Poor Francie, his mother said. My beloved girl is ill. Her family is three thousand miles away, and there’s no one to take care of her. It’s up to me, Archie. We’ll be home in a couple of days, and once we’re there, that’s my new job. To make sure Francie gets well.
Ferguson asked himself if anyone but his mother could have made such an outrageous declaration, willfully ignoring the possibility that psychiatrists might have any role in Francie’s recovery, as if love and the persistence of love were the only reliable cure for a shattered heart. It was such a mad and ignorant thing to say that he couldn’t help laughing, and once the laugh came out of his throat, he realized that it was the first time he had laughed since the accident. Good for him, he thought. And good for his mother, too, he thought, whose statement deserved to be laughed at, even though it had been wrong of him to laugh, for the beautiful thing about his mother’s words was that she believed them, believed with every bone in her body that she was strong enough to carry the world on her back.
THE WORST PART about going home was having to return to school. The hospital had been torture enough, but at least he had felt protected there, walled off from others in the sanctuary of his room, but now he had to walk back into his old world and let everyone see him — and the last thing he wanted was to be seen.
It was February, and in preparation for his return to Montclair High, his mother knitted him a pair of special gloves, one normal glove and one with three and a third fingers, shaped to fit the contours of his newly diminished left hand, and a most comfortable pair of gloves they were, made of the softest imported cashmere in an innocuous pale brown, a bland hue that didn’t assault the eyes and call attention to itself as a bright color would have, and therefore the gloves were almost unnoticeable. For the rest of the month and halfway into the next, Ferguson wore the left glove indoors at school, claiming he had to do it because of doctor’s orders — to protect the hand as it continued to heal. That helped a little bit, as did the stocking cap he wore to hide his patchwork head, which he also had to keep on both outside and inside because of doctor’s orders. Once his hair grew back and the bald spots were gone, he would abandon the cap, but it served him well during the early stages of his reentry, as did the long-sleeved shirts and sweaters he wore to school every day, typical clothing for February but also a way to cover the crosshatched scars on his two forearms, which were still an awful shade of red, and because he had been excused from gym class until his doctor declared him fully mended, he didn’t have to undress and shower in front of his eleventh-grade cronies, which meant that no one saw the scars until they had turned white and were nearly invisible.
Those were some of the ploys Ferguson used to make the trial somewhat less difficult for himself, but it was difficult all the same, difficult to return as a piece of damaged goods (as one of his former baseball teammates put it when Ferguson overheard him talking behind his back), and while his friends and teachers all felt sorry for him and tried not to stare at the gloved left hand, not everyone in that school was his friend, and those who actively disliked him were not the least bit dismayed to see the haughty, standoffish Ferguson get his comeuppance. It was his fault that so many people had turned against him in the past few months, since he had more or less abandoned them when he started seeing Amy, declining all Saturday invitations and making himself scarce on Sundays, and the popular little boy whose double portrait still stood in the window of Roseland Photo had transformed himself into an outsider. About the only thing that had still kept him connected to the school was the baseball team, and now that baseball was gone, he was beginning to feel gone as well. He continued to show up every day, but every day a little less of him was there.
In spite of his estrangement, there were still some friends, still some people he cared about, but apart from dumb Bobby George, his baseball pal and ex—National Geographic sidekick, there was no one he cared about deeply, and why he still should have cared about Bobby was inexplicable to him — until the night he returned from Vermont and Bobby came over to his house to welcome him back, and when the young George saw the gloveless, hatless, sweaterless young Ferguson, he started to say something and then burst out crying, and as Ferguson watched his friend give way in that spontaneous gush of infantile tears, he understood that Bobby loved him more than anyone else in the town of Montclair. All his other friends felt sorry for him, but Bobby was the only one who cried.
