IN THE MONTHS that followed, no more central characters in The Ferguson Story dropped dead on tennis courts or anywhere else, and no more loves were found or lost or even contemplated. A slow, dreary summer with his novel as he began writing the second of the two parts, locked up in his studio apartment for most of the day with no one to see at night except for Billy and Joanna down the block and Noah, who was in town working as an actor in his first professional film, but Noah was both busy and exhausted and had little time for him except on the weekends. Everyone else was gone, either camped out in family bungalows or rented shacks in upstate New York and New England or following the low-budget trail through various cities and countrysides in western Europe. As always, Howard was at his aunt and uncle’s farm in Vermont, but this time Amy was with him, and the two of them were already discussing plans for life after college, which would begin in just one year, and assuming Howard managed to avoid the draft, they were both thinking about graduate school, Howard in philosophy and Amy in American history, the ideal choice being Columbia, where they could live together in an apartment on Morningside Heights and become citizens of New York. Again and again, Howard and Amy asked Ferguson to visit them in Vermont, and again and again Ferguson invented an excuse not to make the trip. Vermont was a haunted place for him, he said, and he still didn’t know if he was quite ready to go back there, or he was too wrapped up in his novel to think of leaving New York, or he had come down with a summer cold and wasn’t up to traveling, but even as he said those things (which were partly true) the greater truth was that now that he had lost Celia, Amy was in his thoughts again, the eternally lost and beloved Amy who had never wanted him and never would, and to expose himself to the spectacle of her happiness with his unofficial brother-in-law was more than he could have handled just then. It wasn’t that he had stopped thinking about Celia that summer, but she climbed into his head less often than he had imagined she would, and as the first hot month turned into the second hot month, he was beginning to feel almost glad they were no longer together, as if a spell had been broken and he was back to being himself and not some fabricated or deluded vision of himself, whereas Artie was with him again in the summer heat, Artie’s death and his father’s death, those were the memories he dwelled on most as he sat in his hot little room bleeding out the words of his book, and once the matter of his inheritance had been settled at the end of April (not a standard bequest, as it turned out, but the funds from a life insurance policy that circumvented the need to pay any death taxes), he had taken the five thousand dollars from Dan and now watched in morbid wonder as month by month the ninety-five thousand inched its way back to the original one hundred thousand. Invisible money, Dan had said. Ferguson called it ghost money.
He was writing a book about death, and on some days he felt the book was trying to kill him. Every sentence was a struggle, every word in every sentence could have been a different word, and as with all the other things he had written in the past three years, he was turning out roughly four pages for every page he kept. Still and all, he had one hundred and twenty-two finished pages by the beginning of the summer, and half the story had been told. A plague of suicides that is now coming to the end of its third month, during which the city of R. has buried twenty-one of its children, an alarming number for a provincial town of ninety-four thousand inhabitants, and Dr. Noyes has been in the thick of it from the start, working with two dozen fellow doctors, a dozen psychiatrists, and close to thirty priests and ministers to ward off the next suicide, but in spite of their intense collective effort, which entails long interviews and counseling sessions with every young person in the city, nothing they do provides the smallest bit of help, and by now the doctor is questioning whether the countless hours they are putting in to end the scourge have only prolonged it, whether isolating a problem and holding it up to public view month after month after month doesn’t keep the problem alive rather than solve it, thereby tempting the vulnerable ones to solve their own problems in ways they might not have thought of on their own, and so the children of R. go on killing themselves as before, and bit by bit the staunch Dr. Noyes is coming undone. That was where Ferguson had left off when he took his final exams and wrote his end-of-the-term course papers in June, and as he felt his way back into the story during the early weeks of the summer, he already knew how it was going to end, but helpful as it was to know that, knowing was not doing, and getting to the end would mean little unless he managed to do it right. The problems facing the young people of Noyes’s city are at once eternal and of the moment, a combination of biological destiny and contingent historical facts. The adolescent upheavals of first loves and broken loves, the daily fear of being singled out for expulsion by the herd, the fear of pregnancy, the trauma of real pregnancy and too-early motherhood, the thrills of excess (driving too fast, drinking too much), ennui, contempt for parents, adults, and everyone in charge, melancholy, loneliness, and the pain of the world (Weltschmerz) pressing on the heart even as sunlight pours down upon them — the old, never-ending torments of being young — but for the ones most at risk, the seventeen- and eighteen-year-old boys, there is the threat of Vietnam looming before them the instant they leave school, the incontestable reality of the American moment, for few high school graduates go on to college from the blue-collar city of R., where the end of high school means the beginning of adult life, and now that sixty-four coffins containing the bodies of dead U.S. soldiers have been shipped back home and buried in local cemeteries over the past three years, now that the limbless and eyeless older brothers of those boys have landed in the wards of the nearby V.A. hospital in W., the patriotic fervor that swept through R. in the summer of 1965 has turned to revulsion and dread by the spring of 1968, and the war being fought by the American government on the other side of the world is no longer a war any of those boys is willing to fight in. To die for nothing as their brothers did, as their cousins did, as their friends’ brothers did seems to mock the principles of life itself, and why were they born, they ask themselves, and what are they doing on this earth if it is only to give away their lives for nothing before they have even begun to live? Some maim themselves by shooting off fingers and toes in order to flunk their army physicals, but others prefer the less bloody solution of gassing themselves to death in idling cars enclosed within their parents’ locked garages, and as often as not, if the boy happens to have a girlfriend, the girl and the boy will be sitting in the car together, wrapped in each other’s arms as the fumes slowly carry out their work. In the beginning, Noyes is appalled by these senseless deaths and does everything he can to stop them, but as time goes on his thoughts start moving in a different direction, and by the fourth or fifth month, he is infected by the contagion himself. What Ferguson was proposing to do with the story after that was to follow Noyes through the various steps that will lead him to take his own life at the end of the book, the enormous sympathy he develops for the young people in his charge, the conversations with more than two hundred and fifty boys and girls that convince him the city is not going through a medical crisis but a spiritual crisis, that the question is not death or a desire for death but a loss of hope in the future, and once Noyes understands that they are all living in a world without hope, Ferguson was planning to put him together with one of the young people he has been counseling for the past months, a seventeen-year-old girl named Lily McNamara, whose twin brother Harold has already killed himself, and the no longer married and childless Dr. Noyes will take Lily into his house for a week or a month or half a year and try to talk the plain, stubborn, inarticulate girl into giving up her thoughts of death. It will be his last stand, a last effort to push back his own desire to succumb, and when he fails to turn her back to life, he will follow her into the garage, shut the doors and windows, and then climb into the car with her and turn on the ignition …