The next day, his grandmother helped him write a letter to Aunt Mildred, whom he hadn’t seen in almost a year. She was living in Chicago now, where she worked as a professor and taught large college students like Gary, although Gary was at a different college from hers, Williams College in Massachusetts, whereas her college was called the University of Something. In thinking about Gary, he naturally started thinking about Francie as well, and it struck him as peculiar that his cousin was already talking about marriage at seventeen when Aunt Mildred, who was two years older than his mother, which made her many years older than Francie, still wasn’t married to anyone. He asked his grandmother why Aunt Mildred had no husband, but apparently there was no answer to that question, for his grandmother shook her head and admitted that she didn’t know, speculating that it could be because Mildred was so busy with her work or else because she simply hadn’t found the right man yet. Then his grandmother handed him a pencil and a small sheet of lined paper, explaining that this was the best kind of paper for writing letters, but before he began he should think carefully about what he wanted to tell his aunt, and on top of that he should remember to keep his sentences short, not because he wasn’t capable of reading long sentences now, but writing was a different story, and since printing the letters was a slow process, she didn’t want him to run out of steam and stop before the end.
Dear Aunt Mildred, Ferguson wrote, as his grandmother spelled out the words for him in her high, undulating voice, drawing out the sound of each letter as if it were a little song, the melody rising and falling as his hand inched across the page. I fell out of a tree and broke my leg. Nana is here. She is teaching me how to read and write. Francie painted my cast blue, red, and yellow. She is mad about those people who fried in the chair. The birds are singing in the yard. Today I counted eleven kinds of birds. The yellow finches are my favorites. I read The Tale of Two Bad Mice and Peewee the Circus Dog. What do you like better, vanilla or chocolate ice cream? I hope you will visit soon. Love, Archie.
There was some disagreement over the use of the word fried, which his grandmother thought was an excessively vulgar way to talk about a tragic event, but Ferguson insisted there was no choice, the language couldn’t be changed because that was how Francie had presented the matter to him, and he found it a good word precisely because it was so vivid and disgusting. Anyway, it was his letter, wasn’t it, and he could write anything he wanted to. Once again, his grandmother shook her head. You never back down, do you, Archie? To which her grandson answered: Why should I back down when I’m right?
Not long after they sealed up the letter, Ferguson’s mother unexpectedly came home, chugging down the street in the red, two-door Pontiac she had been driving since the family moved to West Orange three years ago, the car that Ferguson and his parents referred to as the Jersey Tomato, and when she had finished putting it away in the garage, she came striding across the lawn in the direction of the porch, moving at a faster pace than she normally did, an accelerated clip that fell somewhere between walking and jogging, and once she was close enough for Ferguson to distinguish her features, he saw that she was smiling, a big smile, an unusually big and brilliant smile, and then she lifted her arm and waved to her mother and son, a warm salutation, a sign that she was in excellent spirits, and even before she walked up the steps and joined them on the porch, Ferguson knew exactly what she was going to say, for it was clear from her early return and the buoyant expression on her face that her long search was finally over, that the site for her photography studio had been found.
It was in Montclair, she told them, just a short jump from West Orange, and not only was the place large enough to fit in everything she would need, it was plop in the middle of the main drag. There was work to be done, of course, but the lease wouldn’t start until September first, which would give her enough time to draw up the plans and start construction on day one. What a relief, she said, good news at last, but there was still a problem. She had to come up with a name for the studio, and she didn’t like any of her ideas so far. Ferguson Photo was no good because of the double-f sound. Montclair Photo was too bland. Portraits by Rose was too pretentious. Rose Photo didn’t work because of the double-o sound. Suburban Portraits made her think of a sociology textbook. Modern Image wasn’t bad, but it made her think of a magazine about photography rather than a flesh-and-blood studio. Ferguson Portraiture. Camera Central. F-Stop Photo. Darkroom Village. Lighthouse Square. Rembrandt Photo. Vermeer Photo. Rubens Photo. Essex Photo. No good, she said, they all stank, and her brain had gone numb.
Ferguson chimed in with a question. What was the name of the place where his father had taken her dancing, he asked, something with the word rose in it, the place where they’d gone before they were married? He remembered that she’d told him about it once because they’d had such a good time there, that they’d danced their heads off.
Roseland, his mother said.
Then Ferguson’s mother turned to her own mother and asked her what she thought of Roseland Photo.
I like it, her mother said.
And you, Archie? his mother asked. What do you think?
I like it, too, he said.
So do I, his mother said. It might not be the best name ever invented, but it has a nice ring to it. Let’s sleep on it. If we still like it in the morning, maybe the problem is solved.
That night, as Ferguson and his parents and his grandmother lay asleep in their beds on the second floor of the house, 3 Brothers Home World burned to the ground. The telephone rang at a quarter past five in the morning, and within minutes Ferguson’s father was in his bottle-green Plymouth driving to Newark to inspect the damage. Since the air conditioner was going at full blast in Ferguson’s room, he slept through the telephone call and the commotion of his father’s hasty, pre-dawn departure, and it wasn’t until he woke at seven that he found out what had happened. His mother looked agitated, more confused and distraught than Ferguson had ever seen her, no longer acting as the rock of composure and wisdom he had always thought she was but someone just like himself, a fragile being prey to sadness and tears and hopelessness, and when she put her arms around him he felt frightened, not just because his father’s store had burned down and there would be no more money for them to live on, which meant they would have to move to the poorhouse and subsist on porridge and dried-out pieces of bread for the rest of their days, no, that was bad enough, but the truly frightening thing was to learn that his mother was no stronger than he was, that the blows of the world hurt her just as much as they hurt him and that except for the fact that she was older, there was no difference between them.
Your poor father, his mother said. He’s spent his whole life building up that store, he’s worked and worked and worked, and now it all comes to nothing. A person lights a match, an electric wire short-circuits in a wall, and twenty years of hard work turn into a pile of ashes. God is cruel, Archie. He should protect the good people of this world, but he doesn’t. He makes them suffer just as much as the bad ones. He kills David Raskin, he burns down your father’s store, he lets innocent people die in concentration camps, and they say he’s a kind and merciful God. What a joke.