For Bobby’s sake, he went to one of the after-school indoor practices to watch the pitcher-catcher drills. It was hard for him to stand in that echoing gym as balls popped back and forth into gloves and bounced across the hardwood floor, but Bobby would be starting behind the plate that season, and he had asked Ferguson to come and see if his throwing had improved over last year, and if it hadn’t, to tell him what he was doing wrong. Only players were allowed to be in the gym during those two-hour practice sessions, but even though Ferguson was no longer a member of the team, he still retained certain privileges, which had been granted to him by Coach Martino, whose response to his injuries had been much less restrained than Ferguson had imagined it would be, not holding back as he usually did but cursing loudly at the goddamned, fucked-up thing that had happened, telling Ferguson that he was one of the best players he had ever coached and that he had been expecting great things from him in his junior and senior years. Then, almost immediately, he started talking about converting him into a pitcher. With an arm like his, he could probably pull it off, Mr. Martino said, and then no one would give a flying fuck about his batting average or how many home runs he hit. If it was too soon to begin now, why not think about it for next year? Meanwhile, for this year, he could stay with the team as a sort of unofficial assistant coach, hitting fungoes at practice, leading the players through their drills and calisthenics, discussing strategy with him on the bench during games. But only if he wanted to, of course, and though Ferguson was tempted to take him up on his offer, he knew he couldn’t, he knew it would kill him to be part of the team and not part of the team, a wounded mascot cheering the others on, and so he thanked Mr. Martino and politely said no, explaining that he just wasn’t ready, and the old World War II first sergeant, who had fought in the Battle of the Bulge and had belonged to the unit that liberated Dachau, patted Ferguson on the shoulder and wished him luck. Then, by way of conclusion, as he reached out to shake Ferguson’s hand for the last time, Coach Martino said: The only constant in this world is shit, my boy. We’re all in it up to our ankles every day, but sometimes, when it gets up to our knees or waists, we just have to pull ourselves out of it and move on. You’re moving on, Archie, and I respect you for it, but if you ever happen to change your mind, remember that the door is always open.
Bobby George’s tears and Sal Martino’s always open. Two good things in a world of otherwise all bad things, and yes, Ferguson was moving on now, he had already moved on since he and the coach parted that day, and whether he was headed in the right direction or the wrong direction, the best thing about that second good thing was that no matter where he happened to find himself in the future, he would never forget Mr. Martino’s eloquent words about the pervasive, all-enduring power of shit.
He mostly kept to himself until the end of winter, going straight home after school every day, sometimes hitching rides with seniors who had cars, sometimes making the twenty-minute journey on foot. The house was always empty then, which meant it was quiet, and quiet was what he craved most after spending six and a half hours at school, a large, enveloping quiet that allowed him to recover from the ordeal of dragging his gloved and hatted body in front of the two thousand other bodies that filled the hallways and classrooms for those six and a half hours, and nothing was better than to withdraw into himself again and vanish. His parents generally came home a little past six, which gave him about two and a half hours to loll around in his empty fortress, for the most part upstairs in his room with the door closed, where he could crack open the window and smoke one or two of his mother’s forbidden cigarettes, relishing the irony of how the new report from the surgeon general about the perils of smoking had coincided with his own growing interest in the pleasures of tobacco, and as he smoked his mother’s life-threatening Chesterfields, Ferguson would pace around the room listening to records, alternating between big choral works (Verdi’s Requiem, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis) and solo compositions by Bach (Pablo Casals, Glenn Gould), or else lie on the bed and read books, working his way through the recent bundle of paperbacks sent to him by Aunt Mildred, the unstinting tour guide of his literary education, who had just mapped out his second visit to France in the past nine months, and so Ferguson spent those late-afternoon hours reading Genet (The Thief’s Journal), Gide (The Counterfeiters), Sarraute (Tropisms), Breton (Nadja), and Beckett (Molloy), and when he wasn’t listening to music or reading books, Ferguson felt lost, so deeply at odds with himself that he sometimes felt he was bursting apart. He wanted to begin writing poems again, but he couldn’t concentrate, and every idea that entered his head seemed worthless. The first baseball-playing poet in history could no longer play baseball, and suddenly the poet in him was dying as well. Help me, he wrote one day. Why should I help you? the message to himself continued. Because I need your help, the first voice answered. Sorry, the second voice said. What you need is to stop saying you need help. Start thinking about what I need for a change.