternal promise to be good, to treat others with kindness and generosity, and to obey the holy commandments, which meant never lying or stealing or succumbing to envy, which meant loving his parents and working hard at school and staying out of trouble, and Ferguson believed in the voice and did his best to follow its instructions at all times, and since God seemed to be keeping up His end of the bargain by making things go well for him, Ferguson felt loved and happy, secure in the knowledge that God believed in him just as much as he believed in God. So it went until he was seven and a half, and then one morning in early November, a morning that felt no different from any other morning, his mother walked into his room and told him his father was dead, and everything suddenly changed. God had lied to him. The great invisible spirit could no longer be trusted, and even though He went on talking to Ferguson for the next several days, asking for another chance to prove Himself, beseeching the fatherless boy to stay with him through this dark time of death and mourning, Ferguson was so angry at Him that he refused to listen. Then, four days after the funeral, the voice abruptly went silent, and since that day it hadn’t spoken again.
That was the challenge now: to figure out whether God was still with him in the silence or whether He had vanished from his life for good. Ferguson didn’t have the heart to commit a knowing act of cruelty, he couldn’t bring himself to lie or cheat or steal, he had no inclination to hurt or offend his mother, but within the narrow scope of misdeeds he was capable of, he understood that the only way to answer the question was to break his end of the bargain as often as he could, to defy the injunction to follow the holy commandments and then wait for God to do something bad to him, something nasty and personal that would serve as a clear sign of intended retribution—a broken arm, an attack of boils on his face, a rabid dog biting off a chunk of his leg. If God failed to punish him, that would prove He had indeed disappeared when the voice stopped talking, and since God was supposedly everywhere, in every tree and blade of grass, in every gust of wind and human feeling, it made no sense that He could disappear from one place and still be everywhere else. He necessarily had to be with Ferguson because He was in all places at the same time, and if He was absent from the place where Ferguson happened to be, that could only mean that He was in no place and had never been in any place at all, that He in fact had never existed and the voice Ferguson had taken for the voice of God had been none other than his own voice speaking to him in an inner conversation with himself.
The first act of revolt had been tearing up the Ted Williams baseball card, the precious card that Jeff Balsoni had slipped into his hand a couple of days after he returned to school as a gesture of undying friendship and commiseration. How disgusting it had been to destroy that gift, and how shameful it had been to turn his eyes away from Mrs. Costello and pretend she hadn’t been there, and now that he was at Hilliard, how unconscionable it was for him to be pursuing his campaign of willful self-sabotage, building on his efforts of the first year to establish a new pattern of maddeningly inconsistent results, a far more effective strategy than one of pure failure, he decided, a hundred percent on two math tests in a row, for example, and then twenty-five percent on the next, forty percent on the one after that, and then ninety percent followed by a dead-last zero, how mystified they all were by him, his teachers and classmates alike, not to mention his poor mother and the rest of his family, and yet
even though Ferguson continued to spit on the rules of responsible human behavior, no dog had jumped up to bite him on the leg, no boulder had dropped on his foot, no slamming door had crushed his nose, and it seemed that God had no interest in punishing him, for Ferguson had been engaged in a life of crime for almost a year now, and still there wasn’t a single scratch on him.
That should have settled the matter once and for all, but it didn’t. If God wouldn’t punish him, that meant He couldn’t punish him, and therefore He didn’t exist. Or so Ferguson had assumed, but now that God was on the verge of being lost to him forever, he asked himself: What if he had already been punished enough? What if the killing of his father had been punishment on such a grand scale, a tragedy with such monstrous, everlasting effects, that God had decided to spare him from any other punishments in the future? That seemed possible to him, by no means certain but possible, yet with the voice still silent after so many months, Ferguson had no way of confirming his intuition. God had wronged him, and now He was struggling to make it up to Ferguson by treating him with divine gentleness and mercy. If the voice could no longer tell him what he needed to know, perhaps God could communicate with him in some other way, through some inaudible sign that would prove He was still listening to his thoughts, and so began the final stage of Ferguson’s long theological inquiry, the months of silent prayer when he begged God to reveal Himself to him or else lose the right to bear the name of God. Ferguson wasn’t asking for some grand, biblical revelation, a mighty clap of thunder or a sudden parting of the seas, no, he would have been content with something small, an infinitesimal miracle that only he himself would have been aware of: for the wind to blow hard enough to push an errant scrap of paper across the street before the traffic light changed color, for his watch to stop ticking for ten seconds and then start again, for a single drop of rain to fall from a cloudless sky and land on his finger, for his mother to say the word mysterious within the next thirty seconds, for the radio to turn on by itself, for seventeen people to pass in front of the window within the next minute and a half, for the robin on the grass in Central Park to pull out a worm before the next plane passed overhead, for three cars to honk their horns at the same time, for the book in his hand to fall open to page 97, for the wrong date to appear on the front page of the morning paper, for a quarter to be lying next to his foot when he looked down at the sidewalk, for the Dodgers to score three runs in the bottom of the ninth and win the game, for his Great-aunt Pearl’s cat to wink at him, for everyone in the room to yawn at the same time, for everyone in the room to laugh at the same time, for no one in the room to make a sound for the next thirty-three and a third seconds. One by one, Ferguson wished for those things to happen, those things and many others as well, and when none of them happened over six months of wordless supplication, he stopped wishing for anything and turned his thoughts away from God.