Beanpole Jim was the answer to Ferguson’s age-old prayers, the wish for an older brother, or at least an older cousin-friend he could look up to and draw strength from, and Ferguson exulted in their connection, in the way the sixteen-year-old Jim seemed to have no qualms about embracing his younger stepcousin as a comrade, little understanding that Jim, with a sister and two girl cousins, had no doubt been longing for a brother just as much as he had. In the two years before Jim graduated from high school and went off to study at MIT, he turned out to be an essential figure for the often confused and rebellious Ferguson, who was doing well in his classes at the Riverside Academy but continued to have an attitude problem (talking back to his teachers, quick to flare up when provoked by thugs like Billy Nathanson), and there was Jim, all curiosity and high spirits, a bighearted math-and-science boy who loved to talk about irrational numbers, black holes, artificial intelligence, and Pythagorean dilemmas, with no anger in him, never a rude word or a pugnacious gesture toward anyone, and surely his example helped tamp down the excessiveness of Ferguson’s behavior somewhat, and there too was Jim giving Ferguson the lowdown on female anatomy and what to do about the ever more persistent problem of sex on the brain (cold showers, ice cubes on your dick, three-mile runs around the track), and best of all there was Jim on the basketball court with him, the five-foot-eleven-inch high school junior, the six-foot-one-inch senior who would meet Ferguson on Saturday mornings at the midway point between their two apartments and walk down to Riverside Park with him, where they would find an empty court and practice together for three hours, seven sharp every Saturday as long as the weather gods were with them, drizzles being acceptable but not downpours, flurries but not sleet or heavy snow, and nothing doing if the temperature dropped below twenty-five degrees (frozen fingers) or rose above ninety-five (heat prostration), which meant they were out there on most Saturdays until Jim packed his bags and left for college. No more trotting along beside his mother on weekend photo outings for young Mr. Ferguson, those days were finished forever, and from now on it was basketball, which he had discovered at twelve when the ball stopped being too large and heavy for him to control, and by the time he was twelve and a half it had become the new passion of his life, the next best thing to movies and kissing girls, and how fortunate it was that Jim had arrived on the scene just then and was willing to give up three hours every week instructing him on how to play, what a miraculous turn that was, the right person at the right time—how often did that happen?—and because Jim was a good and conscientious player, more than good enough to have made his high school team if he had chosen to go out for it, he was a good teacher of fundamentals, and one by one he led Ferguson through the basic drills of how to execute a proper layup, how to move his feet on defense, how to box out for rebounds, how to throw a bounce pass, how to shoot free throws, how to bank the ball off the backboard, how to release the ball at maximum altitude when taking a jump shot, so many things to learn, dribbling with his left hand, setting picks, keeping his arms up on defense, and then the games of O-U-T and H-O-R-S-E at the end of each session, which turned into games of one-on-one in the second year, as Ferguson sprouted up to five-four, five-six, and five-seven, always losing to the taller, more experienced Jim but beginning to hold his own after his fourteenth birthday, at times respectable enough to pour in five or six straight jumpers through the netless rims of Riverside Park, the same denuded rims to be found in every public park across the city, and because they played by the New York rule of winners-out, whenever Ferguson went on one of his shooting sprees, he would come dangerously close to not losing. As Jim put it after one of the last games they played together: Give it another year, Archie, grow another two or three inches, and you’ll be wiping my ass off the court. He spoke those words with the proud satisfaction of a teacher who had taught his pupil well. And then it was Boston and good-bye, and a new hole was dug in Ferguson’s heart.
Within a year and a half of his mother’s marriage to Gil, Ferguson had gathered enough information about the Schneidermans to have reached some definitive conclusions about his new family. In the left-hand column of his mental ledger he placed the names of three duds and one semi-dud: the unmentionable uglies (2), the demented patriarch (1), and the well-meaning but inconstant and overwrought Aunt Liz (½). In the right-hand column were the names of the four others: admirable Gil, amiable Dan, ardent Jim, and increasingly attractive Amy. In sum, he counted three and a half negatives as opposed to four positives, which mathematically proved that there was more to be thankful for than to grumble about, and with the Adlers all but gone from the land of the living and the Fergusons entirely absent now (Uncle Lew in prison, Aunt Millie somewhere in Florida, Uncle Arnold and Aunt Joan in Los Angeles, cousin Francie in Santa Barbara—married, the mother of two kids—and his other cousins scattered across the country and no longer in touch), the four good Schneidermans were essentially all Ferguson had left, and because one of those Schneidermans was married to his mother and the other three lived just minutes away on the same Riverside Drive where he lived, Ferguson grew ever more attached to them, for the positives in his family ledger were far more positive than the negatives were negative, and even though his life had been diminished in some ways, it had been greatly enhanced in others.
