No other boy in his circle of acquaintances had read what he had read, and because Aunt Mildred chose carefully for him, just as she had chosen carefully for her sister during the period of her confinement thirteen years earlier, Ferguson read the books she sent to him with an avidity that resembled physical hunger, for his aunt understood what books would satisfy the cravings of a rapidly developing boy as he moved from six years old to eight years old, from eight years old to ten years old, from ten years old to twelve years old — and beyond that to the end of high school. Fairy tales to start with, the Brothers Grimm and the many-colored books compiled by the Scotsman Lang, then the wondrous, fantastical novels by Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, and E. Nesbit, followed by Bulfinch’s retelling of Greek and Roman myths, a child’s version of The Odyssey, Charlotte’s Web, a book culled from The Thousand and One Nights and reassembled as The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, and then, some months after that, a six-hundred-page selection from the whole of The Thousand and One Nights, and the next year Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, horror and mystery stories by Poe, The Prince and the Pauper, Kidnapped, A Christmas Carol, Tom Sawyer, and A Study in Scarlet, and so strong was Ferguson’s response to the book by Conan Doyle that the present he received from Aunt Mildred for his eleventh birthday was an enormously fat, profusely illustrated edition of The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Those were some of the books, but there were the records as well, which were no less important to Ferguson than the books, and especially now, in the past two or three years, starting when he was nine or ten, they had been coming in at regular three- and four-month intervals. Jazz, classical music, folk music, rhythm and blues, and even some rock and roll. Again, as with the books, Aunt Mildred’s approach was a strictly pedagogical one, and she led Ferguson along by stages, knowing that Louis Armstrong had to come before Charlie Parker, who had to come before Miles Davis, that Tchaikovsky, Ravel, and Gershwin had to precede Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach, that the Weavers had to be listened to before Lead Belly, that Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter was a necessary first step before one graduated to Billie Holiday singing Strange Fruit. Much to his regret, Ferguson had discovered that he possessed not one jot of talent for playing music himself. He had tried the piano at seven and had quit in frustration a year later; he had tried the cornet at nine and had quit; he had tried the drums at ten and had quit. For some reason, he had trouble reading music, couldn’t fully absorb the symbols on the page, the empty and filled-in circles sitting on the lines or nestled between them, the flats and sharps, the key signatures, the treble clefs and bass clefs, the notations refused to go into him and become automatically recognizable as letters and numbers once had, and therefore he was compelled to think about each note before he played it, which slowed his progress through the bars and measures of any given piece and, in effect, made it impossible for him to play anything. It was a sad defeat. His normally quick and efficient mind was handicapped when it came to decoding those recalcitrant marks, and rather than persist in beating his head against the wall, he had abandoned the struggle. A sad defeat because his love of music was so strong and he could hear it so well when others played it, for his ear was sensitive and finely tuned to the subtleties of composition and performance, but he was hopeless as a musician himself, an utter washout, which meant that he was now resigned to being a listener, an ardent, devoted listener, and his Aunt Mildred was clever enough to know how to feed that devotion, which surely counted as one of the essential reasons for being alive.
That summer, on one of her visits back east with Uncle Henry, Aunt Mildred helped illuminate Ferguson on another matter of great concern to him, something unrelated to books or music but equally significant to his mind, if not more so. She had come out to Montclair to spend some days with her one and only and his parents, and when the two of them sat down to lunch together on the first afternoon (his mother and father were off at work, which meant that Ferguson and his aunt were alone in the house), he pointed to the bottle of White Rock seltzer water sitting on the table and asked her why the girl had wings sprouting from her back. He couldn’t understand it, he said. They weren’t angel wings or bird wings, which were the kinds of wings you might expect to see on a mythological creature, but fragile insect wings, the wings of a dragonfly or a butterfly, and he found that deeply perplexing.
Don’t you know who she is, Archie? his aunt said.
No, he replied. Of course I don’t. If I did know, why would I be asking the question?
I thought you read the Bulfinch I gave you a couple of years ago.
I did.
All of it?
I think so. I might have missed a chapter or two. I can’t remember.
Never mind. You can look it up later. (Lifting the bottle off the table, tapping her finger against the drawing of the girl.) It’s not a very good picture, but it’s supposed to be Psyche. Do you remember her now?
