4 3 2 1

  * * *

  THE SECOND PART of what happened next had everything to do with Gordon DeWitt and the myth of the Princeton brotherhood.

  The Walt Whitman Scholars luncheon was held each year during the first week of the fall semester, and Ferguson had attended two of them so far, once as a freshman and once as a sophomore. Standing up to take a bow as one of the original four the first year, standing up to take another bow when the ranks expanded to eight the second year, a three-course chicken lunch in the faculty club dining room punctuated by short addresses from university president Robert F. Goheen and other Princeton officials, hopeful, idealistic remarks about young American manhood and the future of the country, precisely what one would have expected to hear at such gatherings, but Ferguson had been impressed by some of the things DeWitt had said at the first of those affairs, or at least by the awkward and sincere way in which he had said them, not only about how he believed that every boy deserved a chance, no matter how humble his background but also about his own memories of coming to Princeton as a public high school kid from a poor family and how out of place he had felt in the beginning, which had struck a chord in the still out-of-place Ferguson, who at the time he heard those words had been on campus for just three days. The next year, DeWitt had stood up and delivered an almost identical speech—but with one fundamental addition. He had mentioned the war in Vietnam, emphasizing the obligation of all Americans to pull together in the effort to push back the tide of communism and harshly attacking the growing numbers of young people and deluded anti-American leftists who were against the war. DeWitt stood with the hawks, but what else could one expect from a Wall Street sharpshooter who had made millions serving in the trenches of American capitalism? On top of that, he was a graduate of the same university that had educated John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, the two men who had invented the Cold War as secretary of state and director of the C.I.A. under Eisenhower, and if not for what those two had done in the fifties, America wouldn’t have been fighting against North Vietnam in the sixties.

  Still and all, Ferguson was happy to accept DeWitt’s money, and in spite of their political differences, he rather liked the man himself. Short and compact, with thick eyebrows, clear brown eyes, and a square jaw, he had pumped Ferguson’s hand vigorously the first time they met, wishing him all the luck in the world as he embarked on his collegiate adventure, and the second time, when Ferguson’s first-year performance had become a matter of record, DeWitt had called him by his first name. Keep up the good work, Archie, he had said, I’m very proud of you. Ferguson was one of his boys now, and DeWitt took a keen interest in his boys and was following their progress closely.

  The morning after the trial, Ferguson said good-bye to his friends in Vermont and drove back to New York. The enervations of the past three weeks had worn him down and left him with much to think about. The violent scene in the bar, the violence in Newark, the strong, tactile memory of the handcuffs pressing against his wrists, the ache in his stomach during the trial, Luther’s sudden but not impetuous decision to make a new life for himself in Montreal, and Amy, poor, ravaged Amy sprinting madly toward the car. There was his book to think about as well, the book he was hoping he would be able to write, and bit by bit he settled in again and began to take comfort from his room and his desk and his long talks on the phone with Celia at night. On August eleventh, his mother called to tell him that a letter from the Walt Whitman Scholars Program had turned up in the mail that afternoon. Did he want her to read it to him over the phone or should she forward it to East Eighty-ninth Street? Assuming it was nothing of any importance, most likely a message from Mrs. Tommasini, the program’s secretary, with information about the date and time of the upcoming September luncheon, Ferguson told his mother not to waste her breath and to send it on to him the next time she had to stop in at the post office. A full week went by before the letter made it to New York, but on the morning of the day it arrived, Friday, August eighteenth, Ferguson left for Woods Hole on a Trailways bus (the Pontiac was in the shop for minor repairs), and consequently it was not until he returned from his visit with Celia on Monday the twenty-first that Ferguson opened the envelope and received his second punch to the face that summer.

