Terrorist

by John Updike

  Corny as they are, and as many times as he has participated in them, commencements at Central High bring Jack Levy near to tears. They all begin with “Pomp and Circumstance” and the stately procession of seniors in their swinging black robes and perilously perched mortarboard hats, and end in the brisker, grinning, parent-greeting, high-fiving parade back up the aisle to the tunes of “Colonel Bogey’s March” and “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In.” Even the most rebellious and recalcitrant student, even those with FREE AT LAST spelled out in white tape on their mortarboards or a sassy sprig of paper flowers interwoven with the tassel cord, appears subdued by the terminal nature of the ceremony and the timeworn pieties of the speeches. Contribute to America, they are told. Take your places in the peaceful armies of democratic enterprise. Even as you strive to succeed, be kind to your fellow-man. Think, in spite of all the scandals of corporate malfeasance and political corruption with which the media daily dishearten and sicken us, of the common good. Real life now commences, they are informed; the Eden of public education has swung shut its garden gate. A garden, Levy reflects, of rote teaching dully ignored, of the vicious and ignorant dominating the timid and dutiful, but a garden nevertheless, a weedy patch of hopes, a rough and ill-tilled seedbed of what this nation wants itself to be. Ignore the armed cops stationed here and there in the back of the auditorium, and the metal detectors at every entrance that isn’t locked and chained. Look instead at the graduating seniors, at the smiling earnestness with which they perform, to loyal applause denied to none of them, not the dullest and most delinquent, their momentary march across the stage, under the Roxyesque proscenium, between banks of flowers and potted palms, to receive their diplomas from the hand of slick Nat Jefferson, head of the New Prospect school system, while their names are chanted into the mike by the acting high-school principal, tiny Irene Tsoutsouras. The diversity of names is echoed by that of the footgear displayed beneath the bouncing hems of their robes as they saunter forth in tattered Nikes, or strut by on stiletto heels, or shuffle past in loose sandals.

  Jack Levy begins to choke up. The docility of human beings, their basic willingness to please. Europe’s Jews dressing up in their best clothes to be marched off to the death camps. The male and female students, men and women suddenly, shaking Nat Jefferson’s practiced hand, something they have never done before and will never do again. The broad-shouldered black administrator, a master surfer of local political waves as voting power has shifted from white to black and now to Hispanics, refreshes his smile for each and every graduating face, showing a special graciousness, in Jack Levy’s eyes, to the white students, a distinct minority here. Thank you for sticking with us, his warmly prolonged handshake says. We’re going to make America / New Prospect / Central High work. In the middle of the seemingly endless list, Irene reads out, “Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy.” The boy moves elegantly, tall but not ungainly, enacting his part but not overacting—too dignified to play, like some of the others, to partisans in the audience with waves and giggles. He has few partisans—sparse handclaps spatter. Situated in a front row between two other faculty members, Levy with a furtive knuckle attacks the incipient tears tickling both sides of his nose.

  The benediction is offered by a Catholic priest and, as a sop to the Muslim community, an imam. A rabbi and a Presbyterian had delivered the invocations, both of them, for Jack Levy’s money, at excessive length. The imam, in a caftan and tight turban of an electrically pure whiteness, stands at the lectern and twangs out a twist of Arabic as if sticking a dagger into the silent audience. Then, perhaps translating, he offers up in English, “Knower of the Hidden and the Manifest! the Great! the Most High! God is the Creator of all things! He is the One! the Conquering! He sendeth down the rain from Heaven: then flow the torrents in their due measure, and the flood beareth along a swelling foam. And from the metals which are molten in the fire for the sake of ornaments or utensils, a like scum ariseth. As to the foam, it is quickly gone: and as to what is useful to man, it remaineth on the Earth. To those who graduate today, we say, rise above the foam, the scum, but dwell instead usefully upon the Earth. To those whom the Straight Path leads into danger, we repeat the words of the Prophet: ‘Say not of those who are slain on God’s path they are Dead; nay, they are Living!’” Levy studies the imam—a slight, impeccable man embodying a belief system that not many years ago managed the deaths of, among others, hundreds of commuters from northern New Jersey. From the higher vantages in New Prospect, crowds gathered to see smoke pour from the two World Trade Towers and recede over Brooklyn, that clear day’s only cloud. When Levy thinks of embattled Israel and of Europe’s pathetically few remaining synagogues needing to be guarded by police day and night, his initial good will toward the imam dissolves: the man in his white garb sticks like a bone in the throat of the occasion. Levy doesn’t mind Father Corcoran’s nasally nailing the triple Lord’s blessing on the lid of the long ceremony; Jews and Irish have been sharing America’s cities for generations, and it was Jack’s father’s and grandfather’s generation, not his, that had to endure the taunt of “Christ-killer.”

