The lights came on, and as Ferguson stood up and stretched his arms, he noticed someone three seats to his left, a tall boy with dark hair who must have been a couple of years older than he was, in all probability another hooky-playing cinephile, and when he glanced over at his fellow renegade, the boy smiled at him.
Some film, the stranger said.
Some film, Ferguson repeated. I loved it.
The boy introduced himself as Andy Cohen, and as he and Ferguson walked out of the theater together, Andy said that this was the third time he had seen Children of Paradise, and did Ferguson know that the criminal Lacenaire, the mime Duburau, and the actor Lemaître had all been real people from France in the 1820s? No, Ferguson confessed, he hadn’t known that. Nor had he known that the film had been shot in Paris during the German occupation, nor that Arletty had gotten herself into a heap of trouble at the end of the war for having an affair with a German officer, nor that the writer Jacques Prévert and the director Marcel Carné had collaborated on several films in the thirties and forties and were the inventors of what critics called poetic realism. This Andy Cohen was certainly a well-informed young man, Ferguson said to himself, and while he might have been showing off a little, trying to impress the backward young neophyte with his superior knowledge of film history, he was doing it in a friendly way, somehow, more from an excess of enthusiasm than from any kind of arrogance or condescension.
They were out on the street by then, walking south down Broadway, and within four blocks Ferguson had learned that Andy Cohen was eighteen, not seventeen, and that he hadn’t cut any classes to go to the movie because he was a freshman at City College and had no classes that afternoon. His father was dead (a heart attack six years ago), and Andy and his mother lived in an apartment on Amsterdam Avenue and 107th Street, and because he didn’t have any plans for the rest of the day, maybe he and Ferguson could go to a coffee shop somewhere and have a bite to eat? No, Ferguson said, he had to be home by four-thirty or else, but maybe they could get together another time, Saturday afternoon, for instance, when he knew he would be free, and the moment Ferguson said the word Saturday, Andy reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the Thalia program for March. The Battleship Potemkin, he said. It’s playing at one o’clock.
The Thalia at one on Saturday, Ferguson replied. I’ll see you there.
He extended his right arm, shook Andy Cohen’s hand, and the two parted company, the one continuing south toward Riverside Drive between Eighty-eighth and Eighty-ninth Streets and the other turning around and heading north toward what might or might not have been home.
As expected, Gil and his mother were in the apartment when Ferguson walked in, but, as not expected, the school had already called to report his unauthorized departure. Gil and his mother had those worried looks on their faces that always saddened Ferguson and made him realize how unpleasant it must have been for them to be the grown-ups responsible for taking care of someone like him, for the call from the school meant that his whereabouts had been unknown from twelve-thirty to four-thirty, which was more than enough time for conscientious parents to start fretting about their missing teenager. That was why his mother had established the four-thirty rule: Be home by then or else call home to explain where he was. The limit had been extended to six o’clock for the basketball season because of after-school practices, but the basketball season was over now and the four-thirty deadline was back in effect. Ferguson had walked into the apartment at four twenty-seven, which on any other day would have kept him in the clear, but he hadn’t counted on the school to call so promptly, and for that stupid oversight he was sorry, not just because of the scare he had put into Gil and his mother but because it made him feel like an idiot.
Half of his allowance was docked for the following week, and for the three school days that remained from the current week he was held after dismissal to work in the lunchroom mopping floors, scrubbing pots, and scouring the large eight-burner stove. The Riverside Academy was an enlightened, forward-looking institution, but it still believed in the punitive virtues of K.P. duty.
