No, his grandfather didn’t count because he was off the charts, disqualified by reason of inanity, as the old man might have put it in one of his dreadful puns, but Uncle Don was only a couple of years younger than Ferguson’s father, and therefore he was a fit candidate for scrutiny, perhaps even a better one than Sam Brownstein or Max Solomon, for like his father those two men lived in the New Jersey suburbs and were members of the striving middle class, a merchant and a white-collar worker, but Don Marx was a creature of the city, born and bred in New York, educated at Columbia, and by some miracle he had no job, at least not one with an employer and a regular paycheck, spending his days at home with a typewriter that produced books and magazine articles, a man unto himself, the first such man Ferguson had ever known. He had moved in with Aunt Mildred three years ago, leaving his wife and son in his old apartment on the Upper West Side, which was another first for Ferguson, a divorced man, a man embarked on a second marriage as of one year ago, having lived in sin with Ferguson’s aunt for the first two years of their cohabitation (something his father and grandparents and Great-aunt Pearl had all frowned upon but had made his mother laugh), and the small apartment Don Marx shared with Aunt Mildred on Perry Street in Greenwich Village was filled with more books than Ferguson had ever seen in a place that was not a bookstore or a library, books everywhere, on shelves lining the walls of the three rooms, on tables and chairs, on the floor, on the tops of cabinets, and not only was Ferguson bewitched by this fantastical clutter, but the mere fact that such an apartment existed served to demonstrate that there were other ways of living in this world than the one he knew, that his parents’ way was not the only way. Aunt Mildred was an associate professor of English at Brooklyn College, Uncle Don was a writer, and although they must have made money from those jobs, enough money to live on in any case, it was clear to Ferguson that they lived for other things besides making money.
Unfortunately, he didn’t get a chance to go to that apartment often, only three times so far in those three years, once for a dinner with his parents and twice alone with his mother for afternoon visits. Ferguson had warm feelings toward his aunt and new uncle, but for some reason his mother and her sister weren’t close, and the sad but ever more apparent truth was that his father and Don Marx had nothing to say to each other. He had always sensed that his father and aunt got along well, and now that his aunt was no longer single, he was convinced the same held true for his mother and uncle. The problem was the woman-woman connection and the man-man connection, for his mother, as the younger of the two sisters, had always looked up to Mildred, and Mildred, as the older of the two sisters, had always looked down on his mother, and with the men there was the utter indifference each one had toward the other’s work and outlook on life, dollars on the one hand, words on the other, compounded further perhaps by Uncle Don having fought in Europe during the war and his father having stayed home, but that was probably a groundless supposition, since Max Solomon had been a soldier as well, and he and his father were always able to talk, at least to the extent that his father was able to talk to anyone.
Still, there were the mutual visits to his grandparents’ apartment for Thanksgiving, Passover, and occasional Sunday gatherings, as well as the other Sundays when Aunt Mildred and Uncle Don would climb into the backseat of the purple Plymouth and accompany his grandparents on day trips to New Jersey. Ferguson therefore had ample opportunities to observe his Uncle Don, and the startling conclusion he came to was that in spite of the vast difference between his father and his uncle regarding their backgrounds, their educations, their work, and their manner of living, they were more the same than not the same, more similar to each other than his father was to Sam Brownstein or Max Solomon, for whether they were in the business of making dollars or making words, each man was driven by his work to the exclusion of all other things, which made them both tense and distracted when they weren’t working, obtuse and self-involved, semi-blind. There was no question that Uncle Don could be more loquacious than his father, funnier than his father, more interesting than his father, but only when he wanted to be, and now that Ferguson had come to know him as well as he did, he saw how often he seemed to look straight through Aunt Mildred when she talked to him, as if he were searching for something behind her back, not able to hear her because he was thinking about something else, which was not unlike how his father often looked at his mother now, more and more often now, the glazed-over look of a man unable to see anything but the thoughts inside his own head, a man who was there but not there, gone.
