But there was more to Thoreau than just style. There was the savage need to be himself and no one but himself even at the cost of offending his neighbors, the stubbornness of soul that so appealed to the ever more stubborn Ferguson, the adolescent Ferguson, who saw in Thoreau a man who had managed to remain an adolescent for his entire life, which is to say, a man who had never abandoned his principles, who had never turned into a corrupt, sellout grown-up — a brave boy to the bitter end, which was precisely how Ferguson wanted to imagine his own future. But beyond the spiritual imperative to transform himself into a bold, self-reliant being, there was Thoreau’s critical examination of the American premise that money rules all, the rejection of the American government and his willingness to go to jail in order to protest that government’s actions, and then, of course, there was the idea that had changed the world, the idea that had helped make India an independent country five months after Ferguson was born, which was the same idea now spreading across the American South and perhaps would help change America as well, civil disobedience, nonviolent resistance to the violence of unjust laws, and how little had changed in the one hundred and twelve years since Walden, Ferguson told himself, the Mexican-American War now turned into the Vietnam War, black slavery now turned into Jim Crow oppression and Klan-run state governments, and just as Thoreau had written his book in the years leading up to the Civil War, Ferguson felt that he too was writing at a moment when the world was about to blow apart again, and three times in the weeks both before and after his mother married Jim and Amy’s father, as he watched the televised images and studied the newspaper photographs of Buddhist monks in South Vietnam burning themselves to death to protest the policies of the American-backed Diem regime, Ferguson understood that the quiet days of his boyhood were over, that the horror of those immolations proved that if men were willing to die for peace, then the steadily expanding war in their country would eventually become so big that it would obscure everything and end up making everyone go blind.
THE NEW HOUSE was in South Orange, not Maplewood, but since the two towns were governed by a single board of education, Ferguson and Amy stayed on as students at Columbia High School, which was the only public high school in the district. They had already finished their sophomore year when their parents were married on August 2, 1963, and the dispiriting conversation that had taken place in the backyard of Ferguson’s old house eleven months earlier was all but forgotten. Amy had found herself a boyfriend, Ferguson had found himself a girlfriend, and their brother-sister friendship had forged on just as Amy had hoped it would, although now that they were actually brother and sister, perhaps the old metaphor had become a trifle redundant.
Ferguson’s father was taking all the money from the sale of the old house, but Dan Schneiderman still owned the old-old house, the first Maplewood house, which young Ferguson had never wanted to leave, and by selling that house for twenty-nine thousand dollars, he had been able to buy the somewhat larger house in South Orange for thirty-six thousand dollars, for even though Ferguson’s mother was nearly penniless because the monthly checks from his father had stopped coming after she married Dan, Dan himself was no longer broke, since he and Liz had both taken out one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar life insurance policies early in their marriage, and now that he had collected that sum in the wake of Liz’s hideous, premature death, the newly formed family of Adlers, Fergusons, and Schneidermans was comfortably solvent for the time being. It was hard not to think about where the money had come from, the gruesome translation of terminal cancer into dollars, but Liz was dead, and life was moving on, and what choice did any of them have but to move along with it?
They all loved the new house. Even Ferguson, who was strongly opposed to living in a small town, who would have given almost anything to move to New York or any other large city anywhere in the world, admitted that it was a fine choice and that the two-story white clapboard house built in 1903 and situated on an out-of-the-way cul-de-sac known as Woodhall Crescent was a far better place to park your bones than the chilly Castle of Silence he had been forced to live in for the past seven years. They probably could have used one more bedroom on top of the four they had, since the room that would have been Jim’s was converted into a studio for Dan, but no one saw it as a hardship, least of all the phlegmatic Jim, who visited only rarely and seemed content to sleep on the living room sofa, and if he didn’t mind, why should anyone else mind? The important thing was that they were all in it together, and because Ferguson approved of Dan, and Amy and Jim approved of Ferguson’s mother, and Dan approved of Ferguson, and Ferguson’s mother approved of Amy and Jim, they all settled in peacefully together and paid no attention to the gossips in the two towns who felt that with all the twists and commotions of the past year — death, divorce, remarriage, a new house, and two sexed-up teenagers living side by side on the same floor in that house — something strange or unnatural or not quite right must have been going on over there at 7 Woodhall Crescent. The man was nothing more than a struggling artist, for pity’s sake, meaning a slovenly, wisecracking luftmensch (according to the Jews) or a long-haired nonconformist with doubtful political leanings (according to the non-Jews), and how could Stanley Ferguson’s wife have walked out on her marriage and all the money that came with it to join forces with a character like that?
The biggest change for Ferguson had nothing to do with his mother’s marriage to Dan Schneiderman. She had been married before, after all, and in that Dan was a better, more compatible husband for her than his father had been, Ferguson endorsed the union and didn’t think about it much because he didn’t have to. What he did think about, however, and what represented a far more significant upheaval in the basic conditions of his life, was that he was no longer an only child. As a young boy, he had prayed for a brother or a sister, again and again he had begged his mother to produce a baby for him so he wouldn’t be alone anymore, but then she had told him it wouldn’t be possible, that she had no more babies in her, which meant that he would be her one and only Archie until the end of time, and little by little Ferguson had come to terms with his solitary fate, evolving into the pensive, dreamy fellow who now wanted to spend his adulthood sequestered in a room writing books, missing out on the rough-and-tumble joys and high-spirited camaraderie that most children live through with their siblings, but also avoiding the conflicts and hatreds that can turn childhood into a hellish, unrelenting brawl that ends in lifelong bitterness and/or permanent psychosis, and now, at the age of sixteen, having eluded both the good and the bad of not being the only one for his entire life, Ferguson’s childhood wish had been granted in the form of a sixteen-year-old sister and a twenty-year-old brother — but too late, too long deferred to be of much use to him anymore, and even though Jim was mostly absent and Amy was his close friend again (after a long spell of resenting her for having turned him down the previous summer), there were days when he couldn’t help longing for his old life as an only child, even if that life had been much worse than this one.