You know who I am, don’t you? Blumenthal asked.
If you’re the Allen Blumenthal I think you are, Ferguson said, then you’re my stepbrother. (A pause to let the magnitude of the word sink in.) Hello, stepbrother.
Blumenthal didn’t laugh at Ferguson’s mild but friendly joke, nor did he waste any time in getting down to business. At seven o’clock that morning, while playing a round of prework tennis on an indoor court at the South Mountain Tennis Center with his boyhood friend Sam Brownstein, Ferguson’s father had collapsed and died of a heart attack. The funeral would be held the day after tomorrow at Temple B’nai Abraham in Newark, and Blumenthal was calling on his mother’s behalf to invite Ferguson to attend the service, which would be officiated by Rabbi Prinz, and then to accompany the family to the cemetery in Woodbridge for the burial, after which (if Ferguson was so inclined) he could join them at the house in Maplewood. What should Blumenthal tell his mother? Yes or no?
Yes, Ferguson said. Of course I’ll be there.
Stanley was such a wonderful guy, the unknown stepbrother said, as his voice began to wobble into another register. I can’t believe this has happened.
Ferguson heard the air catch in Blumenthal’s throat, and suddenly the boy was sobbing …
There were no tears for Ferguson, however. For a long time after he hung up the phone, he couldn’t feel anything but an immense weight bearing down on his head, a ten-ton stone immobilizing him all the way down to his ankles and the soles of his feet, and then bit by bit the weight turned inward and was supplanted by horror, horror crawling up through his body and humming in his veins, and after the horror, an invasion of darkness, darkness within him and around him and a voice in his head telling him the world was no longer real.
Fifty-four. And not one glimpse of him since that grotesque TV commercial eighteen months ago. Prices never lower, spirits never higher. Imagine: dropping dead at fifty-four.
Not once in all the years of their struggles and silences had Ferguson ever wished for such a thing or imagined it could happen. His nonsmoking, nondrinking, eternally fit and athletic father was going to live to an advanced old age, and somehow or other, at some point in the decades still to come, he and Ferguson would have found a way to purge the rancor that had grown between them, but that assumption had been based on the certainty that there were many more years ahead of them, and now there were no more years, there was not even a day or an hour or the smallest fraction of a second.
Three years of unbroken silence. That was the worst part of it now, those three years and no chance to undo the silence anymore, no deathbed farewells, no premonitory illness to prepare him for the blow, and how strange it was that ever since he had signed the contract for his book Ferguson had been thinking more and more about his father again (because of the money, he suspected, proof that there were people in the world willing to give him money for the no-account work of writing make-believe stories), and in the past month or so Ferguson had even been considering the possibility of sending his father a copy of Prolusions when the book was published in order to show him that he was getting by, getting along on his own terms, and also (perhaps) as an opening-round gesture that might have led to some future reconciliation, wondering if his father would respond or not, wondering if he would toss out the book or sit down and write him a letter, and if he did respond, then writing back to him and arranging to meet somewhere to have it out once and for all, honest and open with each other for the first time, no doubt cursing and shouting at each other throughout most of it, and whenever Ferguson played out that scene in his head, it generally wound up in a bloody fistfight, with the two of them pounding each other until they were too tired to hold up their arms anymore. It was also possible that he might not have sent the book in the end, but at least he had been thinking about it, and surely that meant something, surely that was a sign of hope, for even punches would have been better than the blank standoff of the past three years.
Going to the synagogue. Going to the cemetery. Going to the house in Maplewood. The nullity and futility of it alclass="underline" meeting Ethel and her children for the first time, and the discovery that they were real people with arms and legs and faces and hands, the distraught widow doing what she could to hold herself upright through the ordeal, not the cold person of the wedding photograph in the Star-Ledger but a thoughtful, unpretentious woman who had fallen for his father and married him, almost certainly a patient, giving wife, perhaps in some ways a better wife for his father than the fast-moving, independent Rose had been, and after receiving a kiss on the cheek from their mother, shaking hands with Allen and Stephanie, who clearly had loved Stanley more than Stanley’s biological son ever had, Allen finishing his first year at Rutgers and intending to major in economics, which must have pleased his father, a sensible boy with his head in the real world, unlike the disappointing real son who mostly dwelled on the moon, and beyond his father’s second family, Ferguson found himself with members of his first family as well, the aunts and uncles from California, Joan and Millie, Arnold and Lew, not seen since the early days of Ferguson’s childhood, and what struck him most about those long-lost relatives was the curious fact that while the brothers did not look terribly alike, each in his different way bore a strong resemblance to his father.
For some reason, Ferguson stayed on in the house longer than he should have, the old Castle of Silence where he had been held prisoner for seven years and had written the story about the shoes, for the most part standing alone in a corner of the living room and not saying much to the several dozen strangers who were there, neither wanting to be there himself nor willing to leave, accepting condolences from various men and women after they were informed that he was Stanley’s son, nodding thanks, shaking hands, but still too stunned to do anything more than agree with them about how shocked and stunned they were by his father’s sudden, shocking death. His aunts and uncles made an early exit, the weeping, overwrought Sam Brownstein and his wife, Peggy, headed for the door, but even after most of the other guests filed out toward the end of the afternoon, Ferguson still wasn’t ready to call Dan and ask to be picked up (he was planning to spend the night at the house on Woodhall Crescent) because the reason why he had stayed so long he now understood was to have a chance to talk to Ethel in private, and when she walked up to him a couple of minutes later and asked if they could go off somewhere together to talk alone, he was comforted to know that she had been thinking the same thought as well.
It was a sad conversation, one of the saddest conversations in the history of his life so far, sitting with his unknown stepmother in the TV nook of the newly refurbished basement as they shared what they knew about the enigma that had been Stanley Ferguson, a man Ethel admitted had been all but unreachable to her, and how sorry Ferguson felt for that woman as he watched her convulse in tears, then pull herself together for a while, then collapse again, the shock of it, she kept saying, the shock of a fifty-four-year-old man running at full speed into a brick wall of death, the second husband she had buried in the past nine years, Ethel Blumberg, Ethel Blumenthal, Ethel Ferguson, for two decades a sixth-grade teacher in the Livingston public schools, mother of Allen and Stephanie, and yes, she said, it made perfect sense that they had adored Stanley because Stanley had been exceedingly good to them, for after much study on the subject of Stanley Ferguson she had come to the conclusion that he was generous and kind to strangers but closed off and impenetrable with the ones he should have been most intimate with, his wife and children, in this case his one child, Archie, since Allen and Stephanie were no more than distant outsiders to him, a pair of children equivalent to the son and daughter of a third cousin or the man who washed his car, which had made it easy for him to be kind and generous to them, but what about you, Archie, Ethel asked, and why did so much resentment build up between the two of you over the years, so much bitterness that Stanley refused to allow me to meet you and blocked you from our wedding, even though he kept on saying he had nothing against you and was — to use his words—content to wait it out.