THE COURSES NOT taught by Nagle were not as engaging as Classical Literature in Translation, but they were good enough, and between the work of settling into his new surroundings and the work for those courses, which included a freshman requirement in prosody and composition along with Introduction to French Literature with Lafargue, the European Novel from 1857 to 1922 with Baker, and American History I with McDowell, there was little time left over in the first month for him to think about poor Mulligan, and what time there was he squandered on trips to New York.
His grandfather had gone down to Florida for the fall and winter, which gave Ferguson free access to the apartment whenever he wanted it, and with the apartment came the luxury of being entirely and bracingly alone. The rooms on West Fifty-eighth Street also provided him with the further indulgence of being able to make free telephone calls, since his grandfather had explicitly told him to use the phone whenever his mouth felt the itch and not to worry about the cost. The offer implied a certain degree of moderation, of course, an understanding that Ferguson would not lose control of himself and saddle his grandfather with excessive long-distance charges, which eliminated the possibility of calling Dana in Israel, for example (something he might have done anyway if he had known her number), but as it was he managed to stay in touch with various others on the domestic front, all of them women, the women he loved or had loved or might start to love later or soon or now.
Stepsister Amy had thrown herself into the anti-war movement at Brandeis, which had drawn all the most interesting people on campus, she said, among them a senior named Michael Morris, who had been one of the Freedom Summer volunteers in Mississippi last year, and Ferguson could only hope that this one would be better for her than the slob she had given her heart to in high school, duplicitous Loeb of the manifold deceptions and broken promises. Had that been an innocent mistake on Amy’s part, he wondered, or, having rejected her future stepbrother on the night of the fireflies in the backyard of the old house, was she destined to fall for the wrong man again and again? Be careful, he said to her. This Morris seems to be a good fellow, but don’t jump into it until you know who he really is. Ferguson in his self-appointed role as the new Miss Lonelyhearts, dispensing advice on matters he knew nothing about. A subtle form of unconscious revenge, perhaps, for much as he cared about Amy, the scald of her old rejection still stung from time to time, and he had never been able to tell her how badly she had hurt him.
His mother had found a job with the Hammond Map Company in Maplewood, a long-term assignment to take pictures for a series of New Jersey calendars and agendas they were planning to start publishing in 1967, that is, one year from now in the fall of 1966, New Jersey Notables, New Jersey Landscapes, New Jersey Historic Sites, and two editions of New Jersey Architecture (one for public buildings and one for private houses), which had been swung through the intervention of one of Dan’s commercial clients, and Ferguson felt this was excellent news for several reasons, first of all because of the extra cash that would be coming into the household (a source of perpetual worry) but most of all because he wanted his mother to be busy with something again after his father had recklessly pulled the plug on her studio, and with no kids to look after at home anymore, why not do this, which was bound to be satisfying work for her and enliven her days, however far-fetched the notion of New Jersey calendars and weekly planners might have been.
The person he had once called Mrs. Monroe and now addressed as Evie, the short form of Evelyn she was known by to her friends, was back at C.H.S. doing her stuff in front of her several English classes and overseeing the new crop of editors in charge of the student literary magazine, but things had taken a rocky turn for her in early September when her boyfriend of the past three years, a political journalist at the Star-Ledger named Ed Southgate, had abruptly called off their affair and gone back to his wife, and Evie was down and feeling too much pain for her own good, spending the late weekend hours with a glass of scotch in her hand listening to scratchy blues records by Bessie Smith and Lightnin’ Hopkins, and hell, Ferguson kept thinking to himself as the trees changed color and leaves started falling to the ground, how that woman’s big soul could ache. Whenever he called her, he did what he could to pull her out of the doldrums and take her mind off the departed Ed because there was no point in looking back anymore, he felt, nothing for it but to jostle her out of her booze-hole by poking fun at Ed-ness, deadness, and despair, telling her not to worry because he, Ferguson, her former student, was coming to the rescue, and if she didn’t want to be rescued she should lock the doors of her house or get out of town, because he was coming whether she liked it or not, and all at once the two of them would be laughing and the cloud would lift just long enough for her to start talking about other things besides sitting alone in the downstairs parlor with a bottle of scotch, the loveless nights in her half of the two-family house where she lived on a block of tall, undulating shade trees in East Orange, the half-house Ferguson had visited eight or ten times during the summer and knew well enough by now to have learned that it was one of the few places in the world where he felt utterly and only himself, and every time he called her he would think about those summer visits and the one night when they both drank too much and were on the verge of going to bed together when the doorbell rang and the little boy from across the street asked if his mother could borrow a cup of sugar.
Then there was Celia, a call every Friday evening or Saturday afternoon to his new friend, for no other purpose than to prove how seriously he was taking the job of being her friend, and he kept on calling because she always seemed happy when he did. Their early conversations had a tendency to meander over several or many unconnected subjects, but they seldom lagged, and Ferguson enjoyed listening to her earnest, intelligent voice as they zigzagged from the sociology of high school cliques to the war in Vietnam, from worried complaints about her numb, debilitated parents to wistful ruminations about the possibility of orange squirrels, but soon enough she was talking more and more about her preparations for the SATs, which would eliminate any more Saturday outings for the time being, and then, in late September, she announced that she had started seeing a boy named Bruce, who was apparently about to be turned into something that resembled a boyfriend, which jolted Ferguson when she told him about it and went on jolting him for a day or two after that, but once he calmed down he reasoned that it was probably for the best, since she had made too strong an impression on him during the day they had spent together in New York, and with no other girls anywhere in the picture just then, he might have made an impetuous lunge at her the next time they were together, something he would have regretted, something that could have ruined their chances down the road, and better that this Bruce person should be standing between them now, for high school romances rarely lasted beyond the end of high school, and next year she would be in college if things went as planned, as undoubtedly they would, and after that the whole situation would be different again.