The school had gone through weeks of fractious conflict in late February and early March, but even the more subdued eruption after Kent State was much wilder than anything Ferguson had seen at Columbia, especially on the second day he was there, a wintry Buffalo day in mid-spring, with snow on the ground and ice winds blasting in off Lake Erie. No buildings were occupied, but the atmosphere was more charged and potentially more dangerous as close to two thousand students and professors were attacked by helmeted riot police carrying guns, clubs, and tear-gas rifles. Rocks were thrown, bricks were thrown, the windows of police cars and university buildings were smashed, heads and bodies were smashed, and once again Ferguson found himself dead center between two warring mobs, but it was scarier this time because the Buffalo students were more willing to fight than the Columbia students had been, some of them so incensed and out of control that Ferguson felt they might have been willing to die. Whether he was a journalist or not, he was just as exposed as they were, and much as he had been swept up into it two years earlier with the blows to his head and hand, this time he was teargassed along with everyone else, and as he pressed a wet handkerchief against his stinging eyes and vomited his lunch onto the pavement, Gianelli took hold of his arm and pulled him away to look for a spot where the air would be more breathable, and a couple of minutes later, when they had come to the corner of Main Street and Minnesota Avenue just off campus, Ferguson removed the wet handkerchief from his face, opened his eyes, and saw a young man throw a brick through the window of a bank.
Within another day or two, three-quarters of the colleges and universities in America were on strike. More than four million students joined in the protest, and one by one every college and university in Rochester shut down for the rest of the academic year.
The day after Ferguson filed his Buffalo story, he had a brief talk with McManus at the front entrance of the Times-Union building. Staring out at the traffic as they smoked their cigarettes, they both reluctantly acknowledged that there would be no point in publishing any more articles about the sixties. Eight had been enough, and the ninth and tenth were no longer necessary.
* * *
AFTER NANCY SPERONE found her new man in the early days of the student strike, Ferguson squandered the next six months pursuing two different women who were not worth the effort of pursuing and shall remain nameless because they are not worth the effort of naming. Ferguson was beginning to grow restless, feeling that perhaps he had had enough of Rochester after a year and a half in that minor league city, wondering if he shouldn’t try his luck somewhere else with another paper or perhaps leave journalism altogether and try to earn his living as a translator, for however much he still enjoyed the pressures of high-speed composition, wrestling with Villon’s fifteenth-century French was ultimately more satisfying to him, and even though time was scarce, he had polished off a not-bad first rendering of The Legacy and was halfway into a preliminary version of The Testament, not that he could ever feed himself by translating poetry, of course, but a fat book of prose every now and then might help cover the bills, and if nothing else, even if he did stay in Rochester for a while longer, wouldn’t it make sense to leave the crummy, roach-infested dump on Crawford Street and move to a better place?
It was January 1971, February 1971, the darkest, coldest days of the year in that glum hibernal outpost, a time when only glum things could be expected to happen, a time of death fantasies and daydreams about living in the tropics, but just as Ferguson was beginning to think he should bury himself under a pile of quilts and remain in bed for the next three months, his job at the Times-Union became interesting again. The circus was back in town. The lions and tigers were roaring, a crowd was gathering under the large tent, and Ferguson hastily jumped back into his tightrope walker’s costume and scrambled up the ladder to take his spot on the platform.
After the Kent State shootings, he had been reassigned to the national desk and was now working under a man named Alex Pittman, a young editor with good instincts and a more tolerable disposition than Dunlap’s. Ferguson had handed in dozens of stories to Pittman over the long weeks between May and February, but nothing as compelling as the two big stories that broke in the first half of the new year, which curiously enough turned out to be two versions of the same story: tying up loose ends from the fifties and sixties because someone had been brave enough to steal classified government documents and release them to the public, which meant that even if the sixties were chronologically over, they weren’t over and were in fact just beginning—all over again. On March eighth, an unknown group of invisible activists calling themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the F.B.I. broke into the small, two-man government office in the oddly named town of Media, Pennsylvania, and swiped more than a thousand secret documents. By the next day, those documents had been sent to various news organizations across the country, exposing the F.B.I.’s covert spy operation, COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program), which had been started by J. Edgar Hoover in 1956 to harass the fourteen or twenty-six Communists still left in America and then had expanded to include members of black civil rights organizations, anti–Vietnam War organizations, Black Power organizations, feminist organizations, and over two hundred organizations from the New Left, among them SDS and the Weathermen. Not just spying on them but infiltrating their ranks with informants and agents provocateurs to disrupt and discredit them, and just like that the nuthouse fears of sixties activists were turning out to be true, Big Brother had indeed been watching, and Nobodaddy’s craziest, most loyal soldier had been behind it all, squat little J. Edgar Hoover, who had amassed so much power during his forty-seven years in office that presidents quaked when he knocked on their door. The documents revealed hundreds of crimes and hundreds of low blows to smear the names of innocent people, but none lower than the job he had done on Viola Liuzzo, who was the subject of one of Ferguson’s articles, the Detroit housewife with five children who had gone down to Alabama for the Selma-Montgomery march and for the simple act of opening her car door and giving a lift to a black man had been murdered by a group from the Klan, one of the murderers being Gary Thomas Rowe, “an acknowledged F.B.I. informant,” and then Hoover had had the temerity to write a letter to Johnson telling him that Mrs. Liuzzo had been a member of the Communist Party and had abandoned her children in order to have sex with black men from the civil rights movement, a bogus accusation that suggested she had been an enemy of the people and therefore someone who had deserved to die.
