The troops pulled out on the seventeenth, and by the time the last tank left the city, the war was over.
Everything else was over as well, at least for the Jews of Weequahic, who seemed to be of one mind with Ferguson’s father about what had happened, and within six months nearly every family in the area was gone, some of them moving to nearby Elizabeth, others heading to the suburbs of Essex and Morris Counties, and a neighborhood that had once been all Jews had no Jews in it anymore. How odd that most of the parents and grandparents of the black people who lived in Newark had come up from the South during the Great Migration between the wars, and now, because his mother’s photographs of the riots had made a certain mark in the world and she had been offered a new job at the Miami Herald, his parents were trading places with their black neighbors and heading south themselves.
It was terrible to see them go.
FALL 1967. SOMETHING about the sunlight or the starlight or the moonbeams in California had brightened the color of Amy’s hair and darkened the color of her skin, and she returned to New York with paler, blonder eyebrows and lashes and a more tawny glow radiating from her cheeks, arms, and legs, the gold-brown of a freshly baked muffin or a slice of warm, buttery toast. Ferguson wanted to eat her up. After two and a half months of celibate agony, he couldn’t get enough of her, and because she too had starved herself for the entire summer, playing the role of what she called a no-fun nun, she was in an uncommonly arousable state, ready to give him as much as he was ready to give her, and Ferguson, who understood now that he had inherited most if not all of his grandfather’s large appetites, was prepared to give her everything he had, which he did, and which Amy did with everything she had as well, and for three consecutive days after she came back to the apartment on West 111th Street, they camped out on the double bed in her room and reacquainted themselves with the unknown force that held them together.
Nevertheless, certain things had changed, and not all of them were to Ferguson’s liking. For one thing, Amy had fallen in love with California, or at least the Bay Area part of California, and the girl who would never leave New York was now actively considering whether she should apply to law school at Berkeley for next year. Law was not the issue. Ferguson was all for her becoming a lawyer, which was something they had discussed many times in the past, a poor people’s lawyer, an activist lawyer, a profession that would allow her to do more good in the world than someone who organized anti-war demonstrations or rent strikes against greedy, irresponsible landlords, since the war was bound to end one day (she hoped) and it would be far more satisfying to put greedy landlords in jail than to beg them to turn on the heat or exterminate the rats or get rid of the lead paint. By all means become a lawyer — but California, what was she talking about? Didn’t she remember that he would still be in New York next year? Being apart for the summer had been bad enough, but a whole year of it would drive him crazy. And what made her assume he would want to follow her to California after he graduated? Couldn’t she go to a sensible law school like Columbia or NYU or Fordham and stay on in the apartment with him? Why make everything so fucking complicated?
Archie, Archie, don’t get carried away. It’s only speculation at this point.
I’m stunned that you would even consider it.
You don’t know what it’s like out there. After two weeks, I stopped thinking about New York and was glad not to think about it. I felt I was home.
That’s not what you used to say. New York is it, remember?
I was sixteen when I said that, and I’d never been to Berkeley or San Francisco. Now, as an old woman of twenty, I’ve changed my mind. New York is a stinkhole.
Granted. But not every part of it. We could always move to another neighborhood.
Northern California is the most beautiful place in America. As beautiful as France, Archie. Don’t take my word for it if you don’t want to. See it for yourself.
I’m kind of busy right now.
Christmas vacation. We could go out there during winter break.
Fine. But even if I think it’s the best place in the world, that still won’t solve the problem.
What problem?
The problem of one year apart.
We’ll get through it. It won’t be so hard.
I’ve just been through the loneliest, most wretched summer of my life. It was hard, Amy, very hard, so hard that I almost couldn’t take it. A whole year would probably destroy me.
All right, it was hard. But I also think it was good for us. Being alone, sleeping alone, missing each other, and writing letters — I think it made us a stronger couple.
Ha.
I really do love you, Archie.
I know you do. But sometimes I think you love your future more than you love the idea of being with me.
DECEMBER 1967. THEY never made it out to California that winter because Ferguson’s grandmother died, died from the same sort of abrupt inner explosion that had killed his grandfather the year before, and the trip had to be canceled so they could attend yet another burial ceremony in Woodbridge, New Jersey. Then followed a frantic week in which many hands took part in disposing of his grandmother’s possessions and cleaning out her flat, which had to be accomplished in record time because Ferguson’s parents were on the verge of moving to Florida, so everyone pulled together to chip in and help, Ferguson of course but also Amy, who wound up doing more than anyone else, and Nancy Solomon and her husband, Max, and Bobby George, who had been discharged from the army and was back in Montclair getting himself into shape for spring training, and even Didi Bryant, who had formed a friendship with Ferguson’s grandmother after his grandfather’s death and cried for her just as hard as she had cried for him (who in his right mind would ever contend that life made sense?), and Ferguson’s mother needed the help because she was so distraught, shedding more tears that week than the sum total of tears Ferguson had seen her shed from his boyhood until now, and Ferguson too felt an overpowering sadness take hold of him, not just because he had lost his grandmother, which was sorrow enough, but also because he hated to see what was happening to the apartment, the slow dismantling of the rooms where one object after another was being wrapped up in newspapers and put into cardboard boxes, all the things that had been a part of his life since before he could remember being alive, the crummy little knickknacks he had played with on his hands and knees as a kid, his grandmother’s ivory elephants and the green-glass hippopotamus, the yellowing lace doily under the telephone in the hall, his grandfather’s pipes and empty humidors, which he had loved sticking his nose into for a deep whiff of the acrid tobacco smells left behind by long-vanished cigars, all gone now, forever gone now, and the worst of it was that his grandmother had been planning to go down to Florida with his parents and move into the new apartment in Miami Beach with them, and even though she had claimed to be looking forward to it (You’ll come down to visit me, Archie, and we’ll go out for breakfast at Wolfie’s on Collins Avenue and have scrambled eggs with lox and onions), he suspected that the thought of leaving the apartment after so many years had terrified her, and perhaps she had willed herself to have the stroke because she simply couldn’t face it.