Little matter that the projector had been bought secondhand — it worked. Little matter that the prints were scratched and the sound sometimes seemed to be coming from the bottom of a bathtub — the films were watchable. And with the films came a whole new set of words for him to master—sprocket, for example, which turned out to be a far better word to think about than scorched.
ON THE WEEKENDS when his mother wasn’t out of town on an assignment — and the weather wasn’t too cold or too wet or too windy — most Saturday mornings and afternoons were spent prowling the streets in search of good photographs, Ferguson trotting along beside his mother as she strode down the sidewalks of Manhattan or mounted the steps of municipal buildings or scaled rocks or crossed bridges in Central Park, and then, for no reason that was ever apparent to him, she would come to a sudden halt, aim her camera at something, press the shutter release, and click, click-click, click-click-click, which wasn’t the most absorbing activity in the world, perhaps, but it belonged to the pleasure of being with his mother, of having her all to himself again, and how not to enjoy the lunches they ate together in coffee shops along Broadway and on Sixth Avenue in the Village, where ten times out of ten he would order a hamburger and a chocolate milkshake, always the same meal at the midpoint of those Saturday excursions, a hamburger, please, yes, a hamburger, please, as if it were part of a sacred ritual, which meant it could never vary in any way down to the smallest detail, and then the Saturday evenings and/or Sunday afternoons when they went to the movies together, sitting in the balcony where his mother could smoke her Chesterfields, movies that were never Laurel and Hardy movies but new productions from Hollywood such as It’s Always Fair Weather, The Tall Men, Picnic, Guys and Dolls, Artists and Models, The Court Jester, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Searchers, Forbidden Planet, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Our Miss Brooks, Bhowani Junction, Trapeze, Moby Dick, The Solid Gold Cadillac, The Ten Commandments, Around the World in Eighty Days, Funny Face, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Fear Strikes Out, and 12 Angry Men, the good and bad films of 1955, 1956, and 1957 that carried them through his time at Hilliard and on into his first year at the next school he attended, the Riverside Academy, on West End Avenue between Eighty-fourth and Eighty-fifth Streets, a coed institution of so-called progressive tendencies that had been founded twenty-nine years earlier, exactly one hundred years after the founding of Hilliard.
No more blazers and ties, no more morning chapel, no more bus trips through Central Park, no more days trapped in a building without girls, all of which were decided improvements, but the biggest difference between the third and fourth grades was not so much the leap to another school as the end of Ferguson’s duel with God. God had been defeated, exposed as a powerless nonentity who could no longer punish or inspire fear, and with the celestial overman now cut out of the picture, Ferguson could give up playing the old game of Intentional Screw-up, or, as he sometimes called it in later years, Ontological Chicken. He had succeeded so well at failure that he had grown tired of his gift for subterfuge and self-immolation. No one at Hilliard had ever suspected what he’d been up to, he had fooled them all, not only his teachers and fellow students but his mother and Aunt Mildred as well, not one of them ever figured out that he had done it on purpose, that his wildly erratic performance in the third grade had been nothing but an act, a cannily devised effort to prove that nothing he did could ever matter if no divine force were watching over him. He had won the argument with himself by getting thrown out of Hilliard — not expelled, exactly, since they allowed him to stay until the end of the year, but they had seen enough of Ferguson to want no more of him after that. The headmaster told his mother that Archie was the most daunting enigma he had ever come across in all his years at the school. He was both the best student and the worst student in his class, he said, at times brilliant and at other times utterly moronic, and they no longer knew what to do with him. Were they looking at a latent schizophrenic, he asked, or was Archie just another lost boy who would eventually find himself? Since Ferguson’s mother knew her son was neither a moron nor a future mental case, she thanked the headmaster for his time and set about looking for another school.
He received his first report card from the Riverside Academy on a Friday in mid-November. After an entire year of Poors and Fails from Hilliard, Ferguson’s mother was expecting better results from the new school, but nothing close to the seven Excellents and two Very Goods Ferguson brought home that day. Stunned by the magnitude of the reversal, she walked into the living room at five-thirty, just as The Laurel and Hardy Show was ending, and sat down beside her son on the floor.
Good work, Archie, she said, holding up the packet of grades in her right hand as she tapped it with her left. I’m very proud of you.
Thanks, Ma, Ferguson replied.
You must be enjoying your new school.
It’s pretty good. All things considered.
What does that mean?
School is school, which means it’s not something anyone enjoys that much. You go because you have to go.
But some schools are better than others, aren’t they?
I suppose.
For instance, Riverside is better than Hilliard.
Hilliard wasn’t bad. For a school, that is.
But you prefer not having to travel so far every day, don’t you? And not having to wear a uniform. And having girls and boys together instead of just boys. It makes life a little better, doesn’t it?
Much better. But the school itself isn’t that different. Reading, writing, arithmetic, social studies, gym, art, music, and science. I do the same things at Riverside that I did at Hilliard.
What about the teachers?
About the same.
I thought they were less strict at Riverside.
Not really. Miss Donne, the music teacher, yells at us sometimes. But Mr. Bowles, the music teacher at Hilliard, never raised his voice. He’s the best teacher I’ve had anywhere — and the nicest.
But you have more friends at Riverside. Tommy Snyder, Peter Baskin, Mike Goldman, and Alan Lewis — all such fine boys — and that cutie-pie, Isabel Kraft, and her cousin Alice Abrams, beautiful children, real winners. In two months, you’ve made as many friends as you ever had in New Jersey.
They’re fun to be with. Some of the other kids, not so much. Billy Nathanson is about the meanest toad I’ve ever met — much worse than anyone at Hilliard.
But you didn’t have any friends at Hilliard, Archie. Sweet Doug Hayes, I guess, but no one else I can think of.
It was my fault. I didn’t want any friends there.
Oh? And why is that?
It’s hard to explain. I just didn’t want any.
No friends and bad grades at one school. Lots of friends and good grades at another school. There has to be a reason for that. Do you have any idea what it is?
Yes.
And?
I can’t tell you.
Don’t be ridiculous, Archie.
You’ll be mad at me if I tell.