ON THE WEDNESDAY before Thanksgiving, Ferguson went home for the first time in more than two months, traveling with Jim to the house on Woodhall Crescent as Amy made a similar journey from Boston, and there they were again, all five of them together for the long weekend, but beyond sitting down for the annual turkeyfest on Thursday afternoon, Ferguson spent little time at the house. Dan and his mother were so deeply married now, they were beginning to look like each other, he thought, but Amy had descended on them in a foul and contentious mood, and when Ferguson tried to buck up her spirits at the holiday dinner by reeling off a dozen of the newest tennis matches he had concocted with Howard (Arthur Dove versus Walter Pidgeon, John Locke versus Francis Scott Key, Charles Lamb versus Georges Poulet, Robert Byrd versus John Cage), all the others laughed, including Jim, who had already heard most of them twice, but Amy let out a prolonged groan and then tore into him for wasting his time on what she called trivial, asinine, college-boy humor. Didn’t he know that America was fighting an illegal and immoral war? Didn’t he know that black people were being gunned down and killed all across the country? And what gave him the right, Mr. Pampered Princeton Know-It-All, to ignore those injustices and fritter away his education by indulging in dumb dormitory pranks?
Ferguson gathered that Amy’s romance with Freedom Summer hero Michael Morris was not going well or perhaps not going at all, but he held back from asking her about her love life and simply said: Yes, Amy, I agree with you. The world is a cesspool of shit and pain and horror, but if you’re telling me you want to start a country where it’s against the law to laugh, then I think I’d rather live somewhere else.
You’re not listening to me, Amy said. Of course we need to laugh. If we didn’t laugh, we’d probably all be dead within a year. It’s just that your tennis matches aren’t funny — and they don’t make me laugh.
Dan told his daughter to calm down and take it easy. Jim told his sister to take an anti-grumpus pill, which he quickly amended to an anti-pill pill, and Ferguson’s mother asked Amy if there was something on her mind, a question Amy answered by looking down at her napkin and chewing on her lower lip, and from that point on until the end of the meal Ferguson said almost nothing to anyone. After the pumpkin pie, they all went into the kitchen to wash dishes and scrub pots and pans together, and then Dan and Jim went into the living room to watch the news and the results of the Thanksgiving football games on TV while Amy and Ferguson’s mother sat down at the kitchen table to have what Ferguson presumed would develop into a serious heart-to-heart talk about the thing that happened to be on Amy’s mind (no doubt Michael Morris). It was a little past six o’clock. Ferguson went upstairs to use the telephone in the master bedroom, the only phone in the house that would give him the privacy to talk without being overheard. Evie had told him last weekend that she would be having Thanksgiving dinner with the Kaplans, the couple who lived next door to her and were her best friends in the neighborhood, but on the off chance that the party had broken up early, he called her house first. No answer. That would mean having to call the Kaplans, which in turn would oblige him to have a long talk with the Kaplan family member who happened to pick up the phone, either George or Nancy or one of their two college-age kids, Bob or Ellen, all of whom were Ferguson’s friends, all of whom he normally would have been glad to talk to, but on that particular night he wanted to talk only to Evie.
Some of his best memories of growing up were connected to the Kaplans’ house, which he had visited many times during his years in high school, the Friday and Saturday night gatherings in that two-story, sagging wooden structure crammed with thousands of overspill books from George’s secondhand bookstore, often with Dana, often also with Mike Loeb and Amy, and on most of those evenings a small crowd of twelve or sixteen would be there, an unusual mix of adults and teenagers together, an even more unusual mix of white and black teenagers together, but that part of East Orange was more or less half white and half black by then, and because the Kaplans and Evie Monroe were ban-the-bomb-pro-integration leftists with no money and no intention of running away, and also because everyone who showed up there was nimble enough to joke about George’s name and call him the Man Who Didn’t Exist (a reference to the false name given to Cary Grant in North by Northwest—GEORGE KAPLAN), Ferguson sometimes thought of that house as the last outpost of sanity anywhere in America.
Bob was the one who picked up, which was a good thing for Ferguson, since Bob was the least talkative of the Kaplans and tended to have four things on his mind at once, so after a short conversation about the pluses and minuses of college and the goddamn fucking mess in Vietnam (Bob’s words), the phone was passed to Evie.
What’s up, Archie? she asked.
Nothing. I just want to see you.
Dessert begins in about ten minutes. Why not hop in your car and come over?
Just you. Alone.
Anything wrong?
Not really. A sudden need for air. Amy’s in one of her grand snits, the guys are talking football, and I’m hankering to see you.
That’s nice, hankering.
I don’t think I’ve ever used that word before, not once in my whole life.
Nancy has a headache, and George seems to be coming down with the flu, so I doubt this thing will go on much longer. I should be home in about an hour.
You don’t mind?
No, of course not. I’d love to see you.
Good. I’ll be at your place in an hour.
It was no secret that they were fond of each other, that the eighteen-year-old Ferguson and the thirty-one-year-old Evie Monroe had long since moved beyond the teacher-student formalities of the classroom. They were friends now, good friends, possibly the best of friends, but along with their friendship there had been a growing physical attraction on both sides, which had remained a secret to everyone, even to themselves at first, the unbidden lustful thoughts that neither one of them was prepared to act on out of fear or inhibition, but then came the disinhibiting effect of one too many scotches on a Thursday night in mid-August, and from one moment to the next the tamped-down flames of their mutual attraction combusted into a savage necking binge on the sofa in the downstairs parlor, the love play that was interrupted in mid-squeeze by the ringing doorbell, a notable event not only because of its ferocity but because it had taken place during the time of Ed, albeit toward the end of the time of Ed, and now that Ed was gone and Dana Rosenbloom was gone and Celia Federman was no more than a figment on the far horizon and neither Ferguson nor Evie had touched anyone for longer than he or she cared to remember, it seemed almost inevitable that they should want to touch each other again on that chilly Thanksgiving night. No alcohol was necessary this time. Ferguson’s unexpected use of the word hankering had thrust them back into a memory of that Thursday evening in August when the thing they had started had not been finished, and so it was that when Ferguson arrived at Evie’s half of the two-family house on Warrington Place, they went upstairs to the bedroom, gradually removed their clothes, and made a long, happy night of finishing off what they had started at last.
IT WAS SERIOUS. Not a one-time fling to be forgotten in the morning — but the beginning of something, the first step of many steps to follow. Ferguson didn’t care that she was older than he was, he didn’t care if anyone knew about them, he didn’t care if people talked. However inappropriate it might have been for a thirty-one-year-old woman to be carrying on with an eighteen-year-old boy, there was nothing the law could do about it, since Ferguson was past the age of consent and they were aboveboard and absolutely untouchable. If society looked upon what they were doing as wrong, then society could go on looking at them and lump it.