  The letter wasn’t from Mrs. Tommasini but from Gordon DeWitt, a one-paragraph letter from the founder of the Walt Whitman Scholars Program in which Ferguson was told that a number of distressing facts had recently been brought to his attention (DeWitt’s attention) by a former Princeton classmate, Judge William T. Burdock of Brattleboro, Vermont, concerning a barroom fight in which he (Ferguson) had been responsible for breaking a man’s nose, and although legally he had been judged to have acted in self-defense, morally he had behaved in a most reprehensible manner, since there was no defense for his having entered such an unsavory establishment in the first place, and the mere fact that he had been there cast alarming doubts on his ability to assess right from wrong. As Ferguson well knew, all participants in the Walt Whitman Scholars Program had to sign a character oath in which they promised to act as gentlemen in any and all situations, to take it upon themselves to become models of good conduct and civic virtue, and because Ferguson had failed to keep the promise he had made, it was his sad duty (DeWitt’s sad duty) to inform him that his scholarship had been revoked. Ferguson could remain at Princeton as a student in good standing if he chose to remain, but his tuition and room-and-board fees would no longer be funded by the Program. Regretfully but sincerely yours …

  * * *

  FERGUSON PICKED UP the phone and dialed the number of DeWitt’s Wall Street office. Sorry, the secretary said, Mr. DeWitt is traveling in Asia and won’t be back until September tenth.

  No use calling Nagle. Nagle and his wife were in Greece.

  Was it possible to cover the costs himself? No, not possible. He had written a check to McBride for five thousand dollars, and his account now stood at just over two thousand. Not enough.

  Ask his mother and Dan to pay for it? No, he didn’t have the heart to do that. His mother’s calendar and datebook project was finished now, and Phil Costanza, Dan’s Tommy the Bear collaborator for the past sixteen years, had been flattened by a stroke and would probably never work again. Not the best moment to be asking for favors.

  Throw in his two thousand and ask them to make up the difference? Perhaps. But what about next year, when the two thousand would be gone?

  Throwing in the two thousand would also mean having to give up the apartment. A gruesome thought: no more New York.

  And yet, if he didn’t go back to Princeton, he would lose his student deferment. That would mean the draft, and because he would refuse to serve if and when he was called up, the draft would mean jail.

  Another college? A less expensive college? But which one, and how in the world could he swing a transfer with so little time left?

  He had no idea what to do.

  One thing was certain: they didn’t want him anymore. They had decided he was no good and had kicked him out.

  7.1

  After he returned from Florida, he packed up his things and moved four blocks south to an apartment on West 107th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue. Two rooms plus kitchen for the extravagant yet wholly affordable sum of one hundred and thirty dollars a month (there were benefits to having money in the bank), but even though he preferred living without roommates and was glad to have left behind the haunted interiors of West 111th Street (a necessary act), sleeping alone was difficult. The top pillow was either too firm or too soft, the bottom pillow was either too flat or too lumpy, and every night the sheets scratched his arms or twisted themselves around his legs, and with no Amy beside him anymore to lull him into drowsiness with the placid motions of her breathing, his muscles couldn’t relax, his lungs refused to slow down, and he couldn’t stop his mind from running at a speed that churned out fifty-two thoughts per minute, one for every card in the deck. How many cigarettes smoked at two-thirty in the morning? How many g
lasses of red wine drunk past midnight to quell the jitters and induce his eyes to shut? Neck-aches nearly every morning. Stomach cramps in the afternoon. Shortness of breath in the evening. And morning, noon, and night: a heart that beat too fast.

  It wasn’t about Amy anymore. He had spent the summer reconciling himself to the fact of their separation, to the inevitability of their splitting apart for good, and he no longer blamed her or even blamed himself. They had been moving in opposite directions for close to a year, and sooner or later the filament that had been holding them together was bound to snap. Snap it did, and so big and so powerful was the snap that it had shot her clear across the country. California. The calamity of distant California, and since the beginning of May, not a single word from her or about her—a zero as large as a hole in the sky.

