The morning after the trial, Ferguson said good-bye to his friends in Vermont and drove back to New York. The enervations of the past three weeks had worn him down and left him with much to think about. The violent scene in the bar, the violence in Newark, the strong, tactile memory of the handcuffs pressing against his wrists, the ache in his stomach during the trial, Luther’s sudden but not impetuous decision to make a new life for himself in Montreal, and Amy, poor, ravaged Amy sprinting madly toward the car. There was his book to think about as well, the book he was hoping he would be able to write, and bit by bit he settled in again and began to take comfort from his room and his desk and his long talks on the phone with Celia at night. On August eleventh, his mother called to tell him that a letter from the Walt Whitman Scholars Program had turned up in the mail that afternoon. Did he want her to read it to him over the phone or should she forward it to East Eighty-ninth Street? Assuming it was nothing of any importance, most likely a message from Mrs. Tommasini, the program’s secretary, with information about the date and time of the upcoming September luncheon, Ferguson told his mother not to waste her breath and to send it on to him the next time she had to stop in at the post office. A full week went by before the letter made it to New York, but on the morning of the day it arrived, Friday, August eighteenth, Ferguson left for Woods Hole on a Trailways bus (the Pontiac was in the shop for minor repairs), and consequently it was not until he returned from his visit with Celia on Monday the twenty-first that Ferguson opened the envelope and received his second punch to the face that summer.
The letter wasn’t from Mrs. Tommasini but from Gordon DeWitt, a one-paragraph letter from the founder of the Walt Whitman Scholars Program in which Ferguson was told that a number of distressing facts had recently been brought to his attention (DeWitt’s attention) by a former Princeton classmate, Judge William T. Burdock of Brattleboro, Vermont, concerning a barroom fight in which he (Ferguson) had been responsible for breaking a man’s nose, and although legally he had been judged to have acted in self-defense, morally he had behaved in a most reprehensible manner, since there was no defense for his having entered such an unsavory establishment in the first place, and the mere fact that he had been there cast alarming doubts on his ability to assess right from wrong. As Ferguson well knew, all participants in the Walt Whitman Scholars Program had to sign a character oath in which they promised to act as gentlemen in any and all situations, to take it upon themselves to become models of good conduct and civic virtue, and because Ferguson had failed to keep the promise he had made, it was his sad duty (DeWitt’s sad duty) to inform him that his scholarship had been revoked. Ferguson could remain at Princeton as a student in good standing if he chose to remain, but his tuition and room-and-board fees would no longer be funded by the Program. Regretfully but sincerely yours …
FERGUSON PICKED UP the phone and dialed the number of DeWitt’s Wall Street office. Sorry, the secretary said, Mr. DeWitt is traveling in Asia and won’t be back until September tenth.
No use calling Nagle. Nagle and his wife were in Greece.
Was it possible to cover the costs himself? No, not possible. He had written a check to McBride for five thousand dollars, and his account now stood at just over two thousand. Not enough.
Ask his mother and Dan to pay for it? No, he didn’t have the heart to do that. His mother’s calendar and datebook project was finished now, and Phil Costanza, Dan’s Tommy the Bear collaborator for the past sixteen years, had been flattened by a stroke and would probably never work again. Not the best moment to be asking for favors.
Throw in his two thousand and ask them to make up the difference? Perhaps. But what about next year, when the two thousand would be gone?
Throwing in the two thousand would also mean having to give up the apartment. A gruesome thought: no more New York.
And yet, if he didn’t go back to Princeton, he would lose his student deferment. That would mean the draft, and because he would refuse to serve if and when he was called up, the draft would mean jail.
Another college? A less expensive college? But which one, and how in the world could he swing a transfer with so little time left?
He had no idea what to do.
One thing was certain: they didn’t want him anymore. They had decided he was no good and had kicked him out.
