On May 5, 1945, three days before the war in Europe ended, Uncle Archie dropped dead of a heart attack. He was forty-nine years old, a grotesquely young age for anyone to die, and to make the circumstances even more grotesque, the funeral was held on V-E Day, which meant that after the benumbed Adler family left the cemetery and returned to Archie’s apartment on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, people were dancing in the streets of the neighborhood, blasting the horns of their cars, and shouting in raucous merriment to celebrate the end of one half of the war. The noise went on for hours as Archie’s wife, Pearl, and their twin nineteen-year-old daughters, Betty and Charlotte, and Rose’s parents and sister, and Rose and Stanley, and the four surviving members of the Downtown Quintet, and a dozen or more friends, relatives, and neighbors sat and stood in the silent apartment with the shades drawn. The good news they had all been looking forward to for so long seemed to mock the horror of Archie’s death, and the jubilant, singing voices outside felt like a heartless desecration, as if the entire borough of Brooklyn were dancing on Archie’s grave. It was an afternoon Rose would never forget. Not just because of her own sorrow, which was memorable enough, but because Mildred grew so distraught that she drank seven scotches and passed out on the sofa, and because it was the first time in her life that she saw her father break down and cry. It was also the afternoon when Rose told herself that if she was ever lucky enough to have a son, she would name him after Archie.
The big bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, the other half of the war came to an end, and in mid-1946, two months after Rose’s second wedding anniversary, Schneiderman told her that he planned to retire soon and was looking for someone to buy his business. Given the progress she had made in their years together, he said, given that she had turned herself into a skilled and competent photographer by now, he wondered if she had any interest in taking over for him. It was the highest compliment he had ever paid her. Flattered as she was, however, Rose knew the timing was wrong, for she and Stanley had been putting aside all their extra money for the past year in order to buy a house in the suburbs, a one-family house with a backyard and trees and a two-car garage, and they couldn’t afford to buy both the house and the studio. She told Schneiderman she would have to talk it over with her husband, which she promptly did that evening after dinner, fully expecting Stanley to tell her it was out of the question, but he ambushed her by saying the choice was hers, that if she was willing to give up the idea of the house, she could have the studio as long as the cost was something they could manage. Rose was flabbergasted. She knew that Stanley had set his heart on buying the house, and suddenly he was telling her the apartment was perfectly all right, that he wouldn’t mind living there for another few years, all of which was untrue, and because he was lying to her like this, lying because he adored her and wanted her to have whatever she wanted, something changed in Rose that evening, and she understood she was beginning to love Stanley, truly love him, and if life continued to go on in this way much longer, it might even be possible for her to fall in love with him, to be struck down by an impossible second Big Love.
Let’s not be rash, she said. I’ve been dreaming about that house, too, and jumping from assistant to boss is a big step. I’m not sure I’m ready to handle it. Can we think it over for a while?
Stanley agreed to think it over for a while. When she saw Schneiderman at work the next morning, he, too, agreed to let her think it over for a while, and ten days after she started thinking, she discovered she was pregnant again.
For the past several months, she had been seeing a new doctor, a man she trusted named Seymour Jacobs, a good and intelligent doctor, she felt, who listened to her carefully and didn’t rush to conclusions, and because of her past history with the three spontaneous miscarriages, Jacobs urged her to stop commuting to New York every day, to stop working for the length of her pregnancy, and to confine herself to her apartment with as much bed rest as possible. He understood that these measures sounded drastic and a touch old-fashioned, but he was worried about her, and this might be her last good chance to have a child. My last chance, Rose said to herself, as she went on listening to the forty-two-year-old doctor with the large nose and compassionate brown eyes tell her how to succeed at becoming a mother. No more smoking and drinking, he added. A strict, high-protein diet, daily vitamin supplements, and a routine of special exercises. He would stop by to see her every other week, and the instant she felt the slightest twinge or pain, she should pick up the phone and dial his number. Was all that clear?
Yes, it was all clear. And so ended the dilemma of whether to buy a house or the studio, which in turn put an end to her days with Schneiderman, not to speak of interrupting her work as a photographer and turning her life upside down.
