Not long after Ferguson’s fifth birthday, his Aunt Mildred married Henry Ross, a tall man with thinning hair who worked as a college professor, as did Mildred, who had finished her studies in English literature four years earlier and was teaching at a college called Vassar. Ferguson’s new uncle smoked Pall Malls (Outstanding — and they are mild) and seemed highly nervous, since he smoked more cigarettes in one afternoon than his mother did in an entire day, but what intrigued Ferguson most about Mildred’s husband was that he talked so quickly and used such long, complicated words that it was impossible to understand more than a fraction of what he was saying. Still, he struck Ferguson as a good-hearted fellow, with a jolly boom in his laugh and a bright glow in his eyes, and it was clear to him that his mother was happy with Mildred’s choice, since she never referred to Uncle Henry without using the word brilliant and repeatedly said that he reminded her of someone named Rex Harrison. Ferguson hoped his aunt and uncle would get cracking in the baby department and rapidly spew forth a little cousin for him. Imaginary brothers could take you just so far, after all, and perhaps an Adler cousin could turn into something like an almost-brother or, in a pinch, an almost-sister. For several months, he waited for the announcement, every morning expecting his mother to come into his room and tell him that Aunt Mildred was going to have a child, but then something happened, an unforeseen calamity that overturned all of Ferguson’s carefully worked-out plans. His aunt and uncle were moving to Berkeley, California. They were going to teach there and live there and were never coming back, which meant that even if they did produce a cousin for him, that cousin could never be turned into an almost-brother, since brothers and almost-brothers had to live nearby, preferably in one’s very house. When his mother took out a map of the United States and showed him where California was, he was so disheartened that he pounded his fist on Ohio, Kansas, Utah, and every other state between New Jersey and the Pacific Ocean. Three thousand miles. An impossible distance, so far away that it could have been in another country, another world.
It was one of the strongest memories he carried away from his boyhood: the trip to the airport in the green Chevrolet with his mother and Aunt Mildred on the day his aunt left for California. Uncle Henry had flown out there two weeks earlier, so it was just Aunt Mildred who was with them on that hot, humid day in mid-August, Ferguson riding in the back dressed in short pants, his scalp moist with sweat and his bare legs sticking to the imitation-leather seat, and although it was the first time he had been to an airport, the first time he had seen planes up close and could savor the immensity and beauty of those machines, the morning remained inside him because of the two women, his mother and her sister, the one dark and the other blond, the one with long hair and the other with short hair, each so different from the other that you had to study their faces for a while to understand they had come from the same two parents, his mother, who was so affectionate and warm, always touching and hugging you, and Mildred, who was so guarded and held back, rarely touching anyone, and yet there they were together at the gate for the Pan Am flight to San Francisco, and when the number of the flight was announced over the loudspeaker and the moment came to say good-bye, suddenly, as if by some hidden, predetermined signal, the two of them began to weep, tears were cascading from their eyes and dropping to the floor, and then their arms were around each other and they were hugging, weeping and hugging at the same time. His mother had never cried in front of him before, and until he saw it with his own eyes, he hadn’t even known that Mildred was capable of crying, but there they were weeping in front of him as they said good-bye to each other, both of them understanding that it could be months or years before they saw each other again, and Ferguson saw it as he stood below them in his five-year-old’s body, looking up at his mother and his aunt, stunned by the excess of emotion pouring out of them, and the image traveled to a place so deep inside him that he never forgot it.
In November of the following year, two months after Ferguson entered the first grade, his mother opened a photography studio in downtown Montclair. The sign above the front door said Roseland Photo, and life among the Fergusons suddenly took on a new, accelerated rhythm, beginning with the daily morning scramble to get one of them off to school on time and the other two into their separate cars to drive off to work, and with his mother now gone from the house five days a week (Tuesday through Saturday) there was a woman named Cassie who did the chores, cleaning and making beds and shopping for food and sometimes even making dinner for Ferguson when his parents worked late. He saw much less of his mother now, but the truth was that he needed her less. He could tie his own shoes, after all, and whenever he thought about the person he wanted to marry, he would hesitate between two potential candidates: Cathy Gold, the short girl with the blue eyes and long blond ponytail, and Margie Fitzpatrick, the towering redhead who was so strong and fearless that she could lift two boys off the ground at once.
The first person to sit for a portrait at Roseland Photo was the proprietor’s son. Ferguson’s mother had been aiming her camera at him for as long as he could remember, but those earlier pictures had been snapshots, and the camera she had used was small and light and portable, whereas the camera in the studio was much bigger and had to be mounted on a three-legged stand called a tripod. He liked the word tripod, which made him think of peas, his favorite vegetable, as in the expression two peas in a pod, and he was also impressed by how carefully his mother adjusted the lights before she began taking the pictures, which seemed to indicate she was in full command of what she was doing, and to see her working with such skill and assurance gave Ferguson a good feeling about his mother, who was suddenly no longer just his mother but someone who did important things out in the world. She made him wear nice clothes for the picture, which meant putting on his tweed sports jacket and his white shirt with the broad collar and no top button, and because Ferguson found it so enjoyable to be sitting there as his mother went about the business of getting the pose just right, he had no trouble smiling when she asked him to. His mother’s friend from Brooklyn was with them that day, Nancy Solomon, who had once been Nancy Fein and now lived in West Orange, funny Nancy with the buck teeth and the two little boys, his mother’s bosom buddy and therefore a person he had known all his life. His mother explained that after the photos were developed, one of them would be blown up to a very large size and transferred to canvas, which Nancy would then paint over, turning the photograph into a color portrait in oils. That was one of the services Roseland Photo was planning to offer its customers: not just black-and-white portraits, but oil paintings as well. Ferguson had trouble imagining how this could be done, but he figured Nancy would have to be an awfully good painter to pull off such a difficult transformation. Two Saturdays later, he and his mother left the house at eight o’clock in the morning and drove to downtown Montclair. The street was nearly deserted, which meant there was a free parking space directly in front of Roseland Photo, but twenty or thirty yards before they came to a stop, his mother told Ferguson to shut his eyes. He wanted to ask her why, but just as he was about to open his mouth and speak, she said: No questions, Archie. So he shut his eyes, and when they pulled up in front of the studio, she helped him out of the car and led him by the hand to the place where she wanted him to be. All right, she said, you can open them now. Ferguson opened his eyes and found himself looking into the display window of his mother’s new establishment, and what he saw there were two large images of himself, each one measuring about twenty-four inches by thirty-six inches, the first one a black-and-white photograph and the second one an exact replica of the first only in color, with his sandy hair and gray-green eyes and red-flecked brown jacket looking much as they did in the real world. Nancy’s brushwork was so precise, so perfect in its execution, that he couldn’t tell if he was looking at a photograph or a painting. Some weeks passed, and with the pictures now on permanent display, strangers began to recognize him, stopping him on the street to ask if he wasn’t the little guy in the window of Roseland Photo. He had become the most famous six-year-old in Montclair, the poster boy for his mother’s studio, a legend.