On other Sundays, there were the family visits with the Adlers, both in New York and Maplewood, which provided Ferguson with additional subjects to examine in his laboratory of masculine behavior, in particular his grandfather and Aunt Mildred’s husband, Donald Marx, although perhaps his grandfather didn’t count, since he came from an older generation and was so unlike Ferguson’s father that it felt odd even to put their names in the same sentence. Sixty-three years old and still going strong, still working at his real estate business and still making money, but not as much as his father, Ferguson thought, since the apartment on West Fifty-eighth Street was rather cramped, with a minuscule kitchen and a living room only half the size of the one in Maplewood, and the car his grandfather drove, an odd purple Plymouth with push-button gear controls, looked like a circus car next to his father’s sleek Oldsmobile sedan. Yes, there was something buffoonish about Benjy Adler, Ferguson supposed, with his card tricks and handshake buzzers and high wheezing laugh, but his grandson loved him just the same, loved him for the way he seemed to love being alive, and whenever he was in one of his storytelling moods, the narratives were delivered so swiftly and pungently that the world seemed to collapse into a pure outrush of language, funny stories mostly, stories about Adlers of the past and sundry close and distant relatives, his grandfather’s mother’s cousin, for example, a woman with the delicious name of Fagela Flegelman, who was apparently so brilliant that she had mastered nine foreign languages before she turned twenty, and when her family left Poland and arrived in New York in 1891, the officials at Ellis Island were so impressed by her linguistic skills that they hired her on the spot, and for the next thirty-plus years Fagela Flegelman worked as an interpreter for the Department of Immigration, interviewing thousands upon thousands of fresh-off-the-boat future Americans until the facility closed in 1924. A long pause, followed by one of his grandfather’s enigmatic grins, and then another story about Fagela Flegelman’s four husbands and how she outlived them all, ending up as a rich widow in Paris with an apartment on the Champs-Élysées. Could such stories have been true? Did it matter if they were true?
No, his grandfather didn’t count because he was off the charts, disqualified by reason of inanity, as the old man might have put it in one of his dreadful puns, but Uncle Don was only a couple of years younger than Ferguson’s father, and therefore he was a fit candidate for scrutiny, perhaps even a better one than Sam Brownstein or Max Solomon, for like his father those two men lived in the New Jersey suburbs and were members of the striving middle class, a merchant and a white-collar worker, but Don Marx was a creature of the city, born and bred in New York, educated at Columbia, and by some miracle he had no job, at least not one with an employer and a regular paycheck, spending his days at home with a typewriter that produced books and magazine articles, a man unto himself, the first such man Ferguson had ever known. He had moved in with Aunt Mildred three years ago, leaving his wife and son in his old apartment on the Upper West Side, which was another first for Ferguson, a divorced man, a man embarked on a second marriage as of one year ago, having lived in sin with Ferguson’s aunt for the first two years of their cohabitation (something his father and grandparents and Great-aunt Pearl had all frowned upon but had made his mother laugh), and the small apartment Don Marx shared with Aunt Mildred on Perry Street in Greenwich Village was filled with more books than Ferguson had ever seen in a place that was not a bookstore or a library, books everywhere, on shelves lining the walls of the three rooms, on tables and chairs, on the floor, on the tops of cabinets, and not only was Ferguson bewitched by this fantastical clutter, but the mere fact that such an apartment existed served to demonstrate that there were other ways of living in this world than the one he knew, that his parents’ way was not the only way. Aunt Mildred was an associate professor of English at Brooklyn College, Uncle Don was a writer, and although they must have made money from those jobs, enough money to live on in any case, it was clear to Ferguson that they lived for other things besides making money.
Unfortunately, he didn’t get a chance to go to that apartment often, only three times so far in those three years, once for a dinner with his parents and twice alone with his mother for afternoon visits. Ferguson had warm feelings toward his aunt and new uncle, but for some reason his mother and her sister weren’t close, and the sad but ever more apparent truth was that his father and Don Marx had nothing to say to each other. He had always sensed that his father and aunt got along well, and now that his aunt was no longer single, he was convinced the same held true for his mother and uncle. The problem was the woman-woman connection and the man-man connection, for his mother, as the younger of the two sisters, had always looked up to Mildred, and Mildred, as the older of the two sisters, had always looked down on his mother, and with the men there was the utter indifference each one had toward the other’s work and outlook on life, dollars on the one hand, words on the other, compounded further perhaps by Uncle Don having fought in Europe during the war and his father having stayed home, but that was probably a groundless supposition, since Max Solomon had been a soldier as well, and he and his father were always able to talk, at least to the extent that his father was able to talk to anyone.
Still, there were the mutual visits to his grandparents’ apartment for Thanksgiving, Passover, and occasional Sunday gatherings, as well as the other Sundays when Aunt Mildred and Uncle Don would climb into the backseat of the purple Plymouth and accompany his grandparents on day trips to New Jersey. Ferguson therefore had ample opportunities to observe his Uncle Don, and the startling conclusion he came to was that in spite of the vast difference between his father and his uncle regarding their backgrounds, their educations, their work, and their manner of living, they were more the same than not the same, more similar to each other than his father was to Sam Brownstein or Max Solomon, for whether they were in the business of making dollars or making words, each man was driven by his work to the exclusion of all other things, which made them both tense and distracted when they weren’t working, obtuse and self-involved, semi-blind. There was no question that Uncle Don could be more loquacious than his father, funnier than his father, more interesting than his father, but only when he wanted to be, and now that Ferguson had come to know him as well as he did, he saw how often he seemed to look straight through Aunt Mildred when she talked to him, as if he were searching for something behind her back, not able to hear her because he was thinking about something else, which was not unlike how his father often looked at his mother now, more and more often now, the glazed-over look of a man unable to see anything but the thoughts inside his own head, a man who was there but not there, gone.