The troops pulled out on the seventeenth, and by the time the last tank left the city, the war was over.
Everything else was over as well, at least for the Jews of Weequahic, who seemed to be of one mind with Ferguson’s father about what had happened, and within six months nearly every family in the area was gone, some of them moving to nearby Elizabeth, others heading to the suburbs of Essex and Morris Counties, and a neighborhood that had once been all Jews had no Jews in it anymore. How odd that most of the parents and grandparents of the black people who lived in Newark had come up from the South during the Great Migration between the wars, and now, because his mother’s photographs of the riots had made a certain mark in the world and she had been offered a new job at the Miami Herald, his parents were trading places with their black neighbors and heading south themselves.
It was terrible to see them go.
* * *
FALL 1967. SOMETHING about the sunlight or the starlight or the moonbeams in California had brightened the color of Amy’s hair and darkened the color of her skin, and she returned to New York with paler, blonder eyebrows and lashes and a more tawny glow radiating from her cheeks, arms, and legs, the gold-brown of a freshly baked muffin or a slice of warm, buttery toast. Ferguson wanted to eat her up. After two and a half months of celibate agony, he couldn’t get enough of her, and because she too had starved herself for the entire summer, playing the role of what she called a no-fun nun, she was in an uncommonly arousable state, ready to give him as much as he was ready to give her, and Ferguson, who understood now that he had inherited most if not all of his grandfather’s large appetites, was prepared to give her everything he had, which he did, and which Amy did with everything she had as well, and for three consecutive days after she came back to the apartment on West 111th Street, they camped out on the double bed in her room and reacquainted themselves with the unknown force that held them together.
Nevertheless, certain things had changed, and not all of them were to Ferguson’s liking. For one thing, Amy had fallen in love with California, or at least the Bay Area part of California, and the girl who would never leave New York was now actively considering whether she should apply to law school at Berkeley for next year. Law was not the issue. Ferguson was all for her becoming a lawyer, which was something they had discussed many times in the past, a poor people’s lawyer, an activist lawyer, a profession that would allow her to do more good in the world than someone who organized anti-war demonstrations or rent strikes against greedy, irresponsible landlords, since the war was bound to end one day (she hoped) and it would be far more satisfying to put greedy landlords in jail than to beg them to turn on the heat or exterminate the rats or get rid of the lead paint. By all means become a lawyer—but California, what was she talking about? Didn’t she remember that he would still be in New York next year? Being apart for the summer had been bad enough, but a whole year of it would drive him crazy. And what made her assume he would want to follow her to California after he graduated? Couldn’t she go to a sensible law school like Columbia or NYU or Fordham and stay on in the apartment with him? Why make everything so fucking complicated?
Archie, Archie, don’t get carried away. It’s only speculation at this point.
I’m stunned that you would even consider it.
You don’t know what it’s like out there. After two weeks, I stopped thinking about New York and was glad not to think about it. I felt I was home.
That’s not what you used to say. New York is it, remember?
I was sixteen when I said that, and I’d never been to Berkeley or San Francisco. Now, as an old woman of twenty, I’ve changed my mind. New York is a stinkhole.
Granted. But not every part of it. We could always move to another neighborhood.
Northern California is the most beautiful place in America. As beautiful as France, Archie. Don’t take my word for it if you don’t want to. See it for yourself.
I’m kind of busy right now.
Christmas vacation. We could go out there during winter break.
Fine. But even if I think it’s the best place in the world, that still won’t solve the problem.
What problem?
The problem of one year apart.
We’ll get through it. It won’t be so hard.
I’ve just been through the loneliest, most wretched summer of my life. It was hard, Amy, very hard, so hard that I almost couldn’t take it. A whole year would probably destroy me.
All right, it was hard. But I also think it was good for us. Being alone, sleeping alone, missing each other, and writing letters—I think it made us a stronger couple.
Ha.
I really do love you, Archie.
I know you do. But sometimes I think you love your future more than you love the idea of being with me.
