* * *
FERGUSON’S BIRTHDAY FELL on a Wednesday that year. He was eighteen now, which gave him the right to drink alcohol in any bar or restaurant in New York City, to marry without his parents’ consent, to die for his country, to be judged as a man in a court of law, but not to vote in municipal, state, or federal elections. The next afternoon, March fourth, he came home from school to find a letter from Amy sitting in the mailbox. Dear Archie, it said, A big kiss to you on your birthday. Soon, my sweetheart, sooner and sooner and sooner—as long as you’re still interested. I’ve done my best not to think about you, but it hasn’t worked. Such a chilly winter it’s been, living in this room with the windows open. I’m freezing! Love, Amy.
Not knowing what soon meant, much less sooner and sooner and sooner, Ferguson couldn’t quite make sense of what Amy had written, although the tone of the letter seemed encouraging. He was tempted to respond with a gushing letter of his own, but then he decided to wait until the question of college had been settled, which wouldn’t happen until the middle of next month. On the other hand, if Amy sent another letter before then, he would write back at once—but she didn’t, and the standoff continued. Ferguson imagined he was being strong, but later on, when he looked back on his actions from the perspective of his future self, he understood that he was merely being stubborn. Stubbornly proud, which was finally just another term for stupid.
On March seventh, two hundred Alabama state troopers attacked 525 civil rights demonstrators in Selma as they were preparing to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge and begin a march toward Montgomery to protest voting rights discrimination. Forever after, that date would be remembered as Bloody Sunday.
The next morning, U.S. Marines landed in Vietnam. The two battalions, which had been sent to protect the air base in Da Nang, were the first combat forces to be posted in the country. U.S. personnel in Vietnam was now up to 23,000. By late July, the number would be increased to 125,000 and draft quotas would be doubled.
On March eleventh, the Reverend James J. Reeb of Boston, Massachusetts, was beaten to death in Selma. Two other white Unitarian ministers were injured in the attack.
Six days later, a local judge ruled that the march from Selma to Montgomery could proceed. President Johnson federalized the state National Guard, and after he sent in another 2,200 troops to protect the demonstrators, the walk began on March twenty-first. That same evening, Viola Liuzzo, a mother of five from Detroit, who had driven down to Alabama to take part in the action, was shot to death in her car by members of the Ku Klux Klan because a black man was sitting next to her in the front seat.
On Monday (March twenty-second), a distraught, bewildered Ferguson began working for the Montclair Times again. A month had gone by since the end of the basketball season, and now it was time for baseball, dreaded, beautiful baseball, which would be an entirely different proposition from covering basketball, so much so that Ferguson had initially thought he wouldn’t be up to doing it, but not writing for the paper had been hard on him, he had missed reporting on the games in the way a smoker misses cigarettes when the pack runs out, and the extra time he had been given to work on his poems had not produced any poems worth mentioning, nothing but a string of failed poems that had so discouraged him that he was beginning to question whether he had any gift for poetry at all, and now that he was fourteen months removed from the accident and a full season removed from any involvement with baseball, perhaps the moment had come to test himself and see whether he could walk back onto a ball field without tumbling into a funk of useless sorrows and regrets. There would be the excitement of high-speed electric writing, he told himself, there would be the fun of watching Bobby George swat balls over the fence and of talking to the big-league scouts who would surely be coming around to look at Bobby, and as long as he could endure not being part of it anymore, there would be the old sensations of smelling the cut grass and looking up at white balls darting across blue skies and hearing the sounds of balls colliding with bats and leather gloves, and those things he would welcome, he thought, would welcome because he had missed them so much, and therefore, without once sharing his qualms with Imhoff, he kept to the bargain they had struck in December and went into Sal Martino’s office on March twenty-second to interview the coach about the upcoming season, which turned into the first of twenty-one articles he wrote that spring about the Montclair High School varsity baseball team.
It wasn’t as difficult as he had thought it would be, in fact it wasn’t difficult at all, and when the season opened with an away game at Columbia High School in early April, Ferguson drove there thinking less about the game that would be played that afternoon than the words he would use to write about it. He felt infinitely older than he had felt a year ago, so much older than anyone else his age, especially the boys on the team, which would have been his team as well if not for the accident, and just to prove how thoroughly things had changed for him, when he dropped off his Impala at Krolik’s Garage for a tune-up the following week and rode on the team bus to another away game in East Orange, he sat up front with Sal Martino rather than with his classmates in the back, for the boisterous wisecracking and loud laughter of the boys had lost its appeal to him, and suddenly one more childish thing had been put behind him, and it was strange to feel so old, he said to himself, strange because it made him feel both sad and glad at the same time, which was a new emotion for him, something unprecedented in the history of his emotional life, sadness and gladness merging into a single mountain of feeling, and once that image occurred to him, he found himself thinking about the White Rock girl on the seltzer bottle and his conversation with Aunt Mildred about Psyche six years ago when they had discussed the transformation of caterpillars into butterflies, for the puzzling thing about turning from the one into the other was that caterpillars were probably quite content to be caterpillars, creeping over the earth without once thinking about becoming something else, and sad as it must have been for them to stop being caterpillars, surely it was better and altogether astonishing to start over again as butterflies, even if the life of a butterfly was more precarious and sometimes lasted just a single day.
