It was a strange time, then, unconnected to anything he had known in the past, utterly separate from the way things would be for him after they moved into their apartment, a curious interregnum, as his grandfather put it, a short span of hollowed-out time in which he spent every waking moment with his mother, the two beaten comrades who trekked up and down the West Side looking at apartments together, conferring about the pluses and minuses of each place, mutually deciding that the one on Central Park West would be just about ideal for them, and then his mother’s surprising declaration that the house in Millburn was being sold with the furniture, all the furniture, and that they would be starting again from zero, just the two of them, so after they found the apartment they spent their days shopping for furniture, looking at beds and tables and lamps and rugs, never buying anything unless they both agreed on it, and one afternoon, as they were examining chairs and sofas at Macy’s, the bow-tied clerk looked down at Ferguson and said to his mother, Why isn’t this little boy in school? to which his mother replied, with a hard stare into the nosy man’s face: None of your business. That was the best moment of those strange two months, or one of the best moments, unforgettable because of the sudden feeling of happiness that rose up in him when his mother said those words, happier than at any time in weeks, and the sense of solidarity those words implied, the two of them against the world, struggling to put themselves together again, and none of your business was the credo of that double effort, a sign of how much they were depending on each other now. After shopping for furniture, they would go to the movies, escaping the cold winter streets for a couple of hours in the dark, watching whatever happened to be playing just then, always in the balcony because his mother could smoke up there, Chesterfields, one Chesterfield after another as they sat through movies with Alan Ladd, Marilyn Monroe, Kirk Douglas, Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, and William Holden, Westerns, musicals, science fiction, it didn’t matter what was showing that day, they would walk in blindly and hope for the best from Drum Beat, Vera Cruz, There’s No Business Like Show Business, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Bad Day at Black Rock, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, and Young at Heart, and once, just before the strange two months came to an end, the woman in the glass booth who sold them their tickets asked his mother why the little boy wasn’t in school, and his mother answered: Butt out, lady. Just give me my change.
1.4
First, there was the apartment in Newark, about which he remembered nothing, and then there was the house in Maplewood that his parents bought when he was three, and now, six years later, they were moving again, to a much larger house on the other side of town. Ferguson couldn’t understand it. The house they had been living in was a perfectly good house, a more than adequate house for a family with just three people in it, and why would his parents want to go to the trouble of packing up all their things to move such a short distance — especially when they didn’t have to? It would have made sense if they were going to another city or another state, as Uncle Lew and Aunt Millie had done four years ago when they’d moved to Los Angeles, or as Uncle Arnold and Aunt Joan had done the next year when they’d moved to California as well, but why bother to change houses when they weren’t even going to another town?
Because they could afford it, his mother said. His father’s business was doing well, and they were in a position to live on a grander scale now. The words grander scale made Ferguson think of an eighteenth-century European palace, a marble hall filled with dukes and duchesses in white powdered wigs, two dozen ladies and gentlemen dressed in opulent silk costumes standing around with lace hankies and laughing at one another’s jokes. Then, as he embellished the scene a bit further, he tried to imagine his parents in that crowd, but the costumes made them look ridiculous, laughable, grotesque. He said: Just because we can afford something doesn’t mean we should buy it. I like our house and think we should stay. If we have more money than we need, then we should give it to someone who needs it more than we do. A starving person, a crippled old man, someone with no money at all. Spending it on ourselves isn’t right. It’s selfish.
Don’t be difficult, Archie, his mother replied. Your father works harder than any two men in this town. He deserves every penny he’s made, and if he wants to show off a little with a new house, that’s his business.
I don’t like show-offs, Ferguson said. It’s not a good way to act.
Well, like it or not, little man, we’re moving, and I’m sure you’ll be happy about it once we settle in. A bigger room, a bigger backyard, and a finished basement. We’ll put a ping-pong table down there, and then we’ll see if you can finally get good enough to beat me.
But we already play ping-pong in the backyard.
When it isn’t too cold outside. And just think, Archie, in the new house we won’t be bothered by the wind.
He knew that some of the family’s money came from his mother’s work as a portrait photographer, but a much larger share of it, nearly all of it in fact, was produced by his father’s business, a chain of three appliance stores called Ferguson’s, one of them in Union, another in Westfield, and the third in Livingston. Long ago, there had been a store in Newark called 3 Brothers Home World, but that was gone now, sold off when Ferguson was three and a half or four, and if not for the framed black-and-white photograph that hung on a wall in the den, the 1941 snapshot that showed his smiling father standing between his two smiling uncles in front of 3 Brothers Home World on the day it opened for business, all memories of that store would have been expunged from his mind forever. It was unclear to him why his father no longer worked with his brothers, and on top of that there was the even greater puzzle of why Uncle Lew and Uncle Arnold had both left New Jersey to start new lives in California (his father’s words). Six or seven months ago, in a fit of longing for his absent cousin Francie, he had asked his mother to explain their reasons for moving so far away, but she had simply said, Your father bought them out, which wasn’t much of an answer, at least not one he could understand. Now, with this unpleasant development about a new and bigger house, Ferguson was beginning to grasp something that had previously escaped his attention. His father was rich. He had more money than he knew what to do with, and from the look of how things seemed to be going, that could only mean he was becoming richer and richer by the day.
This was both a good thing and a bad thing, Ferguson decided. Good because money was a necessary evil, as his grandmother had once told him, and since everyone needed money in order to live, it was surely better to have too much of it than too little. On the other hand, in order to earn too much, a person had to devote an excessive amount of time to the pursuit of money, far more time than was necessary or reasonable, which happened to be the case with his father, who worked so hard at running his empire of appliance stores that the hours he spent at home had been diminishing steadily for years, so much so that Ferguson rarely saw him anymore, since his father had fallen into the habit of leaving the house at six-thirty, so early in the morning that he was inevitably gone before Ferguson had woken up, and because each store stayed open late two nights a week, Monday and Thursday in Union, Tuesday and Friday in Westfield, Wednesday and Saturday in Livingston, there were many nights when his father failed to come home for dinner, returning to the house at ten or ten-thirty, a good hour after Ferguson had been put to bed. The only day when he could count on seeing his father was therefore Sunday, but Sundays were complicated as well, with several hours in the late morning and early afternoon given over to tennis, and that meant tagging along with his parents to the town courts and waiting around until his mother and father had played a set together before he got a chance to bat the ball around with his mother while his father played his weekly match with Sam Brownstein, his tennis friend since boyhood. Ferguson didn’t despise tennis, but he found it boring compared to baseball and football, which were the best games as far as he was concerned, and even ping-pong trumped tennis when it came to sports that involved nets and bouncing balls, so it was always with mixed feelings that he trudged off to the outdoor courts in spring, summer, and fall, and every Saturday night he would climb into bed hoping for rain in the morning.