So it began, and as Ferguson watched the sequence unfold, he found the slaughter so gruesome that his eyes eventually filled up with tears. It was unbearable to watch the mother being gunned down by the czar’s soldiers, unbearable to watch the killing of the second mother and the awful journey of the baby carriage down the steps, unbearable to watch the Woman with the Pince-Nez howling with her mouth wide open and one lens of her pince-nez shattered and blood gushing from her right eye, unbearable to watch the Cossacks pull out their swords to slice the baby in the carriage to bits — unforgettable images, and therefore images to go on producing nightmares for fifty years — and yet, even as Ferguson recoiled from what he was watching, he was thrilled by it, astonished that anything as vast and complex as that sequence could possibly have been put on film, the pure magnitude of the energy unleashed by those minutes of footage nearly split him in two, and by the time the film was over, he was so shattered, so exhilarated, so mixed up in a confusion of sorrow and elation that he wondered if any film would ever affect him in that way again.
There was a second Eisenstein feature on the program—October, known in English as Ten Days That Shook the World—but when Andy asked Ferguson if he wanted to see it, Ferguson shook his head, saying he was too exhausted and needed to get some air. So they went out into the air, not quite certain what to do next. Andy suggested they go back to his apartment so he could lend Ferguson his copy of Eisenstein’s Film Form and The Film Sense and maybe scrounge up some food as well, and Ferguson, who had no plans for the rest of the day, thought Why not? During the walk to West 107th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, the mysterious Andy Cohen divulged some more facts about his life, first of all the fact that his mother was a registered nurse at St. Luke’s Hospital and was working the twelve-to-eight shift that day and wouldn’t (thank God) be at home when they got there, and the fact that he had been accepted by Columbia but had decided to go to City College because the tuition was free there and his mother couldn’t afford to send him to Columbia (and yet what a nice kick in the pants to know he had the stuff to make the Ivy League), and the fact that much as he loved movies he loved books even more, and if everything went according to plan he would get a Ph.D. and wind up as a professor of literature somewhere, maybe even — hah! — at Columbia. As Andy talked and Ferguson listened, Ferguson was struck by the enormous gap that separated them intellectually, as if the three-year difference in their ages represented a journey of several thousand miles that Ferguson had yet to begin, and because he felt so ignorant when he compared himself to the big-brained college student walking beside him, Ferguson asked himself why Andy Cohen seemed to be working so hard at trying to become his friend. Was he one of those lonely people who had no one to talk to, Ferguson wondered, a person so hungry for companionship that he would settle for anything that dropped in front of him, even when it came in the form of a know-nothing high school boy? If so, it didn’t make much sense. Some people had flaws, character flaws or physical flaws or mental flaws that tended to isolate them from others, but Andy didn’t seem to be one of them. He was amiable and relatively good-looking, he was not without a sense of humor, and he was generous (e.g., the offer to lend Ferguson the book) — in short, someone who fell into the same category of person as cousin Jim, who was just one year older than Andy and had many friends, more friends than he could count on the fingers of twelve hands. In fact, now that Ferguson thought about it, the effect of being with Andy was not dissimilar to what it felt like to be with Jim — the comfortable sense of not being looked down upon by someone older than he was, of older and younger walking down the street together at the same pace. But Jim was his cousin, and it was normal to be treated like that by someone in your family, whereas Andy Cohen, at least for now, was little more than a stranger to him.
The future professor lived in a small two-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a run-down, eleven-story building, one of the many Upper West Side residential towers that had sunk into decrepitude since the end of the war, once a modest dwelling place for members of the middle middle class and now occupied by an assortment of struggling people who spoke several different languages behind the locked doors of their apartments. As Andy showed Ferguson around the sparsely furnished, well-ordered rooms, he explained that he and his mother had been living there since his father’s third and final heart attack, and Ferguson understood that this was just the kind of place he and his mother might have rented if there had been no life insurance money to carry them through the rough years after his own father’s death. Now that his mother had married again and was earning decent money as a photographer, just as Gil was earning decent money from writing about music, they were so much better off than Andy and his poor nurse mother that Ferguson felt ashamed of his good fortune, which he had done nothing to contribute to, just as Andy had done nothing to contribute to his less than good fortune. Not that the Cohens were poor, exactly (the refrigerator was well-stocked with food, Andy’s bedroom was crammed with paperback books), but when Ferguson sat down in the small kitchen to eat one of the salami sandwiches Andy had prepared for them, he noticed that this was a household that collected Green Stamps and cut out discount coupons from the Journal-American and the Daily News. Gil and his mother counted dollars and tried not to overspend, but Andy’s mother counted pennies and spent whatever she had.
After the snack in the kitchen, they went into the living room and talked for a while about Madame Bovary (which Ferguson hadn’t read), The Seven Samurai (which Ferguson hadn’t seen), and other films on the Thalia program for next month. Then something strange happened, or something interesting, or something strangely interesting, which in any case was unexpected, or at least it seemed so at first, but then, as Ferguson began to think about it a little, not as unexpected as all that, for once Andy asked the question, Ferguson finally understood why he was there.