In the first five games of the season, the lovesick Bobby George hit four doubles, three home runs, and had a .632 average with five walks and eight runs batted in. Whatever Margaret O’Mara had done to the poor boy’s heart, she hadn’t affected his ability to play baseball. And just think, a scout for the Minnesota Twins said to Ferguson as he watched Bobby throw out a runner at second base, the kid won’t be eighteen until the summer.
* * *
ON APRIL SIXTEENTH, Ferguson finally sat down and wrote a short letter to Amy. I’m in, he began. Columbia has accepted me as a member of the class of ’69—a deliciously evocative number that seems to suggest all sorts of exciting activities in the future. Unlike you, I haven’t made any effort not to think about you but have kept you in mind steadily and lovingly (and sometimes despondently) for the past four and a half months. So yes, in reply to your rhetorical question, I am still interested and will always be interested and will never not be interested because I love you madly and cannot bear to think of living my life without you. Please tell me when it will be possible to see you again. Your Archie.
She didn’t bother to write this time but called, called him at home just hours after she had received the letter, and the first thing that struck him was how good it was to hear her voice again, her New York voice with the softened r’s that turned his name into something that sounded like Ahchie, and an instant later she was repeating the last sentence of his note, saying When will it be possible to see me?, to which he said, That’s right, when?, and out came the answer he had been hoping she would give him: Anytime you like. Anytime starting now.
And so the banished Ferguson once again found himself in the good graces of his temperamental queen, and because she judged him to have behaved nobly during his exile, with no begging letters or phone calls, no whining exhortations to be reinstated to his fo
rmer position at court, the first words she said to him when he drove into New York to see her the following night were You’re my one and only, Archie, my one in a million one and only, and because she started to cry the moment he put his arms around her, Ferguson suspected that life had been somewhat rocky for her in the past four and a half months, that there were things she felt ashamed of having done, no doubt things concerning sex, and for that reason he decided not to ask her any questions, not then and not ever, for he didn’t want to hear about the other people she had slept with and have to imagine her naked body in bed with another naked body sporting a long, fat erection that was traveling into the space between her parted legs, no names or descriptions, please, not one detail of any kind, and since he didn’t ask her any of the questions she must have been expecting him to ask, she clung to him all the more tightly because of that.
It was the most beautiful spring of his life, the spring of being with Amy again, of having Amy to talk to again, of holding the naked Amy in his arms again, of listening to Amy blast forth against Johnson and the CIA for shipping twenty thousand soldiers down to the Dominican Republic to stop the freely elected writer-historian Juan Bosch from reclaiming the presidency because he was supposedly under the influence of the Communists, which was untrue, and why meddle in that little country’s business when America was already doing so much damage in other parts of the world? How Ferguson admired her for the purity of her indignation, and how satisfying it was to be spending the weekends with her in New York again, which in a few short months would be where he lived as well, and beyond Amy the spring was beautiful because his worries about next year were at last behind him, which meant he could slack off for the first time in all the years he had been in school, just as everyone else in the senior class was slacking off during those two months of dolce far poco, which had somehow reduced ancient conflicts and animosities and seemed to be drawing everyone closer together as the end of their lives together approached, and then, as the weather warmed up, there was the new ritual he established with his father, the two of them waking at six o’clock every weekday morning and leaving the house by six-thirty for an hour or an hour and a half of tennis on the empty public courts in town, his fifty-one-year-old father still able to beat him in every set by scores of 6–2 and 6–3, but the exercise was putting Ferguson back in shape, and after a long stretch of no sports since the day of the crack-up the tennis was fulfilling an old and still powerful need in him, and he was glad to see his father win, glad to see how painless it was for the old man to be dismantling his store, selling off the remaining stock of TVs, radios, and air conditioners for one-third off, one-half off, two-thirds off, the struggle was over now, his father no longer cared about anything, all his former ambitions had vanished into thin air, and with his mother in the process of dismantling her own business as well, each of them scheduled to vacate by May thirtieth and start their new jobs in mid-June, there was something giddy about them that spring, giddy in the way small, exuberant children could be when someone grabbed hold of their ankles and turned them upside down, as he and Amy must have been when they bounced naked on the bed together during those blacked-out moments of the distant past, and how lucky it was that even after his mother had given the Montclair Times notice of her impending departure, Imhoff hadn’t sacked him out of revenge, so Ferguson was continuing to cover the twice-weekly baseball games of the Montclair varsity, and with Bobby George on his way to a first-team all-state season and most likely a contract with a major league club, Ferguson was impressed by how well Bobby was handling his newfound stardom, which had made him the talk of the school, and even though he was still battling with his studies and couldn’t resist laughing at unfunny jokes about farmers’ daughters and traveling salesmen, there was a new aura of greatness around him, which was slowly beginning to seep into Bobby and change how he thought about himself, and now that Margaret O’Mara had started talking to him, one seldom saw Bobby walking around without a smile on his face, the same sweet smile Ferguson remembered from their days together as four- and five-year-old boys.
