It would be years before Ferguson understood the full impact of this death on his family, for he was too young at the time to grasp anything but the ultimate effect it had on him, which wasn’t made manifest until he was seven and a half, and therefore the two years between Andrew’s funeral and the event that cracked apart their little world passed in a blur of present-tense childhood, the mundane affairs of school, sports and games, friendships, television programs, comic books, storybooks, illnesses, scraped knees and banged-up limbs, occasional fistfights, moral dilemmas, and countless questions about the nature of reality, and through it all he continued to love his parents and feel loved by them in return, most of all by his high-spirited, affectionate mother, Rose Ferguson, who owned and operated Roseland Photo on the main street in Millburn, the town where they lived, and, to a lesser, more precarious degree by his father, the enigmatic Stanley Ferguson, who said little and often seemed only dimly aware of his son’s existence, but Ferguson understood that his father had much on his mind, that running 3 Brothers Home World was an all-out, round-the-clock job, which necessarily meant he was distracted, but at those rare moments when he wasn’t distracted and could focus his eyes on his son, Ferguson felt confident that his father knew who he was, that he hadn’t confused him with someone else. In other words, Ferguson lived on safe ground, his material needs were taken care of in a consistent, conscientious manner, a roof over his head, three meals a day, freshly laundered clothes, with no physical hardships to be endured, no emotional torments to arrest his progress, and in those years between the ages of five and a half and seven and a half, he was developing into what educators would have called a healthy, normal child of above-average intelligence, a fine specimen of midcentury American boyhood. But he was too caught up in the tumult of his own life to pay attention to what was happening outside the circle of his immediate concerns, and because his parents weren’t the sort of people who shared their worries with small children, there was no way to prepare himself for the disaster that struck on November 3, 1954, which expelled him from his youthful Eden and turned his life into an entirely different life.
Among the many things Ferguson knew nothing about prior to that fateful moment were the following:
1) The extent of Lew and Millie’s grief over the death of their son, compounded by the fact that they saw themselves as failed parents, having brought up what they considered to be a damaged person, a delinquent child with no conscience or moral foundation, a mocker of rules and authority who exulted in stirring up havoc wherever he could, a liar, a cheat from start to finish, a bad egg, and Lew and Millie tortured themselves over this failure, wondering if they had been too hard on him or too soft on him, wondering what they could have done differently to prevent him from stealing that car, which proved to be his death sentence, and how torn up they felt for having encouraged him to join the army, which they thought might help straighten him out but instead had put him in a wooden box six feet under the ground, and therefore they felt responsible for his death as well, not just his fractious, angry, misspent life but also his death on that frozen mountaintop in godforsaken Korea.
2) Lew and Millie had a taste for alcohol. They were one of those couples who drank as both a sport and a compulsion, a bibulous, insouciant pair of theatrical charmers whenever they were lubricated within the scope of their capacities, which were substantial, but oddly enough it was the pin-thin Millie who seemed the steadier of the two, who rarely ever wobbled or slurred, whereas her much larger husband sometimes went overboard, and even before Andrew’s death, Ferguson could remember the time when he saw his uncle passed out on the couch and snoring in the middle of a loud family party, which everyone had found so funny when it happened, but now, in the aftermath of that death, Lew’s drinking had increased, spreading beyond the parties, the cocktail hours, and the post-dinner nightcaps into high-noon lunchtime sloshes and secret tipples from the flask he carried around in the inside pocket of his jacket, which no doubt helped numb the pain twisting through his guilt-ridden, ravaged heart, but the booze began to affect his work at the store, sometimes rendering him incoherent when he talked to customers about the relative merits of Whirlpool and Maytag washing machines, and when he wasn’t incoherent, he was occasionally irritable, and when he was irritable, he often took pleasure in insulting people, which was no way to conduct business at 3 Brothers Home World, and so Ferguson’s father would have to step in, pull Lew away from the offended customer, and tell him to go home and sleep it off.
