“Not at all,” says Bonnie.
“Do you do much of this sort of thing?” Linda’s on to Bonnie. She knows that Bonnie is lying about not being nervous.
So Bonnie might as well lie more. “Constantly,” she says.
After the second buzzer, Linda and Dave turn, zombielike, and head for the auditorium. All around them, the seniors hold their mortarboards onto their heads and stampede.
As they navigate the rush, Armstrong chooses this moment to tell Bonnie the plans for the ceremony. The hall is noisy, the kids are loud, she and Dave keep getting separated. She hears maybe a third of what he’s saying. Prayer, chorus, diplomas. Bonnie nods and fakes comprehension. She’ll figure it out. Somebody will signal her when she needs to begin her speech.
Dave opens a door and ushers Bonnie and Linda down a corridor that leads over cables, past amplifiers and costume closets, the usual backstage mess. It reminds Bonnie of Chandler. She and Vincent and Meyer went there together and waited in the Green Room.
“The auditorium has some structural problems,” says Dave. “Every time a lightbulb burns out, we have to send a midget through the infrastructure to change it. It would cost over a million to fix.”
“That’s too bad,” says Bonnie.
The three of them stand awkwardly in the wings, from which they can see a sliver of stage and a few rows on one side of the auditorium.
“I need to check a couple of things. Can I leave Bonnie with you?” Dave asks Linda. Bonnie feels like a child in a fairy tale, dropped off at the witch’s for day care.
Linda turns to Bonnie. “So Dave told you about the order of the graduation program? I know it’s a little complicated, but I’m sure you’ll catch on.”
Bonnie smiles.
“It’s a miracle you could hear Dave, walking down that noisy hallway.” Linda wins! How good she is at ferreting out a lie. The kids must be helpless before her.
“Well, actually,” says Bonnie, “I couldn’t hear—”
“So you have no idea what the order is,” Linda says.
“Basically, no,” admits Bonnie.
Linda sighs. “All right. First the pledge of allegiance, then the nondenominational prayer. Then the choir. Then the awards. Then the choir again. Then they’ll hand out the diplomas. Then you. Then the valedictorian. Then Dave will say a few words. And we’ll hear one more time from the choir.”
This is going to last fifty years! How many songs is the choir singing? And they’ve got Bonnie talking after they give out the diplomas, when all the kids will be busy looking to see if they’ve got the right one? No one ever schedules the speeches after the diplomas. No one is that thoughtless.
Look for the hidden blessing. Bonnie might as well talk when no one is listening. What does Bonnie have to say that these graduates need to hear? Meyer would tell her to do her best, to try and make the most of this chance to change one young heart at a time. As always, thinking of Meyer helps her forget her personal problems and concentrate on what she can accomplish. If only she didn’t keep thinking how different this would be if Vincent were here. She could speak for a minute or so, and then let Vincent take over. He was brilliant at the dinner. His first time speaking. Dying.
Bonnie cannot accept the possibility that she might never see Vincent again.
Dave reappears and stage-whispers, “The parents and faculty are getting settled.”
Bonnie needs to locate Danny. She doesn’t want to start talking and make accidental eye contact with him and get stuck. She moves to the edge of the curtain, from where she can see the audience.
Linda grabs her elbow and bumps her onstage, where a group of dignitaries—the district superintendent, the principal, the head of the PTA—have come from the opposite wing and are taking their seats in a row. Four empty chairs remain as Bonnie is perp-walked out between Linda and Dave. Is that chair meant for Vincent? Dave and Linda exchange looks. It would be awkward to have it removed. Might as well leave it empty.
Bonnie’s fixated on the empty seat. Linda and Dave make her sit next to the chair that would have been Vincent’s. Bonnie scans the crowd for Danny, but they’ve already lowered the lights so that all she can see is that the first dozen rows are empty.
The heartbreakingly wobbly orchestra strikes up “Pomp and Circumstance,” and the music starts working its magic. Dear God, it was composed to be played by a crappy high school band. Those sour notes make it soar, the rhythm mistakes make it all the more wrenching.
Bonnie nearly dissolves again. It’s too much trouble to fight it. Why not surrender and let the sobs shake her until something snaps? But what would be the point? She already feels that spongy exhaustion that follows hours of weeping.
