That was the worst moment, she said, the one time when she believed the world could actually come to an end, but there were other rough spots as well, a whole list of unforeseen jolts and mishaps, and then she began enumerating the various accidents that had befallen him as a young child, several of which could have killed him or maimed him, choking on an unchewed sliver of steak, for example, or the piece of broken glass that went through the bottom of his foot and required fourteen stitches, or the time he tripped and fell on a rock, which tore open his left cheek and required eleven stitches, or the bee sting that swelled his eyes shut, or the day last summer when he was learning how to swim and nearly drowned when his cousin Andrew pushed him under the water, and each time his mother recounted one of these events, she would pause for a moment and ask Ferguson if he remembered, and the fact was that he did remember, remembered nearly all of them as if they had happened only yesterday.
It was mid-June when they had this conversation, three days after Ferguson had fallen out of the oak tree in the backyard and broken his left leg, and what his mother was trying to demonstrate by going through this litany of small catastrophes was that whenever he had hurt himself in the past he had always gotten better, that his body had hurt for a while and then had stopped hurting, and that was precisely what was going to happen with his leg. Too bad he had to be in a cast, of course, but eventually the cast would come off and he would be as good as new. Ferguson wanted to know how long it would take before that happened, and his mother said a month or so, which was an extremely vague and unsatisfactory answer, he felt, a month being one cycle of the moon, which might be tolerable if the weather didn’t become too hot, but or so meant even longer than that, an indefinite and therefore unbearable length of time. Before he could get himself fully worked up over the injustice of it all, however, his mother asked him a question, a strange question, perhaps the strangest question anyone had ever asked him.
Are you angry at yourself, Archie, or angry at the tree?
What a perplexing thing to throw at a boy who hadn’t even finished kindergarten. Angry? Why should he be angry at anything? Why couldn’t he just feel sad?
His mother smiled. She was happy he didn’t hold it against the tree, she said, because she loved that tree, she and his father both loved that tree, and they had bought this house in West Orange mostly because of the big backyard, and the best and most beautiful thing about the backyard was the towering oak that stood in the center of it. Three and a half years ago, when she and his father had decided to leave the apartment in Newark and buy a house in the suburbs, they had looked in several towns, Montclair and Maplewood, Millburn and South Orange, but none of those places had the right house for them, they felt weary and discouraged from looking at so many wrong houses, and then they came to this house and knew it was the one for them. She was glad he wasn’t angry at the tree, she said, because if he had been angry she would have been forced to chop it down. Why chop it down? Ferguson asked, beginning to laugh now at the thought of his mother chopping down such a large tree, his beautiful mother dressed in work clothes as she assaulted the oak with an enormous, gleaming axe. Because I’m on your side, Archie, she said, and any enemy of yours is an enemy of mine.
The next day, his father returned from 3 Brothers Home World with an air conditioner for Ferguson’s room. It’s getting hot out there, his father said, meaning he wanted his son to be comfortable as he languished on the bed in his cast, and it would also help with his hay fever, his father continued, preventing pollen from entering the room, for Ferguson’s nose was highly sensitive to the airborne irritants that emanated from grass and dust and flowers, and the less he sneezed during his convalescence, the less his broken bone would hurt, since a sneeze was a powerful force, and a big one could resonate throughout your entire body, from the top of your whiplashed head to the tips of your toes. The six-year-old Ferguson watched his father go about the business of installing the air conditioner in the window to the right of the desk, a far more elaborate operation than he would have imagined, which began with the removal of the screen window and called upon such things as a tape measure, a pencil, a drill, a caulking gun, two strips of unpainted wood, a screwdriver, and several screws, and Ferguson was