7.1
After he returned from Florida, he packed up his things and moved four blocks south to an apartment on West 107th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue. Two rooms plus kitchen for the extravagant yet wholly affordable sum of one hundred and thirty dollars a month (there were benefits to having money in the bank), but even though he preferred living without roommates and was glad to have left behind the haunted interiors of West 111th Street (a necessary act), sleeping alone was difficult. The top pillow was either too firm or too soft, the bottom pillow was either too flat or too lumpy, and every night the sheets scratched his arms or twisted themselves around his legs, and with no Amy beside him anymore to lull him into drowsiness with the placid motions of her breathing, his muscles couldn’t relax, his lungs refused to slow down, and he couldn’t stop his mind from running at a speed that churned out fifty-two thoughts per minute, one for every card in the deck. How many cigarettes smoked at two-thirty in the morning? How many glasses of red wine drunk past midnight to quell the jitters and induce his eyes to shut? Neck-aches nearly every morning. Stomach cramps in the afternoon. Shortness of breath in the evening. And morning, noon, and night: a heart that beat too fast.
It wasn’t about Amy anymore. He had spent the summer reconciling himself to the fact of their separation, to the inevitability of their splitting apart for good, and he no longer blamed her or even blamed himself. They had been moving in opposite directions for close to a year, and sooner or later the filament that had been holding them together was bound to snap. Snap it did, and so big and so powerful was the snap that it had shot her clear across the country. California. The calamity of distant California, and since the beginning of May, not a single word from her or about her — a zero as large as a hole in the sky.
At his strongest moments, he could tell himself that it was all for the best, that the person Amy had become was no longer a person he could live with or want to live with, and therefore he should regret nothing. At his weakest moments, he missed her, missed her in the same way he had missed his two severed fingers after the crash, and now that she was gone, it often felt as if another part of his body had been stolen from him. When he stood in the middle ground between strongest and weakest, he prayed that someone else would come along to occupy the other half of his bed and cure him of his insomnia.
New digs, the dream of a new love, the long summer of work on his translations that persisted through the fall, winter, and spring, the somatic troubles caused by the loss of his old love and/or his current state of mind that eventually landed him in the emergency room at St. Luke’s Hospital with twenty-seven daggers in his gut (not the burst appendix he had thought it was but an attack of gastritis), the ongoing mayhem in Vietnam coupled with numerous other shocks that occurred throughout the latter half of 1968 and the first half of 1969—they were all part of Ferguson’s story — but for now attention must be drawn to the war he was fighting against the symbolic figure of Nobodaddy, the character invented by William Blake who stood in Ferguson’s mind as the representative of the irrational men who had been put in charge of running the world. By mid-September, when he went back to Columbia for his last year of college, he was feeling disillusioned and bitter about most things, among them the things he had discovered concerning the manipulations of the American press, and now he was reconsidering whether he wanted to join the ranks of that fraternity after he left college, whether the decision he had made back in high school to become a professional journalist was still worth making in light of the corruption and dishonesty he had witnessed firsthand during the days of the Columbia revolt last spring. The New York Times had lied. The so-called paper of record, the supposed bastion of ethical, unbiased reporting, had faked its story about the police intervention on April thirtieth and had published an account of the events that was written before those events ever took place. A. M. Rosenthal, the deputy managing editor of the Times, had been tipped off by someone in the Columbia administration about the impending bust several hours before the T.P.F. showed up in the neighborhood, and with the knowledge that one thousand troops would be called in, the lead story on the front page of the early morning edition on April thirtieth announced that those one thousand men had cleared the occupied buildings of the demonstrating students and had arrested seven hundred of them on charges of criminal trespass (a number that had been plugged in at the last minute, after the article had been written), but not one word about what had really happened, not one word about the bloodshed and violence, not one word about the battered students and professors, and not one word about how the police had used handcuffs and nightsticks to pound one of the Times’ own reporters in Avery Hall. In the next morning’s paper, the front-page lead again failed to mention the police riot that had taken place on campus during the bust, although there was a modest story about alleged acts of police brutality hidden on page 35: LINDSAY ORDERS REPORT ON POLICE. The third paragraph of the article contended that “police brutality in such a situation is hard to define, as the remarks of dozens of Columbia students suggest. To an experienced antiwar or civil rights demonstrator, yesterday morning’s police action on the Columbia campus was, for the most part, relatively gentle.” The sadistic beating of Times reporter Robert McG. Thomas Jr. was not mentioned until the eleventh paragraph.