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.
In due course, Marshall made it back. He was usually the most even-tempered of Colin’s children, even when he wasn’t stoned. Now, though, he looked and sounded irked. “Boy, that was fun,” he muttered darkly.
“I bet,” Colin said.
“Sure looks like they could’ve organized it better,” Kelly said. A beat later, she corrected herself: “Sure looks like they could’ve organized it.”
“There you go!” Marshall said. He turned to his father and spoke in serious tones: “You should keep this one.”
“That’d be nice.” Colin could hardly have sounded dryer. All the same, he was most sincere. He wasn’t sure how he’d survived one divorce. If he had to try to survive two. . He shivered as if a goose had just walked over his grave. An awful lot of cops’ marriages failed. That was one reason why eating your gun was an occupational hazard of the trade.
“I think so, too,” Kelly said pointedly, and took his hand. Colin didn’t need to worry about things falling apart right this minute, so he didn’t.
“Where do we go now?” Marshall asked. He’d got done with college at long, long last. Too much to hope for to expect him to have any real notion of what came next.
“Well, I got us reservations for the China Pavilion, but they aren’t till six,” Colin answered. “We have some time to kill first.”
“You did? How?” Marshall, cool Marshall, actually seemed impressed. The China Pavilion was downtown Santa Barbara’s best Chinese restaurant, and the race wasn’t even close. The place was always jammed.
“I’ll tell you how-I did it three months ago, as soon as I was sure you really would get your sheepskin,” Colin replied. Marshall just gaped. Advance planning was almost as alien to him as it was to a drive-by shooter with a head full of crack.
To use up the afternoon, they went to the Santa Barbara Zoo. It wasn’t the kind of place that would drive the San Diego Zoo or even the one in Los Angeles out of business any time soon. It was small and funky: one of FDR’s swarm of WPA projects. Nobody nowadays would built a zoo like this, but nobody in the 1930s had worried about that. Animals prowled or dozed in concrete enclosures. Peanut shells littered the walkways (the signs at the concession stands warning about peanut allergy were relatively new, though). You weren’t supposed to toss the monkeys peanuts, but people did anyhow. Colin thought it was terrific.
When they got to the China Pavilion just before six, it was as crowded as usual. More crowded than usual, in fact: along with prosperous locals (almost a redundancy if you weren’t going to school here-prices knocked the China Pavilion out of most starving students’ price range), the restaurant was full of parents celebrating with their kids.
Sure enough, though, the receptionist ran a perfectly manicured finger down her list and nodded. “Yes, your table is waiting, Mr. Ferguson. Please come this way.” She grabbed menus and led Colin, Kelly, and Marshall to a table by the window. “Is this all right?”
“Couldn’t be better,” Colin said.
“Someone will be along to take your drink orders soon.” The receptionist swayed back to her station.
Colin asked for Laphroaig over ice. Kelly and Marshall both chose Tsingtaos. If you were going to drink beer with Chinese food, why not Chinese beer? And the brewery in Tsingtao dated from the days before the First World War, when the Germans ran the town. Say what you wanted about Germans, but they knew how to make beer.
Marshall eyed the menu with astonished respect. “Boy, this place is even more expensive than I remembered,” he said, and looked a question at his father.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s not like you graduate every day,” Colin said. For quite a while there, it hadn’t been as if Marshall graduated any day. Now Colin wouldn’t have to worry about tuition or rent or utilities at the apartment. He’d got to like the Armenian couple who owned the building (and several others in Ellwood), which didn’t mean he’d be sorry to quit writing them checks every month.