This conversation hit Ferguson like a blow to the stomach, and he felt as lost and afraid as he had been when his fingers slipped off the branch and he started falling out of the tree, that gruesome sensation of helplessness, nothing but air around him and below him, no mother or father, no God, no nothing but the emptiness of pure nothing, and his body on its way to the ground with nothing in his head but the fear of what would happen to him when he got there. His parents never talked to him about things like the Rosenbergs’ execution, they protected him from atomic bombs and mortal enemies and false verdicts and orphaned children and fried grown-ups, and to hear Francie tell him about all that in one grand gush of emotion and indignation caught Ferguson by complete surprise, not like a punch to the stomach, exactly, but more like something from one of the cartoons he watched on television: a cast-iron safe falling from a tenth-floor window and landing on his head. Splat. A five-minute conversation with his cousin Francie, and everything had gone splat. There was a big world out there, a world of bombs and wars and electric chairs, and he knew little or nothing about it. He was dumb, so perfectly dumb and hopeless that he found it embarrassing to be himself, an idiot child, present but not accounted for, a body occupying space in the same way a chair or a bed occupied space, nothing more than a witless zero, and if he meant to change that, he would have to get started now. Miss Lundquist had told his kindergarten class that they would learn how to read and write in the first grade, that there was no sense in rushing things and that they would all be mentally ready to begin next year, but Ferguson couldn’t wait until next year, he had to begin now or else condemn himself to another summer of ignorance, for reading and writing were the first step, he concluded, the only step he was in a position to take as a person of no account, and if there was any justice in the world, which he was seriously beginning to question, then someone would come along and offer to help him.
By the end of that week, help appeared in the form of his grandmother, who drove out to West Orange with his grandfather on Sunday and settled into the bedroom next to his for a visit that lasted well into July. He had acquired a pair of crutches the day before she showed up, which allowed him to move around freely on the second floor and eliminated the humiliations of the milk bottle, but descending to the first floor on his own was still out of the question, the journey down the stairs was far too perilous, and so he had to be carried by someone, yet one more insult to be endured in silence and smoldering resentment, and because his grandmother was too weak and Wanda was too small, the carrying had to be done by his father or mother, which made it necessary to go down early in the morning, since his father left for work at a little past seven A.M. and his mother was still searching for the right place to set up her studio, but no matter, he didn’t care about sleeping late, and it was preferable to spend the mornings and afternoons on the screened-in porch than to languish in the chilly tomb upstairs, and while the weather was often hot and humid, the birds were back in the picture now, and they more than compensated for any discomfort. The porch was where he finally conquered the mysteries of letters, words, and punctuation marks, where he struggled under the tutelage of his grandmother to master such oddities as where and wear, whether and weather, rough and stuff, ocean and motion, and the daunting conundrum of to, too, and two. Until then, he had never felt particularly close to the woman whom fate had chosen to serve as his grandmother, his nebulous Nana from midtown Manhattan, a benign and affectionate person, he supposed, but so quiet and self-contained that it was difficult to establish a connection with her, and whenever he was with his grandparents, his boisterous, madly entertaining grandfather seemed to take up all the room, which left his grandmother in the shadows, almost entirely effaced. With her squat, round body and thick legs, with her dowdy, old-fashioned clothes and stolid shoes with the fat, low heels, she had always struck Ferguson as someone who belonged to another world, an inhabitant of another time and place, and consequently she could never feel at home in this world, could live in the present only as a kind of tourist, as if she were just passing through, longing to go back to where she had come from. Nevertheless, she knew everything there was to know about reading and writing, and when Ferguson asked her if she would be willing to help him, she patted him on the shoulder and said of course she would, it would be an honor. Emma Adler, wife of Benjy, mother of Mildred and Rose, proved to be a patient if plodding teacher, and she went about the business of instructing her grandson with systematic thoroughness, beginning with an examination of Ferguson’s knowledge on the first day, needing to know exactly how much he had learned so far before she devised an appropriate course of action. She was heartened by the fact that he could already recognize the letters of the alphabet, all twenty-six of them, most of the small letters and all of the capitals, and because he was so advanced, she said, it was going to make her job much less complicated than she had thought