Ferguson knew that his father had no idea what to make of him. Not just because he found it impossible to understand why anyone would want to go into such an iffy field as writing books, which struck him as a delusional folly, an all but certain descent into impoverishment, failure, and mind-shattering disappointment, but also because his properly raised son, who had been exposed to the benefits of traditional, up-from-the-bootstraps American enterprise from the day of his birth, now shunned the opportunities that had been given to him for advancement and success in life to fritter away his summers working as a common laborer, toiling under an idiot college dropout who cheated the IRS. There was nothing wrong with the money he was earning, but the problem was that it would never become more money, for bottom-rung work of that sort would always keep him at the bottom, and when his son started talking about supporting himself in the future as a factory worker or a sailor in the merchant marine, the father cringed at the thought of what would become of him. What had happened to the little boy who had wanted to be a doctor? Why had everything gone so wrong?
That was how Ferguson imagined his father must have thought about him, if in fact he did think about him, and in the two- and three-page monologues he wrote in his father’s voice, he struggled to understand his father’s way of thinking, digging down and trying to excavate the few things he knew about Stanley Ferguson’s early life, the difficult, no-money years when his grandfather was murdered and his screaming, quasi-hysterical grandmother took charge of the clan, and then the mysterious departure of his father’s two older brothers to California, never fully explained, never fully understood, and after that the push to become the richest man on earth, the great prophet of profits who believed in money as other people believed in God or sex or good works, money as salvation and fulfillment, money as the ultimate measure of all things, and anyone who resisted that belief was either a fool or a coward, as his ex-wife and son were surely fools and cowards, their brains stuffed with the romantic claptrap dished out by novels and cheap Hollywood films, and his ex-wife was mostly to blame for what had happened, his once beloved Rose, who had turned the boy’s head away from his father and coddled him with all that soft-minded nonsense about discovering his true self and forging his own unique destiny, and now it was too late to undo the damage and the boy was lost.
Still, none of that explained why his father continued to nod off in front of movie and TV screens, or why, as his wealth had grown, he had become cheaper and more tightfisted and took his son only to lousy, inexpensive restaurants for their twice-monthly dinners, or why he had changed his mind about selling the house in Maplewood and had moved back in after Ferguson and his mother had left, or why, after going to the trouble of having Sole Mates printed, he never asked to see any of Ferguson’s new stories, never inquired about how he was getting on with his stepfather and stepsiblings in the house on Woodhall Crescent, never asked what college he wanted to go to, never said a word about the Kennedy assassination or seemed to care that the president had been shot, and the more Ferguson tried to tunnel his way into his father’s soul, searching for something that wasn’t dead or cut off from other people, the less he was able to find. Even the complex Mr. Rosenbloom, who no doubt hid much if not most of his inner life from the world, made more sense to Ferguson than his father did. Nor could the differences between them be boiled down to the fact that his father worked and Mr. Rosenbloom didn’t. Dan Schneiderman worked. Not the twelve- and fourteen-hour days his father put in, but a steady seven to eight hours five or six days a week, and even if he wasn’t the most dazzling artist in the world, he knew the limitations of his modest talent and took pleasure in his work, which he did well enough to cobble together a living as a self-employed artisan of the brush, as he sometimes put it, not the big-money income Stanley Ferguson raked in, of course, but a more generous heart in spite of that, as shown by the new car he bought for his new wife, which turned Ferguson and Amy into joint owners of her old Pontiac when they passed the test for their licenses, by the clever mobiles and whirling little mechanical sculptures he made as presents for everyone’s birthday, by the surprise outings to restaurants, concerts, and films, by the allowance he insisted on giving Ferguson along with the one he gave his daughter—shelling out weekly to both of them because he wanted their summer earnings to be deposited in the bank and not touched while they were still in high school—but most of all by the generosity of his person, his high spirits and loving solicitudes, his boyishness, his whimsy, his passion for poker and all games of chance, his somewhat reckless disregard of tomorrow in favor of today, which added up to a man so different from Ferguson’s father that the son/stepson had trouble reconciling them as members of the same species. Then there was Dan’s older brother, Gilbert Schneiderman, Ferguson’s new, impressively intelligent uncle, who worked as hard as anyone else, teaching music history full-time at Juilliard and writing entry after entry on classical composers for a soon-to-be-published music encyclopedia, and Uncle Don worked as well, the intense, sometimes crabby father of best-friend Noah never stopped working as he plugged away at his Montaigne biography and spilled forth two and sometimes three book reviews a month, and even Arnie Frazier worked, the flunk-out, 4-F, IRS-chiseling ex–football player worked his ass off, as Ferguson well knew, but that didn’t prevent him from drinking a six-pack of Löwenbräu every night and keeping up amorous relations with three different girls from three different towns at the same time.
