□ He was a fool for not touching the money his father had left him.
□ With help from the money he still hadn’t touched, he should wave good-bye to America, cross the Atlantic, and spend a minimum of one year in Europe. He had yet to go anywhere in his sorry little life and needed to start traveling now.
□ Forget that Mary Donohue had found her Señor Magnifico and was talking about marriage, for even though Mary was a remarkable woman and had held Ferguson together through some rough times, they had no future together because he wasn’t what she wanted or needed and had nothing to offer her.
□ Twelve rejections from New York publishers was nothing to lose any sleep over, and even if the book was rejected by twelve more publishers, it would eventually be published by someone, and the only thing that mattered now was to start thinking about his next book …
As Ferguson remembered it, he had agreed with them on all their points.
6) Because he was a conscientious employee, and because he didn’t want to let down his fellow crew members by coming in late, Ferguson showed up for work the next morning at nine sharp. He had slept for four and a half hours on Howard and Amy’s couch, and after drinking three cups of black coffee at Tom’s Restaurant on the corner of Broadway and 112th Street, he walked over to the job site on Riverside Drive between Eighty-eighth and Eighty-ninth Streets, a gigantic four-bedroom apartment he had started painting a few days earlier with Juan, Felix, and Harry. The air was freezing that morning, and Ferguson was badly hungover, with bloodshot eyes, a cracked head, and an iffy gut, stumbling downtown with his face buried in his scarf, which began to reek of the booze still permeating his breath. Juan said: What happened to you, man? Felix said: You look wasted, kid. Harry said: Why don’t you go home and sleep it off? But Ferguson didn’t want to go home and sleep it off, he was perfectly fine and had come to work, but one hour later, as he stood on a tall, expandable ladder painting yet another kitchen ceiling, he lost his balance and fell to the floor, breaking his left ankle and his left wrist. Harry called for an ambulance, and after the doctor at Roosevelt Hospital had set the bones and put the wrist and ankle in plaster casts, he looked over his work and commented: A hard fall, young man. You’re lucky you didn’t land on your head.
7) Ferguson spent the next six weeks at the house on Woodhall Crescent, gorging himself on his mother’s good cooking as his bones knit together again, playing gin rummy with Dan in the evenings after dinner, sitting around the living room with the two Schneiderman men on the nights when the Knicks games were on television, his mother and the pregnant Nancy off by themselves in the kitchen talking about the mysteries of womanhood, home life, the comforts and pleasures of being at home for a little while as he took his compulsory breather (Dan’s words) or simply took stock (his mother’s words) and thought about what he was going to do next.
Mary was gone, soon to be married to an intelligent señor named Bob Stanton, a thirty-one-year-old assistant district attorney from Queens, someone far more settled than Ferguson would ever be, not an unwise decision, he felt, but nevertheless an ache that would require more time to mend than his broken bones would, and with Mary gone now there was nothing to hold him in New York, nothing that compelled him to go on working as a housepainter for Mr. Mangini, for Howard and Noah had finally talked some sense into him on the night of their drunken binge, and he had reversed his thinking about his father’s money, reluctantly agreeing with them that not to accept it would be an insult. His father was dead, and dead men couldn’t defend themselves anymore. Whatever angers had built up between them over the years, his father had included him in his will, which meant he had wanted Ferguson to take the one hundred thousand dollars and use it in any way he saw fit, with the understanding that fit in this case meant living off the money in order to go on writing, surely his father must have known that, Ferguson reasoned, and the truth was there was little anger left in him now, the more his father went on being dead the less anger he felt, so little now after a year and a half that it was almost entirely gone, and the space that had once held the anger was now filled with sorrow and confusion, sorrow and confusion and regret.
It was a lot of money, enough money to live on for years if he spent it carefully, and Howard and Noah had done well to emphasize the importance of that money, wisely counseling patience on the matter of Ferguson’s rejected novel (which Lynn Eberhardt finally found a home for in early February when she sent it to Columbus Books, a small, intrepid, against-the-grain San Francisco publisher that had been in operation since the 1950s), but most of all understanding that the money would allow Ferguson to take the step that would do him the most good in his present circumstances, and as he languished in the house on Woodhall Crescent and looked into the blur of possibilities the money had offered him, he gradually came round to his friends’ point of view: the moment had come to get out of America and see something of the world, to leave the fire behind him and go somewhere else — anywhere else.
Ferguson dithered and mulled for the next two weeks, one by one reducing the plethora of anywheres from five to three to one. Language would have to have the last word, but even though they spoke English in England and English in Ireland, he doubted he would be happy living in one of those dank, wet-weather places. It rained in Paris, too, of course, but French was the only other language he could speak and read with tolerable proficiency, and since he had never heard anyone say a single negative word about Paris, he decided to take his chances there. As a warm-up, he would go to Montreal for a short visit with Luther Bond, who was alive and well in his new country, having talked his way into McGill around the same time Ferguson had entered Brooklyn College, and now that he had graduated, he was working as an apprentice reporter for the Montreal Gazette and living with a new girlfriend, Claire, Claire Simpson or Sampson (Luther’s handwriting was often hard to decipher), and Ferguson was itching to go north, itching to go east, itching to be gone.
He figured he would be walking freely on his ankle again by the end of January, which would be more than enough time to vacate the apartment on East Eighty-ninth Street and prepare himself for the big move.
Then, on January first, as Ferguson was about to take the first bite of his first breakfast of the new decade, his mother told him the joke.
IT WAS AN old joke, apparently, one that had been circulating in Jewish living rooms for years, but for some unaccountable reason it had escaped Ferguson’s notice, somehow or other he had never been in one of those living rooms when someone had been telling it, but on that New Year’s Day morning of 1970 his mother finally told it to him in the kitchen, the classic story about the young Russian Jew with the long, unpronounceable name who arrives at Ellis Island and begins chatting with an older, more experienced Lantsman, and when the young one tells the old one his name, the old one frowns and says a name that long and unpronounceable won’t do the job for his new life in America, he needs to change it to something shorter, something with a nice American ring to it. What do you suggest? the young one asks. Tell them you’re Rockefeller, the old one says, you can’t go wrong with that. Two hours go by, and when the young Russian sits down to be interviewed by an immigration official, he can no longer dredge up the name the old man advised him to give. Your name? the official asks. Slapping his head in frustration, the young man blurts out in Yiddish, Ikh hob fargessen (I’ve forgotten)! And so the Ellis Island official uncaps his fountain pen and dutifully records the name in his ledger: Ichabod Ferguson.