He had been researching the matter for several months, he told them, and the best schools seemed to be in New England, mostly in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, but also in Vermont and Connecticut, with some good ones in upstate New York and Pennsylvania, and even a couple in New Jersey. It was only September, he realized, twelve whole months before the start of the next school year, but applications had to be sent in by mid-January, and unless they began narrowing the list of potential schools now, there wouldn’t be enough time to make an informed decision.
Ferguson could hear his voice trembling as he spoke to them, he and his smug, unknowable parents sitting around the dining room table on a Tuesday night during the fall of the Kennedy-Nixon campaign, a family dinner for once, something that happened less and less often now because of the late closings of the stores and his mother’s newfound passion for bridge, which kept her out of the house two and three nights a week, and there they were in the dining room as Angie Bly shuttled back and forth between the kitchen and the table, bringing in the dishes for each new course and removing the ones from the old, vegetable soup to begin with, followed by thick slices of roast beef with mashed potatoes and a mound of buttery string beans, such excellent food cooked by the brusque and capable Angie Bly, who had been cleaning house and cooking meals for them five days a week for the past four years, and now that Ferguson had swallowed his last morsel of roast beef, he finally spoke up, finally found the courage to talk about the thing that had been burning inside him for months.
He watched his parents carefully as the words left his mouth, studying their faces for signs that would tell him what they thought of his plan, but mostly they looked blank, he thought, as if they couldn’t quite absorb what he was saying, for why would he want to leave the perfect world he lived in, he who was doing so well at school, who took such pleasure in playing on his baseball and basketball teams, who had so many friends and was invited to all the weekend parties, what more could a thirteen-year-old boy possibly want, and because Ferguson was loath to insult his parents by confessing that they were the reason why he wanted to go away, that living under the same roof with them had become almost intolerable to him, he lied and said he was hungry for a change, that he was feeling restless, smothered by the smallness of their small town and longing to take on new challenges, to test himself in a place that wasn’t home.
He understood how ridiculous he must have sounded to them, trying to put his points across and make compelling, sophisticated arguments with his out-of-control, unpredictable voice, his post-boy-pre-man pipes still oscillating from high to low and back again as they sought their ultimate register, a vocal instrument that lacked all authority and command, and how ridiculous he must have looked to them as well, with his chewed-down fingernails and the newborn pus blob sprouting just to the left of his left nostril, a little no one who had been blessed with every material advantage in life, food and shelter and a thousand comforts, and Ferguson was old enough to know how lucky he was to dwell in the upper echelons of good fortune, old enough to know that nine-tenths of humanity was cold and hungry and menaced by want and perpetual fear, and who was he to complain about his lot, how dare he express the smallest note of dissatisfaction, and because he knew where he stood in the big picture of human struggle, he felt ashamed of his unhappiness, revolted by his inability to accept the bounties he had been given, but feelings were feelings, and he couldn’t stop himself from feeling angry and disappointed, for no act of will could change what a person felt.
The problems were the same problems he had identified years earlier, but now they were worse, so much worse that Ferguson had concluded they were beyond fixing. The absurd pistachio-green Cadillac, the lifeless, immaculately tended precincts of the Blue Valley Country Club, the talk about voting for Nixon in November—they were all symptoms of an illness that had long infected his father, but his father had been a lost cause from the start, and Ferguson had watched his rise into the ranks of nouveau riche vulgarians with a sort of numb resignation. Then came the death of Roseland Photo, which had thrown him into a funk that had lasted for months, since he knew there had been more to it than a simple matter of dollars and cents. Closing down the studio had been a defeat, a declaration that his mother had given up on herself, and now that she had surrendered and gone over to the other side, how grim it was to see her turn into one of those women, yet one more country club wife who golfed and played cards and knocked back too many drinks at cocktail hour. He sensed that she was just as unhappy as he was, but he couldn’t talk to her about it, he was too young to meddle in her private affairs, and yet it was clear to him that his parents’ marriage, which had always made him think of a bathful of lukewarm water, had now gone cold, degenerating into a bored and loveless cohabitation of two people who went about their own business and intersected only when they had to or wanted to, which was almost never.
No more Sunday morning tennis at the public courts, no more Sunday lunches at Gruning’s, no more Sunday afternoons at the movies. The day of national rest was now spent at the country club, a Valhalla of silent putting greens, whooshing water sprinklers, and squealing children romping in the all-weather pool, but Ferguson rarely accompanied his parents on those forty-minute drives to Blue Valley, since Sunday was the day when he practiced with his baseball, football, and basketball teams—even on the Sundays when there was no practice. Seen from a distance, there was nothing inherently wrong with golf, he supposed, and no doubt a case could be made for the benefits of lunching on shrimp cocktails and triple-decker sandwiches, but Ferguson missed his hamburgers and bowls of mint-chip ice cream, and the closer he came to the world that golf represented, the more he learned to despise golf—not so much the sport itself, perhaps, but certainly the people who played it.
Priggish, sanctimonious Ferguson. Ferguson the enemy of upper-middle-class customs and manners, the know-it-all scourge who looked down upon the new American breed of status seekers and conspicuous consumers—the boy who wanted out.
