What Ferguson didn’t know was that Anne-Marie was drunk when she said those words, as she had been several other times during their recent talks on the phone, that for some months she had been smuggling bottles of vodka into her room and drinking whenever her parents were out, long solo binges that freed the devils inside her and turned her tongue into a weapon of cruelty. The sober, well-mannered, intelligent girl of the daylight hours vanished when she was alone in her room at night, and because Ferguson never set eyes on that other person, only talked to her and listened to her angry, half-baked pronouncements, he had no idea what was going on, no idea that the first love of his life was headed for a crack-up.
That last conversation took place on a Thursday, and Ferguson was so peeved and bewildered by her hostile denunciations that he was almost glad when she failed to show up at school the following morning. He needed time to think things through, he said to himself, and not having to see her that day would make it less difficult to recover from the hurt she had caused him. Struggling against the impulse to call her after school on Friday, he left the house the instant he dropped off his books and went down the block to see Bobby George, who was the other sophomore who had made the varsity team, bulky, broad-necked Bobby, now a first-rate catcher and champion goofball, one of the morons from the pack of morons Ferguson would soon be playing with. He and Bobby wound up spending the evening with some of the other baseball morons, fellow sophomores who had made the J.V. team, and when Ferguson walked into his house a few minutes before midnight, it was too late to call Anne-Marie. He restrained himself on Saturday and Sunday as well, fighting off the temptation to dial her number by keeping his distance from telephones, determined not to give in, aching to give in, desperate to hear her voice again. He woke up on Monday morning fully cured, the rancor purged from his heart, prepared to forgive her for Thursday’s unaccountable outburst, but then he went to school, and once again Anne-Marie was absent. He figured it was a cold or the flu, nothing of any consequence, but now that he had granted himself the right to talk to her, he called her house at lunchtime from the pay phone next to the cafeteria entrance. No answer. Ten rings, and no answer. Hoping he had dialed the wrong number, he hung up the receiver and tried again. Twenty rings, but no answer.
He called steadily for two days, panic mounting with each failed attempt to get hold of her, ever more confused by what appeared to be an inexplicably empty house, a telephone that rang and rang and was never picked up, what in the world was happening, he asked himself, where had everyone gone, and so early on Thursday morning, a good hour and a half before the first bell at school, he walked to the Dumartins’ house on the other side of town, a large gabled house with an immense front lawn on one of Montclair’s most elegant streets, the Street of Mansions, as Ferguson had called it when he was a small child, and even though Anne-Marie had insisted he stay away from there because she didn’t want him to meet her parents, he had no choice but to go there now in order to solve the mystery of the unanswered phone, which in turn might help him solve the mystery of what had happened to her.
He rang the doorbell and waited, waited long enough to conclude that no one was at home, then rang the doorbell again, and just as he was about to turn around and leave, the door opened. A man was standing in front of him, a man who was clearly Anne-Marie’s father—the same round face, the same jaw, the same gray-blue eyes—and even though it was just seven-twenty in the morning, he was already fully dressed, smartly outfitted in his dark blue diplomat’s suit and his starched white shirt and his striped red tie, cheeks smooth from his early morning shave, a hint of cologne hovering around his head, which was a rather good-looking head, Ferguson thought, but somewhat weary around the eyes, perhaps, or else in the eyes, a fretful, distracted, melancholic sort of gaze, which Ferguson found moving somehow, no, not moving exactly, compelling, no doubt because this was the face that belonged to Anne-Marie’s father.
Yes?
I’m sorry, Ferguson said, I realize it’s quite early, but I’m a friend of Anne-Marie’s from school, and I’ve been calling the house for the past few days, wanting to know if she’s all right, but no one ever answers, so I got worried and walked over here to find out.
And you are?
Archie. Archie Ferguson.
There’s a simple explanation, Mr. Ferguson. The telephone has been out of order. A terrible inconvenience for all of us, but I’ve been assured the repairmen will be coming today.
And Anne-Marie?
