They’re not traitors, Mr. Jameson. They love their country.
Then who’s been talking to you?
No one.
When you started your paper last year, I went along with it, didn’t I? I even let you interview me for one of the articles. I found it charming, just the sort of thing a bright young boy should be doing. No controversy, no politics, and then you go away for the summer and come back a Red. What am I supposed to do with you?
If it’s the Crusader that’s causing the problem, Mr. Jameson, you don’t have to worry about it anymore. There were only fifty copies of the back-to-school issue, and half of them blew away when the fight started. I’ve been on the fence about whether I should keep going with it, but after the fight this morning, my mind is made up. The Cobble Road Crusader is dead.
Is that a promise, Ferguson?
So help me God.
Stick to that promise, and maybe I’ll try to forget that you deserve to be suspended.
No, don’t forget. I want to be suspended. Every boy in the sixth grade is against me now, and school is about the last place I want to be anymore. Suspend me for a long time, Mr. Jameson.
Don’t make jokes, Ferguson.
I’m not joking. I’m the odd man out, and the longer I can stay away from here, the better off I’ll be.
HIS FATHER WAS in a different line of work now. No more 3 Brothers Home World, but a vast weatherproof bubble that sat on the West Orange — South Orange border and was called the South Mountain Tennis Center, six indoor courts that allowed the tennis enthusiasts of the area to indulge their passion for the sport twelve months a year, to play during rainstorms and blizzards, to play at night, to play before the sun rose on winter mornings, half a dozen green, hard-surface courts, a pair of locker rooms equipped with sinks, toilets, and showers, and a pro shop that sold rackets, balls, sneakers, and tennis whites for men and women. The 1953 fire had been ruled an accident, the insurance company had paid up in full, and rather than rebuild or open another store in a new location, Ferguson’s father had generously given his employee-brothers a share of the money (sixty thousand dollars each) and had used the remaining one hundred and eighty thousand to put his tennis project into motion. Lew and Millie took off for southern Florida, where Lew became a promoter of dog races and jai alai matches, and Arnold opened a store in Morristown that specialized in children’s birthday parties, stocking his shelves with bags of balloons, crepe-paper streamers, candles, noisemakers, funny hats, and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey posters, but New Jersey wasn’t ready for such a novel concept, and when the store went out of business two and a half years later, Arnold turned to Stanley for help and was given a job in the pro shop at the Tennis Center. As for Ferguson’s father, every day of the two and a half years it had taken Arnold to run his store into the ground had been spent in raising capital to augment the money he had invested on his own, searching for and eventually buying land, consulting with architects and contractors, and then, finally, erecting the South Mountain Tennis Center, which opened its doors in March 1956, one week after his son’s ninth birthday.
Ferguson liked the weatherproof bubble and the eerie, echoing sounds of tennis balls flying around in that cavernous space, the pop-pop-pop medley of rackets colliding with balls when several courts were in use at the same time, the intermittent squeaks of rubber soles jamming against the hard surfaces, the grunts and gasps, the long stretches when not a single word was spoken by anyone, the hushed solemnity of white-clad people batting white balls over white nets, a small, self-enclosed world that looked like no other place in the big world outside the dome. He felt that his father had done the right thing in changing jobs, that television sets and refrigerators and box-spring mattresses can speak to you for just so long and then a moment comes when you should jump ship and try something else, and because his father was so fond of tennis, why not earn his living from the game he loved? All the way back in 1953, in the spooky days after 3 Brothers Home World burned to the ground, when his father was beginning to formulate his plan for the South Mountain center, his mother had warned him of the risks involved in such a venture, the enormous gamble his father would be taking, and indeed there had been many ups and downs along the way, and even after the center had been built, it had taken some time before the membership ranks grew large enough for the incoming fees to surpass the monthly costs of running such a large operation, which meant that for most of the three-plus years between late 1953 and mid-1957 the Ferguson family had depended on the earnings of Roseland Photo to keep its head above water. Things had improved since then, the center and the studio were both running well in the black, generating enough income to provide for such extravagances as a new Buick for his father, a fresh paint job for the house, a mink stole for his mother, and two consecutive summers at sleepaway camp for Ferguson, but even though their circumstances were more comfortable now, Ferguson understood how hard his parents worked to maintain that comfort, how consuming their jobs were and how little time they had for anything else, especially his father, who kept the tennis center open seven days a week, from six in the morning until ten at night, and while he had a staff of employees to help him, Chuck O’Shea and Bill Abramavitz, for example, who could more or less run things on their own, and John Robinson, an ex — Pullman porter who watched over the courts and locker rooms, and deadbeat Uncle Arnold, who ground out his hours in the pro shop smoking Camels and flipping through newspapers and racing forms, and the three young assistants, Roger Nyles, Ned Fortunato, and Richie Siegel, who rotated in six- and seven-hour shifts, and half a dozen high school part-timers, Ferguson’s father rarely took any days off during the cold-weather months, and not many during the warm-weather months either.
Because his parents were so preoccupied, Ferguson tended to keep his troubles to himself. In the case of a dire emergency, he knew he could count on his mother to stand with him, but the fact was that there hadn’t been any emergencies in the past couple of years, at least none bad enough to send him rushing to her for help, and now that he was eleven and a half, most of the situations that had once seemed dire to him had been reduced to a set of smaller problems he could solve on his own. Getting beaten up on the playground before the first day of school was no doubt a big problem. Being accused of spreading communist propaganda by the principal was unquestionably a big problem as well. But was either one of those problems grave enough to be considered dire? Forget that he had been close to tears after the smackdown in Mr. Jameson’s office, forget that he had gone on fighting back those tears during the entire walk home from school. It had been a wretched day, probably the worst day of his life since the day he fell out of the tree and fractured his leg, and there was every reason in the world for him to want to break down and cry. Punched by his friend, insulted by his other friends, with nothing but more punches and more insults to look forward to, and then the final indignity of being called a traitor by his dumb coward of a principal, who didn’t even have the nerve to suspend him. Yes, Ferguson was feeling blue, Ferguson was struggling not to cry, Ferguson was in a tough spot, but what good would it do to tell his parents about it? His mother would be all sympathy, of course, she would want to hug him and take him in her arms, she would gladly turn him into a little boy again and hold him on her lap as he bawled forth his tearful lamentations, and then she would become angry on his behalf, she would threaten to call Mr. Jameson and give him a piece of her mind, a meeting would be arranged, the adults would argue about him, everyone would be shouting about the pinko subversive and his pinko parents, and what good would that do, how could anything his mother said to him or did for him stop the next punch from coming? His father would be more practical about it. He would take out the boxing gloves and give Ferguson another lesson in the art of fisticuffs, the sweet science, as his father liked to call it, surely the worst misnomer in human history, and for twenty minutes he would demonstrate how to keep your guard up and defend yourself against a taller opponent, but what use were boxing gloves on a playground where people fought with bare knuckles and didn’t follow the rules, where it wasn’t always one against one but often two against one or three against one and even four against one? Dire. Yes, perhaps it was dire, but Father didn’t know best, Mother didn’t know best, and therefore he would have to keep it to himself. No cries for help. Not a word to either one of them. Just stick it out, stay clear of the playground, and hope he wasn’t dead before Christmas.