His father wrote back three days later. It wasn’t the answer Ferguson wanted, but at least it was something. Okay, Archie, we’ll give it a rest for now. I hope you’re doing well. Dad.
Ferguson wasn’t going to reach out to him again. He had decided that much, and if his father wasn’t willing to court him and try to win him back, then that would be the end of it.
He mailed off his applications to Columbia, Princeton, and Rutgers in early January. In mid-February, he took a day off from school and went to New York for his interview at Columbia. He was already familiar with the campus, which had always reminded him of a fake Roman city, with the two massive libraries confronting each other in the middle of the small campus, Butler and Low, each one a hulking granite structure in the classical style, elephants lording it over the less voluminous brick buildings around them, and once he found his way to Hamilton Hall, he went upstairs to the fourth floor and knocked. The interviewer was an economics professor named Jack Shelton, and what a jolly man he was, cracking jokes throughout the conversation and even making fun of stuffy, sclerotic Columbia, and when he learned of Ferguson’s ambition to become a writer, he ended their talk by handing the Columbia High School senior several issues of the Columbia College literary magazine. Flipping through them half an hour later as he rode downtown on the IRT express, Ferguson chanced upon a line of poetry that amused him greatly: A steady fuck is good for you. He laughed out loud when he read it, happy to realize that Columbia couldn’t have been as stuffy as all that, for not only was the line funny, it was true.
The following week, he made his first visit to Princeton, where he doubted many students published poems with the word fuck in them, but the campus was much larger and more attractive than Columbia’s, bucolic splendor to compensate for the fact that it wasn’t in New York but in a small New Jersey town, Gothic architecture as opposed to classical architecture, impressively subtle, near-perfect landscaping filled with carefully tended shrubs and tall, thriving trees, but somewhat antiseptic, as if the vast plot of land on which Princeton stood had been converted into a giant terrarium, smelling of money in the same way the Blue Valley Country Club did, a Hollywood version of the ideal American university, the northernmost southern school, as someone had once said to him, but who was he to complain about anything, and why should he ever want to complain if he happened to win a free pass to walk on those grounds as a Walt Whitman Scholar?
They must have known that Whitman was a man who had no interest in women, he said to himself, as he completed his tour of the campus, a man who believed in love between men and men, but old Walt had spent the last nineteen years of his life just down the road in Camden, which made him New Jersey’s own national monument, and even if his work was both astonishingly good and astonishingly bad, the best of it was the best poetry ever written in this part of the world, and bravo to Gordon DeWitt for having put Walt’s name on his scholarships for New Jersey boys rather than the name of some dead politician or Wall Street pooh-bah, which was precisely what DeWitt had been for the past twenty years.
There were three interviewers this time, not one, and even though Ferguson was properly dressed for the occasion (white shirt, jacket, and tie) and had reluctantly given in when his mother and Amy had begged him to get a haircut before going down there, he felt nervous and out of place in front of those men, who were no less friendly to him than the Columbia professor had been and asked all the questions he was expecting to be asked, but when the hour-long interrogation finally ended, he walked out of the room feeling he had made a botch of it, cursing himself for having mixed up the titles of books by William James and his brother Henry for one thing, and, even worse, having garbled Sancho Panza into Poncho Sanza for another, and in spite of having corrected those errors the instant the words had flown out of his mouth, they were the blunders of a true and thorough idiot, he felt, and not only was he convinced he would come in dead last among all the candidates for the scholarship, he was disgusted with himself for having performed so badly under pressure. For some reason, or reasons, or no reason that anyone but the three men who had talked to him could understand, the committee did not share his opinion, and when he was asked to return for a second interview on March third, Ferguson was perplexed — but also, for the first time, beginning to wonder if there wasn’t some cause for hope.
It was a curious way to spend his eighteenth birthday, decking himself out in a jacket and tie again and traveling down to Princeton for a one-on-one conversation with Robert Nagle, a classics professor who had published translations of plays by Sophocles and Euripides and a book-length study of the pre-Socratics, a man in his early forties with a long, sad face and a watchful, no-nonsense look in his eyes, the best literary mind in all of Princeton according to Ferguson’s high school English teacher, Mr. MacDonald, who had gone to Princeton himself and was rooting hard for Ferguson to win the scholarship. Nagle was not a man to waste his breath chatting about irrelevant things. The first interview had been filled with questions about Ferguson’s academic achievements (good but not spectacular), his work as a moving man during the summers, why he had stopped playing competitive sports, his feelings about his parents’ divorce and his mother’s remarriage, and what he hoped to accomplish by studying at Princeton and not somewhere else, but Nagle ignored those matters and seemed to be interested only in the two stories Ferguson had included with his application and in finding out which writers he had read and hadn’t read and which ones he cared about most.
The first story, Eleven Moments from the Life of Gregor Flamm, was the longest piece Ferguson had written in the past three years, twenty-four typed pages that had been composed between early September and mid-November, two and a half months of steady work during which he had put aside his notebooks and ancillary projects to concentrate on the task he had set for himself, which was to tell the story of someone’s life without telling it as a continuous story, simply jumping in at various disjointed moments to investigate an action, a thought, or an impulse, and then hopping on to the next one, and in spite of the gaps and silences left between the isolate parts, Ferguson imagined the reader would stitch them together in his mind so that the accumulated scenes would add up to something that resembled a story, or something more than just a story — a long novel in miniature. A six-year-old in the first episode, Gregor looks into a mirror to examine his own face and comes to the conclusion that he wouldn’t be able to recognize himself if he saw himself walking down the street, then the seven-year-old Gregor is at Yankee Stadium with his grandfather, standing up with the crowd to applaud a double hit by Hank Bauer and feeling a wet, slithery something land on his bare right forearm, a gob of human spit, a thick lozenge of phlegm that makes him think of a raw oyster creeping along his skin, no doubt an expectoration launched by someone sitting in the upper deck, and beyond the disgust Gregor feels as he wipes it off with his handkerchief and then throws the handkerchief away, there is the conundrum of trying to figure out whether the person who spat on him did it on purpose or not, whether he was aiming for Gregor’s arm and hit his target or whether it was chance that propelled the spit to land where it did, an important distinction in Gregor’s mind, since an intentional hit would postulate a world in which nastiness and evil are the governing forces, a world in which invisible men attack unknown boys for no reason but to indulge in the pleasure of harming others, whereas an accidental hit would postulate a world in which unfortunate things happen but no one is to blame, and further on there is the twelve-year-old Gregor discovering the first pubic hair that has sprouted on his body, the fourteen-year-old Gregor watching his best friend drop dead before his eyes, killed by something called a brain aneurysm, the sixteen-year-old Gregor lying naked in bed with the girl who has helped him lose his virginity, and then, in the final episode, the seventeen-year-old Gregor sitting alone on top of a hill, studying the clouds as they pass overhead, asking himself whether the world is real or nothing more than a projection of his mind, and if it is real, how will his mind ever be able to encompass it? The story concludes: And then he walks down the hill, thinking about the pain in his stomach and whether eating lunch will make him feel better or worse. It is one o’clock in the afternoon. The wind is blowing from the north, and the sparrow that was sitting on the telephone wire is gone.