Rather than mail the story directly back to Ferguson, Uncle Don had sent it to Noah with instructions to return the manuscript to his cousin when he had finished reading it. Early one Saturday morning, about a week after the letters had arrived from London, the telephone rang in the kitchen as Ferguson was polishing off his breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast, and there was Noah on the other end of the line, spitting out words like tommy-gun bullets, saying he had to talk fast because his mother had stepped out to do some shopping and would probably kill him if she walked in and caught him on a long-distance call, especially a call to Ferguson, who was not to be contacted under any circumstances from the sanctuary of her apartment, not only because he wasn’t Noah’s real cousin but because he was tied by blood to the bitch-devil (yes, Noah said, she was out of her mind, everyone knew that, but he was the one who had to live with her), and yet once he finished that breathless prologue of his, Noah immediately began to slow the pace of his delivery, and before long he was talking at normal speed, which was fast but not outrageously fast, and sounding like someone with all the time in the world to settle in for a nice lengthy chat.
Well, pisshead, he began. You’ve really done it this time, haven’t you?
Done what? Ferguson replied, feigning ignorance, since he was more or less certain that Noah was referring to the story.
An odd little thing called Sole Mates.
You’ve read it?
Every word. Three times.
And?
Fantastic, Archie. Just fucking, flat-out fantastic. To tell the truth, I didn’t know you had it in you.
To tell the truth, I didn’t either.
I’m thinking we should turn it into a movie.
Very funny. And how do we do that without a camera?
An insignificant detail. We’ll remedy that problem in due course. Anyway, we don’t have time to work on it now. Because of school, for one thing, and the distance between New York and New Jersey, and assorted maternal impediments I won’t go into today. But there’s always the summer. I mean, we’re finished with camp now, aren’t we? We’re too old for it, and after what happened to Artie, well, I don’t think I could ever go back there.
I agree. No more camp.
So we’ll spend the summer making the movie. Now that you’ve turned yourself into a writer, I suppose you’ll be giving up all that sports nonsense.
Only baseball. But I’m still doing basketball. I’m on a team, you know, a ninth-grade team sponsored by the West Orange Y. We play other Y teams around Essex County twice a week, once on Wednesday night and once on Saturday morning.
I don’t get it. If you want to go on being a jock, why quit baseball? It’s your best sport.
Because of Artie.
What does Artie have to do with it?
He was the best player we’ve ever seen, wasn’t he? And he was also my friend. Not so much your friend, but my friend, my good friend. Now Artie’s dead, and I want to go on thinking about him, it’s important to me to have him in my thoughts as much as possible, and the best way to do that, I realized, was to give up something in his honor, something I care about, something important to me, so I chose baseball, baseball because that was Artie’s best sport, too, and from now on, whenever I see other people playing baseball, or whenever I think about why I’m not playing baseball myself, I’ll think about Artie.
You’re a strange person, do you know that?
I guess. But even if I am, what can I do about it?
Nothing.
That’s right. Nothing.
So play basketball. Join a summer league if you want to, but as long as you’re down to just one sport, you’ll have lots of time to work on the movie.
Agreed. Assuming we manage to get hold of a camera.
We’ll get it, don’t worry. The important thing is that you’ve written your first masterpiece. The door has opened, Archie, and there’ll be many more to come — a whole lifetime of masterpieces.
Let’s not get carried away. I’ve written one thing, that’s all, and who knows if I’ll ever come up with another idea. Besides, I still have my plan.
Not that. I thought you’d dropped it ages ago.
Not really.
Listen to me, pisshead. You’re never going to be a doctor — and I’m never going to be a strong man in the circus. You don’t have a math and science brain, and I don’t have a single muscle in my body. Ergo, no Doctor Ferguson — and no Noah the Magnificent.
How can you be so sure?
Because the idea came to you from a book, that’s why. A stupid novel you read when you were twelve years old and which I had the misfortune to read myself because you insisted it was so good, which it isn’t, and if you looked at it again I’m sure you’d finally see that it isn’t what you thought it was, that it isn’t any damned good at all. Idealistic young doctor blows up contaminated sewer system in order to rid town of disease, idealistic young doctor loses his ideals for money and a posh address, formerly idealistic not-so-young doctor regains his ideals and thus saves his soul. Hogwash, Archie. Just the kind of crap to move an idealistic young boy like yourself, but you’re not a young boy anymore, you’re a strapping fellow with a man’s dick yowling between your legs and a head that can produce literary masterpieces and God knows what else, and you’re telling me you’re still in thrall to that abomination of a book whose title escapes me now because I’ve done everything in my power to forget it?
The Citadel.
That’s it. And now that you’ve reminded me, never say it again in my presence. No, Archie, a person doesn’t become a doctor because he’s read a book. He becomes a doctor because he needs to become a doctor, and you don’t need to become a doctor, you need to become a writer.
I thought this was going to be a short call. You haven’t forgotten about your mother, have you?
Damnit. Of course I have. Gotta go, Arch.
Your father’s coming back in a couple of weeks. We’ll get together then, okay?
You bet. We’ll talk Shoe to each other with thick brogan brogues — and figure out how to steal a camera.
ON DECEMBER NINETEENTH, three days after Ferguson’s conversation with Noah, the New York Times reported that American G.I.s had entered the war zone in South Vietnam and were now taking part in tactical operations with instructions to shoot if fired upon. Along with a shipment of forty helicopters, four hundred American combat troops had arrived in South Vietnam one week earlier. Additional aircraft, ground vehicles, and amphibious ships were on the way. In all, there were now two thousand Americans in uniform in South Vietnam, instead of the officially reported 685 members of the military advisory group.
Four days after that, on December twenty-third, Ferguson’s father left on a two-week trip to southern California to visit his brothers and their families. It was the first pause he had taken from work in years, the last one dating all the way back to December 1954, when he and Ferguson’s mother had gone to Miami Beach for a ten-day winter vacation. This time, Ferguson’s mother didn’t go with him. Nor did she accompany Ferguson’s father to the airport to say good-bye to him on the day he left. Ferguson had heard his mother bad-mouth her brothers-in-law often enough to understand that she had no interest in seeing them, but still, there must have been more to it than that, for once his father was gone, she looked more agitated than usual, preoccupied, morose, unable, for the first time in memory, to follow what he was saying when he talked to her, and so deep was her distraction that Ferguson wondered if she wasn’t brooding about the state of her marriage, which seemed to have taken some definitive turn with his father’s solo departure to Los Angeles. Perhaps the bathtub wasn’t merely cold anymore. Perhaps it was frigid now, on the point of freezing over into a block of ice.