That was the beginning. Five minutes later, she was still talking, and when Ferguson finally told her to shut up and stop the car, shouting that he’d had enough and would walk back to the house to fetch his things, Francie turned to him and said, with something like madness in her eyes, Don’t be ridiculous, Archie, you’ll freeze to death out here, which convinced him that something was wrong with her, that her mind was wobbling, on the verge of cracking up, and because she went on looking at him as if she no longer remembered what she had just been saying, he smiled at her, and when she smiled back at him, he realized that she had stopped looking at the road, and a moment later the car slammed into the tree.
* * *
NO SEAT BELTS, not in 1964, and consequently they were both injured in the crash, even though the car had been traveling at a moderate speed, somewhere between thirty and thirty-five miles an hour. Francie: a concussion, a broken left clavicle caused by the impact when she was flung forward into the steering wheel, and once she was released from the Vermont hospital, transfer to a New Jersey hospital to recover from what the doctors told Gary was a nervous breakdown. Ferguson: unconscious and bleeding from his head, his arms, and his left hand, which had gone through the windshield first, and while no bones were broken (a long-odds fluke that confounded the staff and inspired some of the nurses to call it a medical miracle), two of the fingers on that left hand were severed by the windshield glass, both joints of the thumb and the top two joints of the index, and because the fingers were buried in the snow and not recovered until spring, Ferguson was fated to march through the rest of his life as an eight-fingered man.
He took it hard. He knew he should be glad he wasn’t dead, but his survival was a fact, something that no longer had to be questioned, and the question before him now was not so much a question as a cry of despair: What was going to happen to him? He had been deformed, and when they removed the bandages and showed him what his hand looked like, what it would always look like from now on, he was revolted by what he saw. His hand was no longer his hand. It belonged to someone else, and as he gazed down at the stitched-up, smoothed-over spots that had once been his thumb and index finger, he felt sick and turned his head away. So ugly, so hideous to look at—the hand of a monster. He had joined the brigade of the damned, he told himself, and from now on he would be looked upon as one of those crippled, distorted people who no longer counted as full-fledged members of the human race. And then, to compound the agony of those insidious humiliations, there would be the trial of having to relearn a hundred things he had mastered as a small boy, the myriad manipulations that a two-thumbed person performed unconsciously every day, how to tie his shoes, how to button his shirt, how to cut his food, how to use a typewriter, and until those tasks became automatic for him again, which could take months, perhaps even years, he would be constantly reminded of how far he had fallen. No, Ferguson wasn’t dead, but other words beginning with the letter d clung to him like a flock of starving children in the days that followed the accident, and he found it impossible to free himself from the spell of those emotions: demoralized, depressed, dumbfounded, discouraged, dejected, down in the dumps, desperate, defensive, despondent, discombobulated, distressed, deranged, defeated.
His greatest fear was that Amy would stop loving him. Not that she would want to, and not that she would even understand her own feelings, but how could anyone enjoy being touched by that maimed and disfigured hand, it would turn a person’s stomach, it would kill all desire, and little by little the revulsion would mount until she started to back away from him and eventually let him go, and if he lost Amy not only would his heart be broken but his life would be ruined forever, for what woman in her right mind could possibly be attracted to a man like him, a pitiable, mutilated creature who walked around with a claw jutting from his left arm instead of a hand? Endless sorrow, endless loneliness, endless disappointment—that would be his lot—and even as Amy sat with him in the hospital throughout the weekend and then cut school to stay with him through Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, stroking his face and telling him that everything would be exactly as it had been before, that losing a couple of fingers was a rotten blow but hardly the end of the world, that millions of people lived with far worse and forged on bravely without giving it a second thought, and even as Ferguson listened to her and watched her face as she talked to him, he wondered if he wasn’t looking at an apparition, a substitute Amy who was going through the motions of the real Amy, and if he shut his eyes for a couple of seconds, he wondered if she wouldn’t disappear before he had a chance to open them again.