* * *
DECEMBER 1967. THEY never made it out to California that winter because Ferguson’s grandmother died, died from the same sort of abrupt inner explosion that had killed his grandfather the year before, and the trip had to be canceled so they could attend yet another burial ceremony in Woodbridge, New Jersey. Then followed a frantic week in which many hands took part in disposing of his grandmother’s possessions and cleaning out her flat, which had to be accomplished in record time because Ferguson’s parents were on the verge of moving to Florida, so everyone pulled together to chip in and help, Ferguson of course but also Amy, who wound up doing more than anyone else, and Nancy Solomon and her husband, Max, and Bobby George, who had been discharged from the army and was back in Montclair getting himself into shape for spring training, and even Didi Bryant, who had formed a friendship with Ferguson’s grandmother after his grandfather’s death and cried for her just as hard as she had cried for him (who in his right mind would ever contend that life made sense?), and Ferguson’s mother needed the help because she was so distraught, shedding more tears that week than the sum total of tears Ferguson had seen her shed from his boyhood until now, and Ferguson too felt an overpowering sadness take hold of him, not just because he had lost his grandmother, which was sorrow enough, but also because he hated to see what was happening to the apartment, the slow dismantling of the rooms where one object after another was being wrapped up in newspapers and put into cardboard boxes, all the things that had been a part of his life since before he could remember being alive, the crummy little knickknacks he had played with on his hands and knees as a kid, his grandmother’s ivory elephants and the green-glass hippopotamus, the yellowing lace doily under the telephone in the hall, his grandfather’s pipes and empty humidors, which he had loved sticking his nose into for a deep whiff of the acrid tobacco smells left behind by long-vanished cigars, all gone now, forever gone now, and the worst of it was that his grandmother had been planning to go down to Florida with his parents and move into the new apartment in Miami Beach with them, and even though she had claimed to be looking forward to it (You’ll come down to visit me, Archie, and we’ll go out for breakfast at Wolfie’s on Collins Avenue and have scrambled eggs with lox and onions), he suspected that the thought of leaving the apartment after so many years had terrified her, and perhaps she had willed herself to have the stroke because she simply couldn’t face it.
The last thing on Ferguson’s mind just then was the money, he who rarely stopped thinking and worrying about money in the day-to-day course of his own life had neglected to think about the question of estates and the financial consequences that followed from a person’s death, but his grandfather had earned considerable gobs of money during his long years at Gersh, Adler, and Pomerantz, and even though large chunks of those gobs had been squandered on Didi Bryant and her predecessors, Ferguson’s grandmother had inherited more than half a million dollars after her husband’s death, and now that she herself had died, that money was passed on to her two daughters, Mildred and Rose, each of whom was given half according to the terms of the will, and once the estate taxes had been paid, Ferguson’s aunt and mother were both two hundred thousan
d dollars richer than they had been before their mother’s fatal stroke. Two hundred thousand dollars! It was such an outrageous sum that Ferguson laughed when his mother called from Florida in late January and told him the news, and then he laughed even harder when she announced that half of her half would be going to him.
Your father and I have gone over this very carefully, she said, and we think it’s only fair that you should get something now. The number we came up with was twenty thousand. The other eighty we’ll invest for you, so if and when you’re ever in a spot where you might need to have some of it, the eighty will be more than eighty. You’re a big boy now, Archie, and we figured twenty would be enough to get you through your last three semesters of college with a nice bit left over for the beginning of your so-called real life, a six- or eight-thousand dollar cushion, which will give you a chance to go for a job you really want rather than one you feel you have to take because you’re desperate for money. Besides, this will make things easier for us old folks down in Miami Beach. Your father won’t have to send you monthly checks anymore for your rent and allowance, he won’t have to think about paying the tuition anymore, everything will be simpler for all of us, and from now on you’ll be in charge.
What have I done to deserve this? Ferguson asked.
Nothing. But what did I do to deserve the money in the first place? Nothing. It’s just the way it is, Archie. People die, and the world goes on, and whatever we can do to help each other out, well, that’s what we do, isn’t it?
* * *
JANUARY 1968. BECAUSE Amy was a person who never backed down after she had made up her mind about something, she stuck to her guns and sent off an application to Berkeley Law, and because Ferguson knew she was bound to get in and would decide to go there once they accepted her, even though she would also be accepted by Columbia and Harvard, he tried to comfort himself by thinking about the money, which would allow him to travel to California to see her for short visits, sometimes for long visits if she chose not to return to New York for Christmas and/or spring vacation, and in that way perhaps it would be possible to get through the year without feeling crushed by her absence. Not likely, he thought, but at least the money gave him a chance now, whereas before the money he had been utterly without hope.
Beyond that, the interesting thing about the money was how little it affected the outward circumstances of his life. He hesitated a bit less now about buying the books and records he wanted, he tended to replace worn-out clothes and shoes a bit more readily than he had in the past, and whenever he wanted to surprise Amy with a present (flowers mostly, but also books, records, and earrings), he could give in to the impulse without any second thoughts. Otherwise, not much had changed. He continued going to his classes and writing articles for the Spectator and translating French poems, and he kept on frequenting his usual inexpensive haunts—the West End, the Green Tree, and Chock Full o’Nuts—but on the inside, deep down in the submerged mental chamber where Ferguson lived alone in silent communion with his own consciousness, one thing was vastly different now. Thousands of dollars were sitting in his account at the First National City Bank on the corner of West 110th Street and Broadway, and just knowing they were there, even if he had no particular desire to spend them, relieved him of the obligation to think about money seven hundred and forty-six times a day, which in the end was just as bad if not worse than not having enough money, for those thoughts could be excruciating and even murderous, and not having to think them anymore was a blessing. That was the one true advantage of having money over not having money, he decided—not that you could buy more things with it but that you no longer had to walk around with that infernal thought bubble hanging over your head.