She hasn’t been well.
Nothing serious, I hope.
No, I’m certain everything will be fine, but for now she needs to rest.
Would it be possible for me to visit her?
I’m sorry. If you give me your number, I’ll have her call you as soon as she’s feeling a little better.
Thank you. She already has the number.
Good. I’ll tell her to contact you. (A brief pause.) Just give me your name again. It seems to have slipped my mind.
Ferguson. Archie Ferguson.
Ferguson.
That’s right. And please tell Anne-Marie that I’m thinking about her.
So ended Ferguson’s one and only encounter with Anne-Marie’s father, and as the door closed and he began walking toward the street, he wondered if Mr. Dumartin would forget his name again, or if he would simply forget to tell Anne-Marie to call him, or if he would not tell her to call him on purpose, even if he remembered his name, since that was the job of all fathers everywhere on earth—to protect their daughters from boys who were thinking about them.
After that, silence, and four long days of nothing. Ferguson felt as if someone had tied him up and pushed him off a boat, and after sinking to the bottom of a lake, which was necessarily a large lake, no less broad and profound than Lake Michigan, he had been holding his breath underwater, four long days among the dead bodies and rusted voting machines without drawing a breath, and by Sunday night, his lungs about to burst, his head about to burst, he finally found the courage to pick up the phone, and an instant after he dialed the Dumartins’ number, there she was. So happy, she said, so glad to hear from him, sounding as if she meant it, explaining that she had called him three times that morning (which could have been true, since he had been out with his parents playing tennis), and then she began to tell him about the vodka, the months of secret drinking in her room, culminating in the final binge on Thursday night, the last night they had spoken to each other, which ended with her passing out on the floor, and when her father and stepmother came home from their New York dinner party at eleven-thirty, they saw that her bedroom door was open and the light was on, so they went in and found her, and because they couldn’t wake her, and because the bottle was empty, they called an ambulance to transport her to the hospital, where her stomach was pumped and she regained consciousness, but rather than send her home the next morning, they transferred her to the psychiatric ward, where she was given tests and interviewed by doctors for three days, and now that she had been diagnosed as a manic-depressive in need of long-term psychotherapy, her father had decided she should return to Belgium as soon as possible, which was all she had ever wanted, a chance to escape her horrid stepmother, to put an end to her exile in horrid America, which no doubt had caused her to start drinking in the first place, and now that she would be living with her mother’s sister in Brussels, her beloved Aunt Christine, which meant that she would be with her brothers and cousins and old friends again, she was feeling happy, happier than she had felt in a long, long time.
He saw her only once after that, a farewell date on Wednesday, an exceptional school-night outing that his mother allowed because she knew how important it was to him, even giving him extra money for cab fare (the first and only time it ever happened), so that he and his Belgian girl would not have to endure the humiliation of being chauffeured around by one of his parents, which would only have underscored how young he was, and since when had anyone that young ever been seriously in love? Yes, his mother
continued to understand him, at least many of the important things about him, and he was grateful to her for that, but still, that last evening with Anne-Marie turned out to be a miserable and awkward business for Ferguson, a futile exercise in trying to maintain his dignity, reining in his sorrow so as not to beg or cry or say something harsh to her out of bitterness or disappointment, but how not to remember throughout the evening that this was the end, the last time he would ever see her, and to make matters worse, she was at her very best that night, so warm, so effusive in what she said about him, my wonderful Archie, my beautiful Archie, my brilliant Archie, each kind word seemed to be describing someone who wasn’t there, a dead person, they were words that belonged in a funeral oration, and even worse than that was her unaccustomed cheerfulness, the joy he could see in her eyes when she talked about going away, not once stopping to think that going away meant leaving him behind the day after tomorrow, but suddenly she was laughing and telling him not to worry, they would see each other again soon, he could come to Brussels and spend the summer with her, as if his parents could afford to fly him to Europe, they who had not once gone to California to visit Aunt Mildred and Uncle Henry in all the years they had been there, and then she was saying something even more incomprehensible and wounding to him, sitting on the bench in the park where they had first kissed in October and were now kissing again on their last night together in March, saying that maybe it was a lucky thing for him that she was going, that she was so messed up and he was so normal, and he deserved to be with a healthy, normal girl, not a sick, crazy girl like her, and from that moment until he dropped her off at her house twenty minutes later, he felt as sad as he had ever been in his whole disgustingly normal life.