Cupid and Psyche. I did read that chapter, but they never said anything about Psyche having wings. Cupid has wings, wings and a quiver of arrows, but Cupid is a god, and Psyche is just a mortal. A beautiful girl, but still a human girl, a person like us. No, wait. Now I remember. After she marries Cupid, she becomes immortal, too. That’s right, isn’t it? But I still don’t understand why she has those wings.
The word psyche means two things in Greek, his aunt said. Two very different but interesting things. Butterfly and soul. But when you stop and think about it carefully, butterfly and soul aren’t so different, after all, are they? A butterfly starts out as a caterpillar, an ugly sort of earthbound, wormy nothing, and then one day the caterpillar builds a cocoon, and after a certain amount of time the cocoon opens and out comes the butterfly, the most beautiful creature in the world. That’s what happens to souls as well, Archie. They struggle in the depths of darkness and ignorance, they suffer through trials and misfortunes, and bit by bit they become purified by those sufferings, strengthened by the hard things that happen to them, and one day, if the soul in question is a worthy soul, it will break out of its cocoon and soar through the air like a magnificent butterfly.
NO TALENT FOR music, then, none for drawing or painting, and gruesomely inept at singing, dancing, and acting, but one thing he had a gift for was playing games, physical games, sports in all their seasonal varieties, baseball in the warm weather, football in the chilly weather, basketball in the cold weather, and by the time he was twelve he belonged to teams in all of those sports and was playing year-round without interruption. Ever since that late September afternoon in 1954, the never to be forgotten afternoon he had spent with Cassie watching Mays and Rhodes defeat the Indians, baseball had been a core obsession, and once he began playing in earnest the next year, he proved to be surprisingly good at it, as good as the best players around him, strong in the field, strong at bat, with an innate feel for the nuances of any given situation during the course of a game, and when a person discovers he can do something well, he tends to want to keep doing it, to do it as often as he possibly can. Countless weekend mornings, countless weekday afternoons, countless early evenings throughout the week playing pickup games with his friends in public parks, not to mention the multiple home-grown offshoots of the game, among them stickball, wiffleball, stoopball, punch ball, wall ball, kickball, and roofball, and then, at nine, Little League, and with it the chance to belong to an organized team and wear a uniform with a number on the back, number 9, he was always number 9 for that team and all the others that followed it, 9 for the nine players and the nine innings, 9 as the pure numerical essence of the game itself, and on his head the dark blue cap with the white G sewn onto the crown, G for Gallagher’s Sporting Goods, the sponsor of the team, which was a team with a full-time, volunteer coach, Mr. Baldassari, who drilled the players in fundamentals during the weekly practice sessions and clapped his hands and shouted insults, orders, and encouragement during the twice-weekly games, one on Saturday morning or afternoon and the other on Tuesday or Thursday evening, and there was Ferguson standing at his position in the field, growing from a puny stick of a thing to a robust boy during the four years he spent on that team, second baseman and number eight hitter at nine, shortstop and number two hitter at ten, shortstop and cleanup hitter at eleven and twelve, and the added pleasure of playing before a crowd, fifty to a hundred people on average, parents and siblings of the players, assorted friends, cousins, grandparents, and stray onlookers, cheers and boos, yelling, clapping, and stomping from the bleachers that started with the first pitch thrown and lasted until the final out, and during those four years his mother seldom missed a game, he would watch for her as he was warming up with his teammates, and suddenly she would be there, waving to him from her spot in the bleachers, and he could always hear her voice cutting through the others when he came up to bat, Let’s go, Archie, Nice and easy, Archie, Sock it out of here, Archie, and then, after the demise of 3 Brothers Home World and the birth of Stanley’s TV & Radio, his father started coming to the games as well, and although he didn’t shout in the way Ferguson’s mother did, at least not forcefully enough to be heard above the crowd, he was the one who kept track of Ferguson’s batting average, which rose steadily as the years advanced, ending in an absurdly high.532 for the last season, the last game of which had been played two weeks before Ferguson and Aunt Mildred had their conversation about Psyche, but he was the best player on the team by then, one of the two or three best in the league, and that was the kind of average one expected from a top twelve-year-old player.