That was the real difference, Ferguson concluded. Not too little money or too much money, not what a person did or failed to do, not buying a larger house or a more expensive car, but ambition. That explained why Brownstein and Solomon managed to float through their lives in relative peace — because they weren’t tormented by the curse of ambition. By contrast, his father and Uncle Don were consumed by their ambitions, which paradoxically made their worlds smaller and less comfortable than those who weren’t afflicted by the curse, for ambition meant never being satisfied, to be always hungering for something more, constantly pushing forward because no success could ever be big enough to quell the need for new and even bigger successes, the compulsion to turn one store into two stores, then two stores into three stores, to be talking now about building a fourth store and even a fifth store, just as one book was merely a step on the way to another book, a lifetime of more and more books, which required the same concentration and singleness of purpose that a businessman needed in order to become rich. Alexander the Great conquers the world, and then what? He builds a rocket ship and invades Mars.
Ferguson was in the first decade of his life, which meant that the books he read were still confined to the realm of children’s literature, Hardy Boys mysteries, novels about high school football players and intergalactic travelers, collections of adventure stories, simplified biographies of famous men and women such as Abraham Lincoln and Joan of Arc, but now that he had begun his investigation into the workings of Uncle Don’s soul, he felt it might be a good idea to read something he had written, or try to read something, and so one day he asked his mother if they had any of his uncle’s books in the house. Yes, she said, they had both of them.
F: Both of them? You mean he’s written only two?
F’s mother: They’re long books, Archie. Each one took years to write.
F: What are they about?
F’s mother: They’re biographies.
F: Good. I like biographies. Who are the people?
F’s mother: People from long ago. A German writer from the early nineteenth century called Kleist. And a French philosopher and scientist from the seventeenth century called Pascal.
F: Never heard of them.
F’s mother: To tell the truth, I hadn’t either.
F: Are they good books?
F’s mother: I think so. People say they’re very good.
F: You mean you haven’t read them?
F’s mother: A few pages here and there, but not all the way through. I’m afraid they’re not my cup of tea.
F: But other people think they’re good. That must mean Uncle Don makes a lot of money.
F’s mother: Not really. They’re books for scholars, and they don’t have a big audience. That’s why Uncle Don writes so many articles and reviews. To pad his income while he does the research for his books.
F: I think I should read one.
F’s mother (smiling): If you want to, Archie. But don’t be disappointed if you find it hard going.
So Ferguson’s mother gave him the two books, each one over four hundred pages long, two heavy volumes with small print and no illustrations published by Oxford University Press, and because Ferguson liked the cover of the Pascal book better than the Kleist cover, with its stark photograph of the Frenchman’s white death mask hovering against a pure black background, he decided to tackle that one first. One paragraph in, he understood that it wasn’t merely hard going, it was no going at all. I’m not ready for this, he said to himself. I’ll have to wait until I’m older.
If Ferguson couldn’t read his uncle’s books, he could nevertheless study how he behaved with his son, which was a topic of great interest to Ferguson, no doubt the essential topic, the one that had launched him into his systematic examination of contemporary American manhood, for his growing disillusionment with his own father had made him more attentive to how other fathers treated their sons, and he had to gather evidence in order to judge whether his problem was uniquely his own or a universal problem common to all boys. With Brownstein and Solomon, he had been exposed to two different expressions of paternal conduct. Brownstein was jocular and chummy with his offspring, Solomon was grave and tender; Brownstein chattered and praised, Solomon listened and wiped away tears; Brownstein could lose his temper and scold in public, Solomon kept his thoughts to himself and let Nancy discipline their boys. Two modes, two philosophies, two personalities, one altogether unlike Ferguson’s father, the other somewhat like, but with this fundamental exception: Solomon never fell asleep.
Uncle Don couldn’t fall asleep because he no longer lived with his son and saw him only rarely, one weekend every month, two weeks in the summer, just thirty-eight days a year, but when Ferguson did the calculations in his head, he realized that while he saw his father more often than that — fifty-two Sundays a year to begin with, along with family dinners on the nights when his father didn’t come home late from work, more or less half the nights of the week, which would tally up to about a hundred and fifty Monday-through-Saturday dinners per year, far more contact than Uncle Don’s son had with his father — there was nevertheless a hitch, for Ferguson’s new cousin-by-marriage always saw his father alone on those thirty-eight yearly get-togethers, whereas Ferguson was never alone with his father anymore, and when he searched his memory for the last time they had been together with no one else in the room or the car, he had to go back more than a year and a half, to a rain-filled Sunday morning that had washed out the weekly ritual of tennis and Gruning’s, when he and his father had climbed into the old Buick and driven off to buy the makings of brunch, standing in line at Tabachnik’s with their numbered ticket as they waited their turn in that crowded, good-smelling store to stock up on whitefish, herring, lox, bagels, and a tub of cream cheese. A distinct, luminous memory — but that had been the last time, October 1954, one-sixth of his life ago, and when you subtracted the first three years of his life, which he could no longer actively remember, close to one-quarter of his life ago, the equivalent of ten years for a forty-three-year-old man, for at this point in the story Ferguson was nine.
The boy’s name was Noah, and he was three and a half months younger than Ferguson. Much to Ferguson’s regret, the two of them had been kept apart during the years of sinful cohabitation, since Uncle Don’s ex-wife, justifiably angry at having been dumped in favor of Aunt Mildred, had refused to allow her son to be tainted by contact with the home-wrecker and her family, which extended beyond the Adlers to the Fergusons as well. When Uncle Don and Aunt Mildred decided to get married, however, the injunction had been lifted, since everything was legal now, and the ex-wife was no longer in a position to make those demands on her ex-husband. Ferguson and Noah Marx therefore met at the wedding, which took place in December 1954, a small affair held at Ferguson’s grandparents’ apartment with no more than twenty guests, family members from both sides along with a few intimate friends. Ferguson and Noah were the only children present, and the two boys hit it off from the start, each one being an only child who had always yearned for a brother or sister, and the fact that they were the same age and would henceforth be first cousins, stepcousins by marriage, perhaps, but nevertheless bound together in the same family, turned that initial encounter at the wedding into a kind of auxiliary wedding, or ceremonial alliance, or blood-brother initiation, since they both knew they would be involved with each other for the rest of their lives.