  At his strongest moments, he could tell himself that it was all for the best, that the person Amy had become was no longer a person he could live with or want to live with, and therefore he should regret nothing. At his weakest moments, he missed her, missed her in the same way he had missed his two severed fingers after the crash, and now that she was gone, it often felt as if another part of his body had been stolen from him. When he stood in the middle ground between strongest and weakest, he prayed that someone else would come along to occupy the other half of his bed and cure him of his insomnia.

  New digs, the dream of a new love, the long summer of work on his translations that persisted through the fall, winter, and spring, the somatic troubles caused by the loss of his old love and/or his current state of mind that eventually landed him in the emergency room at St. Luke’s Hospital with twenty-seven daggers in his gut (not the burst appendix he had thought it was but an attack of gastritis), the ongoing mayhem in Vietnam coupled with numerous other shocks that occurred throughout the latter half of 1968 and the first half of 1969—they were all part of Ferguson’s story—but for now attention must be drawn to the war he was fighting against the symbolic figure of Nobodaddy, the character invented by William Blake who stood in Ferguson’s mind as the representative of the irrational men who had been put in charge of running the world. By mid-September, when he went back to Columbia for his last year of college, he was feeling disillusioned and bitter about most things, among them the things he had discovered concerning the manipulations of the American press, and now he was reconsidering whether he wanted to join the ranks of that fraternity after he left college, whether the decision he had made back in high school to become a professional journalist was still worth making in light of the corruption and dishonesty he had witnessed firsthand during the days of the Columbia revolt last spring. The New York Times had lied. The so-called paper of record, the supposed bastion of ethical, unbiased reporting, had faked its story about the police intervention on April thirtieth and had published an account of the events that was written before those events ever took place. A. M. Rosenthal, the deputy managing editor of the Times, had been tipped off by someone in the Columbia administration about the impending bust several hours before the T.P.F. showed up in the neighborhood, and with the knowledge that one thousand troops would be called in, the lead story on the front page of the early morning edition on April thirtieth announced that those one thousand men had cleared the occupied buildings of the demonstrating students and had arrested seven hundred of them on charges of criminal trespass (a number that had been plugged in at the last minute, after the article had been written), but not one word about what had really happened, not one word about the bloodshed and violence, not one word about the battered students and professors, and not one word about how the police had used handcuffs and nightsticks to pound one of the Times’ own reporters in Avery Hall. In the next morning’s paper, the front-page lead again failed to mention the police riot that had taken place on campus during the bust, although there was a modest story about alleged acts of police brutality hidden on page 35: LINDSAY ORDERS REPORT ON POLICE. The third paragraph of the article contended that “police brutality in such a situation is hard to define, as the remarks of dozens of Columbia students suggest. To an experienced antiwar or civil rights demonstrator, yesterday morning’s police action on the Columbia campus was, for the most part, relatively gentle.” The sadistic beating of Times reporter Robert McG. Thomas Jr. was not mentioned until the eleventh paragraph.

  Dozens of students. But which students, Ferguson wanted to know, and what were their names? And who were the experienced veterans of the anti-war and civil rights movements who had been roughed up by the police at earlier demonstrations? No undergraduate working for the Columbia Daily Spectator would have been allowed to publish such a piece, not without providing direct quotations along with the identities of the students who had made those comments, if indeed any of them had been made. Was this a news story, Ferguson asked himself, or an editorial posing as a news story? And what, pray tell, was the definition of the word “gentle”?

  Another front-page article on May first was written by Rosenthal himself, a curiously disjointed, rambling mélange of sorrows, impressions, and angry disbelief. “It was 4:30 in the morning,” the first paragraph began, “and the president of the university leaned against the wall of the room. This had been his office. He passed a hand over his face. ‘My God,’ he said, ‘how could human beings do a thing like this?’ … He wandered about the room. It was almost empty of furniture. The desks and chairs had been smashed, broken and shoved into adjoining rooms by the occupying students…”

  On page 36 of that same morning’s edition of the Times, another article told of the damage done to various rooms and offices by the occupiers of Mathematics Hall. Shattered windows, an overturned cabinet of library index cards, dismembered desks and chairs, cigarette burns on carpets, tipped-over filing cabinets, broken doors. “A secretary, returning to the building for the first time since it was seized last Thursday night, looked about disgustedly. ‘They’re just pigs,’ she said.”

