And Plan C?
I’m getting out. Pulling up stakes, as they used to say in the old cowboy movies. I’ll be driving up to Vermont for your trial on Tuesday, and when the trial is finished, I won’t be going south to Massachusetts, I’ll be heading north to Canada.
Canada. Why Canada?
First, because it isn’t the United States. Second, because I have a bunch of relatives in Montreal. Third, because I can finish college at McGill. I was accepted there out of high school, you know. I’m sure they’ll want me again.
I’m sure they will, but it takes time to transfer, and if you drop out of school for the fall term, you’ll be drafted.
Maybe so, but what difference does it make if I’m never coming back?
Never?
Never.
And what about Amy?
I asked her to come with me, but she said no.
You understand why, don’t you? It has nothing to do with you.
Probably not. But just because she stays down here, that doesn’t mean she can’t come up and visit me. It’s not the end of the world, after all.
No, but it probably means the end of you and Amy.
Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. We weren’t going to last in the long run. In the short run, I think we’ve been trying to prove a point. If not to ourselves, then to everyone else. And then that schmuck walked over to our table the other night and threatened us. We’ve made our point, but who wants to live in a world that forces you to stare down the haters who spend their lives staring at you? Life is hard enough as it is, and I’m exhausted, Archie, just about at the end of my rope.
THERE WERE TWO parts to what happened next, the good first part and the less than good second part. The first part was the trial, which went more or less as McBride had predicted it would. Not that Ferguson wasn’t scared throughout most of the proceedings, not that his intestines weren’t threatening to unravel again during the two and a half hours he spent in the courtroom, but it helped that his mother and stepfather were there along with Noah, Aunt Mildred, and Uncle Don, and it helped that his friends were such precise, articulate witnesses, first Howard, then Mona, then Celia, then Luther, and finally Amy, who gave a vivid account of how frightened she had been by Johnson’s menacing words and gestures before the first punch was thrown, and it also helped that when Johnson took the stand he openly confessed to being drunk on the night of July first and couldn’t remember what he had or hadn’t done. Nevertheless, Ferguson felt McBride committed a tactical error by making him talk so much about college during his testimony, not only asking him what he did for a living (student) but where he attended school (Princeton) and under what conditions (as a Walt Whitman Scholar) and what his grade point average was (three point seven), for even if those answers made a noticeable impression on Judge Burdock, they were irrelevant to the matter at hand and could have been seen as putting unfair pressure on him. In the event, Burdock found Johnson guilty of instigating the brawl and ordered him to pay a heavy fine of one thousand dollars, whereas Ferguson, the first-time offender, was acquitted of the assault charge and ordered to pay fifty dollars in damages to Thomas Griswold, the owner of Tom’s Bar and Grill, to cover the costs of a new chair and six new drinking glasses. It was the best possible outcome, the utter and permanent removal of the weight he had been carrying around on his back, and as Ferguson’s friends and family gathered around him to celebrate the victory, he thanked McBride for his good work. Perhaps the man had known what he was doing, after all. The Princeton brotherhood. If the myth was true, then every Princeton man was bound together with every other Princeton man across the generations, in death as well as in life, and if Ferguson was indeed a Princeton man, as he supposed he was by now, then what man could argue that the Tiger hadn’t saved his skin?
Not long after they left the courthouse, as all eleven of them strolled out into the parking lot to search for their cars, Luther came up from behind Ferguson, put his arm around his shoulder and said, Take good care of yourself, Archie. I’m off.
Before Ferguson could answer him, Luther abruptly turned around and began heading in the opposite direction, walking quickly toward his green Buick, which was parked near the exit at the front of the lot. Ferguson said to himself: So that’s how you do it. No tears, no grand gestures, no tender hugs of farewell. Just sit your ass down in your car and drive away, hoping for a better life in the next country. Admirable. But then again, how could you say good-bye to a country that didn’t exist for you anymore? It would have been like trying to shake hands with a dead man.
As Ferguson watched the grown-up version of the fourteen-year-old punching boy climb into the car, Amy suddenly sprinted into view. The engine kicked over, and at the last second, just as Luther was putting the Skylark into drive, she yanked open the passenger door and hopped in with him.
They drove off together.
That didn’t mean she was intending to stay with him in Canada. It only meant that letting go was hard, too hard for now.
THE SECOND PART of what happened next had everything to do with Gordon DeWitt and the myth of the Princeton brotherhood.
The Walt Whitman Scholars luncheon was held each year during the first week of the fall semester, and Ferguson had attended two of them so far, once as a freshman and once as a sophomore. Standing up to take a bow as one of the original four the first year, standing up to take another bow when the ranks expanded to eight the second year, a three-course chicken lunch in the faculty club dining room punctuated by short addresses from university president Robert F. Goheen and other Princeton officials, hopeful, idealistic remarks about young American manhood and the future of the country, precisely what one would have expected to hear at such gatherings, but Ferguson had been impressed by some of the things DeWitt had said at the first of those affairs, or at least by the awkward and sincere way in which he had said them, not only about how he believed that every boy deserved a chance, no matter how humble his background but also about his own memories of coming to Princeton as a public high school kid from a poor family and how out of place he had felt in the beginning, which had struck a chord in the still out-of-place Ferguson, who at the time he heard those words had been on campus for just three days. The next year, DeWitt had stood up and delivered an almost identical speech — but with one fundamental addition. He had mentioned the war in Vietnam, emphasizing the obligation of all Americans to pull together in the effort to push back the tide of communism and harshly attacking the growing numbers of young people and deluded anti-American leftists who were against the war. DeWitt stood with the hawks, but what else could one expect from a Wall Street sharpshooter who had made millions serving in the trenches of American capitalism? On top of that, he was a graduate of the same university that had educated John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, the two men who had invented the Cold War as secretary of state and director of the C.I.A. under Eisenhower, and if not for what those two had done in the fifties, America wouldn’t have been fighting against North Vietnam in the sixties.
Still and all, Ferguson was happy to accept DeWitt’s money, and in spite of their political differences, he rather liked the man himself. Short and compact, with thick eyebrows, clear brown eyes, and a square jaw, he had pumped Ferguson’s hand vigorously the first time they met, wishing him all the luck in the world as he embarked on his collegiate adventure, and the second time, when Ferguson’s first-year performance had become a matter of record, DeWitt had called him by his first name. Keep up the good work, Archie, he had said, I’m very proud of you. Ferguson was one of his boys now, and DeWitt took a keen interest in his boys and was following their progress closely.