That was one side of Noah, he told the Federmans, the zany agent provocateur and impish clown, but at bottom he was a thoughtful, serious person, and nothing proved that more than how he had behaved on the weekend Kennedy was shot. By pure happenstance, Noah had been invited to come out to New Jersey to spend a couple of days and nights with Ferguson and Amy in the new house on Woodhall Crescent. The plan was to make a movie together with his eight-millimeter camera, a silent adaptation of Ferguson’s short story What Happened?, the one about the boy who runs away from home and returns to find his parents missing, with Noah cast as the boy and Ferguson and Amy as the parents. Then, on Friday, November twenty-second, just hours before Noah was supposed to leave New York from the Port Authority bus terminal, Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas. It would have made sense for him to cancel the visit, but Noah didn’t want to, and he called to tell them to pick him up at the Irvington bus station as scheduled. They all watched television for the entire weekend, Ferguson and his stepfather sitting together at one end of the long sofa in the living room and Amy and her stepmother curled up together at the other end, Rose with her arms around Amy and Amy with her head resting on Rose’s shoulder, and Noah had the wit to take out his camera and film them, all four of them for the better part of two days, moving back and forth between their faces and the black-and-white images on the television screen, the face of Walter Cronkite, Johnson and Jackie Kennedy on the plane as the vice president was sworn in as the new president, Jack Ruby shooting Oswald in a corridor of the Dallas police station, the riderless horse and John-John’s salute on the day of the burial procession, all those public events alternating with the four people on the sofa, grim-faced Dan Schneiderman, his blank, burned-out stepson, and the two wet-eyed women watching those events on the screen, all in silence, of course, since the camera couldn’t record sound, a mass of footage that must have come to ten or twelve hours, an intolerable length that no one could have sat through from start to finish, but then Noah took the rolls of film back to New York, found a professional editor to help him, and cut those hours down to twenty-seven minutes, and the result was stupendous, Ferguson said, a national catastrophe written across the faces of those four people and the television set in front of them, a real film by a sixteen-year-old boy that was more than just a historical document but a work of art as well, or, as Ferguson expressed it, using the word he always used when describing something he loved, a masterpiece.
There were many stories about Noah, but also about Amy and Jim, about his mother and grandparents, about Arnie Frazier and their near crack-up on the New Jersey Turnpike, about Dana Rosenbloom and her family, about his talks with Mr. Rosenbloom, and about his friendship with Mike Loeb, Amy’s boyfriend, then ex-boyfriend, then boyfriend redux, who not only knew who Emma Goldman was and had read her autobiography, Living My Life, but was the only person in the school who had also read Alexander Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. Beefy Mike Loeb, budding anti-Soviet Marxist radical, who believed in the movement, in organizing, in mass action, and consequently took a dim view of Ferguson’s interest in Thoreau, who was all about the individual, the solitary man of conscience acting out of moral principle but with no theoretical foundation for attacking the system, for rebuilding society both from the bottom up and the top down, an excellent writer, yes, but what a pinched and prudish fellow he was, and so frightened of women he probably went to his grave a virgin (Celia, fourteen at the time, snickered when Ferguson repeated those words), and even if his idea of civil disobedience had been picked up by Gandhi, King, and others in the civil rights movement, passive resistance wasn’t enough, sooner or later it would come down to armed struggle, and that was why Mike preferred Malcolm X to M. L. King and had taped a poster of Mao to his bedroom wall.
No, Ferguson replied, when Artie’s parents asked if he agreed with this boy, but that was what made their conversations so instructive, he said, because every time Mike challenged him he would have to think harder about what he believed in himself, and how could you ever learn anything if you only talked to people who thought exactly as you did?
Then there was Mrs. Monroe, his favorite subject of all, the one person who made life as a high school student bearable, and the great good luck to have had her as his English teacher for both his sophomore and junior years, the young and spirited Evelyn Monroe, just twenty-eight when Ferguson entered her class for the first time, the vibrant antidote to the dowdy, reactionary, anti-modernist Mrs. Baldwin, Monroe née Ferrante, a tough Italian girl from the Bronx who rode off to Vassar on a full scholarship, formerly married to jazz saxophonist Bobby Monroe, frequenter of Village hangouts, friend of musicians, artists, actors, and poets, the hippest teacher ever to grace the halls of Columbia High School, and what separated her from all the other teachers Ferguson had ever had was that she looked upon her students as fully formed, independent human beings, young grown-ups rather than large children, which had the effect of making them all feel good about themselves when they sat in her class and listened to her talk about the books she had assigned, Mr. Joyce, Mr. Shakespeare, Mr. Melville, Miss Dickinson, Mr. Eliot, Miss Eliot, Miss Wharton, Mr. Fitzgerald, Miss Cather, and all the rest, and there wasn’t a single student in either one of the two classes Ferguson took with her who didn’t adore Mrs. Monroe, but no one more than Ferguson himself, who showed her every one of the stories he wrote throughout high school, even in the last year when she wasn’t his teacher anymore, not that she was a better judge than Uncle Don or Aunt Mildred were, he supposed, but he felt she was more honest with him than they were, more detailed in her criticisms and at the same time more encouraging, as if it were a foregone conclusion that he had been born to do this and no other choice was possible.
She kept a sign posted above the blackboard, a sentence from the American poet Kenneth Rexroth that she had copied out in letters large enough to be read by someone in the back row, and because Ferguson often found himself looking at the sign during class, he later calculated that he must have read it several thousand times during the years he studied with her: AGAINST THE RUIN OF THE WORLD, THERE IS ONLY ONE DEFENSE: THE CREATIVE ACT.