His grandfather returned from Florida with a deep tan, a dozen more pounds around his middle, and a crazy look in his eyes, which led Ferguson to wonder what naughty things the old man had been up to with the lotus-eaters in the Sunshine State. Nothing he wanted to hear about, that much was certain, and because his grandfather was on the list of relatives who had to be kept in the dark about his affair with Evie, the moment Benjy Adler returned to his New York apartment, their New York idyll came to an end. West Fifty-eighth Street was off-limits now, and with no substitute apartment available to them anywhere in the city, the only solution was to forget New York and spend those days and nights at Evie’s half-house in East Orange. It was a hard adjustment. No more plays or movies or dinners with friends, just the two of them together now for fifty uninterrupted hours every weekend, but what other choice did they have? They talked about renting a small studio apartment somewhere downtown, a cheap place that would give the city back to them without having to depend on wayward grandfathers or anyone else, but even cheap was more than they could afford.
* * *
THE DELAYED PERIOD in December, followed by clockwork blood flow in January, February, March, and April. Evie had told Ferguson not to think about it very often, but he suspected she was thinking about it a good deal more than very often, as many as fifty or sixty times a day, and after four months of no conception, of no sperm cell attaching itself to an ovum, of no zygote or blastula or embryo taking root in Evie’s body, she was beginning to exhibit signs of frustration. Ferguson told her not to worry, that these things often took time, and to underscore his point he mentioned the two long years it had taken his mother to become pregnant with him. He was only trying to help, but the thought of those two years was more than Evie could handle, and she shouted back at him: Are you out of your mind, Archie? What makes you think we have two years? We probably don’t have two months!
Four days later, she went to see her gynecologist for a thorough examination of her reproductive organs and to have blood drawn for detailed tests pertaining to her other organs as well. When the results came back on Thursday, she called Ferguson at Princeton and announced: I’m as healthy as an eighteen-year-old girl.
That begged the question: Was the nineteen-year-old Ferguson as healthy as an eighteen-year-old boy?
It can’t be me, he said. It’s not possible.
Nevertheless, Evie prevailed upon him to see a doctor—just in case.
Ferguson was scared. The idea of trying to plant a baby inside Evie was probably a foolish one, he admitted to himself, an act of unthinking love and misunderstood male pride that could lead to all sorts of wretched consequences in the long run, but whether he and Evie managed or didn’t manage to have a baby together was not what concerned him now. It was his own life, his own life and his own future that were at stake. Ever since he was a small boy, ever since the moment when his young boy self had understood the mysterious fact that he was a transitional creature who was destined to grow up and become a man, he had assumed he would become a father one day, that he would eventually produce little Fergusons who would grow up to become men and women themselves, a daydream he had always taken for granted as a future reality because that was how the world worked, little people developed into big people who in turn brought more little people into the world, and once you were old enough to do that, that was what you did. Even now, as a world-weary nineteen-year-old philosopher and defender of obscure books, it was something he continued to look forward to with great relish.
* * *
NEVER HAD JERKING off been less enjoyable than on the day he went to Dr. Breuler’s office on the outskirts of Princeton. Spilling his seed into a sanitized cup and then crossing his fingers that millions of potential babies were waltzing around in the slime. How many drunken sailors could dance on the head of a pin? How many pins did you need to hold yourself together?
The nurse scheduled a return visit for the following week.
When he showed up on the appointed day, Dr. Breuler said: Let’s do it one more time, just to make sure we know what we’re looking at.
The following week, when Ferguson returned for his third visit to the office, Dr. Breuler told him it was a condition that affected only seven percent of the male population, but a lower than normal sperm count seriously compromised a man’s ability to father a child, that is, fewer than fifteen million sperm per milliliter of semen or a total count of fewer than thirty-nine million per ejaculate, and Ferguson’s numbers were considerably below that.
Is there anything to be done? Ferguson asked.
No, I’m afraid not, Dr. Breuler said.
