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YEARS LATER, HIS mother confessed to him that for her too the beginning had been less difficult than what came next. The curious interregnum had been almost bearable, she said, with so many urgent, practical decisions to be made, the matter of selling her house and business in New Jersey, of finding a place to live in New York, of furnishing that place while she went about the job of putting Ferguson in a proper school, the sudden onslaught of obligations that fell down on her during the early days of her widowhood had not been a burden so much as a welcome distraction, a way of not having to think about the Newark fire every minute of her waking life, and thank God for all those movies, she added, and the darkness of the theaters on those cold winter days, and the chance to disappear into the make-believe of those dumb stories, and thank God for you too, Archie, she told him, my brave little man, my rock, my anchor, for the longest time you were the only real person left in the world for me, and without you what would I have done, Archie, what would I have lived for, and how on earth would I have been able to go on?
No doubt she had been half-crazed during those months, she said, a madwoman fueled by cigarettes, coffee, and steady bursts of adrenaline, but once the questions of home and school had been answered, the whirlwind subsided and then stopped altogether, and she sank into a long period of thought and reflection, horrible days, horrible nights, a time of numbness and indecision when she weighed one possibility against another and struggled to imagine where she wanted the future to take her. She was lucky in that regard, she said, lucky to be in a position to choose between alternatives, but the fact was that she had money now, more money than she had ever dreamed of having, two hundred thousand dollars from the life insurance alone, not to mention the money she had collected from the sale of the Millburn house and Roseland Photo, which included the additional sums she had earned from selling the furniture in the house and the equipment in the studio, and even after she deducted the thousands she had spent on the new furniture and the annual cost of sending Ferguson to private school and the monthly cost of renting the apartment, she had more than enough left over to do nothing for the next twelve or fifteen years, to go on living off her dead husband until the day her son graduated from college—and far beyond that if she found herself a clever stocks-and-bonds man and invested in the market. She was thirty-three years old. No longer a beginner in life, but hardly what one would call a has-been, and though it comforted her to muse on the blessings of her good fortune, to know that it was within her power to live a life of leisure well into her old age if she was of a mind to do that, as the months passed and she continued to meditate and do nothing, her time mostly given over to traveling through Central Park four times a day on the crosstown bus, taking Ferguson to school in the morning and then returning home, picking up Ferguson in the afternoon and again returning home, and on the mornings when she couldn’t bring herself to jump back on the bus and return to the West Side, she would spend the six and a half hours Ferguson was in school wandering around the East Side, browsing alone in shops, lunching alone in restaurants, going to movies alone, going to museums alone, and after three and a half months of that routine, followed by a strange, empty summer holed up in a rented house on the Jersey shore with her son, where they spent the bulk of their time indoors watching television together, she discovered she was growing restless, itching to work again. It had taken her the better part of a year to reach that point, but once she got there, the Leica and the Rolleiflex finally came out of the closet, and before long Ferguson’s mother was sailing on a ship headed back to the land of photography.
She went about it differently this time, throwing herself out into the world rather than inviting the world to come to her, no longer interested in maintaining a studio at a fixed address, which she now felt was an outmoded way of doing photography, needlessly cumbersome in a time of rapid transformations, with new high-speed film stocks and ever more efficient lightweight cameras overturning the field, making it possible to rethink her old ideas about light and composition, to reinvent herself and move beyond the limits of classical portraiture, and by the time Ferguson began his second year at Hilliard, his mother was already casting about for work, stumbling onto her first job in late September when the man who had been hired to take pictures at her cousin Charlotte’s wedding fell down a flight of stairs and broke his leg, and because there was only a week to go before the day of the wedding, she volunteered to fill in for him at no charge. The synagogue was out somewhere in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, the old neighborhood of the first Archie and Great-aunt Pearl, and between the marriage ceremony and the removal of the wedding party to a catering hall two blocks to the south, Ferguson’s mother used her tripod to take formal black-and-white portraits of all the family members in attendance, the bride and groom to begin with, twenty-nine-year-old Charlotte, who had seemed destined never to marry anyone after her fiancé was killed in the Korean War, and thirty-six-year-old widower dentist Nathan Birnbaum, followed by Great-aunt Pearl, Ferguson’s Nana and Papa, Charlotte’s twin sister, Betty, and her accountant husband, Seymour Graf, Aunt Mildred (who was now teaching at Sarah Lawrence) and her husband, Paul Sandler (who worked as an editor at Random House), and finally Ferguson himself in a picture with his two second cousins (Betty and Seymour’s children), five-year-old Eric and three-year-old Judy. Once the party began at the catering hall, Ferguson’s mother abandoned her tripod and spent the next three and a half hours wandering among the guests, taking hundreds of pictures of the ninety-six people who were there, unposed, spontaneous shots of old men in quiet conversation with one another, of young women laughing as they drank wine and shoveled food into their mouths, of children dancing with grown-ups and grown-ups dancing together after the meal was done, all the faces of all those people captured in the natural light of that bare, unglamorous setting, the musicians perched on their small stage as they clanged forth their tired, corny songs, Great-aunt Pearl smiling as she kissed her granddaughter’s cheek, Benjy Adler whooping it up on the dance floor with a twenty-year-old distant cousin from Canada, a frowning nine-year-old girl sitting alone at a table with a half-eaten piece of cake in front of her, and at one point during the festivities, Uncle Paul walked up to his sister-in-law and remarked that she seemed to be enjoying herself, that he hadn’t seen her so happy and animated since she’d moved to New York, and Ferguson’s mother simply said, I have to do this, Paul, I’ll go nuts if I don’t start working again, to which Mildred’s husband replied: I think I can help you, Rose.
