She organized it for a Thursday, which happened to be Angie Bly’s day off, and with Ferguson’s father not expected to return home until ten or ten-thirty, there would be ample time for both a one-on-one dinner and a long conversation afterward. Wary of starting off the post-dinner tête-à-tête by confronting Ferguson with intrusive questions about himself, which likely would have caused him to clam up and leave the table, Rose held him there by breaking the bad news first, the sad bad news about Amy’s mother, Liz, who had just been diagnosed with cancer, a particularly wretched form of cancer that was going to end her life within a matter of months, perhaps even weeks, pancreatic cancer, no hope, no cure, nothing but pain and certain death ahead of her, and at first it was difficult for Ferguson to absorb what his mother was saying, since Amy hadn’t so much as breathed a syllable to him about her mother’s condition, which was altogether bizarre, given that Amy was his close friend and confided in him about all manner of frets and fears and anxious uncertainties, so before Ferguson could begin to delve into the words pancreatic cancer, he had to find out how his mother had been made privy to this information, which Mrs. Schneiderman’s own daughter seemed to know nothing about. Dan told me, his mother said, which only deepened her son’s confusion, for why would a man share such news with a friend before talking to his own child, but then Ferguson’s mother explained that Dan wanted to tell both his children at the same time, feeling that Jim and Amy together would be able to handle the news better than Jim and Amy alone, and therefore he was waiting for Jim to come down from Boston tomorrow afternoon before he spoke to either one of them. Liz had been in the hospital for several days, she added, but both children had been told she was in Chicago visiting her mother.
Poor Amy, Ferguson thought. She had been in conflict with her mother for years, and now that her mother was going to die, the unfinished business between them would never be resolved. How hard it would be on her, so much harder than having to cope with the early death of someone you had always been on good terms with, someone you had adored without reservation, for at least then you could carry the memory of that person inside you with an ongoing tenderness, even happiness, an awful, aching sort of happiness, whereas Amy would never be able to think about her mother without feeling regret. Such a perplexing woman, Mrs. Schneiderman, such an odd presence to Ferguson from the day he met her as a young boy, a muddle of contradictory strengths and weaknesses that encompassed the virtues of a good brain, skillful management of the household, insightful opinions on political matters (she had majored in history at Pembroke), and relentless devotion to her husband and two children, but at the same time there was something nervous and frustrated about Mrs. Schneiderman, a feeling that she had missed out on doing what she was supposed to have done in life (a career of some sort, perhaps, a job that would have been important enough to turn her into
an influential person), and because she had settled for the less exalted job of housewife, she seemed determined to prove to the world that she was smarter than everyone else, knew more than everyone else, not just about some things but about all things, and the fact was that she did know an astonishing amount across an enormous range of subjects, she was without question the most deeply informed human being Ferguson had ever encountered, but the problem with being a know-it-all of the nervous, frustrated variety was that you found it impossible not to correct people when they said something you knew to be wrong, which happened again and again with Mrs. Schneiderman, for she was the only person in the room who knew how many milligrams of Vitamin A were in an average-sized raw carrot, she was the only person who knew how many electoral votes Roosevelt had won in the 1936 presidential election, she was the only person who knew the horsepower differential between a 196 °Chevy Impala and a 1961 Buick Skylark, and even though she was always right, it could be maddening to be around her for any length of time, for one of Mrs. Schneiderman’s deficits was that she talked too much, and Ferguson often wondered how her husband and two children could stand to live under the bombardment of all those words, that ceaseless yammering which failed to make any distinction between important things and unimportant things, talk that could impress you with its intelligence and perspicacity or else bore you half to death with its utter meaninglessness, as when Ferguson and Amy were sitting in the backseat of the Schneidermans’ car one night on the way to the movies and Mrs. Schneiderman went on for half an hour describing to her husband how she had rearranged the clothes in his bedroom bureau drawers, patiently marching him through the entire series of decisions she had made to arrive at her new system, why long-sleeved shirts belonged in one place, for example, and short-sleeved shirts belonged in another, why black socks had to be separated from blue socks, which in turn had to be separated from the white socks he wore when playing tennis, why his more numerous sleeveless undershirts had to sit on top of and not below his V-neck undershirts, why boxer shorts had to sit to the right of jockey shorts and not to the left, and on and on, one inconsequential detail piled upon another inconsequential detail, and by the time they reached the movie theater, after living inside those bureau drawers for half an hour, one half of one of the precious twenty-four hours that comprise a day, Amy was digging her fingers into Ferguson’s arm — unable to scream, and therefore screaming in code with her clenched, dug-in fingers. It wasn’t that her mother was an inadequate or uncaring mother, Ferguson said to himself. If anything, she cared too much, loved too much, had too much faith in her daughter’s golden future, and the curious effect of that too much, Ferguson realized, was that it could generate the same resentments as not enough, especially when the too much was so strong that it blurred the boundaries between parent and child and became a pretext for meddlesome interference, and because the one thing Amy wanted above all else was breathing room, she pushed back hard whenever she began to feel suffocated by her mother’s persistent involvement in the smallest aspects of her life — from questions about her homework assignments to lectures on the proper method of brushing her teeth, from probing interrogations about the dalliances of her school friends to criticisms of the way she did her hair, from warnings about the perils of alcohol to quiet, monotonous harangues about not tempting boys by wearing too much lipstick. She’s driving me straight to the funny farm, Amy would tell Ferguson, or: She thinks she’s the captain of the mind police and has a right to be in my head, or: Maybe I should get myself pregnant so she can worry about something real, and Amy fought back by accusing her mother of bad faith, of having it in for her while pretending to be on her side, and why couldn’t she just let her alone in the same way she let Jim alone, and again and again they clashed, and if not for her even-tempered, amiable father—her fun-loving father—who was continually trying to make peace between them, the intense flare-ups between Amy and her mother would have escalated into an all-out permanent war. Poor Mrs. Schneiderman. She had lost her daughter’s love because she had loved her unwisely. Then, taking that thought one step further, Ferguson said to himself: Pity the fate of unloved parents after they’re buried in the ground — and pity their children as well.