In other words, I’m sterile.
In the sense of not being able to produce children, yes.
It was time for Ferguson to go, but his body had begun to feel so heavy to him that he knew it would be impossible to lift himself out of the chair. He looked up and smiled wanly at Dr. Breuler, as if to apologize for not being able to move.
Don’t worry, the doctor said. In all other respects, you’re in perfect shape.
His life was only just getting started, Ferguson said to himself, his life hadn’t even begun, and the most essential part of him was already dead.
The Fall of the House of Ferguson.
No one, not one other ever to follow him, no one now or ever until the end of time.
A fall to the rank of footnote in The Book of Terrestrial Life, a man forever after to be known as The Last of the Fergusons.
6.1
Later on, which is to say one and two and three years later, whenever Ferguson looked back and thought about the things that happened between the fall of 1966 and Amy’s graduation at the beginning of June 1968, several events dominated his recollections, standing out vividly in spite of the time that had passed, whereas many others, if not most others, had been reduced to shadows: a mental painting composed of several areas bathed in an intense, clarifying light and other areas occluded by dimness, shapeless figures standing in murky brown corners of the canvas, and here and there splotches of all-black nothingness, the blackout dark of the black dormitory elevator.
The three other people who shared the apartment with them, for example, fellow students named Melanie, Fred, and Stu the first year, Alice, Alex, and Fred the second year, had no role to play in the story. They came and went, they read their books and cooked their meals, they slept in their beds and said hello when they popped out of the bathroom in the morning, but Ferguson barely took note of them and had trouble remembering their faces from one day to the next. Or the dreaded two-year science requirement, which he finally started tackling as a sophomore, enrolling in a course mockingly referred to as Physics for Poets and cutting nearly every class, completing his fake lab reports in a mad weekend rush with the help of one of Amy’s math friends from Barnard—a matter of no importance. Even his decision not to join the managing board of the Spectator did not weigh heavily in the narrative. It was a question of the hours, nothing more than that, nothing to do with a lack of interest, but Friedman, Mullhouse, Branch, and the others were putting in fifty- and sixty-hour weeks at the paper, and that was more than Ferguson was willing to commit himself to. Not one member of the board had a girlfriend—no time for love. Not one of them was writing or translating poetry—no time for literature. Not one of them was on top of his course work—no time for studying. Ferguson had already decided to go on with journalism after he graduated from college, but for now he needed Amy and his poets and his seminars on Montaigne and Milton, so he compromised by staying on as a reporter and associate member of the board, reporting much during those years and doing his once-a-week stint as the night man, which entailed going to the office at Ferris Booth Hall and composing headlines for the articles that would be printed in tomorrow morning’s paper, running the finished articles up to Angelo the typesetter on the fourth floor, retrieving the columns of type, pasting up the issue on boards, and then cabbing out to Brooklyn at around two A.M. to hand the boards to the prin
ter, who would produce twenty thousand copies, which would be delivered to the Columbia campus by midmorning. It was a process Ferguson enjoyed taking part in, but neither that nor his decision not to join the board was of any significance in the long run.
What counted, on the other hand, was that both of his grandparents died during those years, his grandfather in December 1966 (heart attack) and his grandmother in December 1967 (stroke).
What also counted was the Six-Day War (June 1967), but it came and went too quickly to count for much, while the race riots that broke out in Newark the following month, which lasted no longer than the war in the Middle East had, changed everything forever. One minute, his parents were celebrating the victory of the tiny, gallant Jews over their gargantuan enemies, and the next minute Sam Brownstein’s store on Springfield Avenue had been smashed and looted and Ferguson’s parents were folding up their tent and escaping into the desert, not just leaving Newark and New Jersey behind them but going all the way down to southern Florida by the end of the year.
Another illuminated spot on the canvas: April 1968 and the explosion at Columbia, the revolution at Columbia, the eight days that shook the world.
