They were good people, kind people, unexceptional people, and they lived in a little white house on a tree-lined street with other little white houses owned by other hard-working middle-class families with two or three children and a car or two cars in the white wooden garage. Ralph Federman was a tall, thin man in his late forties who had trained as a pharmacist and owned the smallest of the three drugstores on the main street of the New Rochelle shopping district. Shirley Federman, also tall but not thin, was a few years younger than her husband. A graduate of Hunter College, she worked part-time at the local library, canvassed for Democratic candidates during state and national elections, and had a thing for Broadway musicals. They both treated Ferguson with a quiet sort of deference, a bit shocked perhaps and also grateful that he went on accepting their invitations out of loyalty to their son, and because they didn’t want to lose him, they tended to sit back at the dinners and let Ferguson do most of the talking. As for Celia, she rarely said a word, but she listened to him, listened more closely than either of her parents did, and as Ferguson watched her evolve from a timid, grieving child into a self-possessed girl of sixteen, it occurred to him that she was the reason why he kept going back there, for it had always been apparent to him how bright she was, but now she was becoming pretty, too, a slender, swanlike, long-limbed kind of prettiness, and even though she was still too young for him, in another year or two she wouldn’t be, and lodged somewhere in a deep, inaccessible part of Ferguson’s brain was the unformed idea that he was destined to marry Celia Federman, that the narrative of his life demanded he marry her in order to negate the injustice of her brother’s early death.
It was essential that he talk, that he not just sit there making polite conversation but really talk, telling them everything he could about himself so they would begin to understand who he was, and more and more after the first few visits that was what he did, talk to them about himself and the things that were happening to him, because by then there was less and less to say about Artie, it was too gruesome to keep going over the same ground again and again, and Ferguson could see with his own eyes how in the course of nine months Mr. Federman’s hair had gone from dark brown to a mix of brown and gray to mostly gray and then to all white, how Artie’s father grew much thinner for a time and his mother kept putting on weight, ten more pounds by October 1961, fifteen more pounds by March 1962, twenty more pounds by September, their bodies were telling Ferguson what was happening to their souls as they went on living with Artie’s death, and there was no need to discuss their son’s exploits as a ten-year-old Little Leaguer anymore, no need to mention his A+’s in science and math ever again, and so Ferguson came up with a new strategy for getting through those dinners, which was to push Artie out of the room and force them to think about something else.
Never a word about giving up baseball because of their son, never a word about his lustful thoughts toward Amy Schneiderman, never a word about having sex with Dana Rosenbloom, never a word about the night he drank too much with Amy’s boyfriend, Mike Loeb, and wound up puking all over his pants and shoes, but other than hiding those secrets and indiscretions, Ferguson made a point of not censoring himself, a difficult task for someone as reticent as he was, but he trained himself to be honest with them, to perform for them, and at the two dozen New Rochelle dinners he attended over the four years between Artie’s death and his graduation from high school, he talked about many things, including the various upheavals that had occurred in his family (his parents’ divorce, his mother’s second marriage, his frigid relations with his father) and the curious experience of having acquired a new set of relatives, not just his stepfather and two stepsiblings but Dan’s brother, Gil, an erudite and sympathetic man who took an interest in his stepnephew’s writerly aspirations (You have to learn everything you can, Archie, he once said to him, and then you have to forget it, and what you can’t forget will create the foundation of your work) and Gil’s dour wife, Anna, and his plump, smirking daughters, Margaret and Ella, along with Dan’s crotchety old father, who lived in a room on the third floor of a nursing home in Washington Heights and was either cracked or in the early stages of dementia, but still, he did come out with some unforgettable remarks from time to time in that Sig Ruman accent of his: I vant ve all shut up now so I can piss! One of the best results of his mother’s marriage, he told them, was that by some mysterious sleight of hand, which had strung together so many different families and overlapping lineages, his dearest friend and cousin by marriage, Noah Marx, was now related to his new stepsister and stepbrother as well, cousins by marriage once or twice removed (no one was quite sure which), a fact that made him dizzy every time he thought about it — Noah and Amy bound together with him in the same mixed-up tribe! — and what an improvement it was to see how well Dan Schneiderman hit it off with Donald Marx, which had not been the case with his father, who had disliked Uncle Don and had once called him a pompous schmuck, and this was better, Ferguson said, even if his mother’s relations with her sister had not improved and never would, but at least now it was possible to sit down and have dinner with the Marxes without wanting to scream or pull out a gun and shoot someone.
He could tell them things he never told anyone else, which made him a different person when he was with them, a more forthright and entertaining person than he was at home or at school, a person who could make people laugh, and perhaps that was another reason why he kept on going back there, because he knew they would want to listen to the stories he told, the amusing anecdotes about Noah, for example, someone he never tired of bringing into the conversation, his staunch fellow traveler through the thickets of life who had been given a full scholarship to the Fieldston School in Riverdale, one of the best private schools in the city, the taller, post-wire-toothed Noah who had managed to find himself a girlfriend and was directing plays at Fieldston, contemporary stuff like The Chairs and The Bald Soprano by Ionesco, older stuff like The White Devil by John Webster (what a bloodbath!), and making little movies with his Bell & Howell eight-millimeter camera. Still one of the world’s most cunning saboteurs, he accompanied Ferguson on the second of his semi-monthly meetings with his father in May 1964, not to a cheap restaurant this time but to the dreaded Blue Valley Country Club, an invitation Ferguson rashly accepted by insisting Noah be included in the party, a proposal he assumed his father would reject, but his father surprised him by agreeing to his demand, and so the appliance king and the two boys set out one Sunday afternoon for lunch at the club, and because Noah knew all about Ferguson’s struggles with his father and how much he detested that club, he mocked the place and the things it stood for by wearing a plaid tam-o’-shanter with a white pom-pom on top for the occasion, such a ludicrous, oversized headpiece that Ferguson and his father both laughed when they saw it, perhaps the only time they had laughed in unison for more than a decade, but Noah deadpanned it and didn’t crack a smile, which made a funny thing even funnier, of course, telling them this was his first visit to a golf club and he wanted to look right, since golf was a Scottish game and therefore all golfers must needs (he actually said must needs) adorn themselves with Scottish hats as they worked their way around the links. It was true that Noah got a little carried away once they arrived at the club, perhaps because he felt uncomfortable to be rubbing shoulders with what he called the filthy rich, or perhaps because he wanted to show his solidarity with Ferguson by saying out loud what Ferguson himself would never have dared to say, as when an obese man waddled by, pointed to the tam-o’-shanter, and called out, Nice hat! — to which Noah replied (with an enormous grin plastered across his face), Thanks, fatso—but Ferguson’s father was walking ten or twelve feet in front of them and missed the insult, thus sparing the boys the dressing-down that would have been given to them if he had heard it, and for once Ferguson managed to get through a day at the Blue Valley Country Club without wishing he were somewhere else.