The biggest topic in the household that summer was Lincoln Center and Gil’s long-term dispute with his colleagues over the new Philharmonic Hall, which would finally be opening on September twenty-third. The pus-ridden eyesore (as Ferguson’s grandfather used to call it) had been part of the West Sixties landscape for as long as Ferguson and his mother had been living in New York — a gigantic, thirty-acre slum-clearance project financed by Rockefeller money that had razed hundreds of buildings and kicked out thousands of people from their apartments to make way for what was being called a new cultural hub. All those mountains of dirt and bricks, all those steam shovels and pile drivers and holes in the ground, all that noise blasting through the neighborhood for all those years, and now that the first building of the sixteen-acre Lincoln Center complex was nearly done, the controversy was about to erupt into one of the angriest public shouting matches in the city’s history. Size versus acoustical balance, arrogance and presumption versus mathematics and reason, and Gil was in the thick of it because the feud had been provoked by the Herald Tribune, in particular by two of the people he worked with most closely at the paper, arts editor Victor Lowry and fellow music critic Barton Crosetti, who had led an aggressive campaign to expand the number of seats in the original blueprints for the new hall because, they insisted, a great metropolis like New York deserved something bigger and better. Bigger, yes, Gil had argued, but not better, since the acoustical design had been calibrated for an auditorium of twenty-four hundred seats, not twenty-six hundred, and even though the architects and engineers responsible for the plan had said the quality of the sound would be different, which was another way of saying worse or unacceptable, the city gave in to the Herald Tribune’s demands and increased the size of the hall. Gil saw that capitulation as a defeat for the future of orchestral music in New York, but now that the larger version of the building was almost finished, what could he do but hope the results would be somewhat less disastrous than he feared? And if they weren’t less, that is, if the results were fully as bad as he expected them to be, then he would launch a public campaign of his own, he said, and throw himself into an effort to help save Carnegie Hall, which the city was already intending to demolish.
The joke in the family that summer was: How do you spell the word hub? Answer: f-l-u-b.
Gil could joke about it because the only other option was to feel angry, and walking around with anger inside you was a bad way to live, he told Ferguson, it was pointless and self-destructive and cruel to the people who depended on you not to be angry, especially when the cause of your anger was something you couldn’t control.
Do you understand what I’m trying to say, Archie? Gil asked.
I’m not sure, Ferguson said. I think so.
(I’m not sure: a subtle reference to Gil’s volcanic outburst against Margaret at the old apartment on Central Park West. I think so: an acknowledgment that he had not seen his stepfather lose his temper again on such a grand scale since that night. There could be only two reasons to account for the change in Giclass="underline" (1) His character had improved over time or (2) His marriage to Ferguson’s mother had turned him into a better, calmer, happier man. Ferguson chose to believe the second possibility — not just because he wanted to believe it but because he knew it was the correct answer.)
It’s not that the issue isn’t important to me, Gil went on. My whole life is music. My whole life is writing about the music performed in this town, and if those performances are going to be less good now because of stupid decisions made by wrongheaded but well-meaning people — some of them my friends, I’m sad to say — then of course I’m going to feel angry, so angry that I’ve even thought about quitting the paper, just to let them know how seriously I take this business. But what good would that do me — or you, or your mother, or anyone else? I suppose we could get along without my salary if we had to, but the fact is I love my job, and I don’t want to quit.
You shouldn’t quit. There might be some problems over there, but you shouldn’t quit.
It’s not going to last much longer anyway. The Herald Tribune is sinking financially, and I doubt it will hold on for more than another two or three years. So I might as well go down with the ship. A loyal crew member to the last, standing by the mad captain who steered us into such dangerous waters.
You’re joking, right?
Since when have you known me to joke, Archie?
The end of the Herald Tribune. I remember the first time you took me there — and how much I liked it, how much I still like it every time we go to the building together. It’s hard to believe it won’t exist anymore. I even thought … well, never mind …
Thought what?
I don’t know … that one day … it sounds so idiotic now … that one day I might end up working there, too.
What a beautiful idea. I’m touched, Archie — deeply touched — but why would a boy with your talents want to be a newspaperman?
Not a newspaperman, a movie critic. In the same way you write about concerts, maybe I could write about films.
I’ve always imagined you’d end up making your own films.
I don’t think so.
But you love movies so much …
I love watching them, but I’m not sure I’d enjoy making them. It takes too much time to make a movie, and during that time you don’t have any time left over to watch other movies. Do you see what I’m talking about? If the thing I enjoy most is watching movies, then the best job for me would be to watch as many movies as I can.
SCHOOL HAD BEEN in session for close to a month when the new hall opened with a gala concert performed by the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Leonard Bernstein, an event considered so important that it was televised by CBS — a live national broadcast beamed into every home in America. In the days that followed, more concerts were performed by some of the most admired symphony orchestras in the country (Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland), and by the end of the week both the press and the public had pronounced their verdict on the acoustical qualities of Lincoln Center’s flagship venue. PHILHARMONIC FLOP read one headline. PHILHARMONIC FOLLY read another. PHILHARMONIC FIASCO read a third. The double-f-sound was apparently irresistible to newspaper editors, given how neatly it flew off the tongues of indignant music lovers, professional naysayers, and barroom wags alike. Some people differed, however, claiming the results weren’t as bad as all that, and so began the screaming contest between fors and againsts, the uncivil debate that would go on filling the New York air for months and years to come.
Ferguson followed these events out of loyalty to Gil, pleased that his stepfather had been on the winning side of the argument, no matter what harm the defective hall would do to the eardrums of the city’s classical music patrons, and one Sunday afternoon he even stood in front of Carnegie Hall with Gil and his mother holding a sign that read PLEASE SAVE ME, but mostly Ferguson didn’t care, and mostly his thoughts were zeroed in on the demands of school and the never-ending quest for love, even when all the newspapers in New York shut down during the printers’ strike that lasted from early December to the final day of March — which he generously chose to interpret as a long-deserved rest for Gil.
Amy had broken up with last year’s boyfriend, the one Ferguson had never met and whose name he had never known, but she had found a new ami intime during her Francophone summer in Vermont, someone who lived in New York and therefore was disponible pour les rencontres chaque weekend, which pushed Ferguson out of the running once again, disqualifying him from even considering a new assault on the fortress of Amy’s heart. The same held true of the attractive girls at the Riverside Academy — all locked up and out of bounds, just as they had been the year before, which meant that Isabel Kraft was still no more than a phantom sylph running through the forests of his imagination, a figment other writhing in the light of the nocturnal bone — more real than Miss September, perhaps, but not by much.