“You have one more year, Jennifer?” she says.
“Yes! One more year and, fingers crossed, I’ll be here wearing my own cap and gown.”
“In social work? You’ll be a doctor of social work?”
Jennifer nods. “A PhD from the School of Social Work.”
They’ve walked up to the middle of the sea of chairs now, toward the division between visitor seating and the seating for the day’s graduates. The world around them is a flurry of excitement. People taking seats, taking pictures, taking stock of where they are on this May morning in 1996 that means so much to them.
“Kenny told me you met working with some of the same patients. But social work—you’re not a medical doctor. I didn’t quite understand that.”
“We were both volunteers at the Gay Health Advocacy Project. I also want to focus on AIDS work. So no, not a medical doctor, but I do work with medical patients.” Jennifer pauses, then adds, “I’m particularly interested in working with the families of HIV-positive patients, though.”
Well. Kenny never told her that.
“That’s nice,” she says and turns away before Jennifer can say anything further. This is a great day, a happy day! Nothing can spoil it. There are two side-by-side chairs toward the very front of the visitor seating that seem to be empty. She points. “Come on.”
When Kenny called to say he’d be returning to Arizona for his residency, she almost jumped for joy. When he specified that the residency would be in infectious diseases down at U of A in Tucson, and that he was going to pursue clinical AIDS research, it was like the wind being knocked out of her. Tucson, not Phoenix? And after all these years of study, after earning both an MD and a PhD, he wasn’t going to be a medical doctor, like his grandfather, his great-grandfather, his uncle? Instead, HIV research? Of all medical ailments, did he have to choose that one? That’s nice, she said. There’s that nice outdoor museum in Tucson. She’s avoided the subject since.
“I don’t believe those are free,” Jennifer says. “You see those—”
She pushes her way forward again. New Yorkers aren’t the only ones who know how to hustle. “Oh, thank heavens!” she says to the middle-aged man seated beside the two empty seats. There’s a little sweater on one and a doll on the other. “I was just about giving up on catching so much as a glimpse of my grandson’s graduation.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. He gestures to a third empty chair on the other side of him. “My wife is just letting the girls run around a bit until the ceremony begins.”
“Lucky you!” she says, “Getting to sit back and relax while your wife does all the running after the children. Well!” She picks up the tiny sweater. “They must be little, too. Two years? Three years?”
“Olivia’s going to be three in July,” he says. “And—”
“Three in July! So she didn’t have a ticket.” She hands him the sweater and sits down, reaching next for the doll. “Don’t worry. They’ll be happier on your laps anyhow. They’ll see better and squirm less. I know. I raised five of them. Six, if you count my grandson.” She places the doll in his arms. “He’s the one graduating today.”
By the time the wife is back, she and the guy are regular old friends. Small and sharp-faced, with a sleek dark ponytail, the wife looks set to kick up a fuss, but the husband stops her: “Dina, this is Barbara. She’s flown all the way here from Arizona on her own—”
“Twice widowed,” she says, shaking her head.
“—to see her grandson graduate from the medical school.”
“His mother couldn’t come,” she explains. “No one else in the family could come. One of my sons is with the army, and another has a farm and couldn’t leave it. My third son—or, actually my second son—isn’t with us anymore.”
“I’m sorry,” the woman says, looking suspicious, as though something more is about to be asked from her than is possible to give.
“I miss him every day,” she says. Because what else is there to say? “And then my youngest daughter is over somewhere in Africa. Working. So she couldn’t come, either. My grandson has a few younger brothers, but he didn’t grow up with them—because he grew up with me, see. And his brothers couldn’t come all the way from California, anyhow. That’s where they live. Which means I’m on my own. But I wouldn’t have missed this day for anything.”
“Well, congratulations.” Looking overwhelmed by all this information, the woman takes one of the kids onto her lap and extracts a box of cinnamon Teddy Grahams from her bag. The other kid clambers around her knees until the man thinks to pick her up also.
