In the spring of his sophomore year, with his mother’s wedding already announced for early August and no solution in sight, Jim put Ferguson in touch with one of his old high school friends, a two-hundred-and-thirty-pound ex — football tackle named Arnie Frazier, who had flunked out of Rutgers in his freshman year and was running a moving business in Maplewood and South Orange. The fleet consisted of one white Chevy van, and the operation was an under-the-table affair transacted on a strict cash-only basis, with no insurance, no bonded employees, no formal business structure, and no taxes paid because no income was declared. Even though Ferguson wouldn’t be old enough to drive until next March, Frazier took him on as a shotgun man to replace his current sidekick, who had been drafted into the army and would be heading off to Fort Dix at the end of June. Jim’s friend would have preferred a full-time, year-round worker, but Jim was Frazier’s friend because he had once rescued Frazier’s twin sister from a touchy situation at a high school party (decking a drunken lacrosse player who was pawing her in a corner of the room), and Frazier felt he owed Jim and couldn’t say no. That was how Ferguson got his foot in the door and began his career as a moving man, which lasted for all three of his high school summers from 1963 to 1965, since his services were required again the next year when the new shotgun man was forced to quit because of a herniated disk in his lower back and again the third year when the fleet expanded to two vans and Frazier was in urgent need of a second driver. It was strenuous work at times, and every year when Ferguson started up again half the muscles in his body would be excruciatingly sore for the first six or seven days, but he found manual work to be a good counterbalance to the mental work of writing, for not only did it keep him in good physical shape and serve a legitimate purpose (moving people’s belongings from one place to another), it allowed him to think his own thoughts rather than have to give his thoughts to someone else, which was the case with most nonmanual work, helping someone else make money with your brains while getting as little as possible for it in return, and even if Ferguson’s salary was low, every job ended with five- and ten- and sometimes twenty-dollar bills being shoved into his hand, and because work was abundant during those years before the millions burned on Vietnam wrecked the national economy, he wound up earning close to two hundred tax-free dollars every week. So Ferguson spent those three summers lugging beds and sofas up and down narrow staircases, delivering antique mirrors and Louis XV escritoires to interior decorators in New York, moving college students in and out of their dorm rooms on campuses in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, hauling old refrigerators and broken-down air conditioners to the town dump, and in the process he met many people who never would have brushed up against his life if he had been sitting in an office or making ice cream cones for noisy children at Gruning’s. More than that, Arnie treated him well and seemed to respect him, and while it was true that Ferguson’s twenty-one-year-old boss voted for Goldwater in the ’64 election and wanted to drop nuclear bombs on Hanoi, it was also true that the same Arnie Frazier hired two black men when the second van was bought and the crew expanded to four, and the last summer Ferguson worked for him brought the inestimable bonus of riding around every day with one of those black men, Richard Brinkerstaff, a broad, big-bellied giant who would look through the windshield of the van as Ferguson drove them to their next destination, carefully absorbing the passing landscapes of empty suburban roads and potholed city streets and crowded industrial highways, and again and again in the same tone of voice, whether he was talking about something that delighted him or saddened him or repelled him, he would point his finger at the little girl playing with her collie on the front lawn of her house or the disheveled wino staggering through the intersection at Bowery and Canal and say: How sweet it is, Archie. How sweet it is.
Ferguson knew that his father had no idea what to make of him. Not just because he found it impossible to understand why anyone would want to go into such an iffy field as writing books, which struck him as a delusional folly, an all but certain descent into impoverishment, failure, and mind-shattering disappointment, but also because his properly raised son, who had been exposed to the benefits of traditional, up-from-the-bootstraps American enterprise from the day of his birth, now shunned the opportunities that had been given to him for advancement and success in life to fritter away his summers working as a common laborer, toiling under an idiot college dropout who cheated the IRS. There was nothing wrong with the money he was earning, but the problem was that it would never become more money, for bottom-rung work of that sort would always keep him at the bottom, and when his son started talking about supporting himself in the future as a factory worker or a sailor in the merchant marine, the father cringed at the thought of what would become of him. What had happened to the little boy who had wanted to be a doctor? Why had everything gone so wrong?