All the rest of the light in the painting shone on Amy. Darkness above and below her, darkness behind her, darkness on either side of her, but Amy enveloped in light, a light so strong that it nearly made her invisible.
* * *
FALL 1966. AFTER attending more than a dozen SDS meetings, after taking part in a three-day hunger strike on the steps of Low Library in early November to protest the killing in Vietnam, after trying to get her points across in numerous conversations with her fellow members at the West End, the Hungarian Pastry Shop, and the College Inn, Amy was growing disenchanted. They don’t listen to me, she said to Ferguson, as the two of them were brushing their teeth one night before going to bed. I stand up to speak, and they all look down at the floor, or else they interrupt and don’t let me finish, or else they let me finish and don’t say anything afterward, and then, fifteen minutes later, one of the guys stands up and says almost exactly what I just said, sometimes using the same words, and everyone applauds. They’re bullies, Archie.
All of them?
No, not all of them. My friends from the ICV are okay, although I wish they’d back me more, but the ones from the PL faction are insufferable. Especially Mike Loeb, the leader of the pack. He cuts me off constantly, shouts me down, insults me. He thinks women in the movement should be making coffee for the men or handing out leaflets on rainy days, but otherwise we should keep our mouths shut.
Mike Loeb. He’s been in a couple of my classes. Another boy from the Jersey suburbs, I’m sorry to say. One of those self-anointed geniuses who has an answer for everything. Mr. Certain in a plaid lumberjack shirt. A bore.
The funny thing is, he went to the same high school as Mark Rudd. Now they’re together again in SDS, and they barely talk to each other.
Because Mark is an idealist and Mike is a fanatic.
He thinks the revolution is coming within the next five years.
Fat chance.
The problem is that the men outnumber the women by about twelve to one. We’re too small, and it’s easy to discount us.
Why not break away and form your own group?
You mean, quit SDS?
You don’t have to quit. Just stop going to the meetings.
And?
And you become the first president of Barnard Women for Peace and Justice.
What a thought.
You don’t like it?
We’d be marginalized. The big issues are all university issues, national issues, world issues, and twenty braless girls marching around with anti-war posters wouldn’t have much of an effect.
What if there were a hundred of you?
There aren’t. We just don’t have enough people to get noticed. For better or worse, I think I’m stuck.
* * *
DECEMBER 1966. NOT only was the heart attack that killed Ferguson’s grandfather unexpected (his cardiograms had been holding steady for years, his blood pressure was normal), but the manner of his death was an embarrassment to everyone in the family, a disgrace. It wasn’t that his wife or daughters or sons-in-law or grandson were unaware of his penchant for skirt chasing, his long fascination with extramarital thrills, but not one of them suspected that the seventy-three-year-old Benjy Adler would go so far as to rent an apartment for a woman less than half his age and keep her as his full-time, live-in mistress. Didi Bryant was just thirty-four. She had been hired as a secretary at Gersh, Adler, and Pomerantz in 1962, and after she had been working there for eight months Ferguson’s grandfather decided that he loved her, decided that no matter what the cost he must and would possess her, and when the sweet, curvy, Nebraska-born Didi Bryant told him she was willing to be possessed, the cost included the monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment on East Sixty-third Street between Lexington and Park, sixteen pairs of shoes, twenty-seven dresses, six coats, one diamond bracelet, one gold bracelet, one pearl necklace, eight pairs of earrings, and one mink stole. The affair lasted approximately three years (quite happily, according to Didi Bryant), and then, on a frigid afternoon in early December, at an hour when Ferguson’s grandfather was supposedly at his office on West Fifty-seventh Street, he walked over to Didi’s place on East Sixty-third, climbed into bed with her, and suffered the immense coronary infarction that killed him just as he was ejaculating for the last time in his eventful, sloppily managed, mostly enjoyable life. La petite mort and la grande mort within ten seconds of each other—coming and going in the space of three short breaths.
