He received his document and he shook hands with Dr. Chase, the school chancellor, and he went back to his seat, following Grace who was walking back off the platform, just a few paces ahead of him. When they were seated again, he covered her hand with his own and squeezed it gently.
It began raining before Dr. Chase could deliver his commencement speech. It rained lightly at first, and he and Grace sat with the other students and guests, hopeful that the clouds would blow over. But the drops began falling more heavily and more steadily, and one by one the gathered crowd began to run for cover. He and Grace stayed until they were certain Dr. Chase would not make his speech. They fled with the rest then, and learned in the Alumni Bulletin the following week that some five hundred foolhardy souls had remained seated throughout the entire downpour, college graduates who had not learned enough to come in out of the rain.
Their families were present at the exercises, of course, and Buddwing found this togetherness almost unbearable. He had never liked Dan and never would, and his presence at something that was terribly important to Buddwing and Grace seemed almost an affront. Grace’s father chattered on about his new Arabian steed, and Grace’s mother asked Buddwing’s mother if she played bridge, and would she like to join her weekly Mount Kisco game? Grace pulled Buddwing aside and whispered, “I wonder who got top billing?”
“Huh?”
“On their joint degree. Alfred or Lynn?”
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, just... how do you feel?”
“Stupid,” Grace answered. “How do you feel?”
“Stupid.”
“Fine way for college graduates to feel.”
“Well, I guess we’re stepping out into the world,” he said. “I guess that’s why.”
“Yes,” she answered with a solemnity that startled him.
In the summer of 1950, Sam Buddwing, or whoever the hell he was, stepped out into the world that was New York City and began looking for a job. He had been advised during the commencement exercises that fifty-five per cent of N.Y.U.’s graduating class was composed of World War II veterans, and that the class was the largest in the school’s history. He had only to extend these spectacular figures to Harvard and Princeton and Rutgers and Yale and C.C.N.Y. and Fordham and Dartmouth and Cornell and Syracuse and any and every college or university, big or small, in the United States of America in order to determine exactly how many eager young graduates were storming the largest city in the world that summer, looking for work. These were the young men who had invaded the fortress of Europe, who had hedgehopped their way from island to island across the Pacific, who had watched their comrades in arms die in muddy ditches and steaming jungles, and they came now like a new invasion force, bristling with knowledge, the greatest peacetime armada ever assembled, to storm the bunkers lining Madison Avenue. They all carried parchments stating that they had completed the required course of study for a baccalaureate degree, and they all came equipped with transcripts of their school records, and bright cheery smiles, and perfect speech learned in elocution courses. None of them knew what a buyer’s market was. None of them realized that jobs which had once been going to high school graduates could, in this embarrassment of educational riches, now be bestowed upon men who had completed a four-year college course of study.
Buddwing did not know quite what he wanted, but he knew he had not gone to college to become a bank clerk trainee. He began seriously entertaining the notion of leaving for Paris with Grace, where they would indeed become bums, drinking absinthe and rotting their brains away with wormwood. They had their first serious argument the day she suggested that perhaps she could find a job to carry them through the summer, after which they could make further plans and either go on with their studies or go to Europe, or whatever.
“If I can’t find a job, how the hell do you expect to find one?” he asked.
“I’m only offering it as a compromise suggestion,” Grace said. “I mean, you can’t find a job, can you?”
“I could, if you wanted me to go out digging ditches,” he answered.
“Well, I don’t want you to do that. But I wouldn’t mind taking a job as a salesgirl someplace or—”
“The hell with that,” he said. “You’re a college graduate!”
“I don’t think we can eat our diplomas, do you?” she asked.
“No. That’s why I think we should go to Paris.”
“We haven’t got the fare.”
“I could take some kind of job to earn the fare, and then we could go.”
“All right, if that’s what you want to do. I simply thought that, since my sign is Gemini—”
“Oh, come on, Grace, not that again. You don’t really think—”
“Yes, I do.”
“That’s all nonsense and you know it.”
“What was it that put me in bed for a month then, would you mind telling me?”
“You had the flu,” he said.
“No, I had a touch of bronchitis.”
“Dr. Manero said it was the flu.”
“Dr. Manero doesn’t know anything about it,” Grace said. “When you’re born under the sign of Gemini, the weakest part of your anatomy is your lungs. I’ve always had trouble with my lungs. I’m always catching cold very easily — you know that, honey, so admit it.”
“I catch cold easily, too, and I’m Capricorn, so what the hell does that prove?”
“You don’t catch colds, you get slight touches of rheumatism. If you’re Capricorn, the weakest parts of your body are the knees, bones, and joints.”
“I’ve never had trouble with my knees, bones or joints,” Buddwing said.
“Except when you get a slight touch of rheumatism.”
“I don’t get slight touches of rheumatism, I get common colds.”
“Well, you can call them what you like, but I happen to know,” Grace said.
“Yeah, Omar the Mystic.”
“Don’t make fun of it,” she warned.
“Queen of the Zodiac,” he said.
“Because I don’t happen to think it’s very funny.”
“No, that’s because you have no sense of humor.”
“That isn’t my fault. I was born under Gemini. I’m not supposed to be some sort of flibbertigibbet scatterbrain.”
“No, you’re supposed to be intelligent, logical, and meticulous.”
“That’s right.”
“Which is why you flunked Greek Mythology the first semester I knew you.”
“I flunked Greek Mythology because Geminians always dissipate their energies. I’m a very changeable person, you know that. I start out to do something and then I lose track of it and start something else. That’s very common if you’re born under Gemini.”
“Sure,” he said.
“But that doesn’t mean I’m not ambitious.”
“No, I know that.”
“Or sensitive.”
“You’re very sensitive,” he said.
“Yes, and I say what I think, which is another characteristic of Geminians, and which happens to be burning you up right now. Huh? Isn’t it?”
“No. You can always say what you think. Nobody’s telling you not to say what you think.”
“Well, then, it seems to me that an intelligent woman who’s a college graduate should be allowed to go out and take a job if her husband can’t find one to support them.”