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  Open it, she commanded him.

  Ferguson lifted up the flaps, and once he could see what was in the box, he felt so confused that he didn’t know if he should burst out laughing or crawl under the bed in shame.

  There were three neatly stacked piles of pamphlets inside, sixty or seventy in all, stapled pamphlets of forty-eight pages each with plain white covers and the following words printed across the front in bold black letters:

  SOUL MATES

  BY ARCHIE FERGUSON

  As Ferguson picked up one of the pamphlets and began leafing through the pages, stunned to see the words of his story looking back at him in eleven-point type, his mother said: He wanted to surprise you, but then the printer screwed up the job by misspelling the title, and your father felt so bad about it, so stupid for not having checked to make sure everything had been done right, he couldn’t bring himself to tell you about it.

  He should have told me, Ferguson said, speaking in a voice so low that his mother could barely hear him. Who cares about the title?

  He’s so proud of you, Archie, his mother said. He just doesn’t know what to say or how to say it. He’s a man who never learned how to talk.

  * * *

  WHAT FERGUSON DIDN’T know at the time, and what continued to be unknown to him until his mother spoke about it seven years later, was that she and Dan Schneiderman had been carrying on a clandestine affair for the past eighteen months. The two or three nights of bridge every week were in fact just one night, and Dan’s poker nights and bowling nights were no longer used for poker or bowling, and Ferguson’s parents’ marriage wasn’t merely the icy, passionless charade it appeared to be, it was defunct, deader than the deadest body in the county morgue, and if they continued to stay together in their nonsensical union, it was only because divorce was considered to be so scandalous in that part of the world that they needed to protect their boy from the stigma of coming from a broken home, which in many ways was worse than being the son of an embezzler or a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. Divorce was for movie stars and rich people who lived in New York townhouses and summered in the south of France, but in the New Jersey suburbs of the fifties and early sixties unhappy couples were supposed to stick it out, which was what Ferguson’s parents were intending to do until their offspring graduated from high school and left Maplewood for good, at which point they would call it quits and go their separate ways, preferably to two different towns, each one as far from Maplewood as possible. Meanwhile, his father had started spending his nights in the guest bedroom, supposedly because his snoring had become so loud that Ferguson’s mother was having trouble falling asleep, and not once did Ferguson suspect his parents might not have been telling the truth.

  Ferguson’s father was the only person who knew about Rose’s affair with Dan Schneiderman, and Ferguson’s mother was the only person who knew that Stanley had recently taken up with a widow from Livingston named Ethel Blumenthal. The grown-ups were cavorting just as rashly and impetuously as the fifteen-year-olds, but they went about it with such stealth and discretion that no one in Maplewood or anywhere else had the smallest inkling of what they were up to. Not Liz Schneiderman, not Jim or Amy, not Ferguson’s grandparents, not Aunt Mildred or Uncle Don, and not Ferguson himself—although the words his mother had spoken that night after dinner, Dan told me, had pushed open the door an inch or two, but not enough for him to see anything in the room behind it, since it was still too dim in there and he didn’t know where to look for the light switch.

  His parents weren’t bitter, and they didn’t detest each other, and neither one wished the other ill. They simply didn’t want to be married anymore, and for the time being they were trying to make the best of it by keeping up appearances. Eighteen years had been ground into a thimbleful of dust, a powdery residue no heavier than the ashes from a single extinguished cigarette, and yet one thing nevertheless remained, an unbroken solidarity about the welfare of their son, and for that reason Rose was doing what she could to mend the rift that had developed between Stanley and Archie, for even though Stanley was a less than adequate father, he wasn’t the villain Archie had made him out to be, and long after their little family had been blown apart, Stanley would go on being Archie’s father, and it wouldn’t do Archie any good to travel through the rest of his life bearing a grudge against him. Luckily, there had been those botched pamphlets. Such a pathetic attempt to ingratiate himself with his son, of course, about whom he understood almost nothing, and how passive Stanley had been when the pamphlets came out wrong (why not go back to the printer and have them done again?), but at least they were something, at least they proved something, and Archie would have to take them into account whenever he thought about his father in the months and years ahead.

  It seemed that Daniel Schneiderman had fallen for Rose as far back as 1941, in the days after she started working at his father’s studio on West Twenty-seventh Street, but Rose had been engaged to David Raskin at the time, and when Raskin was killed at Fort Benning the following August, Schneiderman was already engaged to Elizabeth Michaels and about to go into the army himself. As he confessed to Rose years later, he would have broken off that engagement if he’d thought he had even the slightest chance with her, but Rose was in mourning then, walled off from the world in a dark closet of deadness and despair, not sure if she wanted to go on living or die, and the farthest thing from her thoughts was putting herself back in circulation, since she had no interest in seeing other men or falling for another man, least of all a man who was about to marry someone else, and therefore nothing happened, which is to say, Dan married Liz, Rose married Stanley, and Rose never knew that Dan secretly wished she had married him.

