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  There was also the kneeling Indian girl on the box of Land O’Lakes butter, the adolescent beauty with her long black braids and the two colorful feathers sticking out of her beaded headband, but the problem with this potential rival to the White Rock nymph was that she was fully clothed, which greatly lessened her allure, not to speak of the further problem of her elbows, which were thrust out stiffly from her sides because she was holding up a box of Land O’Lakes butter, identical to the one sitting in front of Ferguson, the same box but smaller, with the same picture of the Indian girl holding up another, smaller box of Land O’Lakes butter, which was an intriguing if perplexing notion, Ferguson felt, an infinite regress of ever-shrinking Indian girls holding up ever-shrinking boxes of butter, which was similar to the effect produced by the Quaker Oats box, with the smiling Quaker in the black hat receding to some distant vanishing point beyond the grasp of human vision, a world inside a world, which was inside another world, which was inside another world, which was inside another world, until the world had been reduced to the size of a single atom and yet was still somehow managing to grow smaller. Interesting in its way, but hardly the stuff to inspire dreams, so the Indian butter maiden continued to run a distant second to the White Rock princess. Not long after he turned twelve, however, Ferguson was let in on a secret. He had gone down the block to visit his friend Bobby George, and as the two boys sat in the kitchen eating tuna fish sandwiches, in walked Bobby’s fourteen-year-old brother, Carl, a tall, chunky fellow with a good head for math and a face spotted with pimples, who sometimes bullied his younger brother and sometimes talked to him as an almost-equal, but on that rainy Saturday afternoon in mid-March the unpredictable Carl was in a generous mood, and as the boys sat at the table chewing their sandwiches and drinking their milk, he told them that he had made an astonishing discovery. Without mentioning what the discovery was, he opened the refrigerator and pulled out a box of Land O’Lakes butter, extracted a pair of scissors and a roll of Scotch tape from a drawer by the sink, and then carried the three items over to the table. Look at this, he said, and the two boys watched as he cut apart the six-paneled box and set aside the two large panels with the picture of the Indian girl on them. He cut into one of the pictures, removing the girl’s knees and the bare skin just above the knees, which were sticking out from under the edge of her skirt, and then taped the knees over the butter box in the other picture, and lo and behold, the knees had been turned into breasts, a pair of large, naked breasts, each one with a red dot in the center of it that for all the world could have passed as a perfectly drawn nipple. The prim Lakota squaw had been transformed into a luscious sexpot, and as Carl grinned and Bobby squealed with laughter, Ferguson looked on without making a sound. What a clever bit of business, he thought. A few swipes from the scissors, a single strip of transparent tape, and the butter girl had been undressed.

  There were photographs of naked women in National Geographic, a magazine Bobby’s parents subscribed to and for some reason never threw away, and every so often during the spring of 1959, Ferguson and Bobby would come home from school and head straight for the Georges’ garage, where they would comb through stacks of the yellow magazines searching for images of bare-breasted women, anthropological specimens from primitive tribes in Africa and South America, the black-skinned and brown-skinned women from warm-weather places who walked around with little or no clothing on their bodies and weren’t ashamed to be seen like that, who displayed their breasts with the same indifference an American woman would feel in exposing her hands or ears. The photographs were distinctly unerotic, and except for a rare young beauty who popped up in every seventh or tenth issue, most of the women were not attractive to Ferguson’s eyes, but still, it was exciting and instructive to look at those pictures, which if nothing else demonstrated the infinite variety of the female form, in particular the multitudinous differences to be found in the size and shape of breasts, from the large to the small and everything in between, from buoyant, surging breasts to flattened, sagging breasts, from proud breasts to defeated breasts, from symmetrical breasts to oddly matched breasts, from laughing breasts to crying breasts, from the thinned-out dugs of ancient crones to the bulging enormities of nursing mothers. Bobby snickered a lot during these foraging expeditions through the pages of National Geographic, laughing to cover up the embarrassment he felt for wanting to look at what he called dirty pictures, but Ferguson never thought of the pictures as dirty and never felt embarrassed by his desire to look at them. Breasts were important because they were the most prominent and visible feature that distinguished women from men, and women were a subject of great interest to him now, for even if he was still just a prepubescent boy of twelve, enough was stirring inside him for Ferguson to know that the days of his boyhood were numbered.

