Ferguson liked the joke, and he laughed hard when his mother told it to him over breakfast in the kitchen, but when he limped upstairs to his bedroom afterward, he found himself unable to stop thinking about it, and with nothing to distract him from his thoughts, he kept on thinking about the poor immigrant for the rest of the morning and into the early afternoon, at which point the story was released from the domain of jokes to become a parable about human destiny and the endlessly forking paths a person must confront as he walks through life. A young man is suddenly torn into three young men, each one identical to the others but each with a different name: Rockefeller, Ferguson, and the long, unpronounceable X that has traveled with him from Russia to Ellis Island. In the joke, he ends up as Ferguson because the immigration official doesn’t understand the language he is speaking. That was already interesting enough — to have a name forced on you because of someone’s bureaucratic error and then to go on bearing that name for the rest of your life. Interesting, as in bizarre or funny or tragic. A Russian Jew transformed into a Scottish Presbyterian with fifteen strokes from another man’s pen. And if the Jew is taken for a Protestant in white, Protestant America, if every person he encounters automatically assumes he is someone other than who he is, how will that affect his future life in America? Impossible to say exactly how, but one can assume it will make a difference, that the life he will lead as Ferguson will not be the same one he would have led as the young Hebrew X. On the other hand, young X was not opposed to becoming Rockefeller. He accepted his older compatriot’s advice about the need to choose another name, and what if he had remembered that name instead of letting it slip out of his mind? He would have become a Rockefeller, and from that day forth people would have assumed he was a member of the richest family in America. His Yiddish accent would have fooled no one, but how would that have prevented people from assuming he belonged to another branch of the family, one of the subsidiary foreign branches that could trace its bloodlines directly back to John D. and his heirs? And if young X had had the wherewithal to remember to call himself Rockefeller, how would that have affected his future life in America? Would he have had the same life or a different life? No doubt a different life, Ferguson said to himself, but in what ways it was impossible to know.
Ferguson, whose name was not Ferguson, found it intriguing to imagine himself having been born a Ferguson or a Rockefeller, someone with a different name from the X that had been attached to him when he was pulled from his mother’s womb on March 3, 1947. In point of fact, his father’s father had not been given another name when he arrived at Ellis Island on January 1, 1900—but what if he had?
Out of that question, Ferguson’s next book was born.
Not one person with three names, he said to himself that afternoon, which happened to be January 1, 1970, the seventieth anniversary of his grandfather’s arrival in America (if family legend was to be believed), the man who had become neither Ferguson nor Rockefeller and had been gunned down in a Chicago leather-goods warehouse in 1923, but for the purposes of the story Ferguson would begin with his grandfather and the joke, and once the joke was told in the first paragraph his grandfather would no longer be a young man with three possible names but one name, neither X nor Rockefeller but Ferguson, and then, after telling the story of how his parents met, were married, and he himself was born (all based on the anecdotes he had heard from his mother over the years), Ferguson would turn the proposition on its head, and rather than pursue the notion of one person with three names, he would invent three other versions of himself and tell their stories along with his own story (more or less his own story, since he too would become a fictionalized version of himself), and write a book about four identical but different people with the same name: Ferguson.
A name born out of a joke about names. The punch line to a joke about the Jews from Poland and Russia who had boarded ships and come to America. Without question a Jewish joke about America — and the enormous statue that stood in New York Harbor.
Mother of exiles.
Father of strife.
Bestower of misbegotten names.
He was still traveling the two roads he had imagined as a fourteen-year-old boy, still walking down the three roads with Lazlo Flute, and all along, from the beginning of his conscious life, the persistent feeling that the forks and parallels of the roads taken and not taken were all being traveled by the same people at the same time, the visible people and the shadow people, and that the world as it was could never be more than a fraction of the world, for the real also consisted of what could have happened but didn’t, that one road was no better or worse than any other road, but the torment of being alive in a single body was that at any given moment you had to be on one road only, even though you could have been on another, traveling toward an altogether different place.
Identical but different, meaning four boys with the same parents, the same bodies, and the same genetic material, but each one living in a different house in a different town with his own set of circumstances. Spun this way and that by the effect of those circumstances, the boys would begin to diverge as the book moved forward, crawling or walking or galloping their way through childhood, adolescence, and early manhood as more and more distinct characters, each one on his own separate path, and yet all of them still the same person, three imaginary versions of himself, and then himself thrown in as Number Four for good measure, the author of the book, but the details of the book were still unknown to him at that point, he would understand what he was trying to do only after he started doing it, but the essential thing was to love those other boys as if they were real, to love them as much as he loved himself, as much as he had loved the boy who had dropped dead before his eyes on a hot summer afternoon in 1961, and now that his father was dead as well, this was the book he needed to write — for them.
God was nowhere, he said to himself, but life was everywhere, and death was everywhere, and the living and the dead were joined.
Only one thing was certain. One by one, the imaginary Fergusons would die, just as Artie Federman had died, but only after he had learned to love them as if they were real, only after the thought of seeing them die had become unbearable to him, and then he would be alone with himself again, the last man standing.
Hence the title of the book: 4 3 2 1.
SO ENDS THE book — with Ferguson going off to write the book. Loaded down with two heavy suitcases and a knapsack, he left New York on February third and traveled by bus to Montreal, where he spent one week with Luther Bond, and then he climbed onto a plane and headed across the ocean to Paris. For the next five and a half years, he lived in a two-room flat on the rue Descartes in the fifth arrondissement, working steadily on his novel about the four Fergusons, which grew into a much longer book than he had imagined it would be, and when he wrote the last word on August 25, 1975, the manuscript came to a total of one thousand one hundred and thirty-three double-spaced typed pages.
The most difficult passages for him to write were the ones that recounted the deaths of his beloved boys. How hard it was to conjure up the storm that killed the thirteen-year-old youth of the shining countenance, and how anguished he felt as he wrote down the details of the traffic accident that ended the life of the twenty-year-old Ferguson-3, and after those two necessary but horrendous obliterations, nothing caused him more pain than having to tell of Ferguson-1’s death on the night of September 8, 1971, a passage he put off writing until the last pages of the book, the account of the fire that consumed the house in Rochester, New York, when Charlie Vincent, Ferguson-1’s downstairs neighbor, fell asleep while smoking one of his Pall Malls in bed, igniting himself along with the sheets and blankets that covered him, and as the flames sprinted across the room, they eventually rose up and touched the ceiling, and because the wood in that old house was dry and crumbling, the fire burst through the ceiling and set the floor of the upstairs bedroom ablaze, and so rapidly did the fire advance upon the sleeping twenty-four-year-old journalist, translator, and lover of Hallie Doyle, that the entire room was burning before he had a chance to spring from the bed and crawl out the window.