His one hope was that his father would think sending him to a well-known boarding school would enhance his prestige at the club. Yes, our boy is at Andover now. So much better than public school, don’t you agree? And damn the expense. There’s no greater gift a parent can give his child than a good education.
A long shot, to be sure, a vain hope hatched from the self-deluding optimism of a thirteen-year-old mind, for in point of fact there was no reason to hope. Sitting across the table from him on that warm September evening, his father put down his fork and said: You’re talking like a greenhorn, Archie. What you’re asking me to do is pay twice for the same thing, and no person in his right mind would fall for a con like that. Think about it. We pay taxes on this house, don’t we? Very high taxes, some of the highest property taxes in the state. I don’t like it, but I’m willing to fork over the money because I get something back for it. Good schools, some of the best public schools in the country. That’s why we moved to this town in the first place. Because your mother knew you’d get a good education here, as good as any education they can offer at one of your fancy private schools. So no dice, kid. I’m not going to pay double for something I already have. Farshtaist?
Apparently, boarding schools were not on his father’s list of show-off expenditures, and because his mother then piped in and said it would break her heart if he left home at such a young age, Ferguson didn’t even bother to mention his idea about working summer jobs in order to help with the tuition. He was stuck now. Not only for the rest of that year, but for the four additional years it would take until he graduated from high school—five years in all, which was more time than many people served for armed robbery or manslaughter.
Angie came into the dining room with dessert, and as Ferguson looked down at his bowl of chocolate pudding, he wondered why there wasn’t a law that allowed children to divorce their parents.
* * *
BECAUSE NOTHING HAD changed or ever would change, because the old system of family gove
rnance was still intact after Ferguson’s efforts to amend the constitution had been voted down, the unfallen ancien régime continued to rule by reflex and ingrained whimsy, and so it was decreed that the vanquished malcontent should be rewarded with yet another summer at his beloved Camp Paradise, his sixth consecutive year in that parentless haven of ball fields, canoe expeditions, and the rowdy companionship of his New York friends. Not only was Ferguson about to leave his mother and father for two long months of respite and freedom, but standing beside him on the platform at Grand Central on the morning of his departure was Noah Marx, who was on his way up north for yet another summer as well, for Noah was back, and after missing the second half of the 1956 season and all eight weeks of 1957, he had resumed his connection with Camp Paradise and was about to embark on his fourth straight session there in the company of his stepmother’s nephew, also known as his stepcousin and friend, the now fourteen-year-old Ferguson, who at five feet, seven inches stood half a head taller than Noah, who still went by the name of Harpo at camp.
It was a curious story. Ferguson’s Aunt Mildred had remained Noah’s stepmother because she and Uncle Don had never bothered to divorce, and when Noah’s father returned from his eighteen-month sojourn in Paris, where he had begun writing a biography of Montaigne, he moved back to his old address on Perry Street. Not into the third-floor apartment he had previously shared with Mildred, however, but into a smaller, second-floor studio that had been vacated during his absence and which Mildred had rented for him prior to his return. That was the new arrangement. After a year and a half of turmoil and indecision, punctuated by three trips to Paris when Mildred was on break from teaching at Brooklyn College, they had concluded that they couldn’t live apart. On the other hand, they also understood that they were incapable of living together—at least not all the time, at least not as a conventionally married couple, and unless they allowed for sporadic interruptions of the domestic routine, they would end up devouring each other in a bloodbath of cannibalistic rage. Hence the compromise of the two apartments, the so-called Escape-Hatch Conciliation, for theirs was one of those impossible loves, a fraught mixture of passion and incompatibility, an electric storm-field of equally charged negative and positive ions, and because Don and Mildred were both selfish and volatile and utterly devoted to each other, the wars they fought were never-ending—except at those moments when Don moved downstairs into his second-floor apartment and a new era of peace began.
It was quite a muddle in Ferguson’s opinion, but not one he dwelled on at any length, since all marriages in his experience were flawed in one way or another, the savage conflicts of Don and Mildred as opposed to the weary indifference of his parents, but both marriages flawed just the same, not to mention his grandparents, who had barely spoken fifty words to each other in the past ten years, and as far as he could tell, the only grown-up man or woman who seemed to take pleasure in the mere fact of being alive was his Great-aunt Pearl, who no longer had a husband and would never have one again. Still and all, Ferguson was glad that Don and Mildred had been reunited, if not for their sakes then at least for his own, since Don’s return had brought Noah back into his life, and after an eighteen-month interval, during which they had been barred from each other’s company by Noah’s quasi-insane mother, Ferguson was astonished by how quickly they became friends again, as if the long separation had lasted no more than a matter of days.