That was the real difference, Ferguson concluded. Not too little money or too much money, not what a person did or failed to do, not buying a larger house or a more expensive car, but ambition. That explained why Brownstein and Solomon managed to float through their lives in relative peace—because they weren’t tormented by the curse of ambition. By contrast, his father and Uncle Don were consumed by their ambitions, which paradoxically made their worlds smaller and less comfortable than those who weren’t afflicted by the curse, for ambition meant never being satisfied, to be always hungering for something more, constantly pushing forward because no success could ever be big enough to quell the need for new and even bigger successes, the compulsion to turn one store into two stores, then two stores into three stores, to be talking now about building a fourth store and even a fifth store, just as one book was merely a step on the way to another book, a lifetime of more and more books, which required the same concentration and singleness of purpose that a businessman needed in order to become rich. Alexander the Great conquers the world, and then what? He builds a rocket ship and invades Mars.
Ferguson was in the first decade of his life, which meant that the books he read were still confined to the realm of children’s literature, Hardy Boys mysteries, novels about high school football players and intergalactic travelers, collections of adventure stories, simplified biographies of famous men and women such as Abraham Lincoln and Joan of Arc, but now that he had begun his investigation into the workings of Uncle Don’s soul, he felt it might be a good idea to read something he had written, or try to read something, and so one day he asked his mother if they had any of his uncle’s books in the house. Yes, she said, they had both of them.
F: Both of them? You mean he’s written only two?
F’s mother: They’re long books, Archie. Each one took years to write.
F: What are they about?
F’s mother: They’re biographies.
F: Good. I like biographies. Who are the people?
F’s mother: People from long ago. A German writer from the early nineteenth century called Kleist. And a French philosopher and scientist from the seventeenth century called Pascal.
F: Never heard of them.
F’s mother: To tell the truth, I hadn’t either.
F: Are they good books?
F’s mother: I think so. People say they’re very good.
F: You mean you haven’t read them?
F’s mother: A few pages here and there, but not all the way through. I’m afraid they’re not my cup of tea.
F: But other people think they’re good. That must mean Uncle Don makes a lot of money.
F’s mother: Not really. They’re books for scholars, and they don’t have a big audience. That’s why Uncle Don writes so many articles and reviews. To pad his income while he does the research for his books.
F: I think I should read one.
F’s mother (smiling): If you want to, Archie. But don’t be disappointed if you find it hard going.
So Ferguson’s mother gave him the two books, each one over four hundred pages long, two heavy volumes with small print and no illustrations published by Oxford University Press, and because Ferguson liked the cover of the Pascal book better than the Kleist cover, with its stark photograph of the Frenchman’s white death mask hovering against a pure black background, he decided to tackle that one first. One paragraph in, he understood that it wasn’t merely hard going, it was n
o going at all. I’m not ready for this, he said to himself. I’ll have to wait until I’m older.
If Ferguson couldn’t read his uncle’s books, he could nevertheless study how he behaved with his son, which was a topic of great interest to Ferguson, no doubt the essential topic, the one that had launched him into his systematic examination of contemporary American manhood, for his growing disillusionment with his own father had made him more attentive to how other fathers treated their sons, and he had to gather evidence in order to judge whether his problem was uniquely his own or a universal problem common to all boys. With Brownstein and Solomon, he had been exposed to two different expressions of paternal conduct. Brownstein was jocular and chummy with his offspring, Solomon was grave and tender; Brownstein chattered and praised, Solomon listened and wiped away tears; Brownstein could lose his temper and scold in public, Solomon kept his thoughts to himself and let Nancy discipline their boys. Two modes, two philosophies, two personalities, one altogether unlike Ferguson’s father, the other somewhat like, but with this fundamental exception: Solomon never fell asleep.