His parents had left Montclair to be with him as well, and they were wonderfully kind to him, just as Amy was wonderfully kind to him, just as the doctors and nurses were wonderfully kind to him, and yet how could any of them know what he was feeling, how could they understand that contrary to what they all kept telling him, it was indeed the end of the world, at least the little part of the world that had belonged to him, and how could he open up to them about the devastation he felt whenever he thought about baseball, the dumbest game ever invented, according to the long-gone Anne-Marie Dumartin, but how deeply he still loved it, and how much he had been looking forward to the first indoor varsity practices, which were scheduled to begin in mid-February, and now the baseball part of his world had ended as well, for he would never be able to hold a bat again with those two fingers missing from his left hand, not in the proper way, not in the way he needed to hold it to swing with power, and how could he control a glove that had been designed for five fingers with only three fingers, he would be cast down into mediocrity if he tried to play with his handicap, and that would be unacceptable to him, especially now, when he had been preparing himself for the season of his life, an all-conference, all-county, all-state kind of season, causing such a stir that the pro scouts would start coming to watch the wizard at third base with the .400 batting average, which would lead to an eventual signing with a major league club, thus making him the first baseball-playing poet in the annals of American sport, winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the Most Valuable Player Award, and because he had never dared to confess this fantastical daydream to anyone, he couldn’t begin now, not when he found himself on the brink of tears every time he thought about returning to Montclair and telling his coach he could no longer play on the team, holding up his miserable left hand to demonstrate why his career was over, at which point the terse, undemonstrative Sal Martino would nod his head in commiseration, mumbling a few short words that would come out more or less as follows: Tough break, kid. We’re going to miss you.
Amy and his father both left on Thursday morning, but his mother stayed with him until he was discharged from the hospital, sleeping in a nearby motel and traveling around in a small rented car. The extremity of her compassion was almost too much for him, the sympathetic maternal eyes that kept watching him and telling him how deeply his suffering had become her suffering, and yet, because she understood how much he disliked it when she fussed and doted, he was thankful to her for not dwelling on his injuries, for not offering any advice, for not encouraging him to buck up, for not shedding any tears. He knew what a frightful mess he was and how painful it must have been for her to look at him, not only the still healing sutures on his left hand, which were still red and raw and swollen, but also the bandages wrapped around his forearms, temporarily masking the sixty-four stitches that had closed up his gouged flesh, and the weird patches of shorn hair dotting his scalp, where more stitches had been applied to the worst cuts and gashes, but none of those future scars seemed to disturb her, the only thing that mattered was that he had come through the accident with his face intact, which again and again she called a blessing, the one lucky turn in this whole unlucky business, and while Ferguson was in no mood to count his blessings just then, he understood her point, since there was a hierarchy of destruction to be reckoned with, and living with a destroyed hand was far less terrible than living with a destroyed face.
I
t was hard to admit to himself how much he wanted his mother to be there with him. Every time she sat down in the chair next to his bed, things felt a little better than they were when he was alone, often vastly better, and yet he still held back from confiding in her, he couldn’t quite bring himself to tell her how afraid he was when he thought about his stunted, abysmal future, the long years of loveless desolation that stood in front of him, all the childish, self-pitying fears that would have sounded so inane if he had spoken them out loud, and so he continued to say next to nothing about himself, and his mother didn’t press him to say more. In the long run, it probably didn’t make any difference if he talked or not, since it was all but certain that she already knew what he was thinking anyway, she had always known somehow, ever since he was a small boy she had known, and why should it be any different now that he was in high school? Nevertheless, there were other things to talk about besides himself, above all Francie and the mystery of her breakdown, which they continued to discuss all through their final days in Vermont, and now that Francie had left the hospital and was checked into another hospital in New Jersey, what was going to happen to her? His mother wasn’t sure. All she knew was what Gary had told her, and she couldn’t make sense of it, nothing was clear except that the problems had apparently been growing for some time. Distress about her father—perhaps. Trouble in the marriage—perhaps. Regret over having married too young—perhaps. All of the above—or none of them. The puzzling thing was that Francie had always seemed so healthy and stable. A diamond of joyful exuberance, the light of everyone’s eye. And now this.
