His mother paused. Small tears were glistening in her eyes, Ferguson noticed, and she was chewing on her lower lip, as if she were trying to prevent more words from coming out of her mouth, as if she understood she had already gone too far, that she had no right to express such bitterness in front of a six-year-old child.
Don’t worry, she said. I’m just upset, that’s all. Your father has fire insurance, and nothing is going to happen to us. A nasty bit of bad luck is what it is, but it’s only temporary, and in the end we’ll all be fine. You know that, Archie, don’t you?
Ferguson nodded, but only because he didn’t want his mother to be upset anymore. Yes, maybe they would be fine, he thought, but then again, if God was as cruel as she said he was, maybe they wouldn’t. Nothing was certain. For the first time since he’d come into the world two thousand three hundred and twenty-five days ago, all bets were off.
Not only that — but who on earth was David Raskin?
1.3
His cousin Andrew was dead. Shot down in action was how Ferguson’s father explained it to him, the action being a night patrol in the frigid mountains that stood between North and South Korea, a single bullet fired by a Chinese Communist soldier, his father said, which entered cousin Andrew’s heart and killed him at the age of nineteen. It was 1952, and the five-year-old Ferguson supposed he should feel as wretched as everyone else in the room, Aunt Millie and cousin Alice to begin with, who couldn’t go longer than ten minutes without breaking down and crying again, and sad Uncle Lew, who smoked cigarette after cigarette and kept looking down at the floor, but Ferguson couldn’t muster the grief he felt was required of him, there was something false and unnatural about trying to be sad when he wasn’t, for the fact was that he had never liked cousin Andrew, who had called him pipsqueak and runt and little shithead, who had bossed him around at family gatherings and had once locked him in a closet to see if he was tough enough to take it, and even when he left Ferguson alone, there were the things he said to his sister, Alice, the cutting epithets such as pig-face and dog-brain and pencil-legs, which made Ferguson cringe with disgust, not to speak of the pleasure Andrew seemed to take in tripping and punching cousin Jack, who was only one year younger than Andrew but half a head shorter. Even Ferguson’s parents admitted that Andrew was a troubled boy, and for as long as Ferguson could remember he had been overhearing stories about his cousin’s antics at school, talking back to the teachers, setting trash cans on fire, breaking windows, flunking classes, so many misdeeds that the principal finally kicked him out in the middle of his junior year, and then, after he was caught stealing a car, the judge offered him a choice, either jail or the army, so Andrew joined the army, and six weeks after they shipped him to Korea, he was dead.
It would be years before Ferguson understood the full impact of this death on his family, for he was too young at the time to grasp anything but the ultimate effect it had on him, which wasn’t made manifest until he was seven and a half, and therefore the two years between Andrew’s funeral and the event that cracked apart their little world passed in a blur of present-tense childhood, the mundane affairs of school, sports and games, friendships, television programs, comic books, storybooks, illnesses, scraped knees and banged-up limbs, occasional fistfights, moral dilemmas, and countless questions about the nature of reality, and through it all he continued to love his parents and feel loved by them in return, most of all by his high-spirited, affectionate mother, Rose Ferguson, who owned and operated Roseland Photo on the main street in Millburn, the town where they lived, and, to a lesser, more precarious degree by his father, the enigmatic Stanley Ferguson, who said little and often seemed only dimly aware of his son’s existence, but Ferguson understood that his father had much on his mind, that running 3 Brothers Home World was an all-out, round-the-clock job, which necessarily meant he was distracted, but at those rare moments when he wasn’t distracted and could focus his eyes on his son, Ferguson felt confident that his father knew who he was, that he hadn’t confused him with someone else. In other words, Ferguson lived on safe ground, his material needs were taken care of in a consistent, conscientious manner, a roof over his head, three meals a day, freshly laundered clothes, with no physical hardships to be endured, no emotional torments to arrest his progress, and in those years between the ages of five and a half and seven and a half, he was developing into what educators would have called a healthy, normal child of above-average intelligence, a fine specimen of midcentury American boyhood. But he was too caught up in the tumult of his own life to pay attention to what was happening outside the circle of his immediate concerns, and because his parents weren’t the sort of people who shared their worries with small children, there was no way to prepare himself for the disaster that struck on November 3, 1954, which expelled him from his youthful Eden and turned his life into an entirely different life.
Among the many things Ferguson knew nothing about prior to that fateful moment were the following:
1) The extent of Lew and Millie’s grief over the death of their son, compounded by the fact that they saw themselves as failed parents, having brought up what they considered to be a damaged person, a delinquent child with no conscience or moral foundation, a mocker of rules and authority who exulted in stirring up havoc wherever he could, a liar, a cheat from start to finish, a bad egg, and Lew and Millie tortured themselves over this failure, wondering if they had been too hard on him or too soft on him, wondering what they could have done differently to prevent him from stealing that car, which proved to be his death sentence, and how torn up they felt for having encouraged him to join the army, which they thought might help straighten him out but instead had put him in a wooden box six feet under the ground, and therefore they felt responsible for his death as well, not just his fractious, angry, misspent life but also his death on that frozen mountaintop in godforsaken Korea.
2) Lew and Millie had a taste for alcohol. They were one of those couples who drank as both a sport and a compulsion, a bibulous, insouciant pair of theatrical charmers whenever they were lubricated within the scope of their capacities, which were substantial, but oddly enough it was the pin-thin Millie who seemed the steadier of the two, who rarely ever wobbled or slurred, whereas her much larger husband sometimes went overboard, and even before Andrew’s death, Ferguson could remember the time when he saw his uncle passed out on the couch and snoring in the middle of a loud family party, which everyone had found so funny when it happened, but now, in the aftermath of that death, Lew’s drinking had increased, spreading beyond the parties, the cocktail hours, and the post-dinner nightcaps into high-noon lunchtime sloshes and secret tipples from the flask he carried around in the inside pocket of his jacket, which no doubt helped numb the pain twisting through his guilt-ridden, ravaged heart, but the booze began to affect his work at the store, sometimes rendering him incoherent when he talked to customers about the relative merits of Whirlpool and Maytag washing machines, and when he wasn’t incoherent, he was occasionally irritable, and when he was irritable, he often took pleasure in insulting people, which was no way to conduct business at 3 Brothers Home World, and so Ferguson’s father would have to step in, pull Lew away from the offended customer, and tell him to go home and sleep it off.