it would be. The lessons she subsequently gave him were divided into three parts, writing for ninety minutes in the morning, followed by a lunch break, reading for ninety minutes in the afternoon, and then, after another pause (for lemonade, plums, and cookies), forty-five minutes of reading out loud to him as they sat together on the porch sofa and she pointed to the words she thought would be hard for him to understand, her chubby right index finger tapping the page below such tricky spellings as intrigue, melancholy, and thorough, and as Ferguson sat there beside her, breathing in the grandmother smells of hand lotion and rosewater perfume, he imagined the day when all of this would become automatic for him, when he would be able to read and write as well as any other person who had ever lived. Ferguson was not a dexterous child, as his fall from the oak had proved, not to speak of the other spills and stumbles that had dogged his early life, and the writing part caused more difficulty for him than the reading part. His grandmother would say, Watch how I do this, Archie, and then she would slowly write out a letter six or seven times in a row, capital B’s, for example, or lowercase f’s, after which Ferguson would try to imitate her, sometimes succeeding at the first go, other times failing to get it just right, and whenever he continued to fail after the fifth or sixth attempt, his grandmother would place her hand on top of his hand, wrap her fingers around his fingers, and then guide the pencil over the page as their two hands executed the letter in the proper way. This skin-on-skin approach helped quicken his progress, for it removed the exercise from the realm of abstract forms and made it tactile and concrete, as if the muscles in his hand were being trained to perform the particular task required by the contour of each letter, and by repeating the exercise again and again, every day going over the letters he had already learned and adding four or five new ones, Ferguson eventually took control of the situation and stopped making errors. With the reading part, the lessons advanced smoothly, since there were no pencils involved and he could fly along at a rapid pace, encountering few barriers as he moved from three- and four-word sentences to ten- and fifteen-word sentences in the course of two weeks, and such was his determination to become a full-fledged reader before his grandmother’s visit came to an end, it was almost as if he were willing himself to understand, forcing his mind into a state of such receptiveness that once a new fact was learned, it stayed there and wasn’t forgotten. One by one, his grandmother would print out sentences for him, and one by one he would read them back to her, beginning with My name is Archie and moving on to Look at Ted run to It’s so hot this morning to When will your cast come off? to I think it’s going to rain tomorrow to How interesting that the little birds sing more beautifully than the big birds to I’m an old woman and can’t remember learning how to read, but I doubt I caught on as quickly as you have, and then he graduated to his first book, The Tale of Two Bad Mice, a story about a pair of housebound rodents named Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca who smash up a little girl’s dollhouse because the food in there isn’t real but made of plaster, and how thoroughly Ferguson savored the violence of their destructive fury, the rampage that followed the shock of their disappoin
ted, unsatisfied hunger, and as he read the book out loud to his grandmother, he faltered over just a few words, difficult words whose meanings escaped him, such as perambulator, oilcloth, hearth-rug, and cheesemonger. A good story, he said to his grandmother after he had finished, and very funny, too. Yes, she agreed, a highly amusing story, and then, as she kissed him on the top of his head, she added: I couldn’t have read it better myself.
The next day, his grandmother helped him write a letter to Aunt Mildred, whom he hadn’t seen in almost a year. She was living in Chicago now, where she worked as a professor and taught large college students like Gary, although Gary was at a different college from hers, Williams College in Massachusetts, whereas her college was called the University of Something. In thinking about Gary, he naturally started thinking about Francie as well, and it struck him as peculiar that his cousin was already talking about marriage at seventeen when Aunt Mildred, who was two years older than his mother, which made her many years older than Francie, still wasn’t married to anyone. He asked his grandmother why Aunt Mildred had no husband, but apparently there was no answer to that question, for his grandmother shook her head and admitted that she didn’t know, speculating that it could be because Mildred was so busy with her work or else because she simply hadn’t found the right man yet. Then his grandmother handed him a pencil and a small sheet of lined paper, explaining that this was the best kind of paper for writing letters, but before he began he should think carefully about what he wanted to tell his aunt, and on top of that he should remember to keep his sentences short, not because he wasn’t capable of reading long sentences now, but writing was a different story, and since printing the letters was a slow process, she didn’t want him to run out of steam and stop before the end.
