Old enough to have our hearts broken.
Toughen up, Archie. You’re talking like a pathetic little child, and I hate that. I just hate that. We’re going to be cousins for a long, long time, and I need you to be my friend, so please don’t make me hate you.
Ferguson tried to toughen up. Hard as it was to listen to Amy tear into him with those scolding remarks, he understood that he had allowed his soft-minded, self-pitying impulses to get the better of him, and unless he put a stop to it, he would turn into Gregor Samsa and awake one morning from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic bug. He was in the ninth grade now, the first year of high school, and although his academic performance at the Riverside Academy had always been respectable, his marks had slipped a little in the seventh and eighth grades, perhaps from boredom, perhaps from an overreliance on his natural abilities to carry him through with less than an all-out effort, but the work was more demanding now, and it wouldn’t be possible to answer test questions about how to conjugate irregular French verbs in the passé simple or put dates on things such as the Defenestration of Prague and the Diet of Worms (the Diet of Worms!) if he didn’t put in the study time to master those abstruse particulars. Ferguson resolved to lift his grades to the highest level he could imagine for himself—nothing less than A’s in English, French, and history, and nothing less than B+’s in biology and math—a stringent but realistic plan of action, since striving for A’s in the last two subjects would have taken so much extra work that basketball would have been pushed out of the picture, and when tryouts began after the Thanksgiving break, he was determined to make the freshman team. He did make it (as a starting forward), and his course work met expectations as well, although not precisely in the way he had predicted, for the A in French wound up as a disappointing B+, and the B+ in biology evolved into a miraculous A−. But no matter. Ferguson made the honor roll for the first semester, and if Amy had been a student at the Riverside Academy, she would have known how well he had done. But she wasn’t, and therefore she didn’t, and because her angry, heartsick cousin was too proud to tell her that he had toughened up, she never knew how deeply she had shamed him into trying to prove her wrong about who he was.
All that said, it went without saying that he still wanted her, that he would have done anything to win Amy back, but even if he eventually managed to make her want him again, it was going to take time, perhaps a long time, and in the interval between not having her anymore and perhaps having her again, he figured the best strategy for turning things around would be to find himself a new girlfriend. Not only would that show he had lost interest in her and had put their breakup behind him (which was essential), it would distract him from thinking about her all the time, and the less he thought about her, the less he would mope, and the less he moped, the more attractive he would appear to her. A new girlfriend would make him a happier person, and emboldened by his newfound happiness, he would surely be nicer to Amy at family gatherings, more charming, more in control of his feelings, and whenever the occasion presented itself, he would talk to her about current events. That was one of her principal gripes against him—his indifference to politics, his lack of concern about what was happening in the big world of national and international affairs—and to remedy that deficit Ferguson resolved to follow the news more closely from now on. Two papers were delivered to the apartment every morning, the Times and the Herald Tribune, although Gil and his mother read the Times and largely ignored the Herald Tribune, even if it was Gil’s employer, for the joke in the family was that the Herald Tribune was too pro-Republican to be taken seriously by anyone who lived on the Upper West Side. Nevertheless, Gil’s reviews and articles appeared roughly every other day in that Park Avenue organ of Wall Street money and American power, and Ferguson’s morning job was to cut out the pieces with Gil’s byline on them and stow the clippings in a box for his mother, who was planning to put together a scrapbook of Gil’s writings one day, and Gil was forever telling him not to bother with that rubbish, but Ferguson, who understood that Gil was both embarrassed by the attention and secretly pleased by it, would shrug and say, Sorry, orders from the Boss, the Boss being yet another name for the already double-named Rose Adler/Rose Schneiderman, and Gil would nod with feigned resignation and reply, Natürlich, mein Hauptmann, you mustn’t get in trouble for not following orders. So the Times and the Herald Tribune were there for him to read in the morning, and when the afternoon rolled around and he came home from school, a copy of the New York Post had generally found its way into the apartment as well, and on top of the dailies there were Newsweek, Life, and Look (in which his mother sometimes published photographs), I. F. Stone’s Weekly, the New Republic, the Nation, and assorted other magazines, and Ferguson diligently plowed through them now instead of turning straight to the film and book reviews in the back, reading the political articles in order to figure out what was going on out there and thus figure out how to hold his own in a conversation with Amy. Such were the sacrifices he was willing to make in the cause of love, for even as he turned himself into a more informed citizen, a more vigilant observer of the battles between Democrats and Republicans, of America’s interactions with friendly and unfriendly foreign governments, he still found politics to be the dullest, deadliest, dreariest subject he could think of. The Cold War, the Taft-Hartley Act, underground nuclear testing, Kennedy and Khrushchev, Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara—none of it meant much to him, and in his opinion all politicians were either stupid or tainted or both, and even handsome John Kennedy, the much-admired new president, was just another stupid or tainted politician to Ferguson, who found it much more nourishing to admire men like Bill Russell and Pablo Casals than to waste his feelings on pompous windbags scrambling for votes. The only three things from out there that truly engaged his attention in the last months of 1961 and the first months of 1962 were the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the crisis in Berlin—because Gil and Uncle Dan were so wrapped up in it—and the civil rights movement at home—because the people were so brave and the injustices they had exposed him to were so obscene that they made America look like one of the most backward countries on earth.
