He received his first report card from the Riverside Academy on a Friday in mid-November. After an entire year of Poors and Fails from Hilliard, Ferguson’s mother was expecting better results from the new school, but nothing close to the seven Excellents and two Very Goods Ferguson brought home that day. Stunned by the magnitude of the reversal, she walked into the living room at five-thirty, just as The Laurel and Hardy Show was ending, and sat down beside her son on the floor.
Good work, Archie, she said, holding up the packet of grades in her right hand as she tapped it with her left. I’m very proud of you.
Thanks, Ma, Ferguson replied.
You must be enjoying your new school.
It’s pretty good. All things considered.
What does that mean?
School is school, which means it’s not something anyone enjoys that much. You go because you have to go.
But some schools are better than others, aren’t they?
I suppose.
For instance, Riverside is better than Hilliard.
Hilliard wasn’t bad. For a school, that is.
But you prefer not having to travel so far every day, don’t you? And not having to wear a uniform. And having girls and boys together instead of just boys. It makes life a little better, doesn’t it?
Much better. But the school itself isn’t that different. Reading, writing, arithmetic, social studies, gym, art, music, and science. I do the same things at Riverside that I did at Hilliard.
What about the teachers?
About the same.
I thought they were less strict at Riverside.
Not really. Miss Donne, the music teacher, yells at us sometimes. But Mr. Bowles, the music teacher at Hilliard, never raised his voice. He’s the best teacher I’ve had anywhere—and the nicest.
But you have more friends at Riverside. Tommy Snyder, Peter Baskin, Mike Goldman, and Alan Lewis—all such fine boys—and that cutie-pie, Isabel Kraft, and her cousin Alice Abrams, beautiful children, real winners. In two months, you’ve made as many friends as you ever had in New Jersey.
They’re fun to be with. Some of the other kids, not so much. Billy Nathanson is about the meanest toad I’ve ever met—much worse than anyone at Hilliard.
But you didn’t have any friends at Hilliard, Archie. Sweet Doug Hayes, I guess, but no one else I can think of.
It was my fault. I didn’t want any friends there.
Oh? And why is that?
It’s hard to explain. I just didn’t want any.
No friends and bad grades at one school. Lots of friends and good grades at another school. There has to be a reason for that. Do you have any idea what it is?
Yes.
And?
I can’t tell you.
Don’t be ridiculous, Archie.
You’ll be mad at me if I tell.
Why on earth would I be mad at you? Hilliard’s in the past now. It makes no difference anymore.
Maybe not. But you’ll still be mad at me.
And what if I promise not to be mad?
It won’t do any good.
Ferguson was looking down at the floor by then, pretending to examine a loose thread in the carpet as a way to avoid his mother’s eyes, for he knew he would be lost if he dared to look into them now, her eyes had always been too strong for him, they were charged with a power that could decipher his thoughts and extract confessions from him and overwhelm his puny will even as he fought to resist her, and now, horribly and inevitably, she was reaching out and touching his jaw with the tips of her fingers, gently prodding him to lift his face and look into her eyes again, and the moment he felt her hand make contact with his skin, he knew that all hope was gone, tears were gathering in his eyes, the first tears that had been there in months, and how humiliating it was to feel the invisible faucet turn on again without warning, no better than stupid, weepy Stan, he said to himself, a nine-year-old infant with faulty plumbing in his brain, and by the time he found the courage to fix his eyes on his mother’s eyes, two waterfalls were trickling down his cheeks and his mouth was moving, words were tumbling out of him, the story of Hilliard was being told, the battle with God and the reason for the bad grades, the silenced voice and the murder of his father, breaking the rules in order to be punished and then hating God for not punishing him, hating God for not being God, and Ferguson had no idea if his mother understood what he was telling her, her eyes looked pained and confused and almost tearful, and after he had been talking for two or three or four minutes, she leaned over, put her arms around him, and told him to stop. Enough, Archie, she said, let it go, and then the two of them were crying together, a marathon sobfest that lasted for close to ten minutes, which was the last time either one of them broke down in the presence of the other, almost two years to the day since Stanley Ferguson’s body had been put in the ground, and once the crying slowly came to an end, they washed their faces, put on their overcoats, and went out to the movies, where they gorged themselves on hot dogs in the balcony instead of eating dinner and then shared a large box of popcorn, which they washed down with fizzless, watery Cokes. The title of the movie they saw that evening was: The Man Who Knew Too Much.
