Mrs. Federman said: Every young person needs a Mrs. Monroe, Archie, but not every young person gets one.
What a frightening thought, Ferguson said. I don’t know what I’d do without her.
NEW YORK KEPT pulling at him, and Ferguson continued to go there as often as he could on his free Saturdays, sometimes alone, sometimes with Dana Rosenbloom, sometimes with Amy, sometimes with Amy and Mike Loeb, sometimes just with Mike Loeb, and sometimes with all three of them together, where he (and they) would link up with Noah on the weekends when young Groucho was camping out in the Village with his father and Mildred, or just with his father if Uncle Don and Aunt Mildred happened to be living apart again. Density, immensity, complexity, as Ferguson once put it when asked why he preferred the city to the suburbs, a sentiment shared by all five members of his little gang, and except for Dana, who had already made up her mind about where she wanted to go after high school, the other four decided they should all stay in New York for college. That meant Columbia for the three boys and Barnard for Amy, assuming they were accepted there, which seemed likely or more than just a long shot because of their strong records, but even though three of them managed to get in, only one of them wound up moving to Morningside Heights the following September. Noah, the rejected applicant, had brought the defeat upon himself by cultivating a new habit in the summer after his junior year, and so fond did he become of smoking pot that he temporarily lost interest in school, which caused his grades and test scores to crash in the first semester of his senior year, and Columbia, which was his father’s alma mater, the place where everyone in his family hoped he would be spending the next four years, turned him down. Noah laughed it off. He would be going to NYU instead, which would allow him to stay in New York as planned, and even though it was universally recognized as a worse college than Columbia, with a mediocre undergraduate program for listless, unmotivated students, NYU would give him the chance to study filmmaking, a subject not offered to Columbia undergraduates, and besides, he said, he would be living downtown in the coolest part of the city rather than in that shithole slum wedged between Harlem and the Hudson River.
Noah to Washington Square, Mike to the uptown grid at West 116th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, and Ferguson and his stepsister to colleges beyond the borders of the city. Amy’s decision had everything to do with Mike. They had already broken up once before, when he cheated on her with a girl named Moira Oppenheim in the middle of their junior year, but after a protracted separation that had ended with groveling gestures of contrition from Mike, Amy had given him another chance, and now, just four months later, he had gone off and done it again, betraying her with the same Moira Oppenheim no less, the mousey little tramp who wouldn’t take no for an answer, and Amy was fed up, furious, and finished with Mike for good. The letters from the colleges she had applied to landed in the mailbox on Woodhall Crescent the following week. Yes from Barnard and yes from Brandeis, her first and second choices, and because she wanted to be nowhere near Mike Loeb or ever have to look at his fat face and bloated body again, she said no to New York and yes to Waltham, Massachusetts, convinced that the one would be just as good as the other and relieved that she had no second thoughts about her decision. The pig had humiliated her and broken her heart, and Ferguson agreed that she would be better off going somewhere else, and just to prove how much he was on her side, he offered to give her the Pontiac they owned together when she left for Massachusetts in the fall and to cut off his friendship with Mike Loeb right now, starting this minute.
Ferguson’s situation was more complicated than hers. He had been accepted by Columbia and wanted to go to Columbia, and even if he had been forced to share a dormitory room with Mike Loeb, he still would have wanted to go to Columbia, but there was the question of money to think about, the unanswerable question of who was going to pay for it. He could have backed down and gone to his father, who no doubt would have come through for him, however reluctant he might have been about it, knowing in the end that it was his responsibility to cough up for his son’s education, but Ferguson refused even to consider that as an option. His mother and Dan knew where he stood on that point, had always known from the beginning, and even though they thought his position was bullheaded and self-defeating, they respected him for it and didn’t try to change his mind, for his mother had withdrawn from the battle, the days of fighting to patch things up between Ferguson and his father were done, and after the shabby trick his father had pulled on her about the sale of the old house, Rose understood that her boy’s decision not to accept any money from Stanley was a way of defending her — a highly emotional and unreasonable one, perhaps, but also an act of love.
Ferguson sat down with his mother and stepfather to discuss these matters in November of his senior year. The time was approaching to send off his college applications, and while Dan told him not to worry, that the money would be there for him no matter what the cost, Ferguson had his doubts. He figured a year of college would come to about five or six thousand dollars (tuition, room and board, books, clothes, supplies, travel money, and a small monthly allotment of pocket cash), which would come to a total of twenty to twenty-five thousand dollars by the time he made it through the full four years. The same held true for Amy — twenty to twenty-five thousand over the next four years. Jim would be graduating from MIT just as Amy and Ferguson were graduating from high school, which would eliminate the need to pay for a third tuition, but Jim was applying to graduate school in physics, and even though he was bound to get in somewhere that would give him a fellowship along with a stipend for living expenses, the stipend wouldn’t be enough to cover everything, and therefore Dan would have to go on forking out another thousand or fifteen hundred dollars a year for Jim, which would bring the overall disbursement of cash for sustaining two Schneidermans and one Ferguson in institutions of higher learning to roughly eleven, twelve, or thirteen thousand dollars per annum. On average, Dan earned thirty-two thousand dollars a year — which explained why Ferguson had his doubts.
There was the extra money from Liz’s life insurance policy, but the one hundred and fifty thousand dollars paid out to Dan in the summer of 1962 was down to seventy-eight thousand by the end of November 1964. Twenty thousand of the seventy-two thousand already spent had gone into paying off the double mortgage on the old-old house, then selling that house and buying the new one with cash, which had put his mother and stepfather in the good position of owning 7 Woodhall Crescent outright, with no bank breathing down their necks, with nothing more to pay but the property taxes and the water bill. Another ten thousand of the seventy-two thousand already spent had gone into the house as well, for painting, repairs, and improvements, which would only make the house more valuable if they ever chose to sell it. Still, another forty-eight thousand dollars had vanished since the marriage on cars, restaurant dinners, vacations, and drawings by Giacometti, Miró, and Philip Guston. Much as Ferguson hated his father’s tightness with money, he was also somewhat alarmed by how freely his stepfather scattered it around him, for if Dan’s income was too small to cover the tuitions, then the seventy-eight thousand left from the insurance money would be their only recourse, and according to Ferguson’s calculations that sum would be reduced to just over or under thirty thousand by the time he and Amy finished college, and far less than that if Dan and his mother kept on spending as they had over the past two years. For that reason, Ferguson wanted to take as little as possible from them — nothing if he could. It wasn’t that he felt anyone was about to starve to death, but it frightened him to think that one day in the not-too-distant future, when his mother was less than young, and perhaps in less than good health after a lifetime of smoking her daily packs of Chesterfields, she and Dan might find themselves in a rough spot.