Ferguson tried not to feel angry when he was with his father, even though he was appalled by how willing the appliance king had been to let Dan Schneiderman give him the money for his allowance, which legally and morally should have been given to him by his father, but Ferguson suspected his father was angry as well, not so much at him but at his mother, who not only had pressed for the divorce but had remarried so soon afterward, and by abdicating his responsibility toward his son, Ferguson’s father had his miser’s reward of not having to part with his money when he didn’t want to (which was almost always now) along with the additional satisfaction of sticking it to his ex-wife’s new husband. Fun and games in the flea circus of petty animosities and tortures, Ferguson said to himself, as his heart contracted ever more tightly within him, but perhaps it was just as well that his father had reneged on his allowance obligation, since Ferguson would have refused the money if it had been offered to him, and he didn’t want to confront his father with the decision he had made not to accept his money, which would have been seen as an act of hostility, something close to a declaration of war, and Ferguson wasn’t looking to pick a fight with his father, he just wanted to endure their meetings as quietly as possible and have nothing happen that would cause either one of them pain.
* * *
NO MONEY FROM his father—and no baseball because Artie Federman’s ghost was still walking beside him and Ferguson wouldn’t back down from his promise. Other sports were permitted, but none of them had ever counted as much as baseball, and after starting at forward for the J.V. basketball team in his first year of high school, Ferguson decided not to go out for the varsity the following year, which brought an abrupt and definitive end to his participation in organized sports. It had once meant everything to him, but that was before he had read Crime and Punishment, before he had discovered sex with Dana Rosenbloom, before he had smoked his first cigarette and downed his first drink, before he had become the future writer who spent his evenings alone in his room filling up his precious notebooks with words, and while he still loved sports and would never think of abandoning them, they had been relegated to the category of idle amusements—touch football, pickup basketball games, ping-pong in the basement of the new house, and occasional Sunday morning tennis with Dan, his mother, and Amy, for the most part doubles matches, either children versus parents or father-daughter versus mother-son. Recreational diversions, as opposed to the do-or-die battles of his boyhood. Play hard, work up a sweat, win the game or lose the game, and then go back home for a shower and a smoke. B
ut it was still beautiful to him, especially the sport he cared about most, forbidden baseball, which he would never play again, and he kept on pulling for his newly invented team from Flushing, even if the fate of the Western world no longer hung in the balance when Choo Choo Coleman stepped into the batter’s box with two outs and two men on in the bottom of the ninth. His stepfather and stepbrother would groan when the inevitable third strike was called, but Ferguson would merely nod or shake his head and then stand up and calmly turn off the TV. The Choo Choo Colemans of this world had been born to strike out, and the Mets wouldn’t have been the Mets if he hadn’t.
Two dinners every month with his father, and one dinner every other month with the Federmans in New Rochelle, a ritual Ferguson held fast to in spite of his misgivings, since it was never clear to him why Artie’s parents kept asking him back and even less clear why he found himself willing to make the long trek out there to see them when in fact he wasn’t willing, when in fact each one of those dinners filled him with dread. Murky. Their motives escaped him, for neither he nor the Federmans understood what they were doing or why they persisted in doing it, and yet the impulse had been there from the start: Mrs. Federman throwing her arms around him after the funeral and telling him he would always be part of the family; Ferguson sitting beside twelve-year-old Celia in the living room for two hours, struggling to find the words to say he was her brother now and would always take care of her. Why had they said those things and thought those things—and what did any of it mean?
He and Artie had been friends for only one month. Long enough to have turned into the A.F. twins, long enough to have felt they were at the beginning of what would be a long and close friendship, but not long enough for either one of them to have become a part of the other’s family. At the time of his friend’s death, Ferguson had never even set eyes on Ralph and Shirley Federman. He hadn’t even known their names, but they had known about him because of the letters their son had written from Camp Paradise. Those letters were crucial. The shy, untalkative Artie had opened up to them about his new and wonderful friend, and therefore his parents were already convinced that Ferguson was wonderful before they ever met him. Then Artie died, and three days later the wonderful friend showed up at the funeral, not the spitting image of their son but a boy much like him, tall and strong, with the same young athlete’s body, the same Jewish background, the same good marks at school, and for such a boy to enter their lives at the precise moment they had lost their son, the very boy their son had referred to as a brother, must have had a powerful effect on them, Ferguson reasoned, an uncanny effect, as if their vanished boy had outmaneuvered the gods and sent them another boy to stand in for him, a changeling son from the world of the living swapped for the one who had died, and by keeping up contact with Ferguson, they could see what would have happened to their own boy as he slowly grew up and turned into a man, the gradual shifts that made a fifteen-year-old different from a fourteen-year-old, a sixteen-year-old different from a fifteen-year-old, a seventeen-year-old different from a sixteen-year-old, and an eighteen-year-old different from a seventeen-year-old. It was a kind of performance, Ferguson realized, and every time he traveled to New Rochelle for another Sunday dinner, he had to take on the job of pretending to be himself by being himself, by enacting himself as fully and truthfully as he could, for they all knew they were playing a game, even if they weren’t aware they knew, and Archie would never be Artie, not just because he didn’t want to be but because the living could never replace the dead.
