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There’s only one solution, Nora said.
A solution? Out with it—please—at once.
A bath.
A bath?
A nice warm bath, with the two of us in it together.
Never had a proposal been so graciously offered to him, and never had Ferguson been so pleased to accept.
Twenty-five minutes later, as Nora turned on the faucets of the tub in her apartment on Claremont Avenue, Ferguson told her that God had indeed given her a glorious body, but more important than that, He had also given her a sense of humor, and even though she would be leaving for Arizona in the morning, Ferguson wished he could marry her now, and even though he knew he couldn’t marry her now or at any time in the future, he wanted to spend every minute of the next eleven hours with her, to be with her every second until she walked onto the plane, and now that she was being so nice to him, he wanted her to know that he loved her for it and would go on loving her for the rest of his life, even if he never saw her again.
Come on, Archie, Nora said. Kick your clothes into the corner and climb in. The bath is full, and we don’t want the water to get cold, do we?
* * *
NOVEMBER. DECEMBER. JANUARY. February.
He was still in college but already finished with college, limping his way to the end as he pondered what to do with himself after they handed him his degree. First of all, there would be the matter of letting Nobodaddy peer into his anus and examine his testicles, of coughing the obligatory cough and taking a written test that would prove whether he was intelligent enough to die for his country. The draft board would be summoning him for his army physical sometime in June or July, but he wasn’t worried about that because of his two absent fingers, and now that the pro-war Quaker with a secret plan to end the war was sitting on his throne and talking about troop reductions, Ferguson doubted the military would be desperate enough to start filling its regiments with one-thumbed soldiers. No, the problem wasn’t the army, the problem was what to do after the army rejected him, and among the dozens of things he had already decided against was graduate school. He had considered it for three or four minutes over Christmas break with his parents in Florida, but just saying the words out loud had made him understand how deeply the thought of spending one more day of his life in a university revolted him, and now that February was about to turn into March, the deadline for sending off applications had passed. Teaching school was another option. A push was being made to enlist recent college graduates to teach in poor neighborhoods around the city, the black and Latino slums of upper and lower Manhattan, the tumbledown wards of the outer boroughs, and at least there would be something honorable about doing that for a couple of years, he told himself, trying to educate the kids from those disintegrating barrios and in the process no doubt learning as much from them as they would ever learn from him, Mr. White Boy doing his small bit to make things better rather than worse, but then he would come back to earth and think about his inability to talk in front of people when more than five or six strangers were in the room, the paralyzing self-consciousness that made it a torture for him to stand up and speak in public, and how could he manage a classroom of thirty or thirty-five ten-year-olds if no words ever came out of his mouth? He wouldn’t be capable of doing it. Even if he wanted to do it, it wouldn’t be possible for him.
He had already dismissed journalism, but sometime around the second or third week of February, he began to wonder if he hadn’t been too hasty, for even if the big-time establishment press was no longer worth thinking about, there were other branches of journalism to consider. The anti-establishment press, otherwise known as the alternative press or the underground press, had been growing stronger in the past year or so, and with the East Village Other, Liberation News Service, and the Rat all in bloom, not to mention several dozen independent weeklies in cities outside New York, rags so wild and unconventional that they made the Village Voice look as stodgy as the old Herald Tribune, perhaps there was something to be said for working at one of those places. At least they were against all the things Ferguson was against and for many of the things he was for, but there were a number of drawbacks to be examined as well, including the problem of low pay (he wanted to support himself with his work and not have to dig too deeply into his grandmother’s fund) and the greater problem of writing exclusively for people on the left (his hope had always been to change people’s thinking, not just confirm what they already thought), which would hardly put him in the Panglossian position of living in the best of all possible worlds, but in a world where best and possible seldom appeared together in the same sentence, a possible job he could live with and not feel tainted by was surely better than no job at all.
A. I. Ferguson, ace reporter for the Weekly Blast, the Amerikan bible of malcontents and vitiated Faustians, the paper of record for the chosen few.
If nothing else, it was a subject that demanded some careful thought.
So Ferguson went on thinking for the next fifteen or twenty days, and then came the Night of the Daggers, which fell just past midnight on March 10, 1969, one week after his twenty-second birthday and four days after he had gone to Jim Freeman’s apartment on West 108th Street and handed him the finished manuscript of The Pretty Redhead and Other Poems from France, a too-large selection he had told Jim to cut down in any way he saw fit, and as Ferguson paced the rooms of his own apartment on the night of the tenth, composing a long, introspective letter to Nora Kovacs in his head, he felt a sharp twinge in the lower part of his abdomen, one of many that had plagued him in recent months, but rather than subside after ten or twelve seconds as most twinges did, this one was followed by a second, more powerful twinge, which hurt so much that it no longer qualified as a twinge but as genuine pain, and a moment after that second stab the assault had begun, the daggers in his gut, the twenty-seven spears that left him writhing on the bed for close to two hours, and the longer the pain went on, the more likely it seemed that his appendix or some other organ was rupturing inside his body, which so frightened him that he willed himself to stand up, put on his coat, and stagger off to the emergency room at St. Luke’s Hospital seven and a half blocks away, Ferguson clutching his stomach and grunting loudly as he wobbled forward in the night, stopping every so often to cling to a lamppost when he felt in danger of falling to the ground, but for all that no one on Amsterdam Avenue seemed to notice he was there, no one bothered to come up to him and ask if he needed help, not one person among the eight million in New York was the least bit interested in whether he lived or died, and then he waited for an hour and a half until he was called into a room where a young doctor spent fifteen minutes asking him questions and probing his belly, after which Ferguson was told to go back to the waiting room, where he went on sitting for another two hours, and when it became clear that his appendix was not going to explode that night, the doctor saw him again and prescribed pills, telling him to stay away from spicy foods, to avoid whiskey and other hard drinks, to shun grapefruits, to stick to the blandest diet possible for the next two or three weeks, and if another attack should occur during that time, he would do well to have another person accompany him to the hospital, and as Ferguson nodded at the doctor’s sound and helpful instructions, he asked himself: But what person, and who in the world would be there for him the next time he thought he was going to die?
