Ferguson called his mother the next morning, and when he told her why he was calling, his mother laughed.
We already know about this, she said.
You know? How can you possibly know?
From the Waxmans. And also from Jim.
Jim?
Yes, Jim.
And how does Jim feel about it?
He doesn’t care. Or rather he does care, because he likes Luther so much.
And what about Dan?
A bit shocked at first, I would say. But I think he’s over it now. I mean, Amy and Luther aren’t planning to get married, are they?
I have no idea.
Marriage would be tough. Tough for both of them, a tough, tough road if they ever decided to do that, but also tough for Luther’s parents, who are none too pleased about this little romance to begin with.
You’ve talked to the Bonds?
No, but Edna Waxman says the Bonds are worried about their son. They think he’s been around white people too much, that he’s lost the sense of his own blackness. The Newark Academy, now Brandeis, and always everyone’s darling, the white people’s darling. Too gentle and accommodating, they say, no chip on his shoulder, and yet, at the same time, they’re so proud of him and so grateful to the Waxmans for helping them out. It’s a complicated world, isn’t it, Archie?
And how do you feel about all this?
My mind is still open. I won’t know what I think until I’ve had a chance to meet Luther. Tell Amy to call me, okay?
I will. And don’t worry. Luther’s a good guy, and tell Edna Waxman to tell the Bonds not to worry either. Their son does have a chip on his shoulder. It’s just not a big one, that’s all. The right length of chip, I’d say, a chip that suits him well.
One month and one week later, Ferguson, Mary Donohue, Amy, and Luther were on their way north in the old Pontiac, heading for the farm in southern Vermont where Howard Small was spending the summer, and on that same Friday in another car, Ferguson’s mother and Amy’s father along with Ferguson’s aunt and stepuncle were heading toward Williamstown, Massachusetts, where the five undergraduates would be joining up with them the following evening to watch Noah perform as Lucky in Waiting for Godot. Pigs and cows and chickens, the stench of manure in the barn, wind rushing down the green hills and swirling through the valley below, and broad-shouldered Howard tramping beside the New York foursome as they toured the grounds of his aunt and uncle’s sixty-acre spread on the outskirts of Newfane. How happy Ferguson was to see his college pal again, and how good it was that the aunt and uncle had no prissy qualms about the coed sleeping arrangements (Howard had put his foot down and forced them to accept — or else), and now that the business between Amy and her father concerning Luther had been resolved, how relaxed everyone was that weekend, far from the hot cement and steaming fumes of New York as Amy galloped around a meadow on a chestnut stallion, a memorable image that Ferguson would go on savoring for years afterward, but nothing was more memorable than the performance on Saturday evening in Williamstown, just fifty miles from the farm, the play that Ferguson had read in high school but had never seen mounted onstage, which he had reread earlier that week to prepare himself for the production, but nothing as it turned out could have prepared him for what he saw that night, Noah with his wig of long white hair hanging under his bowler hat and the rope around his neck, the abused slave and bearer of burdens, the dunce, the mute clown who falls and totters and stumbles, such finely choreographed steps, the shuffling, torporous, snap-to surges forward and back, dozing off on his feet, the unexpected kick delivered to Estragon’s leg, the unexpected tears that fall down his face, the contorted, pathetic dance he does when ordered to dance, the whip and the bags up and the bags down again and again, Pozzo’s stool folded and unfolded again and again, it didn’t seem credible that Noah could do such things, and then, in the first act, the famous speech, the Puncher and Wattman speech, the quaquaquaqua speech, the long harangue of unpunctuated scholarly gibberish, and Noah flew into it as if in a trance, such an impossible display of breath control and complex verbal rhythm, and Jesus Christ, Ferguson said to himself, Jesus fucking Christ as the words flew out of his cousin’s mouth, and then the other three onstage jumped him and pounded him and smashed his hat, and Pozzo brandished the whip again, and once again it was Up! Pig!, and off they went, exiting the stage as Lucky crashed in the wings.
After the bows and the applause, Ferguson took Noah in his arms and embraced him so tightly that he almost broke his ribs. Once Noah was able to breathe again, he said: I’m glad you liked it, Archie, but I think I’ve done a better job in most of the other performances. Knowing you were in the audience, and my father, and Mildred, and Amy, and your mother — well, you get the idea. Pressure, man. Real pressure.
The New York quartet drove back to the city on Sunday night, and the next morning, July twenty-fifth, the poet Frank O’Hara was struck by a dune buggy on a Fire Island beach and killed at the age of forty. As word of the accident spread among the writers, painters, and musicians of New York, a great lamentation rose up throughout the city, and one by one the young downtown poets who had worshipped O’Hara broke down and wept. Ron Pearson wept. Ann Wexler wept. Lewis Tarkowski wept. And uptown, on East Eighty-ninth Street, Billy Best punched a wall so hard that his fist went straight through the Sheetrock. Ferguson had never met O’Hara, but he knew his work and admired it for its effervescence and freedom, and though he didn’t break down or put his fist through a wall, he spent the next day rereading the two books of O’Hara’s that he owned, Lunch Poems and Meditations in an Emergency.
I am the least difficult of men, O’Hara had written in 1954. All I want is boundless love.
TRUE TO HER word, Celia sent Ferguson precisely twenty-four letters during her two months of travel abroad. Good letters, he felt, well-written letters, with many observant remarks about her experiences in Dublin, Cork, London, Paris, Nice, Florence, and Rome, for not unlike her brother, Artie, Celia knew how to look at things carefully, with more patience and curiosity than most people did, as displayed in this sentence about the Irish countryside in one of her early letters, which set the tone for everything that followed: A green treeless land dotted with gray stones and black rooks flying overhead, a stillness in the heart of all things, even when the heart is beating and the wind has begun to blow. Not bad for a future biologist, Ferguson thought, but friendly as the letters were, there was nothing intimate or revealing about them, and when Celia returned to New York on August twenty-third, one day after Mary Donohue kissed him good-bye and returned to Ann Arbor, Ferguson had no idea where he stood with her. He meant to find out as quickly as possible, however, for now that Celia was seventeen and a half, the ban against physical contact had been lifted. Love was a contact sport, after all, and Ferguson was looking for love now, he was ready for love, to use the words from the old number in Singin’ in the Rain, and for all the old reasons and all the new ones as well, he was hoping to find that love in the arms of Celia Federman. If she would have him.
She was dumbfounded by the bareness of his apartment when she came to visit on the twenty-seventh. The desk was fine, the mattress was fine, but how could he keep his clothes in a cardboard box in the closet and not have a bag or a basket for dirty laundry and just throw his socks and undies on the bathroom floor? And why not get a bookcase instead of piling up books against the wall? And why no pictures? And why eat at his desk when there was room for a small kitchen table in the corner? Because he wanted as few things as possible, Ferguson said, and because he didn’t care. Yes, yes, Celia said, she was acting like a middle-aged woman from the suburbs and he was roughing it as a bohemian renegade in the jungles of Manhattan, she got all that, and it wasn’t her concern, but didn’t he want to make it just a little bit nicer?