The last week of summer. August twenty-eighth, and the March on Washington, the speeches at the Mall, the immense crowds, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and then the speech that schoolchildren would later have to memorize, the speech of speeches, as important on that day as the Gettysburg Address had been on its day, a big American moment, a public moment for all to see and hear, even more essential than the words spoken at Kennedy’s inauguration thirty-two months earlier, and everyone at Stanley’s TV & Radio stood in the front room and watched the broadcast, Ferguson and his father, big-bellied Mike and shrimpy Ed, and then Ferguson’s mother came in as well, along with five or six pedestrians who happened to be walking by, but before the big speech there were several other speeches, among them an address delivered by a local New Jersey man, Rabbi Joachim Prinz, the most admired Jew in Ferguson’s part of the world, a hero to his parents, even if they did not practice their religion or belong to a synagogue, but all three Fergusons had seen him and heard him talk at weddings, funerals, and bar mitzvahs at the temple he presided over in Newark, the famous Joachim Prinz, who as a young rabbi in Berlin had denounced Hitler even before the Nazis took power in 1933, who saw the future more clearly than anyone else and urged Jews to quit Germany, which led to repeated arrests by the Gestapo and his own expulsion in 1937, and of course he was active in the American civil rights movement, and of course he had been chosen to represent the Jews that day because of his eloquence and well-documented courage, and of course Ferguson’s parents were proud of him, they who had shaken his hand and talked to him, the person who was now standing before the camera and addressing the nation, the entire world, and then King stepped to the podium, and thirty or forty seconds after the speech began, Ferguson looked over at his mother and saw that her eyes were glistening with tears, which amused him greatly, not because he felt it was inappropriate for her to respond in that way but precisely because he didn’t, because this was yet one more instance of how she engaged with the world, her excessive, often sentimental reading of events, the gushes of feeling that made her so susceptible to tearing up at bad Hollywood movies, the good-hearted optimism that sometimes led to muddled thinking and crushing disappointment, and then he looked over at his father, a man almost entirely indifferent to politics, who seemed to demand so much less from life than his mother did, and what he saw in his father’s eyes was a combination of vague curiosity and boredom, the same man who had been so moved by the dreary resignation of Eliot’s poem was having a hard time swallowing the hopeful idealism of Martin Luther King, and as Ferguson listened to the mounting emotion in the minister’s voice, the drum-roll repetitions of the word dream, he wondered how two such oddly matched souls could have married and stayed married for so many years, and how he himself could have been born from such a couple as Rose Adler and Stanley Ferguson, and how strange, how deeply strange it was to be alive.
ON LABOR DAY, about twenty people came to the house for an end-of-summer barbecue. His parents rarely organized such large gatherings, but two weeks earlier his mother had won a photography competition sponsored by the governor’s new arts council in Trenton. The award came with a commission to produce a book of portraits of one hundred outstanding New Jersey citizens, a project that would be sending her around the state to photograph mayors, college presidents, scientists, businessmen, artists, writers, musicians, and athletes, and because the job would be well paid and Ferguson’s parents were feeling flush for the first time in several years, they decided to celebrate with a grilled-meat blowout in the backyard. The usual crowd was there — the Solomons, the Brownsteins, the Georges from down the block, Ferguson’s grandparents and his Great-aunt Pearl — but some other people turned up as well, among them a family from New York called the Schneidermans, which consisted of a forty-five-year-old commercial artist named Daniel, the younger son of Ferguson’s mother’s old boss, Emanuel Schneiderman, who was now living in a retirement home in the Bronx, and Daniel’s wife, Liz, and their sixteen-year-old daughter, Amy. On the morning of the Labor Day fête, as Ferguson and his parents chopped vegetables and prepared barbecue sauce in the kitchen, his mother told him that he and Amy had known each other as small children and had played together a few times, but somehow she had fallen out of touch with the Schneidermans, twelve years had fluttered off the calendar, and then, just a couple of weeks ago, on a visit to see her parents in New York, she had bumped into Dan and Liz on Central Park South. Hence the invitation. Hence the Schneidermans’ first-ever visit to Montclair.
His mother continued: From the look in your eyes, Archie, I gather you’ve forgotten about Amy, but back when you were three and four, you had quite a crush on her. Once, when we all went to the Schneidermans’ apartment for a late-afternoon Sunday dinner, you and Amy went into her room, closed the door, and took off all your clothes. You can’t even remember that, can you? The adults were still sitting around the table, but then we heard you giggling in there, shrieking with laughter, making those wild, out-of-control sounds only little children can make, and so we all got up to see what the commotion was about. Dan opened the door, and there you were, the two of you, just three and a half or four years old, jumping up and down on the bed, stark naked, shrieking your heads off like a pair of crazy people. Liz was mortified, but I found it hilarious. That ecstatic look on your face, Archie, the sight of your two little bodies bouncing up and down, a savage joy filling the room, nutty human children acting like chimpanzees — it was impossible not to burst out laughing. Your father and Daniel both laughed, too, I remember, but Liz charged into the room and ordered you and Amy to get dressed. At once. You know that angry mother’s voice. At once! But before you could get your clothes on, Amy said one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard. Mommy, she asked, all serious now and very thoughtful, pointing her finger directly at your privates and then at her own, Mommy, why is Archie so fancy and I’m so plain?