Schneiderman was the chief music critic at the New York Herald Tribune, a demanding position that forced him to be out most evenings attending concerts, recitals, and operas, and then the deadline rush to type up the review and deliver it to the arts editor that same evening, which seemed an almost impossible task to Ferguson, a mere two or two and a half hours to marshal his thoughts about the performance he had just seen and heard and write something coherent about it, but Schneiderman was an old hand at working under pressure, on most nights he finished his articles without once lifting his hands off the keyboard, and when Ferguson asked him how he could crank out the words so quickly, he answered his stepson by saying, I’m really quite a lazy fellow, Archie, and if I didn’t have deadlines bearing down on me, I’d never get anything done, and Ferguson was impressed that his stepfather could make fun of himself in that way, since it was clear to him that the man was anything but lazy.
Schneiderman had stories to tell, unlike Ferguson’s father, who had rarely told stories except for far-fetched ones about prospecting for gold in the Andes or shooting elephants in Africa, but these were true stories, and as the adjustment period gradually turned into something that resembled everyday life, Ferguson began to feel comfortable enough to press his mother’s husband to talk to him about his past, for Ferguson’s mind was no longer strictly a child’s mind, and he enjoyed hearing what it had been like to grow up in Berlin, to be listening to someone who had spent the first seven years of his life in that far-off city, which in Ferguson’s imagination was first and foremost the capital of Hitler’s Hell, the most evil city on the face of the earth, but not then, Schneiderman informed him, not for someone who left there in 1921, and even if his life started just after the beginning of the First World War, what people had once called the Great War, he remembered nothing about it, the entire cataclysm was a blank to him, and the first event in his life that he could recall with any certainty was sitting at the kitchen table in his family’s apartment in Charlottenburg with a piece of bread in front of him and covering the bread with spoonfuls of black currant jam as he watched his baby brother Daniel in his high chair, who was all of six or eight months old at the time, which meant the war was about to end or was already over, and the reason why that scene remained so vivid to him was perhaps because Daniel was spewing forth a mass of clotted milk all over his bib without noticing it, smiling through the onslaught as he banged his hands against the table, and Schneiderman had marveled at the fact that someone could be so brainless and incompetent as to throw up on himself without being aware of what he was doing. No Hitler, then, but a momentous time for all that, the seeds of future disaster already being planted at Versailles, armed struggle in Berlin as the Spartacist rebellion surged up briefly and was crushed, followed by the arrests of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, whose murdered bodies were later found in the Landwehr Canal, not to mention the outbreak of the Russian Civil War, the Reds against the Whites, the Bolsheviks against the world, and because Russia was so close to Germany, the sudden influx of refugees and émigrés who streamed into Berlin, unstable, tottering Berlin, heart of the ragged Weimar Republic in which a loaf of bread would eventually cost twenty million marks. It was essential that Schneiderman give the boy this rudimentary history lesson so he would understand why the family had left for America, why Schneiderman’s father had concluded that Germany was a dead-end place and had gotten them out of there as quickly as possible, which proved to be just in time, since America put a stop to immigration in 1924 and barred the gates thereafter, but it was 1921 now, late summer, with Schneiderman about to turn seven and his brother a month past three, and off they sailed with their parents and a trunkful of German books, leaving from Hamburg on a ship called the S.S. Passage to India, bound for the mountainous territory of Washington Heights, or so Schneiderman had assumed, but his English was less than good at that point, almost nonexistent, in fact, and what did a seven-year-old boy know about anything except what his parents had told him? The language was the toughest obstacle, his stepfather said, the difficulty of speaking English without a German accent, which made him stick out as a foreigner and led to taunts and frequent punches from the boys in his school, for he wasn’t just any foreigner but a German, the lowest, most despised form of humanity in those years after the war, a good-for-nothing Kraut or Hun or Boche or Heinie, take your pick, and even as his understanding of English grew to a point of deepest familiarity, even as his vocabulary expanded and he conquered the nuances of English syntax and grammar, he still took his lumps because of that unseemly accent. Vee go schvimming in dee zummer, yah Archie? Schneiderman said, by way of demonstration, and because Schneiderman rarely tried to be funny, Ferguson appreciated this little stab at humor, which in fact was quite funny, and he laughed, and an instant later they were both laughing.
