So the skinny, bedraggled eighteen-year-olds returned from their Gallic adventures, hobbling into the New York air terminal with their overloaded backpacks and bushy heads of hair, and once they had gone through passport control and customs, their parents opened their arms and welcomed them back, greeting them with an enthusiasm and intensity normally reserved for returning war heroes and discoverers of new continents. Amy and Ferguson, who had already arranged to meet up again in a couple of days, kissed each other good-bye, and then they marched off with their respective families to be driven home for baths, haircuts, and brief visits with their parents, grandparents, and aunts and uncles.
As Ferguson quickly learned while walking to the car, home was no longer the house in Montclair but an apartment in the Weequahic section of Newark. Neither one of his parents seemed upset by this backward move out of the suburbs, this apparent fall in social status, or economic status, or worldly status, or any other measure of what constituted success or failure in American life, which relieved him of the obligation to feel upset on their behalf, for the truth was that he didn’t care one way or the other.
His mother was laughing. Not only are we back in Newark, she said, but we’re in the same building we used to live in when we were first married—25 Van Velsor Place. Not the same apartment, but one on the same floor, the third floor, right across the hall from where you spent the first three years of your life. Pretty extraordinary, don’t you think? I wonder if you’ll remember anything about it. An identical apartment, Archie. Not the same one, but one just like it.
An hour later, when Ferguson stepped into the two-bedroom flat on the third floor of 25 Van Velsor Place, he was impressed by how cozy and lived-in it felt after such a short time. In just three weeks his parents had already managed to settle in, and compared to the narrow confines of chambre dix-huit, its proportions struck him as immense. Nothing like the house in Montclair, of course, but big enough.
Well, Archie? his mother said, as he wandered in and out of the rooms, does anything come back to you?
Ferguson wished he could have thought of some clever remark to echo the hopefulness in his mother’s voice, but all he could do was shake his head and smile.
He remembered nothing.
4.2
4.3
The summer of 1962 began with a trip to a far-off place and ended with a second trip to an even farther far-off place, four back-and-forth journeys by air that took Ferguson to California (by himself) and to Paris (with his mother and Gil), where he spent a total of two and a half weeks not having to worry about running into Andy Cohen. In between his travels, he stayed at home on Riverside Drive, avoiding the Thalia but going to as many old and new movies as he could, participating in two outdoor basketball leagues, and, at Gil’s suggestion, reading twentieth-century American literature for the first time (Babbitt, Manhattan Transfer, Light in August, In Our Time, The Great Gatsby), but for the fifteen-year-old Ferguson, who never once laid eyes on Andy Cohen during the months between his freshman and sophomore years, the most memorable part of the summer was traveling in airplanes for the first time and seeing what he saw and doing what he did in California and Paris. Memorable, of course, did not mean that all his memories were good ones, but even the worst one, the memory that continued to cause him the most pain, had come from an experience that proved to be instructive to him, and now that he had learned his lesson, he hoped he would never make the same mistake again.
The California trip was a present from his Aunt Mildred, the once elusive and mysterious relative who had boycotted her sister’s wedding in 1959 and had appeared to want nothing more to do with the family, but she had returned to New York twice since that nasty, inexplicable snub, once for her father’s funeral in 1960 and again for her mother’s funeral in 1961, and now she was back in the fold, on reasonably good terms with her sister again and on excellent terms with her new brother-in-law, and so changed was her attitude that on the second visit she willingly showed up for a dinner at the apartment on Riverside Drive, where one of the guests was her ex-husband, Paul Sandler, Ferguson’s former uncle, who had remained a fast friend of the Adler-Schneiderman household, Paul Sandler in the company of his second wife no less, a forthright, outspoken painter by the name of Judith Bogat, and Ferguson was impressed by how relaxed and comfortable his aunt seemed at that dinner, trading pleasantries with her ex as if there were no history between them, discussing the progress of the not-yet-completed Lincoln Center with Gil, actually deigning to compliment her sister on some of her recent photographs, and asking Ferguson all sorts of friendly, challenging questions about films and basketball and the agonies of adolescence, which led to a sudden, spontaneous invitation to visit her in Palo Alto—on her dime—and thus it was arranged that her nephew would fly out to spend a week with her after the end of the school year. Two hours later, as the last of the dinner guests dispersed into the night, Ferguson asked his mother why Aunt Mildred seemed so different now, so happy.
I think she’s in love, his mother said. I don’t know any of the details, but she mentioned a person named Sidney a couple of times, and I have a feeling they might be living together now. You can never tell with Mildred, but there’s no question she’s in a good mood these days.
He was expecting his aunt to meet him at the airport, but someone else was waiting for him in the terminal the day he landed in San Francisco, a younger woman of perhaps twenty-five or twenty-six who stood by the exit door holding up a copy of Mildred’s book on George Eliot, a diminutive, lively-looking, almost pretty girl with short brown hair dressed in blue jeans rolled up at the bottoms, a red-and-black checkered shirt, two-toned alligator boots with pointy tips, and a yellow bandanna cinched around her neck — Ferguson’s first Westerner, a genuine cowgirl!