It was a drawback, then, perhaps even a disappointment to have fallen in with a man who had no feeling for the dramas and delights of physical competition, but in all fairness to Schneiderman, the opposite was no doubt also true, for Ferguson’s inability to play a musical instrument must have come as a disappointment to his stepfather, who was skilled at both the piano and the violin, not at the highest professional level, perhaps, but to Ferguson’s untrained ear his renditions of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert were flat-out marvels of beauty and precision, as good as anything to be heard on the hundreds of L.P. records Schneiderman had brought with him to Central Park West. It wasn’t that Ferguson hadn’t tried, but his struggle to master the rudiments of keyboard proficiency had ended in failure, at least according to his teacher, old frizzy-haired Miss Muggeridge, who probably freelanced as a witch when she wasn’t breaking the spirits of young children forced to study the piano. After nine months of lessons when he was in the first grade, his mother was told he was a heavy-handed clod of a boy, which led her to conclude that she had started him too early (forget about Mozart composing symphonies when he was six and seven—he didn’t count!), and when she suggested to her failed pianist that he take a year off before making a fresh start with another teacher, Ferguson was relieved that he would never have to see Miss Muggeridge again. The year off was of course the year of the Newark fire, and once they moved to New York and got past the curious interregnum, the little one was at Hilliard, the big one was in disarray, and the piano was forgotten.
So Schneiderman had disappointed Ferguson, and Ferguson had disappointed Schneiderman, but since neither one of them ever spoke about it to the other, each one remained unaware of the other’s disappointment. Eventually, when Ferguson became a starting forward on his freshman basketball team, Schneiderman began to show some interest in sports, at least to the extent of going to several games with Ferguson’s mother, where he cheered on his stepson from the stands, but Ferguson never learned how to play a musical instrument. Still and all, it can safely be said that Ferguson profited more from his stepfather’s involvement with music than Schneiderman did from his stepson’s talent for putting balls in hoops and boxing out opponents for rebounds. At twelve and a half, Ferguson knew nothing about any kind of music except rock and roll, which he and his friends unanimously adored. His head was filled with the lyrics and melodies of Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Del Shannon, Fats Domino, and dozens of other pop singers, but when it came to classical music he was a virgin, not to mention jazz, blues, and the nascent folk revival, about which he was utterly ignorant as well, barring some comic ballads by the Kingston Trio, who were having their moment then. Knowing Schneiderman changed all that. For a boy who had been to only two concerts in his life (a performance of Handel’s Messiah at Carnegie Hall with Aunt Mildred and Uncle Paul; a matinee of Peter and the Wolf, which he saw with his lower school classmates during his first month at Hilliard), a boy who owned not a single record of classical music, whose mother owned not a single record of any kind and listened only to ancient standards and big-band stuff on the radio, for such a boy, who lacked even the smallest glimmer of knowledge about string quartets or symphonies or cantatas, just listening to his stepfather play the piano or the violin was a revelation, and beyond that there was the further revelation of listening to his stepfather’s record collection and discovering that music could actually reconfigure the atoms in a person’s brain, and beyond what happened in the apartments on Central Park West and Riverside Drive, there were the excursions with his mother and Schneiderman to Carnegie Hall and Town Hall and the Metropolitan Opera House that began just weeks after the three of them settled in together. Schneiderman wasn’t on a pedagogical mission, there was no plan to give the boy or his mother a formal education in music, he merely wanted to expose them to works he thought they would respond to, which meant not starting off with Mahler or Schoenberg or Webern but with booming, joyful works such as the 1812 Overture (Ferguson gasped when he heard the cannon for the first time) or histrionic pieces such as the Symphonie Fantastique or the vibrant program music of Pictures at an Exhibition, but bit by bit he lured them in, and before long they were accompanying him to Mozart operas and Bach cello recitals, and for the twelve- and thirteen-year-old Ferguson, who continued to adore the rock and roll he had always adored, those nights out in the concert halls were nothing less than a revelation about the workings of his own heart, for music was the heart, he realized, the fullest expression of the human heart, and now that he had heard what he had heard, he was beginning to hear better, and the better he heard, the more deeply he felt—sometimes so deeply that his body shook.
