He wanted a brother, preferably an older brother, but since that wasn’t possible anymore, he would settle for a younger brother, and if he couldn’t have a brother, he would make do with a sister, even a younger sister. It was often lonely having no one to play with or talk to, and experience had taught him that every child had a brother or a sister, or several brothers and sisters, and as far as he could tell, he was the only exception to that rule anywhere in the world. Francie had Jack and Ruth, Andrew and Alice had each other, his friend Bobby down the street had a brother and two sisters, and even his own parents had spent their childhoods in the company of other children, two brothers for his father and one sister for his mother, and it didn’t seem fair that he should be the only person among the billions of people on earth who had to spend his life alone. He had no clear knowledge of how babies were produced, but he had learned enough to know they started inside the bodies of their mothers, and therefore mothers were essential to the operation, which meant that he would have to talk to his own mother about changing his status from only child to brother. The next morning, he brought up the subject by bluntly asking her if she could please get busy with the work of manufacturing a new baby for him. His mother stood there in silence for a couple of seconds, then lowered herself to her knees, looked him in the eyes, and began stroking his head. This was strange, he thought, not at all what he was expecting, and for a moment or two his mother looked sad, so sad that Ferguson instantly regretted having asked the question. Oh, Archie, she said. Of course you want a brother or a sister, and I’d love for you to have one, but it seems I’m done making babies and can’t have any more. I felt sorry for you when the doctor told me that, but then I thought, Maybe it’s not such a bad thing, after all. Do you know why? (Ferguson shook his head.) Because I love my little Archie so much, and how could I love another child when all the love I have in me is just for you?
It wasn’t just a temporary problem, he now realized, it was eternal. No siblings ever, and because that struck Ferguson as an intolerable state of affairs, he worked his way around the impasse by inventing an imaginary brother for himself. It was an act of desperation, perhaps, but surely something was better than nothing, and even if he couldn’t see or touch or smell that something, what other choice did he have? He called his newborn brother John. Since the laws of reality no longer applied, John was older than he was, older by four years, which meant that he was taller and stronger and smarter than Ferguson, and unlike Bobby George who lived down the street, chubby, big-boned Bobby, who breathed through his mouth because his nose was always clogged with wet green snot, John could read and write and was a champion baseball and football player. Ferguson made sure never to talk out loud to him when other people were in the room, for John was his secret, and he didn’t want anyone to know about him, not even his father and mother. He slipped up only once, but it turned out all right because the flub occurred when he happened to be with Francie. She had come to babysit that evening, and when she walked out into the backyard and heard him telling John about the horse he wanted for his next birthday, she asked him who he was talking to. Ferguson liked Francie so much that he told her the truth. He thought she might laugh at him, but Francie merely nodded, as if expressing her approval of the concept of imaginary brothers, and so Ferguson allowed her to talk to John as well. For months afterward, every time he saw Francie, she would first say hello to him in her normal voice and then bend down, put her mouth against his ear, and whisper: Hello, John. Ferguson was not yet five years old, but he already understood that the world consisted of two realms, the visible and the invisible, and that the things he couldn’t see were often more real than the things he could.
Two of the best places to visit were his grandfather’s office in New York and his father’s store in Newark. The office was on West Fifty-seventh Street, just one block from where his grandparents lived, and the first good thing about it was that it was on the eleventh floor, even higher than the apartment, which made looking out the window even more interesting than on West Fifty-eighth Street, for his gaze could travel far more deeply into the surrounding distance and take in many more buildings, not to speak of most of Central Park, and down on the street below the cars and taxis were so small that they resembled the toy cars he played with at home. The next good thing about the office was the big desks with the typewriters and adding machines on them. The sound of the typewriters sometimes made him think of music, especially when the bell rang at the end of a line, but it also made him think of hard rain falling on the roof of the house in Montclair and the sound of pebbles being thrown against a glass window. His grandfather’s secretary was a bony woman named Doris who had black hairs on her forearms and smelled of breath mints, but he liked it that she called him Master Ferguson and let him use her typewriter, which she referred to as Sir Underwood, and now that he was beginning to learn the letters of the alphabet, there was the satisfaction of being able to put his fingers on the keys of that heavy instrument and tap out a line of a’s and y’s, for example, or, if Doris wasn’t too busy, of asking her to help him write his name. The store in Newark was much bigger than the office in New York, and there were many more things in it, not just a typewriter and three adding machines in the back room, but row after row of small gadgets and large appliances and a whole area on the second floor for beds and tables and chairs, numberless numbers of beds and tables and chairs. Ferguson wasn’t supposed to touch them, but when his father and uncles were out of sight or had their backs turned to him, he would occasionally sneak open a refrigerator door to smell the peculiar smell inside or hoist himself onto a bed to test the bounce of the mattress, and even when he was caught doing those things, no one was terribly angry, except Uncle Arnold sometimes, who would snap at him and growl: Hands off the merchandise, sonny. He didn’t like being talked to in that way, and he especially didn’t like it when his uncle swatted him on the back of the head one Saturday afternoon because the sting had hurt so much he had cried, but now that he had overheard his mother say to his father that Uncle Arnold was a dope, Ferguson didn’t really care anymore. In any case, the beds and refrigerators never held his attention for long, not when there were the televisions to look at, the newly built Philcos and Emersons that reigned over all the other goods on display: twelve or fifteen models standing side by side against the wall to the left of the front door, all of them turned on with the sound off, and Ferguson liked nothing better than to switch the channels on the sets so that seven different programs were playing simultaneously, what a delirious swirl of mayhem that set in motion, with a cartoon on the first screen and a Western on the second screen and a soap opera on the third and a church service on the fourth and a commercial on the fifth and a newscaster on the sixth and a football game on the seventh. Ferguson would run back and forth from one screen to another, then spin around in a circle until he was almost dizzy, gradually moving away from the screens as he spun so that when he stopped he would be in a position to watch all seven of them at once, and seeing so many different things happen at the same time never failed to make him laugh. Funny, so funny it was, and his father let him do it because his father thought it was funny, too.
