As they headed for the park, mysterious bursts of sweat began spilling from Ferguson’s pores, his stomach began to throb, and it was becoming more and more difficult to fill his lungs with air. Dizzy. So dizzy that he took hold of Celia’s arm to maintain his balance as they walked down the sharp incline of West 116th Street and shuffled toward Riverside Drive. Dizzy and scared. He had made the promise to himself when he was still a boy, and since then it had been one of the burning forces in his life, a test of will and inner strength and sacrifice to a holy cause, solidarity across the chasm between the living and the dead, honoring the dead by saying no to something beautiful from this world, and to break that promise now wasn’t easy for him, it was hard, harder than anything he could think of, but it had to be done, had to be done now, for noble as his sacrifice had been, it had also been crazy, and he didn’t want to be crazy anymore.
They crossed Riverside Drive, and once their feet were touching the grass in the park, Ferguson took the ball out of his pocket.
Back up a little bit, Celia, he said to her, and after the smiling Celia had bounced back until they were standing about twelve feet apart, Ferguson raised his arm and threw her the ball.
THE SUMMER PROMISED great things for everyone in his circle. Or so it appeared when the summer began, and why mention the disasters of July and August when the chronology calls for the high hopes of June to come first in the reckoning? For Ferguson and his friends, it was a time when everyone seemed to be rushing along in the same direction, when everyone stood on the brink of doing something unheard of, some extraordinary thing that none of them had ever imagined would be possible. In far-off California, the summer of 1967 had been declared the Summer of Love. Back home on the East Coast, it began as the Summer of Exaltations.
Noah was returning to Williamstown for another season of acting (Chekhov, Pinter) and was hard at work on the script for his second little film, which would be less little than the first one had been, a sixteen-minute talkie with the working title of Tickle My Feet. On top of that, he had found himself a new girlfriend in the person of frizzy-headed, large-breasted Vicki Tremain, a fellow NYUer from the class of ’69 who had memorized more than a hundred poems by Emily Dickinson, smoked pot as compulsively as other people smoked cigarettes, and had aspirations to become the first woman to traverse the twenty-six blocks between Washington Square and the Empire State Building by walking on her hands. Or so she said. She also said she had been raped repeatedly by Lyndon Johnson over the past four years and that Marilyn Monroe wouldn’t have killed herself if she had married Henry Miller instead of Arthur Miller. Vicki was a young woman with a rich sense of humor and a keen awareness of the absurdities of life, and Noah was so bowled over by her that his legs wobbled whenever she came near him.
Amy and Luther would not be coming down to New York again. They had found an apartment in Somerville, and while Luther took supplementary courses at Harvard, Amy would be spending the next two and a half months as an assembly-line worker at the Necco factory in Cambridge. Ferguson remembered Necco wafers from his childhood, in particular the bad-weather battles he had fought with them at Camp Paradise, all the boys cooped up in the cabin and flinging those hard little disks of candy at one another as rain poured down on the roof, but then Rosenberg caught one just below the eye and Necco wafer wars were banned. An interesting choice, Ferguson said to Amy on the phone, but why factory work, and what was it all about? Politics, she said. Members of SDS had been asked to find jobs in factories that summer to help spread the anti-war movement to the working class, which was still mostly pro-war at that point. Ferguson asked whether she thought it would do any good. She had no idea, Amy said, but even if the inside-agitator stuff didn’t pan out, it would be a good experience for her, a chance to learn something about American labor conditions and the people who did the laboring. She had read a hundred books on the subject, but a summer at the Necco factory was bound to teach her a lot more. Full immersion. Hands-on, practical knowledge. Rolling up her sleeves and plunging in. Right?
Right, Ferguson said, but promise me one thing.
What?
Don’t eat too many Necco wafers.
Oh? And why is that?
They’re bad for your teeth. And don’t throw them at Luther. If properly aimed, they can be turned into deadly weapons, and Luther’s health is of great importance to me, since I want to go to a baseball game with him this summer.
All right, Archie. I won’t eat them, and I won’t throw them. I’ll just make them.
Jim had completed his masters in physics at Princeton and would be marrying Nancy Hammerstein in early June. They had already signed a lease on a two-bedroom apartment in South Orange, a third-floor flat in the building that stood on the corner of South Orange Avenue and Ridgewood Road, one of the rare apartment buildings in a town largely made up of one-family houses, and they would be moving in after they returned from their camping-trip honeymoon in the Berkshires. Jim had been offered a job teaching physics at West Orange High School and Nancy would be teaching history at Montclair High, but they had chosen to live in South Orange because Jim still had many friends there, and with babies on the not-too-distant horizon, it made sense to be in the same town as the future grandparents of those children. What a thought that was, Ferguson said to himself: he an uncle, Amy an aunt, and his mother and her father bouncing a pair of grandkids on their knees.
Howard was going back to the farm in Vermont, not to milk cows and repair barbed-wire fences as he had in the past but to put his four semesters of ancient Greek to good use by translating the written fragments and recorded utterances of Democritus and Heraclitus into English, the two pre-Socratic thinkers who were commonly referred to as the Laughing Philosopher and the Weeping Philosopher. Howard had discovered an amusing passage in an early text by John Donne that he was planning to insert as an epigraph to the project: Now among our wise men, I doubt not but many would be found who would laugh at Heraclitus weeping, none which weep at Democritus laughing. But even as Howard wrestled with his versions of D. (Action begins with boldness: chance rules the end) and H. (The way up and the way down are one and the same), he was pursuing his T.M. project as well, the work of illustrating the sixty best tennis matches he and Ferguson had come up with over the past two years, for Howard was one of those fluky beings who felt at home with both words and images and was happiest when living in both realms simultaneously, and beyond those jobs of translating and drawing, his chief objective that summer was to spend as many hours as he could with Mona Veltry, his childhood friend from Brattleboro who in recent months had been elevated to the status of girlfriend, lover, intellectual companion, and possible future wife. Before saying good-bye to each other at Princeton on the day following the last day of finals, Howard had extracted a promise from Ferguson to come to Vermont for two long visits that summer, perhaps even three.