“Second wife,” she whispers to Jennifer. “Kid from first wife graduating today.” Not all stepparents show the kind of love and interest Ronnie did for her children. It was a blessing, and she’s aware of it. In a way, Kenny was the kid they had together. Whatever people may now want to say about her and Ronnie, they can’t say he wasn’t a good stepfather and step-grandfather.
“Here’s the program, Mrs. McCloskey,” Jennifer says, handing her a thick piece of white paper.
The crowd is beginning to still. She settles in her seat. The ivy-covered stone buildings rise up around them, so handsome, so stately, so solid. Here she is at an Ivy League graduation—could her parents have ever imagined this? And Michael! A fourth Gannon doctor. How would it be if, instead of Jennifer, Michael were here beside her? White-haired, but still tall and blue-eyed and handsome? Because Michael would have never stopped being handsome—the first thing she thought the first time she lay eyes on him was he was the handsomest man she’d ever seen, even propped up in his hospital bed and so underweight, his skin yellow from the jaundice, spotted with red dry patches from the malnutrition.
Will you come back again tomorrow?
You bet. I’ll come back to see you as often as you’d like me to.
But if Michael hadn’t died, if he could be here, she wouldn’t be. Because everything would have been different. Patty Ann would never have married a loser at eighteen to keep him from being drafted and then dived into a second marriage with that monster. Michael would never have let any of that happen. Patty Ann would have gone to Vassar, and then who knows? Maybe Patty Ann, always so bright, would have gotten her own medical degree right here at Columbia.
And Kenny—apple of her eye—would never have been born.
The thing about life is it is so damned confusing. Such a web, each piece of it dependent on something else, something that can be as tiny as a smile from a stranger or as huge as heart disease. The good all tangled up with the bad.
Bells toll. The crowd quiets. Horns play, followed by orchestra music. Grouped by school, the graduates begin to file down the stone steps flanking the library to their respective places before the podium. Extracting the binoculars from her purse, she scans the beaming faces coming in waves, the unending flow of blue cloth. One cluster of kids carries foreign flags; another brandishes newspapers. And there they are, the medical school students, with their oversize latex gloves!
That’s him!
And then her vision of Kenny is swallowed up again as the graduating students pour into the central square of the campus, up the steps, across the walkways.
She lays the binoculars in her lap and opens her commencement-day program. There are a lot of graduates. This is going to take a while.
“May I?” Jennifer says, pointing to the binoculars.
“Of course.”
The program is a nice weight. The lettering is handsome. Traditional elegance, like one would expect from a college in the East. Jeanne used to send her notes on similar paper from Vassar.
Poor Jeanne. The last time she came East it was for Jeanne’s funeral, two years ago. A quiet affair: Molly and her family, Francis and his pregnant wife, two former colleagues from Vassar, one former student, and the assistant to the oncologist who had treated Jeanne’s breast cancer. And, of course, she and Kenny.
She opens the program. The list of honorary-degree recipients starts with:
Toward the end, Ronnie would listen to a recording of trumpet solos played by Marsalis over and over. She came both to hate and love those elegant concertos.
Don’t you get tired of those?
I’m listening to them welcome me upstairs.
And how do you know you’re going upstairs?
He turned his head to look at her, slowly and painfully. She and Ronnie had always joked so much; it hadn’t occurred to her that he might take her words seriously. She returned his gaze and took his hand in hers. She squeezed it.
If anyone will be welcome in heaven, it will be you, dearest.
That’s all she ever said. They never spoke further about it. But she knows he understood, at that moment, that she forgave him. No matter what mistakes he might have made or what dark secrets he might have struggled with—even if he might have strayed once or more—Ronnie was a good man. She’s been lucky, really. Most women don’t get one good husband. She got two.