  * * *

  CIRCUMSTANCES HAD CHANGED. The warehouse robbery of November 1955, followed by the car crash of February 1956, had removed both of Ferguson’s uncles from the family circle. The disgraced Uncle Arnold now lived in far-off California, the deceased Uncle Lew had left this earth for good, and 3 Brothers Home World was no more. For the better part of a year, his father had struggled to keep the business going, but the police never managed to recover the stolen appliances, and because he had forfeited his claim to the insurance money by refusing to press charges against his brother, the losses incurred by this act of mercy were too great to be overcome. Rather than go further into debt, he paid off the emergency loan from the bank with help from Ferguson’s grandfather and sold out, unburdening himself of the building, the warehouse, and whatever stock remained, fleeing the ghosts of his brothers and the ruined enterprise that had been his life for more than twenty years. The building was still there, of course, standing in its old spot on Springfield Avenue, but now it was called Newman’s Discount Furniture.

  Ferguson’s father returned his father-in-law’s loan with proceeds from the sale and then opened up a new, significantly smaller store in Montclair, Stanley’s TV & Radio. From Ferguson’s point of view, this was a much better arrangement than the old one, for his father’s new business happened to be on the same block as Roseland Photo, and now it was possible for him to drop in on either one of his parents anytime he wished. Stanley’s TV & Radio was cramped, yes, but it had a nice, cozy feel to it, and Ferguson enjoyed visiting his father there after school, sitting down beside him at his workbench in the back room as his father repaired televisions, radios, and all manner of other things as well, taking apart and then putting back together dysfunctional toasters, fans, air conditioners, lamps, record players, blenders, electric juicers, and vacuum cleaners, for word had quickly spread that Ferguson’s father was a man who could fix anything, and as the young clerk Mike Antonelli stood in the front room of the shop selling radios and televisions to Montclair residents, Stanley Ferguson spent most of his time in the back, tinkering in silence, patiently dissecting broken machines in order to make them work again. Ferguson understood that something in his father had been crushed by Arnold’s betrayal, that this reduced incarnation of his former business represented a profound personal defeat for him, and yet something in him had also changed for the better, and the principal beneficiaries of that change were his wife and son. Ferguson’s parents argued far less than they had before. The tension in the household had dissipated, in fact often seemed to have disappeared altogether, and Ferguson found it reassuring that his mother and father now had lunch together every day, just the two of them in their corner booth at Al’s Diner, and again and again, in a variety of different ways, and yet always in the same way, Ferguson’s mother would make remarks to him that essentially meant this: Your father is a good man, Archie, the best man anywhere. A good man, and a still largely silent man, but now that he had given up his old dream of becoming the next Rockefeller, Ferguson felt more comfortable in his presence. They could talk a little now, and most of the time Ferguson felt reasonably certain that his father was listening to him. And even when they didn’t talk, Fergus
on took pleasure in sitting beside his father at the workbench after school, doing his homework at one end of the table as his father went about his business at the other, slowly taking apart yet another damaged machine and putting it back together.

