When it didn’t rain, tennis was followed by a drive to South Orange Village and lunch at Gruning’s, where Ferguson would scarf down a medium-rare hamburger and a bowl of mint-chip ice cream, a much-anticipated Sunday treat, not just because Gruning’s made the best hamburgers for miles around and produced their own ice cream but because it smelled so good in there, a mixture of warm coffee and grilling meat and the sugary emanations of manifold desserts, such good smells that Ferguson would dissolve in a kind of delirious contentment as he breathed them into his lungs, and then, once they were back in his father’s two-toned Oldsmobile sedan (gray and white), they would return to the house in Maplewood to wash up and change their clothes. On a typical Sunday, one of four things would happen after that. They would stay at home and putter around, as his mother called it, which generally meant that Ferguson would follow his father from room to room as he repaired things that needed mending, broken toilet flushers, faulty electrical connections, squeaking doors, while his mother sat on the sofa reading Life magazine or went downstairs into her basement darkroom and developed pictures. A second option was going to the movies, something he and his mother enjoyed above all other Sunday pastimes, but his father was often reluctant to indulge their cinematic fervor, since movies were of scant interest to him, as were all other forms of what he called sit-down entertainment (plays, concerts, musicals), as if being trapped in a chair for a couple of hours and passively taking in a bunch of silly make-believe was one of life’s worst tortures, but his mother usually won the argument by threatening to go without him, and so the three Fergusons would climb back into the car and drive off to see the latest Jimmy Stewart Western or Martin-and-Lewis comedy (Newark’s own Jerry Lewis!), and it never failed to astonish Ferguson how quickly his father would fall asleep in the darkness of the theater, the oblivions that would engulf him even as the opening credits were rolling across the screen, head tilted back, lips slightly parted, drowned in the deepest slumber as guns blasted, music swelled, and a hundred dishes crashed to the floor. Since Ferguson always sat between his parents, he would tap his mother on the arm whenever his father drifted off like that, and once he had her attention, he would point to his father by jerking back his thumb, as if to say, Look, he’s at it again, and depending on his mother’s mood, she would either nod her head and smile or shake her head and frown, sometimes emitting a brief, muffled laugh and sometimes exhaling a wordless mmmm. By the time Ferguson was eight, his father’s dark-theater swoons had become so common that his mother began referring to their Sunday film excursions as the two-hour rest cure. No longer did she ask her husband if he wanted to go to the movies. Instead, she would say to him: How about a knockout pill, Stanley, so you can catch up on your sleep? Ferguson always laughed when she delivered that line. Sometimes his father laughed along with him, but most of the time he didn’t.
When they weren’t puttering around or going to the movies, Sunday afternoons were spent paying visits to other people or having other people pay visits to them. With the rest of the Fergusons on the other side of the country now, there were no more family get-togethers in New Jersey, but there were several friends who lived nearby, that is, friends of Ferguson’s parents, in particular his mother’s childhood friend from Brooklyn, Nancy Solomon, who lived in West Orange and did the oil paintings for Roseland Photo, and his father’s childhood friend from Newark, Sam Brownstein, who lived in Maplewood and played tennis with his father every Sunday morning, and on Sunday afternoons Ferguson and his parents sometimes visited Brownstein and his wife, Peggy, who had three children, a girl and two boys, all of whom were older than Ferguson by at least four years, and sometimes the Brownsteins came to visit them at their house, which was soon to be their house no more, and when it wasn’t the Brownsteins it tended to be the Solomons, Nancy and her husband, Max, who had two boys, Stewie and Ralph, both of whom were younger than Ferguson by at least three years, which made these back-and-forth New Jersey visits with the Brownsteins and the Solomons something of a trial for Ferguson, who was too old to enjoy playing with the Solomon children and too young to enjoy playing with the Brownstein children, who in fact were too old to be considered children anymore, and so Ferguson often found himself stranded in the middle at these gatherings, not quite certain where he should go or what he should do, since he quickly lost patience with the antics of the three- and six-year-old Stewie and Ralph and was out of his depth with the talk that went on between the fifteen- and seventeen-year-old Brownstein boys, which left him with no recourse but to spend the Brownstein visits in the company of thirteen-year-old Anna Brownstein, who taught him how to play gin rummy and a board game called Careers, but she was already endowed with breasts and had a metallurgy works clamped onto her teeth, which made it hard for him to look at her, since bits of food were perpetually lodged in the silvery network of her braces, tiny particles of unchewed tomatoes, soggy bread crusts, disintegrating blobs of chopped meat, and whenever she smiled, which was often, Ferguson was gripped by a sudden, involuntary rush of queasiness and had to turn his head away.
Still, now that they were on the verge of moving, which had led to important new information about his father (the problem of too much money, too much time spent on making money, so much time that his father had become all but invisible to him for six days of the week, which Ferguson now understood was something he resented, or at least felt bad about, or that frustrated him, or made him angry, or some other word he hadn’t thought of yet), and with the question of his father now on his mind, Ferguson found it instructive to look back on those tedious visits with the Brownsteins and Solomons as a way of studying manhood in action, of comparing his father’s behavior with that of Sam Brownstein and Max Solomon. If the size of the houses they lived in was any measure of how much money they earned, then his father was richer than both of them, for even their house, the Ferguson house, the one that was supposedly too small and needed to be replaced by something better, was larger and more attractive than the Brownstein and Solomon houses. His father drove a 1955 Oldsmobile and was talking about trading it in for a new Cadillac in September, while Sam Brownstein drove a 1952 Rambler and Max Solomon a 195 °Chevrolet. Solomon was a claims adjuster for an insurance company (whatever that meant, since Ferguson had no idea what a claims adjuster did), and Brownstein owned a sporting goods store in downtown Newark, not three stores as Ferguson’s father did but one store, which nevertheless brought in enough money for him to support his wife and three children, whereas Ferguson’s father’s three stores supported just one child and a wife, who happened to work as well, which Peggy Brownstein did not. Like Ferguson’s father, Brownstein and Solomon went to work every day in order to earn money, but neither one of them left the house at six-thirty in the morning or worked so late into the night that his children were already in bed by the time he came home. The quiet, stolid Max Solomon, who had been wounded as a soldier in the Pacific and walked with a slight limp, and the loud-mouthed, expansive Sam Brownstein, brimming with jokes and back-slapping bonhomie, each so different from the other in their outward bearing and yet, at their core, different from Ferguson’s father in remarkably similar ways, for both of those men worked in order to live, whereas his father seemed to live in order to work, which meant that his parents’ friends were defined more by their enthusiasms than their burdens or responsibilities, Solomon by his passion for classical music (vast record collection, hand-built hi-fi system), Brownstein by his love of sport in all of its many incarnations, from basketball to horse racing, from track and field to boxing, but the only thing Ferguson’s father cared about beyond his work was tennis, which was a meager, restrictive sort of hobby, Ferguson felt, and whenever Brownstein switched on the television to a baseball game or football game during one of their Sunday visits, the boys and men in both families would gather in the living room to watch, and nine times out of eleven, just as he did at the movies, his father would struggle to keep his eyes open, struggle for five or ten or fifteen minutes, and then he would lose the struggle and fall asleep.