impressed by how quickly and carefully his father worked, as if his hands understood what to do without any instructions from his mind, autonomous hands, as it were, endowed with their own special knowledge, and then came the moment to hoist the large metallic cube off the ground and mount it in the window, such a heavy object to lift, Ferguson thought, but his father managed it without any apparent strain, and as he completed the job with the screwdriver and the caulking gun, his father hummed the song he always hummed when he fixed things around the house, an old Al Jolson number called Sonny Boy—You’ve no way of knowing / There’s no way of showing / What you mean to me Sonny. His father bent down to pick up an extra screw that had fallen on the floor, and when he stood up straight again he suddenly grabbed the small of his back with his right hand. Och un vai, he said, I think I’ve strained a muscle. The cure for strained muscles was to lie flat on your back for several minutes, his father told him, preferably on a hard surface, and since the hardest surface in the room was the floor, his father promptly lay down on the floor next to Ferguson’s bed. What an unusual vantage that was, to be looking down at his father stretched out on the floor below him, and as Ferguson leaned over the edge of the bed and studied his father’s grimacing face, he decided to ask a question, a question he had thought of several times in the past month but had never found the proper moment to ask: What had his father done before he became the boss of 3 Brothers Home World? He saw his father’s eyes roam across the ceiling, as if searching for an answer to the question, and then Ferguson noticed the muscles around his father’s mouth pulling downward, which was a familiar gesture to him, an indication that his father was struggling to suppress a smile, which in turn meant that something unexpected was about to happen. I was a big-game hunter, his father said, calmly and flatly, betraying no sign that he was about to launch into the most egregious load of nonsense he had ever imparted to his son, and for the next twenty or thirty minutes he reminisced about lions, tigers, and elephants, the sweltering heat of Africa, hacking his way through dense jungles, crossing the Sahara on foot, scaling Mount Kilimanjaro, the time when he was nearly swallowed whole by a giant snake, and the other time when he was captured by cannibals and was about to be thrown into a pot of boiling water, but at the last minute he managed to wriggle out of the vines that were strapped around his wrists and ankles, outran his murderous captors, and disappeared into the thick of the jungle, and the other time when he was on his last safari before coming home to marry Ferguson’s mother and was lost in the darkest heart of Africa, which was known as the dark continent, and wandered onto a broad, endless savanna where he saw a herd of grazing dinosaurs, the last dinosaurs left on earth. Ferguson was old enough to know that dinosaurs had been extinct for millions of years, but the other stories seemed plausible to him, not necessarily true, perhaps, but possibly true, and therefore worthy of being believed—perhaps. Then his mother walked into the room, and when she saw Ferguson’s father lying on the floor, she asked him if anything was wrong with his back. No, no, he said, I’m just resting, and then he stood up as if his back were indeed fine, walked over to the window, and turned on the air conditioner.
Yes, the air conditioner cooled off the room and cut down on sneezes, and because it was cooler his leg didn’t itch as much under the plaster cast, but there were drawbacks to living in a refrigerated chamber as well, the noise first of all, which was a queer and confusing noise, since there were times when he heard it and times when he didn’t, but when he did hear it he found it monotonous and unpleasant, but worse than that there was the matter of the windows, which had to remain shut in order to keep the cool air in, and because they were permanently closed and the motor was perpetually running, he couldn’t hear the birds singing outside, and the only good thin
g about being cooped up in his room with a cast on his leg was listening to the birds in the trees just beyond his window, the twittering, chanting, warbling birds who made what Ferguson felt were the most beautiful sounds in the world. The air-conditioning had its pluses and minuses, then, its benefits and hardships, and as with so many other things the world doled out to him in the course of his life, it was, as his mother often put it, a mixed blessing.