* * *
YEARS PASSED. FERGUSON was ten, eleven, and twelve, he was thirteen and fourteen, and among the family events that occurred during those five years, the most important was no doubt his mother’s marriage to a man named Gilbert Schneiderman, which happened when Ferguson was twelve and a half. A year before that, the Adler clan had lived through its first divorce, the inexplicable breakup between Aunt Mildred and Uncle Paul, a couple who had always seemed so right for each other, two chattering bookworms who had been married for nine years with no apparent conflicts or betrayals, and then it was all over, Aunt Mildred was moving to California to join the English Department at Stanford and Uncle Paul was no longer Ferguson’s Uncle Paul. Then his grandfather disappeared—a heart attack in 1960—and not long after that his grandmother was gone as well—a stroke in 1961—and within a month of that second funeral, Great-aunt Pearl was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The Adlers were diminishing. They had begun to look like one of those families in which no one got to be very old.
Schneiderman was the first-born son of his mother’s former boss, the man with the German accent who had taught her photography during the early days of the war, and since Ferguson understood that his mother was bound to remarry at some point, he was not opposed to her choice, which struck him as the best choice among the several that had been available to her. Schneiderman was forty-five, eight years older than Ferguson’s mother, and the two of them had first crossed paths on the morning she started working at his father’s studio in November 1941, which somehow comforted Ferguson, knowing that his mother had met his stepfather even before she met his father, 1941 as opposed to 1943, a date that had previously marked the beginning of the world for him, but now the world had become even older than that, and it was reassuring to know there was already an accumulated past between them and therefore she wasn’t rushing into the marriage blindly, which had always been Ferguson’s greatest fear, watching his mother get swept off her feet by some smooth-talking clown and then waking up in the morning to discover she had committed the mistake of her life. No, Schneiderman seemed to be a solid sort, someone you could trust. Married to a woman for seventeen years, father of two kids, and then a call from a state trooper summoning him to a Dutchess County morgue to identify a woman’s body, the body of his wife, who had been killed in a car accident, followed by four years alone, which was almost as long as Ferguson’s mother had been alone since his father’s death. His grandparents were still alive in September 1959, and the wedding was held in their apartment on West Fifty-eighth Street, where the five-foot-two-inch Ferguson served as best man. Among the guests were his new stepsisters, twenty-one-year-old Margaret and nineteen-year-old Ella, both college students, doddering Emanuel Schneiderman, the foul-mouthed goat whom Ferguson had already met three or four times and wou
ld never consider a grandfather, not even after his own grandfather died, Gil’s brother, Daniel, his sister-in-law, Liz, his sixteen-year-old nephew Jim and twelve-year-old niece Amy (all arms and legs, that girl, with braces on her teeth and a row of zits on her forehead), and Paul Sandler, Ferguson’s ex-uncle, who remained his mother’s champion in spite of the divorce from Mildred, the editor of her first two books, the full-length Jewish Wedding and the recently published Toughs, ninety black-and-white portraits of Puerto Rican street gang members and their girlfriends, but Aunt Mildred wasn’t there, she had written that she was too busy with her courses at Stanford to make the trip, and as Ferguson looked at his ex-uncle Paul looking at his mother, he wondered if he hadn’t been a contender for his mother’s hand and had lost out to Gil Schneiderman, which could have meant that his breakup with Aunt Mildred had something to do with his belated understanding that he had fallen for the wrong sister. Impossible to know, but perhaps that explained why Mildred was in California that afternoon and not in New York, which also might have accounted for why she seemed to have broken off contact with Ferguson’s mother, for no one said a word about her absence at the wedding party, at least not within earshot of Ferguson, and because he couldn’t bring himself to ask his ex-uncle Paul or his grandparents why no one had mentioned it, the questions forming in his head that afternoon remained unanswered. Yet one more story that would never be told, he said to himself, and then he took the ring out of his pocket and handed it to the burly man with the high forehead and large ears who was about to become his stepfather.
His mother called it a new beginning, and in the beginning of that beginning there were many things to adjust to, a multitude of big things and small things that were suddenly and forever different now, starting with the big fact of living in a household made up of three people instead of two and the novelty of having that third person spend every night in his mother’s bed, a five-foot-ten-inch man with hair on his chest who walked around in the morning wearing old-fashioned boxer shorts and peed loudly into the toilet and hugged and kissed his mother every time she looked at him, a new breed of masculinity for Ferguson to contend with, broad-shouldered but unathletic, elegant in an old-fashioned, distracted sort of way, with his heavy tweed suits and vests, his sturdy shoes and longer than average hair, a bit awkward socially, not given to jokes or breezy chatter, tea in the morning instead of coffee, schnapps, cognac, and a nightly cigar, a steady, stolid, Germanic approach to the business of living, with occasional lapses into grumpiness and fits of distemper (a genetic gift from his father, no doubt) but mostly kind, often exceedingly kind, a stepfather who never showed the slightest ambition to become a substitute father and was happy to be addressed as Gil rather than Dad. For the first six months, the three of them lived together in the apartment on Central Park West, but then they moved to a larger place on Riverside Drive between Eighty-eighth and Eighty-ninth Streets, with a fourth bedroom that was turned into a study for Gil, a change that Ferguson welcomed because he now lived closer to his school and could sleep a little later in the morning, and although he missed the old apartment’s third-floor view of Central Park, he now had a seventh-floor view of the Hudson River, which turned out to be more stimulating because of the constant procession of boats and ships that moved back and forth across the water, and beyond the water there was the land on the other side, the New Jersey side, and whenever Ferguson looked at it he would think about his old life there and try to remember himself as a small boy, but that time was becoming so distant now, it was almost gone.
Schneiderman was the chief music critic at the New York Herald Tribune, a demanding position that forced him to be out most evenings attending concerts, recitals, and operas, and then the deadline rush to type up the review and deliver it to the arts editor that same evening, which seemed an almost impossible task to Ferguson, a mere two or two and a half hours to marshal his thoughts about the performance he had just seen and heard and write something coherent about it, but Schneiderman was an old hand at working under pressure, on most nights he finished his articles without once lifting his hands off the keyboard, and when Ferguson asked him how he could crank out the words so quickly, he answered his stepson by saying, I’m really quite a lazy fellow, Archie, and if I didn’t have deadlines bearing down on me, I’d never get anything done, and Ferguson was impressed that his stepfather could make fun of himself in that way, since it was clear to him that the man was anything but lazy.
Schneiderman had stories to tell, unlike Ferguson’s father, who had rarely told stories except for far-fetched ones about prospecting for gold in the Andes or shooting elephants in Africa, but these were true stories, and as the adjustment period gradually turned into something that resembled everyday life, Ferguson began to feel comfortable enough to press his mother’s husband to talk to him about his past, for Ferguson’s mind was no longer strictly a child’s mind, and he enjoyed hearing what it had been like to grow up in Berlin, to be listening to someone who had spent the first seven years of his life in that far-off city, which in Ferguson’s imagination was first and foremost the capital of Hitler’s Hell, the most evil city on the face of the earth, but not then, Schneiderman informed him, not for someone who left there in 1921, and even if his life started just after the beginning of the First World War, what people had once called the Great War, he remembered nothing about it, the entire cataclysm was a blank to him, and the first event in his life that he could recall with any certainty was sitting at the kitchen table in his family’s apartment in Charlottenburg with a piece of bread in front of him and covering the bread with spoonfuls of black currant jam as he watched his baby brother Daniel in his high chair, who was all of six or eight months old at the time, which meant the war was about to end or was already over, and the reason why that scene remained so vivid to him was perhaps because Daniel was spewing forth a mass of clotted milk all over his bib without noticing it, smiling through the onslaught as he banged his hands against the table, and Schneiderman had marveled at the fact that someone could be so brainless and incompetent as to throw up on himself without being aware of what he was doing. No Hitler, then, but a momentous time for all that, the seeds of future disaster already being planted at Versailles, armed struggle in Berlin as the Spartacist rebellion surged up briefly and was crushed, followed by the arrests of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, whose murdered bodies were later found in the Landwehr Canal, not to mention the outbreak of the Russian Civil War, the Reds against the Whites, the Bolsheviks against the world, and because Russia was so close to Germany, the sudden influx of refugees and émigrés who streamed into Berlin, unstable, tottering Berlin, heart of the ragged Weimar Republic in which a loaf of bread would eventually cost twenty million marks. It was essential that Schneiderman give the boy this rudimentary history lesson so he would understand why the family had left for America, why Schneiderman’s father had concluded that Germany was a dead-end place and had gotten them out of there as quickly as possible, which proved to be just in time, since America put a stop to immigration in 1924 and barred the gates thereafter, but it was 1921 now, late summer, with Schneiderman about to turn seven and his brother a month past three, and off they sailed with their parents and a trunkful of German books, leaving from Hamburg on a ship called the S.S. Passage to India, bound for the mountainous territory of Washington Heights, or so Schneiderman had assumed, but his English was less than good at that point, almost nonexistent, in fact, and what did a seven-year-old boy know about anything except what his parents had told him? The language was the toughest obstacle, his stepfather said, the difficulty of speaking English without a German accent, which made him stick out as a foreigner and led to taunts and frequent punches from the boys in his school, for he wasn’t just any foreigner but a German, the lowest, most despised form of humanity in those years after the war, a good-for-nothing Kraut or Hun or Boche or Heinie, take your pick, and even as his understanding of English grew to a point of deepest familiarity, even as his vocabul
ary expanded and he conquered the nuances of English syntax and grammar, he still took his lumps because of that unseemly accent. Vee go schvimming in dee zummer, yah Archie?, Schneiderman said, by way of demonstration, and because Schneiderman rarely tried to be funny, Ferguson appreciated this little stab at humor, which in fact was quite funny, and he laughed, and an instant later they were both laughing.