  The pigs, however, were not the students who had occupied the buildings but the police who had gone into the buildings after the bust. They were the ones who had smashed the desks and chairs, the ones who had tossed streams of dripping black ink against the walls, who had ripped open five- and ten-pound bags of rice and sugar and scattered their contents around offices and classrooms and had dumped broken jars of tomato paste onto floors, desks, and filing cabinets, the ones who had punched out windows with their clubs and nightsticks. If their aim was to discredit the students, the strategy worked, for within hours of that second police rampage scores of photographs attesting to the damage were circulated around the country (the ink-splattered wall was especially popular) and the young rebels were turned into an uncivilized pack of hooligans and thugs, a gang of barbarians whose sole purpose was to destroy the most sacred institutions of American life.

  Ferguson knew the real story because he had been one of the Spectator reporters assigned to investigate the charges of vandalism against the occupying students, and what he and his fellow reporters had discovered—through sworn affidavits from members of the faculty—was that no ink had been on the walls when a contingent of professors toured the empty Math building at seven o’clock on the morning of April thirtieth. After they left, only police and press photographers had been allowed to enter the building, and when the professors returned later in the day, they found the walls covered with ink. Ditto for the desks, chairs, filing cabinets, windows, and packages of food. In good condition at seven A.M., pillaged and destroyed by noon.

  It didn’t help that the publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, was a member of the Columbia board of trustees. Nor that William S. Paley, head of the CBS television network, and Frank Hogan, the Manhattan district attorney, sat on the board as well. Unlike many of his friends, Ferguson was not in the habit of looking for conspiracies to account for the shrouded operations of Nobodaddy’s henchmen, but how not to wonder that America’s most influential newspaper had willfully distorted its coverage of the events at Columbia and t
hat the most influential television network had invited Columbia president Grayson Kirk to appear on Face the Nation but never asked one of the student leaders to give the other side of the story. As for the question of law enforcement, Ferguson and his fellow students on Morningside Heights were all aware of what the police had done both during and after the bust, but no one else seemed terribly interested.

  Case closed.

  * * *

  FERGUSON WALKED BACK onto the Columbia campus that September feeling crushed and demoralized. A state of depletion and spent resolve as the August outrages continued to echo inside him, Soviet tanks crossing into Czechoslovakia to exterminate the Prague Spring, Daley calling Ribicoff a motherfucking dirty Jew at the Democratic Convention in Chicago as twenty-three thousand local, state, and federal cops gassed and pummeled young demonstrators and journalists in Grant Park, the mob crying out in unison, The whole world is watching!, and then Ferguson began his senior year with New York in yet another crisis, the deranged spectacle of public school teachers going out on strike to contest community control of the School Board in Ocean Hill–Brownsville, yet one more clash between blacks and whites, race hatred in its ugliest, most suicidal form, blacks against Jews, Jews against blacks, more poison to fill the air as the world turned its eyes to the Olympics that were about to begin in Mexico City, where police battled a horde of thirty thousand protesting students and workers, killing twenty-three of them and arresting thousands, and then, in early November, the twenty-one-year-old Ferguson voted for the first time, and America elected Richard Nixon as its new president.

  All during the first six months of that last school year, he felt as if he had been trapped inside a stranger’s body and could no longer recognize himself when he looked at his face in the mirror, which was also true of the thoughts he was thinking whenever he looked inside his head, since they were mostly the thoughts of a stranger as well: cynical thoughts, splenetic thoughts, disgusted thoughts that had nothing to do with the person he had once been. Eventually, a man would come down from the north and help cure him of his bitterness, but that didn’t happen until the first day of spring, and the fall and winter were hard on Ferguson, so hard that his body broke down and he wound up in the emergency room.