3) A known fact about Lew was his penchant for gambling. If not for Millie’s job as a buyer for Bamberger’s department store in downtown Newark, the family would have gone broke many years earlier, since most of what Lew earned at 3 Brothers Home World tended to wind up in his bookie’s pocket. Now, as his drinking burgeoned out of control, so too did his taste for long-odds hunches, the dream of the spectacular, once-in-a-lifetime killing, the kind of legendary bet gamblers would go on talking about for decades, and the more erratic his guesswork became, the more his losses grew. By August 1954, he was thirty-six thousand dollars in the hole, and Ira Bernstein, the man who had been handling his bets for the past dozen years, was running out of patience. Lew needed cash, no less than ten or twelve thousand, a hefty lump to prove his good intentions, or else the boys with the baseball bats and the brass knuckles would be coming around to pay him a visit, and because he couldn’t ask Stanley for the money, knowing his kid brother had been serious when he’d sworn never to bail him out again, he stole it from Stanley instead—by putting a stop order on a check to 3 Brothers’ G.E. supplier and transferring the amount of the check over to himself. He knew he would be found out eventually, but it would take some time for the discrepancy to come to light, since the flow of cash for goods between the store and its suppliers ran on a system of mutual trust and the bookkeeping lagged months behind the actual exchanges, and those months would give him the time he needed to put things right again. In late September, Ferguson’s uncle saw his chance. It would mean putting a stop order on another check, but if all went well, the embezzled nine thousand dollars would be turned into a haul worth ten times that amount, which would be more than enough to make good on the two stopped checks, pay off Bernstein in full, and walk away with a nifty bundle for himself. The World Series was about to begin, with the Indians heavily favored over the Giants, so much a sure thing that betting on Cleveland was hardly worth the effort, but then Lew thought: If the Indians were that powerful a club, what was to stop them from winning four in a row? The odds on such a bet were far more enticing. Ten to one for a sweep, whereas putting his money on Cleveland one game at a time would yield only pennies. So Lew found himself another bookmaker, that is, someone whose name wasn’t Bernstein, and put the nine thousand two hundred dollars he had stolen from his brother on the Indians, betting they would run the table without a single loss to the Giants. No one knew where Ferguson’s uncle watched the first game, but as Stanley and Arnold and the rest of the staff at 3 Brothers Home World gathered around the television sets in the store to follow the action with fifty or sixty walk-in customers, who weren’t real customers but Giants’ fans with no televisions of their own, Lew slipped out to watch the game by himself, perhaps in a local bar or some other place, an unknown spot where no one saw him live through the horror of watching Mays run down Wertz’s fly ball in the top of the eighth inning, and then, even more terrible, the soul-crushing devastation that followed some minutes later when he saw Rhodes turn on Lemon’s pitch and send the ball into the right-field stands. One swing of a man’s bat, and another man’s life was in ruins.
4) In mid-October, the G.E. supplier informed Stanley that they had no record of payment for a truckload of freezers, air conditioners, fans, and refrigerators that had been delivered in early August. Mystified, Stanley went to the 3 Brothers bookkeeper, Adelle Rosen, a plump widow of fifty-six who kept a yellow pencil in her hair and believed in the virtues of precise penmanship and rigidly aligned columns, and
once Stanley explained the problem to her, Mrs. Rosen pulled out the company checkbook from her desk drawer and found the stub for August tenth, which verified that payment had been made in full for the amount they owed, $14,237.16. Stanley shrugged. The check must have been lost in the mail, he said, and then he asked Mrs. Rosen to put a stop order on the August check and issue a new one to the G.E. supplier. The next day, a deeply puzzled Mrs. Rosen reported to Stanley that a stop order had already been put on that check as far back as August eleventh. What could that possibly mean? For the briefest of brief instants, Stanley wondered if Mrs. Rosen hadn’t betrayed him, if his heretofore steadfast employee, who was widely known to have been secretly in love with him for the past eleven years, wasn’t guilty of cooking the books, but then he looked into Mrs. Rosen’s troubled, adoring eyes and dismissed the thought as nonsense. He called Arnold into the back office and asked him what he knew about the missing fourteen thousand dollars, but Arnold, who looked no less shocked and confused than Mrs. Rosen had looked when confronted by this same mystery, said he couldn’t even begin to imagine what was going on, and Stanley believed him. Then he called in Lew. The oldest member of the clan denied everything at first, but Stanley didn’t like the way his brother kept looking past him at the wall behind his shoulder while they were talking, so he pressed on, grilling Lew about the stop order on the August check, insisting that he was the only one who could have done it, the only possible candidate, since Mrs. Rosen was in the clear, as were Arnold and himself, and therefore it had to be Lew, and then Stanley began to bore in on the question of Lew’s recent gambling activities, the exact amounts he had wagered, the total extent of his losses, what baseball games, what football games, what boxing matches, and the harder Stanley pushed, the more Lew’s body appeared to weaken, as if the two of