He couldn’t help it. His mother was the only person he cared about or felt comfortable with, and everyone else grated on his nerves. The people in his family had their good points, he supposed, in that they all seemed to like him, but his grandfather was too loud, his grandmother was too quiet, Aunt Mildred was too bossy, Uncle Paul was too fond of listening to his own voice, Great-aunt Pearl was too smothering in her affections, cousin Betty was too brash, cousin Charlotte was too stupid, little cousin Eric was too rambunctious, little cousin Judy was too much of a crybaby, and the one relative he would have given anything to see again, his cousin Francie, was a college student in faraway California. As for his classmates at Hilliard, he had no real friends, only acquaintances, and even Dougie Hayes, the boy he saw more than anyone else, laughed at things that weren’t funny and never understood a joke when he heard one. Except for his mother, it was hard for Ferguson to attach himself to any of the people he knew, since he always felt alone when he was with them, although being alone with others was probably a little less terrible than being alone with himself, which invariably seemed to push his thoughts back to the same old obsessions, as with his constant begging of God to produce a miracle that would finally put his mind at rest, or, even more insistently, with the photograph in the Newark Star-Ledger that he wasn’t supposed to have looked at but did, studying it for three or four minutes while his mother left the room to fetch a pack of cigarettes, the picture with the caption that read The scorched remains of Stanley Ferguson, and there was his dead father in the burned-down building that had once been 3 Brothers Home World, his body stiff and black and no longer human, as if the fire had turned him into a mummy, a man with no face and no eyes and a mouth wide open as if locked in the middle of a scream, and that charred, mummified corpse had been put in a coffin and buried in the ground, and whenever Ferguson thought about his father now, that was the first thing he saw in his mind, the scorched remains of the black, half-incinerated body with the open mouth still screaming from the bowels of the earth.
It’s going to be a cold day, Archie. Remember to wear your scarf to school.
Morbid ruminations were among the not-good things that belonged to that rough year of being eight and turning nine, but there were some good things as well, even things that happened every day, such as the after-school television program that ran from four o’clock to five-thirty on Channel 11, ninety straight minutes (with commercial interruptions) of old Laurel and Hardy movies, which turned out to be the finest, funniest, most satisfying movies ever made. It was a new show that had been launched in the fall, and until Ferguson accidentally turned it on one afternoon in October, he had known nothing about that ancient comedy team, since Laurel and Hardy had been mostly forgotten by 1955, their films from the twenties and thirties were never shown in theaters anymore, and it was only because of television that they were starting to make a comeback among the little people of the greater metropolitan area. How Ferguson came to adore those two idiots, those grown men with the minds of six-year-olds, brimming with eagerness and goodwill and yet always quarreling and tormenting each other, always falling into the most improbable and dangerous predicaments, nearly drowned, nearly blown to bits, nearly brained into oblivion, and yet always managing to survive, hapless husbands, bumbling schemers, losers to the last, and yet in spite of all their punching and pinching and kicking, what good friends they were, bound together more tightly than any other pair in The Book of Terrestrial Life, each one an inseparable half of a single, two-part human organism. Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy. It pleased Ferguson immensely that those were the names of the real men who played the make-believe characters of Laurel and Hardy in the films, for Laurel and Hardy were always Laurel and Hardy no matter what circumstances they happened to find themselves in, whether they lived in America or another country, whether they lived in the past or the present, whether they were furniture movers or fishmongers or Christmas-tree salesman or soldiers or sailors or convicts or carpenters or street musicians or stable hands or prospectors in the Wild West, and the fact that they were always the same even when they were different seemed to make them more real than any other characters in movies, for if Laurel and Hardy were always Laurel and Hardy, Ferguson reasoned, that must have meant they were eternal.
