I sit between Andrew, Ted, and Johannes. Before and behind us rows and rows of people have come to witness the milestone of graduation. Ted beams like a proud father. I think maybe I shouldn’t have invited Johannes after all, Andrew didn’t speak to him even once at the party last night.
I squeeze Ted’s hand, “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For all your help raising Michael. He wouldn’t have been here if not for you.”
He shrugs, “I just fed you dinner once in a while. You’re the one who fed his obsession with rules. And now you’re the one forking over for the tuition.” He laughs.
Johannes taps my shoulder, pointing to the embossed commencement program. “Did you know Michael’s speaking? Looks like he’s giving the Statement of Class.”
“What?” I hold my own program at arm’s length. “I wish I hadn’t forgotten my reading glasses.”
“Looks like we’ll find out soon enough,” Johannes points to the elevated dais in front of the graduating class. The dean—authoritative in his black robe, complete with a velvet lined hood draped over his shoulders—walks to the podium.
“Welcome. Welcome to all of you who have spent the last three years learning the law with us, welcome to all of you who have supported these students through their academic journey.” He goes on, offering a few words about the pride we should feel in these graduates, the honorable tradition of the law, the drive toward excellence that the school embodies. I wonder if he gives the same speech every year. “And now, I will let you hear from the class itself, from its representative. This young man,” he intones, “has been an exemplary student, responsible, intelligent, compassionate.” I like to think he is describing Michael, but it could be another student. “But what distinguishes him, what radiates from his mind is an indelible belief in the power of the law to allow individuals and communities to solve their differences, to resolve their wrongs not for the benefit of the richest and most powerful, but for the youngest and most vulnerable. It is my honor to introduce Michael S. Capen.”
My mind stumbles over the S as my son stands and strides confidently to the podium. He has no middle name. Why would he add an arbitrary letter to his name?
He grasps the podium with both hands, looks out over the audience as if to ensure our collective attention. “Justice,” he pauses, “is a fundamental human requirement. Without a sense of justice, individuals and societies will engage in almost anything to achieve it. Deceit, wars, murders, mass killings,” he inhales, “terrorist acts.” His roving eyes seem to focus on me with these words. “All have been justified as attempts to achieve justice. Such seemingly barbaric actions are often successful, providing for the aggressor some satisfaction, some salve to a psyche wounded by injustice. The fundamental flaw with such systems of justice lies in the emotional toll they inflict on the families of both the wronged and the avenged.” He stops, looks down at his notes and then challenges the audience. “Imagine the children of a man in a tribal society, orphaned when he is killed over a land dispute. Not only are they deprived of their father, but they are then raised with the purpose to balance their sense of injustice, to make things right according to their own sense of fairness—an eye for an eye. Their future is stolen from them, their actions are predetermined by an archaic system of justice.”
I feel adrenaline shoot through my body in response to these hypothetical orphaned children. From where did he imagine such a story?
“Worse still, in our globalized world where we brush up against and even welcome into our country millions of people who have been acculturated into such revenge-based justice systems, their systems and ours can clash in the most explosive ways. Of course the dark day of September 11, 2001 still haunts our national consciousness.”
I feel tremendously exposed, as if my son were revealing secrets I have long sequestered—for his own protection—here in the blazing public sun. I reach for my purse and slide to the front of my seat, looking for the easiest way to flee. I don’t want to be here, trapped among the folding chairs and fancy spring dresses.
Ted places a hand on my knee. “You need to stay. He needs you to stay.”
I slowly slide back into my seat, but keep my purse on my lap. Johannes’ raised-eyebrow glance to me goes unanswered.
“Thankfully,” Michael continues, “my mother taught me from an early age a set of rules, our own family code, designed to govern our lives in a rational, dependable, peaceable way. As children my brother and I learned that if you want something, you must ask nicely for it. If you are asked nicely for something, and feel you cannot give it, you must at least share it for a time.”
I see them, as children fighting over toys and treats, hear my relentless repetition of this rule.
“Knowing we could rely on a set of rules, parameters for our conduct, with fixed and predictable consequences should we violate them, instilled in me a desire to learn and use the rules of our legal system.
“Our obligation,” he sweeps his arm over the podium, including in the gesture the rows of his fellow students before him, “our mission, as a group of students privileged to study perhaps the most evolved and sophisticated system of justice, is to act as a beacon to the world, to illuminate the ways in which a non-violent, legal method of solving disputes and meting out justice is superior to systems founded on a primitive hunger for revenge which employ tools of violence and intimidation.”
He pauses, allowing his words to settle. “May you meet with success.”
The audience responds with warm applause. Tears spring onto my cheeks. I hope Ted and Johannes will misunderstand my emotion as pride. My son’s eloquent words, however, have filled me with dread.
