The three other people who shared the apartment with them, for example, fellow students named Melanie, Fred, and Stu the first year, Alice, Alex, and Fred the second year, had no role to play in the story. They came and went, they read their books and cooked their meals, they slept in their beds and said hello when they popped out of the bathroom in the morning, but Ferguson barely took note of them and had trouble remembering their faces from one day to the next. Or the dreaded two-year science requirement, which he finally started tackling as a sophomore, enrolling in a course mockingly referred to as Physics for Poets and cutting nearly every class, completing his fake lab reports in a mad weekend rush with the help of one of Amy’s math friends from Barnard — a matter of no importance. Even his decision not to join the managing board of the Spectator did not weigh heavily in the narrative. It was a question of the hours, nothing more than that, nothing to do with a lack of interest, but Friedman, Mullhouse, Branch, and the others were putting in fifty- and sixty-hour weeks at the paper, and that was more than Ferguson was willing to commit himself to. Not one member of the board had a girlfriend — no time for love. Not one of them was writing or translating poetry — no time for literature. Not one of them was on top of his course work — no time for studying. Ferguson had already decided to go on with journalism after he graduated from college, but for now he needed Amy and his poets and his seminars on Montaigne and Milton, so he compromised by staying on as a reporter and associate member of the board, reporting much during those years and doing his once-a-week stint as the night man, which entailed going to the office at Ferris Booth Hall and composing headlines for the articles that would be printed in tomorrow morning’s paper, running the finished articles up to Angelo the typesetter on the fourth floor, retrieving the columns of type, pasting up the issue on boards, and then cabbing out to Brooklyn at around two A.M. to hand the boards to the printer, who would produce twenty thousand copies, which would be delivered to the Columbia campus by midmorning. It was a process Ferguson enjoyed taking part in, but neither that nor his decision not to join the board was of any significance in the long run.
What counted, on the other hand, was that both of his grandparents died during those years, his grandfather in December 1966 (heart attack) and his grandmother in December 1967 (stroke).
What also counted was the Six-Day War (June 1967), but it came and went too quickly to count for much, while the race riots that broke out in Newark the following month, which lasted no longer than the war in the Middle East had, changed everything forever. One minute, his parents were celebrating the victory of the tiny, gallant Jews over their gargantuan enemies, and the next minute Sam Brownstein’s store on Springfield Avenue had been smashed and looted and Ferguson’s parents were folding up their tent and escaping into the desert, not just leaving Newark and New Jersey behind them but going all the way down to southern Florida by the end of the year.
Another illuminated spot on the canvas: April 1968 and the explosion at Columbia, the revolution at Columbia, the eight days that shook the world.
All the rest of the light in the painting shone on Amy. Darkness above and below her, darkness behind her, darkness on either side of her, but Amy enveloped in light, a light so strong that it nearly made her invisible.
FALL 1966. AFTER attending more than a dozen SDS meetings, after taking part in a three-day hunger strike on the steps of Low Library in early November to protest the killing in Vietnam, after trying to get her points across in numerous conversations with her fellow members at the West End, the Hungarian Pastry Shop, and the College Inn, Amy was growing disenchanted. They don’t listen to me, she said to Ferguson, as the two of them were brushing their teeth one night before going to bed. I stand up to speak, and they all look down at the floor, or else they interrupt and don’t let me finish, or else they let me finish and don’t say anything afterward, and then, fifteen minutes later, one of the guys stands up and says almost exactly what I just said, sometimes using the same words, and everyone applauds. They’re bullies, Archie.
All of them?
No, not all of them. My friends from the ICV are okay, although I wish they’d back me more, but the ones from the PL faction are insufferable. Especially Mike Loeb, the leader of the pack. He cuts me off constantly, shouts me down, insults me. He thinks women in the movement should be making coffee for the men or handing out leaflets on rainy days, but otherwise we should keep our mouths shut.
Mike Loeb. He’s been in a couple of my classes. Another boy from the Jersey suburbs, I’m sorry to say. One of those self-anointed geniuses who has an answer for everything. Mr. Certain in a plaid lumberjack shirt. A bore.
The funny thing is, he went to the same high school as Mark Rudd. Now they’re together again in SDS, and they barely talk to each other.
Because Mark is an idealist and Mike is a fanatic.
He thinks the revolution is coming within the next five years.
Fat chance.
The problem is that the men outnumber the women by about twelve to one. We’re too small, and it’s easy to discount us.
Why not break away and form your own group?
You mean, quit SDS?
You don’t have to quit. Just stop going to the meetings.
And?
And you become the first president of Barnard Women for Peace and Justice.
What a thought.
You don’t like it?
We’d be marginalized. The big issues are all university issues, national issues, world issues, and twenty braless girls marching around with anti-war posters wouldn’t have much of an effect.
What if there were a hundred of you?
There aren’t. We just don’t have enough people to get noticed. For better or worse, I think I’m stuck.
DECEMBER 1966. NOT only was the heart attack that killed Ferguson’s grandfather unexpected (his cardiograms had been holding steady for years, his blood pressure was normal), but the manner of his death was an embarrassment to everyone in the family, a disgrace. It wasn’t that his wife or daughters or sons-in-law or grandson were unaware of his penchant for skirt chasing, his long fascination with extramarital thrills, but not one of them suspected that the seventy-three-year-old Benjy Adler would go so far as to rent an apartment for a woman less than half his age and keep her as his full-time, live-in mistress. Didi Bryant was just thirty-four. She had been hired as a secretary at Gersh, Adler, and Pomerantz in 1962, and after she had been working there for eight months Ferguson’s grandfather decided that he loved her, decided that no matter what the cost he must and would possess her, and when the sweet, curvy, Nebraska-born Didi Bryant told him she was willing to be possessed, the cost included the monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment on East Sixty-third Street between Lexington and Park, sixteen pairs of shoes, twenty-seven dresses, six coats, one diamond bracelet, one gold bracelet, one pearl necklace, eight pairs of earrings, and one mink stole. The affair lasted approximately three years (quite happily, according to Didi Bryant), and then, on a frigid afternoon in early December, at an hour when Ferguson’s grandfather was supposedly at his office on West Fifty-seventh Street, he walked over to Didi’s place on East Sixty-third, climbed into bed with her, and suffered the immense coronary infarction that killed him just as he was ejaculating for the last time in his eventful, sloppily managed, mostly enjoyable life. La petite mort and la grande mort within ten seconds of each other — coming and going in the space of three short breaths.