* * *
EARLY 1968. FERGUSON saw the situation as a series of concentric circles. The outer circle was the war and all that went with it: American soldiers in Vietnam, enemy combatants from the North and the South (Vietcong), Ho Chi Minh, the government in Saigon, Lyndon Johnson and his cabinet, U.S. foreign policy since the end of World War II, body counts, napalm, burning villages, hearts and minds, escalation, pacification, peace with honor. The second circle represented America, the two hundred million on the home front: the press (newspapers, magazines, radio, television), the anti-war movement, the pro-war movement, the Black Power movement, the counterculture movement (hippies and Yippies, pot and LSD, rock and roll, the underground press, Zap Comix, the Merry Pranksters, the Motherfuckers), the Hard Hats and the Love-It-or-Leave-It crowd, the empty air occupied by the so-called generation gap between middle-class parents and their children, and the vast throng of nameless citizens who would come to be known as the Silent Majority. The third circle was New York, which was almost identical to the second circle but more immediate, more vivid: a laboratory filled with examples of the aforementioned social currents that Ferguson could perceive directly with his own eyes rather than through the filter of written words or published images, all the while taking into account the nuances and particularities of New York itself, which was different from all the other cities in the United States, especially because of the enormous divide between rich and poor. The fourth circle was Columbia, Ferguson’s temporary abode, the close-to-hand little world that surrounded him and his fellow students, the encompassing ground of an institution no longer walled off from the big world outside it, for the walls had come down and the outside was now indistinguishable from the inside. The fifth circle was the individual, each individual person in any one of the four other circles, but in Ferguson’s case the individuals who counted most were the ones he knew personally, above all the friends he shared his life with at Columbia, and above all those others, of course, the individual of individuals, the dot at the center of the smallest of the five circles, the person who was himself.
Five realms, five separate realities, but each one was connected to the others, which meant that when something happened in the outer circle (the war), its effects could be felt throughout America, New York, Columbia, and every last dot in the inner circle of private, individual lives. When the war escalated in the spring of 1967, for example, half a million people marched in the streets of New York on April fifteenth to condemn the war and call for the immediate withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. Five days after that, on the Columbia campus uptown, three hundred members of SDS showed up at John Jay Hall “to ask some questions” of the marine recruiters who had set up their tables in the lobby and were attacked by a charging gang of fifty jocks and NROTC boys, which led to a bloody scuffle of flying fists and bashed-in noses that had to be broken up by the police. The following afternoon, the largest demonstration at Columbia in over thirty years was held in the Van Am quadrangle between John Jay and Hamilton Halls as eight hundred members and supporters of SDS protested marine recruiting on campus and five hundred pro-marine jock hecklers threw eggs at them from the other side of the fence on South Field in their own counterdemonstration. Ferguson and Amy had both been involved in that hectic scene, she as a participant and he as a witness-reporter, and when he told her about his concentric circles theory that night at the West End, she smiled at him and said, But of course, my dear Holmes, how clever of you.
The point was that no one was happy on either side. The pro-war people were becoming more and more frustrated by Johnson’s failure to win the war, and the anti-war people were becoming more and more frustrated by their failure to force Johnson to end the war. Meanwhile, the war continued to grow, five hundred thousand troops, five hundred and fifty thousand troops, and the bigger it became the more the outer circle pressed in on the other circles, squeezing them ever more tightly together, and before long the spaces between them had shrunk to the merest slivers of air, which was making it hard for the lone ones trapped in the center to breathe, and when a person can’t breathe he starts to panic, and panic is something close to craziness, a feeling that you have lost your mind and are about to die, and by early 1968 Ferguson was beginning to feel that everyone had gone crazy, as crazy a
s the crazy people who talked out loud to themselves on Broadway, and bit by bit he had become as crazy as everyone else.
Then, in those early months of the new year, everything began to snap. The shock attacks by Vietcong sapper-commandos on more than a hundred South Vietnamese cities and towns during the Tet Offensive of January thirtieth proved that America could never win the war, even though American troops fought back and overwhelmed the enemy in every battle of the offensive, killing thirty-seven thousand Vietcong compared to the two thousand lost by the U.S., with tens of thousands of other Vietcong fighters either wounded or captured and half a million South Vietnamese civilians turned into homeless refugees. The message to the American public was that the North Vietnamese would never give up, that they would go on fighting until the last person in their country was dead, and how many more American soldiers would it take to destroy that country, would the five hundred thousand already there have to be increased to a million, to two million, to three million, and if so, would the destruction of North Vietnam not also mean the destruction of America? Two months later, Johnson appeared on television and announced that he would not be running for reelection in the fall. It was an admission of failure, an acknowledgment that public support for the war had eroded to such a point that his policies had been rejected, and Ferguson, who had admired the good Johnson of the War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and had loathed the bad Johnson of Vietnam, found himself in the uncomfortable position of feeling sorry for the president of the United States, at least for a minute or two as he tried to put himself in the head of Lyndon Johnson and experience the anguish he must have felt in deciding to abdicate his throne, and then Ferguson felt glad, both glad and relieved that LBJ would soon be gone.