The quest for a substitute Amy was not without its problems, however. It wasn’t that Ferguson was expecting to discover anyone who resembled her, since Amy was not the sort of girl who had been designed for mass production, but he was reluctant to settle for anything less than a top-quality alternative—nothing to compare to Amy, perhaps, but a scintillating person who would bowl him over and quicken the pace of his heart. Unfortunately, the most promising candidates had already given their hearts to others, among them the ever more beautiful Isabel Kraft, the Hedy Lamarr of the freshman class, who was dating a boy from the sophomore class, as was her attractive cousin, Alice Abrams, as was Ferguson’s former flame, the honey-voiced Rachel Minetta. That was one of the central facts of ninth-grade life: most of the girls were more advanced than most of the boys, which meant that the most impressive girls shunned the boys from their year for the more advanced boys from the next year, if not the next year plus one. Hoping for a quick result, success by mid-October at the latest, that is, three weeks after Amy had told him to toughen up, Ferguson was still searching well into November, not from any lack of effort on his part (four movie dates with four different girls on four successive Saturdays) but simply because none of the girls he went out with was the right one. By the time school recessed for the Thanksgiving break, he was beginning to wonder if any girl at the Riverside Academy would ever be the right one.
Basketball helped to distract him from the disappointments of love, at least for five days of the week, with loveless weekends to be endured by seeking further distraction from such things as pickup games with his friends, occasional Saturday night parties, movies with whatever person he could find to go with him (often his mother), and concerts with Gil or Gil and his mother both, but there was no question that playing basketball for the eleven weeks the season lasted helped to keep
him from falling into too many mope-holes, beginning with the one-week tryout period and the grand satisfaction of making the last cut, followed by an exhausting week of after-school practices as the team knit together under the direction of Coach Nimm, often referred to as Coach Numb because of his placid disposition, and then nine weeks of games, eighteen games in all, one on Tuesday afternoon and the other on Friday evening, half the games on their home court and the other half on the courts of other private schools scattered around the city, the newsreel-cartoon freshman game before the curtain rose on the main-feature varsity game, and there was Ferguson, the oddball who had asked to wear number 13, running onto the court with the other members of the starting five and taking his position for the center jump.
All those Saturday mornings in Riverside Park with cousin Jim had helped transform the raw, twelve-year-old beginner into a solid if unspectacular player by the time he scored seven points in his first game for the Riverside Rebels at the age of fourteen years and nine months. Ferguson knew that his talents were limited, that he lacked the exceptional speed required for basketball greatness, and because he was less nimble with his left hand than his right, he would never be more than an iffy ball handler when pressured by quick and aggressive opponents. No flash, no razzle-dazzle, no fake-them-out-of-their-pants one-on-one moves, but there were enough strong points about Ferguson’s game to keep him off the bench and make him an indispensable part of the team, most of all the spring in his legs, which allowed him to jump higher than anyone else, and when you combined that ability with the reckless enthusiasm of his play—an insane form of hustle that earned him the nickname of Commando-in-Chief—the result was an unusual knack for muscling deft, clean rebounds when he crashed the boards against taller players. He rarely missed layups, and his outside shot was good, with the potential to become very good, but the accuracy he showed at practice was seldom matched by his performance in games, since he tended to rush his shots in the heat of competition, which made him an erratic offensive player that first year, someone capable of scoring ten or twelve points when his shot was on or two points or no points when it was off. Thus the seven points he scored in the first game, which turned out to be his average for the season, but with the games only thirty-two minutes long and the point totals somewhere in the thirty-five-to-forty-five range for each team, seven a game wasn’t bad. Not terribly exciting, perhaps, but not bad.