On Saturday, a day of relaxed curfews and relative freedom, Ferguson announced at breakfast that he was going to the movies with a friend that afternoon, and since Gil and his mother were generally good about not asking too many unimportant questions (no matter how much they might have wished to know the answers), Ferguson didn’t name the movie or the friend, and he left the apartment in time to reach the Thalia by ten to one. He wasn’t expecting Andy Cohen to be there, not when it seemed so unlikely that he would have remembered their hastily plotted rendezvous at the theater door, but now that Ferguson had discovered the pleasures of watching films alone, the prospect of being alone again didn’t bother him. Nevertheless, Andy Cohen had remembered, and as the two of them shook hands and bought their forty-cent tickets, the college boy was already launching into a brief lecture on Eisenstein and the principles of montage, the technique that had supposedly revolutionized the art of filmmaking. Ferguson was told to pay special attention to the scene on the Odessa Steps, which was one of the most famous sequences in movie history, and Ferguson said he would, although the word Odessa had a somewhat troubling effect on him, given that his grandmother had been born in Odessa and had died in New York just seven months earlier, and Ferguson regretted that he had paid so little attention to her when she was alive, no doubt assuming she was immortal and that there would be plenty of time to get to know her better in the future, which of course never happened, and thinking about his grandmother made him think about his grandfather, whom he still missed terribly, and by the time Ferguson and Andy Cohen took their seats in the fifth row — which they agreed was the best row in the house — the expression on Ferguson’s face had changed so radically that Andy asked him if anything was wrong.
I’m thinking about my grandparents, he said. And my father, and all the dead people I’ve known. (Pointing to his left temple.) It gets pretty dark in there sometimes.
I know, Andy said. I can’t stop thinking about my father — and he’s been dead for six years.
It helped that Andy’s father was dead, too, Ferguson thought, that they were both the sons of nonexistent men and spent their days in the company of ghosts, at least on the bad days, the worst days, and because the glare of the world was always brightest on the bad days, perhaps that explained why they sought out the darkness of movie theaters, why they felt happiest when sitting in the dark.
Andy said something about the hundreds of cuts that had gone into editing the big scene, but before he could tell Ferguson exactly how many there were (a number he surely knew by heart), the lights dimmed, the projector went on, and Ferguson turned his attention to the screen, curious to discover what all the fuss was about.
The townspeople of Odessa waving to the striking sailors from the top of the steps. A wealthy woman opens her white umbrella, a legless boy doffs his cap, and then the word SUDDENLY, and the face of a terrified woman fills the screen. A crowd of people charging down the stairs, the legless boy among them, as the white umbrella rushes into the foreground. Fast music, hectic music, music racing faster than the fastest pounding heart. The legless boy in the center as the crowd streams down on either side of him. A reverse shot of the soldiers in their white uniforms chasing the people down the steps. A close-up of a woman getting up from the ground. A man’s knees buckle. Another man falls. Still another man falls. A wide shot of the running crowd as the soldiers run down the stairs in pursuit. Close shots of people hiding in the shadows. The soldiers take aim with their rifles. More cowering people. Lateral shots of the crowd, frontal shots of the crowd, and then the camera begins to move, sprinting along beside the crowd of sprinting people. Rifles blasting from above. A mother running with her little boy until the boy in the white shirt falls down face-first. The mother keeps running, the crowd keeps running. The boy in the white shirt is crying, blood is dripping from his head, the white shirt is speckled with blood. The crowd keeps running, but now the mother realizes that her son is no longer with her and stops. The mother turns around, looking for her boy. A close-up of her anguished face. The crying boy in the bloodied shirt passes out. The mother opens her mouth in horror and grabs hold of her hair. A tight shot of the unconscious boy as legs and more legs rush past him. The music continues to pound. A close-up of the mother’s horrified face. The endless crowd continues to pour down the steps. A boot comes down on the boy’s outstretched hand. A closer shot of the crowd pouring down the steps. Another boot comes down on the boy. The bleeding boy rolls over onto his back. An extreme close-up of the mother’s horrified eyes. She begins to move forward, mouth open, hands in hair. The crowd pours down. The mother approaches her fallen son. She bends down to pick him up. A wide shot of the frenzied, charging crowd. A reverse shot of the mother carrying the boy back up the stairs in the direction of the soldiers. Her mouth is moving, angry words are coming out of her. A broad shot of the dense crowd. A closer shot of some people crouching behind a stone wall, among them the Woman with the Pince-Nez …