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 former 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.