Don’t worry about the draft board, McManus said. You’ve already signed up with me, and no man can serve in two armies at the same time.
* * *
LITTLE BY LITTLE, his heartbeat slowed down that spring and the daggers withdrew from his belly. He bought himself a new pair of down pillows, continued to avoid grapefruits, and took three more baths with Nora. He corrected the proofs of his book. He ordered a three-month subscription to the Times-Union and began following day-to-day life in Rochester. Asked to join the newly formed, whimsically named Columbia Poem Team, he traveled to Sarah Lawrence and Yale with Obenzinger, Quinn, Freeman, and Zimmer to give joint readings to the students (speaking in public was impossible but reading from his typed-up translations was not), high-energy events followed by considerable drinking and laughter and (at Sarah Lawrence) a ninety-minute conversation with a stunning coed named Delia Burns whom he desperately wanted to kiss but didn’t. He wrote the final papers for his literature seminars and managed not to oversleep on the morning of the astronomy exam. There were one hundred questions with five possible answers for each, and since Ferguson had attended only one lecture and had never opened the text book, he circled the A’s through E’s at random and was heartened to score eighteen percent, which was good enough to earn a passing grade of D+. Then, to round off his small act of almost invisible rebellion, he returned to the college bookstore and sold the book back to them, thus sticking it to them twice. They gave him six dollars and fifty cents for it. Ten minutes later, as he walked down Broadway toward his apartment on West 107th Street, a panhandler approached him and asked for a dime. Rather than give a dime, Ferguson thrust the whole six dollars and fifty cents into the man’s open palm and said, Here you are, sir. A gift from the trustees of Columbia University. With my compliments.
His book was published on May twelfth in a fine soft-covered edition of seventy-two pages that gave him much pleasure to look at and hold in his hands in the hours after it was lifted out of a cardboard box in the Review office, and within one week he had given away all but five of his twenty author’s copies to friends and relatives. The cover was illustrated with a reproduction of the well-known photograph of Apollinaire from the First World War, the one that showed the head of Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky wrapped in bandages following the operation to repair the shrapnel wound to his temple: the poet as martyr, the modern age born in the mud of the trenches, France in 1916, America in 1969, both trapped in never-ending wars that devoured their young. Three copies were consigned to the Gotham Book Mart, another three to the Eighth Street Bookshop, and six to the paperback den on campus. Inestimable Zimmer, Ferguson’s closest, most admired friend among the people in his class, reviewed the book for the Spectator and said nothing but kind things about it, excessively kind things. “The works in this assemblage of poems from France should not be looked on as mere translations but as English poems in their own right, a valuable contribution to our own literature. Mr. Ferguson has the ear and the heart of a true poet, and I for one will be going back to these magnificent works again and again as the years roll on.”
Excessively kind. But such a person was young David Zimmer, who would soon be facing the big question all of them would be facing the instant they left Morningside Heights. In Zimmer’s case, the dilemma expressed itself in a rhyme. Yale or jail. A four-year fellowship to do graduate work in literature at Yale or two to five years of jail if they wound up drafting him into the army. Yale or jail. What a neat little ditty that was, and what a world Nobodaddy had wrought.
It wasn’t going to be hard to say good-bye to Columbia, which was living through another round of protests and demonstrations in the spring of 1969, events that Ferguson was willing himself to ignore for reasons of pure self-preservation, but he would miss his friends and some of his professors, he would miss not being able to further the education he had received from Nora on the handful of nights they had spent together, and he would miss the hopeful boy who had come there in the fall of 1965, the boy who had slowly vanished over the past four years and would never be found again.