The graduates file into the first rows, repainting the front of the auditorium in a garish purple that must be the school color. The principal rises and stands at the podium and waits till everyone figures out that they’ve started the nondenominational prayer, a moment of silence. A lengthy moment till everyone bows their heads, which is fine with Bonnie.
The silence ends. Then Kathy Sojak, the music teacher, approaches the choir and raises her arms and makes the grotesquely clownish faces that every kid in the school can imitate to perfection. What a bad person Bonnie is for having laughed at Danny’s Mrs. Sojak imitation. She was thrilled that Danny was trying to amuse her. A better mother would have told him it wasn’t nice. A decent human being would have asked Danny to imagine being Mrs. Sojak and making those faces she can’t help making because she so loves the music.
Parents always get everything backward. After the PTA meeting at which the Linda Graber skin-condition Web site was mentioned, Bonnie told Danny she thought it was mean. But that was before she’d met Linda. Now the site seems like a restrained response to how Linda makes you feel.
In any case, Bonnie’s stopped noticing Kathy Sojak’s funny faces, because now she’s being torn apart by the chorus’s wrenching version of “Bridge over Troubled Water.” What a touching song it is. Why did Bonnie never like it? She’d just thought that it was Simon and Garfunkel sentimental twaddle. But now she sees it’s the hymn for our times, and the kids believe it. The singers’ faces are shining, flushed by their nearness to the light, by being the closest they’re going to come to the flame of pure belief.
Like a bridge over troubled water, I will see you through. Who is that I, exactly? Who will see Bonnie through? No one, no one, no one. Bonnie’s on her own. Everything depends on her. She takes care of everyone, and no one takes care of her. Which is another reason to cry, if she could just let herself go. Danny is somewhere in that room. Bonnie’s not allowed to lose it.
At least the choir has stopped singing. And now they’re giving out the awards. History, English, school service. Each with a name attached. The Brenda Barlow Medal for Women’s Sports. Bonnie hates to think the names might be those of students who died young. She prefers to imagine that they have grown up and given money to the school, funded prizes like the ones Bonnie and Meyer invented for Brotherhood Watch.
Like the Laura Ticknor Prize that Meyer announced at the benefit dinner. What if Laura Ticknor finds out what really happened on Chandler? Or that Vincent has disappeared?
There’s no time to think about any of that. They’re giving out the diplomas. Alphabetically. In order to get their diplomas, the kids have to file past Bonnie. Ninety percent of the kids are white, the rest are Asian, a few blacks. Every last one seems lit from within by the pure flame of personal sweetness. Every kid is beautiful, and yet there is a huge difference in the signals they are transmitting, in a language that mostly speaks about confidence, or its lack. They think high-school success is predictive of the future! Adults joke about how misguided that is. But maybe kids are right. To watch Bonnie talk to Roberta is to know more about who they were in high school than about who they have become since.
By the time they reach the B’s, Bonnie can take one look at the graduate bouncing or slinking up to the stage and predict exactly
how much applause the kid will get. It’s brutal, like a game show: Popularity Contest. It’s so clear how liked each boy or girl is. The winners and losers find out along with their diplomas. But of course they already know. Everybody does. Can’t anybody stop this?
Poor Vincent! How many kids cheered for him when he graduated high school? Maybe that’s what makes someone join ARM. Now she’s thinking like Vincent, blaming everyone but himself, blaming his high school student body for not applauding enough. You don’t become a Nazi because no one liked you in high school. At the benefit dinner Vincent got enough applause to make up for what he missed senior year. And then he almost died, so some of the good effects of the attention may have been lost.
Next year, Danny will have to go through this when he gets his diploma. If he gets his diploma. So much can still go wrong. Danny’s going to college. Bonnie has to start dealing with that. College tours and so forth. Why can’t Joel help? Give Danny a fraction of the time that, whether he likes it or not, he’s about to lavish on the new Bulgarian baby.
What letter of the alphabet are they on? Bonnie’s heart speeds up. She hasn’t got time to go over what she talked about with Danny. Something about the foundation, what they’ve accomplished, what they do. Even though she’d promised not to preach, she did plan to quote Meyer about changing one heart at a time. But how did she intend to begin and get from one point to another?
