It was a curious story. Ferguson’s Aunt Mildred had remained Noah’s stepmother because she and Uncle Don had never bothered to divorce, and when Noah’s father returned from his eighteen-month sojourn in Paris, where he had begun writing a biography of Montaigne, he moved back to his old address on Perry Street. Not into the third-floor apartment he had previously shared with Mildred, however, but into a smaller, second-floor studio that had been vacated during his absence and which Mildred had rented for him prior to his return. That was the new arrangement. After a year and a half of turmoil and indecision, punctuated by three trips to Paris when Mildred was on break from teaching at Brooklyn College, they had concluded that they couldn’t live apart. On the other hand, they also understood that they were incapable of living together — at least not all the time, at least not as a conventionally married couple, and unless they allowed for sporadic interruptions of the domestic routine, they would end up devouring each other in a bloodbath of cannibalistic rage. Hence the compromise of the two apartments, the so-called Escape-Hatch Conciliation, for theirs was one of those impossible loves, a fraught mixture of passion and incompatibility, an electric storm-field of equally charged negative and positive ions, and because Don and Mildred were both selfish and volatile and utterly devoted to each other, the wars they fought were never-ending — except at those moments when Don moved downstairs into his second-floor apartment and a new era of peace began.
It was quite a muddle in Ferguson’s opinion, but not one he dwelled on at any length, since all marriages in his experience were flawed in one way or another, the savage conflicts of Don and Mildred as opposed to the weary indifference of his parents, but both marriages flawed just the same, not to mention his grandparents, who had barely spoken fifty words to each other in the past ten years, and as far as he could tell, the only grown-up man or woman who seemed to take pleasure in the mere fact of being alive was his Great-aunt Pearl, who no longer had a husband and would never have one again. Still and all, Ferguson was glad that Don and Mildred had been reunited, if not for their sakes then at least for his own, since Don’s return had brought Noah back into his life, and after an eighteen-month interval, during which they had been barred from each other’s company by Noah’s quasi-insane mother, Ferguson was astonished by how quickly they became friends again, as if the long separation had lasted no more than a matter of days.
Noah was still all flap and fury, the fast-talking needler of yore, but far less combustible at eleven than he had been at nine, and as the boys staggered through late childhood into early adolescence, each one found support in what he perceived to be the other’s strengths. For Noah, Ferguson was the handsome prince who excelled at everything he touched, the top dog who hit for the highest batting average and earned splendid marks at school, the one the girls liked, the one most looked up to by the other boys, and to be the cousin, friend, and confidant of such a person was an ennobling force in his life, which otherwise was a tormented life, the transitional life of a fourteen-year-old who fretted daily about his frizz-headed, gawky looks, about the disfiguring metal wires that had been bolted onto his teeth for the past year, about his appalling lack of physical grace. Ferguson knew how much Noah admired him, but he also knew that this admiration was misjudged and unwarranted, that Noah had turned him into a heroic, idealized being who in fact did not exist, whereas he, Ferguson, in the dark inner space where he actually lived, understood that Noah possessed a first-class mind, and that when it came to the things that truly mattered, the young Mr. Marx was more advanced than he was, at least one step ahead of him at every moment, often two steps, and occasionally four steps and even ten steps. Noah was his pathfinder, the quick-moving scout who explored the woods for Ferguson and told him where the best hunting was — books to read, music to listen to, jokes to laugh at, films to watch, ideas to think about — and now that Ferguson had ingested Candide and Bartleby, J. S. Bach and Muddy Waters, Modern Times and Grand Illusion, Jean Shepherd’s late-night monologues and Mel Brooks’s two-thousand-year-old man, Notes of a Native Son and The Communist Manifesto (no, Karl Marx wasn’t a relative — and neither, alas, was Groucho), he couldn’t help imagining how impoverished his life would have been without Noah. Anger and disappointment could take you just so far, he realized, but without curiosity you were lost.
So there they were in July 1961, about to set off for Camp Paradise at the start of that eventful summer when all the news from the outside world seemed to be bad news: the wall going up in Berlin, Ernest Hemingway blasting a bullet through his skull in the mountains of Idaho, mobs of white racists attacking the Freedom Riders as they traveled on their buses through the South. Menace, despondency, and hatred, abundant proof that rational men were not in charge of running the universe, and as Ferguson settled into the pleasant and familiar bustle of camp life, dribbling basketballs and stealing bases in the mornings and afternoons, listening to the barbs and blather of the boys in his cabin, exulting in the chance to be with Noah again, which above all meant being able to participate in a nonstop, two-month-long conversation with him, dancing in the evenings with the New York City girls he liked so much, the spirited and busty Carol Thalberg, the slender and thoughtful Ann Brodsky, and eventually the acne-ridden but exceptionally beautiful Denise Levinson, who was of one mind with him about slipping away from the post-dinner “socials” for intense mouth-and-tongue exercises in the back meadow, so many good things to be thankful for, and yet now that he was fourteen and his head was filled with thoughts that wouldn’t even have occurred to him just six months earlier, Ferguson was forever looking at himself in relation to distant, unknown others, wondering, for example, if he hadn’t been kissing Denise at the precise moment when Hemingway was blowing his brains out in Idaho or if, just as he was hitting a double in the game between Camp Paradise and Camp Greylock last Thursday, a Mississippi Klansman hadn’t been driving his fist into the jaw of a skinny, short-haired Freedom Rider from Boston. One person kissed, another person punched, or else one person attending his mother’s funeral at eleven o’clock in the morning on June 10, 1857, and at the same moment on the same block in the same city, another person holding her newborn child in her arms for the first time, the sorrow of the one occurring simultaneously with the joy of the other, and unless you were God, who was presumably everywhere and could see everything that was happening at any given moment, no one could possibly know that those two events were taking place at the same time, least of all the grieving son and the laughing mother. Was that why man had invented God? Ferguson asked himself. In order to overcome the limits of human perception by asserting the existence of an all-encompassing, all-powerful divine intelligence?
Think of it this way, he said to Noah one afternoon as they were walking to the dining hall. You have to go somewhere in your car. It’s an important errand, and you can’t be late. There are two ways to get there — by the main road or the back road. It happens to be rush hour, and normally things are pretty clogged up on the main road at that time of day, but unless there’s an accident or a breakdown, the traffic tends to move slowly and steadily, and chances are the trip will take you about twenty minutes, which would get you to your appointment just in time — on the dot, without a second to spare. The back road is a bit longer in terms of distance, but there are fewer cars to worry about, and if all goes well, you can count on a travel time of about fifteen minutes. In principle, the back road is better than the main road, but there’s also a hitch: it has only one lane going in each direction, and if you happen to run into a breakdown or an accident, you’re liable to get stuck for a long time, which would make you late for your appointment.