They were his steadiest, most reliable companions all during that year and well into the next, Stanley and Oliver, a.k.a. Stan and Ollie, the thin one and the fat one, the feebleminded innocent and the puffed-up fool, who in the end was no less feebleminded than the first, and while it meant something to Ferguson that Laurel’s first name was the same as his father’s, it didn’t mean that much, and surely it had little or nothing to do with his growing fondness for his new friends, who in no time at all had become his best friends, if not his only friends. What he loved most about them were the bedrock elements that never varied from film to film, beginning with the Cuckoos theme song in the opening credits, which announced that the boys were back for another adventure and What would they think of next?, the familiar turns that never grew tiresome to him, Ollie’s tie twiddles and exasperated looks into the camera, Stan’s dumbfounded blinks and sudden tears, the gags that revolved around their bowler hats, the too-big one on Laurel’s head, the too-small one on Hardy’s head, the smashed-in hats and burning hats, the hats yanked down over the ears and the hats stomped underfoot, their propensity for falling down manholes and crashing through broken floorboards, for stepping into muddy bogs and neck-high puddles, their bad luck with automobiles, ladders, gas ovens, and electric sockets, Ollie’s blowhard gentility when talking to strangers, This is my friend Mr. Laurel, Stan’s nonsensical gift for igniting his thumb and puffing on nonexistent but functioning pipes, their out-of-control laughing jags, their penchant for breaking into spontaneous dance routines (both so light on their feet), their unanimity of purpose when confronting their adversaries, all bickering and discord forgotten as they pulled together to destroy a man’s house or wreck a man’s car, but also the variations on who they were and how their identities sometimes overlapped and even merged, as when Ollie rubbed Stan’s foot thinking it was his own foot and sighed with pleasure and relief, or the ingenious ways in which they sometimes duplicated themselves, as when big Stanley and big Oliver babysat their toddler sons, little Stan and little Ollie, who were miniature replicas of their fathers, since Laurel and Hardy played both sets of roles, or when Stan was married to a female Ollie and Ollie to a female Stan, or when they met their long-lost twin brothers, close friends whose names were of course Laurel and Hardy, or, best of all, when a blood transfusion went wrong at the end of a film and Stan wound up with Ollie’s mustache and voice and the smooth-faced Hardy collapsed into a Laurel crying fit.
Yes, they were ever so droll and inventive, and yes, Ferguson’s stomach sometimes ached from laughing so hard at their buffoonery, but why he found them laughable, and why his love for them began to flower beyond all reason, had less to do with their clownish antics than their persistence, with the fact that they reminded Ferguson of himself. Strip away the comic exaggerations and slapstick violence, and Laurel and Hardy’s struggles were no different from his own. They, too, blundered from one ill-conceived plan to the next, they, too, suffered through countless setbacks and frustrations, and whenever misfortune brought them to the snapping point, Hardy’s angers would become his angers, Laurel’s befuddlements would mirror his befuddlements, and the best thing about the botches they made for themselves was that Stan and Ollie were even more incompetent than he was, more stupid, more asinine, more helpless, and that was funny, so funny that he couldn’t stop laughing at them, even as he pitied them and embraced them as brothers, kindred spirits forever smacked down by the world and forever standing up to try again—by hatching another one of their harebrained plans, which, inevitably, would knock them to the ground once more.
