On top of this commercial work for magazines and book publishers, Ferguson’s mother kept busy with her own projects, what she called her wandering-eye explorations, which abandoned the meticulous control required to produce first-rate portraits for a come-what-may openness to chance encounters with the unexpected. She had discovered this contrary impulse in herself at her cousin Charlotte’s wedding, that unpaid job from 1955 that had turned into an exuberant, three-and-a-half-hour binge of manic picture taking as she spun her way through the crowd, freed from the restraints of laborious preparation and plunged into a whirl of rapid-fire compositions, one picture succeeding the next, ephemeral instants that had to be caught precisely then or not at all, pause for half a second and the picture would be gone, and the ferocity of concentration called for under the circumstances had thrown her into a kind of emotional fever, as if every face and body in the room had been rushing in on her at once, as if every person there were breathing inside her eyes, no longer on the other side of the camera but within her, an inseparable part of who she was.
Predictably enough, Charlotte and her husband hated those photographs. Not the others, they said, not the portraits that had been shot at the synagogue after the marriage ceremony, which were truly marvelous, pictures they would cherish for years to come, but the stuff from the wedding party was incomprehensible, so dark and raw, so unflattering, everyone looked so sinister and unhappy, even the laughing people looked vaguely demonic, and why were the shots so off-kilter, why was everything so severely underlit? Miffed by the rebuke, Ferguson’s mother sent the newlyweds copies of the portraits with a short accompanying note that read, Glad you liked these, sent another batch to Aunt Pearl, another batch to her parents, and a last one to Mildred and Paul. After receiving his package, her brother-in-law called to ask why she hadn’t included anything from the wedding party. Because those pictures stink, she said. All artists are revolted by their own work, her new supporter and advocate replied, and eventually Ferguson’s mother was persuaded to develop thirty prints from the more than five hundred images she had shot that afternoon and mail them to Paul’s office at Random House. Three days later, he called back to say that not only did they not stink but that he found them remarkable. With her permission, he was going to give them to Minor White at Aperture magazine. They deserved to be published, he said, to be seen by people who cared about photography, and since he knew White a little bit, why not start at the top? Ferguson’s mother wasn’t sure if Paul meant what he was saying or if he merely felt sorry for her. She thought: Kind man steps in to help lost and grieving relative in her time of trouble, man with connections seeks to connect unconnected widow-photographer to a new life. Then she thought: Pity or no pity, Paul was the one who had sent her down to New Orleans, and while he could have been acting on a whim, or on blind intuition, or on some long-shot hunch, now that the grumpy, alcoholic Wilmot had lauded her for doing one hell of a damned fine job, perhaps her brother-in-law believed he had put his money on the right horse.
Whether Paul influenced their decision or not, the editorial board at Aperture accepted her pictures for publication, a portfolio of twenty-one prints that appeared six months later under the title Jewish Wedding, Brooklyn. That triumph, and the jolt of exaltation that shot through her when the letter from Aperture showed up in the mail, were soon tempered by frustration, however, and then nearly destroyed by anger, since she couldn’t publish the photos without securing releases from the people who were in them, and Ferguson’s mother made the mistake of contacting Charlotte first, who stubbornly refused to allow those grotesque snapshots of herself and Nathan to be published in Aperture or any other cruddy magazine. Over the next three days, Ferguson’s mother spoke to all the other participants, among them Charlotte’s mother and her twin sister, Betty, and when no one else raised any objections, she called Charlotte back and asked her to reconsider. Out of the question. Go to hell. Who do you think you are? Aunt Pearl tried to reason with her, Ferguson’s grandfather scolded her for what he called a selfish disregard of others, Betty called her a pinhead and a priss, but the new Mrs. Birnbaum wouldn’t budge. The three pictures with Charlotte and Nathan in them were therefore scrapped, three others were chosen to take their place, and a photo story about a wedding was published with no bride or groom anywhere in sight.
Nevertheless, it was a start, a first step toward living in the only future that made sense to her, and Ferguson’s mother forged on, emboldened by the publication of those photos to pursue other noncommissioned projects, her own work, as she called it, which continued to be found in the pages of Aperture and sometimes between the covers of books or on the walls of galleries, and the most important element of that transformation was perhaps the last-minute decision she made before the appearance of Jewish Wedding, all the way back in the spring of 1956, when she got down on her knees before her bed and asked Stanley to forgive her for what she was about to do, but it had to be this way, she said to him, any other way would force her to go on living in the ashes of the Newark fire until she too burned up into nothing, and so it was, and so it continued to be for all the years of her future life, that she signed her work Rose Adler.
IN THE BEGINNING, the eight-year-old Ferguson was only dimly aware of what his mother was up to. He understood that she was busier than she had been, out and about on most days working at various photography jobs, or else locked up in what had once been the spare bedroom, which she had turned into a place for developing pictures and which was always sealed shut because of the fumes from the chemicals, and though it was good to see that she was smiling more and laughing more than she had during the spring and summer, the rest of what was happening was not good, not at all good as far as he was concerned. The spare bedroom had been his room for more than eight months, his own private retreat where he could sort through his baseball cards and knock down plastic pins with his plastic bowling ball and throw beanbags through the holes in the wooden target and aim darts at the small red bull’s-eye, and now it was gone, which could hardly be called a good thing, and then, sometime in late October, not long after his bright room had been transformed into an out-of-bounds darkroom, another not-good thing occurred when his mother told him it would no longer be possible for her to pick him up after school. She would continue to take him there in the morning, but she couldn’t count on being free in the afternoon anymore, and so his grandmother would be the one to meet him at the front steps and escort him back to the apartment. Ferguson didn’t like it, since he was opposed to any and all change as a matter of strict moral doctrine, but he wasn’t in a position to protest, he had to do what he was told, and what had once been the best part of the day — seeing his mother again after six and a half hours of boredom, reprimands, and bitter struggles with the Almighty — was turned into a dull plod westward with his fat, waddling Nana, an old woman so shy and so withheld that she never knew what to say to him, which meant that more often than not they rode back home in silence.