THE ADLERS WERE shrinking. One after the other they were dying their too-early deaths and disappearing from the world, and with Aunt Mildred’s removal to California and ex-uncle Paul’s expulsion from the family, combined with the relocation to southern Florida by cousin Betty and her husband Seymour (along with Ferguson’s two second cousins, Eric and Judy) and the fact that Betty’s sister Charlotte was still not talking to her cousin Rose because of the Wedding-Pictures War of 1955 and 1956, Ferguson and his mother were the only Adlers left in New York, the only ones still above ground who hadn’t absconded or smashed their links to the clan. In spite of these losses, however, new blood had entered their lives in the form of various Schneidermans, a collection of stepsisters and stepcousins and a stepaunt, a stepuncle, and a step-grandfather for Ferguson, which for his mother was translated into two stepdaughters, a stepniece and stepnephew, a sister-in-law, a brother-in-law, and a father-in-law, and those Schneidermans now constituted the bulk of the family they belonged to because a city clerk had signed and stamped a marriage certificate declaring Gil and his mother to be lawfully wedded husband and wife. It was a strange change, as Ferguson’s grandfather had put it in one of their last talks together, and indeed it was strange to have been given two sisters because of a wedding, two unknown women who had suddenly become his closest relatives because a man who was equally unknown to him had signed his name on a piece of paper. None of that would have mattered if Ferguson had liked Margaret and Ella Schneiderman, but after several encounters with his new stepsiblings, he had concluded that those fat, ugly, stuck-up girls didn’t deserve to be liked, for it soon became clear that they resented his mother for marrying their father and were disgusted with their father for having betrayed the memory of their mother, who had become a sanctified being after her terrible death in that crackup on the Taconic State Parkway. Well, Ferguson’s father had died a terrible death, too, which theoretically should have put all of them in the same boat, but the Schneiderman sisters weren’t interested in their new stepbrother, they barely deigned to talk to the twelve-year-old nobody, the big college girls from Boston University had no use for the son of the riffraff woman who had stolen their father from them, and even though Ferguson had been puzzled by their behavior at the wedding — the two of them standing off to the side and talking to no one but each other, mostly in whispers, mostly with their backs turned toward the bride and groom — it wasn’t until two weeks later, when they were invited to dinner at the New York apartment, that Ferguson understood how nasty and ungenerous they were, particularly Margaret, the older one, although the younger, less obnoxious Ella invariably followed her sister’s lead, which was probably even worse, and there the five of them were at that never to be forgotten dinner, which had taken his mother so many hours to prepare, wanting to prove her solidarity with Gil by putting herself out for his daughters, those vicious, snotty girls who pretended not to hear his mother when she asked them questions about their life in Boston and what they were planning to do after college, who snidely grilled her about her knowledge of music, which was next to zero, of course, as if to prove to their father that he had married an uncultured imbecile, and when Margaret asked her new stepmother whether she preferred listening to Bach keyboard pieces on the harpsichord, as played by Wanda Landowska, for example, or on the pianoforte by someone like Glenn Gould (not piano, pianoforte), Gil finally exploded and told her to shut up. An open palm slammed down on the dinner table, rattling the silverware and tipping over a glass, and then there was silence, silence not just from Margaret but from everyone in the room.
Enough with your cutting, insidious remarks, Schneiderman said to his daughter. I didn’t know you were capable of such mean-spiritedness, Margaret, such vicious cruelty. Shame on you. Shame on you. Shame on you. Rose is a great and magnificent artist, and if you manage to accomplish one-tenth of what she’s done in your life, you’ll surpass my wildest expectations for you. But one needs a soul to accomplish even the smallest thing in this world, my dear, and from the way you’ve been acting tonight, I’m beginning to wonder if you have one.