Most of the time, he watched the films alone, sitting on the floor in the living room about a yard from the television set, which his mother and grandmoth
er both considered to be too close, since the rays emitted by the cathode tube would ruin his eyes, and whenever one of them caught him in that position, he would have to remove himself to the more distant sofa. On the days when his mother was still out working when he returned home from school, his grandmother would stay with him in the apartment until his mother came back from her daily duties (as the nursemaid put it in The Music Box, complaining to a policeman after Stan had planted his shoe in her rear end: He kicked me right in the middle of my daily duties), but Ferguson’s grandmother had no interest in Laurel and Hardy, her passion was for cleanliness and domestic order, and once she had given her grandson his post-school snack, generally two chocolate chip cookies and a glass of milk, but sometimes a plum or an orange or a stack of saltines that Ferguson would coat with dabs of grape jelly, he would go off to the living room to turn on his program and she would busy herself with scrubbing down kitchen counters or scouring off crud from the stove burners or cleaning the sinks and toilets in the two bathrooms, a dedicated destroyer of filth and germs who never grumbled about her daughter’s shortcomings as a housekeeper but nevertheless sighed often as she went about these tasks, no doubt chagrined that her own flesh and blood did not adhere to her rigorous standards of sanitary living. On the days when Ferguson’s mother was already at home when he returned from school, his grandmother would simply drop him off and leave, exchanging a kiss and a few words with her daughter but rarely pausing long enough to go to the trouble of taking off her coat, and when his mother wasn’t developing pictures in her darkroom or preparing dinner in the kitchen, she would occasionally join her son on the sofa and watch Laurel and Hardy with him, now and then laughing as hard as he did (at the daily duties line in The Music Box, for example, which became a private joke between them, a term that eventually replaced the old words they had used to refer to the human posterior, a long list that had included such dependable idioms as backside, tuchas, keister, heinie, rear end, fanny, and rump, as with the question his mother would sometimes ask when they were in different rooms, calling out, What are you up to, Archie?, and if he wasn’t standing or walking or lying down somewhere in the apartment, he would respond, I’m sitting on my daily duties, Ma), but most often she would merely chuckle at Stan and Ollie’s pranks and pratfalls, or give a little smile, and when things started to get out of hand, with whacks and thwacks and painful blows, she would wince or else shake her head and say, Oh, Archie, that’s just awful, not meaning that the film was awful but that the roughhousing was too excessive for her. Ferguson didn’t agree, of course, but he was old enough to understand that it was possible for someone not to like Laurel and Hardy as much as he did, and he felt she was a good sport for sitting there with him, since he knew that Stan and Ollie were too dumb and childish for her and that even if she watched them every day for a year, she would never become a fan.
Only one person in the family shared his enthusiasm, just one grown-up had the acuity to recognize the genius of his beloved imbeciles, and that was his grandfather, the elusive Benjy Adler, who had always been something of a mystery to Ferguson, a man who seemed to possess two or three different personalities, effusive and generous on some days, shut down and distracted on other days, at times nervous, even jittery and short-tempered, at times calm and expansive, by turns warmly attentive to his grandson and almost indifferent to him, but on his good days, the days when he was in one of his spirited moods and the jokes were flying out of his mouth, he was a sterling companion, a co-conspirator in what Ferguson thought of as the Bore War (his scrambled incarnation of the misheard and misunderstood Boer War), which he took to be a militant assault against the dullness of life. In late November, Uncle Paul sent Ferguson’s mother on another trip, this time all the way out to New Mexico to photograph Millicent Cunningham, an eighty-year-old poet who was about to publish her Collected Essays with Random House, and during her absence Ferguson holed up at his grandparents’ apartment near Columbus Circle. He had been living in Laurel-and-Hardy Land for more than a month by then, entirely dug in with his new infatuation and nearly bereft when weekends rolled around now, since the program was off the air on Saturday and Sunday, but the first night he spent at West Fifty-eighth Street happened to be a Monday, which gave him five straight afternoons of Mr. Fat and Mr. Thin, and when his grandfather came home early from work on the first afternoon, explaining that it had been a slow day at the office, he plunked himself down on the sofa next to Ferguson to watch the program, which seemed to affect his sixty-two-year-old mind in the same way it affected Ferguson’s eight-year-old mind, and before long he was shuddering with laughter, at one point so excessively that he began to wheeze and cough and turn red in the face, and so thorough was his delight that he came home early from the office every day that week to catch the show with his grandson.
Then came the surprise, the Sunday visit in early December when Ferguson’s grandparents walked into the apartment on Central Park West loaded down with packages, some of them so heavy that Arthur, the superintendent of the building, had to wheel them in on a hand truck, which earned him a five-dollar tip from Ferguson’s grandfather (five dollars!), and another one in an exceedingly long cardboard box that his grandparents carried in together, each one grasping an end with two hands, and so long was the box that it nearly didn’t make it into the apartment, and when he saw his grandmother smile (how rarely she smiled) and heard his grandfather laugh and felt his mother’s hand settle onto his right shoulder, he knew that something exceptional was about to happen, but he had no idea what that thing could be until the packages were unwrapped and he discovered that he now owned a sixteen-millimeter movie projector, a roll-up movie screen with a collapsible tripod base, and copies of ten Laurel-and-Hardy shorts: The Finishing Touch, Two Tars, Wrong Again, Big Business, Perfect Day, Blotto, Below Zero, Another Fine Mess, Helpmates, and Towed in a Hole.