Dear Aunt Mildred, Ferguson wrote, as his grandmother spelled out the words for him in her high, undulating voice, drawing out the sound of each letter as if it were a little song, the melody rising and falling as his hand inched across the page. I fell out of a tree and broke my leg. Nana is here. She is teaching me how to read and write. Francie painted my cast blue, red, and yellow. She is mad about those people who fried in the chair. The birds are singing in the yard. Today I counted eleven kinds of birds. The yellow finches are my favorites. I read The Tale of Two Bad Mice and Peewee the Circus Dog. What do you like better, vanilla or chocolate ice cream? I hope you will visit soon. Love, Archie.
There was some disagreement over the use of the word fried, which his grandmother thought was an excessively vulgar way to talk about a tragic event, but Ferguson insisted there was no choice, the language couldn’t be changed because that was how Francie had presented the matter to him, and he found it a good word precisely because it was so vivid and disgusting. Anyway, it was his letter, wasn’t it, and he could write anything he wanted to. Once again, his grandmother shook her head. You never back down, do you, Archie? To which her grandson answered: Why should I back down when I’m right?
Not long after they sealed up the letter, Ferguson’s mother unexpectedly came home, chugging down the street in the red, two-door Pontiac she had been driving since the family moved to West Orange three years ago, the car that Ferguson and his parents referred to as the Jersey Tomato, and when she had finished putting it away in the garage, she came striding across the lawn in the direction of the porch, moving at a faster pace than she normally did, an accelerated clip that fell somewhere between walking and jogging, and once she was close enough for Ferguson to distinguish her features, he saw that she was smiling, a big smile, an unusually big and brilliant smile, and then she lifted her arm and waved to her mother and son, a warm salutation, a sign that she was in excellent spirits, and even before she walked up the steps and joined them on the porch, Ferguson knew exactly what she was going to say, for it was clear from her early return and the buoyant expression on her face that her long search was finally over, that the site for her photography studio had been found.
It was in Montclair, she told them, just a short jump from West Orange, and not only was the place large enough to fit in everything she would need, it was plop in the middle of the main drag. There was work to be done, of course, but the lease wouldn’t start until September first, which would give her enough time to draw up the plans and start construction on day one. What a relief, she said, good news at last, but there was still a problem. She had to come up with a name for the studio, and she didn’t like any of her ideas so far. Ferguson Photo was no good because of the double-f sound. Montclair Photo was too bland. Portraits by Rose was too pretentious. Rose Photo didn’t work because of the double-o sound. Suburban Portraits made her think of a sociology textbook. Modern Image wasn’t bad, but it made her think of a magazine about photography rather than a flesh-and-blood studio. Ferguson Portraiture. Camera Central. F-Stop Photo. Darkroom Village. Lighthouse Square. Rembrandt Photo. Vermeer Photo. Rubens Photo. Essex Photo. No good, she said, they all stank, and her brain had gone numb.
Ferguson chimed in with a question. What was the name of the place where his father had taken her dancing, he asked, something with the word rose in it, the place where they’d gone before they were married? He remembered that she’d told him about it once because they’d had such a good time there, that they’d danced their heads off.
Roseland, his mother said.
Then Ferguson’s mother turned to her own mother and asked her what she thought of Roseland Photo.
I like it, her mother said.
And you, Archie? his mother asked. What do you think?
I like it, too, he said.
So do I, his mother said. It might not be the best name ever invented, but it has a nice ring to it. Let’s sleep on it. If we still like it in the morning, maybe the problem is solved.