them were slugging it out in a ring and each word was another punch, another blow to the gut, to the head, and bit by bit Lew began to stagger, as if his knees were about to buckle, and suddenly he was sitting in a chair with his face in his hands, sobbing out a chopped-up, barely audible confession. Stanley was appalled by what he heard, for in point of fact Lew wasn’t the least bit sorry about what he had done, and if he was sorry about anything it was only that his plan hadn’t worked, his beautiful, flawless plan, but the Indians had let him down and lost the first game of Series, and fuck Willie Mays, he said, fuck Dusty Rhodes, and Stanley finally understood that his brother was beyond hope, that for a full-grown man to point his finger at a couple of ballplayers and think they were the cause of his troubles meant his mind was no more developed than a child’s, an idiot child at that, someone as impoverished and handicapped as Lew’s own son, the dead and buried Private Andrew Ferguson. Stanley was tempted to tell his brother to leave the store and never come back, but he couldn’t do that, it would have been too sudden, too harsh, and as he pondered what to say next, knowing he couldn’t say anything until his anger had subsided somewhat, at least down to a level that wouldn’t make him regret his words, Lew began to talk again, and what he was telling Stanley was that they were all up to their necks in it and that the store was finished. Ferguson’s father had no idea what Lew was talking about, so he held his tongue a bit longer, beginning to feel that perhaps his brother had actually lost his mind, and then Lew was talking about Bernstein and how much money he owed him, more than twenty-five thousand now, but that was only the tip of the iceberg, for Bernstein had begun charging interest, and every day the amount was going up, up, up, and in the past two weeks there had been half a dozen phone calls, a voice on the other end of the line threatening him to pay what he owed or else suffer the consequences, which variously meant that a team of men would jump him in the dark and break every bone in his body, or else blind him with acid, or else cut up Millie’s face, or else kidnap Alice, or else kill both Millie and Alice, and he was scared, Lew told his brother, so scared that he couldn’t sleep anymore, and how was he going to raise the cash when his house was carrying two mortgages and he had already borrowed twenty-three thousand dollars from the store? Now Stanley’s knees were beginning to buckle as well, he felt disoriented and dizzy, no longer quite himself, no longer fully encased in his own skin, and so he sat down in a chair on the other side of the desk from Lew, wondering how fourteen thousand dollars had suddenly turned into twenty-three thousand dollars, and as the two brothers looked at each other across the surface of the gray metal desk, Lew told Stanley that Bernstein had come up with a proposal, and as far as he was concerned it was the only way out of it, the only possible solution, and whether Stanley liked it or not, it had to be done. What are you talking about? Stanley said, speaking for the first time in the past seven minutes. They’re going to burn down the store for us, Lew said, and once we collect on the insurance, everyone takes a cut. Stanley said nothing. He said nothing because he had to say nothing, because the only thought in his head at that moment was how much he wanted to kill his brother, and if he ever dared to speak those words out loud, to tell Lew how much he wanted to put his hands around his throat and strangle him to death, his mother would curse him from her grave and go on torturing him for the rest of his life. At long last Stanley rose from the chair and began walking toward the door, and once he had opened the door, he paused on the threshold and said: I don’t believe you. Then he left the room, and with his back to his brother he heard Lew say: Believe me, Stanley. It has to be done.
5) Stanley’s first impulse was to talk to Rose, to unburden himself to his wife and ask for her help in stopping Lew, but again and again he struggled to get the words out of his mouth, and again and again he failed, each time backing down at the last minute because he couldn’t bear the thought of listening to what she would say to him, what he knew she would say to him. He couldn’t go to the police. No crime had been committed yet, and what sort of a man accuses his brother of plotting a potential crime when he has no hard evidence to substantiate proof of a conspiracy? On the other hand, even if Bernstein and his brother eventually went through with it, would he have it in him to go to the police and have his brother arrested? Lew was in danger. They were threatening to blind him, to kill his wife and daughter, and if Stanley stepped forward now, he would be responsible for that maiming, for those deaths, which meant that he was a part of it, too, an unwilling co-conspirator in spite of himself, and if things went wrong and Bernstein and Lew were caught, he had no doubt that his brother wouldn’t hesitate to name him as an accomplice. Yes, he despised Lew, he was sickened by the mere thought of him, and yet how deeply he despised himself for feeling that hatred, which was sinful and grotesque and only further increased his inability to act, for by failing to talk to Rose he understood that he had chosen the past over the present, had renounced his place as husband and father to go back to the dark world of son and brother, a place where he had no wish to be anymore, but he couldn’t escape, he had been sucked back into it, and for the next two weeks he walked around in a demented state of dread and fury, walled off from everyone by his unbroken silence, seething with frustration, wondering when the bomb inside his head would finally explode.