I stand up, awkwardly step over Ted’s feet.
“Mom, where are you going?” Andrew asks, reaching out for my hand.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I lie. I must reach Michael before the others when he comes off the stage. I must protect Andrew from whatever Michael knows. I move to the edge of the stage, hovering there through the keynote address of some fabulously wealthy lawyer-turned-entrepreneur, through all of the students’ names, called out in monotonously alphabetical order. My mind blurs so that I don’t even see Michael as he receives his diploma.
And finally the ceremony concludes, the newly ordained students—now doctors of justice—move en masse to the edge of an expansive lawn to greet their families in a frenzy of squeals and shoulder thumping.
I find Michael, among a clutch of students, accepting their congratulations. He sees me and opens his arms, embracing me now as a man, not just my child. I can barely raise my arms to reciprocate.
“Michael, the S, why the S in your name?”
He inhales, the smile evaporating from his face. “It’s short for Siddique.”
The blood drains from my face.
“I wanted it as a reminder of the debt I owe.”
I feel as though I am falling, an elevator suddenly dropping, dangerously free from its tethering cable.
“How?” I try to form a question, “what do you know?”
“Mom, I’ve known for years. It wasn’t difficult, the research, putting the story together, to realize we are the family of Rashid Siddique.”
I feel my expression tremble. “Why…”
He reaches for my hand, “It’s all right, Mom. You were trying to protect me.” He wraps his arms around me again, I feel his black graduation robe against my cheek. “I appreciate all you did. But you don’t have to protect me anymore.”
I sob, find myself in unfamiliar territory. My son now shielding me.
“Here you are,” Johannes emerges from the swirl of people around us. “I wondered where you had disappeared to,” he does not touch me, respectfully observes something private between my son and me. Ted and Andrew join us, congratulating Michael, hugging him.
“Hey, good speech,” Andrew puts his arm over his brother’s shoulder, now exactly the same height as his own.
“Did you know he was going to speak, Andrew?” I ask.
“No,” Michael quickly responds. “He doesn’t know. He didn’t know.”
I am grateful for Michael’s answer to my implied question.
“I knew,” Ted volunteers, “We talked about it lots.” He looks at me directly, so I understand his larger meaning. “He didn’t tell you about the speech, because of Dad’s…hospitalization.” He reaches out for Michael’s hand, looks at me, “you’ve got one hell of a kid.” His usually cavalier tone quavers with emotion.
“Perhaps we should all toast to Michael before we have to get you and Ted off to the airport,” Johannes suggests to me politely.
“Yeah,” Ted recovers, “Let’s get ours now, you know free champagne never lasts long.”
My mother looks tired. Without her delicate makeup, the lines in her face seem to stand out like a map of the emotions she has so carefully regulated over the decades. She holds my father’s hand. His body looks so thin, as if the hospital bed held not the steady, capable man of the world who was my father, but his shadow, or perhaps his shell—hollow evidence of his life.
“I’m so glad you’re here. He’s been waiting for you,” our mother says to us.
I kiss my father’s cheek, hear a slow shallow breath emerging from his mouth.
I hug my mother, feeling strangely like the parent in this situation. “How is he?”
“You know, your father’s always been very determined. The doctors say he’s lost almost all his lung capacity. He said he’d take antibiotics for the pneumonia, but made me promise I wouldn’t let them intubate him for oxygen.”
She leans down and whispers in his ear. “Robert, the children are here.” He doesn’t respond. “Kathryn and Ted flew up from San Diego to see you. Do you want to open your eyes and see them?”
His eyelids flutter and I see his hand move slightly in my mother’s. His watery eyes reveal a surprising clarity, a lucidity starkly contrasting his body, which is so obviously shutting down. He looks from my face to Ted’s, the tiny muscles around his eyes flexing to express a smile, an expression too taxing for his mouth. From deep in his throat, comes a reedy sound. I bend down as the sound comes again, a word, words. The air passes through his voice box and reaches my ear. “Michael…graduated…”
“Yes, Dad.” I squeeze his hand. “He graduated today. He gave the speech for his class. We were all very proud.”
His eyes shine from some mysterious source. Ted leans down next to me and the sounds come again. “I’m proud…of…” he inhales, “you…all.”
“We love you, Dad,” Ted looks at him and then looks up at the wall, tears at the corners of his eyes.
“You’ve been a wonderful father.” I stroke his hand, “I’m grateful for all…” I can’t finish the sentence as my throat constricts.
He blinks, I imagine in acknowledgment, then closes his eyes. We are all silent for a moment, waiting for my father to breathe again. When we hear the inhale finally come, I turn to my mother. “Do you want to take a break, maybe get a cup of coffee?”
