It was a strange time, then, unconnected to anything he had known in the past, utterly separate from the way things would be for him after they moved into their apartment, a curious interregnum, as his grandfather put it, a short span of hollowed-out time in which he spent every waking moment with his mother, the two beaten comrades who trekked up and down the West Side looking at apartments together, conferring about the pluses and minuses of each place, mutually deciding that the one on Central Park West would be just about ideal for them, and then his mother’s surprising declaration that the house in Millburn was being sold with the furniture, all the furniture, and that they would be starting again from zero, just the two of them, so after they found the apartment they spent their days shopping for furniture, looking at beds and tables and lamps and rugs, never buying anything unless they both agreed on it, and one afternoon, as they were examining chairs and sofas at Macy’s, the bow-tied clerk looked down at Ferguson and said to his mother, Why isn’t this little boy in school?, to which his mother replied, with a hard stare into the nosy man’s face: None of your business. That was the best moment of those strange two months, or one of the best moments, unforgettable because of the sudden feeling of happiness that rose up in him when his mother said those words, happier than at any time in weeks, and the sense of solidarity those words implied, the two of them against the world, struggling to put themselves together again, and none of your business was the credo of that double effort, a sign of how much they were depending on each other now. After shopping for furniture, they would go to the movies, escaping the cold winter streets for a couple of hours in the dark, watching whatever happened to be playing just then, always in the balcony because his mother could smoke up there, Chesterfields, one Chesterfield after another as they sat through movies with Alan Ladd, Marilyn Monroe, Kirk Douglas, Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, and William Holden, Westerns, musicals, science fiction, it didn’t matter what was showing that day, they would walk in blindly and hope for the best from Drum Beat, Vera Cruz, There’s No Business Like Show Business, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Bad Day at Black Rock, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, and Young at Heart, and once, just before the strange two months came to an end, the woman in the glass booth who sold them their tickets asked his mother why the little boy wasn’t in school, and his mother answered: Butt out, lady. Just give me my change.
1.4
First, there was the apartment in Newark, about which he remembered nothing, and then there was the house in Maplewood that his parents bought when he was three, and now, six years later, they were moving again, to a much larger house on the other side of town. Ferguson couldn’t understand it. The house they had been living in was a perfectly good house, a more than adequate house for a family with just three people in it, and why would his parents want to go to the trouble of packing up all their things to move such a short distance—especially when they didn’t have to? It would have made sense if they were going to another city or another state, as Uncle Lew and Aunt Millie had done four years ago when they’d moved to Los Angeles, or as Uncle Arnold and Aunt Joan had done the next year when they’d moved to California as well, but why bother to change houses when they weren’t even going to another town?
Because they could afford it, his mother said. His father’s business was doing well, and they were in a position to live on a grander scale now. The words grander scale made Ferguson think of an eighteenth-century European palace, a marble hall filled with dukes and duchesses in white powdered wigs, two dozen ladies and gentlemen dressed in opulent silk costumes standing around with lace hankies and laughing at one another’s jokes. Then, as he embellished the scene a bit further, he tried to imagine his parents in that crowd, but the costumes made them look ridiculous, laughable, grotesque. He said: Just because we can afford something doesn’t mean we should buy it. I like our house and think we should stay. If we have more money than we need, then we should give it to someone who needs it more than we do. A starving person, a crippled old man, someone with no money at all. Spending it on ourselves isn’t right. It’s selfish.
Don’t be difficult, Archie, his mother replied. Your father works harder than any two men in this town. He deserves every penny he’s made, and if he wants to show off a little with a new house, that’s his business.
I don’t like show-offs, Ferguson said. It’s not a good way to act.
Well, like it or not, little man, we’re moving, and I’m sure you’ll be happy about it once we settle in. A bigger room, a bigger backyard, and a finished basement. We’ll put a ping-pong table down there, and then we’ll see if you can finally get good enough to beat me.
But we already play ping-pong in the backyard.
When it isn’t too cold outside. And just think, Archie, in the new house we won’t be bothered by the wind.