Rose was both elated and confused. Elated to know she still had a chance; confused by how she was going to cope with what amounted to seven months of house arrest. An infinite number of adjustments would have to be made, not just by her but by Stanley as well, since he would have to do the shopping and the bulk of the cooking now, poor Stanley, who worked so hard and put in such long hours as it was, and then there would be the added expense of hiring a woman to clean the apartment and do the laundry once or twice a week, nearly every aspect of daily life would be altered, her waking hours would henceforth be governed by a multitude of interdictions and restraints, no lifting of heavy objects, no moving the furniture around, no struggling to open a stuck window during a summer hot spell, she would have to keep a vigilant watch over herself, become conscious of the thousands of small and large things she had always done unconsciously, and of course there would be no more tennis (which she had grown to love) and no more swimming (which she had loved since earliest girlhood). In other words, the vigorous, athletic, perpetually moving Rose, who felt most fully herself whenever she was engaged in a rush of high-speed, all-consuming activity, would have to learn how to sit still.
Of all people, it was Mildred who saved her from the prospect of terminal boredom, who stepped in and transformed those months of immobility into what Rose would later describe to her son as a grand adventure.
You can’t sit around the apartment all day listening to the radio and watching that nonsense on television, Mildred said. Why not get your brain working for once and do some catching up?
Catching up? Rose said, not understanding what Mildred was talking about.
You might not realize it, her sister said, but your doctor has given you an extraordinary gift. He’s turned you into a prisoner, and the one thing prisoners have that other people don’t is time, endless amounts of time. Read books, Rose. Start educating yourself. This is your chance, and if you want my help, I’ll be happy to give it.
Mildred’s help came in the form of a reading list, of several reading lists over the months that followed, and with movie theaters temporarily off-limits, for the first time in her life Rose satisfied her hunger for stories with novels, good novels, not the crime novels and bestsellers she might have gravitated to on her own but the books that Mildred recommended, classics to be sure, but always selected with Rose in mind, books that Mildred felt Rose would enjoy, which meant that Moby-Dick and Ulysses and The Magic Mountain were never on any of the lists, since those books would have been too daunting for the meagerly trained Rose, but how many others there were to choose from, and as the months passed and her baby grew inside her, Rose spent her days swimming in the pages of books, and although there were a few disappointments among the dozens she read (The Sun Also Rises, for example, which struck her as fake and shallow), nearly all the others lured her in and kept her engrossed from first to last, among them Tender Is the Night, Pride and Prejudice, The House of Mirth, Moll Flanders, Vanity Fair, Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary, The Charterhouse of Parma, First Love, Dubliners, Light in August, David Copperfield, Middlemarch, Washington Square, The Scarlet Letter, Main Street, Jane Eyre, and numerous others, but of all the writers she discovered during her confinement, it was Tolstoy who sai
d the most to her, demon Tolstoy, who understood all of life, it seemed to her, everything there was to know about the human heart and the human mind, no matter if the heart or mind belonged to a man or a woman, and how was it possible, she wondered, for a man to know what Tolstoy knew about women, it made no sense that one man could be all men and all women, and therefore she marched through most of what Tolstoy had written, not just the big novels like War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and Resurrection, but the shorter works as well, the novellas and stories, none more powerful to her than the one-hundred-page Family Happiness, the story of a young bride and her gradual disillusionment, a work that hit so close to home that she wept at the end, and when Stanley returned to the apartment that evening, he was alarmed to see her in such a state, for even though she had finished the story at three in the afternoon, her eyes were still wet with tears.
The baby was due on March 16, 1947, but at ten in the morning on March second, a couple of hours after Stanley had left for work, Rose, still in her nightgown and propped up in bed with A Tale of Two Cities leaning against the northern slope of her enormous belly, felt a sudden pressure in her bladder. Assuming she had to pee, she slowly extricated herself from the covering sheet and blankets, inched her mountainous bulk to the edge of the bed, put her feet on the floor, and stood up. Before she could take a step toward the bathroom, she felt a rush of warm liquid flowing down the inner halves of her thighs. Rose didn’t move. She was facing the window, and when she looked outside she saw that a light, misty snow was falling from the sky. How still everything seemed at that moment, she said to herself, as if nothing in the world were moving but the snow. She sat down on the bed again and called 3 Brothers Home World, but the person who answered the phone told her Stanley was out on an errand and wouldn’t be back until after lunch. Then she called Dr. Jacobs, whose secretary informed her that he had just left the office on a house call. Feeling some panic now, Rose told the secretary to tell the doctor she was on her way to the hospital, and then she dialed Millie’s number. Her sister-in-law picked up on the third ring, and thus it was Millie who came to fetch her. During the short ride to the maternity ward at Beth Israel, Rose told her that she and Stanley had already chosen names for the child who was about to be born. If it was a girl, they were going to call her Esther Ann Ferguson. If it was a boy, he would go through life as Archibald Isaac Ferguson.