* * *
THE ADLERS WERE shrinking. One after the other they were dying their too-early deaths and disappearing from the world, and with Aunt Mildred’s removal to California and ex-uncle Paul’s expulsion from the family, combined with the relocation to southern Florida by cousin Betty and her husband Seymour (along with Ferguson’s two second cousins, Eric and Judy) and the fact that Betty’s sister Charlotte was still not talking to her cousin Rose because of the Wedding-Pictures War of 1955 and 1956, Ferguson and his mother were the only Adlers left in New York, the only ones still above ground who hadn’t absconded or smashed their links to the clan. In spite of these losses, however, new blood had entered their lives in the form of various Schneidermans, a collection of stepsisters and stepcousins and a stepaunt, a stepuncle, and a step-grandfather for Ferguson, which for his mother was translated into two stepdaughters, a stepniece and stepnephew, a sister-in-law, a brother-in-law, and a father-in-law, and those Schneidermans now constituted the bulk of the family they belonged to because a city clerk had signed and stamped a marriage certificate declaring Gil and his mother to be lawfully wedded husband and wife. It was a strange change, as Ferguson’s grandfather had put it in one of their last talks together, and indeed it was strange to have been given two sisters because of a wedding, two unknown women who had suddenly become his closest relatives because a man who was equally unknown to him had signed his name on a piece of paper. None of that would have mattered if Ferguson had liked Margaret and Ella Schneiderman, but after several encounters with his new stepsiblings, he had concluded that those fat, ugly, stuck-up girls didn’t deserve to be liked, for it soon became clear that they resented his mother for marrying their father and were disgusted with their father for having betrayed the memory of their mother, who had become a sanctified being after her terrible death in that crackup on the Taconic State Parkway. Well, Ferguson’s father had died a terrible death, too, which theoretically should have put all of them in the same boat, but the Schneiderman sisters weren’t interested in their new stepbrother, they barely deigned to talk to the twelve-year-old nobody, the big college girls from Boston University had no use for the son of the riffraff woman who had stolen their father from them, and even though Ferguson had been puzzled by their behavior at the wedding—the two of them standing off to the side and talking to no one but each other, mostly in whispers, mostly with their backs turned toward the bride and groom—it wasn’t until two weeks later, when they were invited to dinner at the New York apartment, that Ferguson understood how nasty and ungenerous they were, particularly Margaret, the older one, although the younger, less obnoxious Ella invariably followed her sister’s lead, which was probably even worse, and there the five of them were at that never to be forgotten dinner, which had taken his mother so many hours to prepare, wanting to prove her solidarity with Gil by putting herself out for his daughters, those vicious, snotty girls who pretended not to hear his mother when she asked them questions about their life in Boston and what they were planning to do after college, who snidely grilled her about her knowledge of music, which was next to zero, of course, as if to prove to their father that he had married an uncultured imbecile, and when Margaret asked her new stepmother whether she preferred listening to Bach keyboard pieces on the harpsichord, as played by Wanda Landowska, for example, or on the pianoforte
by someone like Glenn Gould (not piano, pianoforte), Gil finally exploded and told her to shut up. An open palm slammed down on the dinner table, rattling the silverware and tipping over a glass, and then there was silence, silence not just from Margaret but from everyone in the room.
Enough with your cutting, insidious remarks, Schneiderman said to his daughter. I didn’t know you were capable of such mean-spiritedness, Margaret, such vicious cruelty. Shame on you. Shame on you. Shame on you. Rose is a great and magnificent artist, and if you manage to accomplish one-tenth of what she’s done in your life, you’ll surpass my wildest expectations for you. But one needs a soul to accomplish even the smallest thing in this world, my dear, and from the way you’ve been acting tonight, I’m beginning to wonder if you have one.
It was the first time Ferguson had witnessed his stepfather’s anger, which was a bellowing, apoplectic sort of anger, a wrath of such enormity and destructive force that he could only hope it would never be turned in his direction, but how satisfying it was to see it turned on Margaret that night, she who so fully deserved that brutal dressing-down from her father, and how glad he was to know that Schneiderman was willing to defend his new wife against the attacks of his own daughter, a great and magnificent artist, which augured well for the future of the marriage, he felt, and when Margaret inevitably collapsed into tears and a tearful Ella protested that he had no right to talk to her sister like that, Ferguson heard his mother pronounce a phrase, pronounce for the first time a phrase she would go on using whenever Schneiderman lost control of his temper in the months and years ahead, Easy does it, Gil, which somehow managed to carry the double weight of both a warning and a caress, and just after he heard his mother say those words for the first time, she stood up from her chair and went over to her husband, a man she had been married to for sixteen days, stood behind him as he went on sitting in his chair at the head of the table, put a hand on each of his shoulders, and then leaned over and kissed him on the back of the neck. Ferguson was impressed by her bravery and composure, which made him think of someone stepping into a cage with a lion, but apparently his mother knew what she was doing, for rather than push her away, Schneiderman reached up and wrapped his right hand around hers, and once he had it firmly in his grasp, he brought her hand down to his mouth and kissed it. They hadn’t even looked at each other, but the tantrum had been quelled, or almost quelled, since there was still the matter of an apology to be negotiated, which the stern-voiced Schneiderman eventually pried out of the reluctant, weeping Margaret, who could barely bring herself to look up at her stepmother, but she said the words, she said, I’m sorry, and because the blowup had occurred over dessert (strawberries and cream!), the meal was essentially done, which allowed the sisters to make a prompt, face-saving exit with the excuse that they had a nine o’clock date to see some old high school friends, which Ferguson knew to be false, since the girls were supposed to spend the night at the apartment, sleeping in his bedroom while he sacked out on the sofa in the living room, a special foldout sofa bed his mother had bought specifically for that purpose, but that never happened, not that night or any other night, for on all future visits to New York the sisters stayed with their mother’s brother and his wife in Riverdale, and if Schneiderman wanted to see them, he had to go to that other apartment or meet with them in public places, but not once did they return to the apartment on Central Park West, and years went by before they set foot in the new apartment overlooking the river.