Poor Francie, his mother said. My beloved girl is ill. Her family is three thousand miles away, and there’s no one to take care of her. It’s up to me, Archie. We’ll be home in a couple of days, and once we’re there, that’s my new job. To make sure Francie gets well.
Ferguson asked himself if anyone but his mother could have made such an outrageous declaration, willfully ignoring the possibility that psychiatrists might have any role in Francie’s recovery, as if love and the persistence of love were the only reliable cure for a shattered heart. It was such a mad and ignorant thing to say that he couldn’t help laughing, and once the laugh came out of his throat, he realized that it was the first time he had laughed since the accident. Good for him, he thought. And good for his mother, too, he thought, whose statement deserved to be laughed at, even though it had been wrong of him to laugh, for the beautiful thing about his mother’s words was that she believed them, believed with every bone in her body that she was strong enough to carry the world on her back.
* * *
THE WORST PART about going home was having to return to school. The hospital had been torture enough, but at least he had felt protected there, walled off from others in the sanctuary of his room, but now he had to walk back into his old world and let everyone see him—and the last thing he wanted was to be seen.
It was February, and in preparation for his return to Montclair High, his mother knitted him a pair of special gloves, one normal glove and one with three and a third fingers, shaped to fit the contours of his newly diminished left hand, and a most comfortable pair of gloves they were, made of the softest imported cashmere in an innocuous pale brown, a bland hue that didn’t assault the eyes and call attention to itself as a bright color would have, and therefore the gloves were almost unnoticeable. For the rest of the month and halfway into the next, Ferguson wore the left glove indoors at school, claiming he had to do it because of doctor’s orders—to protect the hand as it continued to heal. That helped a little bit, as did the stocking cap he wore to hide his patchwork head, which he also had to keep on both outside and inside because of doctor’s orders. Once his hair grew back and the bald spots were gone, he would abandon the cap, but it served him well during the early stages of his reentry, as did the long-sleeved shirts and sweaters he wore to school every day, typical clothing for February but also a way to cover the crosshatched scars on his two forearms, which were still an awful shade of red, and because he had been excused from gym class until his doctor declared him fully mended, he didn’t have to undress and shower in front of his eleventh-grade cronies, which meant that no one saw the scars until they had turned white and were nearly invisible.
Those were some of the ploys Ferguson used to make the trial somewhat less difficult for himself, but it was difficult all the same, difficult to return as a piece of damaged goods (as one of his former baseball teammates put it when Ferguson overheard him talking behind his back), and while his friends and teachers all felt sorry for him and tried not to stare at the gloved left hand, not everyone in that school was his friend, and those who actively disliked him were not the least bit dismayed to see the haughty, standoffish Ferguson get his comeuppance. It was his fault that so many people had turned against him in the past few months, since he had more or less abandoned them when he started seeing Amy, declining all Saturday invitations and making himself scarce on Sundays, and the popular little boy whose double portrait still stood in the window of Roseland Photo had transformed himself into an outsider. About the only thing that had still kept him connected to the school was the baseball team, and now that baseball was gone, he was beginning to feel gone as well. He continued to show up every day, but every day a little less of him was there.
In spite of his estrangement, there were still some friends, still some people he cared about, but apart from dumb Bobby George, his baseball pal and ex–National Geographic sidekick, there was no one he cared about deeply, and why he still should have cared about Bobby was inexplicable to him—until the night he returned from Vermont and Bobby came over to his house to welcome him back, and when the young George saw the gloveless, hatless, sweaterless young Ferguson, he started to say something and then burst out crying, and as Ferguson watched his friend give way in that spontaneous gush of infantile tears, he understood that Bobby loved him more than anyone else in the town of Montclair. All his other friends felt sorry for him, but Bobby was the only one who cried.