What bothered him most about falling out of the tree was that it needn’t have happened. Ferguson could accept pain and suffering when he felt they were necessary, such as throwing up when he was sick or letting Dr. Guston jab a needle into his arm for a shot of penicillin, but unnecessary pain violated the principles of good sense, which made it both stupid and intolerable. A part of him was tempted to blame Chuckie Brower for the accident, but in the end Ferguson realized that was no more than a feeble excuse, for what difference did it make that Chuckie had dared him to climb the tree? Ferguson had accepted the dare, which meant he had wanted to climb the tree, had chosen to climb the tree, and therefore he himself was responsible for what had happened. Never mind that Chuckie had promised to follow Ferguson up if Ferguson went first and then had backed down from his promise, claiming he was scared, that the branches were too far apart and he wasn’t tall enough to reach them, but the fact that Chuckie hadn’t followed him up was immaterial, for even if he had been there, how could he have prevented Ferguson from falling? So Ferguson fell, he lost his grip while reaching for a branch that was at most one quarter of an inch beyond the point where he would have been able to grasp it securely, lost his grip and fell, and now he was lying in bed with his left leg imprisoned by a plaster cast that would remain a part of his body for a month or so, meaning more than a month, and there was no one to blame for this misfortune but himself.
He accepted the blame, understood that his present condition was entirely his own fault, but that was a far cry from saying the accident couldn’t have been avoided. Stupid, that’s what it was, just plain stupid to have forged on with his climbing when he couldn’t fully reach the next branch, but if the branch had been one particle of an inch closer to him, it wouldn’t have been stupid. If Chuckie hadn’t rung his doorbell that morning and asked him to come outside and play, it wouldn’t have been stupid. If his parents had moved to one of the other towns where they had been looking for the right house, he wouldn’t even know Chuckie Brower, wouldn’t even know that Chuckie Brower existed, and it wouldn’t have been stupid, for the tree he had climbed wouldn’t have been in his backyard. Such an interesting thought, Ferguson said to himself: to imagine how things could be different for him even though he was the same. The same boy in a different house with a different tree. The same boy with different parents. The same boy with the same parents who didn’t do the same things they did now. What if his father was still a big-game hunter, for example, and they all lived in Africa? What if his mother was a famous movie actress and they all lived in Hollywood? What if he had a brother or a sister? What if his Great-uncle Archie hadn’t died and his own name wasn’t Archie? What if he had fallen out of the same tree and had broken two legs instead of one? What if he had broken both arms and both legs? What if he had been killed? Yes, anything was possible, and just because things happened in one way didn’t mean they couldn’t happen in another. Everything could be different. The world could be the same world, and yet if he hadn’t fallen out of the tree, it would be a different world for him, and if he had fallen out of the tree and hadn’t just broken his leg but had wound up killing himself, not only would the world be different for him, there would be no world for him to live in anymore, and how sad his mother and father would be when they carried him to the graveyard and buried his body in the ground, so sad that they would go on weeping for forty days and forty nights, for forty months, for four hundred and forty years.
There was a week and a half to go before the end of school and the beginning of summer vacation, which meant he wouldn’t miss enough time to flunk kindergarten because of too many absences. That was something to be thankful for, his mother said, and surely she was right, but Ferguson wasn’t in a thankful mood during those first days after the accident, with no friends to talk to except in the late afternoon when Chuckie Brower would stop by with his little brother to look at the cast, with his father gone from morning to night because he was at work, with his mother driving off for several hours a day in search of a vacant shop to house the photography studio she was planning to open in the fall, with the housekeeper Wanda mostly busy with her washing and cleaning except when she brought lunch up to Ferguson at noon and helped him empty his bladder by holding the milk bottle he was supposed to pee into instead of doing his business in the bathroom, such indignities he had to bear, all for the stupid mistake of having fallen out of a tree, and to add to his frustration there was the fact that he hadn’t yet learned to read, which would have been a good way to pass the time, and with the television downstairs in the living room, inaccessible, temporarily out of bounds, Ferguson spent his days musing on the imponderable questions of the universe, drawing pictures of airplanes and cowboys, and practicing how to write by copying the sheet of letters his mother had made for him.