Help came in the form of a commission to go to New Orleans and photograph Henry Wilmot for the dust jacket of his forthcoming novel, a much anticipated work by the past winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and when the sixty-two-year-old Wilmot told his editor how pleased he was with the results, that is, called Paul Sandler and informed him that from now on no one but that beautiful woman would be allowed to take his picture, more commissions for author photos came in from Random House, which led to work for other New York publishers as well, which in turn led to magazine assignments for feature stories about writers, film directors, Broadway actors, musicians, and artists in Town & Country, Vogue, Look, Ladies’ Home Journal, the New York Times Magazine, and other weeklies and monthlies over the years that followed. Ferguson’s mother always photographed her subjects in their own environments, traveling to the places where they lived and worked with her portable light stands, fold-up screens, and collapsible umbrellas, shooting writers in their book-filled studies or sitting behind their desks, painters in the tumult and splatter of their studios, pianists sitting behind or standing next to their gleaming black Steinways, actors looking into their dressing room mirrors or sitting alone on bare stages, and for some reason her black-and-white portraits seemed to capture more about the inner lives of those people than most photographers were able to extract from shooting those same well-known figures, a quality that had less to do with technical skill, perhaps, than with something about Ferguson’s mother herself
, who always prepared for her assignments by reading the books and listening to the records and looking at the paintings of her subjects, which gave her something to talk about with them during their long sessions together, and because she talked easily and was ever so charming and attractive, ever so not a person to talk about herself, those vain and difficult artists would find themselves relaxing in her presence, feeling that she was genuinely interested in who and what they were, which was in fact true, or mostly true most of the time, and once the seduction had taken effect and their guard had come down, the masks they wore on their faces would gradually slip off and a different sort of light would begin to emerge from their eyes.
On top of this commercial work for magazines and book publishers, Ferguson’s mother kept busy with her own projects, what she called her wandering-eye explorations, which abandoned the meticulous control required to produce first-rate portraits for a come-what-may openness to chance encounters with the unexpected. She had discovered this contrary impulse in herself at her cousin Charlotte’s wedding, that unpaid job from 1955 that had turned into an exuberant, three-and-a-half-hour binge of manic picture taking as she spun her way through the crowd, freed from the restraints of laborious preparation and plunged into a whirl of rapid-fire compositions, one picture succeeding the next, ephemeral instants that had to be caught precisely then or not at all, pause for half a second and the picture would be gone, and the ferocity of concentration called for under the circumstances had thrown her into a kind of emotional fever, as if every face and body in the room had been rushing in on her at once, as if every person there were breathing inside her eyes, no longer on the other side of the camera but within her, an inseparable part of who she was.