It was the first time Ferguson had witnessed his stepfather’s anger, which was a bellowing, apoplectic sort of anger, a wrath of such enormity and destructive force that he could only hope it would never be turned in his direction, but how satisfying it was to see it turned on Margaret that night, she who so fully deserved that brutal dressing-down from her father, and how glad he was to know that Schneiderman was willing to defend his new wife against the attacks of his own daughter, a great and magnificent artist, which augured well for the future of the marriage, he felt, and when Margaret inevitably collapsed into tears and a tearful Ella protested that he had no right to talk to her sister like that, Ferguson heard his mother pronounce a phrase, pronounce for the first time a phrase she would go on using whenever Schneiderman lost control of his temper in the months and years ahead, Easy does it, Gil, which somehow managed to carry the double weight of both a warning and a caress, and just after he heard his mother say those words for the first time, she stood up from her chair and went over to her husband, a man she had been married to for sixteen days, stood behind him as he went on sitting in his chair at the head of the table, put a hand on each of his shoulders, and then leaned over and kissed him on the back of the neck. Ferguson was impressed by her bravery and composure, which made him think of someone stepping into a cage with a lion, but apparently his mother knew what she was doing, for rather than push her away, Schneiderman reached up and wrapped his right hand around hers, and once he had it firmly in his grasp, he brought her hand down to his mouth and kissed it. They hadn’t even looked at each other, but the tantrum had been quelled, or almost quelled, since there was still the matter of an apology to be negotiated, which the stern-voiced Schneiderman eventually pried out of the reluctant, weeping Margaret, who could barely bring herself to look up at her stepmother, but she said the words, she said, I’m sorry, and because the blowup had occurred over dessert (strawberries and cream!), the meal was essentially done, which allowed the sisters to make a prompt, face-saving exit with the excuse that they had a nine o’clock date to see some old high school friends, which Ferguson knew to be false, since the girls were supposed to spend the night at the apartment, sleeping in his bedroom while he sacked out on the sofa in the living room, a special foldout sofa bed his mother had bought specifically for that purpose, but that never happened, not that night or any other night, for on all future visits to New York the sisters stayed with their mother’s brother and his wife in Riverdale, and if Schneiderman wanted to see them, he had to go to that other apartment or meet with them in public places, but not once did they return to the apartment on Central Park West, and years went by before they set foot in the new apartment overlooking the river.
Ferguson didn’t care. He wanted nothing to do with either one of those girls, just as he wanted nothing to do with Schneiderman’s father, who unfortunately came round to dinner about once a month, spouting all kinds of inanities about American politics, the Cold War, New York sanitation workers, quantum physics, and even Ferguson himself, Watch out for that boy of yours, liebchen — he has sex on the brain and doesn’t even know it yet, but Ferguson did what he could to avoid him, always making sure to wolf down his main course in record time and then claim to be too full for dessert, at which point he would withdraw to his room to study for tomorrow’s history test, which in fact had already been given that afternoon. His new not-grandfather was a bit less horrible than Margaret and Ella, perhaps, but not by much, not enough to make Ferguson want to sit around and listen to his crackpot harangues about J. Edgar Hoover’s secret concentration camps in Arizona or the alliance between the John Birch Society and the Communist Party to poison the reservoirs of the New York City water system, which might have been funny in an odd sort of way if the old man hadn’t shouted so much, but twenty or thirty minutes in his company was about all Ferguson could stomach. That made three new relatives he couldn’t abide, three Schneidermans he gladly would have done without, but then there were the other Schneidermans, the ones who lived just thirteen and a half blocks away on West Seventy-fifth Street, and though he found it difficult to warm up to his stepaunt Liz, who struck him as a crabby, nervous sort of person, too fretful about the minutiae of daily life to understand that life could run out on you before you’d begun to live, he immediately took to Schneiderman’s brother, Daniel, and the two Schneiderman offspring, stepcousins Jim and Amy, who made Ferguson feel welcome from the start and thought their Uncle Gil was one lucky son of a bitch (Jim’s words) to have married a woman like Ferguson’s mother, who (in Amy’s words) was just about perfect.