YEARS LATER, HIS mother confessed to him that for her too the beginning had been less difficult than what came next. The curious interregnum had been almost bearable, she said, with so many urgent, practical decisions to be made, the matter of selling her house and business in New Jersey, of finding a place to live in New York, of furnishing that place while she went about the job of putting Ferguson in a proper school, the sudden onslaught of obligations that fell down on her during the early days of her widowhood had not been a burden so much as a welcome distraction, a way of not having to think about the Newark fire every minute of her waking life, and thank God for all those movies, she added, and the darkness of the theaters on those cold winter days, and the chance to disappear into the make-believe of those dumb stories, and thank God for you too, Archie, she told him, my brave little man, my rock, my anchor, for the longest time you were the only real person left in the world for me, and without you what would I have done, Archie, what would I have lived for, and how on earth would I have been able to go on?
No doubt she had been half-crazed during those months, she said, a madwoman fueled by cigarettes, coffee, and steady bursts of adrenaline, but once the questions of home and school had been answered, the whirlwind subsided and then stopped altogether, and she sank into a long period of thought and reflection, horrible days, horrible nights, a time of numbness and indecision when she weighed one possibility against another and struggled to imagine where she wanted the future to take her. She was lucky in that regard, she said, lucky to be in a position to choose between alternatives, but the fact was that she had money now, more money than she had ever dreamed of having, two hundred thousand dollars from the life insurance alone, not to mention the money she had collected from the sale of the Millburn house and Roseland Photo, which included the additional sums she had earned from selling the furniture in the house and the equipment in the studio, and even after she deducted the thousands she had spent on the new furniture and the annual cost of sending Ferguson to private school and the monthly cost of renting the apartment, she had more than enough left over to do nothing for the next twelve or fifteen years, to go on living off her dead husband until the day her son graduated from college — and far beyond that if she found herself a clever stocks-and-bonds man and invested in the market. She was thirty-three years old. No longer a beginner in life, but hardly what one would call a has-been, and though it comforted her to muse on the blessings of her good fortune, to know that it was within her power to live a life of leisure well into her old age if she was of a mind to do that, as the months passed and she continued to meditate and do nothing, her time mostly given over to traveling through Central Park four times a day on the crosstown bus, taking Ferguson to school in the morning and then returning home, picking up Ferguson in the afternoon and again returning home, and on the mornings when she couldn’t bring herself to jump back on the bus and return to the West Side, she would spend the six and a half hours Ferguson was in school wandering around the East Side, browsing alone in shops, lunching alone in restaurants, going to movies alone, going to museums alone, and after three and a half months of that routine, followed by a strange, empty summer holed up in a rented house on the Jersey shore with her son, where they spent the bulk of their time indoors watching television together, she discovered she was growing restless, itching to work again. It had taken her the better part of a year to reach that point, but once she got there, the Leica and the Rolleiflex finally came out of the closet, and before long Ferguson’s mother was sailing on a ship headed back to the land of photography.
She went about it differently this time, throwing herself out into the world rather than inviting the world to come to her, no longer interested in maintaining a studio at a fixed address, which she now felt was an outmoded way of doing photography, needlessly cumbersome in a time of rapid transformations, with new high-speed film stocks and ever more efficient lightweight cameras overturning the field, making it possible to rethink her old ideas about light and composition, to reinvent herself and move beyond the limits of classical portraiture, and by the time Ferguson began his second year at Hilliard, his mother was already casting about for work, stumbling onto her first job in late September when the man who had been hired to take pictures at her cousin Charlotte’s wedding fell down a flight of stairs and broke his leg, and because there was only a week to go before the day of the wedding, she volunteered to fill in for him at no charge. The synagogue was out somewhere in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, the old neighborhood of the first Archie and Great-aunt Pearl, and between the marriage ceremony and the removal of the wedding party to a catering hall two blocks to the south, Ferguson’s mother used her tripod to take formal black-and-white portraits of all the family members in attendance, the bride and groom to begin with, twenty-nine-year-old Charlotte, who had seemed destined never to marry anyone after her fiancé was killed in the Korean War, and thirty-six-year-old widower dentist Nathan Birnbaum, followed by Great-aunt Pearl, Ferguson’s Nana and Papa, Charlotte’s twin sister, Betty, and her accountant husband, Seymour Graf, Aunt Mildred (who was now teaching at Sarah Lawrence) and her husband, Paul Sandler (who worked as an editor at Random House), and finally Ferguson himself in a picture with his two second cousins (Betty and Seymour’s children), five-year-old Eric and three-year-old Judy. Once the party began at the catering hall, Ferguson’s mother abandoned her tripod and spent the next three and a half hours wandering among the guests, taking hundreds of pictures of the ninety-six people who were there, unposed, spontaneous shots of old men in quiet conversation with one another, of young women laughing as they drank wine and shoveled food into their mouths, of children dancing with grown-ups and grown-ups dancing together after the meal was done, all the faces of all those people captured in the natural light of that bare, unglamorous setting, the musicians perched on their small stage as they clanged forth their tired, corny songs, Great-aunt Pearl smiling as she kissed her granddaughter’s cheek, Benjy Adler whooping it up on the dance floor with a twenty-year-old distant cousin from Canada, a frowning nine-year-old girl sitting alone at a table with a half-eaten piece of cake in front of her, and at one point during the festivities, Uncle Paul walked up to his sister-in-law and remarked that she seemed to be enjoying herself, that he hadn’t seen her so happy and animated since she’d moved to New York, and Ferguson’s mother simply said, I have to do this, Paul, I’ll go nuts if I don’t start working again, to which Mildred’s husband replied: I think I can help you, Rose.
Help came in the form of a commission to go to New Orleans and photograph Henry Wilmot for the dust jacket of his forthcoming novel, a much anticipated work by the past winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and when the sixty-two-year-old Wilmot told his editor how pleased he was with the results, that is, called Paul Sandler and informed him that from now on no one but that beautiful woman would be allowed to take his picture, more commissions for author photos came in from Random House, which led to work for other New York publishers as well, which in turn led to magazine assignments for feature stories about writers, film directors, Broadway actors, musicians, and artists in Town & Country, Vogue, Look, Ladies’ Home Journal, the New York Times Magazine, and other weeklies and monthlies over the years that followed. Ferguson’s mother always photographed her subjects in their own environments, traveling to the places where they lived and worked with her portable light stands, fold-up screens, and collapsible umbrellas, shooting writers in their book-filled studies or sitting behind their desks, painters in the tumult and splatter of their studios, pianists sitting behind or standing next to their gleaming black Steinways, actors looking into their dressing room mirrors or sitting alone on bare stages, and for some reason her black-and-white portraits seemed to capture more about the inner lives of those people than most photographers were able to extract from shooting those same well-known figures, a quality that had less to do with technical skill, perhaps, than with something about Ferguson’s mother herself, who always prepared for her assignments by reading the books and listening to the records and looking at the paintings of her subjects, which gave her something to talk about with them during their long sessions together, and because she talked easily and was ever so charming and attractive, ever so not a person to talk about herself, those vain and difficult artists would find themselves relaxing in her presence, feeling that she was genuinely interested in who and what they were, which was in fact true, or mostly true most of the time, and once the seduction had taken effect and their guard had come down, the masks they wore on their faces would gradually slip off and a different sort of light would begin to emerge from their eyes.