* * *
ON THE SAME morning in mid-June that Ferguson coughed the cough and took the written exam at the draft-board building on Whitehall Street, Bobby George and Margaret O’Mara were joined in holy wedlock at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church in Dallas, Texas, where Bobby was the starting catcher for Baltimore’s Double-A ball club, which happened to be the same day (according to a letter Ferguson received from his Aunt Mildred) that the still silent and permanently decamped Amy attended the SDS national convention in Chicago, a rancorous meeting that devolved into an angry clash over tactics and ideology between the PL faction and the group that would come to be known as the Weathermen, which led to the crack-up and sudden, shocking demise of SDS as a political organization. Uncle Henry and Aunt Mildred had kept in sporadic contact with Amy during her first year of law school, and Mildred wrote to her former one and only to tell him that Amy had decided to turn her back on the delusions of revolutionary activism and devote herself to the more realistic cause of women’s rights. The moment of revelation occurred when a man named Chaka Wells, the deputy minister of information for the Chicago Black Panthers, stood up to attack the PL and for no discernible reason started talking about the women in SDS by using the term “pussy power” and saying that “Superman was a punk because he never even tried to fuck Lois Lane,” a sentiment echoed a few minutes later by another Black Panther, Jewel Cook, who declared that he was for “pussy power” as well and that “the brother was only trying to say to you sisters that you have a strategic position in the revolution: prone.” It was a tired old joke by then, one that Amy had heard dozens of times in the past years, but that day in Chicago she finally had had enough, and instead of joining forces with the Weathermen, the break-off faction that included ex-Columbia students Mike Loeb, Ted Gold, Mark Rudd, and others, all of whom had been expelled from Columbia at the end of the spring term last year, she stood up from her seat and walked out of the convention center. As Aunt Mildred put it at the end of her letter, lapsing into the patronizing Aunt Mildred tone she often resorted to when talking about other people: I thought you should know about this, Archie, even if the two of you are no longer a couple. It seems to me that our Amy is finally beginning to grow up.
Bobby George says I do. Ferguson sticks out his left hand and shows it to a U.S. Army doctor. Amy walks out of the Chicago Coliseum and quits the movement for good. Was it possible that all three of those things happened at the same instant? Ferguson would have liked to have thought so.
Even more interesting: by the time Ferguson moved to Rochester at the beginning of July, Bobby had already been promoted to the Triple-A Red Wings of the International League. In a city where Ferguson knew absolutely no one, how improbable was it that his oldest friend should be there with him, not for the long haul, perhaps, but at least until the end of the summer and the close of the baseball season, the early months of adjustment and settling in, Bobby and his bride Margaret, two people he had known forever, pretty Maggie O’Mara with her short flowered dresses and drooping socks sticking out her tongue at rough-and-tumble, mouth-breathing Bobby George in the kindergarten class with Mrs. Canobbio in Montclair, now the still pretty but sophisticated and opinionated twenty-two-year-old Margaret with her degree in business management from Rutgers and the ever-amiable, powerhouse Bobby climbing the ladder to the major leagues, an unlikely union, Ferguson felt, not anything he would have predicted, but the mere fact that Bobby had persuaded Margaret to marry him must have meant that after two years in the army and a year and a half as a professional ball player, he was finally beginning to grow up as well.
As for Amy, it was none of his business now, which meant he shouldn’t have cared about what she was doing or not doing with herself, but Ferguson did care, he could never fully bring himself not to care, and as the months went on, he felt more and more relieved by her decision not to join the Weathermen in Chicago. Their old
friends from Columbia had gone insane. The intractable power of the great Oblivious One had thwarted their idealistic impulses and crushed their ability to think rationally anymore, and through a long series of wrong assumptions and wrong conclusions and wrong decisions based on those wrong assumptions and wrong conclusions, they had worked themselves into a corner where they were left with no choice but to believe that an army of one or two hundred middle-class ex-students with no followers and no support anywhere in the country could lead a revolution that would bring down the American government. That government was destroying its young by shipping off the poorest and least educated ones to fight in the war that was supposedly ending but wasn’t ending while the privileged young were destroying themselves. Eight and a half months after Amy walked out of the Chicago convention, her old friend from Columbia SDS, Ted Gold, along with his fellow Weathermen Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins, were blown up and killed in a townhouse on West Eleventh Street in New York when one of them connected the wrong wire to a pipe bomb they were building in the basement. Oughton’s body was so thoroughly obliterated that the sole means of identifying her came from the print on a severed finger found in the rubble. There was nothing left of Robbins. His skin and bones had dematerialized in the fire caused by the detonation of the gas mains, and his death was confirmed only after the Weathermen sent out word that he had been there with the two others.
