Don’t you know who she is, Archie? his aunt said.
No, he replied. Of course I don’t. If I did know, why would I be asking the question?
I thought you read the Bulfinch I gave you a couple of years ago.
I did.
All of it?
I think so. I might have missed a chapter or two. I can’t remember.
Never mind. You can look it up later. (Lifting the bottle off the table, tapping her finger against the drawing of the girl.) It’s not a very good picture, but it’s supposed to be Psyche. Do you remember her now?
Cupid and Psyche. I did read that chapter, but they never said anything about Psyche having wings. Cupid has wings, wings and a quiver of arrows, but Cupid is a god, and Psyche is just a mortal. A beautiful girl, but still a human girl, a person like us. No, wait. Now I remember. After she marries Cupid, she becomes immortal, too. That’s right, isn’t it? But I still don’t understand why she has those wings.
The word psyche means two things in Greek, his aunt said. Two very different but interesting things. Butterfly and soul. But when you stop and think about it carefully, butterfly and soul aren’t so different, after all, are they? A butterfly starts out as a caterpillar, an ugly sort of earthbound, wormy nothing, and then one day the caterpillar builds a cocoon, and after a certain amount of time the cocoon opens and out comes the butterfly, the most beautiful creature in the world. That’s what happens to souls as well, Archie. They struggle in the depths of darkness and ignorance, they suffer through trials and misfortunes, and bit by bit they become purified by those sufferings, strengthened by the hard things that happen to them, and one day, if the soul in question is a worthy soul, it will break out of its cocoon and soar through the air like a magnificent butterfly.
* * *
NO TALENT FOR music, then, none for drawing or painting, and gruesomely inept at singing, dancing, and acting, but one thing he had a gift for was playing games, physical games, sports in all their seasonal varieties, baseball in the warm weather, football in the chilly weather, basketball in the cold weather, and by the time he was twelve he belonged to teams in all of those sports and was playing year-round without interruption. Ever since that late September afternoon in 1954, the never to be forgotten afternoon he had spent with Cassie watching Mays and Rhodes defeat the Indians, baseball had been a core obsession, and once he began playing in earnest the next year, he proved to be surprisingly good at it, as good as the best players around him, strong in the field, strong at bat, with an innate feel for the nuances of any given situation during the course of a game, and when a person discovers he can do something well, he tends to want to keep doing it, to do it as often as he possibly can. Countless weekend mornings, countless weekday afternoons, countless early evenings throughout the week playing pickup games with his friends in public parks, not to mention the multiple home-grown offshoots of the game, among them stickball, wiffleball, stoopball, punch ball, wall ball, kickball, and roofball, and then, at nine, Little League, and with it the chance to belong to an organized team and wear a uniform with a number on the back, number 9, he was always number 9 for that team and all the others that followed it, 9 for the nine players and the nine innings, 9 as the pure numerical essence of the game itself, and on his head the dark blue cap with the white G sewn onto the crown, G for Gallagher’s Sporting Goods, the sponsor of the team, which was a team with a full-time, volunteer coach, Mr. Baldassari, who drilled the players in fundamentals during the weekly practice sessions and clapped his hands and shouted insults, orders, and encouragement during the twice-weekly games, one on Saturday morning or afternoon and the other on Tuesday or Thursday evening, and there was Ferguson standing at his position in the field, growing from a puny stick of a thing to a robust boy during the four years he spent on that team, second baseman and number eight hitter at nine, shortstop and number two hitter at ten, shortstop and cleanup hitter at eleven and twelve, and the added pleasure of playing before a crowd, fifty to a hundred people on average, parents and siblings of the players, assorted friends, cousins, grandparents, and stray onlookers, cheers and boos, yelling, clapping, and stomping from the bleachers that started with the first pitch thrown and lasted until the final out, and during those four years his mother seldom missed a game, he would watch for her as he was warming up with his teammates, and suddenly she would be there, waving to him from her spot in the bleachers, and he could always hear her voice cutting through the others when he came up to bat, Let’s go, Archie, Nice and easy, Archie, Sock it out of here, Archie, and then, after the demise of 3 Brothers Home World and the birth of Stanley’s TV & Radio, his father started coming to the games as well, and although he didn’t shout in the way Ferguson’s mother did, at least not forcefully enough to be heard above the crowd, he was the one who kept track of Ferguson’s batting average, which rose steadily as the years advanced, ending in an absurdly high .532 for the last season, the last game of which had been played two weeks before Ferguson and Aunt Mildred had their conversation about Psyche, but he was the best player on the team by then, one of the two or three best in the league, and that was the kind of average one expected from a top twelve-year-old player.