  “Well, mon, we made it,” the teacher on his right says. The speaker is Adam Bronson, an emigrant from Barbados who taught business math to tenth-and eleventh-graders. “Always I thank God when the school year gets by with no killings.”

  “You watch too much news,” Jack tells him. “We’re no Columbine; that was Colorado—the Wild West. Central is safer now than when I was a kid here. The black gangs had zip guns, and there were no security gates or security guards. The hall monitors were supposed to be the security. They were lucky if they weren’t pushed down the stairs.”

  “I could not at first believe when I came here,” Adam tells him, in his hard-to-understand accent, music from a gentle island, a steel-drum pealing from a distance, “the policemen in the halls and cafeteria. In Barbados we shared books falling apart and used both sides of tablet paper, every scrap, education was so precious to us. We never dreamed of mischief. Here in this grand building you need guards as if in a jail, and the students do everything destructive. I do not understand this American hatred of decent order.”

  “Think of it as love of freedom. Freedom is knowledge.”

  “My students do not believe they will ever need business math in their heads. They imagine the computer will do everything for them. They think the human mind is on eternal holiday, and from now on has nothing else to do but absorb entertainment.”

  The faculty falls two by two into the procession, and Adam, paired with a teacher from across the aisle, steps ahead of Levy but then turns and continues the conversation. “Jack, tell me. There is something I am embarrassed to ask anyone. Who is this J-Lo? My students keep referencing him.”

  “Her. Singer. Actress,” Jack calls ahead. “Hispanic. Very well turned out. Great ass, apparently. I can’t tell any more. There comes a time in life,” he explains, lest the Barbadian think him curt, “when celebrities don’t do for you what they used to.”

  The teacher he has been paired with in the recessional is, he now notices, a woman, Miss Mackenzie, twelfth-grade English, first name Caroline. Lean, square-jawed, a fitness freak, she wears her graying hair in an old-fashioned page-boy, the bangs cut level with her eyebrows. “Carrie,” Jack says warmly. “What’s this I hear about your assigning Sexus to your seniors?” She lives with another woman up in Paramus, and Levy feels he can josh her as he would another man.

  “Don’t be dirty, Jack,” she says, not giving him a smile. “It was one of his memoirs, the one with Big Sur in the title. I had it on the optional list, nobody had to read it.”

  “Yeah, but what did those that did make of it?”

  “Oh,” her flat, incipiently hostile voice tells him, through the din and shuffle and recessional music, “they take it in stride. They’ve already seen it all, at home.”

  The entire human agglomeration of this gala event—graduates, teachers, parents, grandparents and uncles and aunts, nieces and nep
hews—pushes out of the auditorium into the front hall, where the athletic trophies stand watch in long cases like a dead Pharaoh’s treasure, sealed in, the magical past, and out the broad front doors, thrown open to the sunshine of early June and the dusty vista of the lake of rubble, and down the great front steps, gabbing and cat-calling in their triumph. Once this grand granite staircase gave onto an ample green lap of lawn and symmetrical shrubs; but the demands of the automobile nibbled and then slashed at this margin, widening Tilden Avenue (defiantly thus renamed by the solidly Democratic board of aldermen in the wake of the 1877 theft of the Presidency by a Republican-dominated electoral commission colluding with a South anxious to have all Northern military protection of its Negro population lifted) so that now the lowest course of granite impinges directly upon a sidewalk, a sidewalk separated from the asphalt street by a narrow strip of sod that is green only for a few weeks, before summer’s baking heat and a host of heedless footsteps beat its burst of vernal growth into a flat mat of dead grass. Beyond the curb the asphalt avenue, as rumpled as a hastily made bed with its patched and repatched potholes and the tarry swales created by the constant weight of rushing cars and trucks, has been closed to traffic by orange-striped barricades for this hour, to give the graduation crowd a place to stand and bask in self-congratulation and to wait for the recent graduates to turn in their gowns within the building and make their final partings.