Soon she’ll go to the podium, open her mouth—and nothing will come out.
She looks out into the audience, back to the last row where the most infantile part of her still believes that Vincent may yet appear. Her white knight come to save her. Her personal Dustin Hoffman. But no one’s going to rescue her. She can only hope that Danny will eventually find in it his heart to forgive her. Forgive but not forget. All right. She’ll settle for forgiveness.
Apparently, no one has told Dave Armstrong that Bonnie is incapable of giving a speech. That all this was a huge mistake. Dave rises to the podium, and Bonnie hears her name, and something about Brotherhood Watch. Something about Vincent. What about Vincent? Bonnie seems to have missed it.
Then she distinctly hears Dave say, “Bonnie Kalen is a model to us all. As a woman, as a human being, doing something few humans do, and even fewer women, working to make the world a better, safer, more caring place. And if I may inject a personal note, raising two sons as a single mother in a nontraditional family and sacrificing of herself to shelter people in need, to take in and reform a man who spent years lost in the wilderness of prejudice and hate—”
Did Dave say what Bonnie thinks he said? Did he just give the crowd way more information than they need about her personal life? About her being a single mother? Taking in a Nazi? And what was that part about even fewer women? It will be years before Danny will forgive or forget or consent to be in the same room with her. And why is Dave making it sound as if this is about Bonnie? Bonnie promised Danny that she wouldn’t talk about their family, or herself.
The students are used to ignoring Dave. But the parents love where he’s going with this. Bonnie is not just some snobby do-gooder working to help foreigners with unpronounceable names. Bonnie is one of them, a parent, with a parent’s problems and challenges, except that she’s being useful. Making the world a more caring place. The graduates will applaud anything because the ceremony is almost over.
The applause lasts long enough for Bonnie to walk over to the podium and peer into the crowd. On the way, she realizes that she’s still clutching the rose she got from her meeter-and-greeter.
A sudden shift of the light beams in, as if someone’s playing with a mirror. Bonnie squints in the searchlight of the graduates’ upturned baby-bird faces. What do they want from her? To make it short. Which is what Bonnie wants, so at least they agree on that.
Dear God, how pretty their skin is, how bright and clear their eyes. How much Bonnie loves them, with a pure undifferentiated love for their youth, their innocent hearts and souls. Even the angriest, most damaged kids are succumbing to the spell of the day and its promise of a future. What future are they imagining? What does their future hold? Bonnie refuses to guess. Love, grief, the loss of parents, the leaving of children, the death of love, more grief. And now the tears rise up so insistently that Bonnie’s sure she’s about to lose it. Standing here and trying to think of something to say must be a milder version of how Vincent felt at the benefit dinner, trying not to die.
What a brave guy Vincent is. And finally he snapped.
The graduation audience waits. Bonnie has nothing to tell them. A minute passes, then another. She has to say something. For Danny. For Vincent.
The silence is horrifying.
Bonnie shuts her eyes, then opens them. The entire school is listening.
She says, “If I had to pick one word that Brotherhood Watch represents, guess what it would be.” Bonnie’s channeling Meyer. It was always a good line. Everyone likes to guess the one-word sound-bite. Meyer would have said it on Chandler if Raymond hadn’t wrecked things.
Bonnie says, “I’d say that word was: change. The man I work for, a great hero, Meyer Maslow, believes that the world can be changed. One heart, one person, one man or woman or child at a time.”
Bonnie needs Chandler up here now, milking the crowd for a response. Bonnie’s losing her audience. Time to kick things up to a higher level. “I only wish you could meet my friend Vincent Nolan. I wish that he could be here. Because if you saw him, you would know how much a person can change.” This works better. Mentioning Vincent gets the audience’s attention. Many of them must know about him. They’d thought he was going to speak.
There’s no reason why Bonnie has to explain why he isn’t here. And no one’s going to ask her, yelling out from the crowd. That in itself is liberating. She feels lighter, in a way.
