His parents were indifferent. Neither one of them had gone to college, neither one of them knew anything about the distinctions between one college and another, and therefore they would be happy for their boy wherever he went, whether to the state university in New Brunswick (Rutgers) or to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, since they were too ignorant to have developed into snobs about the prestige of one school over another and were simply proud of Ferguson for having been such a good student all his life. Aunt Mildred, however, who had recently been promoted to full professor at Berkeley, had other ideas about the academic destination of her one and only, and in a long coast-to-coast phone call in early December she tried to steer her nephew around to her way of thinking. Columbia was an excellent first choice, she said, no problem with that, the undergraduate program was one of the strongest in the country, but she also wanted him to consider other options, Amherst and Oberlin, for example, small, isolated schools where the atmosphere would be calmer and less distracting than in New York, more conducive to the rigors of focused study, but if he had his heart set on a big university, why not give some thought to Stanford and Berkeley, how dearly she would love to have him out in California with her for the next four years, and either one of those places was every bit as good as Columbia if not better, but Ferguson told her that his mind was made up, it was New York or nothing, and if Columbia turned him down, he would go to NYU, which accepted nearly everyone who applied, and if something went wrong there, his high school diploma would allow him to enroll in courses at the New School, which turned down no one, and that was the plan, he said, just three possibilities, all of them in New York, and when his aunt asked him why it had to be New York when there were so many more attractive places to choose from, Ferguson reached back into his memory and pulled out the words Amy had spoken to him on the first day they met — because, he said, New York is it.
A STATE OF limbo, perhaps, but in the narrow slit between the not-here and not-there of the drab present, something happened to Ferguson that altered his thinking about what would happen next. In early December, he landed a job at the Montclair Times, which more accurately could be said to have been a job that landed on him, since it came his way unexpectedly, with no serious effort on his part, a gift of blind happenstance, but once he started doing it, he discovered that he wanted to keep on doing it, for not only did he enjoy the work but the effect of that enjoyment was to narrow the infinite spaces of a future anywhere into a precise somewhere, and with that narrowing a multitude of anythings was suddenly turned into a single something. In other words, three months short of his eighteenth birthday, Ferguson accidentally stumbled upon a calling in life, something to do over the long haul, and the perplexing thing was that it never would have occurred to him to do it if he hadn’t been thrust into doing it in the first place.
The Montclair Times was a weekly newspaper that had been covering local events since 1877, and since Montclair was larger than most of the towns in the area (population: 44,000), the paper was more substantial, more thorough, and carried more advertising than other Essex County weeklies, even if most of the stories it published were more or less the same as those found in the smaller rags: Board of Education meetings, gatherings of the Ladies Garden Club, Boy Scout banquets, automobile accidents, engagements and marriages, break-ins, muggings, and acts of teenage vandalism as reported in the Police Blotter, reviews of exhibitions at the Montclair Art Museum, lectures at Montclair State Teachers College, and sports in all of their indigenous manifestations: Little League baseball, Pop Warner football, and extensive coverage of the games played by the high school varsity teams, the redoubtable Montclair Mounties, whose football squad had just finished the most successful season in its history — a perfect 9–0 record, a state championship, and a number three ranking in the country, which meant that of all of the thousands of high school football teams spread across the United States, only two were considered to be better than Montclair. Ferguson had missed every one of those Saturday games, but now, just ten days after his glum, post-Thanksgiving conversation with Amy, his mother told him about a possible opening at the Times—assuming he was interested. It seemed that Rick Vogel, the young man who reported on high school sports for the paper, had done such an impressive job chronicling the football team’s glorious season that he had been hired away by the Newark Evening News, a daily paper with twenty times the circulation of the Montclair weekly and a large enough budget to pay twenty times the salary, and the editor in chief of the Times found himself in what Ferguson’s mother called a hell of a fix: the varsity basketball season was scheduled to begin next Tuesday, and he had no one to write about the games.
Until then, the thought of working for a newspaper had never crossed Ferguson’s mind. He saw himself as a literary man, a man whose future would be dedicated to the writing of books, and whether he wound up becoming a novelist or a playwright or the heir to New Jersey’s Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, he was headed in the direction of art, and whatever the importance of newspapers, it was certain that writing for them had nothing to do with art. On the other hand, an opportunity had presented itself to him, he was at loose ends, restless and dissatisfied with just about everything, and perhaps a stint at the Times would inject some color into the drab present and lure him away from dwelling on his own miserable circumstances. More than that, there was some money involved — a nominal ten-dollar fee per article — but even more than the money there was the fact that the Times was a legitimate newspaper, not a joke publication like the Mountaineer at Montclair High, and if Ferguson managed to wrangle himself a job there, he would be entering the ranks of the grown-up world — no longer an almost-eighteen-year-old high school boy but a young adult, or, just as good if not more satisfying to his ears, a boy wonder, meaning a boy who was doing the work of a man.
Not to be forgotten was that Whitman had started out as a journalist for the Brooklyn Eagle and that Hemingway had written for the Kansas City Star and that Newark-born Stephen Crane had been a reporter for the New York Herald, and so when Ferguson’s mother asked him if he had any interest in taking over for the precipitously departed Vogel, Ferguson needed no more than half a minute to say yes. It wasn’t going to be easy, his mother added, but Edward Imhoff, the fat sourpuss who edited the Times, might be desperate enough to chance going with an untested kid, at least for one game, which would buy him a little time if Ferguson didn’t pan out, but as they both knew, his mother said, he was going to pan out, and because she had been publishing photographs in Imhoff’s paper for more than a dozen years and had included his portrait in her book of Garden State notables (an act of uncalled-for generosity if there ever was one), the windbag owed her, she said, and without wasting another second she picked up the phone and called him. Such was the way Ferguson’s mother handled herself when something needed to be done — she seized the moment and did it, unafraid and unstoppable, and how Ferguson relished her gutsy bravura as he listened to her half of the conversation with Imhoff. Not once in the seven minutes they talked did she sound like a mother begging a favor for her son. She was a clever talent scout who had just solved a problem for an old friend, and Imhoff should get down on his knees and thank her for saving his ass.