Both yes and no were out of the question. What Ferguson needed was a maybe that would offer some hope without pinning him down to a lasting commitment, a delaying tactic camouflaged as a step forward, which in truth would be a step backward and a chance to buy more time. He proposed that Timmerman take on a test assignment to see if he enjoyed the work, and once he had written up the story, they would look at it together and decide if it belonged in the Crusader. Timmerman seemed to balk at first, looking none too pleased at the thought of having to be judged by Ferguson, but that was to be expected from a straight-A student with absolute confidence in his intellectual gifts, and so Ferguson was compelled to explain that the test was necessary because the Crusader was his thing and not Timmerman’s, and if Timmerman wanted to be a part of his thing, he would have to prove that his work fit in with the spirit of the enterprise, which was snappy, funny, and quick. It didn’t matter how smart he was, Ferguson said, he had yet to write a single newspaper article, he had no experience at all, and how could they join forces unless they knew what his stuff sounded like? Fair enough, Timmerman said. He would write a sample piece and prove how good he was, and that would be that.
This is what I’m thinking, Ferguson said. Who is your favorite movie actress — and why? Talk to everyone in the class, every girl and every boy, and ask them all that one question: Who is your favorite movie actress — and why? Be sure to write down every word they say, word for word the exact answers they give you, and then go home and turn the results into a one-column story that will make people laugh when they read it, and if you can’t make them laugh, at least make them smile. Okay?
Okay, Timmerman said. But why not favorite actor, too?
Because contests with one winner are better than contests with two winners. The actors can wait until the next issue.
So Ferguson bought himself some time by sending Timmerman off on this useless, make-work errand, and all was calm for the next ten days as the rookie reporter gathered his data and set about to write the article. As Ferguson had suspected, Marilyn Monroe received the most votes from the boys, six out of eleven, with the other five going to Elizabeth Taylor (two), Grace Kelly (two), and Audrey Hepburn (one), but the girls gave Monroe only two of their twelve votes, with the other ten distributed among Hepburn (three), Taylor (three), and one each to Kelly, Leslie Caron, Cyd Charisse, and Deborah Kerr. Ferguson himself hadn’t been able to decide between Taylor and Kelly, so he’d flipped a coin and wound up giving his vote to Taylor, while Timmerman, faced with a similar dilemma between Kelly and Hepburn, had flipped the same coin and wound up going for Kelly. Complete nonsense, of course, but there was something amusing about it as well, and Ferguson noted how conscientiously Timmerman went about the business of interviewing the kids and jotting down their comments in his small, spiral-bound reporter’s notebook. Top marks for legwork and industry, then, but that was only the beginning, the foundation of the house, as it were, and it was still unclear what kind of structure Timmerman would be capable of building. There was no doubt that the boy had a good brain, but that didn’t mean he could write well.
During that ten-day period of watching and waiting, Ferguson lapsed into an odd state of ambivalence, becoming less and less sure of how he felt about Timmerman, uncertain whether he should go on resenting him or begin to show some gratitude for his hard work, one minute hoping he would fail with the article and the next moment hoping he would succeed, wondering if it might not be a good idea to have another reporter share the load with him after all, realizing now that there was a certain satisfaction in assigning tasks to other people, that being the boss was not without its pleasures, for Timmerman had followed his orders without complaint, and that was a new feeling, the sense of being in charge, and if all went well with Timmerman’s article, perhaps he should consider letting him in, not as a partner, of course, no, not that, never that, but as a contributing writer, the first of what could be several contributing writers, which could end up making it possible to expand the Crusader from two pages to four. Perhaps. And then again, perhaps not, for Timmerman had yet to hand in the article, even though he had finished the interviews in five days, and now that another five days had gone by, Ferguson could only conclude that he was struggling with it, and if Timmerman was having a hard time, that probably meant the piece was no good, and anything less than good would be unacceptable. He would have to tell that to Timmerman’s face. Imagine looking into the eyes of hotshot Michael Timmerman, he said to himself, the one person who had never failed at anything, and telling him he had failed. By the morning of the tenth day, Ferguson’s hopes for the future had collapsed into a single wish: that Timmerman was writing a masterpiece.
As it turned out, the article wasn’t bad. Not horribly bad, in any case, but it lacked the bounce Ferguson had been hoping for, the touch of humor that would have turned its trivial subject into something worth reading about. If there was any consolation in this letdown, it came from the fact that Timmerman seemed to think it was bad as well, or so Ferguson surmised from the author’s self-deprecatory shrug when he handed him the finished manuscript on the playground that morning, accompanied by an apology for having taken so long to do the job, but it hadn’t been as easy as he was expecting it to be, Timmerman said, he had rewritten the article four times, and if he had learned anything from the experience, it was that writing was a pretty tough business.
Good, Ferguson said to himself. A little humility from Mr. Perfect. An admission of doubt, perhaps even an admission of defeat, and therefore the confrontation he had been dreading most likely would not be taking place, which was a good thing, a most excellent and reassuring thing, since Ferguson had spent the past days imagining fists flying into his stomach and summary banishments to the outer realms of the scorned. Still, he realized, if he wanted to keep their friendship intact, he would have to tread cautiously around Timmerman and make sure he didn’t step on his toes. They were big toes, and the person they belonged to was a big boy, and amiable as that boy could be, he also had a temper, which Ferguson had witnessed several times over the years, most recently when Timmerman had decked Tommy Fuchs for calling him a stuck-up shit, the same Tommy Fuchs who was known to his detractors as Tommy Fucks, and Ferguson had no wish to be fucked around by Timmerman as Tommy Fucks had been.
He asked Timmerman to give him a few minutes, and then he withdrew to a corner of the playground to read the article alone:
“The question was: Who is your favorite movie actress — and why? A poll of the twenty-three students in Miss Van Horn’s fifth-grade class has given us the answer — Marilyn Monroe, who garnered eight votes, winning out over Elizabeth Taylor, who came in second with five votes…”
Timmerman had done a creditable job of reporting the facts, but his language was bland, stiff to the point of lifelessness, and he had concentrated on the least interesting part of the story, the numbers, which were profoundly boring when compared to what the students had said about their choices, comments Timmerman had shared with Ferguson and then had largely neglected to work into the piece, and as Ferguson recalled some of those statements now, he found himself beginning to rewrite the article in his head: