Every other Wednesday throughout the first semester, Nagle and his wife, Susan, hosted an afternoon tea at their small house on Alexander Street for Nagle’s six freshman advisees. Mrs. Nagle was a short, round brunette who taught ancient history at Rutgers and stood a full head shorter than her lean, long-faced husband. While she poured the tea, Nagle served the sandwiches, or while Nagle poured the tea, she served the sandwiches, and while Nagle sat in an armchair smoking cigarettes and talking or listening to some of his charges, Mrs. Nagle sat on the sofa talking and listening to his other charges, and so companionable and yet distantly polite were the two Nagles with each other that Ferguson sometimes wondered if they didn’t communicate in ancient Greek when they didn’t want their eight-year-old daughter, Barbara, to know what they were talking about. The idea of a formal tea had always struck Ferguson as the dullest sort of social business imaginable (he had never been to one until now), but in fact he enjoyed Nagle’s ninety-minute parties and tried not to miss them, for they offered another chance to see the professor in action, and what they told him was that Nagle was more than he appeared to be in the classroom or his office, where he never talked about politics or the war or current issues, but here in his house every other Wednesday afternoon he welcomed in his six first-year charges, who happened to be two Jewish students, two foreign students, and two black students, and when you considered that there were only twelve black freshmen in the entire class of eight hundred (only twelve!) and no more than five or six dozen Jews and perhaps half or a third that many foreigners, it seemed clear to Ferguson that Nagle had quietly taken it upon himself to look after the outsiders and make sure they didn’t drown in that forbidding, alien place, and whether he was motivated by political beliefs or a love of Princeton or simple human kindness, Robert Nagle was doing what he could to make the marginal ones feel at home.
Nagle and Howard and Jim — in the first month of Ferguson’s new life as a discombobulated scholarship boy, a boy who had previously come to think of himself as a man and was now regressing into the anxious uncertainties of childhood, they were the ones who held him together. Howard was more than just a demon cartoonist and high-energy wit, he was a solid thinker and conscientious student with plans to major in philosophy, and because he was considerate and mostly self-contained and undemanding of Ferguson’s attentions, it was possible for Ferguson to share the room with him and not feel that his privacy was being impinged upon. That had been one of Ferguson’s greatest fears, having to live in a less than large room with someone else, which until now had happened to him only at Camp Paradise, where he had bunked in cabins with two counselors and seven other boys, but at home he had always been able to retreat into the four walls of his one-person sanctuary, even in the new house on Woodhall Crescent when Amy had been in the next room slamming doors and blasting out loud music, and the worry had been whether he would be able to read or write or even think with another person lying on a bed or sitting at a desk just six or seven feet from him. As it happened, Howard had been fretting about the same close-quarters problem, for he too had always had his own room while growing up, and in a frank conversation on the third day of Freshman Orientation Week, during which they both confessed to their fears of no solitude and too much air going from one set of lungs into the other, they worked out what they hoped would be an acceptable modus operandi. Their suitemates were a pre-med student from Vermont named Will Noyes and an 800 math wizard from Iowa named Dudley Krantzenberger, and Ferguson and Howard agreed that when the common room was empty, that is, when Noyes and Krantzenberger were in their bedroom or out of the building, one of them (Ferguson or Howard) would read-write-think-study-draw in the bedroom and the other in the common room, and when either Noyes or Krantzenberger or both was/were in the common room, Ferguson and Howard would take turns going to the library while the other remained in the bedroom. They shook hands on it, but then the semester began in earnest, and after a couple of weeks they had grown so comfortable with each other that the precautionary rules were no longer in force. They came and went as they pleased, and if they both decided to stay in at the same time, they discovered that they were able to sit in the room together for long stretches of silent work without breaking in on each other’s thoughts or contaminating the air they both breathed. Potential problems sometimes turned into genuine problems, and sometimes they didn’t. This one didn’t. By the first of October, the two occupants of the third-floor room in Brown Hall had invented eighty-one more tennis matches.
As for Jim, he was adjusting to a new set of circumstances as well, feeling his way as a first-year graduate student in the roughly competitive Department of Physics, acclimating himself to life with a roommate in an off-campus apartment, no less frazzled than his stepbrother was during that early period in black squirrel heaven, but still they managed to have dinner together every Tuesday night, either spaghetti at the apartment with Jim’s fellow MIT-graduate roommate, Lester Patel from New Delhi, or hamburgers at a crowded little place on Nassau Street called Bud’s, along with an hour and a half of one-on-one basketball at Dillon Gym every ten days or so, where Ferguson always lost to the slightly taller, slightly more talented Schneiderman, but not by such embarrassing scores that it wasn’t worth the effort. One evening about two weeks after the start of classes, Jim dropped by Brown Hall for an impromptu visit with Ferguson and Howard, and when Howard pulled out the list of tennis matches they had done so far and showed Jim some of the drawings that went with them (Claude Rains on one side of the net as a cluster of isolate droplets, Muddy Waters on the other side up to his waist in goo), Jim laughed as hard as Ferguson and Howard had laughed on the morning they’d cooked up the game, and to see him doubled over and in stitches like that said something good about Jim’s character, Ferguson felt, just as passing the Horn & Hardart Initiation Exam had said something good about Celia’s character, for in each case the reaction had proved that the person in question was a kindred spirit, someone who appreciated the same screwball juxtapositions and unpredictable yokings of like and unlike that Ferguson did, for the unhappy truth was that not everyone was enamored of Horn & Hardart’s or the poetic grandeur of automated, nickel-in-the-slot cuisine, and not everyone laughed or even smiled at the tennis matches, as Ferguson and Howard had observed with Noyes and Krantzenberger, who one by one had looked at the pairings with blank faces, not understanding that they were supposed to be funny, not capable of grasping the droll doubleness that occurred when a thing-word also posed as a name-word and that putting two of those thing-names together could hoist you into a realm of unexpected mirth, no, the whole venture had fallen flat for their sober, literal-minded suitemates, whereas Jim was in a lather of extreme jollification, clutching his sides and telling them he hadn’t laughed so hard in years, and once again Ferguson found himself looking at the old punch-kiss problem, which appeared to be intractable, since the what couldn’t speak for itself except by being itself and therefore was forever at the mercy of the who, and given that there was always just one what and many whos, the whos inevitably had the last word, even when they were wrong in their judgments, not just about big things such as books and the design of eighty-story buildings but about small things such as a random list of harmless, silly jokes.