Ferguson tried not to feel angry when he was with his father, even though he was appalled by how willing the appliance king had been to let Dan Schneiderman give him the money for his allowance, which legally and morally should have been given to him by his father, but Ferguson suspected his father was angry as well, not so much at him but at his mother, who not only had pressed for the divorce but had remarried so soon afterward, and by abdicating his responsibility toward his son, Ferguson’s father had his miser’s reward of not having to part with his money when he didn’t want to (which was almost always now) along with the additional satisfaction of sticking it to his ex-wife’s new husband. Fun and games in the flea circus of petty animosities and tortures, Ferguson said to himself, as his heart contracted ever more tightly within him, but perhaps it was just as well that his father had reneged on his allowance obligation, since Ferguson would have refused the money if it had been offered to him, and he didn’t want to confront his father with the decision he had made not to accept his money, which would have been seen as an act of hostility, something close to a declaration of war, and Ferguson wasn’t looking to pick a fight with his father, he just wanted to endure their meetings as quietly as possible and have nothing happen that would cause either one of them pain.
NO MONEY FROM his father — and no baseball because Artie Federman’s ghost was still walking beside him and Ferguson wouldn’t back down from his promise. Other sports were permitted, but none of them had ever counted as much as baseball, and after starting at forward for the J.V. basketball team in his first year of high school, Ferguson decided not to go out for the varsity the following year, which brought an abrupt and definitive end to his participation in organized sports. It had once meant everything to him, but that was before he had read Crime and Punishment, before he had discovered sex with Dana Rosenbloom, before he had smoked his first cigarette and downed his first drink, before he had become the future writer who spent his evenings alone in his room filling up his precious notebooks with words, and while he still loved sports and would never think of abandoning them, they had been relegated to the category of idle amusements — touch football, pickup basketball games, ping-pong in the basement of the new house, and occasional Sunday morning tennis with Dan, his mother, and Amy, for the most part doubles matches, either children versus parents or father-daughter versus mother-son. Recreational diversions, as opposed to the do-or-die battles of his boyhood. Play hard, work up a sweat, win the game or lose the game, and then go back home for a shower and a smoke. But it was still beautiful to him, especially the sport he cared about most, forbidden baseball, which he would never play again, and he kept on pulling for his newly invented team from Flushing, even if the fate of the Western world no longer hung in the balance when Choo Choo Coleman stepped into the batter’s box with two outs and two men on in the bottom of the ninth. His stepfather and stepbrother would groan when the inevitable third strike was called, but Ferguson would merely nod or shake his head and then stand up and calmly turn off the TV. The Choo Choo Colemans of this world had been born to strike out, and the Mets wouldn’t have been the Mets if he hadn’t.
Two dinners every month with his father, and one dinner every other month with the Federmans in New Rochelle, a ritual Ferguson held fast to in spite of his misgivings, since it was never clear to him why Artie’s parents kept asking him back and even less clear why he found himself willing to make the long trek out there to see them when in fact he wasn’t willing, when in fact each one of those dinners filled him with dread. Murky. Their motives escaped him, for neither he nor the Federmans understood what they were doing or why they persisted in doing it, and yet the impulse had been there from the start: Mrs. Federman throwing her arms around him after the funeral and telling him he would always be part of the family; Ferguson sitting beside twelve-year-old Celia in the living room for two hours, struggling to find the words to say he was her brother now and would always take care of her. Why had they said those things and thought those things — and what did any of it mean?
He and Artie had been friends for only one month. Long enough to have turned into the A.F. twins, long enough to have felt they were at the beginning of what would be a long and close friendship, but not long enough for either one of them to have become a part of the other’s family. At the time of his friend’s death, Ferguson had never even set eyes on Ralph and Shirley Federman. He hadn’t even known their names, but they had known about him because of the letters their son had written from Camp Paradise. Those letters were crucial. The shy, untalkative Artie had opened up to them about his new and wonderful friend, and therefore his parents were already convinced that Ferguson was wonderful before they ever met him. Then Artie died, and three days later the wonderful friend showed up at the funeral, not the spitting image of their son but a boy much like him, tall and strong, with the same young athlete’s body, the same Jewish background, the same good marks at school, and for such a boy to enter their lives at the precise moment they had lost their son, the very boy their son had referred to as a brother, must have had a powerful effect on them, Ferguson reasoned, an uncanny effect, as if their vanished boy had outmaneuvered the gods and sent them another boy to stand in for him, a changeling son from the world of the living swapped for the one who had died, and by keeping up contact with Ferguson, they could see what would have happened to their own boy as he slowly grew up and turned into a man, the gradual shifts that made a fifteen-year-old different from a fourteen-year-old, a sixteen-year-old different from a fifteen-year-old, a seventeen-year-old different from a sixteen-year-old, and an eighteen-year-old different from a seventeen-year-old. It was a kind of performance, Ferguson realized, and every time he traveled to New Rochelle for another Sunday dinner, he had to take on the job of pretending to be himself by being himself, by enacting himself as fully and truthfully as he could, for they all knew they were playing a game, even if they weren’t aware they knew, and Archie would never be Artie, not just because he didn’t want to be but because the living could never replace the dead.