  Money was less plentiful than it had been in the days of 3 Brothers Home World. Instead of two cars, Ferguson’s parents now owned one car—his mother’s 1954 powder-blue Pontiac—and a red Chevrolet delivery van with the name of his father’s business printed on each of the side doors. In the past, his parents had sometimes gone away together on weekend excursions, mostly to the Catskills for a couple of days of tennis and dancing at Grossinger’s or the Concord, but they had stopped doing that after Stanley’s TV & Radio opened in 1957. In 1958, when Ferguson was in need of a new baseball glove, his father drove him all the way to Sam Brownstein’s store in downtown Newark to buy one at cost instead of giving him the money to buy the same glove at Gallagher’s, the sporting goods shop in Montclair. The difference amounted to twelve and a half dollars, an even twenty as opposed to thirty-two-fifty, not a large difference in the grand scheme of things but a crucial savings nevertheless, enough to alert Ferguson to the fact that life had changed and that from now on he would have to think carefully before he asked his parents for anything beyond what was strictly essential. Not long after that, Cassie Burton stopped working for them, and in much the same way that his mother and Aunt Mildred had wept in each other’s arms at the airport in 1952, Cassie and his mother both wept on the morning Cassie was told the family could no longer afford to keep her. Yesterday, it had been steaks, today it was hamburgers. The family had slipped a notch or two, but who in his right mind would lose any sleep over a little belt-tightening? A book from the public library was the same book you bought in a store, tennis was still tennis whether you played at the municipal courts or a private club, and steaks and hamburgers were cut from the same cow, and even if steaks were supposed to represent the pinnacle of the good life, the truth was that Ferguson had always loved hamburgers, especially with ketchup on them—which was the same ketchup he had once smeared over the plump, medium-rare sirloins his father had liked so much.

  Sunday was still the best day of the week, particularly when it was a Sunday that didn’t include visits to or from other people, a day that Ferguson could spend alone with his parents, and now that he was bigger and stronger and had turned into an agile, sports-crazed twelve-year-old, he relished the morning tennis matches with his parents, the singles matches with his father, the two-against-one matches between mother-son and husband/father, the doubles matches that paired him with his father against Sam Brownstein and his younger son, and after tennis there was lunch at Al’s Diner, along with the inevitable chocolate milkshake, and after lunch there were the movies, and after the movies there was Chinese food at the Green Dragon in Glen Ridge or fried chicken at the Little House in Millburn or hot open turkey sandwiches at Pal’s Cabin in West Orange or pot roast and cheese blintzes at the Claremont Diner in Montclair, the crowded, inexpensive dining spots of the New Jersey suburbs, noisy and unsophisticated, perhaps, but the food was good, and it was Sunday night, and the three of them were together, and even if Ferguson was starting to pull away from his parents by then, that one day a week helped maintain the illusion that the gods could be merciful when they chose to be.

  * * *

  AUNT MILDRED AND Uncle Henry had failed to produce the Adler cousin he had longed for as a small boy. The reasons were unknown to him, whether sterility or infertility or a conscious refusal to add to the world’s population, but in spite of Ferguson’s disappointment, the no-cousin vacuum on the West Coast had ultimately worked to his advantage. Aunt Mildred might not have been close to her sister, but with no children of her own, and with no other nephews or nieces anywhere in sight, whatever maternal impulses she had in her were showered upon her one and only Archie. After her removal to California when Ferguson was five, she and Uncle Henry had returned to New York several times for extended summer visits, and even when she was back in Berkeley during the rest of the year, she kept in touch with her nephew by writing letters and occasionally calling him on the phone. Ferguson understood that there was something glacial about his aunt, that she could be harsh and opinionated and even rude with other people, but with him, her one and only Archie, she was another person, full of praise and good humor and curiosity about what her boy was doing and thinking and reading. From his earliest childhood, she had been in the habit of buying him gifts, an abundance of gifts that had usually come in the form of books and records, and now that he was older and his mental capacities had increased, the number of books and records she shipped to him from California had also increased. Perhaps she didn’t trust his mother and father to give him the proper intellectual guidance, perhaps she thought his parents were a couple of uneducated bourgeois nobodies, perhaps she believed it was her duty to rescue Ferguson from the wasteland of ignorance he dwelled in, thinking that she and she alone could offer him the help necessary to scale the exalted slopes of enlightenment. It was no doubt possible that she was (as he had once overheard his father say to his mother) an intellectual snob, but there was no arguing against the fact that, snob or not, she was a genuine intellectual, a person of vast erudition who earned her living as a university professor, and the works she exposed her nephew to were indeed a great blessing to him.