MARK O. HATFIELD, UNITED STATES SENATOR FROM OREGON
ANDREI KOZYREV, FORMER FOREIGN MINISTER OF RUSSIA
SADAKO OGATA, UNITED NATIONS HIGH COMMISSIONER FOR REFUGEES
“Pff,” she says, shutting the program. Times change. The Japs tortured Michael. For more than a half century, Russia kept the entire US spooked with the threat of communism. Now Kenny’s school is handing out graduate degrees to their people like doughnuts from a welcome table.
“It’s slow getting started, isn’t it?” Jennifer says. “It’s such a big school. Almost nine thousand students are graduating today.”
Nine thousand. That’s how many “fire balloons” the Japanese launched across the Pacific, hoping to strike North America. Each balloon contained a bomb.
The only way is not to think about it. About any of it. Sissy, who is supposed to be an expert on the subject, working over there in Africa, says the path to resolving conflict is through recognition and truth. She couldn’t agree less. Nothing erases the past. The past will always be around longer than the present. The solution lies in moving on.
“Yep,” she tells Jennifer. “A lot of happy kids. A lot of happy parents.”
“And grandparents,” Jennifer says, smiling.
“And grandparents.”
Horns blow again. The graduates are seated now, and older men and women in cloak and gown, less steady on their feet, appear at the door of the library. A voice over a loudspeaker introduces them with due pomp and circumstance: the representatives of the alumni anniversary classes, the faculty, and on and on until the president of the college takes his place by the dais.
“Daddy. Can’t see,” the little girl sitting on her neighbor’s lap says.
“There’s nothing to see yet,” he tells her.
She takes the binoculars back from Jennifer and hands them to the little girl. “These are magic,” she says. “Stand up on your daddy’s lap. Now, don’t drop them, and don’t put them in your mouth.”
Finally they play the opening song, “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
“Put your hand over your heart,” she says to the little girl, tapping her hand against her own thin chest. The girl smiles, excited to be part of a ritual or just to have a reason to move, and flings her left hand in the region of her right shoulder.
She catches the father’s eye and gives him a steely look. He quickly switches his daughter’s hands, then slips his hand over his heart also.
“Honestly,” she mutters. To think she had a brother, two husbands, and two sons fight for the likes of this. And one of those husbands came back on a slow path to dying. And one son and her brother never came back at all. Not alive, anyhow.
And then there were all the other, connected casualties, like Francis’s friend and even, in a way, Patty Ann. All these lives rearranged or even ended. It’s easy to say, “Don’t dwell on the past”—and she does say that all the time. But it is harder in practice not to do so.
“O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave…”
But things are getting better with Patty Ann. That’s something to remember. Between Glenn’s stonework and the rent from the house’s extra bedrooms, their money problems seem under control finally. Patty Ann even says two fancy boutiques, one on Melrose and one on Montana, have begun stocking her Beachswept jewelry, and Glenn sold one of his sculptures to the private collection of a famous actor—she’d never heard of him, but that doesn’t mean anything. And Sean has his job and, it seems, a girlfriend. The other two boys are a bit more of a mess, but they’re still young; there’s time for them. Look at Francis! He didn’t come into his own until well into his thirties, and then he became a family man and from one of his songs alone must have made a million.
“In our enthusiasm to save money and to make money…” the president of the college is saying, talking about health care in America, comparing it to the savings-and-loan debacle. Thank God she didn’t lose anything in that. Thank God she and Ronnie didn’t have to rely on Medicare, either. It cost an arm and a leg those last months, keeping him home, hiring home health care. For the first time in their two decades of marriage, she saw Ronnie completely naked helping the nurse get him into the bath, to slip him into clean pajamas. Poor Ronnie—he’d always been such a modest man. But at least he didn’t have to face the endless scrutiny of being in a hospital. People whispering about him. People saying things.