Most of the time, his father wasn’t funny. He worked long hours six days a week, the longest days being Wednesday and Friday, when the store didn’t close until nine o’clock, and on Sunday he slept until ten or ten-thirty and played tennis in the afternoon. His favorite command was: Listen to your mother. His favorite question was: Have you been a good boy? Ferguson tried to be a good boy and listen to his mother, although he sometimes fell down on the job and forgot to be good or to listen, but the lucky thing about those failures was that his father never seemed to notice. He was probably too busy to notice, and Ferguson was grateful for that, since his mother rarely punished him, even when he forgot to listen or be good, and because his father never yelled at him in the way Aunt Millie yelled at her children and never swatted him in the way Uncle Arnold sometimes swatted cousin Jack, F
erguson concluded that his branch of the Ferguson family was the best one, even if it was too small. Still, there were times when his father made him laugh, and because those times were few and far between, Ferguson laughed even harder than he might have laughed if they had happened more often. One funny thing was being thrown up in the air, and because his father was so strong and had such hard, bulging muscles, Ferguson flew up almost to the ceiling when they were indoors and even higher than that when they were in the backyard, and not once did it cross his mind that his father would drop him, which meant that he felt safe enough to open his mouth as wide as he could and fill the air with loud bellyfuls of laughter. Another funny thing was watching his father juggle oranges in the kitchen, and a third funny thing was hearing him fart, not just because farts were funny in themselves but because each time his father let out a fart in his presence, he would say: Whoops, there goes Hoppy—meaning Hopalong Cassidy, the cowboy on TV that Ferguson liked so much. Why his father would say that after he farted was one of the world’s great mysteries, but Ferguson loved it anyway, and he always laughed when his father said those words. Such an odd, interesting idea: to turn a fart into a cowboy named Hopalong Cassidy.
Not long after Ferguson’s fifth birthday, his Aunt Mildred married Henry Ross, a tall man with thinning hair who worked as a college professor, as did Mildred, who had finished her studies in English literature four years earlier and was teaching at a college called Vassar. Ferguson’s new uncle smoked Pall Malls (Outstanding—and they are mild) and seemed highly nervous, since he smoked more cigarettes in one afternoon than his mother did in an entire day, but what intrigued Ferguson most about Mildred’s husband was that he talked so quickly and used such long, complicated words that it was impossible to understand more than a fraction of what he was saying. Still, he struck Ferguson as a good-hearted fellow, with a jolly boom in his laugh and a bright glow in his eyes, and it was clear to him that his mother was happy with Mildred’s choice, since she never referred to Uncle Henry without using the word brilliant and repeatedly said that he reminded her of someone named Rex Harrison. Ferguson hoped his aunt and uncle would get cracking in the baby department and rapidly spew forth a little cousin for him. Imaginary brothers could take you just so far, after all, and perhaps an Adler cousin could turn into something like an almost-brother or, in a pinch, an almost-sister. For several months, he waited for the announcement, every morning expecting his mother to come into his room and tell him that Aunt Mildred was going to have a child, but then something happened, an unforeseen calamity that overturned all of Ferguson’s carefully worked-out plans. His aunt and uncle were moving to Berkeley, California. They were going to teach there and live there and were never coming back, which meant that even if they did produce a cousin for him, that cousin could never be turned into an almost-brother, since brothers and almost-brothers had to live nearby, preferably in one’s very house. When his mother took out a map of the United States and showed him where California was, he was so disheartened that he pounded his fist on Ohio, Kansas, Utah, and every other state between New Jersey and the Pacific Ocean. Three thousand miles. An impossible distance, so far away that it could have been in another country, another world.
