A queer fish, the local faculty had gotten used to him. But occasionally a visitor to the college might be shocked at him, or surprised to say least. Sometimes when you visit an aquarium, a strange-looking animal of an unknown species comes swerving up to the glass and peers at you with its glazed eye, slowly waving soft translucent pectoral fins. It doesn't seem to fit in any previously familiar category of fish, and it's a bit anxious-making. Well, Ferguson was like that in a way. He didn't easily fit into any of the usual categories of human. He was a queer fish even in academe which tends to give asylum to queer fish and pay them salaries. He was a constant source of interest to his colleagues: except that his responses to situations could be relied upon to be ironic, he was reliably unpredictable. The truth was that hardly anybody knew him; very few people were his familiars, even fewer were his specific friends. His caustic wit could be irritating, but he was not seriously disliked, not for long anyway, and in fact by many he was quietly admired. His life was very private, and thus it was the object of endless speculation. There were anecdotes about him, which were retailed from mouth to mouth, and like the sagas in the dark ages they grew in size and improbability as they went around. The legend developed; and his colleagues could dine out on a story about Ferguson. In fact, no dinner party in this tight little community went by but someone quoted him or referred to him or retailed some absurdly distorted story. If visitors from outside this little world were present, it had to be explained that Ferguson was the local wit, the odd fellow, the enigma, the joker in the deck.
Except for Madeleine Clemens, no one ever called him anything else but Ferguson. What the A in front of that name stood for, no one knew and no one dared ask. In the folklore that had grown up around him during his many years at Mount Pisgah College was a tale that once in a doctor's office a young nurse, assuming a nurse's fatuous prerogative to use the first names of patients twice her age, asked him his first name.
"Ferguson," he had said.
"No, your first name. What does the A stand for?"
Ferguson had stared at her with his glassy eyes. "Ferguson," he repeated.
That steely gaze would have made a cobra wince, and being stared at in that way must have been seriously unnerving. But the girl pressed on. She had a form to fill out. "C'mon, what does your wife call you?"
Ferguson stared at her again for a long minute with a gathered brow as if he were trying to understand the utterances of a complete lunatic.
"Fuckhead," he said at last.
She proceeded to call him Mr. Ferguson.
This was the story that went the rounds. No one knew quite where it had come from. The nurse seemed an unlikely source, and Ferguson never spoke about himself. There were other famous legends: according to one, he had let himself into Madeleine's apartment and had been discovered trying to make a cocktail out of her lime flavored douche. This was not true. But it was true that he knew where she kept the hide-a-key.
Of his origins no one knew anything, but there were the legends. Some said his father had run a speakeasy during prohibition, others said, no, that was his grandfather. Another story held that his grandfather had been an excise officer in Scotland and had died of drinking too much illegal whisky. Ferguson himself said nothing. Only once, when a newcomer to the community had the gall to inquire directly of him, he had said, "My fader?" in the accents of an immigrant from the Middle East. "My fader was a rich merchant in Stambouli," a line from Ezra Pound that the interrogator did not recognize. Ferguson frequently used lines from the classics in his small talk, a practice which contributed to the strangeness of many of his utterances.
There were other legends that went the rounds—legends that, if they once contained a germ of truth, had been so embellished over the years they were almost pure fiction. And in fact in the end not much was known for sure about Ferguson; he was a very private person. And yet, private though he was and wished to be, he was the kind of person people talked to. So he knew things about the college and its people that others did not. He knew more than he wanted to know.
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