Noah was still all flap and fury, the fast-talking needler of yore, but far less combustible at eleven than he had been at nine, and as the boys staggered through late childhood into early adolescence, each one found support in what he perceived to be the other’s strengths. For Noah, Ferguson was the handsome prince who excelled at everything he touched, the top dog who hit for the highest batting average and earned splendid marks at school, the one the girls liked, the one most looked up to by the other boys, and to be the cousin, friend, and confidant of such a person was an ennobling force in his life, which otherwise was a tormented life, the transitional life of a fourteen-year-old who fretted daily about his frizz-headed, gawky looks, about the disfiguring metal wires that had been bolted onto his teeth for the past year, about his appalling lack of physical grace. Ferguson knew how much Noah admired him, but he also knew that this admiration was misjudged and unwarranted, that Noah had turned him into a heroic, idealized being who in fact did not exist, whereas he, Ferguson, in the dark inner space where he actually lived, understood that Noah possessed a first-class mind, and that when it came to the things that truly mattered, the young Mr. Marx was more advanced than he was, at least one step ahead of him at every moment, often two steps, and occasionally four steps and even ten steps. Noah was his pathfinder, the quick-moving scout who explored the woods for Ferguson and told him where the best hunting was—books to read, music to listen to, jokes to laugh at, films to watch, ideas to think about—and now that Ferguson had ingested Candide and Bartleby, J. S. Bach and Muddy Waters, Modern Times and Grand Illusion, Jean Shepherd’s late-night monologues and Mel Brooks’s two-thousand-year-old man, Notes of a Native Son and The Communist Manifesto (no, Karl Marx wasn’t a relative—and neither, alas, was Groucho), he couldn’t help imagining how impoverished his life would have been without Noah. Anger and disappointment could take you just so far, he realized, but without curiosity you were lost.
So there they were in July 1961, about to set off for Camp Paradise at the start of that eventful summer when all the news from the outside world seemed to be bad news: the wall going up in Berlin, Ernest Hemingway blasting a bullet through his skull in the mountains of Idaho, mobs of white racists attacking the Freedom Riders as they traveled on their buses through the South. Menace, despondency, and hatred, abundant proof that rational men were not in charge of running the universe, and as Ferguson settled into the pleasant and familiar bustle of camp life, dribbling basketballs and stealing bases in the mornings and afternoons, listening to the barbs and blather of the boys in his cabin, exulting in the chance to be with Noah again, which above all meant being able to participate in a nonstop, two-month-long conversation with him, dancing in the evenings with the New York City girls he liked so much, the spirited and busty Carol Thalberg, the slender and thoughtful Ann Brodsky, and eventually the acne-ridden but exceptionally beautiful Denise Levinson, who was of one mind with him about slipping away from the post-dinner “socials” for intense mouth-and-tongue exercises in the back meadow, so many good things to be thankful for, and yet now that he was fourteen and his head was filled with thoughts that wouldn’t even have occurred to him just six months earlier, Ferguson was forever looking at himself in relation to distant, unknown others, wondering, for example, if he hadn’t been kissing Denise at the precise moment when Hemingway was blowing his brains out in Idaho or if, just as he was hitting a double in the game between Camp Paradise and Camp Greylock last Thursday, a Mississippi Klansman hadn’t been driving his fist into the jaw of a skinny, short-haired Freedom Rider from Boston. One person kissed, another person punched, or else one person attending his mother’s funeral at eleven o’clock in the morning on June 10, 1857, and at the same moment on the same block in the same city, another person holding her newborn child in her arms for the first time, the sorrow of the one occurring simultaneously with the joy of the other, and unless you were God, who was presumably everywhere and could see everything that was happening at any given moment, no one could possibly know that those two events were taking place at the same time, least of all the grieving son and the laughing mother. Was that why man had invented God? Ferguson asked himself. In order to overcome the limits of human perception by asserting the existence of an all-encompassing, all-powerful divine intelligence?
Think of it this way, he said to Noah one afternoon as they were walking to the dining hall. You have to go somewhere in your car. It’s an important errand, and you can’t be late. There are two ways to get there—by the main road or the back road. It happens to be rush hour, and normally things are pretty clogged
up on the main road at that time of day, but unless there’s an accident or a breakdown, the traffic tends to move slowly and steadily, and chances are the trip will take you about twenty minutes, which would get you to your appointment just in time—on the dot, without a second to spare. The back road is a bit longer in terms of distance, but there are fewer cars to worry about, and if all goes well, you can count on a travel time of about fifteen minutes. In principle, the back road is better than the main road, but there’s also a hitch: it has only one lane going in each direction, and if you happen to run into a breakdown or an accident, you’re liable to get stuck for a long time, which would make you late for your appointment.
Hold on, Noah said. I need to know more about this appointment. Where am I going, and why is it so important to me?
It doesn’t matter, Ferguson replied. The car trip is just an example, a proposition, a way of talking about the thing I want to discuss with you—which has nothing to do with roads or appointments.
But it does matter, Archie. Everything matters.
Ferguson let out a long sigh and said: All right. You’re going to a job interview. It’s the job you’ve been dreaming about all your life—Paris correspondent for the Daily Planet. If you get the job, you’ll be the happiest person in the world. If you don’t, you’ll go home and hang yourself.
If it means that much to me, why would I leave at the last minute? Why not start the trip an hour earlier and make sure I won’t be late?