Millie looked into the rearview mirror and studied Rose, who was sprawled out on the backseat. Archibald, she said. Are you sure about that one?
Yes, we’re sure, Rose answered. Because of my Uncle Archie. And Isaac because of Stanley’s father.
Let’s just hope he’s a tough kid, Millie said. She was about to go on, but before she could get another word out of her mouth, they had reached the hospital entrance.
Millie rounded up the troops, and when Rose gave birth to her son at 2:07 the following morning, everyone was there: Stanley and her parents, Mildred and Joan, and even Stanley’s mother. Thus Ferguson was born, and for several seconds after he emerged from his mother’s body, he was the youngest human being on the face of the earth.
1.1
His mother’s name was Rose, and when he was big enough to tie his shoes and stop wetting the bed, he was going to marry her. Ferguson knew that Rose was already married to his father, but his father was an old man, and it wouldn’t be long now before he was dead. Once that happened, Ferguson would marry his mother, and from then on her husband’s name would be Archie, not Stanley. He would be sad when his father died, but not too sad, not sad enough to shed any tears. Tears were for babies, and he wasn’t a baby anymore. There were moments when tears still came out of him, of course, but only when he fell down and hurt himself, and hurting yourself didn’t count.
The best things in the world were vanilla ice cream and jumping up and down on his parents’ bed. The worst things in the world were stomach aches and fevers.
He knew now that sourballs were dangerous. No matter how much he liked them, he understood that he mustn’t put them in his mouth anymore. They were too slippery, and he couldn’t help swallowing them, and because they were too big to go all the way down, they would get stuck in his windpipe and make it hard to breathe. He would never forget how bad it felt the day he started to choke, but then his mother rushed into the room, lifted him off the ground, turned him upside down, and with one hand holding him by the feet, pounded him on the back with the other hand until the sourball popped out of his mouth and clattered onto the floor. His mother said: No more sourballs, Archie. They’re too dangerous. After that, she asked him to help her carry the bowl of sourballs into the kitchen, and one by one they took turns dropping the red, yellow, and green candies into the garbage. Then his mother said: Adios, sourballs. Such a funny word: adios.
That happened in Newark, in the long-ago days when they lived in the apartment on the third floor. Now they lived in a house in a place called Montclair. The house was bigger than the apartment, but the truth was that he had trouble remembering much about the apartment anymore. Except for the sourballs. Except for the venetian blinds in his room, which rattled whenever the window was open. Except for the day when his mother folded up his crib and he slept alone in a bed for the first time.
His father left the house early in the morning, often before Ferguson was awake. Sometimes his father would come home for dinner, and sometimes he wouldn’t come home until after Ferguson had been put to bed. His father worked. That was what grown men did. They left the house every day and worked, and because they worked they made money, and because they made money they could buy things for their wives and children. That was how his mother explained it to him one morning as he watched his father’s blue car drive away from the house. It seemed to be a good arrangement, Ferguson thought, but the money part was a little confusing. Money was so small and dirty, and how could those small, dirty pieces of paper get you something as big as a car or a house?
His parents had two cars, his father’s blue DeSoto and his mother’s green Chevrolet, but Ferguson had thirty-six cars, and on gloomy days when it was too wet to go outside, he would take them out of their box and line up his miniature fleet on the living room floor. There were two-door cars and four-door cars, convertibles and dump trucks, police cars and ambulances, taxis and buses, fire trucks and cement mixers, delivery trucks and station wagons, Fords and Chryslers, Pontiacs and Studebakers, Buicks and Nash Ramblers, each one different from the others, no two even remotely alike, and whenever Ferguson began to push one of them across the floor, he would bend down and look inside at the empty driver’s seat, and because every car needed a driver in order to move, he would imagine he was the person sitting behind the wheel, a tiny person, a man so tiny he was no bigger than the top joint of his thumb.