  Milling in this crowd, in no hurry to go home and face the start of a summer in the company of his wife, and morosely feeling after his merry exchange with Carrie Mackenzie that he is missing out in an anything-goes society, Jack Levy bumps into Teresa Mulloy. Freckled and flushed in the heat, she wears an already wilted orchid pinned to the rumpled jacket of a pale linen suit. He greets her gravely: “Congratulations, Ms. Mulloy.”

  “Hello!” she responds, making an exclamatory occasion of it, and lightly touching his forearm, as if to re-establish the burgeoning intimacy of their last encounter. She tells him, breathlessly grabbing the first words that come to her, “You must have a wonderful summer ahead of you!”

  The thought takes him aback. “Oh—same old same old,” he tells her. “We don’t do much. Beth has only a few weeks off from the library. I try to pick up some pin money tutoring. We have a son in New Mexico and we visit him for a week in usually August; it’s hot but not muggy the way it is here. Beth has a sister in Washington, but that’s even muggier, so she used to come up to us and we’d go for a week or so to the mountains somewhere, one side or other of the Delaware Water Gap. But now she’s so damn busy, always some emergency or other, that this summer…” Shut up, Levy. Don’t talk it to death. Maybe it was good that the “we” slipped out, reminding this woman he has a wife. He thinks of them, actually, as being on the same continuum, with their fair skins and tendency to plumpness, but Beth twenty years farther along. “What about you? You and Ahmad.”

  Her outfit is staid enough—eggshell-colored linen suit over a white chemise—yet colorful touches suggest a free spirit, an artist as well as a mother. Clunky turquoise rings weigh down those short-nailed, firm-fleshed hands of hers, and her arms, showing haloes of fuzz candescent in the sunlight, hold a clicking horde of gold and coral bracelets. Most surprisingly, a large silk scarf, patterned in angular abstract shapes and staring circles, is knotted beneath her chin and covers the hair of her head but for the blurred edge, with a few stray reddish filaments, where it meets the Irish-white bulge of her brow. Watching Levy’s eyes with her own, and seeing them fix on her jauntily demure head scarf, she laughs and explains, “He wanted me to wear it. He said if there was one thing he wanted for his graduation it was his mother not looking like a whore.”

  “My goodness. But, anyway, it’s oddly becoming. And the orchid was his idea too?”

  “Not really. The other boys do it for their mothers, and he would have been embarrassed not to. He has this conformist streak.”

  Her face with its protuberant green eyes, pale as beach glass, seems in the scarf to look at him around a corner; its covering poses a provocation, implying a dazzling ultimate nakedness. Her head scarf speaks of submission, which stirs him. He moves closer in the press of the crowd, as if taking her under his protection. She tells him, “I spotted some other scarved mothers, Black Muslims quite dramatic in all their white, and some of the graduating daughters of the Turks—as a girl we called them ‘Turks,’ the dark men at the mills, but of course they all weren’t. I was thinking, I bet I have the reddest hair underneath. The nuns would be thrilled. They said I flaunted my charms. At the time I wondered what charms were, and how you could flaunt them. They were just there, it seemed to me. My so-called charms.”

  She shares his tendency to babble, here in this excited crowd. He says quietly, meaning it, “You were a good mom, to humor Ahmad.”

  Her face loses its gleam of mischief. “He’s asked so little, really, over the years, and now he’s leaving. He’s always seemed so alone. He did this Allah thing all by himself, with no help from me. Less than help, really—I resented that he cared so much about a father who didn’t do squat for him. For us. But I guess a boy needs a father, and if he doesn’t have one he’ll invent one. How’s that for cut-rate Freud?”

