Still, it was difficult for Ferguson to understand why his mother was telling him about Mrs. Schneiderman’s illness, the fatal illness that not even Jim and Amy knew anything about at that point, and once he had said all the things one says at such a moment, how terrible, how unfair, how cruel to be cut down in the middle of your life, he asked his mother why she was giving him this advance warning. There was something presumptuous and furtive about it, he said, it made him feel as if they were whispering behind the Schneidermans’ backs, but no, his mother replied, not at all, she was telling him now so he wouldn’t be shocked when Amy broke the news to him, he would be prepared for the blow and be able to take it calmly, which would help him be a better friend to Amy, who was going to need his friendship now more than ever, and not just now but almost certainly for a long time to come. That made some sense, Ferguson supposed, but not a lot of sense, by no means enough sense, and because his mother was usually sensible when she talked about complicated situations like this one, he wondered if she wasn’t hiding something from him, holding back part of the story even as she divulged other parts of it, above all a plausible account that would explain the words Dan told me, for why had Dan Schneiderman chosen to confide in her about his wife’s cancer in the first place? They were old friends, yes, acquaintances of more than twenty years, but not close friends, as far as Ferguson could tell, not close in the way he and Amy had become close, and yet Amy’s father had gone to Ferguson’s mother in his hour of greatest trouble and unburdened himself to her, which was an act that first of all required a deep level of mutual trust, but also the kind of intimacy that could exist only between the closest of close friends.
They went on talking about Mrs. Schneiderman for a few more minutes, not wanting to say anything unkind about her but both agreeing that she had never figured out the right approach to take with her daughter and that her biggest problem was not knowing when to back off (Rose’s words) or butt out (Ferguson’s words), and then, almost imperceptibly, the troubled relations between Amy and her mother turned into a discussion about the difficulties between Ferguson and his father, and once they arrived at that subject, which was where Rose had been subtly pushing the conversation since the beginning, she startled her son by asking him an unexpectedly blunt question—Tell me, Archie, why have you turned against your father? — which so discombobulated him that he couldn’t think fast enough to invent a false answer. Exposed and defenseless, with no will to evade the truth anymore, he blurted out the whole petty business about the missing copy of Sole Mates and how burned up he was that nearly six months had gone by and his father still hadn’t said a word to him about it.
He’s too embarrassed, his mother said.
Embarrassed? What kind of an excuse is that? He’s a man, isn’t he? All he has to do is speak up and tell me what happened.
Why don’t you ask him?
It’s not my job to ask him. It’s his job to tell me.
You’re being awfully hard, aren’t you?
He’s the hard one, not me. He’s so hard and so wrapped up in himself that he’s turned this family into a nightmare.
Archie …
All right, maybe not a nightmare. A disaster area. And this house — it’s like living inside one of his goddamn deep freezers.
Is that how it feels to you?
Cold, Ma, so cold, especially between you and him, and I wish to hell you hadn’t let him talk you into shutting down your studio. You should be taking photographs, not wasting your time on bridge.
Whatever problems your father and I might be having are entirely separate from what’s been happening between you and your father. You need to give him another chance, Archie.
I don’t think so.
Well, I know so, and if you come upstairs with me, I’ll show you why.
With that mysterious request, Ferguson and his mother stood up from the table and left the dining room, and since Ferguson had no idea where his mother was intending to go, he followed her up the stairs to the second floor, where they turned left and entered his parents’ bedroom, a room he rarely went into anymore, and then he watched his mother open the door of the closet where his father kept his clothes, disappear inside, and reemerge a few moments later holding a large cardboard box in her arms, which she carried to the middle of the room and put down on top of the bed.
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.