For Bobby’s sake, he went to one of the after-school indoor practices to watch the pitcher-catcher drills. It was hard for him to stand in that echoing gym as balls popped back and forth into gloves and bounced across the hardwood floor, but Bobby would be starting behind the plate that season, and he had asked Ferguson to come and see if his throwing had improved over last year, and if it hadn’t, to tell him what he was doing wrong. Only players were allowed to be in the gym during those two-hour practice sessions, but even though Ferguson was no longer a member of the team, he still retained certain privileges, which had been granted to him by Coach Martino, whose response to his injuries had been much less restrained than Ferguson had imagined it would be, not holding back as he usually did but cursing loudly at the goddamned, fucked-up thing that had happened, telling Ferguson that he was one of the best players he had ever coached and that he had been expecting great things from him in his junior and senior years. Then, almost immediately, he started talking about converting him into a pitcher. With an arm like his, he could probably pull it off, Mr. Martino said, and then no one would give a flying fuck about his batting average or how many home runs he hit. If it was too soon to begin now, why not think about it for next year? Meanwhile, for this year, he could stay with the team as a sort of unofficial assistant coach, hitting fungoes at practice, leading the players through their drills and calisthenics, discussing strategy with him on the bench during games. But only if he wanted to, of course, and though Ferguson was tempted to take him up on his offer, he knew he couldn’t, he knew it would kill him to be part of the team and not part of the team, a wounded mascot cheering the others on, and so he thanked Mr. Martino and politely said no, explaining that he just wasn’t ready, and the old World War II first sergeant, who had fought in the Battle of the Bulge and had belonged to the unit that liberated Dachau, patted Ferguson on the shoulder and wished him luck. Then, by way of conclusion, as he reached out to shake Ferguson’s hand for the last time, Co
ach Martino said: The only constant in this world is shit, my boy. We’re all in it up to our ankles every day, but sometimes, when it gets up to our knees or waists, we just have to pull ourselves out of it and move on. You’re moving on, Archie, and I respect you for it, but if you ever happen to change your mind, remember that the door is always open.
Bobby George’s tears and Sal Martino’s always open. Two good things in a world of otherwise all bad things, and yes, Ferguson was moving on now, he had already moved on since he and the coach parted that day, and whether he was headed in the right direction or the wrong direction, the best thing about that second good thing was that no matter where he happened to find himself in the future, he would never forget Mr. Martino’s eloquent words about the pervasive, all-enduring power of shit.
He mostly kept to himself until the end of winter, going straight home after school every day, sometimes hitching rides with seniors who had cars, sometimes making the twenty-minute journey on foot. The house was always empty then, which meant it was quiet, and quiet was what he craved most after spending six and a half hours at school, a large, enveloping quiet that allowed him to recover from the ordeal of dragging his gloved and hatted body in front of the two thousand other bodies that filled the hallways and classrooms for those six and a half hours, and nothing was better than to withdraw into himself again and vanish. His parents generally came home a little past six, which gave him about two and a half hours to loll around in his empty fortress, for the most part upstairs in his room with the door closed, where he could crack open the window and smoke one or two of his mother’s forbidden cigarettes, relishing the irony of how the new report from the surgeon general about the perils of smoking had coincided with his own growing interest in the pleasures of tobacco, and as he smoked his mother’s life-threatening Chesterfields, Ferguson would pace around the room listening to records, alternating between big choral works (Verdi’s Requiem, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis) and solo compositions by Bach (Pablo Casals, Glenn Gould), or else lie on the bed and read books, working his way through the recent bundle of paperbacks sent to him by Aunt Mildred, the unstinting tour guide of his literary education, who had just mapped out his second visit to France in the past nine months, and so Ferguson spent those late-afternoon hours reading Genet (The Thief’s Journal), Gide (The Counterfeiters), Sarraute (Tropisms), Breton (Nadja), and Beckett (Molloy), and when he wasn’t listening to music or reading books, Ferguson felt lost, so deeply at odds with himself that he sometimes felt he was bursting apart. He wanted to begin writing poems again, but he couldn’t concentrate, and every idea that entered his head seemed worthless. The first baseball-playing poet in history could no longer play baseball, and suddenly the poet in him was dying as well. Help me, he wrote one day. Why should I help you? the message to himself continued. Because I need your help, the first voice answered. Sorry, the second voice said. What you need is to stop saying you need help. Start thinking about what I need for a change.