Predictably enough, Charlotte and her husband hated those photographs. Not the others, they said, not the portraits that had been shot at the synagogue after the marriage ceremony, which were truly marvelous, pictures they would cherish for years to come, but the stuff from the wedding party was incomprehensible, so dark and raw, so unflattering, everyone looked so sinister and unhappy, even the laughing people looked vaguely demonic, and why were the shots so off-kilter, why was everything so severely underlit? Miffed by the rebuke, Ferguson’s mother sent the newlyweds copies of the portraits with a short accompanying note that read, Glad you liked these, sent another batch to Aunt Pearl, another batch to her parents, and a last one to Mildred and Paul. After receiving his package, her brother-in-law called to ask why she hadn’t included anything from the wedding party. Because those pictures stink, she said. All artists are revolted by their own work, her new supporter and advocate replied, and eventually Ferguson’s mother was persuaded to develop thirty prints from the more than five hundred images she had shot that afternoon and mail them to Paul’s office at Random House. Three days later, he called back to say that not only did they not stink but that he found them remarkable. With her permission, he was going to give them to Minor White at Aperture magazine. They deserved to be published, he said, to be seen by people who cared about photography, and since he knew White a little bit, why not start at the top? Ferguson’s mother wasn’t sure if Paul meant what he was saying or if he merely felt sorry for her. She thought: Kind man steps in to help lost and grieving relative in her time of trouble, man with connections seeks to connect unconnected widow-photographer to a new life. Then she thought: Pity or no pity, Paul was the one who had sent her down to New Orleans, and while he could have been acting on a whim, or on blind intuition, or on some long-shot hunch, now that the grumpy, alcoholic Wilmot had lauded her for doing one hell of a damned fine job, perhaps her brother-in-law believed he had put his money on the right horse.
Whether Paul influenced their decision or not, the editorial board at Aperture accepted her pictures for publication, a portfolio of twenty-one prints that appeared six months later under the title Jewish Wedding, Brooklyn. That triumph, and the jolt of exaltation that shot through her when the letter from Aperture showed up in the mail, were soon tempered by frustration, however, and then nearly destroyed by anger, since she couldn’t publish the photos without securing releases from the people who were in them, and Ferguson’s mother made the mistake of contacting Charlotte first, who stubbornly refused to allow those grotesque snapshots of herself and Nathan to be published in Aperture or any other cruddy magazine. Over the next three days, Ferguson’s mother spoke to all the other participants, among them Charlotte’s mother and her twin sister, Betty, and when no one else raised any objections, she called Charlotte back and asked her to reconsider. Out of the question. Go to hell. Who do you think you are? Aunt Pearl tried to reason with her, Ferguson’s grandfather scolded her for what he called a selfish disregard of others, Betty called her a pinhead and a priss, but the new Mrs. Birnbaum wouldn’t budge. The three pictures with Charlotte and Nathan in them were therefore scrapped, three others were chosen to take their place, and a photo story about a wedding was published with no bride or groom anywhere in sight.
Nevertheless, it was a start, a first step toward living in the only future that made sense to her, and Ferguson’s mother forged on, emboldened by the publication of those photos to pursue other noncommissioned projects, her own work, as she called it, which continued to be found in the pages of Aperture and sometimes between the covers of books or on the walls of galleries, and the most important element of that transformation was perhaps the last-minute decision she made before the appearance of Jewish Wedding, all the way back in the spring of 1956, when she got down on her knees before her bed and asked Stanley to forgive her for what she was about to do, but it had to be this way, she said to him, any other way would force her to go on living in the ashes of the Newark fire until she too burned up into nothing, and so it was, and so it continued to be for all the years of her future life, that she signed her work Rose Adler.
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IN THE BEGINNING, the eight-year-old Ferguson was only dimly aware of what his mother was up to. He understood that she was busier than she had been, out and about on most days working at various photography jobs, or else locked up in what had once been the spare bedroom, which she had turned into a place for developing pictures and which was always sealed shut because of the fumes from the chemicals, and though it was good to see that she was smiling more and laughing more than she had during the spring and summer, the rest of what was happening was not good, not at all good as far as he was concerned. The spare bedroom had been his room for more than eight months, his own private retreat where he could sort through his baseball cards and knock down plastic pins with his plastic bowling ball and throw beanbags through the holes in the wooden target and aim darts at the small red bull’s-eye, and now it was gone, which could hardly be called a good thing, and then, sometime in late October, not long after his bright room had been transformed into an out-of-bounds darkroom, another not-good thing occurred when his mother told him it would no longer be possible for her to pick him up after school. She would continue to take him there in the morning, but she couldn’t count on being free in the afternoon anymore, and so his grandmother would be the one to meet him at the front steps and escort him back to the apartment. Ferguson didn’t like it, since he was opposed to any and all change as a matter of strict moral doctrine, but he wasn’t in a position to protest, he had to do what he was told, and what had once been the best part of the day—seeing his mother again after six and a half hours of boredom, reprimands, and bitter struggles with the Almighty—was turned into a dull plod westward with his fat, waddling Nana, an old woman so shy and so withheld that she never knew what to say to him, which meant that more often than not they rode back home in silence.