Three months after the COINTELPRO scandal, the Pentagon Papers were published in the New York Times, and Ferguson worked on that story as well, including the story behind the story of how Daniel Ellsberg had smuggled the papers out of the building and given them to Times reporter Neil Sheehan, the once abhorred New York Times perhaps atoning for the lies it had printed in sixty-eight by taking the risk of going public with classified documents, a bright moment for American journalism, as Pittman, McManus, and Ferguson all agreed, and suddenly the lies of the American government were standing naked in front of the entire world, the things that had never been reported anywhere in the press, the secret bombings of Cambodia and Laos, the coastal raids on North Vietnam, but beyond that and before that the thousands of pages delineating the step-by-step process by which something that had once seemed to make sense had collapsed into utter senselessness.
* * *
THEN THE CIRCUS left town again, and Ferguson fell into the arms of Hallie Doyle, a twenty-one-year-old student from Mount Holyoke with a summer job at the paper, the first woman he had met since moving north who might have had the power to break the Amy-spell at last, a deeply intelligent and insightful person who had been raised in the Roman Catholic Church but was no longer part of it because she didn’t believe that virgins could be mothers or that dead men could climb out of their graves, yet she lived with an inner certainty that the meek would inherit the earth, that virtue was its own reward, and that not doing unto others what you didn’t want them to
do unto you was a more sensible way to conduct your life than struggling to follow the precepts of the golden rule, which forced human beings to turn themselves into saints and led to nothing but guilt and unending despair.
A sane person, perhaps even a wise one. A small but not diminutive person of five-four or five-five with a lean, quick-moving body, a pair of granny glasses perched on her nose, and intensely yellow hair, so blond as to create the impression of a fully grown Goldilocks, but attractive as that golden hair was to Ferguson, the mystery was in Hallie’s face, which was both a plain face and a pretty face, by turns dull and sparkling, a face that changed aspect with the slightest turn or tilt of her head, now a Goldilocksian mouse, now a stunning White Rock girl, now bland and almost featureless, now radiant and arresting, an unremarkable Irish mug that could, in a single blink, transform itself into the most ravishing countenance ever beheld this side of a movie screen. What was he to make of such a conundrum? Nothing, Ferguson decided, nothing at all, since the only answer was to go on looking at her in order to feel the more and more pleasant sensation of being permanently off balance.
She had grown up in Rochester and was back in town for the summer to sell her family’s house on East Avenue, which had become redundant after her science-writer parents moved to San Francisco earlier in the year. The job at the Times-Union had been obtained through the help of an old family friend and was nothing but a way to kill the time more efficiently than by doing nothing—along with a chance to earn some extra cash into the bargain.
A temporary newsroom assistant for the summer, but in her real life a dual English-biology major who would be starting her senior year in the fall. A budding poet with a long-range plan to go to medical school, then push on to become a psychiatrist, and finally to train as a psychoanalyst, all of which was impressive enough, but what impressed Ferguson even more was how she had spent the two summers before this one: living in New York and answering telephones at a suicide hotline on East Fourth Street and Avenue A.
In other words, he said to himself, when he had been listening to the record spin out the lurid, demoralizing verses of Lord, Thy Name Is Death, Hallie had been working to save lives. Not everything all at once, as Amy and so many others believed, but one by one by one. Talk to a man on the telephone and gradually convince him not to pull the trigger of the gun he is pointing at his head. Talk to a woman the next night and slowly persuade her not to down the bottle of pills clenched in her hand. No impulse to reinvent the world from the bottom up, no acts of revolutionary defiance, but a commitment to doing good in the broken world she belonged to, a plan to spend her life helping others, which was not a political act so much as a religious act, a religion without religion or dogma, a faith in the value of the one and the one and the one, a journey that would begin with medical school and then continue for however long it took to complete her psychoanalytic training, and while Amy and a host of others would have argued that people were sick because society was sick and helping them adjust to a sick society would only make them worse, Hallie would have answered, Please, go ahead and improve society if you can, but meanwhile people are suffering, and I have a job to do.
Not only had Ferguson met the next one, but as the summer went on he asked himself if he hadn’t found the One who would blot out all others for the rest of his days on this wretched, beautiful earth.
