No, the problem wasn’t Bobby, who was in the full flower of his inimitable Bobbyness by then, the problem was Margaret, the same Margaret who had developed a crush on Ferguson when she was seven years old, who had written him an unsigned love letter when she was twelve, who had made eyes at him throughout high school and had actively rejoiced at Anne-Marie Dumartin’s return to Belgium, who had been the one girl he had been tempted by during his four and a half months apart from Amy in their senior year, who had been the one whose mouth his tongue would have entered if not for Bobby’s infatuation with her, who had mocked him as Cyrano when he had tried to intercede on Bobby’s behalf, the dull but intelligent and achingly attractive Margaret who for reasons he could not fathom was now the wife of his oldest friend, for Ferguson was fairly stunned by how little attention she paid to Bobby’s monologue about the double suicide squeeze, by how she kept looking at him across the table and not at her husband while her husband spoke, eating him up with her eyes, as if she were telling him, yes, I’ve been married to this kind, softheaded lummox for a month now, but I’m still dreaming about you, Archie, and how could you possibly have rejected me for all those years when in fact we were made for each other from the start, and here I am, take me, and damn the consequences because all along I’ve always wanted only you. Or so Ferguson gathered from the way she looked at him in the restaurant of the Crescent Beach Hotel, and the truth was that he was aroused by her, as a solitary, celibate, unloved bachelor searching for love as a stranger in a new town, how could he not have been aroused by the looks she was giving him, and who knew if he wouldn’t have capitulated to her that summer if she and Bobby hadn’t left for Baltimore, since there would have been countless opportunities for them to see each other alone, all the nights when Bobby would have been on the road playing games in far-off Louisville, Columbus, and Richmond, and how many times would he have accepted her invitations to come to dinner at her apartment, how many bottles of wine would they have drunk together, surely his resistance would have weakened at some point, yes, that was what her eyes were telling him as they sat across from each other at the hotel restaurant, give in, please give in, Archie, and because Ferguson understood that he might not have been strong enough to keep his hands off her if she had stayed, he was more than happy to see her go.
LAST YEAR, THE concentric circles had fused into a solid black disk, an L.P. record with a single blues song playing on Side A. Now the record had been turned over, and the song on the flip side was a dirge called Lord, Thy Name Is Death. The melody entered Ferguson’s head just days after he started his job at the Times-Union, and as the first bar floated in from California on August ninth with the words Charles Manson and the Tate-LaBianca murders, it wasn’t long before it modulated into the suicide on Halloween night of young Marshall Bloom, cofounder of Liberation News Service, which Ferguson had seriously considered joining straight out of college, which segued by the middle of fall into a verse about Lieutenant William Calley and the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam, and then, as the last year of the 1960s went into its final month, the Chicago police belted out a loud staccato refrain by shooting and killing Black Panther Fred Hampton as he lay asleep in his bed, and two days after that, as the Rolling Stones mounted the stage at Altamont to sing the rest of the song, a crew of Hells Angels jumped a young black man waving a gun in the crowd and stabbed him to death.
Woodstock II. The flower children and the heavies. And behold how quickly the day hath melted into night.
Bobby Seale strapped to a chair with a gag in his mouth by order of Judge Julius Hoffman as the original Eight were turned into the Seven.
The Weathermen launching a kamikaze attack against two thousand Chicago cops during the Days of Rage in October, Ferguson’s old school pals girded in football helmets and goggles, jockstraps and cups bulging on the outside of their pants, poised to do battle with chains, pipes, and clubs. Six of them were shot, hundreds were carted off in paddy wagons. To what end? “To bring the war home,” they shouted. But since when had the war ever not been at home?
Four days after that: Vietnam Moratorium Day. Millions of Americans said yes, and for twenty-four hours nearly everything in America stopped.
One month to the day after the Day: Seven hundred and fifty thousand people marched on Washington to end the war, the largest political demonstration ever seen in the New World. Nixon watched a football game that afternoon and told the country it wouldn’t make any difference.
At the Weathermen gathering that December in Flint, Michigan, Bernardine Dohrn extolled Charles Manson for having killed “those pigs,” meaning the pregnant Sharon Tate and the others who had died with her in the house. One of Ferguson’s old pals from Columbia stood up and said: “We’re against everything that’s ‘good and decent’ in honky America. We will burn and loot and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother’s nightmare.”
Then they went into hiding and never appeared in public again.
And there was Ferguson, back in his role as the smallest dot at the center of the smallest circle, no longer surrounded by Columbia and New York but by the Times-Union and Rochester. As far as he could tell, it had been a fairly even trade, and now that he was in the clear (his 4-F notice arrived three days before he started work), the job was his as long as he could prove he deserved it.
There were two dailies in Rochester. Both of them were owned by the Gannett Publishing Company, but each one had a different purpose, a different editorial doctrine, and a different outlook on life. In spite of its name, the morning Democrat and Chronicle was solidly Republican and pro-business, whereas the afternoon Times-Union was more in the liberal camp, especially now that McManus was in charge. Liberal was better than conservative, of course, even if it was finally just another term for middle of the road, which was hardly where Ferguson stood on any political issue of the moment, but for the time being he was content to be where he was, writing stories for McManus and not for the East Village Other, the Rat, or L.N.S., which had gone through such a violent split that it had broken into two separate organizations, the hardline Marxists in New York City and the counterculture dreamers on a farm in western Massachusetts, which was where Marshall Bloom had killed himself, just twenty-five years old and now dead from carbon monoxide poisoning, and with that death Ferguson had begun to lose faith in the closed-off world of far-left journalism, which at times seemed to have gone just as insane as the splinter groups from defunct SDS, and now that the Los Angeles Free Press was publishing a regular column written by Charles Manson, Ferguson wanted no part of that world anymore. He hated the right, he hated the government, but now he hated the false revolution of the far left as well, and if that meant having to work for a middle-of-the-road paper like the Rochester Times-Union, then so be it. He had to start somewhere, and McManus had promised to give him a real chance — if and when he proved himself.