“‘Va va voom,’ said Kevin Lassiter, needing just three short words to explain why Marilyn Monroe was his favorite movie actress.
“‘She seems like such a kind and intelligent person, I wish I knew her and could be her friend,’ said Peggy Goldstein, defending her choice of Deborah Kerr.
“‘So elegant, so beautiful — I just can’t tear my eyes away from her,’ said Gloria Dolan about her number one, Grace Kelly.
“‘Some dish,’ said Alex Botello, referring to his top star, Elizabeth Taylor. ‘I mean, get a load of that body of hers. It makes a boy want to grow up real fast.’”
Impossible to ask Timmerman to go back to the beginning and write the article for a fifth time. Useless to tell him that his work had produced neither a laugh nor a smile and that he might be better served by focusing on the why instead of the who. It was too late to get into any of that now, and the last thing Ferguson wanted was to lord it over Timmerman and start lecturing him on what he should or shouldn’t write. He walked back to where Mr. Big Toes was standing and returned the article to him.
Well? Timmerman said.
Not bad, Ferguson replied.
You mean not good.
No, not not good. Not bad. Which means pretty good.
And what about the next issue?
I don’t know. I haven’t even thought about it yet.
But you’re planning to do one, right?
Maybe. Maybe not. It’s too soon to tell.
Don’t give up. You’ve started something good, Archie, and you’ve got to keep it going.
Not if I don’t feel like it I don’t. Anyway, why should you care? I still don’t get why the Crusader is suddenly so important to you.
Because it’s exciting, that’s why, and I want to be part of something exciting. I think it would be a lot of fun.
Okay. I’ll tell you what. If I decide to do another issue, I’ll let you know.
And give me a chance to write something?
Sure, why not?
You promise?
To give you a chance? Yes, I promise.
Even as he spoke those words, Ferguson knew that his promise meant nothing, since he had already made up his mind to shut down the Crusader for good. The fourteen-day battle with Timmerman had worn him out, and he was feeling depleted and uninspired, disgusted with himself for his weak-minded changes of heart, demoralized by his reluctance to stand up for himself and fight for his position, which was a one-man paper or nothing, and now that he had made his splash and done what he had set out to do, perhaps it was better that it should be nothing, better that he should get out of the pool, dry himself off, and call it quits. Besides, it was baseball season now, and he was busy playing for the West Orange Chamber of Commerce Pirates, and when he wasn’t playing baseball he was busy reading The Count of Monte Cristo, the immense book that Aunt Mildred had sent him last month for his eleventh birthday, which he had finally started after the second issue of the Crusader had been put to bed, and now that he was in it he was fully in it, for it was without question the most absorbing novel that had ever fallen into his hands, and how pleasant it was to be following the adventures of Edmond Dantès every night after dinner instead of counting the words in his articles in order to fit them into the narrow columns of his broadsheet, so much labor, so many late nights squinting under his one-bulb lamp, forging on in the near-black while his parents thought he was asleep, so many false starts and corrections, so many silent thanks to the man who had invented erasers, knowing now that the job of writing was as much about removing words as adding them, and then the tedious work of going over every penciled letter with ink to make sure the words would be dark enough to be legible in the facsimiles, exhausting, yes, that was the word for it, and after his prolonged and harrowing standoff with Timmerman, he was exhausted, and as any doctor would have told him, the only cure for exhaustion was rest.
He rested for a month, finished the Dumas with a heavy heart, afraid that years might go by before he came across another novel as good as that one, and then, in the three days following his completion of the book, three things happened that changed his thinking and brought him out of retirement. He simply couldn’t help himself. The words of a new headline had popped into his head, and so delightful were those words to him, so vivid was the rhyming jangle of their clattering consonants, so tricky was the way their apparent nonsense was in fact not nonsense but sense, that he longed to see those words in print, and so, reneging on his vow to leave the newspaper business, he started planning a third issue of the Crusader, which would carry his one-two punch of a headline in large letters across the front page: FRACAS IN CARACAS.
It began on May thirteenth, when Richard Nixon was attacked by a mob of Venezuelan protesters on the final stop of a three-country goodwill tour of South America. The vice president had just landed at the airport, and as his motorcade drove through the streets of downtown Caracas, the crowds lining the sidewalks chanted Death to Nixon!, Nixon Go Home!, and before long Nixon’s car was surrounded by scores of people, mostly young men, who began spitting on the car and smashing the windows, and a few moments after that they were tipping the car from side to side, jostling it back and forth with such fury that it looked as if the car was about to turn over, and if not for the sudden appearance of Venezuelan soldiers, who dispersed the mob and cleared a path for Nixon’s car to get away, things might have ended badly, quite badly for everyone concerned, especially for the almost murdered Nixon and his wife.
Ferguson read about it in the paper the next morning, saw footage of the incident on the TV news that evening, and late the following afternoon cousin Francie, her husband Gary, and their five-month-old baby stopped by the house for a visit. They lived in New York now, where Gary was about to finish his first year of law school at Columbia, and ever since Ferguson’s performance as ring bearer at the wedding ceremony four years earlier, Gary had treated his young cousin-in-law as a kind of protégé, an up-and-coming fellow traveler in the world of ideas and manly pursuits, which had led to some long conversations about books and sports, but also about politics, which were something of an obsession for Gary (who subscribed to Dissent, I. F. Stone’s Weekly, and the Partisan Review), and because Francie’s husband was an intelligent young man, surely the best thinker Ferguson knew besides his Aunt Mildred, it was only natural that he should ask Gary what he thought about Nixon’s run-in with the mob in Venezuela. They were outside in the backyard together, walking under the oak tree that Ferguson had fallen out of when he was six, the tall, heavyset Gary puffing on a Parliament as Ferguson’s mother and Francie sat on the porch with baby Stephen, that plump little novice human being, as young in relation to Ferguson as Ferguson had once been to Francie, and as the two women laughed together and took turns holding the baby, the didactic, ever-solemn Gary Hollander was talking to him about the Cold War, the blacklist, the Red Scare, and the unhinged anti-communism that drove American foreign policy, which had led the State Department into supporting vicious, right-wing dictatorships all around the world, especially in Central and South America, and that was why Nixon had been attacked, he said, not because he was Nixon but because he represented the government of the United States, and that government was despised by vast numbers of people in those countries, justly despised for backing the tyrants who oppressed them.