  Ferguson was told about the affair but never anything specific about it—how it began, where they met on the evenings they spent together, what they were planning or not planning for the future—only that it started two days after Kennedy’s inauguration and that his mother went into it with a clear conscience because her marriage to his father was already over, a mutual decision arrived at six months earlier that had freed both of them from the vows they had made in 1944, with nothing left to discuss but the formalities of an eventual divorce and what to tell Archie about Stanley’s removal to another bed. Dan was in a much trickier spot, however, since he and Liz hadn’t had that sort of throw-in-the-towel conversation and were still married, would always be married, he feared, because he didn’t have the heart to walk out on her after two decades of rugged, contentious, but not entirely miserable wedlock, and unlike Ferguson’s mother, Jim and Amy’s father suffered from the guilt of his adulterous infidelities. Then came more guilt, guilt for both of them now, the corrosive, gut-consuming guilt of Liz’s cancer, for how many times had each one of them thought about the happier life they would have had together if Dan were no longer married to Liz, and now the gods were about to remove Liz from the story, and the good thing they had both daydreamed about but had never dared to express out loud had turned into something exceedingly bad, the worst thing either one of them could have imagined, for how not to feel that their thoughts were pushing that luckless, dying woman into her grave?

  That was all the fifteen-year-old Ferguson knew back then—that Mrs. Schneiderman was going to die—and when Amy called him late Sunday night, three days after his mother had warned him of the disaster that was about to fall on the Schneiderman children, he was prepared for Amy’s tears and capable of uttering more or less cogent sentences in response to the grotesque things she was telling him on the phone, the Saturday and Sunday visits to the hospital where her mother was lying in a morphine-induced blur of panicked dissociation, pain and then less pain, then more pain and a slow, stuporous withdrawal into sleep, her face so gaunt and gray now, as if she were no longer herself, lying alone in the bed as her rotting, burned-up insides went about the job of killing her, and why had her father lied about it, she moaned, why had he kept it back from her and Jim with that dumb story about going to Chicago to be wi
th Grandma Lil, how awful of him to have done that and how awful that she had been thinking about buying black lipstick in order to shock her mother at the very moment when her mother was being taken to the hospital, she felt so bad about that now, so bad about so many things, and Ferguson did what he could to calm her down, saying that her father had done the right thing in waiting for Jim to come home from college so he could break the news to them together, and remember that he, Ferguson, would always be there for her, and whenever she needed a shoulder to cry on, he wanted her to think about using his shoulder first.

  Mrs. Schneiderman held on for another four weeks, and in late June, just as the school year was coming to a close, Ferguson attended his second funeral in the past eleven months, a smaller and quieter affair than the massive obsequies for Artie Federman, no uncontrollable outbursts of howling and sobbing this time but rather stillness and shock, a subdued farewell to a woman who had died on the morning of her forty-second birthday, and as Ferguson listened to Rabbi Prinz recite the customary prayers and say the customary words, he looked around and saw that only a few people who were not close relatives of the Schneidermans had tears in their eyes, his mother among them, who wept throughout the entire service, but not even Jim was crying, he just sat there holding Amy’s hand and looking down at the floor, and afterward, in the pause between the service and the drive to the cemetery, he was moved to see his weeping mother throw her arms around the weeping Dan Schneiderman and hang on for a long, hard hug, little understanding the full import of that hug or why they held on to each other for so long, and then he was throwing his own arms around the weeping, swollen-eyed Amy, who had cried on his shoulder countless times in the past month, and because he felt so sorry for her, and because it felt so good to be holding her body in his arms, Ferguson decided that he must and should and with all due haste would fall in love with her. Her situation was so precarious now that it demanded something more than friendship from him, something more than the old Archie-and-Amy routine they had perfected over the years, but Ferguson never had a chance to tell her about his sudden change of heart, since that was the last he saw of Amy for the next two months. After the day of her mother’s funeral, her father let her skip the last four days of the semester, and the fifth day, which was the day their class graduated from Maplewood Junior High, the three Schneidermans took off on a summer-long journey through England, France, and Italy, which Ferguson’s mother thought was a brilliant idea, the best possible medicine for a family that had suffered as much as they had.

  His father had to work on the morning of Ferguson’s graduation, so his mother came to the ceremony alone. Afterward, they drove to South Orange Village and stopped in for lunch at Gruning’s, the site of so many delectable hamburgers in the years before the Blue Valley Country Club had destroyed the old Sunday ritual, and for the first several minutes after they found a table in the back, they discussed Ferguson’s plans for the summer, which included a job at his father’s outlet in Livingston (a multipurpose, minimum-wage position that would have him working at such tasks as mopping floors, squirting Windex onto the screens of the show-room televisions, washing down the refrigerators and other appliances on display, and installing air conditioners with the delivery man, Joe Bentley), two outdoor basketball games a week in the Maplewood–South Orange Twilight League, and as many hours at his desk as possible: he had come up with ideas for a couple of new stories and was hoping to finish them before school started again. Not to speak of books, of course, all the dozens of books he wanted to read, and then, with whatever time he had left, he would write Amy as many letters as he could and hope she would be at the addresses he mailed them to.

