FERGUSON WAS IN the ninth grade now, technically the first year of high school but in his case the last year of junior high, and among the subjects he studied during the first semester was typing, an elective course that proved to be more valuable to him than anything else he took that year. Because he was so keen on mastering this new skill, he went to his father and asked for the money to buy a typewriter of his own, managing to persuade the prophet of profits to cough up the cash with the argument that he was going to need one eventually and prices would never be lower than they were now, and thus Ferguson secured himself a new toy to play with, a solid, elegantly designed Smith-Corona portable, which instantly acquired the status of most treasured possession. How he came to love that writing machine, and how good it felt to press his fingers against the rounded, concave keys and watch the letters fly up on their steel prongs and strike the paper, the letters moving right as the carriage moved left, and then the ding of the bell and the sound of the cogs engaging to drop him down to the next line as black word followed black word to the bottom of the page. It was such a grown-up instrument, such a serious instrument, and Ferguson welcomed the responsibilities it demanded of him, for life was serious now, and with Artie Federman never more than half an inch away from him, he knew it was time to start growing up.
When Ferguson completed the handwritten first draft of Sole Mates in early November, he had made enough progress in his typing course to do the second draft on the Smith-Corona. After he corrected that version and typed up the story again, the finished manuscript came to fifty-two double-spaced pages. It seemed incomprehensible to him that he had written so much, that somehow or other he had managed to crank out more than fifteen thousand words about a dumb pair of shoes, but after the idea came to him, one thing kept leading to another, his head kept filling up with new situations to write about, new aspects of the characters to explore and develop, and by the time he was finished more than two months of his life had been given over to the project. He felt a certain satisfaction in having done it, of course, the mere fact of having composed such a long work was something any fourteen-year-old would have felt proud of, but when he read it over for the fifth time and made the last of his final revisions, he still didn’t know if it was any good or not. Since neither one of his parents was capable of judging the story, let alone any story ever written in the history of mankind, and since Aunt Mildred and Uncle Don were in London for the fall semester (Mildred had been given a half-year sabbatical) — which meant that Noah was living full-time with his mother and was therefore inaccessible until January — and since he was too frightened to share it with the one classmate whose opinion he would have trusted, he reluctantly gave it to his English teacher, Mrs. Baldwin, who had been standing in front of ninth-grade classrooms since the 1920s and was just a year or two from retirement. Ferguson knew he was taking a risk. Mrs. Baldwin excelled at giving vocabulary quizzes and spelling tests, she was masterful at explaining how to diagram a sentence and terrifically good at clarifying the tough points of grammar and diction, but her taste in literature belonged to the fuddy-duddy school of superannuated treasures, as evinced by her enthusiasm for Bryant, Whittier, and Longfellow, those turgid, insipid has-beens who dominated the curriculum when she led the class through the wonders of nineteenth-century American verse, and while Ferguson’s dark-browed E. A. Poe was there with his obligatory black bird, there was no Walt Whitman—too profane! — and no Emily Dickinson—too obscure! To her credit, however, Mrs. Baldwin had also assigned them A Tale of Two Cities, which was his first exposure to Dickens on the page (he had once watched a movie version of A Christmas Carol on TV), and though Ferguson had gladly joined his friends in the age-old tradition of referring to the novel as A Sale of Two Titties, he had fallen hard for the book, had found the sentences ferociously energetic and surprising, an inexhaustible inventiveness that mixed horror and humor in ways he had never encountered in any other book, and he was grateful to Mrs. Baldwin for having introduced him to what he now considered to be the best novel he had ever read. That was why he decided to give her his story — because of Dickens. Too bad he couldn’t write as well as old Charles, but he was just a beginner, an amateur author with only one work to his name so far, and he hoped she would take that into account.
It wasn’t as bad as he thought it might be, but in other ways it was much worse. Mrs. Baldwin corrected his typos, spelling errors, and grammatical blunders, which not only was a help to him but proved that she had read the story with some care, and when they sat down for their after-school conference six days after he had given her the manuscript, she praised him for his perseverance and the richness of his imagination, and to be perfectly frank, she added, she was stunned that an apparently normal, well-adjusted boy should have such dark, disturbing thoughts about the world. As for the story itself, well, it was ludicrous, of course, a blatant example of the pathetic fallacy gone wrong, but even granted that a pair of shoes could think and feel and carry on conversations, what had Ferguson been trying to accomplish by inventing this comic-book world of his? There were unquestionably some touching and amusing moments, some flashes of genuine literary talent, but much of the story had offended her, and she wondered why Ferguson had chosen her to be his first reader, since he must have known she would be put off by his use of four-letter words (pigeon shit on page 17, holy shit on page 30—which she pointed out to him by tapping her finger on the lines in which those words appeared), not to mention his mockery of the police throughout, beginning with the derisory terms flatfoot and cop shoes, then deepening the insult with his portrayal of Captain Benton as a drunken, abusive sadist — didn’t Ferguson know that her father had been Maplewood chief of police when she was a girl, hadn’t she told the class enough stories about him to make that clear? — but worst of all, she said, worse than anything else was the smutty tone of the story, not just that Quine hops in and out of bed with various unsavory women before he proposes to Alice but that Alice herself is willing to sleep with him before their marriage — an institution, by the way, that Ferguson seemed to hold in absolute contempt — and then, even worse than worst of all, the fact that the sexual innuendos don’t stop with the human characters but go all the way down to the shoes themselves, what a preposterous notion that was, the erotic lives of shoes, for pity’s sake, and how could Ferguson look at himself in the mirror after writing about the pleasure a shoe feels when a foot steps into it, or the ecstasy that comes from being shined and polished, and how on earth did he ever think up the shoe orgy with Flora and Nora, that truly was the limit, and didn’t Ferguson feel the least bit ashamed of himself for dwelling on such filth?