A week later, he wrote her a nine-page letter and sent it to her aunt’s address in Brussels. A week after that, a six-page letter. Three weeks after that, a two-page letter. A month after that, a postcard. She didn’t answer any of them, and by the time school let out for the summer, he understood that he was never going to write to her again.
* * *
THE TRUTH WAS that healthy, normal girls didn’t interest him. Life in the suburbs was dull enough, and the problem with healthy, normal girls was that they reminded him of the suburbs, which had become far too predictable for his taste, and the last thing he wanted was to be with a predictable girl. Whatever her shortcomings, whatever anguish she had caused him, at least Anne-Marie had been full of surprises, at least she had kept his heart pounding in a state of prolonged suspense, and now that she was gone, everything had become dull and predictable again, even more oppressive than it had been before she walked into his life. He knew it wasn’t her fault, but he couldn’t help feeling betrayed. She had abandoned him, and from now on it was either make do with the morons or live in solitary confinement for the next two years, at which point he would flee this place and never come back.
He was sixteen now, and he spent the summer working for his father and playing baseball in the evenings, always baseball, still and always baseball, which was no doubt a mindless pursuit but continued to give too much pleasure for him to think of abandoning it, this time in a league for high school and college players from around the county, a stiff and competitive league, but he had done well in his first year on the Montclair varsity, starting third baseman and number five hitter, a .312 batting average for a good team, the best team in the Big Ten Conference, and he was hitting for more power now as he continued to grow, five-eleven at the last measurement, 174 pounds the last time he stepped on the scales, and so he played that summer in order to keep his hand in and spent the mornings and afternoons working for his father, mostly driving around town in the van delivering and installing air conditioners with a guy named Ed, and when there was nothing to deliver, he would help Mike Antonelli up front with sales or fill in for Mike while he took one of his frequent coffee breaks at Al’s Diner, and when there were no customers in the store, he would go into the back room and sit with his father until someone else showed up, his almost fifty-year-old father, still lean and fit, still anchored to his work table and repairing broken machines, his walled-off and silent father, almost serene now after six years in the quiet of that back room, and while Ferguson consistently offered to help with the repair work, even though he was clumsy and unskilled in all that pertained to machines, his father always shrugged him off, saying his son shouldn’t be wasting his time on broken toasters, he was traveling a road that would lead to far greater things than that, and if he wanted to make himself useful, he should bring in some of those poetry books he had at home and read out loud while his old man took care of the broken toasters, and so it was that Ferguson, who had been ingesting vast amounts of poetry in the past year and a half, spent a portion of that summer reading to his father in the back room of Stanley’s TV & Radio, Dickinson, Hopkins, Poe, Whitman, Frost, Eliot, Cummings, Pound, Stevens, Williams, and others, but the poem his father seemed to like best, the one that seemed to make the strongest impression on him, was The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which startled Ferguson, and because he was unprepared for that reaction, he understood that he had missed something, had been missing something for a long time now, which meant that he would have to rethink everything he had previously assumed about his father, for once he had finished the last line, Till human voices wake us, and we drown, his father turned to him and looked into his eyes, looked at him with an intensity Ferguson had never seen in all the years he had known him, and after a long pause he said: Oh, Archie. What a magnificent thing. Thank you. Thank you so much. And then his father shook his head back and forth three times and spoke the last words again: Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
