He didn’t know how to answer her. Until Mrs. Baldwin started hammering him with her criticisms, he had assumed they would be talking about the mechanics of fiction writing, technical matters such as structure, pace, and dialogue, the importance of using one word instead of three or four words, how to avoid needless digressions and drive the story forward, the small but essential things he was still trying to figure out for himself, but it had never occurred to him that Mrs. Baldwin would attack him on what seemed to be moral grounds, calling into question the very substance of what he had written and condemning it as indecent. Whether she approved of the story or not, it was his work, and he was free to write whatever he wanted, to use the word shit if he felt it was necessary, for example, since people in the real world said that word a hundred times a day, and even if he was still a virgin, he had learned enough about sex to know that you didn’t have to be married in order to do it, that human lust paid little or no heed to the laws of matrimony, and as for the sexual life of shoes, how could she not see how funny it was, funny in such an absurd, innocent way that anyone reading those passages would have to be half-dead not to crack a smile, and fuck her, Ferguson said to himself, she had no right to be reproaching him like this, and yet in spite of his resistance her words were doing the job she had intended them to do, they were scalding his insides and peeling off his skin, and so dazed was he by the assault that he didn’t have the strength to defend himself, and when he was finally able to speak, he could get no more than two words out of his mouth, two mumbled words that surely ranked as the most pathetic words he had ever spoken:
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry, too, Mrs. Baldwin said. I know you think I’m being hard on you, but it’s for your own good, Archie. I’m not saying your story is obscene, not when you compare it to some of the books they’ve been publishing these past few years, but it’s vulgar and distasteful, and I just want to know what you were thinking when you wrote it. Did you have anything in mind, or were you simply trying to shock people with a bunch of off-color jokes?
Ferguson didn’t want to be there anymore. He wanted to stand up and leave the room and never have to look at Mrs. Baldwin’s wrinkled face and watery blue eyes again. He wanted to quit school and run away from home and ride the rails like a Depression hobo, begging for meals at kitchen doors and writing dirty books in his spare time, a man beholden to no one, laughing as he spat in the face of the world.
I’m waiting, Archie, Mrs. Baldwin said. Don’t you have anything to say for yourself?
You want to know what was in my mind, is that it?
Yes, what you were thinking.
I was thinking about slavery, Ferguson said. About how some people were actually owned by other people and had to do what they were told from the minute they were born until the minute they died. Hank and Frank are slaves, Mrs. Baldwin. They come from Africa — the shoe factory — then they’re put in chains and shipped to America on a boat — the shoe box, the truck ride to Madison Avenue — and then they’re sold off to their master at a slave auction.
But the shoes in your story like being shoes. You’re not going to tell me that slaves liked being slaves, are you?
No, of course not. But slavery lasted for hundreds of years, and how many times did the slaves rise up and revolt, how many times did slaves kill their masters? Almost never. Slaves did the best they could under bad conditions. They even told jokes and sang songs when they were able to. That’s the story of Hank and Frank. They have to serve the will of their master, but that doesn’t mean they don’t try to make the most of what they have.
None of this comes through in the writing, Archie.
I didn’t want to make it too obvious. Maybe that’s a problem, or maybe you just missed it, I don’t know. In any case, that’s what I had in mind.
I’m glad you told me this. It doesn’t change my opinion of the story, but at least I know you were trying to do something serious. I dislike it with all my heart, you understand, dislike it all the more because some of it is so good, and because I’m such an old woman now, I suppose I’ll always dislike what you do — but keep writing, Archie, and don’t listen to me. You don’t need advice, you just need to keep at it. As your dear friend Edgar Allan Poe once wrote to an aspiring author: Be bold — read much — write much — publish little — keep aloof from the little wits — and fear nothing.
HE DIDN’T TELL her about the final pages of the story or what he had been thinking when Alice puts Hank and Frank in the closet. If Mrs. Baldwin had missed the secret references to slavery, how could she have understood that the closet is a concentration camp and that Hank and Frank are no longer black Americans at that point but European Jews in the Second World War, wasting away in captivity until they are finally burned to death in the incinerator-crematorium? It wouldn’t have done any good to tell her that, nor was there any reason to talk about friendship, which was the true subject of the story as far as he was concerned, because that would have meant having to talk about Artie Federman, and he had no desire to share his grief with Mrs. Baldwin. She could have been right about not making those things visible enough for a reader to detect them, but then again she could have been blind, so rather than put the story away and stop thinking about it, he corrected the errors Mrs. Baldwin had circled on the manuscript and typed up yet another version, this time using carbon paper in order to make a second copy, which he airmailed to Aunt Mildred and Uncle Don the following afternoon. Twelve days after that, he received a letter from London, which in fact was two letters in a single envelope, a separate response from each of them, both favorable and enthusiastic, neither one of them blind to the things his teacher had failed to notice. What a puzzle, he said to himself, as a great surge of happiness swept through him, for even if his aunt and uncle had pronounced Sole Mates to be a good story, their verdict did nothing to change the fact that Mrs. Baldwin still thought it was a bad story. The same manuscript perceived differently by different pairs of eyes, different hearts, different brains. It was no longer a question of one person being punched while another person was being kissed, it was the same person being punched and kissed at the same time, for that was how the game worked, Ferguson realized, and if he meant to go on showing his story to other people in the future, he would have to prepare himself to be punched as often as he was kissed, or punched ten times for every kiss, or a hundred times with no kiss at all.