Ferguson meant to stick to his promise because he wanted to read those books and had every intention of reading every one of them. He didn’t want to go through life as an untrained, undisciplined know-nothing, he merely didn’t want to go to college, and even though he was willing to sit through five two-hour classes a week at the Alliance Française because one of his ambitions in life was to become wholly proficient in French, he had no desire to sit through classes anywhere else, least of all in a college, which would have been no better than any of the other maximum-security institutions he had been confined to since the age of five — and undoubtedly even worse. The only reason to surrender your ideals and go in for one of those four-year stretches was to be given a student deferment from the army, which would put off the dilemma of marching off to Vietnam or saying no to Vietnam, which in turn would put off the second dilemma of federal prison or permanent removal from the United States, all postponed for the length of your four-year sentence, but Ferguson had already solved the problem by other means, and now that the army had rejected him, he could reject college without ever having to face any of those dilemmas again.
He knew how lucky he was. Not only had he been spared from the war and each one of the odious choices that followed from the war, the terrible ayes and nays that every post — high school and post-college American male would have to confront for as long as the evil war went on, but his parents had not turned against him, that was crucial, nothing was more important to the prospects of his long-range survival than the fact that Gil and his mother had forgiven him for the transgressions of his senior year, and even though they continued to worry about him and question his mental and emotional stability, they had not forced him to start seeing a doctor for the psychotherapy Gil had suggested might do him an enormous amount of good, for Ferguson had argued that it wasn’t necessary, that he had made his fair share of dumb adolescent mistakes but was essentially fine and that throwing away their money on such a nebulous proposition would only make him feel guilty. They gave in. They always gave in when he talked to them in a mature and sensible tone of voice, because whenever Ferguson was on top of himself and not under himself, which was about half the time, there were few people in the world as sweet as he was, as loving as he was, such sweetness and transparent love emanating from his eyes that few could resist him, least of all his mother and stepfather, who were perfectly aware that Ferguson could be other things besides sweet as well, but still they found themselves powerless to resist.
Two lucky things, and then a third lucky thing that came through for him at the last minute, the chance to live in Paris for a time, perhaps for a long time, which had not seemed possible at first, not with his mother fretting about the enormous distance that would stand between them and Gil stewing about the logistics of the venture and the dozens of practical difficulties it would present, but then, a couple of weeks after Ferguson’s 4-F classification landed in the family mailbox, Gil wrote to Vivian Schreiber in Paris to ask for her advice, and the surprising answer she gave him in her return letter put an end to Gil’s stewing and greatly diminished Ferguson’s mother’s alarm. “Send Archie to me,” Vivian wrote. “The sixth-floor chambre de bonne that belongs to my apartment is empty now, since my brother’s son Edward has gone back to America for his senior year at Berkeley and I haven’t bothered to look for a new occupant, which means that Archie can have it if he doesn’t mind living in minimal quarters. Rent-free, of course. And now that my Chardin book has been published in London and New York, I’ve been spending my time translating it into French for my Paris publisher, a tedious job that thankfully is nearly done, and with no new projects burning on the immediate horizon, I would be happy to take on the task of tutoring Archie as he works his way through the extraordinary books on your list, which will of course make it necessary for me to read them as well, and I must admit that the thought of plunging into all that good stuff again is exceedingly pleasant to me. The high school film articles you included in your letter show that Archie is a capable and intelligent young man. If he doesn’t approve of my teaching methods, we can look for someone else. But I’m willing to give it a try.”
Ferguson was euphoric. Not just Paris, but Paris under the same roof as Vivian Schreiber, Paris under the benevolent care of womankind’s most glorious incarnation, Paris on the rue de l’Université in the seventh arrondissement, Left Bank Paris with all the comforts of a rich and tranquil neighborhood, just a short walk to the cafés of Saint-Germain, just a short walk across the river to the Cinémathèque at the Palais de Chaillot, and, most important of all, for the first time ever in his life, life on his own.
It was painful having to say good-bye to his mother and Gil, especially his mother, who cried a bit at the end of their last home-cooked dinner together on a wet night in mid-October, which almost made him want to tear up as well, but he averted that potential embarrassment by telling them about the book he had started writing in the days just after his army physical, at a moment when he still wasn’t sure what would happen to him and was feeling entirely lost, a little book which already had a title that was forever fixed in stone, How Laurel and Hardy Saved My Life, which was essentially a book about his mother, he said, and the rough years they had gone through together between the night of the Newark fire and the day she married Gil, a book that would be broken down into three parts, “Glorious Oblivions” being the first one, an account of all the movies they had watched together during the Curious Interregnum and the months beyond, the importance of those movies to them, the life-saving power of those ridiculous studio films, watched together in the balconies of West Side theaters as his mother puffed away on her Chesterfields and Ferguson dreamed he was inside the movies playing on the two-dimensional screens in front of him, and then the second part would be called “Stan and Ollie,” a history of his infatuation with those two morons and how he loved them still, and then a final section, not yet fully worked out, something with a title such as “Art and Trash” or “This Versus That,” which would explore the differences between Hollywood garbage films and masterpieces from other countries and argue strongly for the value of garbage even as it defended those masterpieces, and maybe it was good for him to be going so far away, he said, away from his mother as she was now in order to write about her as she had been then, to be able to live for a while in the large, densely crowded spaces of memory with no interference from the present, nothing to distract him from living in the past for as long as he needed to be there.
His mother smiled at him through her tears. Stubbing out a half-smoked cigarette with her left hand, she reached out to Ferguson with her right, drew her son toward her, and kissed him on the forehead. Gil stood up from the table, walked over to where Ferguson was sitting, and kissed him as well. Ferguson kissed both of them, and then Gil kissed his mother, and they all said good night. By the evening of the next day, good night had turned into good-bye, and a minute later Ferguson was boarding the plane and was gone.