  Does she know she is doing this to him, making him want her? Beth would never think to bring in Freud. Freud, who encouraged a century to keep on screwing. Levy says, “Ahmad looked handsome up there, in his robe. I’m sorry I began too late to get to know your son. I feel a fondness for him, though I suspect it’s not reciprocated.”

  “You’re wrong, Jack—he appreciates your wanting to raise his sights. Maybe he’ll do it himself later. For now he’s barreling ahead on the trucker’s license. He passed the written exam and in two weeks takes the physical exam. For Passaic County it’s over in Wayne. They need to make sure you’re not color-blind and have enough peripheral vision. Ahmad has beautiful eyes, I’ve always thought. Inky. His father had lighter eyes, oddly, sort of gingerbread color. I say ‘oddly’ because you’d think Omar’s would be the darker, with my pale ones in there.”

  “I see a shadow of your green in Ahmad’s.”

  She ignores this flirtation and goes on, “But they’re not twenty-twenty. Ahmad’s. More like twenty-thirty—astigmatism—but he was always too vain to wear glasses. You’d think with all this piety he wouldn’t be vain, but he is. Maybe it’s not vanity, it’s more that he thinks Allah would give you glasses if He wanted you to wear them. He had trouble seeing the ball in baseball; that was one of the reasons he took up track as his spring sport.”

  This tumble of sudden specifics about a boy not too different in Jack Levy’s mind from the hundreds he deals with every year, intensifies his suspicion that this woman wants to see him again. He says to her, “I guess he won’t be needing those college catalogues I dropped off a month ago.”

  “I hope he can still find them: his room is a mess except for the corner where he prays. He should have returned them to you, Jack.”

  “No problema, señora.” He notices around them, in the jostling, jubilant, but already dwindling crowd, other people glancing in their direction and giving them a little room, sensing that something is cooking here. He feels himself incriminated by Terry’s overanimation as he tenaciously tries to match his smile to that on her round, bright, freckle-starred face.

  The shadow of a big dark-hearted cloud sweeps the sunshine away and casts dullness upon the scene—the lake of rubble, the street from which traffic is barred, the bravely, brightly clad mob of parents and relatives, the civic façade of Central High School, its portals pillared and its windows barred, the height of it like the backdrop of an opera set dwarfing the singers of a duet.

  “That was rude of Ahmad,” his mother says, “not to return them to you at the school. Now it’s too late.”

  “Like I said, no problem. Why don’t I come by sometime and pick ’em up?” he asks. “I’ll give a call ahead to make sure you’re there.”

  As a kid, living
over on Totowa Road when it was still pretty rural but for the new ranch houses, walking to school in the winter, Jack would sometimes venture out, to test his nerve, onto the ice of a marshy pond, long since built over, that he passed on the way. The water was not deep enough to drown in—cattails and grassy hummocks betrayed its shallow depth—but if he broke through, his good leather school shoes would be soaked and muddied and maybe even ruined, and in a family whose finances were as pinched as his family’s, that would have been a disaster. At the silver edge of the cloud, sunshine breaks through, scintillating on Terry’s silk head scarf, and he listens with trepidation for the ice to crack.

  III

  THE PHONE RINGS. Beth Levy struggles to extricate herself from her favorite chair, a rocker recliner called a La-Z-Boy, covered in a dull-brown vinyl imitating creased cowhide and equipped with a lever-operated padded leg rest, in which she has been sitting eating a plate of oatmeal-raisin cookies—low in calories compared with chocolate-chip or sandwich creams—while watching All My Children on WABC before switching channels to As the World Turns, on at two. She has often thought of putting a longer cord into the jack so she can carry the phone over to her chair and rest it on the floor for this part of her day, the days when she doesn’t go into the Clifton Library, but she never remembers to ask Jack to buy the longer cord at the telephone store, which is way off in the mall on Route 23. When she was a girl you just called AT&T and they sent a man in a gray (or was it green?) uniform and black shoes who fixed everything for a few dollars. It was a monopoly, and she knows this was a bad thing—calling long-distance, you were charged for every minute, and now she can talk to Markie or Herm for hours and it costs next to nothing—but also now there is no fixing phones. You throw them out, just like old computers and yesterday’s paper.