His mother smoked cigarettes, but his father smoked nothing, not even a pipe or cigars. Old Golds. Such a good-sounding name, Ferguson thought, and how hard he laughed when his mother blew smoke rings for him. Sometimes his father would say to her, Rose, you smoke too much, and his mother would nod her head and agree with him, but still she went on smoking as much as before. Whenever he and his mother climbed into the green car to go out on errands, they would stop for lunch in a little restaurant called Al’s Diner, and as soon as he finished his chocolate milk and grilled-cheese sandwich, his mother would hand him a quarter and ask him to buy her a pack of Old Golds from the cigarette machine. It made him feel like a big person to be given that quarter, which was about the best feeling there was, and off he would march to the back of the diner where the machine stood against the wall between the two restrooms. Once there, he would reach up on his toes to put the coin in the slot, pull the knob under the pillar of stacked-up Old Golds, and then listen to the sound of the pack as it tumbled out of the bulky machine and landed in the silver trough below the knobs. In those days, cigarettes didn’t cost twenty-five cents but twenty-three cents, and each pack came with two freshly minted copper pennies tucked inside the cellophane wrapper. Ferguso
n’s mother always let him keep those two pennies, and as she smoked her post-lunch cigarette and finished her coffee, he would hold them in his open palm and study the embossed profile of the man on the face of the two coins. Abraham Lincoln. Or, as his mother sometimes said: Honest Abe.
Beyond the little family of Ferguson and his parents, there were two other families to think about, his father’s family and his mother’s family, the New Jersey Fergusons and the New York Adlers, the big family with two aunts, two uncles, and five cousins and the small family with his grandparents and Aunt Mildred, which sometimes included his Great-aunt Pearl and his grown-up twin cousins, Betty and Charlotte. Uncle Lew had a thin mustache and wore wire-rimmed glasses, Uncle Arnold smoked Camels and had reddish hair, Aunt Joan was short and round, Aunt Millie was a little taller but very thin, and the cousins mostly ignored him because he was so much younger than they were, except for Francie, who sometimes babysat for him when his parents went to the movies or to someone’s house for a party. Francie was far and away his favorite person in the New Jersey family. She made beautiful, complicated drawings of castles and knights on horses for him, let him eat as much vanilla ice cream as he wanted, told funny jokes, and was ever so pretty to look at, with long hair that seemed both brown and red at the same time. Aunt Mildred was pretty as well, but her hair was blond, unlike his mother’s hair, which was dark brown, and even though his mother kept telling him that Mildred was her sister, he sometimes forgot because the two of them looked so different. He called his grandfather Papa and his grandmother Nana. Papa smoked Chesterfields and had lost most of his hair. Nana was on the fat side and laughed in the most interesting way, as if there were birds trapped inside her throat. It was better to visit the Adler apartment in New York than the Ferguson houses in Union and Maplewood, not least because the drive through the Holland Tunnel was something he relished, the curious sensation of traveling through an underwater tube lined with millions of identical square tiles, and each time he made that subaquatic journey, he would marvel at how neatly the tiles fit together and wonder how many men it had taken to finish such a colossal task. The apartment was smaller than the houses in New Jersey, but it had the advantage of being high up, on the sixth floor of the building, and Ferguson never tired of looking out the window in the living room and watching the traffic move around Columbus Circle, and then, on Thanksgiving, there was the further advantage of being able to watch the annual parade pass in front of that window, with the gigantic balloon of Mickey Mouse almost smack against his face. Another good thing about going to New York was that there were always presents when he arrived, boxed candies from his grandmother, books and records from Aunt Mildred, and all kinds of special things from his grandfather: balsa-wood airplanes, a game called Parcheesi (another excellent word), decks of playing cards, magic tricks, a red cowboy hat, and a pair of six-shooters in genuine leather holsters. The New Jersey houses offered no such bounties, and therefore Ferguson decided that New York was the place to be. When he asked his mother why they couldn’t live there all the time, she broke into a big smile and said: Ask your father. When he asked his father, his father said: Ask your mother. Apparently, there were some questions that had no answer.