He had saved twenty-six hundred dollars from his two summers of work for Arnie Frazier. If he cut back on buying books and records, he could probably add another fourteen hundred to his bank account by the end of the summer, which would lift the total to four thousand dollars even. His grandfather had already confided to his mother that he was planning to give him two thousand dollars as a graduation present, and if his money and his grandfather’s money were both used to pay for college, then Dan’s share would be reduced to nothing. So much for the first year, but what about the three years after that? He would continue to work during the summers, of course, but doing what and earning what were no more than question marks at that point, and even though his grandfather would probably be willing to chip in something, it would be wrong to count on it, especially now that his grandmother had come down with heart trouble and their medical bills were mounting. One year of New York if he was lucky enough to get into Columbia — and after that, what else could a sane man do but fly to Las Vegas and put everything he owned on number thirteen?
There was one far-fetched solution available to him, a roll of the dice that would solve all their money problems if the winning combination came up, but if Ferguson won the bet, he would also lose the thing he wanted most, for New York and Columbia would be off the table for good. Even worse, it would mean having to spend four more years in New Jersey, the last place in the world where he wanted to be, and not just New Jersey, but a small town in New Jersey that was no bigger than the one he lived in now, which would put him in the same situation he had been trying to run away from for most of his life. Still, if the solution presented itself to him (and there was every reason to believe it wouldn’t), he would gladly accept it and kiss the dice he had rolled.
Princeton was starting something new that year, the Walt Whitman Scholars Program, which had been funded by a 1936 alumnus named Gordon DeWitt, who had grown up in East Rutherford and had attended the public schools there, and DeWitt’s money would be paying for full scholarships to four graduates from New Jersey public high schools every year. Financial need was one of the requirements, along with academic excellence and soundness of character, and as the son of a well-heeled businessman, one would have assumed Ferguson had no right to apply, but that was not the case, for in addition to reneging on his allowance obligation to his son, Stanley Ferguson had broken the divorce agreement he had signed with his ex-wife, which stipulated that he contribute half the money needed for the boy’s upkeep, that is, to reimburse Ferguson’s mother for half of what she and her new husband spent on the food Ferguson ate and the clothes he wore as well as half his medical and dental bills, but six months into her second marriage, when no money from her ex-husband had arrived, Ferguson’s mother consulted a lawyer, who wrote a letter threatening to haul Ferguson’s father into court to make him pay what he owed, and when Ferguson’s father countered by offering a compromise — no money for his half of the boy’s upkeep, but from now on he would stop claiming his son as a dependent on his income tax returns and hand that honor over to Dan Schneiderman — the matter was settled. Ferguson himself had known nothing about this dispute, but when he told his mother and stepfather about the Walt Whitman scholarships at Princeton, explaining that he wanted to send in an application but didn’t think he fit all the requirements, they assured him he did, for even though Dan made a respectable income, the burden of sending three children to universities at the same time practically qualified Ferguson as a hardship case. As far as the law was concerned, the link between father and son had been severed. Ferguson was a minor, and because his sole financial support now came from his mother and stepfather, in the eyes of Princeton and everyone else, it was as if his father had ceased to exist. That was the good news. The bad news was that Ferguson had finally learned the truth about his father, and he was so upset by what the man had done, so angry at him for his cheapness and meanness toward the woman he had once been married to, that nothing would have satisfied Ferguson more than to slug his father in the face. The son of a bitch had disowned him, and now he wanted to disown him back.
I know I promised to have dinner with him twice a month, Ferguson said, but I don’t think I want to see him anymore. He broke his promise to you. Why can’t I break my promise to him?
You’re almost eighteen now, his mother said, and you can do anything you want. Your life belongs to you.
Fuck him.
Easy does it, Archie.
No, I mean it. Fuck him.
He figured there would be thousands of applicants, the top boys from around the state, all-county athletes in football and basketball, class presidents and debating club champions, science prodigies with double 800s on their SATs, such sterling candidates that he himself wouldn’t have the smallest chance of making the first cut, but he sent in his application anyway, along with two of his stories and a list of people who had offered to write letters of recommendation for him: Mrs. Monroe; his French teacher, Mr. Boldieu; and his current English teacher, Mr. MacDonald. He wanted to be a lion, but if it turned out that fate had chosen him to become a tiger, he would make every effort to wear his stripes proudly. Black and orange instead of powder blue and white. F. Scott Fitzgerald instead of John Berryman and Jack Kerouac. Did any of it really matter? Princeton might not have been New York, but it was only an hour away by train, and the one advantage Princeton had over Columbia was that Jim had applied there for graduate work in physics. He was sure to be accepted, which Ferguson was not, but one could nevertheless dream, and how pleasant it was to imagine the two of them spending the next four years together in that woodsy world of books and fellowship as the ghost of Albert Einstein flitted among the trees.
After his conversation with his mother and Dan in late November, Ferguson wrote a long letter to his father in which he explained why he wanted to suspend their twice-a-month dinners. He didn’t quite come out and say he never wanted to see him again, for it still wasn’t clear to Ferguson if that was his position or not, though he suspected it was, but he was only seventeen, and he lacked the courage and confidence to issue life-altering ultimatums about the future, which he hoped would be a long one, and who knew what turns his relationship with his father would take in the years ahead? What he did bring up, however, and what constituted the heart of the letter, was how distressed he was to have learned that his father had removed him as a dependent on his income tax returns. It felt as if he had been erased, he wrote, as if his father were trying to forget the past twenty years of his life and pretend they had never happened, not only his marriage to Ferguson’s mother but the fact that he had a son, whom he had now given over entirely to the care of Dan Schneiderman. But putting all that aside, Ferguson continued, after devoting two full pages to the subject, the dinners they had together had become infinitely depressing to him, and why go on with the dreary charade of making lifeless small talk with each other when the truth was that neither of them had anything to say anymore, and how sad it was to sit together in those grimy places looking at the clock and counting the minutes until the torture was over, and wouldn’t it be better to take a pause for a while and reflect on whether they wanted to start up again at some future point or not?