Don’t worry about the draft board, McManus said. You’ve already signed up with me, and no man can serve in two armies at the same time.
LITTLE BY LITTLE, his heartbeat slowed down that spring and the daggers withdrew from his belly. He bought himself a new pair of down pillows, continued to avoid grapefruits, and took three more baths with Nora. He corrected the proofs of his book. He ordered a three-month subscription to the Times-Union and began following day-to-day life in Rochester. Asked to join the newly formed, whimsically named Columbia Poem Team, he traveled to Sarah Lawrence and Yale with Obenzinger, Quinn, Freeman, and Zimmer to give joint readings to the students (speaking in public was impossible but reading from his typed-up translations was not), high-energy events followed by considerable drinking and laughter and (at Sarah Lawrence) a ninety-minute conversation with a stunning coed named Delia Burns whom he desperately wanted to kiss but didn’t. He wrote the final papers for his literature seminars and managed not to oversleep on the morning of the astronomy exam. There were one hundred questions with five possible answers for each, and since Ferguson had attended only one lecture and had never opened the text book, he circled the A’s through E’s at random and was heartened to score eighteen percent, which was good enough to earn a passing grade of D+. Then, to round off his small act of almost invisible rebellion, he returned to the college bookstore and sold the book back to them, thus sticking it to them twice. They gave him six dollars and fifty cents for it. Ten minutes later, as he walked down Broadway toward his apartment on West 107th Street, a panhandler approached him and asked for a dime. Rather than give a dime, Ferguson thrust the whole six dollars and fifty cents into the man’s open palm and said, Here you are, sir. A gift from the trustees of Columbia University. With my compliments.
His book was published on May twelfth in a fine soft-covered edition of seventy-two pages that gave him much pleasure to look at and hold in his hands in the hours after it was lifted out of a cardboard box in the Review office, and within one week he had given away all but five of his twenty author’s copies to friends and relatives. The cover was illustrated with a reproduction of the well-known photograph of Apollinaire from the First World War, the one that showed the head of Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky wrapped in bandages following the operation to repair the shrapnel wound to his temple: the poet as martyr, the modern age born in the mud of the trenches, France in 1916, America in 1969, both trapped in never-ending wars that devoured their young. Three copies were consigned to the Gotham Book Mart, another three to the Eighth Street Bookshop, and six to the paperback den on campus. Inestimable Zimmer, Ferguson’s closest, most admired friend among the people in his class, reviewed the book for the Spectator and said nothing but kind things about it, excessively kind things. “The works in this assemblage of poems from France should not be looked on as mere translations but as English poems in their own right, a valuable contribution to our own literature. Mr. Ferguson has the ear and the heart of a true poet, and I for one will be going back to these magnificent works again and again as the years roll on.”
Excessively kind. But such a person was young David Zimmer, who would soon be facing the big question all of them would be facing the instant they left Morningside Heights. In Zimmer’s case, the dilemma expressed itself in a rhyme. Yale or jail. A four-year fellowship to do graduate work in literature at Yale or two to five years of jail if they wound up drafting him into the army. Yale or jail. What a neat little ditty that was, and what a world Nobodaddy had wrought.
It wasn’t going to be hard to say good-bye to Columbia, which was living through another round of protests and demonstrations in the spring of 1969, events that Ferguson was willing himself to ignore for reasons of pure self-preservation, but he would miss his friends and some of his professors, he would miss not being able to further the education he had received from Nora on the handful of nights they had spent together, and he would miss the hopeful boy who had come there in the fall of 1965, the boy who had slowly vanished over the past four years and would never be found again.
ON THE SAME morning in mid-June that Ferguson coughed the cough and took the written exam at the draft-board building on Whitehall Street, Bobby George and Margaret O’Mara were joined in holy wedlock at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church in Dallas, Texas, where Bobby was the starting catcher for Baltimore’s Double-A ball club, which happened to be the same day (according to a letter Ferguson received from his Aunt Mildred) that the still silent and permanently decamped Amy attended the SDS national convention in Chicago, a rancorous meeting that devolved into an angry clash over tactics and ideology between the PL faction and the group that would come to be known as the Weathermen, which led to the crack-up and sudden, shocking demise of SDS as a political organization. Uncle Henry and Aunt Mildred had kept in sporadic contact with Amy during her first year of law school, and Mildred wrote to her former one and only to tell him that Amy had decided to turn her back on the delusions of revolutionary activism and devote herself to the more realistic cause of women’s rights. The moment of revelation occurred when a man named Chaka Wells, the deputy minister of information for the Chicago Black Panthers, stood up to attack the PL and for no discernible reason started talking about the women in SDS by using the term “pussy power” and saying that “Superman was a punk because he never even tried to fuck Lois Lane,” a sentiment echoed a few minutes later by another Black Panther, Jewel Cook, who declared that he was for “pussy power” as well and that “the brother was only trying to say to you sisters that you have a strategic position in the revolution: prone.” It was a tired old joke by then, one that Amy had heard dozens of times in the past years, but that day in Chicago she finally had had enough, and instead of joining forces with the Weathermen, the break-off faction that included ex-Columbia students Mike Loeb, Ted Gold, Mark Rudd, and others, all of whom had been expelled from Columbia at the end of the spring term last year, she stood up from her seat and walked out of the convention center. As Aunt Mildred put it at the end of her letter, lapsing into the patronizing Aunt Mildred tone she often resorted to when talking about other people: I thought you should know about this, Archie, even if the two of you are no longer a couple. It seems to me that our Amy is finally beginning to grow up.
Bobby George says I do. Ferguson sticks out his left hand and shows it to a U.S. Army doctor. Amy walks out of the Chicago Coliseum and quits the movement for good. Was it possible that all three of those things happened at the same instant? Ferguson would have liked to have thought so.
Even more interesting: by the time Ferguson moved to Rochester at the beginning of July, Bobby had already been promoted to the Triple-A Red Wings of the International League. In a city where Ferguson knew absolutely no one, how improbable was it that his oldest friend should be there with him, not for the long haul, perhaps, but at least until the end of the summer and the close of the baseball season, the early months of adjustment and settling in, Bobby and his bride Margaret, two people he had known forever, pretty Maggie O’Mara with her short flowered dresses and drooping socks sticking out her tongue at rough-and-tumble, mouth-breathing Bobby George in the kindergarten class with Mrs. Canobbio in Montclair, now the still pretty but sophisticated and opinionated twenty-two-year-old Margaret with her degree in business management from Rutgers and the ever-amiable, powerhouse Bobby climbing the ladder to the major leagues, an unlikely union, Ferguson felt, not anything he would have predicted, but the mere fact that Bobby had persuaded Margaret to marry him must have meant that after two years in the army and a year and a half as a professional ball player, he was finally beginning to grow up as well.