Amy was the Schneiderman bonus, the birthday present hidden under a pile of bunched-up wrapping paper that doesn’t get found until after the party is over and all the guests have gone home. It was Ferguson’s fault for not paying more attention to her, but there had been so many things to adjust to in the beginning, and he hadn’t known what to make of the gawky, grinning creature who waggled and flung out her arms when she talked and couldn’t seem to sit still, such an odd-looking girl with those braces on her teeth and that head of tangled, dirty-blond hair, but then the braces came off, her hair was cut into a short bob, and by the time Ferguson turned thirteen he noticed that breasts were beginning to grow inside Amy’s formerly useless training bra and that his already thirteen-year-old stepcousin no longer resembled the girl she had been at twelve. A week after the move from Central Park West to Riverside Drive, she called him up after school one day and boldly announced that she was coming over for a visit. When he asked her why she wanted to see him, she said: Because we’ve known each other for six months, and in all that time you haven’t said more than three words to me. We’re supposed to be cousins now, Archie, and I want to find out if it’s worth the trouble to be friends with you or not.
His mother and stepfather were both out that afternoon, and with no snack material in the cupboard beyond a half-eaten box of stale Fig Newtons, Ferguson felt at a loss, uncertain how he should handle this abrupt intrusion. After Amy hung up the phone in her apartment, it took just eighteen minutes before she was pushing the downstairs buzzer of his apartment, but in that interval Ferguson toyed with and discarded at least half a dozen ideas about what he could do to entertain her (watch television? look at family photo albums? show her the complete thirty-seven-volume set of Shakespeare plays and poems Gil had given to him for his birthday?), then decided to haul out the movie projector and portable screen from the utility closet and set them up for a viewing of one of his Laurel and Hardy films, which was probably a terrible mistake, he realized, since girls didn’t like Laurel and Hardy, at least none of the girls he had ever known, starting with the beautiful Isabel Kraft two or three years earlier, who had made a face when he asked her what she thought of them, a sentiment that had been echoed just recently by his current number one, Rachel Minetta, who had called them juvenile and idiotic, but then in walked Amy on that cool afternoon in March 1960, dressed in a white sweater, a gray pleated skirt, saddle shoes, and white cotton socks—the ubiquitous bobby socks of the moment—and when Ferguson announced his intention to show her Blotto, a Laurel and Hardy two-reeler from 1930, she smiled and said: Great. I love Laurel and Hardy. After the Marx Brothers, they’re the best team ever. Forget the Three Stooges, forget Abbott and Costello—Stan and Olli
e are the cheese.
No, Amy wasn’t like any of the other girls he knew, and as Ferguson watched her laughing at the film, heard her laughing at the film for a good fourteen of the twenty-six minutes it lasted, he concluded that it would indeed be worth the trouble to try to become friends with her, for her laugh wasn’t the squealing, out-of-control noise of a child, he noted, but a succession of gut-deep, resonant guffaws—merry yaps, to be sure, but at the same time thoughtful, as if she understood why she was laughing, which made her laugh an intelligent laugh, a laugh that laughed at itself even as it laughed at what it was laughing at. Too bad that she went to public school and not the Riverside Academy, which eliminated the possibility of daily contact, but in spite of their involvement with their separate friends, and in spite of their various after-school activities (piano and dance lessons for Amy, sports for Ferguson), they managed to get together once every ten days or so following Amy’s impromptu visit in March, which worked out to three or four times a month, not counting the additional times when they saw each other for joint family outings, holiday dinners, trips to Carnegie Hall with Gil, and special events (Jim’s high school graduation party, the old buzzard’s eightieth birthday bash), but for the most part they saw each other alone, walking through Riverside Park when the weather was good, sitting in one of their two apartments when it was bad, occasionally going to the movies together or working on school assignments at the same table together or hanging around together in one of their apartments on Friday night to watch the new television program they were both so keen on (The Twilight Zone), but mostly when they were together they talked, or Amy talked and Ferguson listened, for no one he knew had more to say about the world than Amy Schneiderman, who seemed to have an opinion on every subject and knew so much more than he did about nearly everything. Brilliant, obstreperous Amy, who teased her father and joked with her brother and warded off her mother’s perpetual fussing with acerbic, know-it-all put-downs that she somehow managed to get away with without being scolded or punished, most likely because she was a girl who spoke her mind and had trained the people in her family to respect her for that, and not even Ferguson, who had rapidly become her new ace copain, was altogether immune from her insults and criticisms. No matter how vociferously she claimed to like him and admire him, she often found him lazy in the head and was continually appalled by his lack of interest in politics, by how little thought he was giving to Kennedy’s presidential campaign and the civil rights movement, but Ferguson couldn’t be bothered, he said, he hoped Kennedy would win, but even if he did become president, things wouldn’t get any better than they were now, they just wouldn’t get a whole lot worse, and as for the civil rights movement, of course he was in favor of it, how could anyone be against justice and equality for all, but he was only thirteen years old, for heaven’s sake, no more than an insignificant speck of dust, and what the hell could a speck do about changing the world?
