No matter how you looked at it, Bill’s new lineup was a demotion, a small drop in the ranks, and it stung Ferguson to have lost his position as supreme commander of the Camp Paradise baseball army, but just as feelings were always feelings, subjectively true one hundred percent of the time, facts were also facts, and in this case the objective, unarguable fact was that Bill had made the right decision. Ferguson was the number two man now. The old boyhood dream of one day making it to the major leagues slowly dissolved into a gunky residue at the bottom of his stomach. It left a bitter taste for a while, but then he got over it. Federman was simply too good to want to compete with him. In the face of such a talent, the only proper response was to be thankful he was on your side.
What made that talent so unusual, Ferguson felt, was that Federman was all but oblivious to it. No matter how earnestly he played, no matter how many games he won with last-inning hits or diving stops in the field, he never seemed to understand how much better he was than everyone else. Excelling at baseball was merely something he could do, and he accepted it in the same way he accepted the color of the sky or the roundness of the earth. A passion to do well, yes, but at the same time indifference, even a touch of boredom, and whenever someone on the team remarked that he should think about turning pro after he finished high school, Federman would shake his head and laugh. Baseball was a fun thing to do, he’d say, but it was essentially meaningless, no more than kid’s stuff, and when he graduated from high school his plan was to go on to college and study to become a scientist — either a physicist or a mathematician, he wasn’t sure which one yet.
There was something both lunkheaded and disarming about that response, Ferguson thought, which struck him as a typical example of what defined his almost-namesake and set him apart from the others, since it was a foregone conclusion that all the boys would eventually go on to college, that was the world they lived in, the third-generation Jewish-American world in which all but the most feebleminded were now expected to earn an undergraduate degree, if not a professional or advanced degree, but Federman didn’t understand the nuances of what the others were saying to him, he failed to realize they weren’t telling him he shouldn’t go to college but that he didn’t have to go if he didn’t want to, which meant they thought he was in a stronger position than they were, more in control of his own destiny, and because he was indeed an excellent student in math and science and had every intention of going to college (he was teaching himself calculus that summer, for God’s sake, and how many fourteen-year-olds could grasp the principles of calculus?), he had ignored the compliment and given them a blunt, straight-from-the-heart answer that was so obvious and beside the point (everyone knew he was studying calculus and was inevitably bound for college) that he needn’t have said it at all.
But that was one of the things Ferguson liked best about the other A.F. — his innocence, his unworldly remove from the ironies and contradictions of the society he belonged to. Everyone else seemed to be trapped in the throes of a perpetual agitation, a chaos of clashing impulses and turbulent inconsistencies, but Federman was still, pensive, and apparently at peace with himself, so locked into his own thoughts and his own way of doing things that he paid little attention to the noise around him. An uncontaminated being, Ferguson sometimes thought, so pure and rigorously himself that it was often difficult to make sense of him, which was no doubt why he and Noah had formed such different impressions of their new cabinmate. Noah was willing to grant that Federman was both highly intelligent and a superb ballplayer, but he was too sincere for his taste, too lacking in the humor department to qualify as good company, and the stillness that emanated from him, which had such a calming effect on Ferguson, was altogether unnerving to Noah, who felt that Federman was something less than fully human, a weird ghosty-boy, as he once put it, a specter who had been born with parts of his brain missing. Ferguson understood what Noah was trying to express with those comments, but he didn’t agree with him. Federman was different, that was all, a person who lived on a separate plane from the others, and what Noah saw as weaknesses of character — Federman’s shyness with girls, his inability to tell a joke, his reluctance to argue with anyone — Ferguson tended to read as strengths, for he spent more time with Federman than Noah did, and he understood that what Noah perceived as shallowness or even emptiness was in fact depth, a largeness of soul that was not present in anyone else he knew. The problem was that Federman didn’t do well in groups, whereas alone with a single counterpart he was a different person, and now that three weeks had gone by and the two A.F.s had walked back and forth to the baseball field together dozens of times, Ferguson had come to know that other person, or at least was beginning to know him, and the thing that impressed him most about Federman was how observant he was, how remarkably attuned his senses were to the world around him, and whenever he pointed to a cloud passing overhead, or to a bee alighting on the stamen of a flower, or identified the call of an invisible bird crying out from the woods, Ferguson felt he was seeing and hearing those things for the first time, that without his friend to alert him to the presence of those things, he never would have known they were there, for walking with Federman was above all an exercise in the art of paying attention, and paying attention, Ferguson discovered, was the first step in learning how to be alive.
Then came the exceptionally warm Thursday afternoon toward the end of the month, more or less the midpoint of the summer, just two days before the start of parents’ weekend, with a basketball-baseball doubleheader scheduled for Saturday morning and afternoon against much-feared and much-hated rival Camp Scatico, whose teams would be visiting Camp Paradise for the day, games that would be watched by the mothers and fathers of the Paradise boys, the roly-poly women in their sleeveless cotton dresses, the chunky men in their Bermuda shorts, the sleek and formerly sleek women in their pedal-pusher slacks and stiletto heels, the men with thinning hair in their white business shirts with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow, it was the biggest sports day of the summer, which would be followed in the evening by a performance of the old Marx Brothers play The Cocoanuts, which had been turned into their first film in 1929, and bizarrely and yet most fittingly, Noah, who was widely known throughout the camp as Harpo, had been cast in the role of Groucho, a part for which his talents were far better suited, and not only was Ferguson looking forward to the games he would be involved in two days hence, he couldn’t wait to see his cousin walk the Groucho walk as he pranced about the stage with a cigar wedged between the second and third fingers of his right hand and a greasepaint mustache smeared across the skin between his nose and upper lip. So much anticipation leading up to the events of that day, and because Camp Paradise was almost certain to lose the basketball game (they had been trounced on their visit to Camp Scatico ten days earlier), Bill Rappaport was determined to repeat their victory in baseball, and to that end he had put the boys through several grueling practices over the past days, with endless precision drills in fundamentals (bunting, hitting the cutoff man, holding runners on base) and strenuous calisthenic exercises to keep them in shape (push-ups, sit-ups, wind sprints, laps around the field), and on that particular Thursday in late July, which was the warmest, muggiest day that had fallen upon the camp all summer, Ferguson’s body had been awash in sweat throughout the entire practice, and now that the two-hour session was over and he and Federman were walking back to the cabin, where they would be changing into their bathing suits for the obligatory pre-dinner swim, he felt exhausted from his exertions on the field, sapped of energy, as he put it to Federman, as if each one of his legs weighed two hundred pounds, and even the normally indefatigable New Rochelle calculus boy admitted that he, too, was feeling rather pooped. About halfway to the cabin, Ferguson began talking about the book he had finished reading during the post-lunch rest hour, Miss Lonelyhearts, a tiny novel by Nathanael West that had been included by his Aunt Mildred in her annual package of summer books for him, and just as he was starting to explain that Miss Lonelyhearts was in fact a man, a journalist writing in the voice of a woman for an advice column to the lovelorn, he heard Federman emit a small, muffled noise, something that sounded like the word oh, and when he swiveled his head to the right and looked at his friend, he saw that Federman was staggering, as if he had been overcome by a fit of dizziness, and before Ferguson could ask him what was wrong, Federman’s knees buckled and he slowly fell to the ground.