They were good people, kind people, unexceptional people, and they lived in a little white house on a tree-lined street with other little white houses owned by other hard-working middle-class families with two or three children and a car or two cars in the white wooden garage. Ralph Federman was a tall, thin man in his late forties who had trained as a pharmacist and owned the smallest of the three drugstores on the main street of the New Rochelle shopping district. Shirley Federman, also tall but not thin, was a few years younger than her husband. A graduate of Hunter College, she worked part-time at the local library, canvassed for Democratic candidates during state and national elections, and had a thing for Broadway musicals. They both treated Ferguson with a quiet sort of deference, a bit shocked perhaps and also grateful that he went on accepting their invitations out of loyalty to their son, and because they didn’t want to lose him, they tended to sit back at the dinners and let Ferguson do most of the talking. As for Celia, she rarely said a word, but she listened to him, listened more closely than either of her parents did, and as Ferguson watched her evolve from a timid, grieving child into a self-possessed girl of sixteen, it occurred to him that she was the reason why he kept going back there, for it had always been apparent to him how bright she was, but now she was becoming pretty, too, a slender, swanlike, long-limbed kind of prettiness, and even though she was still too young for him, in another year or two she wouldn’t be, and lodged somewhere in a deep, inaccessible part of Ferguson’s brain was the unformed idea that he was destined to marry Celia Federman, that the narrative of his life demanded he marry her in order to negate the injustice of her brother’s early death.
It was essential that he talk, that he not just sit there making polite conversation but really talk, telling them everything he could about himself so they would begin to understand who he was, and more and more after the first few visits that was what he did, talk to them about himself and the things that were happening to him, because by then there was less and less to say about Artie, it was too gruesome to keep going over the same ground again and again, and Ferguson could see with his own eyes how in the course of nine months Mr. Federman’s hair had gone from dark brown to a mix of brown and gray to mostly gray and then to all white, how Artie’s father grew much thinner for a time and his mother kept putting on weight, ten more pounds by October 1961, fifteen more pounds by March 1962, twenty more pounds by September, their bodies were telling Ferguson what was happening to their souls as they went on living with Artie’s death, and there was no need to discuss their son’s exploits as a ten-year-old Little Leaguer anymore, no need to mention his A+’s in science and math ever again, and so Ferguson came up with a new strategy for getting through those dinners, which was to push Artie out of the room and force them to think about something else.
Never a word about giving up baseball because of their son, never a word about his lustful thoughts toward Amy Schneiderman, never a word about having sex with Dana Rosenbloom, never a word about the night he drank too much with Amy’s boyfriend, Mike Loeb, and wound up puking all over his pants and shoes, but other than hiding those secrets and indiscretions, Ferguson made a point of not censoring himself, a difficult task for someone as reticent as he was, but he trained himself to be honest with them, to perform for them, and at the two dozen New Rochelle dinners he attended over the four years between Artie’s death and his graduation from high school, he talked about many things, including the various upheavals that had occurred in his family (his parents’ divorce, his mother’s second marriage, his frigid relations with his father) and the curious experience of having acquired a new set of relatives, not just his stepfather and two stepsiblings but Dan’s brother, Gil, an erudite and sympathetic man who took an interest in his stepnephew’s writerly aspirations (You have to learn everything you can, Archie, he once said to him, and then you have to forget it, and what you can’t forget will create the foundation of your work) and Gil’s dour wife, Anna, and his plump, smirking daughters, Margaret and Ella, along with Dan’s crotchety old father, who lived in a room on the third floor of a nursing home in Washington Heights and was either cracked or in the early stages of dementia, but still, he did come out with some unforgettable remarks from time to time in that Sig Ruman accent of his: I vant ve all shut up now so I can piss! One of the best results of his mother’s marriage, he told them, was that by some mysterious sleight of hand, which had strung together so many different families and overlapping lineages, his dearest
friend and cousin by marriage, Noah Marx, was now related to his new stepsister and stepbrother as well, cousins by marriage once or twice removed (no one was quite sure which), a fact that made him dizzy every time he thought about it—Noah and Amy bound together with him in the same mixed-up tribe!—and what an improvement it was to see how well Dan Schneiderman hit it off with Donald Marx, which had not been the case with his father, who had disliked Uncle Don and had once called him a pompous schmuck, and this was better, Ferguson said, even if his mother’s relations with her sister had not improved and never would, but at least now it was possible to sit down and have dinner with the Marxes without wanting to scream or pull out a gun and shoot someone.