6) As he saw it, there was no alternative but to play along—or pretend to play along. He needed to know what Bernstein and company were planning, to be kept abreast of the details, and in order to learn those things he had to trick Lew into believing he was with him, so the next morning, just twenty-four hours after their last conversation, the chilling dialogue that had ended with the words It has to be done, Stanley told Lew that he had changed his mind, that against his better judgment and with infinite disgust in his heart, he understood there was no other way. This falsehood produced the desired results. Thinking Stanley was now on board, a grateful, trembling, all but unhinged Lew began to treat his brother as his cherished ally and most trusted confidant, and not once did he suspect that Stanley was acting as a double agent whose sole intention was to gum up the works and prevent the fire from happening.
7) There would be two men, Lew informed him, a seasoned arsonist with
no criminal record working in tandem with a lookout, and the date was set for next Tuesday, the night of November second/third, as long as it turned out to be a dry night with no rain in the forecast. Lew’s job was to dismantle the burglar alarm and provide the men with keys to the store. He would spend the night at home and suggested Stanley do the same, but Stanley had other plans for that night, or just a single plan, which was to park himself in the unlit store and chase off the firebug before he could start his work. Stanley wanted to know if the men would be carrying guns, but Lew wasn’t certain, Bernstein had neglected to touch on that point with him, but what difference did it make, he asked, why worry about something that didn’t concern them? Because someone might choose the wrong moment to go walking past the store, Stanley said, a cop, a man out with his dog, a woman on her way home from a party, and he didn’t want anyone to get hurt. Burning down a business for three hundred thousand dollars in insurance money was bad enough, but if some innocent bystander happened to be shot and killed in the process, they could go to jail for the rest of their lives. Lew hadn’t thought of that. Maybe he should bring it up with Bernstein, he said, but Stanley told him not to bother, since Bernstein’s men were going to do exactly as they pleased, regardless of what Lew wanted. That put an end to the discussion, and as Stanley walked away from his brother and entered the downstairs showroom, he realized that this question of guns or no guns was the great unknown variable, the one factor that could destroy his plan. It would make sense for him to buy a gun before Tuesday, he told himself, but something in him balked at the idea, a lifetime of revulsion toward guns, so much so that he had never fired one or even held one in his hand. His father had been killed by a gun, and what good had it done him to be carrying his own revolver in that Chicago warehouse thirty-one years ago, he had been shot down anyway, killed with an unfired thirty-eight in his right hand, and who knew if he hadn’t been killed because he’d gone for his gun first, leaving his killer no choice but to shoot him in order to save his own life? No, guns were a complicated business, and once you pointed a weapon at someone, especially someone with a weapon of his own, the thing you were counting on to protect you was just as likely to turn you into a corpse. Besides, the man Bernstein had dug up to incinerate 3 Brothers Home World wasn’t a contract killer but an arsonist, an ex-firefighter according to Lew, that was a good one, a man who once made his living putting out fires now setting them for fun and profit, and why would he need a gun to do that? The lookout was another matter, no doubt some broad-chested thug who would come to the store fully armed, but Stanley figured he would be waiting outside while the ex-fireman went about his job, and since Stanley would already be inside before the two of them showed up, he concluded that a gun wouldn’t be necessary. That didn’t mean he would go there empty-handed, but a baseball bat would serve his purpose just as well, he felt, a thirty-six-inch Louisville Slugger would scare off the torch just as effectively as a thirty-two-caliber pistol, and given Stanley’s state of mind in the two weeks leading up to November second, the demonic, half-mad, out-of-control roar of thoughts that had been raging in his head since the morning of Lew’s confession, he found the idea of a baseball bat deeply and perversely funny, so funny that he laughed out loud when the idea came to him, a brief yelp of a laugh that rose up from the bottom of his lungs and burst out of him like a splatter of buckshot bouncing off a wall, for the whole gruesome comedy had started with a baseball bat, the bat used by Dusty Rhodes at the Polo Grounds on September twenty-ninth, and what better way to end the farce than by taking hold of another bat and threatening to bash in the head of the man who wanted to burn down his store?