That was how Ferguson imagined his father must have thought about him, if in fact he did think about him, and in the two- and three-page monologues he wrote in his father’s voice, he struggled to understand his father’s way of thinking, digging down and trying to excavate the few things he knew about Stanley Ferguson’s early life, the difficult, no-money years when his grandfather was murdered and his screaming, quasi-hysterical grandmother took charge of the clan, and then the mysterious departure of his father’s two older brothers to California, never fully explained, never fully understood, and after that the push to become the richest man on earth, the great prophet of profits who believed in money as other people believed in God or sex or good works, money as salvation and fulfillment, money as the ultimate measure of all things, and anyone who resisted that belief was either a fool or a coward, as his ex-wife and son were surely fools and cowards, their brains stuffed with the romantic claptrap dished out by novels and cheap Hollywood films, and his ex-wife was mostly to blame for what had happened, his once beloved Rose, who had turned the boy’s head away from his father and coddled him with all that soft-minded nonsense about discovering his true self and forging his own unique destiny, and now it was too late to undo the damage and the boy was lost.
Still, none of that explained why his father continued to nod off in front of movie and TV screens, or why, as his wealth had grown, he had become cheaper and more tightfisted and took his son only to lousy, inexpensive restaurants for their twice-monthly dinners, or why he had changed his mind about selling the house in Maplewood and had moved back in after Ferguson and his mother had left, or why, after going to the trouble of having Sole Mates printed, he never asked to see any of Ferguson’s new stories, never inquired about how he was getting on with his stepfather and stepsiblings in the house on Woodhall Crescent, never asked what college he wanted to go to, never said a word about the Kennedy assassination or seemed to care that the president had been shot, and the more Ferguson tried to tunnel his way into his father’s soul, searching for something that wasn’t dead or cut off from other people, the less he was able to find. Even the complex Mr. Rosenbloom, who no doubt hid much if not most of his inner life from the world, made more sense to Ferguson than his father did. Nor could the differences between them be boiled down to the fact that his father worked and Mr. Rosenbloom didn’t. Dan Schneiderman worked. Not the twelve- and fourteen-hour days his father put in, but a steady seven to eight hours five or six days a week, and even if he wasn’t the most dazzling artist in the world, he knew the limitations of his modest talent and took pleasure in his work, which he did well enough to cobble together a living as a self-employed artisan of the brush, as he sometimes put it, not the big-money income Stanley Ferguson raked in, of course, but a more generous heart in spite of that, as shown by the new car he bought for his new wife, which turned Ferguson and Amy into joint owners of her old Pontiac when they passed the test for their licenses, by the clever mobiles and whirling little mechanical sculptures he made as presents for everyone’s birthday, by the surprise outings to restaurants, concerts, and films, by the allowance he insisted on giving Ferguson along with the one he gave his daughter — shelling out weekly to both of them because he wanted their summer earnings to be deposited in the bank and not touched while they were still in high school — but most of all by the generosity of his person, his high spirits and loving solicitudes, his boyishness, his whimsy, his passion for poker and all games of chance, his somewhat reckless disregard of tomorrow in favor of today, which added up to a man so different from Ferguson’s father that the son/stepson had trouble reconciling them as members of the same species. Then there was Dan’s older brother, Gilbert Schneiderman, Ferguson’s new, impressively intelligent uncle, who worked as hard as anyone else, teaching music history full-time at Juilliard and writing entry after entry on classical composers for a soon-to-be-published music encyclopedia, and Uncle Don worked as well, the intense, sometimes crabby father of best-friend Noah never stopped working as he plugged away at his Montaigne biography and spilled forth two and sometimes three book reviews a month, and even Arnie Frazier worked, the flunk-out, 4-F, IRS-chiseling ex — football player worked his ass off, as Ferguson well knew, but that didn’t prevent him from drinking a six-pack of Löwenbräu every night and keeping up amorous relations with three different girls from three different towns at the same time.