“We need a new contract today, where everyone gains—not just a few…”
Jennifer is clapping loudly, her hair and breasts swinging. A pleasant young woman, but what a physical spectacle girls make of themselves nowadays, tossing their vim and vigor all over the place. A sparrow skims the air over their heads. He doubles back and alights on a lamppost, letting out a brilliant trill. Who is he calling to amidst the thousands of humans on this campus this morning? Above, the sky stretches clear blue, streaked with ribbons of white cloud. The little girl has fallen asleep, one arm and one foot flung onto her lap. She pats the child’s chubby ankle aimlessly, smoothes her skirt down over her pink tights. The sweet thing is the same age as Francis’s daughter. She’d have liked to see Mia while she was East. She would have liked to see Francis, too, for that matter. But now that the fuss over his music has died down, he prefers his privacy up on that farm in Massachusetts, and she has to accept that.
How sprawled her family has ended up! Patty Ann on one coast. Francis on the other. Mike smack in the middle of the country, in Texas. And Sissy—not even on the continent. At least Kenny will be in Arizona.
The degrees are being conferred now, the dean of each school introducing a mass of graduates and formally requesting that the president of the university bestow diplomas on them. The actual diplomas will be handed out in the individual ceremonies this afternoon. For now, graduates of each school rise in turn by their places, while related members of the audience seem to rise along with them, a spirit of shared elation as buoyant as the bright spring air. Each dean tries to say something funny, something to set apart their throng of optimistic hearts and faces, and no one jeers at the goofy jokes and awkward attempts to be clever.
The family next to her cheers. The little girl wakes and touches her hand milkily.
“It’s all right,” she says. “They’re shouting because they’re happy.”
The law school dean steps away from the podium, and a new bunch of students rise from their chairs. Their necks are flecked with deep green; it’s the medical school!
She lifts the binoculars and scans the standing graduates; they are to the right of the dais, toward the front, with their backs to the thousands sitting behind them. They sway and clap, and she is sure she’ll be able to pick out her Kenny. Kennedy. Twenty-two years ago, he sat beside her, a skinny seven-year-old clutching a torn sweater of his mother’s in the place of a stuffed animal as they drove away from his parents’ pitiful hovel in Los Angeles, through the desert, toward her and Ronnie’s comfortable home in Arizona.
G
ive me his brother, too, she told Patty Ann. Give me Sean also.
No. Sean needs to stay with me.
Then Patty Ann married Troy and suddenly wanted Kenny back. But she’d been smart enough to make Patty Ann sign over legal guardianship. It’s just a formality, she’d said, in case of an accident or something. We can tear it up later. She wasn’t so uneducated as people might think.
How Patty Ann yelled at her when she refused to return Kenny. Go ahead, she told Patty Ann. Shout as much as you like. Kenny is staying right here, where he is safe and happy. During the worst of times, Patty Ann would call in the middle of the night, three sheets to the wind, shouting about Luke, shouting about Kenny, virtually incoherent.
Kenny would have been torn to bits trying to protect his mother in that household. Instead he grew up with Sissy walking with him to school and Ronnie taking him to his baseball games and helping him patiently with his math homework. A sweet boy in a happy household. He would never be here today if she’d sent him back to Patty Ann. That’s the real reason Patty Ann backpedaled on coming today, not Glenn’s wrist surgery. They’ve called a truce over her keeping Kenny, finally. Neither of them wants to reopen old wounds.
“I respectfully request, sir, that you grant these degrees, along with the rights, privileges, and responsibilities thereto attached…”
She scans the backs of the graduates again. That’s Kenny! Boxing the air with his latex glove!
“I solemnly swear by whatsoever I hold most sacred that I will be loyal to the profession of medicine…”
She lifts a white-gloved hand to her mouth. A little sob, like a hiccup, escapes.
“…and just and generous to its members. That I will lead my life and practice my art in uprightness and honor…”
“Mrs. McCloskey, are you okay?” Jennifer whispers, hand hovering over hers.
“Congratulations, and welcome to the profession of medicine!”
Shining Sea Page 22