When Ferguson asked her how she had managed to pull off such an incredible stunt, Mildred said: I told them the truth, Archie.
The truth being that he had come to the defense of a black friend under threat from a white bigot and had been exonerated for his actions in court, which would suggest that his Walt Whitman Scholarship at Princeton had been revoked unfairly and he deserved a place at Brooklyn, not only because his grade point average ranked him in the top ten percent of his class but because the loss of the scholarship would bar him from continuing at Princeton for lack of funds, and if he was not enrolled in another college by the beginning of the fall semester, he would lose his student deferment on top of losing his scholarship and find himself subject to the military draft. As an opponent of the war in Vietnam, he would refuse to join the army if called upon to serve, which likely would result in a prison term for resisting the Selective Service laws, and wasn’t it Brooklyn College’s duty to save this promising young man from such a dark and pointless outcome?
It had never occurred to him that his aunt had it in her to take such a forceful stand about anything, least of all about him or anyone else in the family, but on August twenty-first, less than an hour after calling DeWitt’s office and being told the great man was traveling abroad, he had turned to Aunt Mildred out of desperation — not because he was expecting her to do anything for him but because he needed advice, and with Nagle off on a Mediterranean island sifting through pre-Hellenic pottery shards, she was the only one who could give it to him. Uncle Don picked up the phone that day on the fourth ring. Mildred was out doing some errands, he said, and wasn’t expected back for another hour or so, but Ferguson couldn’t wait an hour, his insides were jammed up with dread and disbelief as he continued to swallow down the words of DeWitt’s letter, so he barfed out the whole thing to Don, who was shocked and outraged and sufficiently furious to tell Ferguson that DeWitt should be drawn and quartered for what he had done, but even in those early moments of the crisis, when Ferguson was still in no condition to think, Don was feeling his way toward a solution, wondering how to finagle an opening that would get Ferguson into another college before time ran out on them, meaning it was his idea to begin with, but once Mildred returned to the apartment and talked to Don, it quickly became her idea as well, and when she called back Ferguson forty-five minutes later, she told him not to worry because she was going to handle everything.
It made all the difference to have her on his side. The hot and cold Aunt Mildred, the kind and cruel Aunt Mildred, the inconstant, not-so-friendly sister of her sister Rose, the somewhat encouraging but mostly distracted stepmother of Don’s son Noah, the goodwilled but essentially unengaged aunt of her only nephew now seemed to be telling her sister’s son that she cared about him far more than he had ever suspected. She had told Ferguson how she had managed to get him into Brooklyn College, but when he asked her why she had bothered to go to all that trouble for him in the first place, the ferocity of her answer startled him: I have tremendous faith in you, Archie. I believe in your future, and over my dead body was I going to allow anyone to take that future away from you. Let Gordon DeWitt go fry an egg. We’re people of the Book, and people of the Book have to stick together.
Queen Esther. Mother Courage. Mother Jones. Sister Kenny. Aunt Mildred.
The first and most important thing to be said about going to Brooklyn College was that the tuition was free. In a rare display of political wisdom, the city fathers of New York had declared that the boys and girls of the five boroughs were entitled to an education at an annual cost of no dollars, which not only helped advance the principles of democracy and proved how the greater good might be served when municipal tax revenues were put into the correct hands, it offered tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and over the years millions of New York boys and girls the opportunity to receive an education most of them would not otherwise have been able to afford, and Ferguson, who could no longer afford the high cost of Princeton, thanked those long-dead city fathers every time he strode up the concrete steps of the Flatbush Avenue subway station and walked onto the Midwood campus. More than that, it was a good college, an excellent college. A minimum high school average of 87 was required for admission along with passing a stringent entrance exam, which meant there was no one in any of his classes who had performed under a B+ level, and with most of them in the 92-to-96 range, Ferguson was surrounded by highly intelligent people, many of them smart enough to qualify as brilliant. Princeton had had its share of brilliant students as well, but also a certain percentage of deadwood legacy boys, whereas Brooklyn consisted of both boys and girls (thankfully) and carried no dead wood. Everyone came from the city, of course, roughly twice the number of students as at Princeton, where the undergraduate population had come from every part of the country, but Ferguson was a die-hard New Yorker now and staunchly pro-city, and just as he had relished the companionship of his New York friends at Camp Paradise when he was a boy, he took pleasure in being with his high-strung, argumentative fellow New Yorkers at B.C., where the student body might have been less geographically diverse than at Princeton but was more humanly diverse in its teeming jumble of ethnicities and cultural backgrounds, with hordes of Catholics and Jews, a refreshing number of black and Asian faces, and since most of them were the grandchildren of Ellis Island immigrants, the odds were better than even that they were the first ones in their families ever to attend college. On top of that, the campus was a model of sound architectural design, not at all what Ferguson had been expecting, a cozy twenty-six acres as compared to the five hundred acres at Princeton, but just as attractive to his eyes, with elegant Georgian buildings filling the landscape instead of imposing Gothic towers, grassy quadrangles studded with elms, and a lily pond and garden to visit in the lulls between classes, with no dormitories, no eating clubs, and no football madness. It was an altogether different way of going to college, with anti-war politics replacing sports as the principal obsession on campus, the demands of academic work pushing out most extracurricular pastimes, and, best of all, the chance to go home to his apartment on East Eighty-ninth Street when his work for the day was done.
The subway rides from Yorkville in Manhattan to Midwood in Brooklyn and then back again every Monday through Thursday were so long that Ferguson managed to do most of the reading for his courses while sitting on the train. He didn’t register for Aunt Mildred’s class on the Victorian novel because he thought his presence in the room might be a burden on her, but when Uncle Don came back as a guest lecturer in the spring to teach his biennial one-semester course on the art of biography, Ferguson signed up for it. Don delivered a dense, rapid-fire mini-lecture at the start of each class and then opened things up for general discussion, a somewhat awkward, scattershot kind of teacher, Ferguson supposed, but never dull or ponderous, always up to the challenge of thinking on his feet, both humorous and deadpan as he was under most circumstances elsewhere, and what a range of books he had them read that spring, Plutarch, Suetonius, Augustine, Vasari, Montaigne, Rousseau, and Dr. Johnson’s bizarre, sexed-up chum James Boswell, who confessed in his journals that he would interrupt his writing in midsentence to go out into the London streets and make rumpty-rumpty with as many as three different whores in a single night, but the most enthralling part of that class for Ferguson was finally reading Montaigne for the first time, and now that he had been exposed to the Frenchman’s intractable, lightning-bolt sentences, he had found a new master to accompany him on his own travels through the Land of Ink.