The thing of it is, Schneiderman said, knowing German probably saved my life.
When Ferguson asked him to explain, his stepfather started talking about the war, about enlisting in the army just after Pearl Harbor because he wanted to go back to Europe and kill Nazis, but because he was a little older than most of the boys, and because he’d gone to college and was fluent in both German and French, he was kept out of combat and thrown into an intelligence unit instead. Ergo, no duty on the front lines. And because of that, no bullets or bombs to put him in an early grave. Ferguson was of course eager to know what he had done in the intelligence unit, but like most men who had come home from the war, Schneiderman didn’t want to talk about it. He simply said, Interrogating German prisoners, interviewing Nazi officials, putting my German to good use. When Ferguson asked him to elaborate, Schneiderman smiled, patted his stepson on the shoulder, and said, Some other time, Archie.
If there was any drawback to the new arrangement, it was that Schneiderman had no interest in sports—not in baseball or football, not in basketball or tennis, not in golf or bowling or badminton. Not just that he didn’t play any of those games himself but that he never even glanced at the sports pages, which meant that he paid no attention to the ups and downs of the local professional teams, not to speak of the college teams and high school teams, and ignored the exploits of every sprinter, shot-putter, high jumper, broad jumper, long-distance runner, golfer, skier, bowler, and tennis player in the world. One of the reasons why Ferguson had not been opposed to the idea of his mother getting married again was that he had assumed her second husband would necessarily be a sportsman, since she herself was so fond of swimming and tennis and ping pong and even bowling, and he had been looking forward to having a grown man in the house with whom he could share some sporting activities, whether throwing around a baseball or a football or shooting baskets or playing tennis (it didn’t matter which one), and if this hypothetical stepfather turned out not to be an athletic sort of person, there was an excellent chance that he would be a fan of at least one sport, since most men were, as his grandfather had been, for example, whose sport had been baseball, and when the two of them hadn’t been talking about Laurel and Hardy and asking themselves if the shorts weren’t better than the features or vice versa, most of their conversations had been about analyzing the relative merits of Mantle, Snider, and Mays, dissecting Alvin Dark’s talent for smacking the ball to right-center when the hit-and-run was on, debating who had the stronger arm, Furillo or Clemente, or if there was any truth to the story that Yogi Berra kept a razor blade in his right shin guard in order to nick up the ball before he threw it back to Whitey Ford. Every year from the age of six to ten Ferguson had gone to at least three games with his grandfather, their annual tour of the New York City ballparks, the Polo Grounds in Manhattan, Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, and Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, where they saw their one World Series game together in 1955, but three was the minimum, and after Ferguson’s father died and the Dodgers and Giants left town, the total per season was usually six or seven trips to Yankee Stadium, the house that Ruth built, and how Ferguson had savored those outings in the blistering, sunlit afternoons of July and August, eyes fixed on the field with its immaculate green grass and smooth brown soil, a formal garden tucked inside the great stone city, pastoral pleasures amid the raucous shouts and whistles from the crowd, thirty thousand voices booing in unison, what a sound that was, and through it all his grandfather would patiently keep score with his stubby pencil, predicting whether the batter would wind up on base or not according to what he called the law of averages, meaning that a slumping batter was bound to get a hit because he was due, and no matter how many times he got it wrong, his grandfather never abandoned faith in his law, his flawed law of guesswork nonsense. All those games with his bizarre, incomprehensible Papa, who on the warmest days would protect himself from the sun by spreading a white handkerchief over his bald head because it was too hot for hats, and now that he was gone Ferguson understood that no one could ever take his place, least of all Schneiderman, who was probably the one New Yorker in any of the five boroughs whose heart hadn’t been broken when the Dodgers and Giants decamped to California after the 1957 season.