I didn’t either, but then my Uncle Gil gave me her autobiography as a present, and now I’m in love with her. She’s one of the greatest women who ever lived. (A brief pause.) And what about you, Mr. Ferguson? Any ideas yet?
Jackie Robinson.
Ah, Amy said, the baseball player. But not just any baseball player, right?
The man who changed America.
Not a bad choice, Archie. Go for it.
Do I need your permission?
Of course you do, silly.
They both laughed, and then Amy jumped to her feet and said: Come on, let’s go downstairs. I’m famished.
ON TUESDAY, FERGUSON went outside to retrieve the mail and found a hand-delivered letter sitting in the box — no stamp, no address, just his name written across the front. The message was succinct:
Dear Archie,
I hate you.
Love, Amy
P.S. I’ll return the ms. tomorrow. I need one more ride with Hank and Frank before I let go.
His father returned to Maplewood on January fifth. Ferguson was expecting him to say something about the story, if only to apologize for not having read it, but he said nothing, and when he continued to say nothing over the days that followed, Ferguson assumed he had lost it. Since Amy had returned the original typescript by then, the loss of the copy was of little importance. What counted was how little his father seemed to care about that matter of little importance, and because Ferguson resolved never to speak to him about it unless his father spoke to him about it first, it grew into a matter of great importance, of greater and greater importance as time went on.
3.1
There was pain. There was fear. There was confusion. Two virgins deflowering each other with no more than the dimmest understanding of what they were up to, prepared only in the sense that Ferguson had managed to procure a box of condoms and that Amy, anticipating the blood that would inevitably flow out of her, had put a dark brown bath towel over the bottom sheet of her bed — a precaution inspired by the enduring power of old legends and which in fact proved unnecessary. Joy to begin with, the ecstatic sensation of being entirely naked with each other for the first time since their long-forgotten mattress romp as small children, the chance to touch every square centimeter of the other’s body, the delirium of bare skin pressing against bare skin, but once they were fully aroused, the difficulty of advancing to the next step, the anxiety of entering another person for the first time, of being entered by another person for the first time, Amy tensing up in those first instants because it hurt so much, Ferguson feeling wretched for causing that hurt and therefore slowing down and ultimately withdrawing altogether, after which there was a three-minute time-out, and then Amy grabbed hold of Ferguson and instructed him to begin again, saying, Just do it, Archie, don’t worry about me, just do it, and so Ferguson did it, knowing he couldn’t not worry about her but also knowing that the line had to be crossed, that this was the moment they had been given, and in spite of the inner bruising that must have made her feel as if she were being torn apart, Amy laughed when it was over, laughed her big laugh and said, I’m so happy, I think I could die.
What a strange weekend it was, never once leaving the apartment as they sat on the sofa and watched Johnson being sworn in as the new president, watched Oswald being carted off to jail in his bloodied T-shirt, protesting to the cameras that he was nothing but a patsy, a word that Ferguson would forever associate with the frail young man who either killed or didn’t kill Kennedy on his own, watched a brief respite from the news when an orchestra played the dirge from Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, watched the funeral procession through the streets of Washington on Sunday as Amy choked up at the sight of the riderless horse, and watched Jack Ruby slip into the Dallas police station and shoot Oswald in the stomach. Unreal city. The line from Eliot kept exploding in Ferguson’s head throughout those three days as he and Amy gradually ate up the food in the kitchen, the eggs, the lamb chops, the sliced turkey, the packages of cheese, the cans of tuna fish, the boxes of breakfast cereal and cookies, Amy smoking more than he had ever seen her smoke and Ferguson smoking with her for the first time since they had met, the two of them sitting on the sofa together and stubbing out their Luckys in unison, then throwing their arms around each other and kissing, unable to stop themselves from committing the sacrilege of kissing at such a solemn moment, from leaving the sofa every three or four hours for another visit to the bedroom, shedding their clothes and climbing onto the bed again, both of them sore now, not just Amy but Ferguson as well, but they couldn’t stop themselves, the pleasure was always stronger than the pain, and grim as it was to be there on such a miserable weekend, it was the biggest, most important weekend of their young lives.