Uncle Don couldn’t fall asleep because he no longer lived with his son and saw him only rarely, one weekend every month, two weeks in the summer, just thirty-eight days a year, but when Ferguson did the calculations in his head, he realized that while he saw his father more often than that—fifty-two Sundays a year to begin with, along with family dinners on the nights when his father didn’t come home late from work, more or less half the nights of the week, which would tally up to about a hundred and fifty Monday-through-Saturday dinners per year, far more contact than Uncle Don’s son had with his father—there was nevertheless a hitch, for Ferguson’s new cousin-by-marriage always saw his father alone on those thirty-eight yearly get-togethers, whereas Ferguson was never alone with his father anymore, and when he searched his memory for the last time they had been together with no one else in the room or the car, he had to go back more than a year and a half, to a rain-filled Sunday morning that had washed out the weekly ritual of tennis and Gruning’s, when he and his father had climbed into the old Buick and driven off to buy the makings of brunch, standing in line at Tabachnik’s with their numbered ticket as they waited their turn in that crowded, good-smelling store to stock up on whitefish, herring, lox, bagels, and a tub of cream cheese. A distinct, luminous memory—but that had been the last time, October 1954, one-sixth of his life ago, and when you subtracted the first three years of his life, which he could no longer actively remember, close to one-quarter of his life ago, the equivalent of ten years for a forty-three-year-old man, for at this point in the story Ferguson was nine.
The boy’s name was Noah, and he was three and a half months younger than Ferguson. Much to Ferguson’s regret, the two of them had been kept apart during the years of sinful cohabitation, since Uncle Don’s ex-wife, justifiably angry at having been dumped in favor of Aunt Mildred, had refused to allow her son to be tainted by contact with the home-wrecker and her family, which extended beyond the Adlers to the Fergusons as well. When Uncle Don and Aunt Mildred decided to get married, however, the injunction had been lifted, since everything was legal now, and the ex-wife was no longer in a position to make those demands on her ex-husband. Ferguson and Noah Marx therefore met at the wedding, which took place in December 1954, a small affair held at Ferguson’s grandparents’ apartment with no more than twenty guests, family members from both sides along with a few intimate friends. Ferguson and Noah were the only children present, and the two boys hit it off from the start, each one being an only child who had always yearned for a brother or sister, and the fact that they were the same age and would henceforth be first cousins, stepcousins by marriage, perhaps, but nevertheless bound together in the same family, turned that initial encounter at the wedding into a kind of auxiliary wedding, or ceremonial alliance, or blood-brother initiation, since they both knew they would be involved with each other for the rest of their lives.
They saw each other infrequently, of course, since one lived in New York and the other in New Jersey, and because Noah was potentially available only thirty-eight days a year, they had been together only six or seven times in the eighteen months since the wedding. Ferguson wished it could have been more, but it was enough to have reached some conclusions about Uncle Don’s performance as a father, which was nothing like his own father’s, and yet different from Brownstein’s and Solomon’s as well. Then again, Noah was a special case, a scrawny, snaggle-toothed rascal who bore no resemblance to the children of those other men, and handling him required a special touch. Noah was the first cynic Ferguson had ever met, a subversive prankster and wise-ass motormouth, smart, ever so smart, both smart and funny at the same time, a far more nimble and sophisticated thinker than Ferguson was at that point and consequently a delight to be with if you were his friend, which Ferguson most definitely was by now, but Noah lived with his mother and saw his father only thirty-eight days a year, and he was forever testing his father’s patience during the time they spent together, and yet why wouldn’t he be against his father, Ferguson thought, since Uncle Don had essentially abandoned him when he was five and a half years old. Ferguson had developed a great fondness for Noah, but he also knew his cousin could be impossible, a belligerent, irritating pest, and so his affections were somewhat divided between father and son, solidarity with the abandoned boy but also some sympathy for the put-upon father, and before long Ferguson understood that Uncle Don wanted him to come along on his father-son outings with Noah in order to serve as a buffer between them, a moderating presence, a distraction. So off the three of them went to Ebbets Field to watch the Dodgers play the Phillies, off they went to the Museum of Natural History to look at dinosaur bones, off they went to a double bill of Marx Brothers movies in a rerun house near Carnegie Hall, and Noah would always start the afternoon with a series of bitter cracks, taunting his father for dragging him out to Brooklyn because that was what fathers were supposed to do, wasn’t it, shove their boys into hot subway cars and take them to baseball games, even though the father couldn’t have cared less about baseball, or: See the caveman in the diorama, Dad? At first I thought I was looking at you, or: The Marx Brothers! Do you think they’re related to us? Maybe I should write to Groucho and ask him if he’s my real father. The truth was that Noah loved baseball, and even if he was miserably inept at playing it, he knew the batting average of every Dodger and carried around an autograph (which his father had given him) from Jackie Robinson in his front pocket. The truth was that Noah was absorbed by every display at the Museum of Natural History and didn’t want to leave the building when his father said it was time to go. The truth was that Noah laughed his head off through Duck Soup and Monkey Business and left the theater shouting, What a family! Karl Marx! Groucho Marx! Noah Marx! The Marxes rule the world!