The thing of it is, Schneiderman said, knowing German probably saved my life.
When Ferguson asked him to explain, his stepfather started talking about the war, about enlisting in the army just after Pearl Harbor because he wanted to go back to Europe and kill Nazis, but because he was a little older than most of the boys, and because he’d gone to college and was fluent in both German and French, he was kept out of combat and thrown into an intelligence unit instead. Ergo, no duty on the front lines. And because of that, no bullets or bombs to put him in an early grave. Ferguson was of course eager to know what he had done in the intelligence unit, but like most men who had come home from the war, Schneiderman didn’t want to talk about it. He simply said, Interrogating German prisoners, interviewing Nazi officials, putting my German to good use. When Ferguson asked him to elaborate, Schneiderman smiled, patted his stepson on the shoulder, and said, Some other time, Archie.
If there was any drawback to the new arrangement, it was that Schneiderman had no interest in sports — not in baseball or football, not in basketball or tennis, not in golf or bowling or badminton. Not just that he didn’t play any of those games himself but that he never even glanced at the sports pages, which meant that he paid no attention to the ups and downs of the local professional teams, not to speak of the college teams and high school teams, and ignored the exploits of every sprinter, shot-putter, high jumper, broad jumper, long-distance runner, golfer, skier, bowler, and tennis player in the world. One of the reasons why Ferguson had not been opposed to the idea of his mother getting married again was that he had assumed her second husband would necessarily be a sportsman, since she herself was so fond of swimming and tennis and ping pong and even bowling, and he had been looking forward to having a grown man in the house with whom he could share some sporting activities, whether throwing around a baseball or a football or shooting baskets or playing tennis (it didn’t matter which one), and if this hypothetical stepfather turned out not to be an athletic sort of person, there was an excellent chance that he would be a fan of at least one sport, since most men were, as his grandfather had been, for example, whose sport had been baseball, and when the two of them hadn’t been talking about Laurel and Hardy and asking themselves if the shorts weren’t better than the features or vice versa, most of their conversations had been about analyzing the relative merits of Mantle, Snider, and Mays, dissecting Alvin Dark’s talent for smacking the ball to right-center when the hit-and-run was on, debating who had the stronger arm, Furillo or Clemente, or if there was any truth to the story that Yogi Berra kept a razor blade in his right shin guard in order to nick up the ball before he threw it back to Whitey Ford. Every year from the age of six to ten Ferguson had gone to at least three games with his grandfather, their annual tour of the New York City ballparks, the Polo Grounds in Manhattan, Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, and Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, where they saw their one World Series game together in 1955, but three was the minimum, and after Ferguson’s father died and the Dodgers and Giants left town, the total per season was usually six or seven trips to Yankee Stadium, the house that Ruth built, and how Ferguson had savored those outings in the blistering, sunlit afternoons of July and August, eyes fixed on the field with its immaculate green grass and smooth brown soil, a formal garden tucked inside the great stone city, pastoral pleasures amid the raucous shouts and whistles from the crowd, thirty thousand voices booing in unison, what a sound that was, and through it all his grandfather would patiently keep score with his stubby pencil, predicting whether the batter would wind up on base or not according to what he called the law of averages, meaning that a slumping batter was bound to get a hit because he was due, and no matter how many times he got it wrong, his grandfather never abandoned faith in his law, his flawed law of guesswork nonsense. All those games with his bizarre, incomprehensible Papa, who on the warmest days would protect himself from the sun by spreading a white handkerchief over his bald head because it was too hot for hats, and now that he was gone Ferguson understood that no one could ever take his place, least of all Schneiderman, who was probably the one New Yorker in any of the five boroughs whose heart hadn’t been broken when the Dodgers and Giants decamped to California after the 1957 season.