Anne Korkeakivi - Shining Sea

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:

WYNTON MARSALIS, COMPOSER, MUSICIAN, TEACHER

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 up stairs?

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.