4 3 2 1 Read online

  8) On the afternoon of the second, Stanley called Rose to tell her he wouldn’t be coming home for dinner that evening. He would be working late with Adelle, he said, going over the books in preparation for an audit that was scheduled for Friday, and chances were it would keep them busy until around midnight, so Rose shouldn’t bother to wait up for him. The store closed at five on Tuesdays, and by five-thirty everyone but Stanley was gone—Arnold, Mrs. Rosen, Ed and Phil, Charlie Sykes, Bob Dawkins, and the absent Lew, who had been too frightened to come to work that morning and had spent the day at home with a pretend fever. Bernstein’s men wouldn’t be turning up until one or two in the morning, and with several blank hours in front of him, Stanley decided to go out to dinner, indulging himself with a visit to his favorite Newark restaurant, Moishe’s, which specialized in Eastern European Jewish cuisine, the same food Stanley’s mother had cooked for him in the old days, boiled beef with horseradish, potato pirogen, gefilte fish, and matzo ball soup, the peasant delicacies of another time, another world, and Stanley had only to walk into the dining room at Moishe’s to be thrown back into his vanished childhood, for the restaurant itself was a throwback, a threadbare, inelegant place with cheap, plastic-laminated tablecloths and dusty light fixtures hanging from the ceiling, but each table was adorned with a blue-tinted or green-tinted seltzer bottle, a sight that for some reason never failed to provoke a small surge of happiness in him, and when he heard the grouchy, ill-mannered waiters talking in their Yiddish-inflected voices, that brought comfort to him as well, although he would have been hard-pressed to explain why. So Stanley dined on the dishes of his youth that night, starting with borscht and a dollop of sour cream, followed by a plate of pickled herring, and then on to a main course of flank steak (well-done) with cucumbers and potato pancakes on the side, and as he squirted jets of seltzer water into his clear ribbed glass and worked his way through the meal, he thought about his dead parents and his two impossible brothers, who had caused him so much heartache over the years, and also about his beautiful Rose, the person he loved most but not well enough, never well enough, a fact he had understood for some time now, and it pained him to admit there was something blocked and stifled about him, a flaw in his makeup that prevented him from giving her as much of himself as she deserved, and then there was the little boy, Archie, a pure conundrum that one, no doubt a lively, quick-thinking fellow, a boy above most other boys, but he had been his mother’s child from the start, so attached to her that Stanley had never managed to find a way in, and after seven and a half years he was still flummoxed by his inability to read what the boy was thinking, whereas Rose always seemed to know, as if by some inborn knowledge, some inexplicable power that burned in women but was rarely granted to men. It was unusual for Stanley to dwell on such matters, to drive his thoughts into himself and seek out his failings and sorrows, the torn threads of his patched-together life, but this was not a usual moment for him, and after two long weeks of silence and inner struggle, he was exhausted, barely capable of standing up anymore, and even when he could stand up, too unsteady to walk in a straight line, and once he had paid for his dinner and was driving back to 3 Brothers Home World, he wondered if his plan made any sense at all, if he hadn’t deluded himself into thinking it would work simply because he was right and Lew and the others were wrong, and if that was the case, perhaps he should just drive on home and let the store burn to the ground.