No excuses, Amy said. You’re not going to be thirteen forever—and then what happens to you? You can’t spend your life thinking only about yourself, Archie. You have to let something in, or else you’ll turn into one of those hollowed-out people you hate so much—you know, one of the walking dead from Zombieville, U.S.A.
We shall overcome, Ferguson said.
No, my funny little speck-man. You shall overcome.
It was odd being so close to a girl, Ferguson discovered, especially a girl he had no desire to kiss, which was an unprecedented form of friendship in his experience, as intense as any friendship he had ever had with a boy and yet, in that Amy was a girl, there was a different tonality to their interactions, a girl-boy buzz just below the surface that was nevertheless unlike the buzz he felt with Rachel Minetta, or Alice Abrams, or any of the other girls he had crushes on and kissed when he was thirteen, a loud buzz as opposed to the soft buzz he felt with Amy, since she was supposed to be his cousin, a member of his own family, which meant he had no right to kiss her or even think about kissing her, and so great was the interdiction that it never once crossed Ferguson’s mind to go against it, knowing that such an act would have been highly improper, if not deeply shocking, and even though Amy was becoming more and more attractive to him as he watched her body unfurl into the high bloom of her early adolescent womanhood, not pretty in the way Isabel Kraft was pretty, perhaps, but arresting, alive in her eyes as no girl had ever been for him, Ferguson continued to resist the urge to break the code of family honor. Then they turned fourteen, first Amy in December, followed by Ferguson in March, and suddenly he found himself inhabiting a new body that was no longer under his control, a body that produced unbidden erections and much shortness of breath, the early masturbation phase in which no thought that wasn’t an erotic thought could fit inside his skull, the delirium of becoming a man without the privileges of being a man, turmoil, consternation, relentless chaos within, and whenever he looked at Amy now his first and only thought was how much he wanted to kiss her, which he sensed was beginning to be true for her whenever she looked at him. One Friday evening in April, with Gil and his mother off at some dinner party downtown, he and Amy sat alone in the seventh-floor apartment discussing the term kissing cousins, which Ferguson admitted he didn’t fully understand, since it seemed to conjure up an image of cousins politely kissing each other on the cheek, which didn’t seem right, somehow, since that kind of kissing didn’t qualify as genuine kissing, and therefore why kissing cousins when the people in his head were just normal cousins, at which point Amy laughed and said, No, silly, this is what kissing cousins means, and without saying another word she leaned toward Ferguson on the sofa, put her arms around him, and planted a kiss on his mouth, which soon became a kiss that was traveling into his mouth, and from that moment on Ferguson decided they weren’t really cousins, after all.
2.4
Amy Schneiderman had been sleeping in his old bedroom for the past four years, Noah Marx had vanished for a time and then resurfaced, and the thirteen-year-old Ferguson, who had just entered the eighth grade, wanted out. Since he wasn’t in a position to run away from home (where would he have gone, and how could he have lived without money?), he asked his parents for the next best thing: Would they please ship him off to a boarding school the following September and allow him to spend his four years of high school in a place far from the town of Maplewood, New Jersey.
He wouldn’t have asked unless he had known they could afford the expense, but life on a grander scale had continued to flourish at ever more exalted heights since the family moved into the new house in 1956. Two more stores had been added to his father’s growing empire (one in Short Hills, the other in Parsippany), and with local consumers now splurging on two and three television sets per household, with dishwashers, washing machines, and clothes dryers now considered standard equipment in every middle-class home, with half the population sinking money into voluminous deep-freeze receptacles to store the frozen foods they now preferred to eat, Ferguson’s father had become a wealthy man—not yet a Rockefeller, perhaps, but a king of suburban retail, the renowned prophet of profits whose low prices had killed off the competition in seven counties.
The spoils from this expanding income now included a pistachio-green four-door Eldorado for Ferguson’s father, a snappy red Pontiac convertible for his mother, membership at the Blue Valley Country Club, and the demise of Roseland Photo, which marked the end of his mother’s brief career as independent breadwinner and artist (the fad for painted-over photographs had run its course, the studio was just barely breaking even, so why bother to go on when sales at the five stores were stronger than they had ever been?), and with all this getting and spending, all this jitterbugging opulence, Ferguson failed to see how boarding school could possibly be a burden to them. And if they happened to object to his plan (meaning if his father happened to object, since he had the last word on all matters concerning money), Ferguson would counter by offering to give up Camp Paradise and work summer jobs instead, which would help reduce their share of
the costs.