* * *
FERGUSON DROVE UP to Rochester in the old Impala on July first, but his job at the Times-Union wouldn’t be starting until August fourth. Five weeks to acclimate himself to his new surroundings, to hunt for an apartment and transfer his money to a local bank, to hang out with Bobby and Margaret, to wait for his new classification from the draft board, to see Kennedy’s promise fulfilled as he watched a pair of American astronauts walk on the surface of the moon, to carry on with the project he had started in New York of translating the poems of François Villon, and to get New York out of his system. The largest, least expensive apartment he could find was in a run-down neighborhood called South Wedge, a cluster of blocks on the east side of town not far from the Genesee River. McManus’s beloved Mount Hope was just a few steps away, as were the University of Rochester and a large grassy terrain called Highland Park, where the annual lilac festival was held every spring. Prices were low in that part of the world, and for eighty-seven dollars a month he took possession of the entire top floor of a three-story wooden house on Crawford Street. The house itself wasn’t much to look at, with its cracked ceilings and rickety staircase, its overclogged storm gutters and yellow paint peeling on the façade, but Ferguson had three furnished rooms and a kitchen all to himself, and the light that poured through the windows in the afternoon was so much better for his mental health than the darkness of West 107th Street that he was willing to overlook the house’s flaws. The owners lived in the apartment on the ground floor, and even though Mr. and Mrs. Crowley’s weakness for vodka often led them to bicker at night, they were never less than cordial with Ferguson, which was also true of Mrs. Crowley’s unmarried younger brother, Charlie Vincent, the World War II vet who occupied the middle apartment and lived on monthly disability payments, an agreeable sort who seemed to do little else but smoke, cough, and watch television, along with suffering through an occasional bad night when he would call out in his sleep, shouting Stuart! Stuart! at the top of his voice, so loud and so panicked that Ferguson could hear him through the floorboards upstairs, but who could blame Charlie for reliving his past from time to time when his guard was down, and how not to pity the teenage boy who had been sent off to fight in the Pacific twenty-six years ago and had come home to Rochester with a head full of nightmares?
As it turned out, Bobby and Margaret had to leave town before there was a chance to do much hanging out together. Ferguson had one dinner with them, he managed to see Bobby play in one game for the Red Wings, but the team was on the road when he arrived on July first, and four days after Bobby returned to Rochester on the tenth, the Orioles catcher broke his hand in a collision with a New York Yankee at home plate. After batting .327 in his first three weeks of Triple-A, Bobby was called up to join the roster of first-place Baltimore, and if he could hold his own against American League pitching, it was unlikely he would ever work in the minors again. Impossible not to feel happy for him, impossible not to exult in his promotion—and yet, hard as it was for Ferguson to admit to himself, impossible not to feel glad they were moving away.
It had nothing to do with Bobby. Bobby was still the same old Bobby, an older, more experienced, more reflective Bobby, but still the bighearted boy who was incapable of thinking a bad thought about anyone, Ferguson’s most constant and loving friend, the one who loved him more than anyone else ever had, including Amy, especially including Amy, and how alive Bobby was on the night of their one dinner in Rochester at the Crescent Beach Hotel, hugging Margaret every fourteen seconds and talking about the old days in Montclair, the glory days of their sophomore year when Ferguson’s hand was still intact and they were on the team together, the youngest starters on that conference-winning 16-and-2 team, the team that had pulled off the play. Of course Bobby had to talk about the play because he never tired of talking about it, and when Ferguson asked him to tell the story again for Margaret’s benefit, Bobby smiled, kissed his wife on the cheek, and launched into his account of that May afternoon six years ago. This is how it was, he said. We’re down one–nothing to Bloomfield in the last inning. One man out and two men on, Archie at third and Caleb at second, Caleb Williams, Rhonda’s older brother, and then Fortunato comes up and Coach Martino signals for the bunt, two taps to the brim of his cap and then he takes off the cap and scratches his head, that was the signal, the only time he ever gave it, not just a bunt for a suicide squeeze to bring in one run but a double suicide squeeze to bring in two. No one in history had ever thought of that play, but Sal Martino invented it because he was a baseball genius. A tough play to execute because you need to have a fast runner on second, but Caleb was extra fast, the fastest runner on the team, and so the pitch comes in and Fortunato lays down a good bunt, a slow little dribbler to the right of the mound. By the time the pitcher gets to it, Archie is already crossing the plate to tie the score. Figuring there’s nothing else to do, the pitcher throws to first, and Fortunato is out by three or four steps. But what the pitcher doesn’t realize is that Caleb started running at the same time Archie did, just as he was going into his windup, and by the time the first baseman catches the ball, Caleb is three-quarters of the way home. Everyone on Bloomfield is shouting to the first baseman, Throw the ball! Throw the ball!, so he throws the ball home, but the throw is late, a hard throw right into the catcher’s glove, but it’s a couple of seconds too late, and Caleb slides in with the winning run. A cloud of dust, and Caleb is jumping to his feet with his arms in the air. Victory out of loss, a big win from a squiggly little nothing of a teeny-tiny bunt. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve played in hundreds of games since then, but that was the best and most exciting thing I’ve ever seen on a baseball field, my number one all-time moment. Two runs, boys and girls, and the ball didn’t travel more than thirty feet.
