They were the same age, or very nearly the same age, two hundred months old as opposed to a hundred and ninety-eight months old, but because Amy had been born at the end of 1946 (December 29) and Ferguson at the beginning of 1947 (March 3), she was a full year ahead of him in school, which meant that she was about to start her senior year at Hunter while he was still stuck in the trenches as a lowly junior. College was no more than a nebulous anywhere to him at that point, a far-flung destination that had yet to be given a name, whereas she had been studying maps for the better part of a year and was almost ready to begin packing her bags. She would be applying to several schools, she said. Everyone had told her she would need backups, second and third options, but Barnard was her first choice, her only choice, really, because it was the best college in New York, the all-girl twin of all-boy Columbia, and objective number one was to stay in New York.
But you’ve been in New York all your life, Ferguson said. Wouldn’t you like to try some other place?
I’ve been to other places, she said, lots of other places, and every one of them is called Yawn City. Have you ever been to Boston or Chicago?
No.
Yawn City One and Yawn City Two. L.A.?
No.
Yawn City Three.
Fine. But what about a school in the country? Cornell, Smith, one of those places. Green lawns and echoing quads, the pursuit of knowledge in a rustic setting.
Joseph Cornell is a genius, the Smith Brothers make excellent cough drops, but freezing my ass off for four years at Wilderness U. isn’t my idea of a fun time. No, Archie, New York is it. There’s no other place.
He had known her for approximately ten minutes when they exchanged these words, and as Ferguson listened to Amy defend New York, declare her love of New York, it occurred to him that she herself was somehow an embodiment of her city, not only in her confidence and quickness of mind but also and especially in her voice, which was the voice of brainy Jewish girls from Brooklyn, Queens, and the Upper West Side, the third-generation New York Jewish voice, meaning the second generation of Jews born in America, which had a slightly different music from the New York Irish voice, for example, or the New York Italian voice, at once earthy, sophisticated, and brash, with a similar aversion to hard r’s but more precise and emphatic in its articulations, and the more he accustomed himself to those articulations, the more he wanted to go on hearing them, for the Schneiderman voice represented everything that was not the suburbs, not his life as it existed now, and therefore the promise of an escape into a possible future, or at least a present inhabited by that possible future, and as he sat in the room with Amy and later walked through the streets with her, they talked about any number of things, mostly about the roller-coaster summer that had started with the killing of Medgar Evers and ended with Martin Luther King’s speech, the endless tangle of horror and hope that seemed to define the American landscape, and also about the books and records on the shelves and floor of Ferguson’s room, not to mention schoolwork, SATs, and even baseball, but the one question he did not ask her, was determined at all costs to refrain from asking, was whether she had a boyfriend, for he had already decided he was going to do everything in his power to make her the next one, and he had no interest in learning how many rivals were standing in his way.
On September fifteenth, less than two weeks after the Labor Day barbecue, which was exactly six days before they were supposed to get together again in New York, she called him, and because he was the one she called and no one else, he understood that there was no boyfriend in the picture, no rival to be afraid of, and that she was with him now in the same way he was with her. He knew that because he was the person she chose to call when she heard the news about the bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, and the murder of four little girls inside, another American horror, another battle in the race war spreading across the South, as if the March on Washington two and a half weeks earlier had to be avenged with bombs and murder, and Amy was crying into the phone, struggling not to cry as she told him the news, and bit by bit, as she slowly pulled herself together, she began to talk about what could be done, about what she felt had to be done, not just laws passed by politicians but an army of people to go down there and fight the bigots, and she would be the first one to join up, the day after she graduated from high school she would hitchhike to Alabama and work for the cause, bleed for the cause, make the cause the central purpose of her life. It’s our country, she said, and we can’t let the bastards steal it from us.
They saw each other the following Saturday and every other Saturday throughout the fall, Ferguson riding the bus from New Jersey to the Port Authority terminal and then taking the IRT express train to West Seventy-second Street, where he would get off and walk three blocks north and two blocks west to the Schneidermans’ apartment on Riverside Drive and Seventy-fifth Street, Apartment 4B, which was now the most important address in New York City. Outings of various sorts, nearly always just the two of them together, occasionally with some of Amy’s friends, foreign films at the Thalia on Broadway and Ninety-fifth Street, Godard, Kurosawa, Fellini, visits to the Met, the Frick, the Museum of Modern Art, the Knicks at the Garden, Bach at Carnegie Hall, Beckett, Pinter, and Ionesco at small theaters in the Village, everything so close and available, and Amy always knew where to go and what to do, the warrior-princess of Manhattan was teaching him how to find his way around her city, which had rapidly become his city as well. Nevertheless, for all the things they did and all the things they saw, the best part of those Saturdays was sitting in coffee shops and talking, the first rounds of the ongoing dialogue that would continue for years, conversations that sometimes turned into fierce spats when their opinions differed, the good or bad film they had just seen, the good or bad political idea one of them had just expressed, but Ferguson didn’t mind arguing with her, he had no interest in pushovers, the pouting, nincompoop girls who wanted only what they imagined to be the formalities of love, this was real love, complex and deep and pliable enough to allow for passionate discord, and how could he not love this girl, with her relentless, probing gaze and immense, booming laugh, the high-strung and fearless Amy Schneiderman, who one day was going to be a war correspondent or a revolutionary or a doctor who worked among the poor. She was sixteen years old, pushing toward seventeen. The blank slate was no longer entirely blank, but she was still young enough to know she could rub out the words she had already written, rub them out and start again whenever the spirit moved her.
Kisses, of course. Embraces, of course. Along with the irksome fact that Amy’s parents tended to stay at home on Saturday afternoons and evenings, which limited the opportunities for being alone in the apartment and led to much chilly-weather necking on benches in Riverside Park, some furtive, back-bedroom makeout splurges at parties given by Amy’s friends, and twice, just twice, on the two occasions when her homebody parents stepped out for the evening, a chance to indulge in earnest, half-naked tumbles on the bed in Amy’s room, marked by the old fear that the door would be flung open at the worst possible moment. The frustrations of not being fully in control of their lives, hormonal frenzies thwarted again and again by circumstances, the two of them growing ever more desperate as the weeks passed. Then, on a Tuesday night in mid-November, Amy called with good news. Her parents would be going out of town the weekend after next, three full days in distant Chicago to visit her mother’s ailing mother, and with her big brother Jim not scheduled to fly in from Boston until the day before Thanksgiving, she would have the apartment to herself while her parents were gone. A whole weekend, she said. Just think of it, Archie. A whole weekend with no one in the apartment but us.