It wasn’t just a temporary problem, he now realized, it was eternal. No siblings ever, and because that struck Ferguson as an intolerable state of affairs, he worked his way around the impasse by inventing an imaginary brother for himself. It was an act of desperation, perhaps, but surely something was better than nothing, and even if he couldn’t see or touch or smell that something, what other choice did he have? He called his newborn brother John. Since the laws of reality no longer applied, John was older than he was, older by four years, which meant that he was taller and stronger and smarter than Ferguson, and unlike Bobby George who lived down the street, chubby, big-boned Bobby, who breathed through his mouth because his nose was always clogged with wet green snot, John could read and write and was a champion baseball and football player. Ferguson made sure never to talk out loud to him when other people were in the room, for John was his secret, and he didn’t want anyone to know about him, not even his father and mother. He slipped up only once, but it turned out all right because the flub occurred when he happened to be with Francie. She had come to babysit that evening, and when she walked out into the backyard and heard him telling John about the horse he wanted for his next birthday, she asked him who he was talking to. Ferguson liked Francie so much that he told her the truth. He thought she might laugh at him, but Francie merely nodded, as if expressing her approval of the concept of imaginary brothers, and so Ferguson allowed her to talk to John as well. For months afterward, every time he saw Francie, she would first say hello to him in her normal voice and then bend down, put her mouth against his ear, and whisper: Hello, John. Ferguson was not yet five years old, but he already understood that the world consisted of two realms, the visible and the invisible, and that the things he couldn’t see were often more real than the things he could.
Two of the best places to visit were his grandfather’s office in New York and his father’s store in Newark. The office was on West Fifty-seventh Street, just one block from where his grandparents lived, and the first good thing about it was that it was on the eleventh floor, even higher than the apartment, which made looking out the window even more interesting than on West Fifty-eighth Street, for his gaze could travel far more deeply into the surrounding distance and take in many more buildings, not to speak of most of Central Park, and down on the street below the cars and taxis were so small that they resembled the toy cars he played with at home. The next good thing about the office was the big desks with the typewriters and adding machines on them. The sound of the typewriters sometimes made him think of music, especially when the bell rang at the end of a line, but it also made him think of hard rain falling on the roof of the house in Montclair and the sound of pebbles being thrown against a glass window. His grandfather’s secretary was a bony woman named Doris who had black hairs on her forearms and smelled of breath mints, but he liked it that she called him Master Ferguson and let him use her typewriter, which she referred to as Sir Underwood, and now that he was beginning to learn the letters of the alphabet, there was the satisfaction of being able to put his fingers on the keys of that heavy instrument and tap out a line of a’s and y’s, for example, or, if Doris wasn’t too busy, of asking her to help him write his name. The store in Newark was much bigger than the office in New York, and there were many more things in it, not just a typewriter and three adding machines in the back room, but row after row of small gadgets and large appliances and a whole area on the second floor for beds and tables and chairs, numberless numbers of beds and tables and chairs. Ferguson wasn’t supposed to touch them, but when his father and uncles were out of sight or had their backs turned to him, he would occasionally sneak open a refrigerator door to smell the peculiar smell inside or hoist himself onto a bed to test the bounce of the mattress, and even when he was caught doing those things, no one was terribly angry, except Uncle Arnold sometimes, who would snap at him and growclass="underline" Hands off the merchandise, sonny. He didn’t like being talked to in that way, and he especially didn’t like it when his uncle swatted him on the back of the head one Saturday afternoon because the sting had hurt so much he had cried, but now that he had overheard his mother say to his father that Uncle Arnold was a dope, Ferguson didn’t really care anymore. In any case, the beds and refrigerators never held his attention for long, not when there were the televisions to look at, the newly built Philcos and Emersons that reigned over all the other goods on display: twelve or fifteen models standing side by side against the wall to the left of the front door, all of them turned on with the sound off, and Ferguson liked nothing better than to switch the channels on the sets so that seven different programs were playing simultaneously, what a delirious swirl of mayhem that set in motion, with a cartoon on the first screen and a Western on the second screen and a soap opera on the third and a church service on the fourth and a commercial on the fifth and a newscaster on the sixth and a football game on the seventh. Ferguson would run back and forth from one screen to another, then spin around in a circle until he was almost dizzy, gradually moving away from the screens as he spun so that when he stopped he would be in a position to watch all seven of them at once, and seeing so many different things happen at the same time never failed to make him laugh. Funny, so funny it was, and his father let him do it because his father thought it was funny, too.
Most of the time, his father wasn’t funny. He worked long hours six days a week, the longest days being Wednesday and Friday, when the store didn’t close until nine o’clock, and on Sunday he slept until ten or ten-thirty and played tennis in the afternoon. His favorite command was: Listen to your mother. His favorite question was: Have you been a good boy? Ferguson tried to be a good boy and listen to his mother, although he sometimes fell down on the job and forgot to be good or to listen, but the lucky thing about those failures was that his father never seemed to notice. He was probably too busy to notice, and Ferguson was grateful for that, since his mother rarely punished him, even when he forgot to listen or be good, and because his father never yelled at him in the way Aunt Millie yelled at her children and never swatted him in the way Uncle Arnold sometimes swatted cousin Jack, Ferguson concluded that his branch of the Ferguson family was the best one, even if it was too small. Still, there were times when his father made him laugh, and because those times were few and far between, Ferguson laughed even harder than he might have laughed if they had happened more often. One funny thing was being thrown up in the air, and because his father was so strong and had such hard, bulging muscles, Ferguson flew up almost to the ceiling when they were indoors and even higher than that when they were in the backyard, and not once did it cross his mind that his father would drop him, which meant that he felt safe enough to open his mouth as wide as he could and fill the air with loud bellyfuls of laughter. Another funny thing was watching his father juggle oranges in the kitchen, and a third funny thing was hearing him fart, not just because farts were funny in themselves but because each time his father let out a fart in his presence, he would say: Whoops, there goes Hoppy — meaning Hopalong Cassidy, the cowboy on TV that Ferguson liked so much. Why his father would say that after he farted was one of the world’s great mysteries, but Ferguson loved it anyway, and he always laughed when his father said those words. Such an odd, interesting idea: to turn a fart into a cowboy named Hopalong Cassidy.