His parents weren’t bitter, and they didn’t detest each other, and neither one wished the other ill. They simply didn’t want to be married anymore, and for the time being they were trying to make the best of it by keeping up appearances. Eighteen years had been ground into a thimbleful of dust, a powdery residue no heavier than the ashes from a single extinguished cigarette, and yet one thing nevertheless remained, an unbroken solidarity about the welfare of their son, and for that reason Rose was doing what she could to mend the rift that had developed between Stanley and Archie, for even though Stanley was a less than adequate father, he wasn’t the villain Archie had made him out to be, and long after their little family had been blown apart, Stanley would go on being Archie’s father, and it wouldn’t do Archie any good to travel through the rest of his life bearing a grudge against him. Luckily, there had been those botched pamphlets. Such a pathetic attempt to ingratiate himself with his son, of course, about whom he understood almost nothing, and how passive Stanley had been when the pamphlets came out wrong (why not go back to the printer and have them done again?), but at least they were something, at least they proved something, and Archie would have to take them into account whenever he thought about his father in the months and years ahead.
It seemed that Daniel Schneiderman had fallen for Rose as far back as 1941, in the days after she started working at his father’s studio on West Twenty-seventh Street, but Rose had been engaged to David Raskin at the time, and when Raskin was killed at Fort Benning the following August, Schneiderman was already engaged to Elizabeth Michaels and about to go into the army himself. As he confessed to Rose years later, he would have broken off that engagement if he’d thought he had even the slightest chance with her, but Rose was in mourning then, walled off from the world in a dark closet of deadness and despair, not sure if she wanted to go on living or die, and the farthest thing from her thoughts was putting herself back in circulation, since she had no interest in seeing other men or falling for another man, least of all a man who was about to marry someone else, and therefore nothing happened, which is to say, Dan married Liz, Rose married Stanley, and Rose never knew that Dan secretly wished she had married him.
Ferguson was told about the affair but never anything specific about it — how it began, where they met on the evenings they spent together, what they were planning or not planning for the future — only that it started two days after Kennedy’s inauguration and that his mother went into it with a clear conscience because her marriage to his father was already over, a mutual decision arrived at six months earlier that had freed both of them from the vows they had made in 1944, with nothing left to discuss but the formalities of an eventual divorce and what to tell Archie about Stanley’s removal to another bed. Dan was in a much trickier spot, however, since he and Liz hadn’t had that sort of throw-in-the-towel conversation and were still married, would always be married, he feared, because he didn’t have the heart to walk out on her after two decades of rugged, contentious, but not entirely miserable wedlock, and unlike Ferguson’s mother, Jim and Amy’s father suffered from the guilt of his adulterous infidelities. Then came more guilt, guilt for both of them now, the corrosive, gut-consuming guilt of Liz’s cancer, for how many times had each one of them thought about the happier life they would have had together if Dan were no longer married to Liz, and now the gods were about to remove Liz from the story, and the good thing they had both daydreamed about but had never dared to express out loud had turned into something exceedingly bad, the worst thing either one of them could have imagined, for how not to feel that their thoughts were pushing that luckless, dying woman into her grave?
That was all the fifteen-year-old Ferguson knew back then — that Mrs. Schneiderman was going to die — and when Amy called him late Sunday night, three days after his mother had warned him of the disaster that was about to fall on the Schneiderman children, he was prepared for Amy’s tears and capable of uttering more or less cogent sentences in response to the grotesque things she was telling him on the phone, the Saturday and Sunday visits to the hospital where her mother was lying in a morphine-induced blur of panicked dissociation, pain and then less pain, then more pain and a slow, stuporous withdrawal into sleep, her face so gaunt and gray now, as if she were no longer herself, lying alone in the bed as her rotting, burned-up insides went about the job of killing her, and why had her father lied about it, she moaned, why had he kept it back from her and Jim with that dumb story about going to Chicago to be with Grandma Lil, how awful of him to have done that and how awful that she had been thinking about buying black lipstick in order to shock her mother at the very moment when her mother was being taken to the hospital, she felt so bad about that now, so bad about so many things, and Ferguson did what he could to calm her down, saying that her father had done the right thing in waiting for Jim to come home from college so he could break the news to them together, and remember that he, Ferguson, would always be there for her, and whenever she needed a shoulder to cry on, he wanted her to think about using his shoulder first.
Mrs. Schneiderman held on for another four weeks, and in late June, just as the school year was coming to a close, Ferguson attended his second funeral in the past eleven months, a smaller and quieter affair than the massive obsequies for Artie Federman, no uncontrollable outbursts of howling and sobbing this time but rather stillness and shock, a subdued farewell to a woman who had died on the morning of her forty-second birthday, and as Ferguson listened to Rabbi Prinz recite the customary prayers and say the customary words, he looked around and saw that only a few people who were not close relatives of the Schneidermans had tears in their eyes, his mother among them, who wept throughout the entire service, but not even Jim was crying, he just sat there holding Amy’s hand and looking down at the floor, and afterward, in the pause between the service and the drive to the cemetery, he was moved to see his weeping mother throw her arms around the weeping Dan Schneiderman and hang on for a long, hard hug, little understanding the full import of that hug or why they held on to each other for so long, and then he was throwing his own arms around the weeping, swollen-eyed Amy, who had cried on his shoulder countless times in the past month, and because he felt so sorry for her, and because it felt so good to be holding her body in his arms, Ferguson decided that he must and should and with all due haste would fall in love with her. Her situation was so precarious now that it demanded something more than friendship from him, something more than the old Archie-and-Amy routine they had perfected over the years, but Ferguson never had a chance to tell her about his sudden change of heart, since that was the last he saw of Amy for the next two months. After the day of her mother’s funeral, her father let her skip the last four days of the semester, and the fifth day, which was the day their class graduated from Maplewood Junior High, the three Schneidermans took off on a summer-long journey through England, France, and Italy, which Ferguson’s mother thought was a brilliant idea, the best possible medicine for a family that had suffered as much as they had.