She runs her hand over her silver hair. “Maybe I’ll just go to the bathroom.” She leans down and kisses my father’s forehead. “I’ll be right back, Kathryn and Ted are here with you.”
Ted and I do not look at each other. The slight tension in my father’s hand dissipates, and minutes seem to pass since we last heard him inhale. Suddenly his eyes open, still clear. The inhale comes and his lips part, his lower lip sliding under his upper teeth. His faint exhale pushes against his lip, vibrating until we hear the first letter, and then a series of tiny changes take place in his mouth. His tongue and lips sculpt a word from his breath. “Forgive.” His eyes roll, taking in the whole room. I wait for the rest of the thought, the subject and the object. His eyes find mine and lock for a moment.
“Yes, Dad? I’m listening.” His eyelids cover his eyes, like a curtain closing. The rest of his thought hangs, incomplete between us.
My mother returns to the bedside. She looks so out of place here. Her ever-feminine blouse, her classic gold jewelry—a world apart from the plastic and chrome hospital bed, the sockets in the wall for electricity, computers, fluids, oxygen.
I relinquish my father’s hand to my mother. I touch his feet, a little protrusion under the sheets at the end of the bed.
My mother kisses his forehead, his cheeks, his eyes. She whispers in his ear. I feel both an intruder on this intimacy and a privileged witness to the end of a lifetime of love and respect. I hear my mother’s words. “You can go now, Robert. No need to hold on for us.”
We all sit quietly, the air between us charged with expectation. I silently wish him Godspeed in whatever journey or transformation this end brings. I notice my own shallow breathing, the coldness in my body except for the place where I can feel my father. Then, despite the absence of an inhale, my father exhales, a rattle echoes up from deep in his lungs and for a moment I feel some movement in his feet before they are still.
My handkerchief absorbs another wave of tears, red lipstick smeared across the corner of the cloth.
“Robert Capen was the kind of man many of us wish we could be,” the minister says in his resonant voice. “Accomplished in the larger world, yet always devoted to the private world of his family. He was a man with a sharp understanding of what divides people, but an abiding faith in what connects us.” He goes on, describing my father, with stories of their interactions, inferences about his early life. The minister’s words conjure images of my father I haven’t considered for years. I look at Michael, did I give him enough opportunity to know his grandfather? Why didn’t we go to visit more often? Now we have one more absence in our lives.
“Once when I asked him about his experience as a young man, living in the Middle East, surrounded by customs and faiths that are so foreign to us,” the minister continues, “people so seemingly different from our Presbyterian congregation, he told me, ‘We all live beneath the same heaven’.”
I catch my breath as I remember when my father had repeated his quintessential phrase to me, see again when he said it to Rashid’s sister-in-law to translate to Rashid’s father just before our wedding. I used to believe him. But since everything changed I have built walls, divided us from them, tried to keep them carefully separate in the columns of the newspaper.
Will my father really join them in the same heaven? What would he say to the spirit of Rashid’s father? To Rashid? I think of the man who was my husband, the man who held me while I birthed my sons, the man who used to gather us all in his powerful arms. I see our wedding in Pakistan, the swirling colors. I remember the bride I was. She is gone too. I sob openly.
Ted follows the minister, taking his place at the pulpit. He takes several moments to compose himself, carefully avoiding the coffin, or the eyes of the mourners in the pews. “The older I get, the more I realize a father’s job is never done. No matter how old a kid becomes, his dad is always older, more experienced, and if a kid is lucky, his father is always wiser.” He gasps with his inhale, continuing on quickly so as not to weep. “I was such a lucky kid. Even to his last day, my dad showed me how to think of others, how to express care. Some of his last words were about his grandchildren.”
I close my eyes and hold my breath trying to suppress my grief. I tremble with the force of my losses. Even the opportunity to grieve for my husband as my mother now does, in the open, with her loved ones around her, was lost so long ago.
Andrew surprises me by reaching his arm across my shoulders, and I rest my head against his strong shoulder, feeling a childlike need for comfort. My mother reaches across Michael’s lap from the other side to pat my hand. I raise my head to look at her. Her stoic smile seems neither forced nor fearful. She leans in and whispers to me, “We are lucky to have so many memories of such a wonderful man.”
She has so many memories. She has a full married lifetime of memories with my father. I have only a pearl, a brief densely beautiful period from a different lifetime, the luster of happy memories forbidden beneath strata of little lies, omissions, denial.
Ted returns to sit between my mother and Janet. The organist presses out the first line of a hymn I remember from childhood. The congregation stands, and I feel myself girded by my sons, the fruit of a union I have never told them about. I reach my hands into theirs and I tell one and then the other, “Your father loved you. He loved you the way my father loved his children. He would have been proud of you.”
They squeeze my hands in acknowledgment. They stand mutely, listening as others sing a hymn they never learned.