4 3 2 1 Read online

  On September 29, 1954, Ferguson stayed home from school. He had a fever of 101.6 and had spent the previous night throwing up into an aluminum stew pot his mother had put on the floor beside his bed. When she left for work in the morning, she told him to stay in his pajamas and sleep as much as he could. If he couldn’t sleep, he was to remain in bed with his comic books, and whenever he had to go to the bathroom, he should remember to put on his slippers. By one o’clock, however, the fever had dropped to 99 and he was feeling well enough to go downstairs and ask Cassie if he could have something to eat. She made him scrambled eggs and dry toast, which went down without disturbing his stomach, and so rather than go upstairs and return to his bed, he shuffled into the small room next to the kitchen that his parents alternately referred to as the den and the little living room and turned on the television. Cassie followed him in, sat down on the sofa beside him, and announced that the first game of the World Series would be starting in a few minutes. The World Series. He knew what that was, but he had never watched any of the games, and only once or twice had he watched any regular-season games, not because he didn’t like baseball, which in fact he enjoyed playing very much, but simply because he was always outside with his friends when the day games were on, and by the time the night games started he had already been put to bed. He recognized the names of some of the important players—Williams, Musial, Feller, Robinson, Berra—but he didn’t follow any particular team, didn’t read the sports pages in the Newark Star-Ledger or the Newark Evening News, and had no idea what it meant to be a fan. By contrast, the thirty-eight-year-old Cassie Burton was an ardent follower of the Brooklyn Dodgers, chiefly because Jackie Robinson played for them, number 42, the second baseman she always called my man Jackie, the first person with dark skin to wear a major league uniform, a fact that Ferguson had learned from both his mother and Cassie, but Cassie had more to say on the subject because she was a person with dark skin herself, a woman who had spent the first eighteen years of her life in Georgia and spoke with a heavy southern accent, which Ferguson found both strange and marvelous, so languid in its musicality that he never tired of listening to Cassie talk. The Dodgers weren’t in it this year, she told him, they had been beaten out by the Giants, but the Giants were a local team as well, and therefore she was rooting for them to win the Series. They had some good colored players, she said (that was the word she used, colored, even though Ferguson’s mother had instructed him to say the word Negro when talking about people with black or brown skin, and how odd it was, he thought, that a Negro should not say Negro but colored, which proved—yet again—just how confounding the world could be), but in spite of the presence of Willie Mays and Hank Thompson and Monte Irvin on the Giants’ roster, no one was giving them a chance against the Cleveland Indians, who had set a record for the most wins by an American League team. We’ll see about that, Cassie said, not willing to concede anything to the oddsmakers, and then she and Ferguson settled in to watch the broadcast from the Polo Grounds, which started out badly when Cleveland scored twice in the top of the first inning, but the Giants got those runs back in the bottom of the third, and then the game evolved into one of those tense, well-pitched struggles (Maglie versus Lemon) in which no one does much of anything and all can hinge on a single at-bat, which elevates the importance and drama of every pitch as the game wears on. Four consecutive innings with no one crossing the plate for either team, and then, suddenly, in the top of the eighth, the Indians put two runners on base, and up stepped Vic Wertz, a power-hitting left-handed batter, who tore into a fastball from Giants’ reliever Don Liddle and sent it flying deep to center field, so deep that Ferguson thought it was a sure home run, but he was still a novice at that point and didn’t know that the Polo Grounds was an oddly configured ballpark, with the deepest center field in all of baseball, 483 feet from home plate to the fence, which meant that Wertz’s monumental fly ball, which would have been a home run anywhere else, was not going to make it to the bleachers, but still, it was a thunderous blast, and there was every certainty it would sail over the head of the Giants’ center fielder and bounce all the way to the wall, good enough for a triple, perhaps even an inside-the-park home run, which would give the Indians at least two if not three more runs, but then Ferguson saw something that defied all probability, a feat of athletic prowess that dwarfed every other human accomplishment he had witnessed in his short life, for there was the young Willie Mays running after the ball with his back turned to the infield, running in a way Ferguson had never seen a man run, sprinting from the second the ball left Wertz’s bat, as if the sound of the ball colliding with the wood had told him exactly where the ball was going to land, Willie Mays not looking up or back as he sprinted toward the ball, knowing where the ball was throughout its entire trajectory even if he couldn’t see it, as if he had eyes in the back of his head, and then the ball reached the top of its arc and was descending to a spot some 440 feet from home plate, and there was Willie Mays extending his arms in front of him, and there was the ball coming down over his left shoulder and landing in the pocket of his open glove. The moment Mays caught the ball, Cassie jumped up from the sofa and started shrieking, Hot damn! Hot damn! Hot damn!, but there was more to the play than just the catch, for the instant the men on base had seen the ball leave Wertz’s bat, they had started running, running with the conviction that they were going to score, that they had to score because no center fielder could possibly catch such a ball, and so right after Mays caught the ball, he spun around and threw it to the infield, an impossibly long throw that was thrown so hard that he lost his cap and fell to the ground after the ball left his hand, and not only was Wertz out, but the lead runner was prevented from scoring on the fly ball. The score was still tied. It seemed inevitable that the Giants would win in the bottom of the eighth or ninth, but they didn’t. The game went into extra innings. Marv Grissom, the new relief pitcher for the Giants, held the Indians scoreless in the top of the tenth, and then the Giants put two men on in the bottom of the inning, prompting manager Leo Durocher to send in Dusty Rhodes as a pinch hitter. What a good-sounding name that was, Ferguson said to himself, Dusty Rhodes, which was almost like calling someone Wet Sidewalks or Snowy Streets, but when Cassie saw the thick-browed Alabaman take his warm-up swings, she said: Look at that old cracker with the stubble on his chin. If he ain’t drunk, Archie, then I’m the queen of England. Drunk or not, Rhodes’s eyesight was in excellent form that day, and a split second after the arm-weary Bob Lemon delivered a not-so-fast fastball over the middle of the plate, Rhodes turned on it and pulled it over the right-field wall. Game over. Giants 5, Indians 2. Cassie whooped. Ferguson whooped. They hugged, they jumped up and down, they danced around the room together, and from that day forth, baseball was Ferguson’s game.

