All that said, it went without saying that he still wanted her, that he would have done anything to win Amy back, but even if he eventually managed to make her want him again, it was going to take time, perhaps a long time, and in the interval between not having her anymore and perhaps having her again, he figured the best strategy for turning things around would be to find himself a new girlfriend. Not only would that show he had lost interest in her and had put their breakup behind him (which was essential), it would distract him from thinking about her all the time, and the less he thought about her, the less he would mope, and the less he moped, the more attractive he would appear to her. A new girlfriend would make him a happier person, and emboldened by his newfound happiness, he would surely be nicer to Amy at family gatherings, more charming, more in control of his feelings, and whenever the occasion presented itself, he would talk to her about current events. That was one of her principal gripes against him — his indifference to politics, his lack of concern about what was happening in the big world of national and international affairs — and to remedy that deficit Ferguson resolved to follow the news more closely from now on. Two papers were delivered to the apartment every morning, the Times and the Herald Tribune, although Gil and his mother read the Times and largely ignored the Herald Tribune, even if it was Gil’s employer, for the joke in the family was that the Herald Tribune was too pro-Republican to be taken seriously by anyone who lived on the Upper West Side. Nevertheless, Gil’s reviews and articles appeared roughly every other day in that Park Avenue organ of Wall Street money and American power, and Ferguson’s morning job was to cut out the pieces with Gil’s byline on them and stow the clippings in a box for his mother, who was planning to put together a scrapbook of Gil’s writings one day, and Gil was forever telling him not to bother with that rubbish, but Ferguson, who understood that Gil was both embarrassed by the attention and secretly pleased by it, would shrug and say, Sorry, orders from the Boss, the Boss being yet another name for the already double-named Rose Adler/Rose Schneiderman, and Gil would nod with feigned resignation and reply, Natürlich, mein Hauptmann, you mustn’t get in trouble for not following orders. So the Times and the Herald Tribune were there for him to read in the morning, and when the afternoon rolled around and he came home from school, a copy of the New York Post had generally found its way into the apartment as well, and on top of the dailies there were Newsweek, Life, and Look (in which his mother sometimes published photographs), I. F. Stone’s Weekly, the New Republic, the Nation, and assorted other magazines, and Ferguson diligently plowed through them now instead of turning straight to the film and book reviews in the back, reading the political articles in order to figure out what was going on out there and thus figure out how to hold his own in a conversation with Amy. Such were the sacrifices he was willing to make in the cause of love, for even as he turned himself into a more informed citizen, a more vigilant observer of the battles between Democrats and Republicans, of America’s interactions with friendly and unfriendly foreign governments, he still found politics to be the dullest, deadliest, dreariest subject he could think of. The Cold War, the Taft-Hartley Act, underground nuclear testing, Kennedy and Khrushchev, Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara — none of it meant much to him, and in his opinion all politicians were either stupid or tainted or both, and even handsome John Kennedy, the much-admired new president, was just another stupid or tainted politician to Ferguson, who found it much more nourishing to admire men like Bill Russell and Pablo Casals than to waste his feelings on pompous windbags scrambling for votes. The only three things from out there that truly engaged his attention in the last months of 1961 and the first months of 1962 were the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the crisis in Berlin — because Gil and Uncle Dan were so wrapped up in it — and the civil rights movement at home — because the people were so brave and the injustices they had exposed him to were so obscene that they made America look like one of the most backward countries on earth.
The quest for a substitute Amy was not without its problems, however. It wasn’t that Ferguson was expecting to discover anyone who resembled her, since Amy was not the sort of girl who had been designed for mass production, but he was reluctant to settle for anything less than a top-quality alternative — nothing to compare to Amy, perhaps, but a scintillating person who would bowl him over and quicken the pace of his heart. Unfortunately, the most promising candidates had already given their hearts to others, among them the ever more beautiful Isabel Kraft, the Hedy Lamarr of the freshman class, who was dating a boy from the sophomore class, as was her attractive cousin, Alice Abrams, as was Ferguson’s former flame, the honey-voiced Rachel Minetta. That was one of the central facts of ninth-grade life: most of the girls were more advanced than most of the boys, which meant that the most impressive girls shunned the boys from their year for the more advanced boys from the next year, if not the next year plus one. Hoping for a quick result, success by mid-October at the latest, that is, three weeks after Amy had told him to toughen up, Ferguson was still searching well into November, not from any lack of effort on his part (four movie dates with four different girls on four successive Saturdays) but simply because none of the girls he went out with was the right one. By the time school recessed for the Thanksgiving break, he was beginning to wonder if any girl at the Riverside Academy would ever be the right one.