It was, to be sure, an awkward business, a complex business. The horrified Didi pinned under the weight of her corpulent lover, staring at the top of his bald head and the few strands of hair that remained around the temples, which were dyed brown (O, the vanity of old men), extricating herself out from under the corpse and then calling for an ambulance, which conveyed her and the shrouded body of Ferguson’s grandfather to Lenox Hill Hospital, where, at 3:52 P.M., Benjamin Adler was pronounced dead on arrival, and then the poor, shaken Didi had to call Ferguson’s grandmother, who knew nothing about the young woman’s existence, and tell her to come to the hospital right away because there had been an accident.
The funeral was restricted to the immediate family. No Gershes or Pomerantzes were invited, no friends, no business associates, not even Ferguson’s great-aunt and great-uncle from California (his grandmother’s older brother, Saul, and his Scottish wife, Marjorie). The scandal had to be suppressed, and a large public gathering would have been too much for his grandmother to cope with, so just eight people made the trip out to the cemetery in Woodbridge, New Jersey, to attend his grandfather’s burial: Ferguson and his parents, Amy, Great-aunt Pearl, Aunt Mildred and Uncle Henry (who had flown in from Berkeley the day before), and Ferguson’s grandmother. They listened to the rabbi recite the Kaddish, they tossed dirt onto the pine box in the grave, and then they returned to the apartment on West Fifty-eighth Street for lunch, after which they repaired to the living room and spread out into three separate groups, three separate conversations that went on until it was well past dark: Amy on the sofa with Aunt Mildred and Uncle Henry, Ferguson’s father and Great-aunt Pearl in the armchairs across from the sofa, and Ferguson at the little table in the alcove by the front windows with his mother and grandmother. For once, his grandmother did most of the talking. After all the years of sitting in silence while her husband held forth with his nonstop jokes and rambling stories, it was as if she were finally claiming her right to speak for herself, and what she said that afternoon astonished Ferguson, not only because the words themselves were astonishing but because it was astonishing to learn how thoroughly he had misjudged her all his life.
The first astonishment was that she bore no resentment against Didi Bryant, whom she described as that pretty girl in tears. And how brave of her, his grandmother said, not to have run off and disappeared into the nigh
t, as most people in her situation would have done, but this girl was different, she had stuck around the lobby of the hospital until THE WIFE showed up and had not been embarrassed to talk about her affair with Benjy or how fond of him she had been or what a sad, sad thing it was that had just happened. Rather than blame Didi for Benjy’s death, Ferguson’s grandmother pitied her and called her a good person, and at one point, when Didi broke down and started to sob (this was the second astonishment), she had said to her: Don’t cry, dear. I’m sure you made him happy, and my Benjy was a man who needed to be happy.
There was something heroic in that response, Ferguson felt, a depth of human understanding that overturned everything he had ever thought about his grandmother until that moment, and then she shifted slightly in her chair and looked directly at his mother, her eyes tearing up for the first time all day, and a moment later she was talking about things no one from her generation ever talked about, flatly asserting that she had failed her husband, that she had been a bad wife to him because the physical part of marriage had never interested her, she had found sexual intercourse painful and unpleasant, and after the girls were born she had told Benjy that she couldn’t do it anymore, or only every now and then as a favor to him, and what could you expect, she asked Ferguson’s mother, of course Benjy chased after other women, he was a man with large appetites, and how could she hold that against him when she had let him down and done such a miserable job in the bed department? In every other way she had loved him, for forty-seven years he was the only man in her life, and believe me, Rose, not for one minute did I ever feel he didn’t love me back.
* * *
JUNE 1967. IT all came down to a question of money. When Ferguson’s mother told him in late January that his father was covering the costs of Columbia and the apartment and the food, books, and extras allowance by cashing in portions of his life insurance policy every six months, Ferguson understood that he would have to start contributing something more than the minimum-wage crumbs he had been given as a bookstore clerk last summer, that he owed it to his parents to kick in whatever additional amounts he could earn as a gesture of good faith, of thanks.