One of the best things about that beautiful spring was anticipating the summer, making plans with Amy for the trip they were going to take to France, a month-long journey from the middle of July to the middle of August, one month because that was all they could afford after stitching together money saved from past summer jobs, the fees from Ferguson’s Montclair Times articles that had not been spent on gas for his car and hamburgers for his stomach, a sizable graduation present from Ferguson’s grandparents (five hundred dollars), a smaller contribution from Amy’s paternal grandfather, and additional sums chipped in by both sets of parents, which would cover four and a half weeks of bare-bones living once the fares for the charter flight had been dispensed with, so rather than try to cram a grand European tour into that limited amount of time, they chose to stick to one country and immerse themselves in it as fully as they could. France was the inevitable choice because they were both studying French and wanted to become more fluent in the language, but also because France was the center of all things that were not American, with the best poets, the best novelists, the best filmmakers, the best philosophers, the best museums, and the best food, and with no luggage but the knapsacks on their backs they left American soil from Kennedy Airport at eight o’clock in the evening on July fifteenth, one day after the annual celebration of Bastille Day in France. It was their first trip abroad. For Ferguson, it was also the first time he had flown in an airplane, which meant it was the first time he had ever lost contact with the earth.
Paris for the most part, Paris for twenty-two of the thirty-one days they spent in France, with one excursion by train to the north (Normandy and Brittany, with visits to Omaha Beach, Mont Saint-Michel, and Chateaubriand’s family castle in Saint-Malo) and one excursion to the south (Marseille, Arles, Avignon, and Nîmes). A vow to converse in French with each other as often as possible, to shun American tourists, to strike up conversations with local residents in order to practice their French, to read only French books and newspapers, to see only French films, to send home postcards written in French. The Paris hotel they lived in was so obscure that it didn’t even have a name. The sign above the front door simply read HOTEL, and the simple room they shared on the rue Clément in the sixth arrondissement, directly facing the Marché Saint-Germain, the small but large enough chambre dix-huit, which had no telephone or television or radio in it, which was equipped with a cold-water sink but no toilet, cost ten francs a night, the equivalent of two dollars, which came to one dollar apiece, and what difference did it make that the toilet down the hall wasn’t always free when you wanted to use it, or that the shower was a cramped metal box jammed into the wall at the top of the stairs and wasn’t always free when you wanted to use it, the essential thing was that the room was clean and light and that the bed was big enough for two people to sleep in it comfortably, and even more essential was the fact that the owner of the hotel, a stout man with a mustache named Antoine, could not have cared less that Ferguson and Amy were sharing that bed, even though they were clearly not married and were young enough to have been Antoine’s children.
That was the first thing that endeared them to France (the blessed indifference to the private lives of others), but more things soon followed, such as the hard-to-understand fact that everything seemed to smell better in Paris than in New York, not just the bakeries and restaurants and cafés but even the nethermost bowels of the metro, where the disinfectant used to wash down the floors was scented with something akin to perfume, whereas the New York subways were rank and often unbreathable, and the constant motion of the sky, with clouds continually massing overhead and then breaking apart, which created a shimmering, mutating sort of light that was both soft and full of surprises, and the northern latitude that kept the midsummer sky aglow for many more hours than at home, still not dark until ten-thirty or a quarter to eleven at night, and the pleasure of simply wandering through the streets, of being l
ost and yet never fully lost, as in the streets of the Village in New York, but now an entire city was like the Village, with no grid and few right angles in the neighborhoods they went to as one sinuous, cobbled path wound around and flowed into another, and of course there was the food, la cuisine française, rapturously ingested at the one restaurant meal they had every night after a breakfast of buttered bread and coffee (tartine beurré and café crème) and a lunch of homemade ham sandwiches (jambon de Paris) or homemade cheese sandwiches (gruyère, camembert, emmental), nightly dinners at the good but inexpensive restaurants noted in Europe on Five Dollars a Day, and at places such as Le Restaurant des Beaux Arts and Wadja in Montparnasse and La Crémerie Polidor (supposedly one of James Joyce’s eating spots), they dug into foods and dishes they had never encountered in New York or anywhere else, poireaux vinaigrette, rillettes, escargots, céleri rémoulade, coq au vin, pot au feu, quenelles, bavette, cassoulet, fraises au crème chantilly, and the beguiling sugar bomb known as baba au rhum. Within a week of setting foot in Paris, they had both turned into rabid Francophiles, with Amy suddenly announcing her decision to major in French as she worked her way through novels by Flaubert and Stendhal and Ferguson made his first halting attempts to translate French poetry as he sat in chambre dix-huit or the back room at La Palette and read Apollinaire, Éluard, Desnos, and other pre-war French poets for the first time.