  No other boy in his circle of acquaintances had read what he had read, and because Aunt Mildred chose carefully for him, just as she had chosen carefully for her sister during the period of her confinement thirteen years earlier, Ferguson read the books she sent to him with an avidity that resembled physical hunger, for his aunt understood what books would satisfy the cravings of a rapidly developing boy as he moved from six years old to eight years old, from eight years old to ten years old, from ten years old to twelve years old—and beyond that to the end of high school. Fairy tales to start with, the Brothers Grimm and the many-colored books compiled by the Scotsman Lang, then the wondrous, fantastical novels by Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, and E. Nesbit, followed by Bulfinch’s retelling of Greek and Roman myths, a child’s version of The Odyssey, Charlotte’s Web, a book culled from The Thousand and One Nights and reassembled as The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, and then, some months after that, a six-hundred-page selection from the whole of The Thousand and One Nights, and the next year Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, horror and mystery stories by Poe, The Prince and the Pauper, Kidnapped, A Christmas Carol, Tom Sawyer, and A Study in Scarlet, and so strong was Ferguson’s response to the book by Conan Doyle that the present he received from Aunt Mildred for his eleventh birthday was an enormously fat, profusely illustrated edition of The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Those were some of the books, but there were the records as well, which were no less important to Ferguson than the books, and especially now, in the past two or three years, starting when he was nine or ten, they had been coming in at regular three- and four-month intervals. Jazz, classical music, folk music, rhythm and blues, and even some rock and roll. Again, as with the books, Aunt Mildred’s approach was a strictly pedagogical one, and she led Ferguson along by stages, knowing that Louis Armstrong had to come before Charlie Parker, who had to come before Miles Davis, that Tchaikovsky, Ravel, and Gershwin had to precede Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach, that the Weavers had to be listened to before Lead Belly, that Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter was a necessary first step before one graduated to Billie Holiday singing Strange Fruit. Much to his regret, Ferguson had discovered that he possessed not one jot of talent for playing music himself. He had tried the piano at seven and had quit in frustration a year later; he had tried the cornet at nine and had quit; he had tried the drums at ten and had quit. For some reason, he had trouble reading music, couldn’t fully absorb the symbols on the page, the empty and filled-in circles sitting on the lines or nestled between them, the flats and sharps, the key signatures, the treble clefs and bass clefs, the notations refused to go into him and become automatically r
ecognizable as letters and numbers once had, and therefore he was compelled to think about each note before he played it, which slowed his progress through the bars and measures of any given piece and, in effect, made it impossible for him to play anything. It was a sad defeat. His normally quick and efficient mind was handicapped when it came to decoding those recalcitrant marks, and rather than persist in beating his head against the wall, he had abandoned the struggle. A sad defeat because his love of music was so strong and he could hear it so well when others played it, for his ear was sensitive and finely tuned to the subtleties of composition and performance, but he was hopeless as a musician himself, an utter washout, which meant that he was now resigned to being a listener, an ardent, devoted listener, and his Aunt Mildred was clever enough to know how to feed that devotion, which surely counted as one of the essential reasons for being alive.

  That summer, on one of her visits back east with Uncle Henry, Aunt Mildred helped illuminate Ferguson on another matter of great concern to him, something unrelated to books or music but equally significant to his mind, if not more so. She had come out to Montclair to spend some days with her one and only and his parents, and when the two of them sat down to lunch together on the first afternoon (his mother and father were off at work, which meant that Ferguson and his aunt were alone in the house), he pointed to the bottle of White Rock seltzer water sitting on the table and asked her why the girl had wings sprouting from her back. He couldn’t understand it, he said. They weren’t angel wings or bird wings, which were the kinds of wings you might expect to see on a mythological creature, but fragile insect wings, the wings of a dragonfly or a butterfly, and he found that deeply perplexing.