He wrote to Aunt Mildred one last time in early May, hoping that something had finally turned up in Berkeley that would allow him to back out of his handshake agreement with Fleming before he started the job, but two weeks went by without an answer, and when he finally splurged on the cost of a long-distance call to California, his aunt claimed she hadn’t received the letter. Ferguson suspected she was lying, but he couldn’t voice his suspicions without proof, and what difference did it make anyway? Mildred hadn’t set out to sabotage his plan, she was lazy, that was all, she had let the matter slide, and now it was too late to do anything about it, and his once doting aunt of the one and only Archie had let him down.
Amy was miserable. Ferguson was in despair. The thought of being separated from each other for two and a half months was too horrible even to talk about, and yet neither one of them could see a way around the problem. Amy said she admired him for acting like a grown-up (even if he sensed that she was a little angry at him as well), and while Ferguson was tempted to ask her to cancel the trip and stay behind in New York, he knew it would have been presumptuous and wrong of him to do that, so he never asked. The Six-Day War broke out on June fifth, and one day after it ended Amy took off for Berkeley on her own. Her parents had given her the money for a plane ticket, and Ferguson rode out to the airport with them on the morning she left. An awkward, unhappy farewell. No tears or grand gestures, but a long, solemn hug followed by a promise to write to each other as often as possible. Back in his room on West 111th Street, Ferguson sat down on the bed and looked at the wall in front of him. He heard an infant crying in the next apartment, he heard a man shouting Fuck at someone down on the sidewalk five stories below, and all at once he realized that he had made the worst mistake of his life. Job or no job — he should have gone with her and played out whatever hand he was dealt. That was how you were supposed to live, that was the leaping sort of life he wanted for himself, a life that danced, but he had chosen duty over adventure, responsibility to his parents over his love for Amy, and he hated himself for his cautiousness, for his stick-in-the-mud plodder’s heart. Money. Always money. Always not enough money. For the first time in his life, he began to wonder how it would feel to have been born stinking rich.
Another summer in hot New York with the crazy people and the radios, listening to the snoring and farting of the subtenant in Amy’s room next door as he lay in his bed at night, sweating, sweating through his shirts and socks every day by noon and walking down the streets with his fists clenched, a knifepoint mugging every other hour in the neighborhood now, four women raped in the elevators of their buildings, be prepared, keep your eyes open, and try not to breathe when you walked past a garbage can. Long days in the million-book Parthenon replica called Butler Library, taking notes on prerevolutionary Columbia, then known as King’s College, and the living conditions of mid-eighteenth-century New York (pigs running through the streets, horse shit everywhere), the first college in the state, the fifth college anywhere in the country, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, Robert Livingston, first chief justice of the Supreme Court, first secretary of the Treasury, author of the final draft of the U.S. Constitution, member of the five-man committee that composed the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers as young men, as boys, as toddlers running through the streets with the pigs and horses, and then home after five or six hours in musty Butler to type up his notes for Fleming, whom he met with twice a week in the air-conditioned West End, always there and never in Fleming’s office or apartment, for even if the kind, decorous, deeply intelligent historian never laid a hand on Ferguson, his eyes were on him continually, searching for a sign of encouragement or some glance of reciprocal longing, and that was enough to contend with, Ferguson felt, since he liked Fleming and couldn’t help feeling sorry for him.
Meanwhile, Amy was in hippie-land three thousand miles to the west, Amy was in the Garden of Eden, Amy was roaming down Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley during the Summer of Love, and Ferguson read and reread her letters as often as he could in order to go on hearing her voice, carrying them to the library with him every morning to use as anti-boredom pills whenever his work threatened to put him into a coma, and the letters he wrote back to her were light and fast and as funny as he could make them, with no talk about the war or the rancid smells in the streets or the women raped in elevators or the gloom that had settled in his heart. You seem to be having the time of your life, he wrote in one of the forty-two letters he sent to her that summer. Back here in New York, I’m having the life of my times.
JULY 1967. IN Ferguson’s opinion, the saddest part of the sad Newark riots was that nothing could have stopped them from happening. Unlike most large events that occurred in the world, which also might not have occurred if people had been thinking more clearly (Vietnam, for example), Newark was unavoidable. Not to the extent of twenty-six people killed, perhaps, or seven hundred people injured, or fifteen hundred people arrested, or nine hundred businesses destroyed, or ten million dollars in property damage, but Newark was a place where everything had been going wrong for years, and the six days of violence that began on July twelfth were the logical outcome of a situation that could be addressed only through violence of one sort or another. That the war broke out when a black cab driver named John Smith was arrested for illegally passing a police patrol car and then bludgeoned by two white cops was not a cause so much as an effect. If it hadn’t been Smith, it would have been Jones. And if it hadn’t been Jones, it would have been Brown or White or Gray. In the event, it happened to be Smith, and when he was dragged into the Fourth Precinct station house by arresting officers John DeSimone and Vito Pontrelli, a rumor quickly spread among the residents of the large public housing project across the street that Smith had been murdered. Not true, as it turned out, but the deeper truth was that Newark’s population was more than fifty percent black now, and most of those two hundred and twenty thousand people were poor. Newark had the highest percentage of substandard housing in the country, the second-highest crime rate, the second-highest infant mortality rate, and an unemployment rate double the national average. The municipal government was all white, the police department was ninety percent white, and nearly every construction contract was awarded to companies controlled by the Mob, which thanked the city officials who helped them with generous kickbacks and refused to hire black workers because they didn’t belong to the all-white unions. The system was so corrupt that City Hall was commonly referred to as the Steal Works.
Once upon a time, Newark had been a town where people made things, a town of factories and blue-collar jobs, and every object on earth had been manufactured there, from wristwatches to vacuum cleaners to lead pipes, from bottles to bottle brushes to buttons, from packaged bread to cupcakes to foot-long Italian salamis. Now the wood-stick houses were falling apart, the factories had shut down, and the white middle class was moving to the suburbs. Ferguson’s parents had done that as long ago as 1950, and as far as he could tell, they were the only ones who had ever come back, but Weequahic wasn’t really Newark, it was a Jewish town at the southwestern edge of an imaginary Newark, and everything had been tranquil there since the beginning of time. Seventy thousand Jews in one place, a splendid three-hundred-and-eleven-acre park designed by Olmsted, and a high school that produced more Ph.D.s than any other high school in the country.