  9) He returned to the store a few minutes past eight. All dark, all still—the nightly nothingness of mute televisions and dozing Frigidaires, a cemetery of shadows. He had little doubt he would live to regret what he was doing, that his calculations were bound to go wrong, but he had no other ideas, and it was too late to think of another one now. He had started the business when he was eighteen, and for the past twenty-two years it had been his life, his one and only life, and he couldn’t let Lew and his band of crooks get away with destroying it, because there was more to this place than just a business, it was a man’s life, and that man’s life was the store, the store and the man were one, and if they set fire to the store, they would be setting fire to the man as well. A few minutes past eight. How many hours to go? At least four, perhaps as many as five or six, a long time to sit there doing nothing, waiting in a pitch-black room for a man to show up with his cans of gasoline and his book of killer matches, but there was no choice except to wait there in silence and hope the baseball bat was as strong as it looked. He settled into a chair in the back office, Mrs. Rosen’s chair, the one that belonged to the desk in the far corner, which had the best view through the narrow, rectangular window set in the wall between the office and the showroom, and from where he was sitting, he could see all the way to the front entrance, or would have been able to see it if the store hadn’t been in total darkness, but the gasoline man would surely be carrying a flashlight in his pocket, and once Stanley heard the front door open, the light would be turned on, even if only for a second or two, and then he would know where the man was. Immediately after that: throw on the overhead lights, burst out of the back room clutching the bat in his upraised hand, shout at the top of his voice, and order the man out of there. Such was the plan. Cross your fingers, Stanley, he said to himself, and if luck isn’t with you, then cross your heart and hope to die. Meanwhile, he went on sitting in Mrs. Rosen’s chair, which was mounted on wheels and could swivel from side to side and tip back and forth, a standard office chair, comfortable enough to sit in for a little while, but hardly a good spot for the long haul, long being the four or five hours that were still in front of him, and yet the more uncomfortable the better, Stanley reasoned, since a state of mild discomfort would help to keep him alert. Or so he thought, but as he sat there behind the gray metal desk, rocking back and forth in Mrs. Rosen’s chair, telling himself that this was the worst moment of his life, that he had never felt unhappier or more lonely than he did now, that even if he managed to get through the night in one piece, everything else had been smashed, hammered into dust by Lew’s betrayal, and after this night nothing would ever be the same, for now that he was betraying Lew, Bernstein would resort to his old threats, which would put Lew and Millie in danger again, and if anything happened to them it would be on Stanley’s head, he would have to live with it and die with it, and yet how could he not do what he was doing, how could he let himself get caught up in an insurance scam and risk going to jail, no, he couldn’t let them burn down the store, they had to be stopped, and as Stanley continued to think about these things, which were the same things he had been thinking about and thinking about for the past two weeks, he understood that he couldn’t take it anymore, that he had come to the limit of what was possible for him, that he was worn out, weary beyond all measure, so tired that he couldn’t bear to be in the world anymore, and little by little his eyes began to close, and before long he had stopped fighting to keep them open and had put his head down on his folded arms, which were lying on the desk in front of him, and two or three minutes after that he was asleep.

  10) He slept through the break-in and the subsequent dousing of the store with twelve gallons of gasoline, and because the man who had come to do the job had no idea that Stanley was sleeping in the back room, he lit the match that ignited 3 Brothers Home World with a guiltless conscience, knowing he was about to commit an act of arson but not that he would later be charged with manslaughter as well. As for Ferguson’s father, he never had a chance. By the time he opened his eyes, he was no more than half conscious, unable to move because of the vast clouds of smoke he had already inhaled, and as he struggled to lift his head and breathe some air into his scalded lungs, the fire was burning its way through the door of the back room, and once it had entered the room, it rushed over to the desk where Stanley was sitting and ate him alive.

  * * *

  THESE WERE THE things Ferguson did not know, the things he could not have known during the two years that separated his cousin’s death in the Korean War from his father’s death in the Newark fire.
By spring of the following year, his Uncle Lew was in prison, along with the gasoline man Eddie Schultz, his lookout accomplice George Ionello, and the mastermind of the operation, Ira Bernstein, but by then Ferguson and his mother had left the New Jersey suburbs and were living in New York, occupants of a three-bedroom apartment on Central Park West between Eighty-third and Eighty-fourth Streets. The photography studio in Millburn had been sold, and because his father’s life insurance policy had provided his mother with two hundred thousand tax-free dollars, there were no financial burdens, which meant that even in death, the loyal, pragmatic, ever-responsible Stanley Ferguson was continuing to support them.