Then things began to brighten somewhat. His cousin Francie finished her junior year of high school, and for several days before she left to work as a counselor at a summer camp in the Berkshires, she came to the house to keep him company, sometimes for just an hour, sometimes for three or four, and the time he spent with her was always the most enjoyable part of the day, no doubt the only enjoyable part, for Francie was the cousin he liked best, liked more than anyone else in either one of his two families, and how grown-up she was now, Ferguson thought, with bosoms and curves and a body similar to his mother’s, and just like his mother she had a way of talking to him that made him feel calm and comfortable, as if nothing could ever go wrong when he was with her, and sometimes it was even better to be with Francie than his mother, for no matter what he did or said, she never got angry at him, not even when he lost control of himself and became rambunctious. Clever Francie was the one who came up with the idea to decorate his cast, a job that took three and a half hours, such careful brushstrokes as she covered the white plaster with an array of brilliant blues and reds and yellows, an abstract, swirling pattern that made him think of riding on an exceedingly fast merry-go-round, and as she applied the acrylics to his new and detested body part, she talked about her boyfriend, Gary, big Gary who used to play fullback on the high school football team but was now in college, Williams College in the Berkshires, not far from the camp where the two of them were going to work together that summer, she was looking forward to it so much, she said, and then she announced that she was pinned, a term not familiar to Ferguson at the time, so Francie explained that Gary had given her his fraternity pin, but fraternity was a word that eluded Ferguson’s understanding as well, so Francie explained again, and then she broke into a big smile and said never mind, the important thing was that being pinned was the first step toward getting engaged, and the plan was that she and Gary were going to announce their engagement in the fall, and next summer, after she had turned eighteen and was finished with high school, she and Gary were going to be married. The reason why she was telling him all this, she said, was that she had an important job for him, and she wanted to know if he was willing to do it. Do what? Ferguson asked. To be the ring bearer at the wedding, she said. Once again, Ferguson had no idea what she was talking about, so Francie explained once again, and when he listened to her tell him that he would walk down the aisle with the wedding ring perched on top of a blue velvet pillow and that Gary would take it from him and then put it on the fourth finger of her left hand to conclude the marriage ceremony, Ferguson agreed that it was an important job, perhaps the most important job he had ever been given. With a solemn nod of the head, he promised he would do it. It would probably make him nervous to walk down the aisle with so many people looking at him, of course, an
d there was always the chance that his hands would tremble and the ring would fall to the ground, but he had to do it because Francie had asked him to, because Francie was the one person in the world he couldn’t ever let down.
When Francie came to the house the following afternoon, Ferguson immediately understood that she had been crying. Reddened nose, foggy, pink-tinged traces around both her left and right irises, a handkerchief balled up in her fist—even a six-year-old could figure out the truth from that evidence. Ferguson wondered if Francie had been quarrelling with Gary, if suddenly and unexpectedly she was no longer pinned, which would mean the marriage was off and he wouldn’t be called upon to carry the ring on a velvet pillow. He asked her why she was upset, but rather than pronounce the name Gary as he imagined she would, Francie started talking about a man and a woman named Rosenberg, who had been put to death yesterday, fried in the electric chair, she said, speaking those words with what sounded like both horror and disgust, and it was wrong, wrong, wrong, she went on, because they were probably innocent, they had always said they were innocent, and why would they let themselves be executed when they could have spared their lives by saying they were guilty? Two sons, Francie said, two little boys, and what parents would willingly turn their children into orphans by refusing to declare their guilt if they were guilty, which meant they must have been innocent and had died for nothing. Ferguson had never heard such outrage in Francie’s voice, had never known anyone to be so distraught over an injustice committed against people who qualified as strangers, for it was clear to him that Francie had never met the Rosenbergs in person, and therefore it was something deadly serious and important that she was talking about, so serious that those people had been fried for it, what a dreadful thought that was, to be fried like a piece of chicken submerged in a pan of hot, bubbling oil. He asked his cousin what the Rosenbergs had supposedly done to deserve such a punishment, and Francie explained that they had been accused of passing secrets to the Russians, vital secrets concerning the construction of atomic bombs, and since the Russians were communists, which made them our mortal enemies, the Rosenbergs had been convicted of treason, a ghastly crime that meant you had betrayed your country and should be put to death, but in this case the crime had been committed by America, the American government had slaughtered two innocent people, and then, quoting her boyfriend and future husband, Francie said: Gary thinks America has gone mad.