“But the fact is,” Bonnie hears herself saying, “change is the one thing—the only thing—you can count on. Nothing stays the same.” Can Bonnie get back to Brotherhood Watch? She’s having an out-of-body moment. “And the thing is, you can’t be prepared. And that part is hardwired. It’s not only human nature, it’s the nature of the universe. Right now, you kids think you’ll always be young. If your parents are together, you think they’ll stay together. You think everything’s going to continue pretty much on track. But I promise every one of you. I can guarantee it. Nothing’s going to be anything like it is today.”
She is trying to reassure them. Whatever they’re worried about, or afraid of, will improve or stop mattering. So why does it sound like a threat? She needs to put the brakes on. She is certainly not going to surrender to the temptation to list all the things in her life that unexpectedly changed. She never expected her parents to die so soon, never expected Joel to leave, never expected Meyer to decide to take off for Asia, never expected to turn around after a brawl on Chandler and discover that Vincent had disappeared.
The kids and parents and teachers wait.
Bonnie looks back past the last row.
And there he is. Standing there.
Vincent.
THE SCHOOL GUARD NEARLY BODY-BLOCKS VINCENT. The guy probably would do the same no matter what Vincent looked like, but what makes it a no-brainer is that Vincent’s tattoos are showing.
Vincent had considered whether to hide them or not. It felt like time travel back to that first day he walked into Brotherhood Watch. Except that it’s all turned around. Back then, when he was a Nazi, he hid his tattoos. And now that he isn’t, he flashes them. He wants these kids to see what permanent harm you can do yourself if you’re screwed up and immature and pretending to believe something you don’t really believe just because it’s convenient and, for the moment, it feels good.
The guard is black, about Vincent’s size. Vincent could take him if he had to. Vincent’s not going to have to. This is not three months ago, when just talking to a receptionist—poor Anita Shu, who, Vincent later learned, is in love with an American boy her parents will never accept—was a maj
or challenge. Since then, Vincent’s gotten up and spoken to five hundred rich New Yorkers. He nearly died. He was on Chandler. He’s definitely a changed man.
The guard’s island accent rolls toward him.
“Good morning, sir,” he says.
“Good morning. I’m Vincent Nolan. I’m supposed to speak at the graduation.”
“Right.” The guard gazes at Vincent and nods. Frankly, it doesn’t surprise him that the white dude with the Nazi tattoos is speaking at graduation while he’s working as a security guard for six-fifty an hour.
The ex-Nazi with the Waffen-SS bolts, Vincent wants to explain. This is from another life. I’m not like that anymore. The thought makes Vincent feel like a jerk. Let the guy think what he wants. Vincent’s got work to do.
The guard says, “I saw you on Chandler, man. I saw you on Chandler trashing that bad boy.” And with that, he waves Vincent through.
Vincent likes how this has gone down. Like a key in a lock. Which is everyone’s secret desire. Show Mr. Spielberg to his table.
The last few days, which Vincent has spent camped out in the HiWayVu Motel by the side of the thruway, have hardly been what you might call showing Mr. Spielberg to his table. If the motel clerk saw Vincent on Chandler, he was not about to say so. The kid was Indian, Danny’s age. Vincent paid ahead, in cash.
The room was the black hole he expected. Nothing. Nothing. Nowhere. No more Bonnie, no more Bonnie’s kids, no more Bonnie’s house, no more pizza dinners, no more good wine, no more big TV, no more instant family that liked him, no more decent people who gave him everything and asked for nothing in return.
No more Bonnie was the main thing—the fact he kept coming back to. He wished he could talk to her about this, about what was happening, what he was feeling. But part of the point of his being there was taking a break from Bonnie.
He’d lain down on the lumpy bed and tried reading the books he’d brought along, but nothing held his interest. Certainly not Crime and Punishment. He couldn’t even stand the title. He’d turned on the remote and flipped through the channels, and within a few minutes was watching himself on Chandler. He remembered it being messier. Chandler’s people cleaned it up. So maybe Vincent’s luck has changed, because if they’d shown the whole thing, it would have been a disaster for Brotherhood Watch. No matter what he did after this, Bonnie would never speak to him again. On the other hand, there’s always the chance that Raymond’s friends will track him down and make him pay, which will mean that Vincent’s luck has changed back again. For the worse.
A Changed Man Page 42