The last thing on Ferguson’s mind just then was the money, he who rarely stopped thinking and worrying about money in the day-to-day course of his own life had neglected to think about the question of estates and the financial consequences that followed from a person’s death, but his grandfather had earned considerable gobs of money during his long years at Gersh, Adler, and Pomerantz, and even though large chunks of those gobs had been squandered on Didi Bryant and her predecessors, Ferguson’s grandmother had inherited more than half a million dollars after her husband’s death, and now that she herself had died, that money was passed on to her two daughters, Mildred and Rose, each of whom was given half according to the terms of the will, and once the estate taxes had been paid, Ferguson’s aunt and mother were both two hundred thousand dollars richer than they had been before their mother’s fatal stroke. Two hundred thousand dollars! It was such an outrageous sum that Ferguson laughed when his mother called from Florida in late January and told him the news, and then he laughed even harder when she announced that half of her half would be going to him.
Your father and I have gone over this very carefully, she said, and we think it’s only fair that you should get something now. The number we came up with was twenty thousand. The other eighty we’ll invest for you, so if and when you’re ever in a spot where you might need to have some of it, the eighty will be more than eighty. You’re a big boy now, Archie, and we figured twenty would be enough to get you through your last three semesters of college with a nice bit left over for the beginning of your so-called real life, a six- or eight-thousand dollar cushion, which will give you a chance to go for a job you really want rather than one you feel you have to take because you’re desperate for money. Besides, this will make things easier for us old folks down in Miami Beach. Your father won’t have to send you monthly checks anymore for your rent and allowance, he won’t have to think about paying the tuition anymore, everything will be simpler for all of us, and from now on you’ll be in charge.
What have I done to deserve this? Ferguson asked.
Nothing. But what did I do to deserve the money in the first place? Nothing. It’s just the way it is, Archie. People die, and the world goes on, and whatever we can do to help each other out, well, that’s what we do, isn’t it?
JANUARY 1968. BECAUSE Amy was a person who never backed down after she had made up her mind about something, she stuck to her guns and sent off an application to Berkeley Law, and because Ferguson knew she was bound to get in and would decide to go there once they accepted her, even though she would also be accepted by Columbia and Harvard, he tried to comfort himself by thinking about the money, which would allow him to travel to California to see her for short visits, sometimes for long visits if she chose not to return to New York for Christmas and/or spring vacation, and in that way perhaps it would be possible to get through the year without feeling crushed by her absence. Not likely, he thought, but at least the money gave him a chance now, whereas before the money he had been utterly without hope.
Beyond that, the interesting thing about the money was how little it affected the outward circumstances of his life. He hesitated a bit less now about buying the books and records he wanted, he tended to replace worn-out clothes and shoes a bit more readily than he had in the past, and whenever he wanted to surprise Amy with a present (flowers mostly, but also books, records, and earrings), he could give in to the impulse without any second thoughts. Otherwise, not much had changed. He continued going to his classes and writing articles for the Spectator and translating French poems, and he kept on frequenting his usual inexpensive haunts — the West End, the Green Tree, and Chock Full o’Nuts — but on the inside, deep down in the submerged mental chamber where Ferguson lived alone in silent communion with his own consciousness, one thing was vastly different now. Thousands of dollars were sitting in his account at the First National City Bank on the corner of West 110th Street and Broadway, and just knowing they were there, even if he had no particular desire to spend them, relieved him of the obligation to think about money seven hundred and forty-six times a day, which in the end was just as bad if not worse than not having enough money, for those thoughts could be excruciating and even murderous, and not having to think them anymore was a blessing. That was the one true advantage of having money over not having money, he decided — not that you could buy more things with it but that you no longer had to walk around with that infernal thought bubble hanging over your head.
EARLY 1968. FERGUSON saw the situation as a series of concentric circles. The outer circle was the war and all that went with it: American soldiers in Vietnam, enemy combatants from the North and the South (Vietcong), Ho Chi Minh, the government in Saigon, Lyndon Johnson and his cabinet, U.S. foreign policy since the end of World War II, body counts, napalm, burning villages, hearts and minds, escalation, pacification, peace with honor. The second circle represented America, the two hundred million on the home front: the press (newspapers, magazines, radio, television), the anti-war movement, the pro-war movement, the Black Power movement, the counterculture movement (hippies and Yippies, pot and LSD, rock and roll, the underground press, Zap Comix, the Merry Pranksters, the Motherfuckers), the Hard Hats and the Love-It-or-Leave-It crowd, the empty air occupied by the so-called generation gap between middle-class parents and their children, and the vast throng of nameless citizens who would come to be known as the Silent Majority. The third circle was New York, which was almost identical to the second circle but more immediate, more vivid: a laboratory filled with examples of the aforementioned social currents that Ferguson could perceive directly with his own eyes rather than through the filter of written words or published images, all the while taking into account the nuances and particularities of New York itself, which was different from all the other cities in the United States, especially because of the enormous divide between rich and poor. The fourth circle was Columbia, Ferguson’s temporary abode, the close-to-hand little world that surrounded him and his fellow students, the encompassing ground of an institution no longer walled off from the big world outside it, for the walls had come down and the outside was now indistinguishable from the inside. The fifth circle was the individual, each individual person in any one of the four other circles, but in Ferguson’s case the individuals who counted most were the ones he knew personally, above all the friends he shared his life with at Columbia, and above all those others, of course, the individual of individuals, the dot at the center of the smallest of the five circles, the person who was himself.