He knew that some of the family’s money came from his mother’s work as a portrait photographer, but a much larger share of it, nearly all of it in fact, was produced by his father’s business, a chain of three appliance stores called Ferguson’s, one of them in Union, another in Westfield, and the third in Livingston. Long ago, there had been a store in Newark called 3 Brothers Home World, but that was gone now, sold off when Ferguson was three and a half or four, and if not for the framed black-and-white photograph that hung on a wall in the den, the 1941 snapshot that showed his smiling father standing between his two smiling uncles in front of 3 Brothers Home World on the day it opened for business, all memories of that store would have been expunged from his mind forever. It was unclear to him why his father no longer worked with his brothers, and on top of that there was the even greater puzzle of why Uncle Lew and Uncle Arnold had both left New Jersey to start new lives in California (his father’s words). Six or seven months ago, in a fit of longing for his absent cousin Francie, he had asked his mother to explain their reasons for moving so far away, but she had simply said, Your father bought them out, which wasn’t much of an answer, at least not one he could understand. Now, with this unpleasant development about a new and bigger house, Ferguson was beginning to grasp something that had previously escaped his attention. His father was rich. He had more money than he knew what to do with, and from the look of how things seemed to be going, that could only mean he was becoming richer and richer by the day.
This was both a good thing and a bad thing, Ferguson decided. Good because money was a necessary evil, as his grandmother had once told him, and since everyone needed money in order to live, it was surely better to have too much of it than too little. On the other hand, in order to earn too much, a person had to devote an excessive amount of time to the pursuit of money, far more time than was necessary or reasonable, which happened to be the case with his father, who worked so hard at running his empire of appliance stores that the hours he spent at home had been diminishing steadily for years, so much so that Ferguson rarely saw him anymore, since his father had fallen into the habit of leaving the house at six-thirty, so early in the morning that he was inevitably gone before Ferguson had woken up, and because each store stayed open late two nights a week, Monday and Thursday in Union, Tuesday and Friday in Westfield, Wednesday and Saturday in Livingston, there were many nights when his father failed to come home for dinner, returning to the house at ten or ten-thirty, a good hour after Ferguson had been put to bed. The only day when he could count on seeing his father was therefore Sunday, but Sundays were complicated as well, with several hours in the late morning and early afternoon given over to tennis, and that meant tagging along with his parents to the town courts and waiting around until his mother and father had played a set together before he got a chance to bat the ball around with his mother while his father played his weekly match with Sam Brownstein, his tennis friend since boyhood. Ferguson didn’t despise tennis, but he found it boring compared to baseball and football, which were the best games as far as he was concerned, and even ping-pong trumped tennis when it came to sports that involved nets and bouncing balls, so it was always with mixed feel
ings that he trudged off to the outdoor courts in spring, summer, and fall, and every Saturday night he would climb into bed hoping for rain in the morning.