No, the problem wasn’t Bobby, who was in the full flower of his inimitable Bobbyness by then, the problem was Margaret, the same Margaret who had developed a crush on Ferguson when she was seven years old, who had written him an unsigned love letter when she was twelve, who had made eyes at him throughout high school and had actively rejoiced at Anne-Marie Dumartin’s return to Belgium, who had been the one girl he had been tempted by during his four and a half months apart from Amy in their senior year, who had been the one whose mouth his tongue would have entered if not for Bobby’s infatuation with her, who had mocked him as Cyrano when he had tried to intercede on Bobby’s behalf, the dull but intelligent and achingly attractive Margaret who for reasons he could not fathom was now the wife of his oldest friend, for Ferguson was fairly stunned by how little attention she paid to Bobby’s monolo
gue about the double suicide squeeze, by how she kept looking at him across the table and not at her husband while her husband spoke, eating him up with her eyes, as if she were telling him, yes, I’ve been married to this kind, softheaded lummox for a month now, but I’m still dreaming about you, Archie, and how could you possibly have rejected me for all those years when in fact we were made for each other from the start, and here I am, take me, and damn the consequences because all along I’ve always wanted only you. Or so Ferguson gathered from the way she looked at him in the restaurant of the Crescent Beach Hotel, and the truth was that he was aroused by her, as a solitary, celibate, unloved bachelor searching for love as a stranger in a new town, how could he not have been aroused by the looks she was giving him, and who knew if he wouldn’t have capitulated to her that summer if she and Bobby hadn’t left for Baltimore, since there would have been countless opportunities for them to see each other alone, all the nights when Bobby would have been on the road playing games in far-off Louisville, Columbus, and Richmond, and how many times would he have accepted her invitations to come to dinner at her apartment, how many bottles of wine would they have drunk together, surely his resistance would have weakened at some point, yes, that was what her eyes were telling him as they sat across from each other at the hotel restaurant, give in, please give in, Archie, and because Ferguson understood that he might not have been strong enough to keep his hands off her if she had stayed, he was more than happy to see her go.
* * *
LAST YEAR, THE concentric circles had fused into a solid black disk, an L.P. record with a single blues song playing on Side A. Now the record had been turned over, and the song on the flip side was a dirge called Lord, Thy Name Is Death. The melody entered Ferguson’s head just days after he started his job at the Times-Union, and as the first bar floated in from California on August ninth with the words Charles Manson and the Tate-LaBianca murders, it wasn’t long before it modulated into the suicide on Halloween night of young Marshall Bloom, cofounder of Liberation News Service, which Ferguson had seriously considered joining straight out of college, which segued by the middle of fall into a verse about Lieutenant William Calley and the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam, and then, as the last year of the 1960s went into its final month, the Chicago police belted out a loud staccato refrain by shooting and killing Black Panther Fred Hampton as he lay asleep in his bed, and two days after that, as the Rolling Stones mounted the stage at Altamont to sing the rest of the song, a crew of Hells Angels jumped a young black man waving a gun in the crowd and stabbed him to death.