So it was that a bad thing had been transformed into a good thing. A knockout punch from Gordon DeWitt that theoretically should have flattened him, but just as Ferguson was beginning to fall, a dozen people jumped into the ring and caught him in their arms before his body hit the canvas, Aunt Mildred first and most significantly as the strongest of the body catchers, but also quick-thinking Uncle Don, and one by one all the others who gathered around him when they were told about the punch, Celia, his mother and Dan, Noah, Jim and Nancy, Billy and Joanna, Ron and Peg, and Howard, who talked to Nagle the morning after Ferguson’s ex — academic adviser returned to Princeton, and then Nagle himself, who wrote an uncommonly warm letter after Howard broke the disturbing news to him about the scholarship, offering to help in any way he could and suggesting that perhaps Susan could swing something for him at Rutgers, how much that letter meant to Ferguson, Nagle reaching out to him as a friend and taking his side over DeWitt’s, and the long telephone conversation with Amy and Luther in Montreal, coupled with the alarming turn that led to Howard’s breakup with Mona Veltry, a fierce verbal spat about which one of them had been responsible for leading the group to Tom’s Bar and Grill, each one blaming the other until they lost control of themselves and their big love died as rapidly as a sick flower dies with the first frost, and then, no more than days after that, Luther abruptly put an end to it with Amy, pushing her out the door and demanding that she go back to America, and there was Ferguson’s dazed and grieving stepsister telling him that Luther had done it for her own good, and Please, Archie, she said, my dear, crazy brother, don’t do anything stupid like running off to Canada, just hold your ground and hold your breath and pray that something good turns up, which was precisely what happened because of Mother Courage Mildred, and despite the havoc he lived through in those days of uncertainty, Ferguson felt so deeply loved by the people he loved that winning the Walt Whitman Scholarship turned out to have done less for his morale than losing it.
THE WORLD WAS churning. All things everywhere were in flux. The war was boiling in his blood, Newark was a dead city on the other side of the river, lovers were going up in flames, and now that Ferguson had been granted his reprieve, he was back inside his book about Dr. Noyes and the dead children of R. Two hours starting at six o’clock every morning from Monday to Thursday, and then as many hours as possible from Friday to Sunday, in spite of the ever-mounting load of schoolwork, which he had to plow through diligently in order to repay his debt to Mildred, who would have been disappointed in him if he slacked off and failed to do well. Montaigne; Leibniz; Leopardi; and Dr. Noyes. The world was falling apart, and the only way not to fall apart with it was to keep his mind fixed on his work — to roll out of bed every morning and get down to business, whether the sun chose to come up that day or not.
The free tuition was a blessing, but there were still a number of money problems to be dealt with, and for the first weeks of the fall semester Ferguson struggled to come up with a plan that would not include help from his mother and stepfather. The scholarship had covered room and board as well as tuition, which had allowed him to stuff his face at no charge three times a day five days a week, five days that could have been seven days if he hadn’t insisted on spending the other two days in New York, but now that he was in the city and only in the city, he had to pay for all his meals and groceries, which was something he could no longer afford to do, not after shelling out five thousand dollars to the Brattleboro lawyer and being left with just over two thousand in the bank. He figured he could muddle along on about four thousand a year, which would provide him with enough crumbs to sustain a lowly sort of church mouse existence, but two thousand wasn’t four thousand, and he still had only half of what he would need. True to form, Dan offered to make up the difference with a monthly allowance, which Ferguson reluctantly agreed to because he had no choice in the end, knowing the only alternative was to take a part-time job somewhere (assuming he could find one), which would make it impossible to go on with his book. He said yes because he had to say yes, but just because he was thankful to Dan for the two hundred dollars a month, that didn’t require him to feel happy about the arrangement.
In early November, help came from an unexpected source, which directly or indirectly could be traced back to his own past but at the same time had nothing to do with him. Others were responsible for giving him the money he needed, money he hadn’t earned but had nevertheless worked for without any intention of earning money, for just as a writer couldn’t know whether he was about to be mauled or embraced, he couldn’t know whether the hours he spent at his desk would lead to something or nothing. All along, Ferguson had assumed nothing, and therefore he had never spoken the words writing and money in the same breath, thinking only sellouts and Grub Street hacks dreamed about money while doing their work, thinking money would always have to come from somewhere else in order to feed his compulsion for filling up white rectangles with row after row of descending black marks, but at the preposterously unadvanced age of twenty Ferguson learned that always did not mean always but just most of the time, and at those rare times when the somber expectations of always were proved to be wrong, the only proper response was to thank the gods for their random act of benevolence and then return to the somber expectations of always, even if one’s first encounter with the principle of most of the time thundered in the bones with the force of a holy benediction.
Tumult Books, the legitimate, non-mimeo press that had been launched by Ron, Lewis, and Anne in the spring, released its first batch of publications on November fourth: two collections of poems (one by Lewis, the other by Anne), Ron’s translations of Pierre Reverdy, and Billy’s 372-page epic, Crushed Heads. The angel of the enterprise, Anne’s mother’s first husband’s ex-wife, an effusive woman in her mid-forties named Trixie Davenport, threw a large party at her Lexington Avenue duplex to celebrate the event, and Ferguson, along with nearly everyone else he knew, was invited to the Saturday night bash. He had never felt comfortable in crowds, the crush of too many bodies crammed together in enclosed spaces tended to make him dizzy and mute, but that night was different for some reason, perhaps because he felt so good for Billy after all the years he had put into writing his book, or perhaps because he found it amusing to see the scruffy, impoverished, downtown poets and painters mixing with the East Side swells, but whether it was for one of those reasons or both of them, he felt glad to be there that night, standing next to the beautiful, somewhat intimidated Celia, who wasn’t much of a crowd person herself, and as Ferguson turned around and surveyed that packed and noisy scene, he saw John Ashbery alone in a corner puffing on a Gitane, Alex Katz sipping a glass of white wine, Harry Mathews shaking the hand of a tall, redheaded woman in a blue dress, Norman Bluhm laughing as he put someone in a pretend hammerlock, and there was dapper, frizzy-haired Noah standing with voluptuous, frizzy-haired Vicki Tremain, and there was Howard talking to none other than Amy Schneiderman, who had come down to New York for the weekend, and ten minutes after Ferguson arrived, there was Ron Pearson elbowing his way toward him, and a moment later Ron was putting his arm around his shoulder and guiding him out of the room because he wanted to talk to him about something.