When it didn’t rain, tennis was followed by a drive to South Orange Village and lunch at Gruning’s, where Ferguson would scarf down a medium-rare hamburger and a bowl of mint-chip ice cream, a much-anticipated Sunday treat, not just because Gruning’s made the best hamburgers for miles around and produced their own ice cream but because it smelled so good in there, a mixture of warm coffee and grilling meat and the sugary emanations of manifold desserts, such good smells that Ferguson would dissolve in a kind of delirious contentment as he breathed them into his lungs, and then, once they were back in his father’s two-toned Oldsmobile sedan (gray and white), they would return to the house in Maplewood to wash up and change their clothes. On a typical Sunday, one of four things would happen after that. They would stay at home and putter around, as his mother called it, which generally meant that Ferguson would follow his father from room to room as he repaired things that needed mending, broken toilet flushers, faulty electrical connections, squeaking doors, while his mother sat on the sofa reading Life magazine or went downstairs into her basement darkroom and developed pictures. A second option was going to the movies, something he and his mother enjoyed above all other Sunday pastimes, but his father was often reluctant to indulge their cinematic fervor, since movies were of scant interest to him, as were all other forms of what he called sit-down entertainment (plays, concerts, musicals), as if being trapped in a chair for a couple of hours and passively taking in a bunch of silly make-believe was one of life’s worst tortures, but his mother usually won the argument by threatening to go without him, and so the three Fergusons would climb back into the car and drive off to see the latest Jimmy Stewart Western or Martin-and-Lewis comedy (Newark’s own Jerry Lewis!), and it never failed to astonish Ferguson how quickly his father would fall asleep in the darkness of the theater, the oblivions that would engulf him even as the opening credits were rolling across the screen, head tilted back, lips slightly parted, drowned in the deepest slumber as guns blasted, music swelled, and a hundred dishes crashed to the floor. Since Ferguson always sat between his parents, he would tap his mother on the arm whenever his father drifted off like that, and once he had her attention, he would point to his father by jerking back his thumb, as if to say, Look, he’s at it again, and depending on his mother’s mood, she would either nod her head and smile or shake her head and frown, sometimes emitting a brief, muffled laugh and sometimes exhaling a wordless mmmm. By the time Ferguson was eight, his father’s dark-theater swoons had become so common that his mother began referring to their Sunday film excursions as the two-hour rest cure. No longer did she ask her husband if he wanted to go to the movies. Instead, she would say to him: How about a knockout pill, Stanley, so you can catch up on your sleep? Ferguson always laughed when she delivered that line. Sometimes his father laughed along with him, but most of the time he didn’t.
When they weren’t puttering around or going to the movies, Sunday afternoons were spent paying visits to other people or having other people pay visits to them. With the rest of the Fergusons on the other side of the country now, there were no more family get-togethers in New Jersey, but there were several friends who lived nearby, that is, friends of Ferguson’s parents, in particular his mother’s childhood friend from Brooklyn, Nancy Solomon, who lived in West Orange and did the oil paintings for Roseland Photo, and his father’s childhood friend from Newark, Sam Brownstein, who lived in Maplewood and played tennis with his father every Sunday morning, and on Sunday afternoons Ferguson and his parents sometimes visited Brownstein and his wife, Peggy, who had three children, a girl and two boys, all of whom were older than Ferguson by at least four years, and sometimes the Brownsteins came to visit them at their house, which was soon to be their house no more, and when it wasn’t the Brownsteins it tended to be the Solomons, Nancy and her husband, Max, who had two boys, Stewie and Ralph, both of whom were younger than Ferguson by at least three years, which made these back-and-forth New Jersey visits with the Brownsteins and the Solomons something of a trial for Ferguson, who was too old to enjoy playing with the Solomon children and too young to enjoy playing with the Brownstein children, who in fact were too old to be considered children anymore, and so Ferguson often found himself stranded in the middle at these gatherings, not quite certain where he should go or what he should do, since he quickly lost patience with the antics of the three- and six-year-old Stewie and Ralph and was out of his depth with the talk that went on between the fifteen- and seventeen-year-old Brownstein boys, which left him with no recourse but to spend the Brownstein visits in the company of thirteen-year-old Anna Brownstein, who taught him how to play gin rummy and a board game called Careers, but she was already endowed with breasts and had a metallurgy works clamped onto her teeth, which made it hard for him to look at her, since bits of food were perpetually lodged in the silvery network of her braces, tiny particles of unchewed tomatoes, soggy bread crusts, disintegrating blobs of chopped meat, and whenever she smiled, which was often, Ferguson was gripped by a sudden, involuntary rush of queasiness and had to turn his head away.
