Albert kept his book a secret, but in other ways he was surprisingly unwithheld, at times even eager to talk about himself, and in their first weeks together Ferguson came to know many things about his past. Abandoned by his father at six, just as he had told Vivian on the night they met at Reid Hall, but then, after seventeen years of no contact, remembered in his father’s will, remembered to the tune of sixty thousand dollars, enough money to live on in Paris for five years or more with nothing to worry about except his novel. His closeness to his mother, who had been booted out of her strict Roman Catholic family after marrying a black man, and even after the black man left and the family was willing to forgive and forget, his strong, spirited mother had stayed booted out on purpose because she wasn’t willing to forgive or forget. Montreal, a city not devoid of black people and mixed-race people, a city where Albert had thrived as a pup, a top boy in sports, a top boy in school, but by mid-adolescence the growing knowledge that he was different from most boys whether black or white or mixed and the fear that his mother would find out, which Albert felt would have devastated her, and so he had left Montreal at seventeen for college in America at all-black Howard in mostly black Washington, a fine school but a rotten place to live, and bit by bit during his first year down there he had come undone. First booze, then cocaine, then heroin, the big crash into apathetic confusion and enraged certainty, a lethal mixture that sent him limping back to Montreal and into the arms of his mother, but better to be a drug-addict son than a faggot-son, he reasoned, and then she dragged him off to the Laurentian Mountains for the summer and locked him up in a barn for what she called the Miles Davis Cure, four straight days of vomiting and shitting and screaming, the shaking and wailing grotesqueries of cold-turkey detox, the brutal confrontation with his own pathetic nothingness and the puny god who refused to watch over him, and then his mother led him out of the barn and sat with him quietly for the next two months as he learned how to eat again and think again and stop feeling sorry for himself. Back to Howard in the fall, and from that day on not a drop of wine, beer, or booze, not a whiff of grass or a snort of coke, clean for the past eight years but still frightened to his bones that he would lapse and die an O.D. death, and when Albert told Ferguson that story on the third day they were together, Ferguson resolved to stop drinking in Albert’s presence, he who took such pleasure in alcohol and enjoyed drinking wine almost as much as he enjoyed having sex would no longer drink with dear Mr. Bear, and no, it wasn’t fun, it wasn’t fun at all, but it was necessary.
TEN DAYS AFTER that third day, Ferguson started writing again. His original plan had been to tiptoe back into it by looking over some of his old high school articles to see if anything could be salvaged from them, but after a close examination of the piece on John Ford’s non-Westerns, which he had once felt was the best essay he had written, he found it crude and wanting, not worth thinking about anymore. He had come so far since then, and why go back when everything in him was crying out to go forward? He had accumulated enough good examples to begin writing the article about the representation of childhood in films, and the ever-evolving “Junkyards and Geniuses” had been given the simpler, more direct title of “Films and Movies,” a distinction that would allow him to explore the often fuzzy line between art and entertainment, but in the middle of his deliberations about which piece to write first, something new had come up, something big enough to encompass both of those ideas, and Ferguson was ready to dig in.
Gil had sent a letter from Amsterdam along with a package of books, pamphlets, and postcards from the Anne Frank House at Prinsengracht 263, which he and Ferguson’s mother had visited on their last day in the city. It was a museum now, Gil wrote, and the public could climb the stairs up to the Secret Annex and stand in the room where young Anne Frank had written her diary, and because he remembered how taken Ferguson had been with that book when he’d read it with his eighth-grade English class at the Riverside Academy, swept up in it to such a degree that you confessed to having a “gigantic crush” on Anne Frank and once went so far as to say you were “madly in love with her,” I thought the enclosed material would interest you. I know there’s something unseemly about the fetishization of this poor girl, Gil continued. After the bestselling book, and then the play and the movie, Anne Frank has been turned into the kitsch representative of the Holocaust for the non-Jewish population in America and elsewhere, but one can’t blame Anne Frank for that, Anne Frank is dead, and the book she wrote is a fine piece of work, the work of a budding writer with genuine talent, and I must say that your mother and I were both deeply moved by our visit to that house. After you told us about the essay you’re planning to write about children in films, I couldn’t help thinking of you when I looked at the pictures Anne had taped onto a wall in the Secret Annex, cutouts from newspapers and magazines of Hollywood stars — Ginger Rogers, Greta Garbo, Ray Milland, the Lane sisters — which led me to buy you the book of her writings not connected to the diary, Tales from the House Behind. Take a look at the story “Dreams of Movie Stardom,” a wish-fulfillment fantasy about a seventeen-year-old European girl named Anne Franklin (Anne Frank did not live to be seventeen) who writes to Priscilla Lane in Hollywood and is eventually invited to spend her summer vacation with the Lane family. A long trip by air across the ocean, then across the American continent, and once she lands in California, Priscilla takes her to the Warner Bros. studio, where the girl is photographed and tested — and winds up with a job modeling tennis outfits. What a delirium! And remember, too, Archie, the photograph that Anne F. pasted into her diary with the caption “This is a photograph of me as I wish I looked all the time. Then I might have a chance of getting into Hollywood.” The slaughter of millions, the end of civilization, and a little Dutch girl destined to die in a camp is dreaming of Hollywood. You might want to think about this.
That became Ferguson’s next project, an essay of as yet undetermined length entitled “Anne Frank in Hollywood.” Not only would he write about children in films, he would write about the effect of films on children, especially Hollywood films, and not just American children but children from around the world, for he remembered having read somewhere about the young Satyajit Ray in India writing a fan letter to juvenile star Deanna Durbin in California, and by using Ray and Anne Frank as his principal examples, he would also be able to explore the art-entertainment divide he had been thinking about ever since he’d started thinking about films. The lure of entering a parallel world of glamour and freedom, the desire to align oneself with the larger-than-real and better-than-real stories of others, the self levitating out of itself and leaving the earth behind. Not an insignificant subject, and in Anne Frank’s case, a matter of life and death. Movies and films. His once beloved Anne, his still beloved Anne, trapped in the Secret Annex and longing to go to Hollywood, dead at fifteen, murdered in Bergen-Belsen at age fifteen, and then Hollywood made a movie about the last years of her life and turned her into a star.