The pity was that no more chances came their way for the next two months. Ferguson kept going to New York every Saturday, but Amy’s apartment was never empty long enough for them to return to the bedroom. One of her parents was always around, often both of her parents, and with nowhere else for them to go, the only solution was for the Schneidermans to leave town again — which they didn’t. That was why Ferguson accepted his cousin’s invitation to go on the skiing trip to Vermont in late January. Not that he had any interest in skiing, which he had tried once and felt no need to try again, but when Francie told him that the only house they had been able to rent for the weekend was a sprawling old place with five bedrooms, Ferguson thought there might be some hope. Plenty of room, Francie said, which explained why she had thought of calling him, and if he wanted to bring along a friend, there would be room for that person as well. Do girlfriends count as friends? Ferguson asked. Of course they do! Francie said, and from the way she replied to his question, from the spontaneous enthusiasm of that ringing Of course, Ferguson naturally supposed she understood he was telling her that he and Amy were a couple now and wanted to sleep in the same bedroom, for Francie had been married at eighteen, after all, just one year older than Amy was now, and if anyone knew about thwarted teenage lust, it had to be his twenty-seven-year-old cousin, who had been his favorite cousin ever since he was in diapers. Amy was dubious about Ferguson’s optimistic reading of Francie’s Of course, knowing how far the two of them had strayed from the accepted rules of sexual conduct, which not only didn’t allow for intercourse between unmarried teenagers but considered it to be a positive scandal, but still, she said, she had never been to Vermont, had never been on skis, and what could be better than a weekend in the snow with Archie? As for the other business, they would just have to see who was right and who was wrong, and if it turned out she was right, that didn’t mean there couldn’t be some late-night room-hopping for a silent crawl into someone else’s bed. They left on a cold Friday afternoon, as Amy and Ferguson wedged themselves into a cramped blue station wagon with Francie, her husband, Gary, and the two Hollander children, six-year-old Rosa and four-year-old David, and it was a lucky thing for the big ones that the little ones slept for most of the five hours it took them to reach Stowe.
Francie had named her daughter after Ferguson’s mother, even though the names were not identical. The injunction against giving children the names of living parents, grandparents, and relatives was a law that even nonpracticing Jews still followed, which accounted for the one-letter difference between Rose and Rosa, a subtle point that Gary the lawyer had come up with in order to outflank the traditionalists in his family, but nevertheless the name was there for everyone to see, Rosa in honor of Rose, and with that gesture Francie and Gary were telling the world they had turned their backs on Arnold Ferguson, who had broken apart the family with the crime he had committed against his brother, and henceforth their loyalties would be shifted over to that brother, victim Stanley and his wife, Rose, whom Francie had loved from the moment she first set eyes on her as a young girl. It wasn’t easy for Francie to take that step, to denounce her father when she still felt so close to her mother, brother, and sister, but Gary’s contempt for his father-in-law was so strong, his disgust at the man’s moral weakness and dishonesty was so absolute, that Francie had little choice but to go along with her husband. They had already been married for two years when the robbery took place, living in northwestern Massachusetts as Gary finished his undergraduate work at Williams, one of the three “baby couples” in his class, and the twenty-year-old Francie was already pregnant with her own first baby, who was born several months after her father’s involvement in the warehouse cleanout came to light. The rest of the family had all moved to California by then, not just her parents but the docile young Ruth as well, who had just finished high school and was enrolled in a secretarial course in L.A., and even Jack, who dropped out of Rutgers in his last year to join them, a decision Francie and Gary urged him not to make, which led to Jack telling them both to fuck off, and by the time Rosa was born, only Francie’s mother and sister made the trip back east to hold the child in their arms. Jack said he was too busy to come, and the disgraced Arnold Ferguson couldn’t come, because he could never come back east again.