Little matter that the projector had been bought secondhand—it worked. Little matter that the prints were scratched and the sound sometimes seemed to be coming from the bottom of a bathtub—the films were watchable. And with the films came a whole new set of words for him to master—sprocket, for example, which turned out to be a far better word to think about than scorched.
* * *
ON THE WEEKENDS when his mother wasn’t out of town on an assignment—and the weather wasn’t too cold or too wet or too windy—most Saturday mornings and afternoons were spent prowling the streets in search of good photographs, Ferguson trotting along beside his mother as she strode down the sidewalks of Manhattan or mounted the steps of municipal buildings or scaled rocks or crossed bridges in Central Park, and then, for no reason that was ever apparent to him, she would come to a sudden halt, aim her camera at something, press the shutter release, and click, click-click, click-click-click, which wasn’t the most absorbing activity in the world, perhaps, but it belonged to the pleasure of being with his mother, of having her all to himself again, and how not to enjoy the lunches they ate together in coffee shops along Broadway and on Sixth Avenue in the Village, where ten times out of ten he would order a hamburger and a chocolate milkshake, always the same meal at the midpoint of those Saturday excursions, a hamburger, please, yes, a hamburger, please, as if it were part of a sacred ritual, which meant it could never vary in any way down to the smallest detail, and then the Saturday evenings and/or Sunday afternoons when they went to the movies together, sitting in the balcony where his mother could smoke her Chesterfields, movies that were never Laurel and Hardy movies but new productions from Hollywood such as It’s Always Fair Weather, The Tall Men, Picnic, Guys and Dolls, Artists and Models, The Court Jester, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Searchers, Forbidden Planet, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Our Miss Brooks, Bhowani Junction, Trapeze, Moby Dick, The Solid Gold Cadillac, The Ten Commandments, Around the World in Eighty Days, Funny Face, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Fear Strikes Out, and 12 Angry Men, the good and bad films of 1955, 1956, and 1957 that carried them through his time at
Hilliard and on into his first year at the next school he attended, the Riverside Academy, on West End Avenue between Eighty-fourth and Eighty-fifth Streets, a coed institution of so-called progressive tendencies that had been founded twenty-nine years earlier, exactly one hundred years after the founding of Hilliard.
No more blazers and ties, no more morning chapel, no more bus trips through Central Park, no more days trapped in a building without girls, all of which were decided improvements, but the biggest difference between the third and fourth grades was not so much the leap to another school as the end of Ferguson’s duel with God. God had been defeated, exposed as a powerless nonentity who could no longer punish or inspire fear, and with the celestial overman now cut out of the picture, Ferguson could give up playing the old game of Intentional Screw-up, or, as he sometimes called it in later years, Ontological Chicken. He had succeeded so well at failure that he had grown tired of his gift for subterfuge and self-immolation. No one at Hilliard had ever suspected what he’d been up to, he had fooled them all, not only his teachers and fellow students but his mother and Aunt Mildred as well, not one of them ever figured out that he had done it on purpose, that his wildly erratic performance in the third grade had been nothing but an act, a cannily devised effort to prove that nothing he did could ever matter if no divine force were watching over him. He had won the argument with himself by getting thrown out of Hilliard—not expelled, exactly, since they allowed him to stay until the end of the year, but they had seen enough of Ferguson to want no more of him after that. The headmaster told his mother that Archie was the most daunting enigma he had ever come across in all his years at the school. He was both the best student and the worst student in his class, he said, at times brilliant and at other times utterly moronic, and they no longer knew what to do with him. Were they looking at a latent schizophrenic, he asked, or was Archie just another lost boy who would eventually find himself? Since Ferguson’s mother knew her son was neither a moron nor a future mental case, she thanked the headmaster for his time and set about looking for another school.