Through all these tempests and confrontations, these sudden lulls and bursts of manic gaiety, these alternating fits of laughter and aggression, Noah’s father persevered with a strange and steadfast calm, never responding to his son’s insults, refusing to be provoked, weathering each assault in silence until the wind changed direction again. A mysterious, unprecedented form of paternal conduct, Ferguson felt, less to do with a man controlling his temper than with allowing his boy to punish him for crimes he had committed, with subjecting himself to these flagellations as a way of doing penance. What a curious pair they were—a wounded boy screaming love with each act of hostility toward his father and a wounded father emanating love by not slapping him down, by letting himself be punched. When the waters were still, however, when combat had temporarily ceased and father and son were drifting along in their boat together, there was one remarkable thing that Ferguson had noted: Uncle Don talked to Noah as if he were an adult. No condescension, no fatherly pats on the head, no setting down of rules. When the boy talked, the father would listen. When the boy asked a question, the father would answer him as if he were a colleague, and as Ferguson listened to them talk, he couldn’t
help feeling some envy, for at no time had his father ever talked to him in that way, not with that respect, that curiosity, that look of pleasure in his eyes. All in all, then, he concluded that Uncle Don was a good father—a flawed father, perhaps, even a failed father—but nevertheless a good father. And cousin Noah was a most excellent friend, even if he could be a bit crazy at times.
On a Monday morning in mid-June, Ferguson’s mother informed him at breakfast that they would be moving into the new house by the end of the summer. She and his father were about to close on it next week, and when Ferguson asked her what that meant, she explained that a closing was real estate jargon for buying a house, and once they had given the money and signed the papers, the new house would be theirs. That was grim enough, but then she went on to say something that struck Ferguson as both outrageous and wrong. As luck would have it, his mother continued, we’ve also found a buyer for the old house. Old house! What was she talking about? They were eating breakfast in that house now, they were living in that house now, and until they packed up and left for the other side of town, she had no right to talk about it in the past tense.
Why so glum, Archie? his mother said. This is good news, not bad news. You look like someone who’s about to march off to war.
He couldn’t tell her he had been hoping that no one would buy the house, that no one would want it because they would all see that it suited the Fergusons better than anyone else, and if his mother and father weren’t able to sell the house, then they wouldn’t be able to afford the new one, which would force them to stay where they were. He couldn’t tell her because his mother looked so happy, happier than he had seen her in a long time, and few things were better than seeing his mother look happy, and yet, and yet, his last hope was gone now, and it had all happened behind his back. A buyer! Who was that unknown person, and where had he come from? No one ever shared anything with him until after it had happened, things were always being worked out behind his back, and he never had a say in any of it. He wanted a vote! He was sick of being a child, sick of being pushed around and told what to do. America was supposed to be a democracy, but he lived in a dictatorship, and he was fed up, fed up, fed up.