She moved into the Crawford Street rathole with him in early July, and because it was an especially hot summer that year, they pulled down the window shades and turned into nudists whenever they were indoors. Outdoors, on weekday nights and weekend days and nights, they went to twelve movies together, attended six Red Wings games, played tennis four times (the ultra-athletic Hallie consistently beat him two sets to one), took walks in Mount Hope Cemetery, sat in Highland Park reading each other’s poems and translations until Hallie broke down in tears one Sunday afternoon and declared that her work was no good (no, not no good, Ferguson said to her, still developing, although there seemed little doubt that she had a more promising future in medicine than in literature), went to four classical concerts at the Eastman School of Music, Bach, Mozart, Bach, and Webern, and ate numerous dinners in all manner of restaurants both decent and atrocious, but no dinner was more memorable than the one they had at Antonio’s on Lake Avenue, where the meal was accompanied by nonstop music from a man named Lou Blandisi, who billed himself as the Corny Accordionist from Little Italy and seemed to know every song that had ever been written, from American pop standards to Irish jigs to klezmer from the Pale.
More to the point: by the first days of August they had both uttered the decisive three-word sentence several dozen times each, the three words that seal the deal and announce there is no turning back, and by the end of the month they were both starting to think long-term, permanent thoughts about the future. Then came the inevitable good-bye, and as Ferguson’s love drove off for her last year of college in South Hadley, Massachusetts, he wondered how he was going to survive without her.
September eighth. The summer was over and done with now. The kids were yelling under his bedroom window early in the morning again, and overnight the Rochester air had taken on the vivid, beginning-of-the-year feel of freshly sharpened pencils and stiff new shoes—the scent of childhood, the deep-in-the-bone memories of way back when. Sad Monsieur Solitaire, who had been pining for his absent Hallie every hour over the past ten days, returned to his rathole at four-thirty that afternoon, and within one minute of his arrival, before he had managed to unload the brown paper bag with the makings of his dinner in it, the telephone rang. Pittman calling from his office at the Times-Union. Pittman with a tone of urgency in his voice. Pittman telling him that “something was brewing at Attica,” the state prison fifty miles southwest of Rochester, and he was assigning Ferguson and Gianelli to go there early tomorrow morning to talk to Vincent Mancusi, the superintendent of the prison, “to find out what was going on.” The interview had already been arranged for nine o’clock, Gianelli would be picking him up at seven, and while it was still just a little mess at this point, it could turn out to be a big one, so “keep your eyes and ears open, Archie, and stay out of trouble.”
There had been two large disturbances at New York prisons in the past year, one at upstate Auburn and the other at the Tombs in Manhattan, rugged, physical confrontations between prisoners and guards that had led to scores of indictments and additional punishments. Leaders from both uprisings—most of them black, all of them committed to some form of revolutionary politics—had been transferred to Attica in order to “weed out the troublemakers,” and now that Black Panther George Jackson had been gunned down and killed at San Quentin Prison in California during a supposed attempt to escape with a gun stashed inside the Afro wig he was wearing (some people actually believed that), the inmates at the overcrowded New York prisons were beginning to make noise again. Sixty percent of the 2,250 prisoners at Attica were black, one hundred percent of the guards were white, and not only was Ferguson not looking forward to his first visit to a maximum-security correctional facility, he was dreading it. He was glad Gianelli would be going with him, the one-hour drive would be pleasant enough as Tom talked to him in the voices of Cary Grant and Jean Harlow and rattled on about the National League pennant race, but once they got there and walked into the prison, they would be stepping into hell.
Ferguson didn’t want it anymore. He was burned out and ready to give up, and after telling himself he was finished half a dozen times in the past eight or nine months and then not doing anything about it, this time he wasn’t going to back down. He had come to the end of what he could endure. Enough of Rochester, enough of the paper, enough of having to live with his eyes permanently fixed on the dark world of meaningless wars and lying governments and spying undercover cops and angry, hopeless men trapped in dungeons built by the state of New York. It wasn’t teaching him anything anymore. Again and again he kept learning the same lesson, and by now he knew the story by heart even before he sat
down to write it. Rien ne va plus, as the gamblers in Monte Carlo were told when the wheel was about to spin again. No more bets. He had put his money on number zero and had lost, and now it was time to get out.
He would go to the prison with Gianelli in the morning, he would do the interview with the warden, who would probably tell him everything was under control, and if he asked to have a look around and perhaps talk to one or two of the prisoners, he would doubtless be turned down for security reasons. Then he would write whatever story he was able to write and hand it in to Pittman. But that would be the last one. He would tell Pittman he was through and shake his hand good-bye. After that, he would go to McManus’s office and thank Carl for having given him the chance to work there, shake his hand and thank him for the privilege of having known him, but he wasn’t cut out for this kind of work anymore, he would say, the job was killing him now and he was all washed up, and then he would thank his boss again for being the good man he was and walk out of the building for the last time.