THESE WERE THE things Ferguson did not know, the things he could not have known during the two years that separated his cousin’s death in the Korean War from his father’s death in the Newark fire. By spring of the following year, his Uncle Lew was in prison, along with the gasoline man Eddie Schultz, his lookout accomplice George Ionello, and the mastermind of the operation, Ira Bernstein, but by then Ferguson and his mother had left the New Jersey suburbs and were living in New York, occupants of a three-bedroom apartment on Central Park West between Eighty-third and Eighty-fourth Streets. The photography studio in Millburn had been sold, and because his father’s life insurance policy had provided his mother with two hundred thousand tax-free dollars, there were no financial burdens, which meant that even in death, the loyal, pragmatic, ever-responsible Stanley Ferguson was continuing to support them.
First, the shock of November third, and with it the spectacle of his mother’s tears, the onslaught of intense, smothering embraces, her gasping, shuddering body pressed against him, and then, some hours later, the arrival of his grandparents from New York, and the day after that the appearance of Aunt Mildred and her husband, Paul Sandler, and through it all the comings and goings of countless Fergusons, the two weeping aunts, Millie and Joan, the stone-faced Uncle Arnold, and even the treacherous, not-yet-exposed Uncle Lew, so much chaos and noise, a house with too many people in it, and Ferguson sat in a corner and watched, not knowing what to say or think, still too stunned to cry. It was unimaginable that his father should be dead. He had been alive the previous morning, sitting at the breakfast table with a copy of the Newark Star-Ledger in his hands, telling Ferguson it was going to be a cold day and he should remember to wear his scarf to school, and it made no sense that those were the last words his father would ever speak to him. Days passed. He stood in the rain beside his mother as they lowered his father into the ground and the rabbi intoned a dirge in incomprehensible Hebrew, such awful-sounding words that Ferguson wanted to cover his ears, and two days after that he returned to school, to fat Mrs. Costello and his second-grade class, but everyone seemed afraid of him, too embarrassed to talk to him anymore, as if an X had been stamped on his forehead to warn them not to come near, and even though Mrs. Costello kindly offered to let him skip the group lessons and sit at his desk reading whatever book he wanted, that only made things worse somehow, for he found it difficult to keep his mind on the books, which normally gave him so much pleasure, since his thoughts would invariably drift off from the words on the page to his father, not the father who was buried in the ground but the father who had gone to heaven, if there was such a place as heaven, and if his father was indeed there, was it possible that he was looking down on him now, watching him sit at his desk pretending to read? It would be nice to think that, Ferguson said to himself, but at the same time, what good would it do? His father would be glad to see him, yes, which would probably make the fact of being dead a bit less unbearable, but how could it help Ferguson to be seen if he himself couldn’t see the person who was looking at him? Most of all, he wanted to hear his father talk. That was what he missed above everything else, and even though his father had been a man of few words, a master in the art of giving short answers to long questions, Ferguson had always liked the sound of his voice, which had been a tuneful, gentle voice, and the thought that he would never hear it again filled him with an immense sadness, a sorrow so deep and so wide that it could have contained the Pacific Ocean, which was the largest ocean in the world. It’s going to be a cold day, Archie. Remember to wear your scarf to school.
The world wasn’t real anymore. Everything in it was a fraudulent copy of what it should have been, and everything that happened in it shouldn’t have been happening. For a long time afterward, Ferguson lived under the spell of this illusion, sleepwalking through his days and struggling to fall asleep at night, sick of a world he had stopped believing in, doubting everything that presented itself to his eyes. Mrs. Costello asked him to pay attention, but he didn’t have to listen to her now, since she was only an actress trying to impersonate his teacher, and when his friend Jeff Balsoni made the extraordinary, uncalled-for sacrifice of giving Ferguson his Ted Williams baseball card, the rarest card among the hundreds in the Topps collection, Ferguson thanked him for the gift, put the card in his pocket, and then tore it up at home. It was possible to do such things now. Before November third, they would have been inconceivable to him, but an unreal world was much bigger than a real world, and there was more than enough room in it to be yourself and not yourself at the same time.
According to what his mother later told him, she hadn’t been planning such a quick departure from New Jersey, but then the scandal broke, and suddenly there was no choice but to get out of there. Eleven days before Christmas, the Newark police announced that they had cracked the 3 Brothers Home World case, and by the next morning the ugly particulars were front-page news in every paper across Essex and Union Counties. Fratricide. Gambling Kingpin Arrested. Ex-Fireman Turned Firebug Held Without Bail. Louis Ferguson Indicted On Multiple Charges. His mother kept him home from school that day, and then the day after that, and the day after that, and every day until the school closed for Christmas vacation. It’s for your own good, Archie, she said to him, and because he couldn’t have cared less about not going to school, he didn’t bother to ask her why. Much later, when he was old enough to grasp the full horror of the word fratricide, he understood that she was trying to protect him from the vicious talk circulating around town, for his name was now a notorious name, and to be a Ferguson meant you belonged to a family that was damned. So the soon-to-be-eight-year-old Ferguson stayed at home with his grandmother as his mother went about the business of putting the family house on the market and searching for a photographer to buy her studio, and because the newspapers never stopped calling, asking, begging, harassing her to open up and give her side of the story, the latter-day Jacobean drama now known as the Ferguson Affair, his mother decided that enough was enough, and two days after Christmas, she packed up some suitcases, loaded them into the trunk of her blue Chevy, and the three of them drove to New York.
For the next two months, he and his mother lived in his grandparents’ apartment on West Fifty-eighth Street, his mother back in the old bedroom she had once shared with her sister, Mildred, and Ferguson camped out in the living room on a small fold-up cot. The most interesting part of this temporary arrangement was that he didn’t have to go to school, an unexpected liberation caused by their lack of a fixed address, and until they found a place of their own, he would be a free man. Aunt Mildred opposed the idea of no school for him, but Ferguson’s mother calmly brushed her off. Don’t worry, she said. Archie is a bright kid, and a little time off won’t hurt him. Once we know where we’ll be living, we’ll start looking for a school. First things first, Mildred.