Ferguson assumed it was a joke, that after all the talk about how tired they were Federman had gotten it into his head to do a comic demonstration of what happens to a body after too much exercise on hot and humid summer days, but the laugh Ferguson was expecting to hear didn’t come, for the truth was that Artie wasn’t a person who trafficked in jokes, and as Ferguson bent down to examine his friend’s face, he was startled to see that his eyes were neither open nor closed but half-open, half-closed, with only the whites visible, as if his eyes had rolled up into his head, which seemed to suggest that he had passed out, so Ferguson began to tap Federman’s cheeks with his fingers, first tapping and then pinching the cheeks as he told him to wake up, as if a few taps and a few pinches would be enough to rouse him to consciousness, but when Federman didn’t respond, when his head lolled back and forth as Ferguson began to shake his shoulders and his inert eyelids refused to open or shut or even flutter with the smallest sign of life, Ferguson started to grow afraid, and so he pressed his ear against Federman’s chest in order to listen to the beating of his heart, in order to feel his rib cage rising and falling as the air went in and out of his lungs, but there was no heartbeat, there was no breath, and an instant later Ferguson stood up and began to howclass="underline" Help me! Help me, someone! Please — someone — help me!
BRAIN ANEURYSM. THAT was the official cause of death, someone said, and since the Columbia County medical examiner performed the autopsy himself, those were the words he inscribed on Federman’s death certificate: brain aneurysm.
Ferguson knew what a brain was, but it was the first time he had come across the word aneurysm, so he walked over to the head counselor’s office and looked it up in the Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary that sat on the top shelf of the bookcase: a permanent abnormal blood-filled dilation of an artery, resulting from disease of the vessel wall.
THE GAMES WITH Camp Scatico were canceled until further notice. The Marx Brothers comedy would be held back until sometime the following month. The family songfest scheduled for Sunday morning was erased from the calendar.
AT THE ALL–CAMP gathering that convened in the Big Barn after dinner on Thursday, half the children wept, many of whom had never even known Federman. Jack Feldman, the head counselor, told the boys and girls that the ways of God were incomprehensible, beyond the grasp of human understanding.
BILL RAPPAPORT BLAMED himself for Federman’s collapse. He had pushed the team too hard, he told Ferguson, he had put everyone in danger with those punishing workouts in that intolerable heat and humidity. What the fuck had he been thinking? Ferguson remembered the words from the dictionary: permanent, abnormal, blood-filled … disease. No, Bill, he said, it was bound to happen sooner or later. Artie was walking around with a time bomb in his head. It’s just that no one knew about it — not him, not his parents, not one doctor who ever examined him. He had to die before anyone found out that the time bomb had been there his whole life.
DURING REST HOUR on Friday afternoon, his name was announced over the loudspeaker. Archie Ferguson, the voice of the camp secretary said. Archie Ferguson, please come to the main office. You have a telephone call.
It was his mother. Such a terrible thing, Archie, she said. I feel so sorry for that boy, for you … for everyone.
It wasn’t just a terrible thing, Ferguson replied. It was the worst thing, the worst thing that’s ever happened.
A long pause followed on the other end of the line, and then his mother said that she had just received a call from Artie’s mother. An unexpected call, of course, an excruciating call, of course, but purely for the purpose of inviting Ferguson to attend the funeral in New Rochelle on Sunday — assuming he could get permission to leave the camp, and assuming he felt up to going.
I don’t understand, Ferguson said. No one else is invited. Why me?
His mother explained that Mrs. Federman had been reading and rereading the letters her son had sent home from camp, and in nearly all of them Ferguson had been mentioned, often several times in the space of three or four paragraphs. Archie is my best friend, his mother said, quoting from a passage that had been read to her over the phone, the best friend I’ve ever had. And again: Archie is such a good person, it makes me happy just to be near him. And again: Archie is the closest thing I’ve ever had to a brother.
Another long pause, and then Ferguson said, in a voice so quiet he could barely hear his own words, That’s how I felt about Artie.
IT WAS SETTLED, then. There would be no weekend visit from his parents. Instead, Ferguson would take the train down to New York in the morning, his mother would meet him at Grand Central Station, they would spend the night in the city at her parents’ apartment, and the next morning the two of them would drive up to New Rochelle together. Not one to ignore the exigencies of public occasions, his mother promised to carry along clothes for him to wear at the funeral — his white shirt, jacket, and tie, his black shoes, black socks, and charcoal-gray pants.
She said: Have you grown much since you’ve been up there, Archie?
I’m not sure, Ferguson answered. Maybe a little.
I’m wondering if those things will still fit you.
Does it matter?
Maybe yes, maybe no. If the buttons pop off your shirt, we can always buy some new clothes tomorrow.
THE BUTTONS DIDN’T pop off, but the shirt was too small for him now, as was everything else except the tie. What a nuisance to go out shopping in ninety-four-degree weather, he thought, trudging through the streets of the broiling city because he’d grown two and a half inches since the spring, but he couldn’t go to New Rochelle in his camp jeans and tennis shoes, and so off he went with his mother to Macy’s, prowling the men’s department for more than an hour in search of something decent to wear, without question the most boring activity on earth even in the best of times, which these times most definitely were not, and so little was his heart in what they were doing that he allowed his mother to make all the decisions, selecting this shirt, this jacket, and this pair of pants for him, and yet, as he would soon learn, how preferable was the boredom of shopping to the wretched hopelessness of sitting in the synagogue the next day, the hot sanctuary crowded with more than two hundred people, Artie’s mother and father, his twelve-year-old sister, his four grandparents, his aunts and uncles, his boy and girl cousins, his friends from school, his various teachers going all the way back to kindergarten, his friends and coaches from the sports teams he had played on, friends of the family, friends of friends of the family, a mob of people baking in that airless room as tears spurted from clenched eyes and men and women sobbed, as boys and girls sobbed, and there was the rabbi at the pulpit reciting prayers in both Hebrew and English, none of that Christian claptrap about going to a better place, no fairy-tale afterlife for Ferguson and his people, these were the Jews, the demented, defiant Jews, and for them there was only one life and one place, this life and this earth, and the only way to look at death was to praise God, to praise the power of God even when the death belonged to a fourteen-year-old boy, to praise their fucking God until their eyes fell out of their heads and their balls fell off their bodies and their hearts shriveled inside them.