Of all people, it was Mildred who saved her from the prospect of terminal boredom, who stepped in and transformed those months of immobility into what Rose would later describe to her son as a grand adventure.
You can’t sit around the apartment all day listening to the radio and watching that nonsense on television, Mildred said. Why not get your brain working for once and do some catching up?
Catching up? Rose said, not understanding what Mildred was talking about.
You might not realize it, her sister said, but your doctor has given you an extraordinary gift. He’s turned you into a prisoner, and the one thing prisoners have that other people don’t is time, endless amounts of time. Read books, Rose. Start educating yourself. This is your chance, and if you want my help, I’ll be happy to give it.
Mildred’s help came in the form of a reading list, of several reading lists over the months that followed, and with movie theaters temporarily off-limits, for the first time in her life Rose satisfied her hunger for stories with novels, good novels, not the crime novels and bestsellers she might have gravitated to on her own but the books that Mildred recommended, classics to be sure, but always selected with Rose in mind, books that Mildred felt Rose would enjoy, which meant that Moby-Dick and Ulysses and The Magic Mountain were never on any of the lists, since those books would have been too daunting for the meagerly trained Rose, but how many others there were to choose from, and as the months passed and her baby grew inside her, Rose spent her days swimming in the pages of books, and although there were a few disappointments among the dozens she read (The Sun Also Rises, for example, which struck her as fake and shallow), nearly all the others lured her in and kept her engrossed from first to last, among them Tender Is the Night, Pride and Prejudice, The House of Mirth, Moll Flanders, Vanity Fair, Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary, The Charterhouse of Parma, First Love, Dubliners, Light in August, David Copperfield, Middlemarch, Washington Square, The Scarlet Letter, Main Street, Jane Eyre, and numerous others, but of all the writers she discovered during her confinement, it was Tolstoy who said the most to her, demon Tolstoy, who understood all of life, it seemed to her, everything there was to know about the human heart and the human mind, no matter if the heart or mind belonged to a man or a woman, and how was it possible, she wondered, for a man to know what Tolstoy knew about women, it made no sense that one man could be all men and all women, and therefore she marched through most of what Tolstoy had written, not just the big novels like War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and Resurrection, but the shorter works as well, the novellas and stories, none more powerful to her than the one-hundred-page Family Happiness, the story of a young bride and her gradual disillusionment, a work that hit so close to home that she wept at the end, and when Stanley returned to the apartment that evening, he was alarmed to see her in such a state, for even though she had finished the story at three in the afternoon, her eyes were still wet with tears.
The baby was due on March 16, 1947, but at ten in the morning on March second, a couple of hours after Stanley had left for work, Rose, still in her nightgown and propped up in bed with A Tale of Two Cities leaning against the northern slope of her enormous belly, felt a sudden pressure in her bladder. Assuming she had to pee, she slowly extricated herself from the covering sheet and blankets, inched her mountainous bulk to the edge of the bed, put her feet on the floor, and stood up. Before she could take a step toward the bathroom, she felt a rush of warm liquid flowing down the inner halves of her thighs. Rose didn’t move. She was facing the window, and when she looked outside she saw that a light, misty snow was falling from the sky. How still everything seemed at that moment, she said to herself, as if nothing in the world were moving but the snow. She sat down on the bed again and called 3 Brothers Home World, but the person who answered the phone told her Stanley was out on an errand and wouldn’t be back until after lunch. Then she called Dr. Jacobs, whose secretary informed her that he had just left the office on a house call. Feeling some panic now, Rose told the secretary to tell the doctor she was on her way to the hospital, and then she dialed Millie’s number. Her sister-in-law picked up on the third ring, and thus it was Millie who came to fetch her. During the short ride to the maternity ward at Beth Israel, Rose told her that she and Stanley had already chosen names for the child who was about to be born. If it was a girl, they were going to call her Esther Ann Ferguson. If it was a boy, he would go through life as Archibald Isaac Ferguson.
Millie looked into the rearview mirror and studied Rose, who was sprawled out on the backseat. Archibald, she said. Are you sure about that one?
Yes, we’re sure, Rose answered. Because of my Uncle Archie. And Isaac because of Stanley’s father.
Let’s just hope he’s a tough kid, Millie said. She was about to go on, but before she could get another word out of her mouth, they had reached the hospital entrance.
Millie rounded up the troops, and when Rose gave birth to her son at 2:07 the following morning, everyone was there: Stanley and her parents, Mildred and Joan, and even Stanley’s mother. Thus Ferguson was born, and for several seconds after he emerged from his mother’s body, he was the youngest human being on the face of the earth.
1.1
His mother’s name was Rose, and when he was big enough to tie his shoes and stop wetting the bed, he was going to marry her. Ferguson knew that Rose was already married to his father, but his father was an old man, and it wouldn’t be long now before he was dead. Once that happened, Ferguson would marry his mother, and from then on her husband’s name would be Archie, not Stanley. He would be sad when his father died, but not too sad, not sad enough to shed any tears. Tears were for babies, and he wasn’t a baby anymore. There were moments when tears still came out of him, of course, but only when he fell down and hurt himself, and hurting yourself didn’t count.
The best things in the world were vanilla ice cream and jumping up and down on his parents’ bed. The worst things in the world were stomach aches and fevers.
He knew now that sourballs were dangerous. No matter how much he liked them, he understood that he mustn’t put them in his mouth anymore. They were too slippery, and he couldn’t help swallowing them, and because they were too big to go all the way down, they would get stuck in his windpipe and make it hard to breathe. He would never forget how bad it felt the day he started to choke, but then his mother rushed into the room, lifted him off the ground, turned him upside down, and with one hand holding him by the feet, pounded him on the back with the other hand until the sourball popped out of his mouth and clattered onto the floor. His mother said: No more sourballs, Archie. They’re too dangerous. After that, she asked him to help her carry the bowl of sourballs into the kitchen, and one by one they took turns dropping the red, yellow, and green candies into the garbage. Then his mother said: Adios, sourballs. Such a funny word: adios.