Rah-rah-sis-koom-bah! Rebels! Rebels! Yah-yah-yah!
The numbers meant little to him, however, and as long as the team won he didn’t care how many points he scored, but even more important than winning or losing was the mere fact that he was on the team in the first place. He loved wearing the red-and-yellow Rebels’ uniform with the number 13 on it, he loved the nine other boys he played with, he loved Coach Nimm’s pepless but insightful pep talks in the locker room at halftime, he loved riding on the bus to the away games with his teammates and the ten varsity boys and the six varsity cheerleaders and the four freshman cheerleaders, he loved the chaos of merriment and loud jokes on the bus and especially when junior-class cutup Yiggy Goldberg got suspended for two games for pulling down his pants and sticking his bare ass against the window to moon the people in the passing cars, he loved playing so hard that he was no longer aware of being inside his own body, no longer conscious of who he was, he loved working himself into a sweat at practice and then feeling the hot water from the shower blast the sweat from his skin, he loved that the team had started off slowly and gotten better as the season went along, losing most of the games in the first half and then winning most of them in the second half to wind up with an almost even 8 and 10 record, and he loved it that one of the wins came against Hilliard at home when he scored just three points but led the team in rebounds.
Ho-ho-tic-tac-toe! Rebels! Rebels! Go-go-go!
The best part of it was that people came to watch, that there was always a crowd in the small gym at Riverside for the two games, not thousands or even hundreds but enough to make it feel like a spectacle, with Chuckie Showalter pounding on the bass drum to urge the team on, and nearly everyone in Ferguson’s family showed up at one time or another to root for the Commando-in-Chief, Uncle Dan most of all, who didn’t miss a single home game, and his mother next, who failed to come only when she was out of town for her work, and several times an appearance from Mr. No-Sport Gil, and once cousin Jim, down from Boston on his midwinter break from college, and once, for the game against Hilliard, Miss Amy Schneiderman herself, who saw Ferguson take a hard tumble trying to save a ball from going out of bounds, who saw him thrust his shoulder into a Hilliard player and knock him to the floor as they battled for an errant pass, who saw him block a layup from going into the basket in the fourth quarter to keep Riverside ahead by three points, and after the game was over she said to him: Good show, Archie. A little scary at times, but fun to watch.
Scary? he asked. What does that mean?
I don’t know. Intense, maybe. Super intense. I hadn’t realized basketball was supposed to be a contact sport.
Not always. But under the boards, you have to be tough.
Is that what you are now, Archie—tough?
Don’t you remember?
What are you talking about?
Toughen up. You don’t remember?
Amy smiled and shook her head. Ferguson found her so unbearably beautiful at that moment, he wanted to throw his arms around her and attack her mouth with kisses, but before he could do anything that foolish and disgraceful, Uncle Dan walked up to him and said: Terrific job, Archie. The jump shot might have been a little off, but I think it was your best all-around game so far.
* * *
THEN THE BASKETBALL season was over, and it was back to the no-girlfriend void of no Amy and no one else. The only girl he saw with any regularity was last year’s Miss April in the copy of Playboy Jim had passed on to him before heading off to college, but Wanda Powers of Spokane, Washington, a grinning twenty-two-year-old with gravity-defying cantaloupe breasts and a body that seemed to have been manufactured from a rubber model of the real Wanda Powers, had begun to lose her hold over Ferguson’s imagination.
