A sane person, perhaps even a wise one. A small but not diminutive person of five-four or five-five with a lean, quick-moving body, a pair of granny glasses perched on her nose, and intensely yellow hair, so blond as to create the impression of a fully grown Goldilocks, but attractive as that golden hair was to Ferguson, the mystery was in Hallie’s face, which was both a plain face and a pretty face, by turns dull and sparkling, a face that changed aspect with the slightest turn or tilt of her head, now a Goldilocksian mouse, now a stunning White Rock girl, now bland and almost featureless, now radiant and arresting, an unremarkable Irish mug that could, in a single blink, transform itself into the most ravishing countenance ever beheld this side of a movie screen. What was he to make of such a conundrum? Nothing, Ferguson decided, nothing at all, since the only answer was to go on looking at her in order to feel the more and more pleasant sensation of being permanently off balance.
She had grown up in Rochester and was back in town for the summer to sell her family’s house on East Avenue, which had become redundant after her science-writer parents moved to San Francisco earlier in the year. The job at the Times-Union had been obtained through the help of an old family friend and was nothing but a way to kill the time more efficiently than by doing nothing — along with a chance to earn some extra cash into the bargain.
A temporary newsroom assistant for the summer, but in her real life a dual English-biology major who would be starting her senior year in the fall. A budding poet with a long-range plan to go to medical school, then push on to become a psychiatrist, and finally to train as a psychoanalyst, all of which was impressive enough, but what impressed Ferguson even more was how she had spent the two summers before this one: living in New York and answering telephones at a suicide hotline on East Fourth Street and Avenue A.
In other words, he said to himself, when he had been listening to the record spin out the lurid, demoralizing verses of Lord, Thy Name Is Death, Hallie had been working to save lives. Not everything all at once, as Amy and so many others believed, but one by one by one. Talk to a man on the telephone and gradually convince him not to pull the trigger of the gun he is pointing at his head. Talk to a woman the next night and slowly persuade her not to down the bottle of pills clenched in her hand. No impulse to reinvent the world from the bottom up, no acts of revolutionary defiance, but a commitment to doing good in the broken world she belonged to, a plan to spend her life helping others, which was not a political act so much as a religious act, a religion without religion or dogma, a faith in the value of the one and the one and the one, a journey that would begin with medical school and then continue for however long it took to complete her psychoanalytic training, and while Amy and a host of others would have argued that people were sick because society was sick and helping them adjust to a sick society would only make them worse, Hallie would have answered, Please, go ahead and improve society if you can, but meanwhile people are suffering, and I have a job to do.
Not only had Ferguson met the next one, but as the summer went on he asked himself if he hadn’t found the One who would blot out all others for the rest of his days on this wretched, beautiful earth.
She moved into the Crawford Street rathole with him in early July, and because it was an especially hot summer that year, they pulled down the window shades and turned into nudists whenever they were indoors. Outdoors, on weekday nights and weekend days and nights, they went to twelve movies together, attended six Red Wings games, played tennis four times (the ultra-athletic Hallie consistently beat him two sets to one), took walks in Mount Hope Cemetery, sat in Highland Park reading each other’s poems and translations until Hallie broke down in tears one Sunday afternoon and declared that her work was no good (no, not no good, Ferguson said to her, still developing, although there seemed little doubt that she had a more promising future in medicine than in literature), went to four classical concerts at the Eastman School of Music, Bach, Mozart, Bach, and Webern, and ate numerous dinners in all manner of restaurants both decent and atrocious, but no dinner was more memorable than the one they had at Antonio’s on Lake Avenue, where the meal was accompanied by nonstop music from a man named Lou Blandisi, who billed himself as the Corny Accordionist from Little Italy and seemed to know every song that had ever been written, from American pop standards to Irish jigs to klezmer from the Pale.
More to the point: by the first days of August they had both uttered the decisive three-word sentence several dozen times each, the three words that seal the deal and announce there is no turning back, and by the end of the month they were both starting to think long-term, permanent thoughts about the future. Then came the inevitable good-bye, and as Ferguson’s love drove off for her last year of college in South Hadley, Massachusetts, he wondered how he was going to survive without her.
September eighth. The summer was over and done with now. The kids were yelling under his bedroom window early in the morning again, and overnight the Rochester air had taken on the vivid, beginning-of-the-year feel of freshly sharpened pencils and stiff new shoes — the scent of childhood, the deep-in-the-bone memories of way back when. Sad Monsieur Solitaire, who had been pining for his absent Hallie every hour over the past ten days, returned to his rathole at four-thirty that afternoon, and within one minute of his arrival, before he had managed to unload the brown paper bag with the makings of his dinner in it, the telephone rang. Pittman calling from his office at the Times-Union. Pittman with a tone of urgency in his voice. Pittman telling him that “something was brewing at Attica,” the state prison fifty miles southwest of Rochester, and he was assigning Ferguson and Gianelli to go there early tomorrow morning to talk to Vincent Mancusi, the superintendent of the prison, “to find out what was going on.” The interview had already been arranged for nine o’clock, Gianelli would be picking him up at seven, and while it was still just a little mess at this point, it could turn out to be a big one, so “keep your eyes and ears open, Archie, and stay out of trouble.”
There had been two large disturbances at New York prisons in the past year, one at upstate Auburn and the other at the Tombs in Manhattan, rugged, physical confrontations between prisoners and guards that had led to scores of indictments and additional punishments. Leaders from both uprisings — most of them black, all of them committed to some form of revolutionary politics — had been transferred to Attica in order to “weed out the troublemakers,” and now that Black Panther George Jackson had been gunned down and killed at San Quentin Prison in California during a supposed attempt to escape with a gun stashed inside the Afro wig he was wearing (some people actually believed that), the inmates at the overcrowded New York prisons were beginning to make noise again. Sixty percent of the 2,250 prisoners at Attica were black, one hundred percent of the guards were white, and not only was Ferguson not looking forward to his first visit to a maximum-security correctional facility, he was dreading it. He was glad Gianelli would be going with him, the one-hour drive would be pleasant enough as Tom talked to him in the voices of Cary Grant and Jean Harlow and rattled on about the National League pennant race, but once they got there and walked into the prison, they would be stepping into hell.