* * *
HE STAYED IN bed for four days drinking weak tea and nibbling on crackers and slices of dry toast, and seven days after he was well enough to go out again, a man named Carl McManus came down from upstate New York to talk to the departing members of the Spectator staff. The editorial board of Friedman, Branch, Mullhouse, and the others had already finished its March-to-March one-year term and had handed the paper over to the new board, and Ferguson, the occasional freelance critic, had already written the last article he would ever publish in the Spectator, a somber, admiring review of George Oppen’s latest collection of poems, Of Being Numerous, which had come out on March sevent
h, three days before the Night of the Daggers. The irony was that he was the only one of the seniors who was still toying with the idea of going into journalism. The overworked, mind-blasted Friedman was planning to hibernate in one of the public school teaching jobs that had scared off Ferguson, Branch was going to med school at Harvard, Mullhouse was staying at Columbia to do graduate work in history, but they all came to the meeting because McManus had written a letter to Friedman back in the spring praising the work of the Spectator staff during the “Troubles,” and praise from Carl McManus meant something to them. The executive editor of the Rochester Times-Union had been editor in chief of the Spectator in 1934, and in the thirty-plus years since then he had gone to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War, had gone to Asia to cover the Pacific front in World War II, and had stayed at home to cover the Red Scare in the late forties and the civil rights movement in the fifties and early sixties. A long stint of editorial work with the Washington Post after that, and now, as of a year and a half ago, the head man at the Times-Union, where he had found his first job after graduating from Columbia in the thirties. Not quite a legend (he had never published a book and rarely appeared on radio or TV) but a known personage, a man with a large enough reputation to have lifted the spirits of the exhausted Spectator crew when his letter arrived in early May.
A Brooklyn accent, a broad Irish face with protruding ears, a body that could have belonged to an ex-linebacker or longshoreman, alert blue eyes and a mop of graying reddish hair, long enough to suggest an interest in keeping pace with the times or else the hair of a man who had forgotten to go to the barbershop for his next haircut. Informal. More at ease with himself than most men, and a good resonant laugh when Mullhouse proposed they all go down to the Lion’s Den on the first floor, the student snack bar that served, in Mullhouse’s riff on the familiar New York phrase, the worst cup of coffee in the world.
Seven people sitting around a brown Formica table, six students in their early twenties and the fifty-six-year-old man from Rochester, who got straight to the point and told them he had come back to Columbia in search of recruits. Several positions were about to open up at his paper, and he wanted to fill them with what he called fresh blood, hungry kids who would bust their asses for him and turn a decent operation into a good one, a better one, and because he was already familiar with their work and knew what they were capable of, he was willing to hire three of them on the spot. That is, he added, if anyone was crazy enough to want to move to Rochester, New York, where the winds that gusted off Lake Ontario in winter could freeze the snot in your nose and turn your legs into popsicle sticks.
Mike Aronson asked him why he was talking to them and not to anyone from the School of Journalism, or was he planning to stop in there, too?
Because, McManus said, the experience gained from four years of work at the Spectator is more valuable than one year in a graduate program. The story you covered last spring was a big, complicated business, one of the biggest college stories in years, and every one of you sitting at this table did a good job, in some cases a remarkable job. You’ve been through the fire, you’ve all been tested, and I know what I’ll be getting if any of you chooses to join up.
Then Branch raised the far more important issue of the New York Times. What did McManus think of their reporting about Columbia last spring, and why would any of them ever want to work for the mainstream press when all they did was print lies?
They broke the rules, McManus said, and I’m just as angry about it as you are, Mr. Branch. What they did bordered on the monstrous, the unforgivable.
Much later, when Ferguson had a chance to reflect on what happened that afternoon, to think about why he did what he did and to ask himself what the consequences of not doing it would have been or not have been, he understood that everything turned on the word monstrous. A lesser, more prudent man would have said irresponsible, or shoddy, or disappointing, none of which would have had the smallest effect on Ferguson, only monstrous carried the full force of the indignation he had been walking around with for the past months, an indignation that was apparently shared by McManus, and if the two of them felt the same way about that one thing, then they must have felt the same way about other things as well, and if Ferguson still had any interest in working for a daily paper or in finding out whether journalism was the solution for him or not, then perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to brave the winds of the frozen north and accept the offer from McManus. It was only a job, after all. If it didn’t work out, he could always move on and try his hand at something else.