Antsy and demoralized, ever more frustrated by the stuckness of his position in the world, dragged down by his dulled hopes and the feverish daydreams that had supplanted those hopes, the useless and incessant mental journeys into realms of voluptuous happiness where everything he wished for came true, Ferguson decided to make a last attempt to patch things up with Amy and start their romance again, but when he called her five days after the end of the season, asking her to accompany him to the team party that would be held at Alex Nordstrom’s place on Saturday night, she said she was busy. Well, he asked, what about the day after that? No, she said, she was busy on Sunday as well, and then he learned that she would continue to be busy for as long as it lasted, it being the mutual love she had formed with a person she refused to name, and that was that, Ferguson said to himself, Amy had a boyfriend, Amy was gone, and the green fields of hope had turned to mud.
A number of unpleasant incidents occurred in the wake of that dispiriting phone call. One: Getting drunk for the first time in his life on the evening of the party when he and fellow team member Brian Mischevski broke into the Nordstroms’ liquor cabinet and stole an unopened bottle of Cutty Sark, which they hid in the inside pocket of Ferguson’s winter coat and then carried back to Brian’s apartment when the fête at the Nordstroms’ was over. Fortunately, Brian’s parents were out of town for the weekend (which explained why they picked his apartment as their watering hole), and fortunately Brian remembered to tell Ferguson to call his own parents and ask permission to spend the night before they cracked open the bottle and downed two-thirds of its contents, two-thirds of that two-thirds scalding its way down Ferguson’s throat and landing in his stomach, where, unfortunately, it didn’t remain for long, for Ferguson had drunk just one can of beer and two glasses of wine before that night and had no experience with the intoxicating powers of
eighty-six-proof distilled scotch, and not long before he passed out on the living room sofa, he puked up the entire swizzle on the Mischevskis’ Oriental rug. Two: Just ten days after that binge of weepy, semi-suicidal drunkenness, he tangled with Bill Nathanson, formerly known as Billy, the large toad who had been tormenting him since his first year at the Riverside Academy, at long last letting loose with a barrage of punches to Nathanson’s fat belly and pimple-studded face when the cretin called him a stupid prick in the lunchroom, and even though Ferguson was punished with three days of after-school detention, along with a sharp warning from Gil and his mother to shape up, he had no regrets about having lost his temper, and as far as he was concerned, the satisfaction of pummeling Nathanson was well worth the price he had to pay for it. Three:
On a Tuesday afternoon in late March, less than a month after his fifteenth birthday, he skipped out of school immediately following lunch, walked from West End Avenue to Broadway, and went to the movies. It was going to be a one-time-only exception, he told himself, but the rules had to be broken that day because the film he wanted to see would not be showing the next day, or on any other day in the foreseeable future, and cousin Jim, who had seen Children of Paradise at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, had told Ferguson that he must see it the next time it came to New York or else lose the right to call himself a human being. The picture was scheduled to start at one, and Ferguson covered the ten blocks to West Ninety-fifth Street and the Thalia Theater as quickly as he could, telling himself that if he had been a little bit older, he wouldn’t have had to resort to truancy, since there was another showing of the film at eight o’clock, but Gil and his mother never would have given him permission to go on a school night, especially not to a movie that was over three hours long. There would be the matter of inventing an excuse for them, he supposed, but nothing had come to mind so far, and the best and simplest one—that he had felt sick after lunch and had gone home to lie down—was not going to work in this case because Gil and his mother were almost certainly in the apartment, Gil in his study working on his book about Beethoven and his mother in her darkroom developing pictures, and even if his mother happened to be out, there was a ninety-nine percent chance that Gil would be in. Not having an excuse was a problem, but as with most of the problems Ferguson created for himself, he tended to jump first and worry about the consequences later, for he was a young man who wanted what he wanted precisely when he wanted it, and woe to the person who stood in his way. On the other hand, Ferguson reasoned, as he half-walked and half-trotted up the crowded sidewalk in the frigid March air, he wasn’t missing much of anything by cutting his Tuesday afternoon classes, which consisted of gym and study hall, and since Mr. McNulty and Mrs. Wohlers rarely bothered to take attendance, he might even get away with it. And if he didn’t, and if he still hadn’t managed to come up with a false explanation by the time he saw Gil and his mother again, he would simply tell the truth. He wasn’t committing a crime or an immoral act, after all. He was going to the movies, and few things in this world were better than going to the movies.