Young children didn’t play basketball in the fifties because they were seen as too small, too weak to launch shots at ten-foot-high rims, so Ferguson’s education in the science of hoops didn’t start until the year he turned twelve, but he had been playing football steadily from the age of six, tackle football with helmets and shoulder pads, halfback mostly, since he was a determined if not especially fast runner, but once his hands grew large enough to grip the ball firmly, his position changed, since Ferguson and his friends discovered that he had a crazy talent for throwing passes, that the spirals he flung with his right hand had more speed, more accuracy, and went much farther than anyone else’s, fifty, fifty-five yards down the field by the time he was fourteen, and although Ferguson didn’t love the game with the same thoroughness and ardor that he loved baseball, he exulted in playing quarterback, for few sensations felt better than completing a long pass to a receiver running full-tilt toward the end zone thirty or forty yards from the line of scrimmage, the uncanny sense of an invisible connection through empty space was similar to the experience of sinking a twenty-foot jump shot, but even more satisfying somehow, the connection being with another person as opposed to an inanimate object made of twine and steel, and so he endured the less appealing aspects of the sport (the rough tackles, the murderous blocks, the bruising collisions) in order to repeat the never less than thrilling sensation of throwing the ball to his teammates. Then, in November 1961, as a fourteen-and-a-half-year-old ninth grader, he was sacked by a two-hundred-and-fifteen-pound defensive lineman named Dennis Murphy and wound up in the hospital with a broken left arm. He had been planning to try out for the high school team next fall, but the problem with football was that you needed your parents’ permission in order to play it, and when he came home from his first day of high school and presented the form to his mother, she refused to sign. He pleaded with her, he denounced her, he cursed her for behaving like a hysterical, overprotective mother, but Rose wouldn’t budge, and that was the end of Ferguson’s career as a football player.
I know you think I’m an idiot, his mother said, but one day you’ll thank me for this, Archie. You’re a strong boy, but you’ll never be strong enough or big enough to turn into a lummox, and that’s what you have to be to play football—a thick-bodied lummox, a lunkhead who enjoys smashing other people, a human animal. Your father and I were so upset when you broke your arm last year, but now I see it as a blessing in disguise, a warning, and I’m not about to let my son crack up his body in high school so he can hobble around on a pair of damaged knees for the rest of his life. Stick to baseball, Archie. It’s a beautiful sport, and you’re so good at it, so exciting to watch, and why risk losing baseball by injuring yourself in a meaningless football game? If you want to go on throwing those passes of yours, play touch football.
I mean, look at the Kennedys. That’s what they do, isn’t it? The whole family up there in Cape Cod romping around on the lawn, flinging footballs left and right, laughing their heads off. It sure looks like a lot of fun to me.
* * *
THE KENNEDYS. EVEN now, as an independent, free-thinking, occasionally rebellious fifteen-year-old boy, he marveled at how well his mother continued to understand him, how deftly she could pierce through to his heart when the situation demanded it, his ever blundering and conflicted heart, for even though he was unwilling to admit it to her or anyone else, he knew she was right about football, that he was temperamentally unsuited to the protocols of blood combat and would be better served by concentrating on his cherished baseball, but then she had turned the crank another notch and brought up the Kennedys, which she knew was a subject of real importance to him, far more important than the ephemeral issue of football or no football, and by deflecting the conversation from scholastic sports to the American president, the conversation had become a different conversation, and suddenly there was nothing more to be said.