It was one of the strongest memories he carried away from his boyhood: the trip to the airport in the green Chevrolet with his mother and Aunt Mildred on the day his aunt left for California. Uncle Henry had flown out there two weeks earlier, so it was just Aunt Mildred who was with them on that hot, humid day in mid-August, Ferguson riding in the back dressed in short pants, his scalp moist with sweat and his bare legs sticking to the imitation-leather seat, and although it was the first time he had been to an airport, the first time he had seen planes up close and could savor the immensity and beauty of those machines, the morning remained inside him because of the two women, his mother and her sister, the one dark and the other blond, the one with long hair and the other with short hair, each so different from the other that you had to study their faces for a while to understand they had come from the same two parents, his mother, who was so affectionate and warm, always touching and hugging you, and Mildred, who was so guarded and held back, rarely touching anyone, and yet there they were together at the gate for the Pan Am flight to San Francisco, and when the number of the flight was announced over the loudspeaker and the moment came to say good-bye, suddenly, as if by some hidden, predetermined signal, the two of them began to weep, tears were cascading from their eyes and dropping to the floor, and then their arms were around each other and they were hugging, weeping and hugging at the same time. His mother had never cried in front of him before, and until he saw it with his own eyes, he hadn’t even known that Mildred was capable of crying, but there they were weeping in front of him as they said good-bye to each other, both of them understanding that it could be months or years before they saw each other again, and Ferguson saw it as he stood below them in his five-year-old’s body, looking up at his mother and his aunt, stunned by the excess of emotion pouring out of them, and the image traveled to a place so deep inside him that he never forgot it.
In November of the following year, two months after Ferguson entered the first grade, his mother opened a photography studio in downtown Montclair. The sign above the front door said Roseland Photo, and life among the Fergusons suddenly took on a new, accelerated rhythm, beginning with the daily morning scramble to get one of them off to school on time and the other two into their separate cars to drive off to work, and with his mother now gone from the house five days a week (Tuesday through Saturday) there was a woman named Cassie who did the chores, cleaning and making beds and shopping for food and sometimes even making dinner for Ferguson when his parents worked late. He saw much less of his mother now, but the truth was that he needed her less. He could tie his own shoes, after all, and whenever he thought about the person he wanted to marry, he would hesitate between two potential candidates: Cathy Gold, the short girl with the blue eyes and long blond ponytail, and Margie Fitzpatrick, the towering redhead who was so strong and fearless that she could lift two boys off the ground at once.
The first person to sit for a portrait at Roseland Photo was the proprietor’s son. Ferguson’s mother had been aiming her camera at him for as long as he could remember, but those earlier pictures had been snapshots, and the camera she had used was small and light and portable, whereas the camera in the studio was much bigger and had to be mounted on a three-legged stand called a tripod. He liked the word tripod, which made him think of peas, his favorite vegetable, as in the expression two peas in a pod, and he was also impressed by how carefully his mother adjusted the lights before she began taking the pictures, which seemed to indicate she was in full command of what she was doing, and to see her working with such skill and assurance gave Ferguson a good feeling about his mother, who was suddenly no longer just his mother but someone who did important things out in the world. She made him wear nice clothes for the picture, which meant putting on his tweed sports jacket and his white shirt with the broad collar and no top button, and because Ferguson found it so enjoyable to be sitting there as his mother went about the business of getting the pose just right, he had no trouble smiling when she asked him to. His mother’s friend from Brooklyn was with them that day, Nancy Solomon, who had once been Nancy Fein and now lived in West Orange, funny Nancy with the buck teeth and the two little boys, his mother’s bosom buddy and therefore a person he had known all his life. His mother explained that after the photos were developed, one of them would be blown up to a very large size and transferred to canvas, which Nancy would then paint over, turning the photograph into a color portrait in oils. That was one of the services Roseland Photo was planning to offer its customers: not just black-and-white portraits, but oil paintings as well. Ferguson had trouble imagining how this could be done, but he figured Nancy would have to be an awfully good painter to pull off such a difficult transformation. Two Saturdays later, he and his mother left the house at eight o’clock in the mo
rning and drove to downtown Montclair. The street was nearly deserted, which meant there was a free parking space directly in front of Roseland Photo, but twenty or thirty yards before they came to a stop, his mother told Ferguson to shut his eyes. He wanted to ask her why, but just as he was about to open his mouth and speak, she said: No questions, Archie. So he shut his eyes, and when they pulled up in front of the studio, she helped him out of the car and led him by the hand to the place where she wanted him to be. All right, she said, you can open them now. Ferguson opened his eyes and found himself looking into the display window of his mother’s new establishment, and what he saw there were two large images of himself, each one measuring about twenty-four inches by thirty-six inches, the first one a black-and-white photograph and the second one an exact replica of the first only in color, with his sandy hair and gray-green eyes and red-flecked brown jacket looking much as they did in the real world. Nancy’s brushwork was so precise, so perfect in its execution, that he couldn’t tell if he was looking at a photograph or a painting. Some weeks passed, and with the pictures now on permanent display, strangers began to recognize him, stopping him on the street to ask if he wasn’t the little guy in the window of Roseland Photo. He had become the most famous six-year-old in Montclair, the poster boy for his mother’s studio, a legend.