“I’m sure something will turn up for you,” he said now, and tried to get back to his speech.
That seemed safe enough. It shouldn’t have been another gaffe. It shouldn’t have been, but. . . . “What? Where? When? How?” the graduates shouted, and variations on all those themes. They knew their prospects were rotten. How blind was the Vice President, if he didn’t?
“Ladies and gentlemen, please!” The chancellor came to the microphone to try to quiet them down. “Let’s give our speaker the chance to finish his address.”
They booed her, and they booed the Vice President. A couple of them made paper airplanes out of program pages and flung them toward the podium, but that was as far as it went. Back when Colin was a kid, rioting UCSB students had wrecked Isla Vista and burned down the Bank of America there. These kids had better reason to rise up than their elders could have imagined. So it seemed to Colin, at any rate. But they subsided after some more jeers and catcalls. In due course, the Vice President did finish, and sat down. He got a lot of applause when he did, along with more derisive hoots.
He said something to the dean or vice chancellor next to him. They both chuckled. Why not? They didn’t need to worry about where their next paycheck would come from. The kids, on the other hand . . .
Colin noticed something odd when the chancellor finished the ceremony by formally awarding the degrees. She announced each group separately: the A.B.s from the College of Letters and Sciences, the B.S.s from the College of Letters and Sciences, and so on. Each group in turn whooped and cheered and hollered as it turned its mortarboard tassels from left to right to show it was now full of graduates (to say nothing of those B.S.s).
Each group in turn . . . till the chancellor awarded the Ph.D.s. The newly minted holders of doctorates turned their tassels silently and without any fuss. “Same thing happened when Rob graduated here a few years back,” Colin told Kelly in a low voice. “Isn’t that funny?”
“It doesn’t surprise me one bit. When I finally get my diss done, I’ll be too tired to feel like making a fuss even if I do go to the ceremony,” Kelly said. Right now she was teaching geology at Cal State Dominguez Hills, not far from San Atanasio. The slot was probably a wedding present from her chairman up at Berkeley, and a very welcome one. She kept working on the dissertation in her copious spare time.
“Huh,” Colin said thoughtfully. “Hadn’t looked at it like that. Sure makes more sense than any of my guesses.”
“Trust me,” Kelly said. Most of the time, few phrases set off more alarm bells in Colin’s head than that one. He nodded now.
Along with the rest of the graduates’ relatives, he and Kelly went down onto the pitch to meet up with their hero of the moment and to immortalize that moment in ones and zeros. Marshall duly pantomimed turning his tassel. He started to do it again, but paused in midturn to hug a pretty Asian girl. “Sorry about that,” he said as he went back to posing. “She was in my writing class this past quarter.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Colin answered. “If I’d come up here by myself, I would’ve wanted to hug her, too.”
Kelly poked him in the ribs. “You want to tell me some more about that, mister?” she said in a mock-fierce growl.
“Didn’t say I would’ve done it. I said I would’ve wanted to,” Colin explained. “I’m married, but I’m not blind.”
“Hmm. Let’s see how much deeper you can dig yourself in here,” Kelly said. “What you’re telling me is, it’s all a question of impulse control. You can have the impulse, but as long as you don’t do anything about it, you’re golden.”
After some thought, Colin cautiously nodded. “Yeah, that’s pretty much what I’m saying. An awful lot of policework is catching the jerks who go ahead and do the first thing that pops into their heads. If they’d stop for five seconds to wonder what happened next, half the cops in the country’d be out of work. But they don’t. Chances are, they can’t.”
Marshall made vague waving motions. “Listen, guys, I gotta go give the gown back and get my receipt for it. See you in a few.” He headed off towards an exit already crowded with new graduates. Eyeing that crowd, Colin suspected returning the gown would take more than a few. Waiting till tomorrow, though, would bring on a fee. The University of California system missed few tricks when it came to revenue enhancement.
The UC system did let you keep your mortarboard and tassel. Colin prayed such untrammeled generosity wouldn’t bankrupt it.