Ferguson had been following Kennedy for more than two and a half years by then, beginning with the announcement of his candidacy for the Democratic nomination on January 3, 1960, precisely two months before Ferguson’s thirteenth birthday and three days after the start of the new decade, which for some reason Ferguson had been looking forward to as a sign of ecstatic renewal, the whole of his conscious life having been spent in the fifties with an old man as president, the heart attack–prone, golf-playing ex-general, and Kennedy struck him as something new and altogether remarkable, a vigorous young man out to change the world, the unjust world of racial oppression, the idiotic world of the Cold War, the perilous world of the nuclear arms race, the complacent world of mindless American materialism, and with no other candidate addressing those problems to his satisfaction, Ferguson decided Kennedy was the man of the future. He was still too young at that point to understand that politics is always politics, but at the same time he was old enough to understand that something had to give, for those early days of 1960 were filled with news about the lunch-counter sit-in staged by four black students in North Carolina as a protest against segregation, the disarmament conference in Geneva, the downing of the U-2 spy plane in Soviet territory and the arrest of pilot Gary Powers, which led Khrushchev to walk out of a summit meeting in Paris and ended the Geneva disarmament talks with no progress made on halting the spread of nuclear weapons, followed by growing hostility between Castro and the United States, which cut its imports of Cuban sugar by ninety-five percent, and then, seven days after that, on the evening of July thirteenth, Kennedy won the nomination on the first ballot at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles. That was the first of three consecutive summers Ferguson spent at home in New Jersey playing American Legion baseball with the Montclair Mudhens, four games a week as leadoff hitter and second baseman that first year, since he was the youngest player on the team now and was starting from the bottom again, the lone thirteen-year-old on a team of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds, and all through those hot months of July and August, as Ferguson read newspapers and books such as Animal Farm, 1984, and Candide, listened closely to Beethoven’s Third, Fifth, and Seventh Symphonies for the first time, loyally kept up with each new issue of Mad magazine, and played and replayed the Porgy and Bess album by Miles Davis, he continued to stop in at his mother’s studio and his father’s store for impromptu visits, and after those brief hellos he would walk to the local Democratic Party headquarters a block and a half down the street, where he would help the adult volunteers lick stamps and envelopes in exchange for an endless supply of campaign buttons, bumper stickers, and posters, which he affixed with Scotch tape to every vacant spot on the four walls of his bedroom, so that by the end of the summer his room had been transformed into a shrine to Kennedy.
Years later, when he was old enough to know better, he would look back on that period of youthful hero worship and cringe, but that was how things stood for him in 1960, and how could he possibly have known any better when he had been living on this earth for only thirteen years? So Ferguson rooted for Kennedy to win, in the same way he had once pulled for the Giants to win the World Series, for a political campaign was no different from a sporting event, he realized, words instead of blows, perhaps, but no less rough than the bloodiest boxing match, and when it came to the office of president, the struggle was fought on a scale so grand and so spectacular that there was no better show anywhere in America. Glamorous Kennedy versus dour Nixon, King Arthur versus Gloomy Gus, charm versus resentment, hope versus bitterness, day versus night. Four times the two men squared off on television, four times Ferguson and his parents watched the debates in the little living room, and four times they were convinced that Kennedy had gotten the better of Nixon, even though people said Nixon had trumped him on the radio broadcasts, but television was all that mattered now, television was everywhere and would soon be everything, just as Ferguson’s father had predicted during the war, and the first television president had clearly won the battle on the home screen.
The victory of November eighth, the narrow victory by a hundred thousand popular votes, one of the smallest margins in history, and the more substantial victory in the electoral college by eighty-four votes, and when Ferguson went to school the next morning and celebrated with his pro-Kennedy friends, some of those figures were still not known, and talk was already circulating about why nothing had been heard from Illinois, there were rumors that Mayor Daley of Chicago had stolen voting machines from Republican districts and dumped them in Lake Michigan, and when that accusation reached Ferguson’s ears, he had trouble accepting it, the idea was too reprehensible, too nauseating, for a trick like that would have turned the election into a bad joke, a travesty of devious manipulations and lies, but then, just as Ferguson was about to give full vent to his outrage, he abruptly reversed the direction of his thoughts, realizing that he had to stop with the Boy Scout stuff and admit that anything was possible. Corrupt men were everywhere, and the more powerful the man, the greater the potential for corruption, but even if the story was true, there was nothing to suggest that Kennedy had anything to do with it. Daley and his band of crooks from Cook County—perhaps. But not Kennedy, never Kennedy.
Still, in spite of his unbroken confidence in the man of the future, Ferguson spent the rest of the day walking around with an image in his head of those submerged voting machines lying at the bottom of Lake Michigan, and even after the final numbers proved that Kennedy would have won the election with or without Illinois, Ferguson continued to think about the machines, continued to think about them for years.
