Why on earth would I be mad at you? Hilliard’s in the past now. It makes no difference anymore.
Maybe not. But you’ll still be mad at me.
And what if I promise not to be mad?
It won’t do any good.
Ferguson was looking down at the floor by then, pretending to examine a loose thread in the carpet as a way to avoid his mother’s eyes, for he knew he would be lost if he dared to look into them now, her eyes had always been too strong for him, they were charged with a power that could decipher his thoughts and extract confessions from him and overwhelm his puny will even as he fought to resist her, and now, horribly and inevitably, she was reaching out and touching his jaw with the tips of her fingers, gently prodding him to lift his face and look into her eyes again, and the moment he felt her hand make contact with his skin, he knew that all hope was gone, tears were gathering in his eyes, the first tears that had been there in months, and how humiliating it was to feel the invisible faucet turn on again without warning, no better than stupid, weepy Stan, he said to himself, a nine-year-old infant with faulty plumbing in his brain, and by the time he found the courage to fix his eyes on his mother’s eyes, two waterfalls were trickling down his cheeks and his mouth was moving, words were tumbling out of him, the story of Hilliard was being told, the battle with God and the reason for the bad grades, the silenced voice and the murder of his father, breaking the rules in order to be punished and then hating God for not punishing him, hating God for not being God, and Ferguson had no idea if his mother understood what he was telling her, her eyes looked pained and confused and almost tearful, and after he had been talking for two or three or four minutes, she leaned over, put her arms around him, and told him to stop. Enough, Archie, she said, let it go, and then the two of them were crying together, a marathon sobfest that lasted for close to ten minutes, which was the last time either one of them broke down in the presence of the other, almost two years to the day since Stanley Ferguson’s body had been put in the ground, and once the crying slowly came to an end, they washed their faces, put on their overcoats, and went out to the movies, where they gorged themselves on hot dogs in the balcony instead of eating dinner and then shared a large box of popcorn, which they washed down with fizzless, watery Cokes. The title of the movie they saw that evening was: The Man Who Knew Too Much.
YEARS PASSED. FERGUSON was ten, eleven, and twelve, he was thirteen and fourteen, and among the family events that occurred during those five years, the most important was no doubt his mother’s marriage to a man named Gilbert Schneiderman, which happened when Ferguson was twelve and a half. A year before that, the Adler clan had lived through its first divorce, the inexplicable breakup between Aunt Mildred and Uncle Paul, a couple who had always seemed so right for each other, two chattering bookworms who had been married for nine years with no apparent conflicts or betrayals, and then it was all over, Aunt Mildred was moving to California to join the English Department at Stanford and Uncle Paul was no longer Ferguson’s Uncle Paul. Then his grandfather disappeared — a heart attack in 1960—and not long after that his grandmother was gone as well — a stroke in 1961—and within a month of that second funeral, Great-aunt Pearl was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The Adlers were diminishing. They had begun to look like one of those families in which no one got to be very old.
Schneiderman was the first-born son of his mother’s former boss, the man with the German accent who had taught her photography during the early days of the war, and since Ferguson understood that his mother was bound to remarry at some point, he was not opposed to her choice, which struck him as the best choice among the several that had been available to her. Schneiderman was forty-five, eight years older than Ferguson’s mother, and the two of them had first crossed paths on the morning she started working at his father’s studio in November 1941, which somehow comforted Ferguson, knowing that his mother had met his stepfather even before she met his father, 1941 as opposed to 1943, a date that had previously marked the beginning of the world for him, but now the world had become even older than that, and it was reassuring to know there was already an accumulated past between them and therefore she wasn’t rushing into the marriage blindly, which had always been Ferguson’s greatest fear, watching his mother get swept off her feet by some smooth-talking clown and then waking up in the morning to discover she had committed the mistake of her life. No, Schneiderman seemed to be a solid sort, someone you could trust. Married to a woman for seventeen years, father of two kids, and then a call from a state trooper summoning him to a Dutchess County morgue to identify a woman’s body, the body of his wife, who had been killed in a car accident, followed by four years alone, which was almost as long as Ferguson’s mother had been alone since his father’s death. His grandparents were still alive in September 1959, and the wedding was held in their apartment on West Fifty-eighth Street, where the five-foot-two-inch Ferguson served as best man. Among the guests were his new stepsisters, twenty-one-year-old Margaret and nineteen-year-old Ella, both college students, doddering Emanuel Schneiderman, the foul-mouthed goat whom Ferguson had already met three or four times and would never consider a grandfather, not even after his own grandfather died, Gil’s brother, Daniel, his sister-in-law, Liz, his sixteen-year-old nephew Jim and twelve-year-old niece Amy (all arms and legs, that girl, with braces on her teeth and a row of zits on her forehead), and Paul Sandler, Ferguson’s ex-uncle, who remained his mother’s champion in spite of the divorce from Mildred, the editor of her first two books, the full-length Jewish Wedding and the recently published Toughs, ninety black-and-white portraits of Puerto Rican street gang members and their girlfriends, but Aunt Mildred wasn’t there, she had written that she was too busy with her courses at Stanford to make the trip, and as Ferguson looked at his ex-uncle Paul looking at his mother, he wondered if he hadn’t been a contender for his mother’s hand and had lost out to Gil Schneiderman, which could have meant that his breakup with Aunt Mildred had something to do with his belated understanding that he had fallen for the wrong sister. Impossible to know, but perhaps that explained why Mildred was in California that afternoon and not in New York, which also might have accounted for why she seemed to have broken off contact with Ferguson’s mother, for no one said a word about her absence at the wedding party, at least not within earshot of Ferguson, and because he couldn’t bring himself to ask his ex-uncle Paul or his grandparents why no one had mentioned it, the questions forming in his head that afternoon remained unanswered. Yet one more story that would never be told, he said to himself, and then he took the ring out of his pocket and handed it to the burly man with the high forehead and large ears who was about to become his stepfather.
His mother called it a new beginning, and in the beginning of that beginning there were many things to adjust to, a multitude of big things and small things that were suddenly and forever different now, starting with the big fact of living in a household made up of three people instead of two and the novelty of having that third person spend every night in his mother’s bed, a five-foot-ten-inch man with hair on his chest who walked around in the morning wearing old-fashioned boxer shorts and peed loudly into the toilet and hugged and kissed his mother every time she looked at him, a new breed of masculinity for Ferguson to contend with, broad-shouldered but unathletic, elegant in an old-fashioned, distracted sort of way, with his heavy tweed suits and vests, his sturdy shoes and longer than average hair, a bit awkward socially, not given to jokes or breezy chatter, tea in the morning instead of coffee, schnapps, cognac, and a nightly cigar, a steady, stolid, Germanic approach to the business of living, with occasional lapses into grumpiness and fits of distemper (a genetic gift from his father, no doubt) but mostly kind, often exceedingly kind, a stepfather who never showed the slightest ambition to become a substitute father and was happy to be addressed as Gil rather than Dad. For the first six months, the three of them lived together in the apartment on Central Park West, but then they moved to a larger place on Riverside Drive between Eighty-eighth and Eighty-ninth Streets, with a fourth bedroom that was turned into a study for Gil, a change that Ferguson welcomed because he now lived closer to his school and could sleep a little later in the morning, and although he missed the old apartment’s third-floor view of Central Park, he now had a seventh-floor view of the Hudson River, which turned out to be more stimulating because of the constant procession of boats and ships that moved back and forth across the water, and beyond the water there was the land on the other side, the New Jersey side, and whenever Ferguson looked at it he would think about his old life there and try to remember himself as a small boy, but that time was becoming so distant now, it was almost gone.