You mentioned Swift. What about Fielding, Sterne, and Austen?
No, not yet.
And what is it about Kleist that attracts you so much?
The speed of his sentences, the propulsion. He tells and tells but doesn’t show much, which everyone says is the wrong way to go about it, but I like the way his stories charge forward. It’s all very intricate, but at the same time it feels as if you’re reading a fairy tale.
You know how he died, don’t you?
He shot himself in the mouth when he was thirty-four. After he’d killed a woman friend in a double-suicide pact.
Tell me, Ferguson, what would happen if you were accepted by Princeton but turned down for the scholarship? Would you come here anyway?
It all depends on what Columbia says.
That’s your first choice.
Yes.
May I ask why?
Because it’s in New York.
Ah, of course. But you’d come here if we gave you the scholarship.
Absolutely. It’s all about the money, you see, and even if I do get into Columbia, I’m not sure my family could afford to send me there.
Well, I don’t know what the committee will decide, but I just want to tell you that I enjoyed reading your stories and think they’re much better than so-so. Mr. Flute is still searching for another second road, I believe, but Gregor Flamm is a lovely surprise, an excellent piece of work for someone your age, and with a few small revisions in the third and fifth parts, I’m sure you could publish it somewhere. But don’t. That’s what I wanted to say to you, my one word of advice. Hold off for a while, don’t rush to get yourself into print, keep working, keep growing, and before long you’ll be ready.
Thank you. No, not thank you — but yes, as in yes, you’re right, even if you could be wrong, about not being so-so, I mean, but it means so much to … Christ, I don’t know what I’m saying anymore.
Don’t say anything, Ferguson. Just stand up from that chair, shake my hand, and go home. It’s been a privilege to meet you.
SIX WEEKS OF uncertainty followed. All through March and halfway into April, Robert Nagle’s words blazed in Ferguson’s mind, the excellent piece of work and the privilege to meet you kept him warm through the chilly days of late winter and early spring, for he realized that Nagle was the first stranger, the first neutral person, the first utterly indifferent outsider who had ever read his work, and now that the best literary mind in all of Princeton had judged his stories to be worthy, the young author wished he could stop going to school and spend ten hours a day sitting in his room with the new work that was taking shape in his head, a multipart epic called Mulligan’s Travels, which was sure to be the best thing he had ever done, the great leap forward at last.
One morning in the midst of the long waiting period, as Ferguson sat in the kitchen brooding about lions and tigers and the odds of ending up as an ant in the big ant factory known as Rutgers, situated in the world-renowned metropolis of New Brunswick, New Jersey, his mother walked into the room with that day’s Star-Ledger, plopped it down on the breakfast table in front of him, and said, Get a load of this, Archie. Ferguson looked, and what he saw was so unexpected, so outside the realm of what seemed possible, so egregiously wrong and ridiculous, that he had to look at it three more times before he could begin to assimilate the news. His father had married again. The prophet of profits had hitched himself to forty-one-year-old Ethel Blumenthal, widow of the late Edgar Blumenthal and mother of two children, sixteen-year-old Allen and twelve-year-old Stephanie, and as Ferguson looked down at the photograph of his grinning father and the not unpresentable second Mrs. Ferguson, he saw that she bore a certain resemblance to his mother, especially in her height and shape and the darkness of her hair, as if his father had gone out looking for a new version of the original model, but the replacement was only half as pretty and had a guarded look in her eyes, something sad and shut off and perhaps a little cold, whereas Ferguson’s mother’s eyes were a port of refuge for everyone who came near her.
He supposed he should have been outraged that his father had never introduced him to this woman, who was technically his stepmother now, and deeply offended that he had not been invited to the wedding, but Ferguson was neither one of those things. He was relieved. The story was over, and Stanley Ferguson’s son, who no longer had to pretend he felt any filial attachment to the man who had sired him, looked at his mother and shouted, Adios, papa — vaya con Dios!
Three weeks after that, on the same day in three different parts of the country — New York City, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a small town in New Jersey — the youngest members of the mingled, mixed-up tribe opened their mailboxes and found the letters they had been waiting for. Except for the one no to Noah, it was a clean sweep of yeses for all of them, an unprecedented triumph that put the Schneiderman-Ferguson-Marx quartet in the enviable position of being able to choose where they wanted to go for the next four years of their lives. In addition to NYU, Noah could attend City College or the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Jim could go west to Caltech, south to Princeton, or stay where he was at MIT. In addition to Barnard and Brandeis, Amy’s options included Smith, Pembroke, and Rutgers. As for Ferguson, the ants had come through for him as expected, but so had the two jungle beasts, as not expected, and when he looked over at the exultant Amy, who was throwing her letters around the kitchen and laughing her head off, he stood up and said to her, in his best imitation of her grandfather’s accent: Ve valtz together now, ja liebchen? Then he walked over to where she was standing, wrapped his arms around her, and kissed her smack on the lips.
Walt Whitman Scholar.
In spite of the heartening letter from Columbia, New York would have to wait. The money made it imperative for him to go to Princeton, but beyond the money there was the distinction of having won the scholarship, which was unquestionably the biggest thing that had ever happened to him, a gigantic feather in his cap, as Dan had put it, and even for the hardened, undemonstrative Ferguson, who was normally so shy about his accomplishments that he would rather have left the room than open his mouth and brag about himself, the Princeton scholarship was different, a thing so big that it felt good to carry it around with him and let others see it, and when word got out at school that he was one of the four anointed ones, he soaked up the compliments without feeling embarrassed or making any of his usual self-deprecatory remarks, he was greedy for the adulation, he enjoyed being at the center of a world that was suddenly revolving around him, admired and envied and talked about by everyone, and even though he had wanted to move to New York in September, the thought of becoming a Walt Whitman Scholar at Princeton was more than enough to live on for now.
Two months went by, and the day after he graduated from high school, Ferguson received a letter from his father. In addition to a short note congratulating him on the scholarship (which had been announced in the Star-Ledger), the envelope contained a check for one thousand dollars. Ferguson’s first impulse was to tear it up and mail the pieces back to his father, but then he thought better of it and decided to deposit the check in his account. Once it cleared, he would write out two checks for five hundred dollars each, one of them to SANE (National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy) and the other one to SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). There was no sense in tearing up money when it could be put to good use, and why not give it away to the ones who were fighting against the imbecilities and injustices of the messed-up world he lived in?