On the morning of January 20, 1961, he told his parents he wasn’t feeling well and asked if he could stay home from school. Since Ferguson was a conscientious boy and not known for inventing imaginary ailments, his wish was granted. That was how he came to watch Kennedy’s inauguration speech, sitting in front of the television set while his mother and father worked at their jobs downtown, alone in the little living room just off the kitchen, watching the ceremony take place in the cold and blustery Washington weather, so frigid and windswept that when the ancient, rheumy-eyed Robert Frost stood up to read the poem he had been asked to write for the occasion, the same Robert Frost who was responsible for the one line of poetry Ferguson knew by heart, Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, the wind gave a fierce, sudden kick just after he arrived at the lectern, wrenching the one-page manuscript from his hands and gusting it high into the air, which left the frail, white-haired bard with nothing to read, but he pulled himself together with admirable poise and alacrity, Ferguson felt, and with his new poem flying out over the crowd, he recited an old poem from memory, turning what could have been a disaster into an odd sort of triumph, impressive but somehow comical as well, or, as Ferguson put it to his parents that evening, both funny and not funny at the same time.
Then came the newly sworn-in president, and the moment he began to d
eliver his speech, the notes emanating from that tightly strung rhetorical instrument felt so natural to Ferguson, so comfortably joined to his inner expectations, that he found himself listening to it in the same way he listened to a piece of music. Man holds in his mortal hands. Let the word go forth. Pay any price, bear any burden. The power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. Let every nation know. The torch has been passed. Meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe. A new generation of Americans. That uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind’s final war. Now the trumpet summons us again. A call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle. But let us begin. Born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace. Let us explore the stars. Ask. Ask not. A struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself. A new generation. Ask. Ask not. But let us begin.
For the next twenty months, Ferguson watched closely as the man of the future stumbled forward, launching his administration with the birth of the Peace Corps and then nearly destroying it with the Bay of Pigs debacle on April seventeenth. Three weeks after that, a human-sized football named Alan Shepard was punted into space by NASA and Kennedy declared that an American would walk on the moon before the end of the sixties, which Ferguson found difficult to believe but hoped would happen, for he wanted his man to be proven right, and then Jack and Jackie were off to Paris to meet de Gaulle, followed by two days of talks with Khrushchev in Vienna, and one blink of the eyes later, as Ferguson read his first book about contemporary American politics, The Making of the President, 1960, the Berlin Wall had gone up and the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem had begun, that dolorous spectacle of the half-bald, twitching murderer sitting alone in the glass box, which Ferguson watched on television every day after school, engulfed by the horror of it and yet keeping his eyes fixed on the screen, unable to stop looking, and by the time the trial was over, he had worked his way through all 1,245 pages of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the immense tome by blacklisted former journalist William Shirer, which won the National Book Award in 1961 and was the longest book Ferguson had ever read. The next year began with another extraterrestrial exploit: John Glenn catapulted beyond the edge of the troposphere and circling the earth three times in February, which Scott Carpenter repeated in the spring, and then, just two days after James Meredith became the first black student admitted to the University of Mississippi (another spectacle Ferguson watched on television, praying the poor man wouldn’t be stoned to death), Wally Schirra outdid Glenn and Carpenter by looping around the globe six times in early October. Ferguson was in the tenth grade by then, his first year at Montclair High School, and because his mother had refused to sign the form in September, the football season had started without him. He was largely over that disappointment by the time of Schirra’s journey, however, having found a new interest in the person of Anne-Marie Dumartin, a fellow sophomore who had come to America from Belgium two years earlier and was in his geometry and history classes, and so absorbed was he by this object of his rapidly growing affections that there was little time to think about the man of the future just then, and so, on the night of October twenty-second, when Kennedy addressed the American people and told them about Russian missile bases in Cuba and the naval blockade he was about to put in force, Ferguson was not at home with his parents watching the broadcast. Instead, he was sitting on a bench in a public park with Anne-Marie Dumartin, wrapping his arms around her body and kissing her for the first time. For once, the normally attentive Ferguson was not paying attention, and the greatest international crisis since the end of the Second World War, the threat of nuclear conflict and the possible end of the human race, did not register with him until the following morning, after which he began paying attention again, but within a week his man Kennedy had outmaneuvered the Russians, and the crisis was over. It had looked as if the world was about to end—and then it didn’t.