  His mother listened, his mother nodded, his mother smiled a distant, thoughtful sort of smile, and before Ferguson could think of what to say next, she interrupted him and said: Your father and I are splitting up, Archie.

  Ferguson wanted to make sure he had heard her correctly, so he repeated the words back to her: Splitting up. As in divorce?

  That’s right. As in So long, it’s been good to know ya.

  And when did you decide this?

  Ages ago. We were planning to wait until you went off to college, or wherever you go after you finish high school, but three years is a long time, and what’s the point of waiting? As long as you approve, of course.

  Me? What do I have to do with it?

  People will talk. People will point fingers. I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable.

  I don’t care what people think. It’s none of their business.

  So?

  By all means. By any means. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the best news I’ve heard in a long time.

  You mean it?

  Of course I mean it. No more lies, no more pretending. The age of truth begins!

  * * *

  TIME PASSED, AND again and again during the months that followed, Ferguson would stop, take a good look at the things around him, and tell himself that life was getting better. Not only was he finished with junior high school now, which meant that nothing he wrote would ever be judged by Mrs. Baldwin again, but the breakup of his parents’ marriage seemed to be breaking up many other things as well, and with the old, predictable routines no longer in place, it was becoming more and more difficult to know what would happen from one day to the next. Ferguson enjoyed that new feeling of instability. Things might have been in flux, at times verging on out-and-out confusion, but at least they weren’t dull.

  For the time being, he and his mother were to go on living in the big house in Maplewood. His father had rented a smaller house in Livingston, not far from the house of his lady friend Ethel Blumenthal, who was still a secret at that point and therefore not known to Ferguson, but the long-range plan was to sell the big house within a certain number of months after the divorce was finalized and for both of his parents to move elsewhere. It went without saying that Ferguson would go on living with his mother. He would be free to see his father whenever he wished, but if it turned out he didn’t want to see his father, then his father would have the right to see him for two dinners every month. That was the minimum. There was no maximum. It seemed to be a fair arrangement, and they all shook hands on it.

  His father was writing a monthly check to his mother for what was termed sundry and essential living expenses, each of them had a lawyer, and the amicable parting that was supposed to have been wrapped up in a matter of weeks dragged on for months in less than amicable disputes about alimony payments, the division of common property, and the deadline for putting the house on the market. From Ferguson’s point of view, it seemed that his father was the one who was gumming up the works, that something in him was unconsciously but actively resisting the divorce, and although he felt frustrated on his mother’s behalf (who wanted it over and done with as quickly as possible), in the early days of his parents’ wrangling Ferguson felt oddly reassured by his father’s obstructionism, since it seemed to suggest that the prophet of profits was capable of normal human feelings after all, which had not been apparent to his son for many years, and whether it was because Stanley Ferguson still harbored an abiding love for the woman he had married almost two decades earlier (the sentimental reason) or because the ignominy of divorce represented failure and humiliation in the eyes of others (the social reason) or simply because he was reluctant to see Ferguson’s mother walk off with half the money from the sale of the big house (the financial reason) was less important than the fact that he felt something, and even though he ultimately gave in and signed the divorce agreement in December after Ferguson’s mother said she would be willing to relinquish her share of the house, that didn’t mean money alone had had the last word, for Ferguson sensed that the sentimental and social reasons were the true cause of the conflict and that holding out for the money was merely an attempt to save face.

  At the same time, using that money as a wedge in the negotiations struck Ferguson as an unforgivable act. The largest asset his parents owned in common was the
house, the big house Ferguson had always detested, the show-off Tudor-style manor he had never wanted to move to in the first place, and by depriving his soon-to-be ex-wife of her share of the proceeds from that most valuable asset, Ferguson’s father was in effect pauperizing Ferguson’s mother, making it all but impossible for her to buy a new house of her own, thus condemning her and his own son to a diminished life in a cheap, cramped apartment somewhere near the railroad tracks. He was punishing her for not loving him anymore, and the fact that Ferguson’s mother had agreed to such a harsh stipulation only proved how desperately she wanted to be liberated from the marriage, even if it wrecked her financially, and so Ferguson’s father forged on with his cruel demand and wouldn’t back down. If there was any hope in the wording of the final agreement, it was that the house wouldn’t have to be put on the market until two years after the divorce became final, which would more or less cover the three years Ferguson would be in high school, but still, after trying to give his father the benefit of the doubt ever since the Sole-Soul contretemps, after doing his best to treat his father amicably and politely all during the long, tedious summer of working at the Livingston store, Ferguson now turned against him with something close to hatred, and he resolved never to accept another penny from his father for the rest of his life, not for spending money, not for clothes or a secondhand car, not for college tuition, not for anything ever again, and even after Ferguson was a grown man and had failed to publish any of his books and was living as a wino on the lowest block of the Bowery, he would refuse to unclench his fist when his father tried to press a fifty-cent piece into his hand, and when the old man finally left this world and Ferguson inherited eighty million dollars and the ownership of four hundred and seventy-three appliance stores, he would close the stores and distribute the money equally among the bums he had known from his days of living as a forgotten man on the sidewalks of skid row.