It was, to be sure, an awkward business, a complex business. The horrified Didi pinned under the weight of her corpulent lover, staring at the top of his bald head and the few strands of hair that remained around the temples, which were dyed brown (O, the vanity of old men), extricating herself out from under the corpse and then calling for an ambulance, which conveyed her and the shrouded body of Ferguson’s grandfather to Lenox Hill Hospital, where, at 3:52 P.M., Benjamin Adler was pronounced dead on arrival, and then the poor, shaken Didi had to call Ferguson’s grandmother, who knew nothing about the young woman’s existence, and tell her to come to the hospital right away because there had been an accident.
The funeral was restricted to the immediate family. No Gershes or Pomerantzes were invited, no friends, no business associates, not even Ferguson’s great-aunt and great-uncle from California (his grandmother’s older brother, Saul, and his Scottish wife, Marjorie). The scandal had to be suppressed, and a large public gathering would have been too much for his grandmother to cope with, so just eight people made the trip out to the cemetery in Woodbridge, New Jersey, to attend his grandfather’s buriaclass="underline" Ferguson and his parents, Amy, Great-aunt Pearl, Aunt Mildred and Uncle Henry (who had flown in from Berkeley the day before), and Ferguson’s grandmother. They listened to the rabbi recite the Kaddish, they tossed dirt onto the pine box in the grave, and then they returned to the apartment on West Fifty-eighth Street for lunch, after which they repaired to the living room and spread out into three separate groups, three separate conversations that went on until it was well past dark: Amy on the sofa with Aunt Mildred and Uncle Henry, Ferguson’s father and Great-aunt Pearl in the armchairs across from the sofa, and Ferguson at the little table in the alcove by the front windows with his mother and grandmother. For once, his grandmother did most of the talking. After all the years of sitting in silence while her husband held forth with his nonstop jokes and rambling stories, it was as if she were finally claiming her right to speak for herself, and what she said that afternoon astonished Ferguson, not only because the words themselves were astonishing but because it was astonishing to learn how thoroughly he had misjudged her all his life.
The first astonishment was that she bore no resentment against Didi Bryant, whom she described as that pretty girl in tears. And how brave of her, his grandmother said, not to have run off and disappeared into the night, as most people in her situation would have done, but this girl was different, she had stuck around the lobby of the hospital until THE WIFE showed up and had not been embarrassed to talk about her affair with Benjy or how fond of him she had been or what a sad, sad thing it was that had just happened. Rather than blame Didi for Benjy’s death, Ferguson’s grandmother pitied her and called her a good person, and at one point, when Didi broke down and started to sob (this was the second astonishment), she had said to her: Don’t cry, dear. I’m sure you made him happy, and my Benjy was a man who needed to be happy.
There was something heroic in that response, Ferguson felt, a depth of human understanding that overturned everything he had ever thought about his grandmother until that moment, and then she shifted slightly in her chair and looked directly at his mother, her eyes tearing up for the first time all day, and a moment later she was talking about things no one from her generation ever talked about, flatly asserting that she had failed her husband, that she had been a bad wife to him because the physical part of marriage had never interested her, she had found sexual intercourse painful and unpleasant, and after the girls were born she had told Benjy that she couldn’t do it anymore, or only every now and then as a favor to him, and what could you expect, she asked Ferguson’s mother, of course Benjy chased after other women, he was a man with large appetites, and how could she hold that against him when she had let him down and done such a miserable job in the bed department? In every other way she had loved him, for forty-seven years he was the only man in her life, and believe me, Rose, not for one minute did I ever feel he didn’t love me back.
JUNE 1967. IT all came down to a question of money. When Ferguson’s mother told him in late January that his father was covering the costs of Columbia and the apartment and the food, books, and extras allowance by cashing in portions of his life insurance policy every six months, Ferguson understood that he would have to start contributing something more than the minimum-wage crumbs he had been given as a bookstore clerk last summer, that he owed it to his parents to kick in whatever additional amounts he could earn as a gesture of good faith, of thanks.
Amy already had a job lined up for the summer. At the post-funeral lunch in his grandparents’ apartment, she had spent several hours talking to Aunt Mildred and Uncle Henry. Henry the historian and Amy the history student had hit it off particularly well, and when Ferguson’s uncle told her about the project he was planning to begin in June (a study of the American labor movement), Amy had jumped in with so many interesting questions (according to Henry) that she suddenly found herself being offered a summer job as a research assistant. The job was in Berkeley, of course, and now that Amy would be going there at the end of the spring semester, it naturally followed that Ferguson would go with her. All through the winter and early spring, they talked about it as their next big foreign adventure—another France, but this time traveling abroad in their own country. Train, plane, or bus, chancing it in the old Impala, hitchhiking, or one of those drive-away jobs to transport someone’s car to another city: those were the options before them, and the trick was to figure out which one would cost the least. Still, it was essential that he find a job in Berkeley before he went out there, the whole project was contingent on his having work, and he couldn’t afford to waste time looking for something after he arrived. Aunt Mildred promised to help, she assured him that jobs were plentiful and there would be no problem, but when he wrote to her at the end of March and again in the middle of April, her replies were so obscure, so devoid of details that he was almost certain she had forgotten to look for him, or hadn’t yet started to look, or had no intention of looking until he was on his way to California. Then an opportunity presented itself to him in New York, a good opportunity, and in spite of the disappointment it caused him, he felt he couldn’t turn it down without risking a summer with no job at all. Strangely enough, it was a job almost identical to Amy’s, which somehow made the situation even worse, as if he had been turned into the butt of someone’s warped idea of how to tell a bad joke. Ferguson’s CC professor for the spring term had been commissioned to write a history of Columbia from its founding to the celebration of its two hundredth anniversary (1754 to 1954), and he was looking for a research assistant to help him get the book off the ground. Ferguson didn’t have to apply for the post. Andrew Fleming offered it to him because he was impressed by the twenty-year-old’s work in class and by his ability to write — not just his academic papers but his news articles and poetry translations as well. Ferguson was flattered by those generous remarks, but it was the salary that clinched it, two hundred dollars a week (funded by a grant from the university), which meant he would accumulate over two thousand dollars by the time the fall semester began, and just like that he wasn’t going to California anymore. Little matter that the tubby fifty-two-year-old Fleming was a life-long bachelor who took a serious interest in young men. Ferguson never doubted that the professor had a crush on him — but it was nothing he couldn’t handle, and nothing to prevent him from accepting the job.