Then things began to brighten somewhat. His cousin Francie finished her junior year of high school, and for several days before she left to work as a counselor at a summer camp in the Berkshires, she came to the house to keep him company, sometimes for just an hour, sometimes for three or four, and the time he spent with her was always the most enjoyable part of the day, no doubt the only enjoyable part, for Francie was the cousin he liked best, liked more than anyone else in either one of his two families, and how grown-up she was now, Ferguson thought, with bosoms and curves and a body similar to his mother’s, and just like his mother she had a way of talking to him that made him feel calm and comfortable, as if nothing could ever go wrong when he was with her, and sometimes it was even better to be with Francie than his mother, for no matter what he did or said, she never got angry at him, not even when he lost control of himself and became rambunctious. Clever Francie was the one who came up with the idea to decorate his cast, a job that took three and a half hours, such careful brushstrokes as she covered the white plaster with an array of brilliant blues and reds and yellows, an abstract, swirling pattern that made him think of riding on an exceedingly fast merry-go-round, and as she applied the acrylics to his new and detested body part, she talked about her boyfriend, Gary, big Gary who used to play fullback on the high school football team but was now in college, Williams College in the Berkshires, not far from the camp where the two of them were going to work together that summer, she was looking forward to it so much, she said, and then she announced that she was pinned, a term not familiar to Ferguson at the time, so Francie explained that Gary had given her his fraternity pin, but fraternity was a word that eluded Ferguson’s understanding as well, so Francie explained again, and then she broke into a big smile and said never mind, the important thing was that being pinned was the first step toward getting engaged, and the plan was that she and Gary were going to announce their engagement in the fall, and next summer, after she had turned eighteen and was finished with high school, she and Gary were going to be married. The reason why she was telling him all this, she said, was that she had an important job for him, and she wanted to know if he was willing to do it. Do what? Ferguson asked. To be the ring bearer at the wedding, she said. Once again, Ferguson had no idea what she was talking about, so Francie explained once again, and when he listened to her tell him that he would walk down the aisle with the wedding ring perched on top of a blue velvet pillow and that Gary would take it from him and then put it on the fourth finger of her left hand to conclude the marriage ceremony, Ferguson agreed that it was an important job, perhaps the most important job he had ever been given. With a solemn nod of the head, he promised he would do it. It would probably make him nervous to walk down the aisle with so many people looking at him, of course, and there was always the chance that his hands would tremble and the ring would fall to the ground, but he had to do it because Francie had asked him to, because Francie was the one person in the world he couldn’t ever let down.
When Francie came to the house the following afternoon, Ferguson immediately understood that she had been crying. Reddened nose, foggy, pink-tinged traces around both her left and right irises, a handkerchief balled up in her fist — even a six-year-old could figure out the truth from that evidence. Ferguson wondered if Francie had been quarrelling with Gary, if suddenly and unexpectedly she was no longer pinned, which would mean the marriage was off and he wouldn’t be called upon to carry the ring on a velvet pillow. He asked her why she was upset, but rather than pronounce the name Gary as he imagined she would, Francie started talking about a man and a woman named Rosenberg, who had been put to death yesterday, fried in the electric chair, she said, speaking those words with what sounded like both horror and disgust, and it was wrong, wrong, wrong, she went on, because they were probably innocent, they had always said they were innocent, and why would they let themselves be executed when they could have spared their lives by saying they were guilty? Two sons, Francie said, two little boys, and what parents would willingly turn their children into orphans by refusing to declare their guilt if they were guilty, which meant they must have been innocent and had died for nothing. Ferguson had never heard such outrage in Francie’s voice, had never known anyone to be so distraught over an injustice committed against people who qualified as strangers, for it was clear to him that Francie had never met the Rosenbergs in person, and therefore it was something deadly serious and important that she was talking about, so serious that those people had been fried for it, what a dreadful thought that was, to be fried like a piece of chicken submerged in a pan of hot, bubbling oil. He asked his cousin what the Rosenbergs had supposedly done to deserve such a punishment, and Francie explained that they had been accused of passing secrets to the Russians, vital secrets concerning the construction of atomic bombs, and since the Russians were communists, which made them our mortal enemies, the Rosenbergs had been convicted of treason, a ghastly crime that meant you had betrayed your country and should be put to death, but in this case the crime had been committed by America, the American government had slaughtered two innocent people, and then, quoting her boyfriend and future husband, Francie said: Gary thinks America has gone mad.
This conversation hit Ferguson like a blow to the stomach, and he felt as lost and afraid as he had been when his fingers slipped off the branch and he started falling out of the tree, that gruesome sensation of helplessness, nothing but air around him and below him, no mother or father, no God, no nothing but the emptiness of pure nothing, and his body on its way to the ground with nothing in his head but the fear of what would happen to him when he got there. His parents never talked to him about things like the Rosenbergs’ execution, they protected him from atomic bombs and mortal enemies and false verdicts and orphaned children and fried grown-ups, and to hear Francie tell him about all that in one grand gush of emotion and indignation caught Ferguson by complete surprise, not like a punch to the stomach, exactly, but more like something from one of the cartoons he watched on television: a cast-iron safe falling from a tenth-floor window and landing on his head. Splat. A five-minute conversation with his cousin Francie, and everything had gone splat. There was a big world out there, a world of bombs and wars and electric chairs, and he knew little or nothing about it. He was dumb, so perfectly dumb and hopeless that he found it embarrassing to be himself, an idiot child, present but not accounted for, a body occupying space in the same way a chair or a bed occupied space, nothing more than a witless zero, and if he meant to change that, he would have to get started now. Miss Lundquist had told his kindergarten class that they would learn how to read and write in the first grade, that there was no sense in rushing things and that they would all be mentally ready to begin next year, but Ferguson couldn’t wait until next year, he had to begin now or else condemn himself to another summer of ignorance, for reading and writing were the first step, he concluded, the only step he was in a position to take as a person of no account, and if there was any justice in the world, which he was seriously beginning to question, then someone would come along and offer to help him.