He went there because Aunt Mildred had convinced his mother that Hilliard was one of the best schools in the city, with a long-standing reputation for academic excellence, but no one had told Ferguson that his fellow students would be among the richest children in America, the scions of privileged, old-money New York, or that he would be the only boy in his class who lived on the West Side and one of only eleven non-Christians in a school with a K-through-12 enrollment of nearly six hundred. At first, no one suspected he was anything other than a Scottish Presbyterian, an understandable error in light of the name his grandfather had been given after the Rockefeller bungle of 1900, but then one of the teachers noticed that Ferguson’s lips weren’t moving when he was supposed to be saying Jesus Christ, our Lord at morning chapel, and word eventually got out that he was one of the eleven and not one of the five hundred and seventy-six. Add in the fact that he entered the school as a latecomer, a mostly silent boy with no ties to anyone in the class, and it would appear that Ferguson’s tenure at Hilliard was doomed from the start, doomed before he even set foot in the building on his first day.
It wasn’t that anyone was unkind to him, or that anyone harassed him, or that he was made to feel unwelcome. As with every other school, there were friendly boys and neutral boys and nasty boys, but not even the nastiest among them ever taunted Ferguson for being a Jew. Hilliard might have been a stuffy, jacket-and-tie sort of place, but it also preached tolerance and the virtues of gentlemanly self-control, and any act of overt prejudice would have been dealt with harshly by the authorities. More subtly, and more confusingly, what Ferguson had to contend with was a guileless sort of ignorance that seemed to have been injected into his classmates at birth. Even Doug Hayes, the ever amiable and good-hearted Dougie Hayes, who had made a point of befriending Ferguson from the moment he arrived at Hilliard, who had been the first boy to invite him to a birthday party and had subsequently asked him over to his parents’ townhouse on East Seventy-eighth Street no fewer than a dozen times, could still ask, after having known Ferguson for nine months, what he was planning to do on Thanksgiving.
Eat turkey, Ferguson said. That’s what we do every year. My mother and I go to my grandparents’ apartment and eat turkey with stuffing and gravy.
Oh, Dougie said. I had no idea.
Why not? Ferguson answered. Isn’t that what you do?
Of course. I just didn’t know your people celebrated Thanksgiving.
My people?
You know. Jewish people.
Why wouldn’t we celebrate Thanksgiving?
Because it’s kind of an American thing, I guess. The Pilgrims. Plymouth Rock. All those English guys with the funny black hats who came over on the Mayflower.
Ferguson was so bewildered by Dougie’s comment that he didn’t know what to say. Until that moment, it had never occurred to him that he might not be an American, or, more precisely, that his way of being an American was any less authentic than the way Dougie and the other boys were American, but that was what his friend seemed to be asserting: that there was a difference between them, an elusive, indefinable quality that had to do with black-hatted English ancestors and the length of time spent on this side of the ocean and the money to live in four-story townhouses on the Upper East Side that made some families more American than others, and in the end the difference was so great that the less American families could barely be considered American at all.
No doubt his mother had chosen the wrong school for him, but in spite of that perplexing conversation about Jewish dining habits on national feast days, not to mention other perplexing moments both before and after his talk with Dougie H., Ferguson never felt any desire to leave Hilliard. Even if he failed to grasp the peculiar customs and beliefs of the world he had entered, he did his best to comply with them, and not once did he blame his mother or Aunt Mildred for having sent him there. He had to be somewhere, after all. The law said that every child under the age of sixteen had to go to school, and as far as he was concerned, Hilliard was no better or no worse than any other penitentiary for the young. It wasn’t the school’s fault that he did so badly there. In those bleak early days following Stanley Ferguson’s death, young Ferguson had concluded that he was living in an upside-down universe of infinitely reversible propositions (day = night, hope = despair, power = weakness), which meant that when it came to the question of school he was now obliged to fail rather than succeed, and given how good it felt not to care anymore, to court failure as a matter of principle and will himself into the comforting arms of humiliation and defeat, it was all but certain that he would have failed just as gloriously anywhere else.
His teachers found him lazy and unmotivated, indifferent to authority, distracted, stubborn, shockingly undisciplined, a human puzzle. The boy who had answered every question on the entrance exam correctly, who had won over the admissions director with his sweet nature and precocious insights, the late-in-the-year add-on who was supposed to bring home top marks in every subject earned only one Excellent on his first report card, which was issued in April of his second-grade year. The subject was gym. A grade of Good for reading, writing, and penmanship (he had tried to do worse, but he was still a beginner at masking his talents), Satisfactory in music (he couldn’t resist belting out the Negro spirituals and Irish folk songs that Mr. Bowles taught them, even though he struggled to stay in tune), and Poor in everything else, which included math, science, art, social studies, comportment, citizenship, and attitude. The next and final report card, which was issued in June, was almost identical to the first, the only difference being his grade in math, which descended from Poor to Fail (he had perfected the art of giving wrong answers to arithmetic questions by then, three out of every five on average, but he still couldn’t bring himself to misspell more than a tenth of his words). Under normal circumstances, Ferguson would not have been asked back for the following year. His work had been so hideously subpar as to suggest profound psychological trouble, and a school like Hilliard was not accustomed to carrying dead weight, at least not when the flunker came from a non-legacy family, legacy meaning a third- or fourth- or fifth-generation boy whose father wrote out a check every year or sat on the board of trustees. They were willing to give Ferguson another chance, however, for they understood that his circumstances were anything but normal. Mr. Ferguson had died in the middle of the school year, a sudden, violent death that had sent the boy spinning into the nether zones of grief and disintegration, and surely he deserved a little more time to pull himself together. He had too much potential for them to give up on him after just three and a half months, and therefore they informed Ferguson’s mother that her son would have one more year to prove himself. If he could turn it around by then, he would no longer be on probation. If not, well, that would be that, and good luck to him wherever he happened to land.
Ferguson hated himself for having disappointed his mother, whose life was hard enough without having to fret about his rotten performance at school, but there were more important issues at stake than trying to please her or bending over backward to impress the family with a report card full of Excellents and Very Goods. He knew that life would have been simpler for him and everyone else if he had toed the line and done what was expected of him. How easy and thoroughly uncomplicated it would have been to stop giving wrong answers on purpose, to begin paying attention again and make everyone proud of him for being such a conscientious boy, but Ferguson had embarked on a grand experiment, a secret investigation into the most fundamental matters concerning life and death, and he couldn’t turn back now, he was traveling down a rough and perilous road, alone among the rocks and twisting mountain paths, in danger of falling off the precipice at any moment, but until enough information had been gathered to provide him with conclusive results, he would have to go on putting himself at risk — even if it meant being expelled from the Hilliard School for Boys, even if it meant turning himself into a disgrace.