By the end of that week, help appeared in the form of his grandmother, who drove out to West Orange with his grandfather on Sunday and settled into the bedroom next to his for a visit that lasted well into July. He had acquired a pair of crutches the day before she showed up, which allowed him to move around freely on the second floor and eliminated the humiliations of the milk bottle, but descending to the first floor on his own was still out of the question, the journey down the stairs was far too perilous, and so he had to be carried by someone, yet one more insult to be endured in silence and smoldering resentment, and because his grandmother was too weak and Wanda was too small, the carrying had to be done by his father or mother, which made it necessary to go down early in the morning, since his father left for work at a little past seven A.M. and his mother was still searching for the right place to set up her studio, but no matter, he didn’t care about sleeping late, and it was preferable to spend the mornings and afternoons on the screened-in porch than to languish in the chilly tomb upstairs, and while the weather was often hot and humid, the birds were back in the picture now, and they more than compensated for any discomfort. The porch was where he finally conquered the mysteries of letters, words, and punctuation marks, where he struggled under the tutelage of his grandmother to master such oddities as where and wear, whether and weather, rough and stuff, ocean and motion, and the daunting conundrum of to, too, and two. Until then, he had never felt particularly close to the woman whom fate had chosen to serve as his grandmother, his nebulous Nana from midtown Manhattan, a benign and affectionate person, he supposed, but so quiet and self-contained that it was difficult to establish a connection with her, and whenever he was with his grandparents, his boisterous, madly entertaining grandfather seemed to take up all the room, which left his grandmother in the shadows, almost entirely effaced. With her squat, round body and thick legs, with her dowdy, old-fashioned clothes and stolid shoes with the fat, low heels, she had always struck Ferguson as someone who belonged to another world, an inhabitant of another time and place, and consequently she could never feel at home in this world, could live in the present only as a kind of tourist, as if she were just passing through, longing to go back to where she had come from. Nevertheless, she knew everything there was to know about reading and writing, and when Ferguson asked her if she would be willing to help him, she patted him on the shoulder and said of course she would, it would be an honor. Emma Adler, wife of Benjy, mother of Mildred and Rose, proved to be a patient if plodding teacher, and she went about the business of instructing her grandson with systematic thoroughness, beginning with an examination of Ferguson’s knowledge on the first day, needing to know exactly how much he had learned so far before she devised an appropriate course of action. She was heartened by the fact that he could already recognize the letters of the alphabet, all twenty-six of them, most of the small letters and all of the capitals, and because he was so advanced, she said, it was going to make her job much less complicated than she had thought it would be. The lessons she subsequently gave him were divided into three parts, writing for ninety minutes in the morning, followed by a lunch break, reading for ninety minutes in the afternoon, and then, after another pause (for lemonade, plums, and cookies), forty-five minutes of reading out loud to him as they sat together on the porch sofa and she pointed to the words she thought would be hard for him to understand, her chubby right index finger tapping the page below such tricky spellings as
intrigue, melancholy, and thorough, and as Ferguson sat there beside her, breathing in the grandmother smells of hand lotion and rosewater perfume, he imagined the day when all of this would become automatic for him, when he would be able to read and write as well as any other person who had ever lived. Ferguson was not a dexterous child, as his fall from the oak had proved, not to speak of the other spills and stumbles that had dogged his early life, and the writing part caused more difficulty for him than the reading part. His grandmother would say, Watch how I do this, Archie, and then she would slowly write out a letter six or seven times in a row, capital B’s, for example, or lowercase f’s, after which Ferguson would try to imitate her, sometimes succeeding at the first go, other times failing to get it just right, and whenever he continued to fail after the fifth or sixth attempt, his grandmother would place her hand on top of his hand, wrap her fingers around his fingers, and then guide the pencil over the page as their two hands executed the letter in the proper way. This skin-on-skin approach helped quicken his progress, for it removed the exercise from the realm of abstract forms and made it tactile and concrete, as if the muscles in his hand were being trained to perform the particular task required by the contour of each letter, and by repeating the exercise again and again, every day going over the letters he had already learned and adding four or five new ones, Ferguson eventually took control of the situation and stopped making errors. With the reading part, the lessons advanced smoothly, since there were no pencils involved and he could fly along at a rapid pace, encountering few barriers as he moved from three- and four-word sentences to ten- and fifteen-word sentences in the course of two weeks, and such was his determination to become a full-fledged reader before his grandmother’s visit came to an end, it was almost as if he were willing himself to understand, forcing his mind into a state of such receptiveness that once a new fact was learned, it stayed there and wasn’t forgotten. One by one, his grandmother would print out sentences for him, and one by one he would read them back to her, beginning with My name is Archie and moving on to Look at Ted run to It’s so hot this morning to When will your cast come off? to I think it’s going to rain tomorrow to How interesting that the little birds sing more beautifully than the big birds to I’m an old woman and can’t remember learning how to read, but I doubt I caught on as quickly as you have, and then he graduated to his first book, The Tale of Two Bad Mice, a story about a pair of housebound rodents named Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca who smash up a little girl’s dollhouse because the food in there isn’t real but made of plaster, and how thoroughly Ferguson savored the violence of their destructive fury, the rampage that followed the shock of their disappointed, unsatisfied hunger, and as he read the book out loud to his grandmother, he faltered over just a few words, difficult words whose meanings escaped him, such as perambulator, oilcloth, hearth-rug, and cheesemonger. A good story, he said to his grandmother after he had finished, and very funny, too. Yes, she agreed, a highly amusing story, and then, as she kissed him on the top of his head, she added: I couldn’t have read it better myself.