Seven hundred and twenty people arrested. Nearly one hundred and fifty injuries reported, with untold numbers of unreported injuries as well, among them the knocks that had been delivered to Ferguson’s head and hand.
The editorial in that day’s Spectator had no words in it — just the masthead followed by two blank columns bordered in black.
SPRING 1968 (V). On Saturday, May fourth, Ferguson and Amy finally sat down and talked. Ferguson was the one who insisted on it, and he made it clear to her that he didn’t want it to be a conversation about his wounds or Amy’s arrest with her fellow occupiers in Low, nor were they going to discuss the general strike against Columbia that had been declared on the evening of April thirtieth by a coalition of red-bands, green-bands, and moderates (the SDS strategy had worked) or dwell for a single moment on the big things that were starting to happen in their adored, fiercely remembered Paris, no, he said, for one night they would forget about politics and talk about themselves, and Amy reluctantly gave in, even though she could think about little else but the movement now, what she called the euphoria of the struggle, and the electric awakening that had transformed her after six days of communal living in Low.
In order to avoid a potential shouting match in the apartment, Ferguson suggested they go to a neutral site, a public site, where the presence of strangers would stop them from losing control of themselves, and because they hadn’t been to the Green Tree in over two months, they decided to return to Yum City for what Ferguson supposed would be the last meal they ever had together for the rest of their lives. How happy Mr. and Mrs. Molnár were to see their favorite young couple walk through the door of the restaurant, and how accommodating they were when Ferguson asked for a rear corner table in the back room, the smaller, slightly elevated room that had fewer tables in it, and how kind they were to offer them a free bottle of Bordeaux to accompany their dinner, and how miserable Ferguson felt as he and Amy sat down for their last supper of all time, noting how perfectly apt it was that Amy should instinctively choose to sit in the chair with her back against the wall, meaning that she could look out and see the other people in the restaurant, while Ferguson instinctively sat down in the chair with his back to those other people, meaning that the only person he could see was Amy, Amy and the wall behind her, for that was who they were, he said to himself, that was who they had always been for the past four years and eight months, Amy looking out at others and he looking only at Amy.
They spent an hour and a half there, perhaps an hour and three-quarters, he was never sure exactly how long it was, and as the normally ravenous Amy picked at her food and Ferguson downed glass after glass of red wine, polishing off most of the first bottle himself and then ordering another, they talked and fell silent, talked and fell silent again, and then talked and talked and talked, and soon enough Ferguson was being told they were finished, that they had outgrown each other and were moving in different directions now and therefore would have to stop living together, and no, Amy said, it wasn’t anyone’s fault, least of all Ferguson’s fault, he who had loved her so hard and so well since their first kiss on the bench in that little Montclair park, no, it was simply that she could no longer bear the smothering confines of couplehood, she had to be free to push on alone, to go out to California unattached and unencumbered by anyone or anything and continue working for the movement, that was her life now and Ferguson had no place in it anymore, her wonderful Archie of the big soul and kind heart would have to get along without her, and she was sorry, so sorry, so immensely sorry, but that’s the way it was now and nothing, not one thing in the whole wide world, could ever make it different.
Amy was crying by then, two streams of tears were falling down her face as she gently crucified the son of Rose and Stanley Ferguson, but Ferguson himself, who had far more reason to cry than she did, was too drunk to cry, not excessively drunk but drunk enough to feel no impulse to open the saltwater spigots, which was a fortunate thing, he felt, since he didn’t want her last impression of him to be that of a destroyed man weeping his guts out in front of her, and therefore he summoned every bit of the strength he still had in him and said:
O, my best beloved Amy, my extraordinary Amy of the wild hair and shining eyes, my darling lover of a thousand transcendent naked nights, my brilliant girl whose mouth and body have done such wondrous things to my mouth and body over the years, the only girl who has ever slept with me, the only girl I have ever wanted to sleep with, not only am I going to miss your body every day for the rest of my life, but I will especially miss those parts of your body that belong only to me, that belong to my eyes and my hands and are not even known to you by yourself, the parts of you that you have never seen, the back parts that are invisible to you just as mine are to me, just as they are to each person who has a body of his or her own, beginning with your ass, of course, your deliciously round and shapely ass, and the backs of your legs with the little brown dots on them that I have worshipped for so long, and the lines engraved in your skin just behind your knees, in the place where the legs bend, how I have marveled at the beauty of those two lines, and then the hidden half of your neck and the bumps in your spine when you lean over and the lovely curve in the small of your back, which have belonged to me and only to me for all these years, and most of all your shoulder blades, darling Amy, the jut of your two shoulder blades, which have always reminded me of swan’s wings, or the wings jutting from the back of the White Rock seltzer girl, who was the first girl I ever loved.
Please, Archie, Amy said. Please stop.
But I haven’t finished.
No, Archie, please. I can’t take it.
Ferguson was about to speak again, but before he could get his tongue into the proper position, Amy stood up from her chair, wiped away her tears with a napkin, and walked out of the restaurant.
MAY — JUNE 1968. THE next morning, Amy packed up her things, deposited them with her parents on West Seventy-fifth Street, and then spent her last month as a Barnard undergraduate camped out on the sofa in the living room of Patsy Dugan’s apartment on Claremont Avenue.
Ferguson was more than exhausted now, more than numb, he was back in the dark dormitory elevator of the 1965 blackout, which could no longer be distinguished from the 1946–47 blackout when he was still in his mother’s womb. He was twenty-one years old, and if he meant to have any kind of life in the future, he would have to be born all over again — a yowling neonate pulled from the darkness for another chance to find his way in the glare and shimmer of the world.
On May thirteenth, one million people marched through the streets of Paris. The whole country of France was in revolt, and where in God’s name had de Gaulle gone to? One placard read: COLUMBIA-PARIS.
On the twenty-first, Hamilton Hall was occupied for a second time, and one hundred and thirty-eight people were arrested. That night, the battle on the Columbia campus between cops and students was bigger, bloodier, and even more savage than the one on the night of the seven-hundred-person bust.
After the May twenty-second issue, the Spectator ceased publication until the final issue of the semester on June third. That same day, Ferguson left New York to spend a month with his parents in Florida.