Count me in, Ferguson said. I think I’m willing to give it a shot.
There were no other takers. One by one Ferguson’s friends all bowed out, one by one they all shook McManus’s hand and said good-bye, and then it was just the two of them, Ferguson and his future boss, and because McManus’s plane wasn’t scheduled to leave until seven o’clock, Ferguson decided to cut his class on English Romantic poetry and suggested they walk across the street to the West End, where they could continue the conversation in more pleasant surroundings.
They found a spot in one of the front booths, ordered two bottles of Guinness, and after some brief words about Columbia then and Columbia now, McManus started to fill him in on the geography of the place where he would be going, talking with refreshing bluntness about the dying world of northwestern New York, the only part of the country where the population was going down, he said, nowhere more drastically than in Buffalo, which had lost nearly one hundred thousand people in the past decade, once glorious Buffalo, as he put it, not without a touch of mock blarney in his voice, the jewel of the old canal and shipping culture, now a half-empty wasteland of ruined and abandoned factories, derelict houses, boarded-up, caved-in structures, a bombed-out city never touched by bombs or war, and then, moving beyond dismal Buffalo, he took Ferguson on a short tour of some of the other cities in the region, choosing his epithets carefully as he touched on sad-sack Syracuse, anemic Elmira, ugly Utica, hapless Binghamton, and ragged Rome, which had never been the capital of any empire.
You make it sound so … so enticing, Ferguson said. But what about Rochester?
Rochester was a bit different, McManus said, a better brand of decline, a place that was falling more slowly than the others, and therefore still more or less solid, at least for now. A city of three hundred thousand in a metropolitan area of about one point two million, which accounted for the Times-Union’s circulation of two hundred and fifty thousand copies per day. A minor league town, of course, but not a two-bit minor league town, with the Triple-A Red Wings feeding the Baltimore Orioles a high-protein diet of Boog Powells, Jim Palmers, and Paul Blairs, home of Eastman Kodak, Bausch & Lomb, Xerox, and the indispensable French’s mustard, companion to every American hot dog since 1904, which made it a city where most people had jobs in businesses that weren’t about to head down south or go abroad. On the other hand, in spite of the sailboats and country clubs, the splendid film archive and decent philharmonic orchestra, the good university and even better music school, which was one of the best in the world, there were the gambling, prostitution, and extortion rackets controlled by Frank Valenti and the Mob as well as vast zones of poverty and crime, the rough black slums that housed fifteen to twenty percent of the population, many of those people struggling or out of work or doing drugs, and in case Ferguson had forgotten (Ferguson hadn’t forgotten), there had been the three days of rioting in the summer of 1964, one week after the riots in Harlem, three dead, two hundred stores looted and damaged, a thousand arrests, and then Rockefeller had called in the National Guard to put an end to it, the first time on record that the Guard had breached the walls of a northern city.
At that point, Ferguson mentioned Newark, Newark in the summer of 1967, and how it had felt to stand with his mother on Springfield Avenue during the night of the broken glass.
So you know what I’m talking about, McManus said.
I’m afraid so, Ferguson replied.
&nbs
p; Chilly springs, McManus continued, lovely summers, tolerable autumns, brutal winters. You’ll see George Eastman’s name everywhere you turn, but remember that Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony lived in Rochester, too, and even Emma Goldman put in time there organizing sweatshop workers at the end of the last century. Also—and this is very important—whenever you’re in a down mood and feel you might want to kill yourself, go for a walk in Mount Hope. It’s one of the biggest and oldest public cemeteries anywhere in America and still the most beautiful spot in the city. I often go there myself, especially when I have an urge to think deep thoughts and smoke long, fat cigars. It never fails to clarify and sometimes even illuminate. The resting ground of three hundred thousand departed souls.
Three hundred thousand people above ground in Rochester, Ferguson said, and three hundred thousand below. What our good friend might have called fearful symmetry.
Or the marriage of heaven and hell.
So began the first conversation between Ferguson and Carl McManus, the warm-up to the two hours they spent together at the West End discussing the kinds of stories he would be writing for the paper, the initiation period of local reportage that would eventually lead to state and national events if he panned out, which McManus thankfully seemed to accept as a foregone conclusion, the salary he would be given to start with (low, but not to the point of dire struggle or heart-wrenching misery), detailed information about the staff and the running of the paper, and the more they talked the more pleased Ferguson became with the decision he had made, his instinctive count me in as an answer to the word monstrous, and now that he was getting to know McManus a little bit, he understood he would learn much by working for this man, that unlikely Rochester was in fact a good and plausible move, and as he held up his left hand and showed it to McManus (who was the first stranger who had ever asked him how he had lost his fingers), he said: I’m hoping this keeps the draft board off my back so I can take the job.