Still, now that they were on the verge of moving, which had led to important new information about his father (the problem of too much money, too much time spent on making money, so much time that his father had become all but invisible to him for six days of the week, which Ferguson now understood was something he resented, or at least felt bad about, or that frustrated him, or made him angry, or some other word he hadn’t thought of yet), and with the question of his father now on his mind, Ferguson found it instructive to look back on those tedious visits with the Brownsteins and Solomons as a way of studying manhood in action, of comparing his father’s behavior with that of Sam Brownstein and Max Solomon. If the size of the houses they lived in was any measure of how much money they earned, then his father was richer than both of them, for even their house, the Ferguson house, the one that was supposedly too small and needed to be replaced by something better, was larger and more attractive than the Brownstein and Solomon houses. His father drove a 1955 Oldsmobile and was talking about trading it in for a new Cadillac in September, while Sam Brownstein drove a 1952 Rambler and Max Solomon a 1950 Chevrolet. Solomon was a claims adjuster for an insurance company (whatever that meant, since Ferguson had no idea what a claims adjuster did), and Brownstein owned a sporting goods store in downtown Newark, not three stores as Ferguson’s father did but one store, which nevertheless brought in enough money for him to support his wife and three children, whereas Ferguson’s father’s three stores supported just one child and a wife, who happened to work as well, which Peggy Brownstein did not. Like Ferguson’s father, Brownstein and Solomon went to work every day in order to earn money, but neither one of them left the house at six-thirty in the morning or worked so late into the night that his children were already in bed by the time he came home. The quiet, stolid Max Solomon, who had been wounded as a soldier in the Pacific and walked with a slight limp, and the loud-mouthed, expansive Sam Brownstein, brimming with jokes and back-slapping bonhomie, each so different from the other in their outward bearing and yet, at their core, different from Ferguson’s father in remarkably similar ways, for both of those men worked in order to live, whereas his father seemed to live in order to work, which meant that his parents’ friends were defined more by their enthusiasms than their burdens or responsibilities, Solomon by his passion for classical music (vast record collection, hand-built hi-fi system), Brownstein by his love of sport in all of its many incarnations, from basketball to horse racing, from track and field to boxing, but the only thing Ferguson’s father cared about beyond his work was tennis, which was a meager, restrictive sort of hobby, Ferguson felt, and whenever Brownstein switched on the television to a baseball game or football game during one of their Sunday visits, the boys and men in both families would gather in the living room to watch, and nine tim
es out of eleven, just as he did at the movies, his father would struggle to keep his eyes open, struggle for five or ten or fifteen minutes, and then he would lose the struggle and fall asleep.
On other Sundays, there were the family visits with the Adlers, both in New York and Maplewood, which provided Ferguson with additional subjects to examine in his laboratory of masculine behavior, in particular his grandfather and Aunt Mildred’s husband, Donald Marx, although perhaps his grandfather didn’t count, since he came from an older generation and was so unlike Ferguson’s father that it felt odd even to put their names in the same sentence. Sixty-three years old and still going strong, still working at his real estate business and still making money, but not as much as his father, Ferguson thought, since the apartment on West Fifty-eighth Street was rather cramped, with a minuscule kitchen and a living room only half the size of the one in Maplewood, and the car his grandfather drove, an odd purple Plymouth with push-button gear controls, looked like a circus car next to his father’s sleek Oldsmobile sedan. Yes, there was something buffoonish about Benjy Adler, Ferguson supposed, with his card tricks and handshake buzzers and high wheezing laugh, but his grandson loved him just the same, loved him for the way he seemed to love being alive, and whenever he was in one of his storytelling moods, the narratives were delivered so swiftly and pungently that the world seemed to collapse into a pure outrush of language, funny stories mostly, stories about Adlers of the past and sundry close and distant relatives, his grandfather’s mother’s cousin, for example, a woman with the delicious name of Fagela Flegelman, who was apparently so brilliant that she had mastered nine foreign languages before she turned twenty, and when her family left Poland and arrived in New York in 1891, the officials at Ellis Island were so impressed by her linguistic skills that they hired her on the spot, and for the next thirty-plus years Fagela Flegelman worked as an interpreter for the Department of Immigration, interviewing thousands upon thousands of fresh-off-the-boat future Americans until the facility closed in 1924. A long pause, followed by one of his grandfather’s enigmatic grins, and then another story about Fagela Flegelman’s four husbands and how she outlived them all, ending up as a rich widow in Paris with an apartment on the Champs-Élysées. Could such stories have been true? Did it matter if they were true?