The last week of summer. August twenty-eighth, and the March on Washington, the speeches at the Mall, the immense crowds, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and then the speech that schoolchildren would later have to memorize, the speech of speeches, as important on that day as the Gettysburg Address had been on its day, a big American moment, a public moment for all to see and hear, even more essential than the words spoken at Kennedy’s inauguration thirty-two months earlier, and everyone at Stanley’s TV & Radio stood in the front room and watched the broadcast, Ferguson and his father, big-bellied Mike and shrimpy Ed, and then Ferguson’s mother came in as well, along with five or six pedestrians who happened to be walking by, but before the big speech there were several other speeches, among them an address delivered by a local New Jersey man, Rabbi Joachim Prinz, the most admired Jew in Ferguson’s part of the world, a hero to his parents, even if they did not practice their religion or belong to a synagogue, but all three Fergusons had seen him and heard him talk at weddings, funerals, and bar mitzvahs at the temple he presided over in Newark, the famous Joachim Prinz, who as a young rabbi in Berlin had denounced Hitler even before the Nazis took power in 1933, who saw the future more clearly than anyone else and urged Jews to quit Germany, which led to repeated arrests by the Gestapo and his own expulsion in 1937, and of course he was active in the American civil rights movement, and of course he had been chosen to represent the Jews that day because of his eloquence and well-documented courage, and of course Ferguson’s parents were proud of him, they who had shaken his hand and talked to him, the person who was now standing before the camera and addressing the nation, the entire world, and then King stepped to the podium, and thirty or forty seconds after the speech began, Ferguson looked over at his mother and saw that her eyes were glistening with tears, which amused him greatly, not because he felt it was inappropriate for her to respond in that way but precisely because he didn’t, because this was yet one more instance of how she engaged with the world, her excessive, often sentimental reading of events, the gushes of feeling that made her so susceptible to tearing up at bad Hollywood movies, the good-hearted optimism that sometimes led to muddled thinking and crushing disappointment, and then he looked over at his father, a man almost entirely indifferent to politics, who seemed to demand so much less from life than his mo
ther did, and what he saw in his father’s eyes was a combination of vague curiosity and boredom, the same man who had been so moved by the dreary resignation of Eliot’s poem was having a hard time swallowing the hopeful idealism of Martin Luther King, and as Ferguson listened to the mounting emotion in the minister’s voice, the drum-roll repetitions of the word dream, he wondered how two such oddly matched souls could have married and stayed married for so many years, and how he himself could have been born from such a couple as Rose Adler and Stanley Ferguson, and how strange, how deeply strange it was to be alive.
* * *
ON LABOR DAY, about twenty people came to the house for an end-of-summer barbecue. His parents rarely organized such large gatherings, but two weeks earlier his mother had won a photography competition sponsored by the governor’s new arts council in Trenton. The award came with a commission to produce a book of portraits of one hundred outstanding New Jersey citizens, a project that would be sending her around the state to photograph mayors, college presidents, scientists, businessmen, artists, writers, musicians, and athletes, and because the job would be well paid and Ferguson’s parents were feeling flush for the first time in several years, they decided to celebrate with a grilled-meat blowout in the backyard. The usual crowd was there—the Solomons, the Brownsteins, the Georges from down the block, Ferguson’s grandparents and his Great-aunt Pearl—but some other people turned up as well, among them a family from New York called the Schneidermans, which consisted of a forty-five-year-old commercial artist named Daniel, the younger son of Ferguson’s mother’s old boss, Emanuel Schneiderman, who was now living in a retirement home in the Bronx, and Daniel’s wife, Liz, and their sixteen-year-old daughter, Amy. On the morning of the Labor Day fête, as Ferguson and his parents chopped vegetables and prepared barbecue sauce in the kitchen, his mother told him that he and Amy had known each other as small children and had played together a few times, but somehow she had fallen out of touch with the Schneidermans, twelve years had fluttered off the calendar, and then, just a couple of weeks ago, on a visit to see her parents in New York, she had bumped into Dan and Liz on Central Park South. Hence the invitation. Hence the Schneidermans’ first-ever visit to Montclair.