The fortunes of Roseland Photo were also sinking, not as quickly as those of Stanley’s TV & Radio, perhaps, but Ferguson’s mother knew the days of studio photography were nearly done, and for some time she had been reducing the number of hours she kept the studio open, from five ten-hour days in 1953 to five eight-hour days in 1956 to four eight-hour days in 1959 to four six-hour days in 1961 to three six-hour days in 1962 to three four-hour days in 1963, devoting more and more of her energies to photo work for Imhoff at the Montclair Times, where she had been put on salary as the paper’s chief photographer, but then her book of Garden State notables was published in February 1965, and within two months the book had landed in the waiting rooms of most doctors’ offices, dentists’ offices, lawyers’ offices, and municipal offices around the state, and Rose Ferguson was no longer an invisible no one but a recognizable someone, and on the strength of her success with the book, she decided to go to the editor of the Newark Star-Ledger (whose picture was in the book) and ask for a job as a staff photographer, for even though Ferguson’s mother was forty-three by then (too old, perhaps?), to most people she looked six or eight years younger than that, and as the editor scanned the contents of her voluminous portfolio and remembered the flattering portrait she had taken of him, which was hanging on a wall in his den at home, he suddenly reached out and shook her hand, for the fact was that they did have an opening, and Rose Ferguson was just as qualified to fill that slot as anyone else. The salary wasn’t much, more or less the same amount she had managed to cobble together with studio portraits and her work with Imhoff in an average year, which would neither hurt nor help the family’s overall financial situation, but then Ferguson’s father came up with the bright idea of shutting down Stanley’s TV & Radio, which had been running in the red for the past three years, and a negative was turned into a positive, which became slightly more positive when Sam Brownstein talked him into accepting a job at his sporting goods store in Newark (or, as Ferguson’s father put it, in one of his rare moments of levity, trading in air conditioners for catcher’s gloves), and thus, in the spring of 1965, both Roseland Photo and Stanley’s TV & Radio closed their doors for good, and with Ferguson about to go off to college in the fall, his parents said it was time to start thinking about selling the house and renting a smaller place closer to their new jobs, which would free up more than enough money to cover Ferguson’s college expenses, since for some reason Ferguson’s father was opposed to the idea of asking for a scholarship (stupid pride or proud stupidity?) or reducing the burden by taking part in a work-study program, because, as his father explained, he didn’t want his boy to work while he studied but to work at his studies, and when Ferguson protested that his father was being absurd, his mother walked over to his father, kissed him on the cheek, and said: No, Archie, you’re the one who’s absurd.
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.