It was a rough initiation. He was put on the city desk, the youngest of several reporters working under a man named Joe Dunlap, who correctly or incorrectly saw Ferguson as McManus’s fair-haired boy, his hotshot Ivy League protégé, the chosen one among the newcomers to the staff, and consequently Dunlap made a point of being hard on Ferguson, for it was the rare article Ferguson handed in to him that was not extensively rewritten, not just the leads and the slant of the stories but often the words themselves, always to the detriment of the piece as a whole, Ferguson felt, making his articles worse rather than better, as if Dunlap’s editorial axe was an instrument not for pruning but for chopping down trees. McManus had warned him about that during their first talk at the West End and had instructed him never to complain. Dunlap was a boot-camp sergeant out to break his spirit, and as a raw buck private Ferguson had to do what he was told, keep his mouth shut, and not allow his spirit to be broken, no matter how many times he would be tempted to punch Dunlap in the face.
Other people were less difficult to work with, some of them downright pleasant in fact, people who little by little began to count as friends, among them Tom Gianelli, a chunky, balding photographer from the Bronx who often went out on stories with Ferguson and could imitate the voices of two dozen Hollywood actors and actresses to near perfection (his Bette Davis was sublime), and Nancy Sperone, a recent graduate from the University of Rochester who had landed a spot on the Women’s Page and was going for an advanced degree in after-hours flirting, which helped get him through the early adjustment period without having to sleep alone every night, and Vic Howser from sports, who was tracking Bobby’s progress with the Orioles and responded no less happily than Ferguson did when Bobby went two for four in his one World Series start against the Mets, and beyond the people he was coming to know and like at the paper there was the paper itself, the big building and the hundreds of employees who worked there every day, editors and movie critics, receptionists and telephone operators, obituary writers and fishing columnists, reporters typing up stories at their desks, copyboys running around from floor to floor, and the huge, on-site printing press down below, cranking out a new paper every morning in time to hit the streets by noon, and despite the grumpy, butchering Dunlap, who had emerged as the second coming of Edward Imhoff, Ferguson enjoyed being part of that complex swarm of bustling bodies and never regretted the decision he had made.
No regrets, but even though Nancy Sperone was an unencumbered single woman, which had not been the case with the tempting but off-limits Margaret O’Mara George, Ferguson knew from the start that she was not the answer. Nevertheless, he went on going out with her and sleeping with her during his first nine months in Rochester, which was the first time in his life he had entered into a less than passionate, off-and-on affair with a woman he was fond of but could never bring himself to love. The native-born Nancy showed him around town by introducing him to one of Rochester’s famous Friday Night Fish Fries, dragged him to a joint called Nick Tahou Hots to indulge in another Rochester dish known as the Garbage Plate (an experience Ferguson swore he would never repeat for as long as he lived), and sat through several old movies with him at the Eastman House archive, among them Bresson’s A Man Escaped and Kazan’s 1945 sob-a-thon A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which induced both of them to shed the requisite oceans of blubbering, nonsensical tears. Nancy was bright and companionable, an earnest reader of books and a talented journalist who had joined the Times-Union as another one of McManus’s new wave of kids, a dark-eyed brunette with short hair and a large, round face (her Little Lulu face, as Nancy called it), a bit on the heavy side, perhaps, but sexy enough to make Ferguson long for her body whenever they were apart for more than a week or ten days. It wasn’t Nancy’s fault that he couldn’t love her, but neither was it Ferguson’s fault that Nancy was looking for a husband and he had no interest in looking for a wife. In mid-December, when he went down to Florida for a short weekend visit with his parents, he understood that he and Nancy were going nowhere, but still he went on seeing her for another four months after he returned, muddling along as previously until Nancy found a new man who wanted to marry her, which was a good thing, Ferguson decided, since all through the months of not being able to love Nancy Sperone there had been the dawning awareness that after one full year and the better part of another year with no Schneiderman in sight, he still hadn’t recovered from losing Amy. He was still mourning her absence — as if hanging on in the aftermath of a divorce, perhaps even a death, and there was nothing to be done about it except to keep hanging on until he didn’t feel it anymore.
Almost a year had gone by since he had last been with his parents, and now that they had fully settled into the alien world of southern Florida, they had turned into creatures of the sun, tanned and healthy-looking ex-northerners living and working in the Land of No Snow, advocates of long walks on sand-covered patches of earth (his mother) and outdoor tennis every morning from January through December (his father), and yes, Ferguson was glad to see them again, but they had both changed in the gap between visits, and those changes were the first things he noticed when they picked him up at the airport early Friday evening. Not so much his mother, perhaps, who was still rushing around with her photography work at the Herald and liked nothing better than to talk newspaper talk with her son, but she had been trying to quit smoking in the past six months and had put on weight, perhaps ten or twelve pounds, which made her look different somehow, both older and younger at the same time, if such a thing was possible, whereas his father, who was nearing fifty-six and still strong because of his daily tennis routine, nevertheless struck Ferguson as slightly diminished, with grayer, more thinned-out hair and a slight limp when he had to walk for more than fifty or a hundred yards (a pulled muscle, or else permanently aching feet), no longer the numb and silent Dr. Manette toiling away at his workbench but a clerk in the classifieds department at the Herald, a job he professed to enjoy and even love, but it had turned him into a lowly Bob Cratchit, and Ferguson couldn’t help thinking of what a long, slow fall it had been from 3 Brothers Home World to this.
The best day of the Friday-to-Sunday visit was the last day, when they went out for a large, unhurried brunch at Wolfie’s on Collins Avenue, the good smells of fresh onion rolls and smoked fish flooding the room as the three of them ate lox and eggs in honor of Ferguson’s grandmother, whom they talked about at length, along with Ferguson’s grandfather and the now vanished Didi Bryant, but mostly his mother asked him questions about Rochester and the Times-Union, wanting to know everything about everything, and Ferguson told them nearly everything he could, failing to mention his involvement with Nancy Sperone because it probably wouldn’t have sat well with his father, the mere thought of his boy going around with an Italian Catholic girl no doubt would have upset him, leading to some bitter us-versus-them remarks about schvartzes and shiksas (words that Ferguson hated, two of the ugliest words in the Yiddish lexicon), and so he left Nancy out of it and talked about McManus and Dunlap instead, about Bobby George hitting his first big-league home run in Boston last July and now just four months away from becoming a father, about some of the articles he had written and the tawdry, beaten-up apartment where he lived, which led his mother to ask the question all mothers ask their children, whether those children are small, piss-in-the-pants tykes or twenty-two-year-old college graduates: