3) No eating club. Three-quarters of his classmates would wind up joining one, but Ferguson wasn’t interested. Similar to fraternities but not quite identical to fraternities, with the word bicker standing in for what other places called rush, they smacked of all the time-honored, backward-looking things about Princeton that left him cold, and by steering clear of the clubs and going “independent,” he would be able to avoid one of the stuffiest aspects of that stuffy place and thus feel happier about being there.
4) The ban against baseball would continue, an injunction that would include all spinoff forms of the game as welclass="underline" softball, wiffleball, stickball, and playing catch with anyone at any time, even with a tennis ball or a pink rubber spaldeen or a rolled-up pair of socks. Being out of high school would help put the struggle behind him, he felt, since he would no longer be in contact with his old baseball friends, who remembered what a good and promising player he had been, and because they had been mystified by his decision to stop playing and couldn’t understand the false excuses he had given for abandoning the game, they had gone on questioning him about it all through high school. Mercifully, those questions would end now. On the other hand, now that he had escaped the halls and classrooms of Columbia High, he was about to go to one of the most sports-obsessed colleges in the country, the school that had taken on Rutgers in the first intercollegiate football game ever played in 1869, the school that just six months earlier had gone to the Final Four and come in third in the NCAA basketball tournament, the strongest finish ever for an Ivy League team, with the whole country swept up in Bill Bradley’s headline battles with Cazzie Russell of Michigan, followed by Bradley’s unprecedented fifty-eight points in the consolation-game victory for Princeton, and no doubt everyone on campus would still be rehashing those exploits when Ferguson arrived. Athletes would be everywhere, and Ferguson would naturally want to jump in and take part in various games, but those games would have to be confined to such things as half-court basketball and touch football, and in order to guard against any future temptations to participate in the sport he had vowed to shun as a memorial to Celia’s dead brother, he had given away his baseball gear at the end of August, casually handing over two bats, a pair of spikes, and the Luis Aparicio — model Rawlings glove that had been sitting on a shelf in his room for the past four years to Charlie Bassinger, the scrawny nine-year-old kid who lived next door to him on Woodhall Crescent. Take it, Ferguson had said to Charlie, I don’t need this stuff anymore, and young Bassinger, who wasn’t quite certain what his much admired almost-college-man neighbor was talking about, had looked up at Ferguson and asked, You mean for keeps, Archie? That’s right, Ferguson answered. For keeps.
5) No overtures to his father. If his father made an overture to him, he would think carefully about how he should or shouldn’t respond, but he wasn’t expecting that to happen. Their last communication had been the short note Ferguson had written to thank his father for the high school graduation present in June, and because he had been feeling especially bitter and hopeless on the afternoon the check arrived (Dana had left for Israel earlier that day), he had told his father about his plan to contribute half the money to SNCC and the other half to SANE. It was unlikely his father had been pleased.
QUALMS AND FOREBODINGS, nerves and more nerves, and if not for the soothing presences of his mother and Jim, who were both in the van with Ferguson on the morning he made his way down to the bogs and marshes of COLLEGE LIFE, he probably would have lost his breakfast and staggered out onto the dewy swards of Princeton with half of that breakfast on his shirt.
It was an intense day for the whole family. Dan and Amy were in another car traveling north to Brandeis, Ferguson and company were traveling south in one of Arnie Frazier’s white Chevy vans, which Arnie had been kind enough to let them borrow for free, and there they were cruising along the New Jersey Turnpike on that drizzly, mizzly morning, with Jim at the controls and Ferguson and his mother wedged in beside him on the front seat, the entire space in back filled up to the ceiling with the worldly possessions of the two stepbrothers, the familiar hodgepodge of bedding and pillows and towels and clothes and books and records and record players and radios and typewriters, and now that Ferguson had just finished reciting the first three of his five commandments to them, Jim was shaking his head and smiling his enigmatic Schneiderman smile, which was a smile of thought and reflection rather than a smile that verged on or even suggested laughter.
Loosen up, Archie, he said. You’re taking this much too seriously.
Yes, Archie, his mother chimed in. What’s with you this morning? We haven’t even gotten there, and already you’re thinking about how to get away.
I’m scared, that’s all, Ferguson said. Scared that I’m about to get lost in some reactionary, anti-Semitic dungeon and won’t get out alive.
Now his stepbrother laughed.
Think of Einstein, Jim said. Think of Richard Feynman. They don’t kill Jews at Princeton, Archie, they just make them walk around with yellow stars on their sleeves.
Now Ferguson laughed.
Jim, his mother said, you shouldn’t joke like that, really you shouldn’t — but a moment later she was laughing, too.
About ten percent, Jim said. That’s what I’ve been told. Which is a lot higher than the national percentage of … of what? Two percent, three percent?
Columbia is somewhere around twenty or twenty-five percent, Ferguson said.
Maybe so, Jim replied, but Columbia didn’t give you the scholarship.
BROWN HALL, AND a suite of two bedrooms on the third floor large enough to house four freshmen with a common room and bathroom in between. Brown Hall and a roommate named Small, Howard Small, a solid, chunky fellow of around five-eleven with a clear gaze and an aura of tranquil self-confidence about him, a person comfortably settled into his own patch of ground, his own skin. A firm but not too firm or bone-crunching grip when they shook hands for the first time, and a moment later Howard was leaning forward and studying Ferguson’s face, which was an odd thing for someone to do, Ferguson thought, but then Howard asked him a question that turned the odd thing into a thing that wasn’t odd at all.
You didn’t happen to go to Columbia High School, did you? Howard asked.
Yes, Ferguson said. As a matter of fact I did.
Ah. And while you were at Columbia, you didn’t happen to play on the J.V. basketball team, did you?
I did. Just for my sophomore year, though.
I knew I’d seen you somewhere before. You played forward, right?
Left. Left forward. But you’re right. Not that I know why you’re right, but you are.
I was a benchwarmer on the West Orange J.V. that year.
Which means … how interesting … that we’ve already crossed paths twice.
Twice without even knowing it. Once for the home game and once for the away game. And just like you, I stopped playing after that one season. But I was a talentless oaf, truly awful and inept. Whereas you were pretty good, as I remember it, maybe even very good.