  The Giants went on to sweep the Indians by winning the second, third, and fourth games as well, a miraculous upset that brought much happiness to the seven-year-old Ferguson, but no one was happier with the results of the 1954 World Series than Uncle Lew. His father’s oldest brother had suffered his ups and downs as a gambler over the years, consistently losing more than he won but winning just enough to keep himself from drowning, and now, with the smart money all on Cleveland, it would have made sense for him to follow the herd, but the Giants were his team, he had been pulling for them through good seasons and bad since the early twenties, and for once he decided to ignore the odds and bet with his heart rather than his brain. Not only did he put his money on the underdogs but he wagered they would win four in a row, a hunch so preposterous and delusional that his bookie gave him odds of 300 to 1, which meant that for the modest sum of two hundred dollars, the sharp-dressing Lew Ferguson walked off with a pot of gold, sixty grand, an enormous amount back in those days, a fortune. The haul was so spectacular, so startling in its ramifications, that Uncle Lew and Aunt Millie invited everyone to their house for a party, a celebratory blowout with champagne, lobster, and thick porterhouse steaks that featured a viewing of Mil
lie’s new mink coat and a spin around the block in Lew’s new white Cadillac. Ferguson was out of sorts that day (Francie wasn’t there, his stomach hurt, and his other cousins barely talked to him), but he assumed that everyone else was having a good time. After the festivities ended, however, as he and his parents were on their way home in the blue car, he was caught by surprise when his mother started bad-mouthing Uncle Lew to his father. He couldn’t follow everything she said, but the anger in her voice was unusually harsh, a bitter harangue that seemed to have something to do with his uncle owing his father money, and how dare Lew splurge on Cadillacs and mink coats before paying his father back. His father took it calmly at first, but then he raised his voice, which was something that almost never happened, and suddenly he was barking at Ferguson’s mother to stop, telling her that Lew didn’t owe him anything, that it was his brother’s money and he could do anything he goddamned pleased with it. Ferguson knew his parents sometimes argued (he could hear their voices through the wall of their bedroom), but this was the first time they had fought a battle in front of him, and because it was the first time, he couldn’t help feeling that something fundamental about the world had changed.

  Just after Thanksgiving the following year, his father’s warehouse was emptied out in a nighttime burglary. The warehouse was the one-story cinder-block building that stood behind 3 Brothers Home World, and Ferguson had visited it several times over the years, a vast, dank-smelling room with row upon row of cardboard boxes containing televisions, refrigerators, washing machines, and all the other things the brothers sold in their store. The stuff on display in the showrooms was merely for the customers to look at, but whenever someone wanted to buy something, it would be taken out of the warehouse by a man named Ed, a big fellow with a mermaid tattooed onto his right forearm who had served on an aircraft carrier during the war. If it was a small thing like a toaster or a lamp or a coffeepot, Ed would hand it to the customer, who could drive it home in his or her own car, but if it was a big thing like a washing machine or a refrigerator, Ed and another large-muscled vet named Phil would load it into the back of the delivery truck and drive it to the customer’s house. That was how business was conducted at 3 Brothers Home World, and Ferguson was familiar with the system, old enough to understand that the warehouse was the heart of the operation, and so when his mother woke him up on the Sunday morning after Thanksgiving and told him that the warehouse had been robbed, he immediately grasped the dreadful significance of the crime. An empty warehouse meant no business; no business meant no money; no money meant trouble: the poorhouse! starvation! death! His mother pointed out that the situation wasn’t quite that desperate because all the stolen goods were insured, but yes, it was a tough blow, especially with the Christmas shopping season about to begin, and since it would probably be weeks or months before the insurance company paid up, the store wouldn’t be able to survive without an emergency loan from the bank. Meanwhile, his father was in Newark talking to the police, she said, and because every article had a serial number on it, maybe there was a chance, a small chance, that the robbers would be hunted down and caught.