Ferguson didn’t care. He wanted nothing to do with either one of those girls, just as he wanted nothing to do with Schneiderman’s father, who unfortunately came round to dinner about once a month, spouting all kinds of inanities about American politics, the Cold War, New York sanitation workers, quantum physics, and even Ferguson himself, Watch out for that boy of yours, liebchen—he has sex on the brain and doesn’t even know it yet, but Ferguson did what he could to avoid him, always making sure to wolf down his main course in record time and then claim to be too full for dessert, at which point he would withdraw to his room to study for tomorrow’s history test, which in fact had already been given that afternoon. His new not-grandfather was a bit less horrible than Margaret and Ella, perhaps, but not by much, not enough to make Ferguson want to sit around and listen to his crackpot harangues about J. Edgar Hoover’s secret concentration camps in Arizona or the alliance between the John Birch Society and the Communist Party to poison the reservoirs of the New York City water system, which might have been funny in an odd sort of way if the old man hadn’t shouted so much, but twenty or thirty minutes in his company was about all Ferguson could stomach. That made three new relatives he couldn’t abide, three Schneidermans he gladly would have done without, but then there were the other Schneidermans, the ones who lived just thirteen and a half blocks away on West Seventy-fifth Street, and though he found it difficult to warm up to his stepaunt Liz, who struck him as a crabby, nervous sort of person, too fretful about the minutiae of daily life to understand that life could run out on you before you’d begun to live, he immediately took to Schneiderman’s brother, Daniel, and the two Schneiderman offspring, stepcousins Jim and Amy, who made Ferguson feel welcome from the start and thought their Uncle Gil was one lucky son of a bitch (Jim’s words) to have married a woman like Ferguson’s mother, who (in Amy’s words) was just about perfect.
Daniel worked as a commercial artist and sometime illustrator of children’s books, a self-employed odd-jobber who spent eight to ten hours a day in a small room at the back of the family apartment that had been converted into a studio, a cluttered, dimly lit micro-atelier where he churned out drawings and paintings for greeting cards, advertisements, calendars, corporate brochures, and Tommy the Bear watercolors for his collaborations with writer Phil Costanza, bringing in enough money to feed, clothe, and house a family of four but with nothing left over for extravagances like long summer vacations or private schools for the kids. His work was skilled and professional, bearing the marks of a deft hand and a capricious imagination, and although there was nothing terribly original about what he did, it was never less than charming, a word that was often used to describe Daniel Schneiderman himself, who turned out to be one of the most unpretentious and jovial people Ferguson had ever met, a person who liked to laugh and consequently laughed a lot, an altogether different kind of being from his older brother, the little one who never had to struggle with a German accent, the handsome one, the unserious one, the one who liked sports, as did stepcousin Jim, long, lean, basketball-playing Jim, who had just started his junior year at the Bronx High School of Science when Gil and Ferguson’s mother were married, and once the male contingent of the other Schneidermans learned that their new nephew/cousin was as big on basketball as they were, the duo became a trio, and every time Dan and Jim went to see a game at the Garden, Ferguson was invited to go along with them. That was the old Garden, the now demolished Madison Square Garden that had once stood on Eighth Avenue between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth Streets, and so it was that Ferguson was taken to see his first live basketball games during that 1959–60 season, Saturday afternoon college triple-headers, Harlem Globetrotter exhibitions, and the shoddy, mediocre Knicks of Richie Guerin, Willie Naulls, and Jumping Johnny Green, but there were only eight teams in the NBA back then, which meant that the Boston Celtics played at the Garden at least half a dozen times per season, and those were the games the trio made a point of attending, since no one played the game better than that team of Cousy, Heinsohn, Russell, and the Jones boys, they were a single, five-part brain in constant motion, a single consciousness, utterly selfless players who thought only of the team and not of themselves, basketball as it was meant to be played, as Uncle Dan kept repeating as he watched them, and yes, it was astonishing to observe how much better they were than the Knicks, who seemed sluggish and awkward beside them, but much as Ferguson admired the team as a whole, there was one player who stood out for him and captured the bulk of his attention, sinewy, wire-thin Bill Russell, who al
ways seemed to be at the heart of what the Celtics did, the one whose brain seemed to hold the four other brains inside his head, or a man who had somehow dispersed his brain into the heads of his teammates, for Russell moved strangely and didn’t look like an athlete, he was a limited player who rarely took shots or scored, who rarely even dribbled the ball, and yet there he was snagging another crucial rebound, making another impossible bounce pass, blocking another shot, and because of him the Celtics kept winning game after game season after season, champions or competing for the championship every year, and when Ferguson asked Jim what made Russell so great when in many ways he wasn’t even good, Jim paused for a moment to think, shook his head, and replied, I don’t know, Archie. Maybe he’s just smarter than everyone else, or maybe it’s because he sees more than other people do and always knows what’s going to happen next.