Ferguson’s father returned his father-in-law’s loan with proceeds from the sale and then opened up a new, significantly smaller store in Montclair, Stanley’s TV & Radio. From Ferguson’s point of view, this was a much better arrangement than the old one, for his father’s new business happened to be on the same block as Roseland Photo, and now it was possible for him to drop in on either one of his parents anytime he wished. Stanley’s TV & Radio was cramped, yes, but it had a nice, cozy feel to it, and Ferguson enjoyed visiting his father there after school, sitting down beside him at his workbench in the back room as his father repaired televisions, radios, and all manner of other things as well, taking apart and then putting back together dysfunctional toasters, fans, air conditioners, lamps, record players, blenders, electric juicers, and vacuum cleaners, for word had quickly spread that Ferguson’s father was a man who could fix anything, and as the young clerk Mike Antonelli stood in the front room of the shop selling radios and televisions to Montclair residents, Stanley Ferguson spent most of his time in the back, tinkering in silence, patiently dissecting broken machines in order to make them work again. Ferguson understood that something in his father had been crushed by Arnold’s betrayal, that this reduced incarnation of his former business represented a profound personal defeat for him, and yet something in him had also changed for the better, and the principal beneficiaries of that change were his wife and son. Ferguson’s parents argued far less than they had before. The tension in the household had dissipated, in fact often seemed to have disappeared altogether, and Ferguson found it reassuring that his mother and father now had lunch together every day, just the two of them in their corner booth at Al’s Diner, and again and again, in a variety of different ways, and yet always in the same way, Ferguson’s mother would make remarks to him that essentially meant this: Your father is a good man, Archie, the best man anywhere. A good man, and a still largely silent man, but now that he had given up his old dream of becoming the next Rockefeller, Ferguson felt more comfortable in his presence. They could talk a little now, and most of the time Ferguson felt reasonably certain that his father was listening to him. And even when they didn’t talk, Ferguson took pleasure in sitting beside his father at the workbench after school, doing his homework at one end of the table as his father went about his business at the other, slowly taking apart yet another damaged machine and putting it back together.
Money was less plentiful than it had been in the days of 3 Brothers Home World. Instead of two cars, Ferguson’s parents now owned one car — his mother’s 1954 powder-blue Pontiac — and a red Chevrolet delivery van with the name of his father’s business printed on each of the side doors. In the past, his parents had sometimes gone away together on weekend excursions, mostly to the Catskills for a couple of days of tennis and dancing at Grossinger’s or the Concord, but they had stopped doing that after Stanley’s TV & Radio opened in 1957. In 1958, when Ferguson was in need of a new baseball glove, his father drove him all the way to Sam Brownstein’s store in downtown Newark to buy one at cost instead of giving him the money to buy the same glove at Gallagher’s, the sporting goods shop in Montclair. The difference amounted to twelve and a half dollars, an even twenty as opposed to thirty-two-fifty, not a large difference in the grand scheme of things but a crucial savings nevertheless, enough to alert Ferguson to the fact that life had changed and that from now on he would have to think carefully before he asked his parents for anything beyond what was strictly essential. Not long after that, Cassie Burton stopped working for them, and in much the same way that his mother and Aunt Mildred had wept in each other’s arms at the airport in 1952, Cassie and his mother both wept on the morning Cassie was told the family could no longer afford to keep her. Yesterday, it had been steaks, today it was hamburgers. The family had slipped a notch or two, but who in his right mind would lose any sleep over a little belt-tightening? A book from the public library was the same book you bought in a store, tennis was still tennis whether you played at the municipal courts or a private club, and steaks and hamburgers were cut from the same cow, and even if steaks were supposed to represent the pinnacle of the good life, the truth was that Ferguson had always loved hamburgers, especially with ketchup on them — which was the same ketchup he had once smeared over the plump, medium-rare sirloins his father had liked so much.
Sunday was still the best day of the week, particularly when it was a Sunday that didn’t include visits to or from other people, a day that Ferguson could spend alone with his parents, and now that he was bigger and stronger and had turned into an agile, sports-crazed twelve-year-old, he relished the morning tennis matches with his parents, the singles matches with his father, the two-against-one matches between mother-son and husband/father, the doubles matches that paired him with his father against Sam Brownstein and his younger son, and after tennis there was lunch at Al’s Diner, along with the inevitable chocolate milkshake, and after lunch there were the movies, and after the movies there was Chinese food at the Green Dragon in Glen Ridge or fried chicken at the Little House in Millburn or hot open turkey sandwiches at Pal’s Cabin in West Orange or pot roast and cheese blintzes at the Claremont Diner in Montclair, the crowded, inexpensive dining spots of the New Jersey suburbs, noisy and unsophisticated, perhaps, but the food was good, and it was Sunday night, and the three of them were together, and even if Ferguson was starting to pull away from his parents by then, that one day a week helped maintain the illusion that the gods could be merciful when they chose to be.
AUNT MILDRED AND Uncle Henry had failed to produce the Adler cousin he had longed for as a small boy. The reasons were unknown to him, whether sterility or infertility or a conscious refusal to add to the world’s population, but in spite of Ferguson’s disappointment, the no-cousin vacuum on the West Coast had ultimately worked to his advantage. Aunt Mildred might not have been close to her sister, but with no children of her own, and with no other nephews or nieces anywhere in sight, whatever maternal impulses she had in her were showered upon her one and only Archie. After her removal to California when Ferguson was five, she and Uncle Henry had returned to New York several times for extended summer visits, and even when she was back in Berkeley during the rest of the year, she kept in touch with her nephew by writing letters and occasionally calling him on the phone. Ferguson understood that there was something glacial about his aunt, that she could be harsh and opinionated and even rude with other people, but with him, her one and only Archie, she was another person, full of praise and good humor and curiosity about what her boy was doing and thinking and reading. From his earliest childhood, she had been in the habit of buying him gifts, an abundance of gifts that had usually come in the form of books and records, and now that he was older and his mental capacities had increased, the number of books and records she shipped to him from California had also increased. Perhaps she didn’t trust his mother and father to give him the proper intellectual guidance, perhaps she thought his parents were a couple of uneducated bourgeois nobodies, perhaps she believed it was her duty to rescue Ferguson from the wasteland of ignorance he dwelled in, thinking that she and she alone could offer him the help necessary to scale the exalted slopes of enlightenment. It was no doubt possible that she was (as he had once overheard his father say to his mother) an intellectual snob, but there was no arguing against the fact that, snob or not, she was a genuine intellectual, a person of vast erudition who earned her living as a university professor, and the works she exposed her nephew to were indeed a great blessing to him.