  Time passed, and no robbers were found, but his father managed to get the loan from the bank, which meant that Ferguson and his family were spared the dishonor of having to relocate to the poorhouse. Life went on, then, more or less as it had been going for the past several years, but Ferguson sensed a new atmosphere in the household, something grim and sullen and mysterious hovering in the air around him. It took a while before he could identify the source of that barometric shift, but by observing his mother and father whenever he was with them, both singly and in tandem, he concluded that his mother was essentially the same, still full of stories about her work at the studio, still producing her daily quotient of smiles and laughter, still looking him directly in the eye whenever she spoke to him, still up for fierce games of ping-pong in the winterized back porch, still listening to him intently whenever he came to her with a problem. It was his father who was different, his normally untalkative father who now said almost nothing at the breakfast table in the morning, who seemed distracted and barely present, as if his mind were concentrating on some dark, grievous thing he wasn’t willing to share with anyone. Sometime after the beginning of the new year, when 1955 had turned into 1956, Ferguson summoned up the courage to approach his mother and ask her what was wrong, to explain why his father looked so sad and distant. It was the burglary, she said, the burglary was eating him alive, and the more he thought about it, the less he could think about anything else. Ferguson didn’t understand. The warehouse had been broken into six or seven weeks ago, the insurance company was going to pay for the lost goods, the bank had come through with the loan, and the store was still on its feet. Why would his father worry when there was nothing to worry about? He saw his mother hesitate, as if struggling to decide whether to take him into her confidence, not sure if he was old enough to handle the facts of the story, doubt flickering in her eyes for no more than an instant, but palpable for all that, and then, as she stroked his head and studied his not-yet-nine-year-old face, she took the plunge, opening up to him in a way she had never done before, and let him in on the secret that was tearing his father apart. The police and the insurance company were still working on the case, she said, and they had both come to the conclusion that it was an inside job, meaning the burglary had not been committed by strangers but by someone who worked at the store. Ferguson, who knew everyone on the staff of 3 Brothers Home World, from the warehouse men Ed and Phil to the bookkeeper Adelle Rosen to the repairman Charlie Sykes to the janitor Bob Dawkins, felt the muscles in his stomach clench into a small fist of pain. It wasn’t possible that any of those good people could have done such an evil thing to his father, not a single one of them was capable of such treachery, and therefore the police and the insurance company must be wrong. No, Archie, his mother said, I don’t think they’re wrong. But the person who did it wasn’t any of the people you just mentioned.

  What did she mean by that? Ferguson wondered. The only other people connected to the store were Uncle Lew and Uncle Arnold, his father’s brothers, and brothers didn’t rob one another, did they? Things like that simply didn’t happen.

  Your father had a terrible decision to make, his mother said. Either drop the charges and the insurance claim or send Arnold to prison. What do you think he did?

  He dropped the charges and didn’t send Arnold to prison.

  Of course not. He never would have dreamed of it. But you understand now why he’s been so upset.

  A week after Ferguson had this conversation with his mother, she told him that Uncle Arnold and Aunt Joan were moving to Los Angeles. She would miss Joan, his mother said, but it was probably better this way, since the damage that had been done was beyond repair. Two months after Arnold and Joan left for California, Uncle Lew smashed up his white Cadillac on the Garden State Parkway and died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital, and before anyone could comprehend how swiftly the gods accomplished their work when they had nothing better to do, the Ferguson clan had been blown to bits.

  1.2

  When Ferguson was six, his mother told the story of how she had nearly lost him. Not lost in the sense of not knowing where he was but lost in the sense of being dead, of exiting this world and floating up to heaven as a bodiless spirit. He wasn’t yet a year and a half old, she said, and one night he began running a fever, a low fever that rapidly shot up to a high fever, just over 106, an alarming temperature even for a small child, and so she and his father bundled him up and drove him to the hospital, where he started going into convulsions, which easily could have done him in, for even the doctor who removed his tonsils that night said it was touch-and-go, meaning that he couldn’t be certain whether Ferguson would live or die, that it was all in God’s hands now, and his mother was so scared, she told him, so horribly scared she would lose her little boy that she nearly went out of her mind.