That night, as Ferguson and his parents and his grandmother lay asleep in their beds on the second floor of the house, 3 Brothers Home World burned to the ground. The telephone rang at a quarter past five in the morning, and within minutes Ferguson’s father was in his bottle-green Plymouth driving to Newark to inspect the damage. Since the air conditioner was going at full blast in Ferguson’s room, he slept through the telephone call and the commotion of his father’s hasty, pre-dawn departure, and it wasn’t until he woke at seven that he found out what had happened. His mother looked agitated, more confused and distraught than Ferguson had ever seen her, no longer acting as the rock of composure and wisdom he had always thought she was but someone just like himself, a fragile being prey to sadness and tears and hopelessness, and when she put her arms around him he felt frightened, not just because his father’s store had burned down and there would be no more money for them to live on, which meant they would have to move to the poorhouse and subsist on porridge and dried-out pieces of bread for the rest of their days, no, that was bad enough, but the truly frightening thing was to learn that his mother was no stronger than he was, that the blows of the world hurt her just as much as they hurt him and that except for the fact that she was older, there was no difference between them.
Your poor father, his mother said. He’s spent his whole life building up that store, he’s worked and worked and worked, and now it all comes to nothing. A person lights a match, an electric wire short-circuits in a wall, and twenty years of hard work turn into a pile of ashes. God is cruel, Archie. He should protect the good people of this world, but he doesn’t. He makes them suffer just as much as the bad ones. He kills David Raskin, he burns down your father’s store, he lets innocent people die in concentration camps, and they say he’s a kind and merciful God. What a joke.
His mother paused. Small tears were glistening in her eyes, Ferguson noticed, and she was chewing on her lower lip, as if she were trying to prevent more words from coming out of her mouth, as if she understood she had already gone too far, that she had no right to express such bitterness in front of a six-year-old child.
Don’t worry, she said. I’m just upset, that’s all. Your father has fire insurance, and nothing is going to happen to
us. A nasty bit of bad luck is what it is, but it’s only temporary, and in the end we’ll all be fine. You know that, Archie, don’t you?
Ferguson nodded, but only because he didn’t want his mother to be upset anymore. Yes, maybe they would be fine, he thought, but then again, if God was as cruel as she said he was, maybe they wouldn’t. Nothing was certain. For the first time since he’d come into the world two thousand three hundred and twenty-five days ago, all bets were off.
Not only that—but who on earth was David Raskin?
1.3
His cousin Andrew was dead. Shot down in action was how Ferguson’s father explained it to him, the action being a night patrol in the frigid mountains that stood between North and South Korea, a single bullet fired by a Chinese Communist soldier, his father said, which entered cousin Andrew’s heart and killed him at the age of nineteen. It was 1952, and the five-year-old Ferguson supposed he should feel as wretched as everyone else in the room, Aunt Millie and cousin Alice to begin with, who couldn’t go longer than ten minutes without breaking down and crying again, and sad Uncle Lew, who smoked cigarette after cigarette and kept looking down at the floor, but Ferguson couldn’t muster the grief he felt was required of him, there was something false and unnatural about trying to be sad when he wasn’t, for the fact was that he had never liked cousin Andrew, who had called him pipsqueak and runt and little shithead, who had bossed him around at family gatherings and had once locked him in a closet to see if he was tough enough to take it, and even when he left Ferguson alone, there were the things he said to his sister, Alice, the cutting epithets such as pig-face and dog-brain and pencil-legs, which made Ferguson cringe with disgust, not to speak of the pleasure Andrew seemed to take in tripping and punching cousin Jack, who was only one year younger than Andrew but half a head shorter. Even Ferguson’s parents admitted that Andrew was a troubled boy, and for as long as Ferguson could remember he had been overhearing stories about his cousin’s antics at school, talking back to the teachers, setting trash cans on fire, breaking windows, flunking classes, so many misdeeds that the principal finally kicked him out in the middle of his junior year, and then, after he was caught stealing a car, the judge offered him a choice, either jail or the army, so Andrew joined the army, and six weeks after they shipped him to Korea, he was dead.