  First, the shock of November third, and with it the spectacle of his mother’s tears, the onslaught of intense, smothering embraces, her gasping, shuddering body pressed against him, and then, some hours later, the arrival of his grandparents from New York, and the day after that the appearance of Aunt Mildred and her husband, Paul Sandler, and through it all the comings and goings of countless Fergusons, the two weeping aunts, Millie and Joan, the stone-faced Uncle Arnold, and even the treacherous, not-yet-exposed Uncle Lew, so much chaos and noise, a house with too many people in it, and Ferguson sat in a corner and watched, not knowing what to say or think, still too stunned to cry. It was unimaginable that his father should be dead. He had been alive the previous morning, sitting at the breakfast table with a copy of the Newark Star-Ledger in his hands, telling Ferguson it was going to be a cold day and he should remember to wear his scarf to school, and it made no sense that those were the last words his father would ever speak to him. Days passed. He stood in the rain beside his mother as they lowered his father into the ground and the rabbi intoned a dirge in incomprehensible Hebrew, such awful-sounding words that Ferguson wanted to cover his ears, and two days after that he returned to school, to fat Mrs. Costello and his second-grade class, but everyone seemed afraid of him, too embarrassed to talk to him anymore, as if an X had been stamped on his forehead to warn them not to come near, and even though Mrs. Costello kindly offered to let him skip the group lessons and sit at his desk reading whatever book he wanted, that only made things worse somehow, for he found it difficult to keep his mind on the books, which normally gave him so much pleasure, since his thoughts would invariably drift off from the words on the page to his father, not the father who was buried in the ground but the father who had gone to heaven, if there was such a place as heaven, and if his father was indeed there, was it possible that he was looking down on him now, watching him sit at his desk pretending to read? It would be nice to think that, Ferguson said to himself, but at the same time, what good would it do? His father would be glad to see him, yes, which would probably make the fact of being dead a bit less unbearable, but how could it help Ferguson to be seen if he himself couldn’t see the person who was looking at him? Most of all, he wanted to hear his father talk. That was what he missed above everything else, and even though his father had been a man of few words, a master in the art of giving short answers to long questions, Ferguson had always liked the sound of his voice, which had been a tuneful, gentle voice, and the thought that he would never hear it again filled him with an immense sadness, a sorrow so deep and so wide that it could have contained the Pacific Ocean, which was the largest ocean in the world. It’s going to be a cold day, Archie. Remember to wear your scarf to school.

  The world wasn’t real anymore. Everything in it was a fraudulent copy of what it should have been, and everything that happened in it shouldn’t have been happening. For a long time afterward, Ferguson lived under the spell of this illusion, sleepwalking through his days and struggling to fall asleep at night, sick of a world he had stopped believing in, doubting everything that presented itself to his eyes. Mrs. Costello asked him to pay attention, but he didn’t have to listen to her now, since she was only an actress trying to impersonate his teacher, and when his friend Jeff Balsoni made the extraordinary, uncalled-for sacrifice of giving Ferguson his Ted Williams baseball card, the rarest card among the hundreds in the Topps collection, Ferguson thanked him for the gift, put the card in his pocket, and then tore it up at home. It was possible to do such things now. Before November third, they would have been inconceivable to him, but an unreal world was much bigger than a real world, and there was more than enough room in it to be yourself and not yourself at the same time.

  According to what his mother later told him, she hadn’t been planning such a quick departure from New Jersey, but then the scandal broke, and suddenly there was no choice but to get out of there. Eleven days before Christmas, the Newark police announced that they had cracked the 3 Brothers Home World case, and by the next morning the ugly particulars were front-page news in every paper across Essex and Union Counties. Fratricide. Gambling Kingpin Arrested. Ex-Fireman Turned Firebug Held Without Bail. Louis Ferguson Indicted On Multiple Charges. His mother kept him home from school that day, and then the day after that, and the day after that, and every day until the school closed for Christmas vacation. It’s for your own good, Archie, she said to him, and because he couldn’t have cared less about not going to school, he didn’t bother to ask her why. Much later, when he was old enough to grasp the full horror of the word fratricide, he understood that she was trying to protect him from the vicious talk circulating around town, for his name was now a notorious name, and to be a Ferguson meant you belonged to a family that was damned. So the soon-to-be-eight-year-old Ferguson stayed at home with his grandmother as his mother went about the business of putting the family house on the market and searching for a photographer to buy her studio, and because the newspapers never stopped calling, asking, begging, harassing her to open up and give her side of the story, the latter-day Jacobean drama now known as the Ferguson Affair, his mother decided that enough was enough, and two days after Christmas, she packed up some suitcases, loaded them into the trunk of her blue Chevy, and the three of them drove to New York.

  For the next two months, he and his mother lived in his grandparents’ apartment on West Fifty-eighth Street, his mother back in the old bedroom she had once shared with her sister, Mildred, and Ferguson camped out in the living room on a small fold-up cot. The most interesting part of this temporary arrangement was that he didn’t have to go to school, an unexpected liberation caused by their lack of a fixed address, and until they found a place of their own, he would be a free man. Aunt Mildred opposed the idea of no school for him, but Ferguson’s mother calmly brushed her off. Don’t worry, she said. Archie is a bright kid, and a little time off won’t hurt him. Once we know where we’ll be living, we’ll start looking for a school. First things first, Mildred.