My Father's Tears and Other Stories

by John Updike

  She seemed to hear, far in the front, some shouting over the roar of the engines, and the plane dropped so that her stomach lurched. Yet the faces around her showed no alarm, and the heads she could see above the seatbacks were still. The plane stopped falling, and a voice came on the sound system that said, as best as she could understand, to remain seated. The pilot’s voice sounded changed—tense and foreign. Where did the drawl go? He said, as best as Carolyn could hear, “Ladies and gentlemen: Here the captain. Please sit down, keep remaining sitting. We have bomb on board. So—sit.”

  Then a young man was standing in front of the first-class curtain. He was slender, and touchingly graceful and hesitant in the way he used his hands; he appeared to have no weapon, yet had gained everyone’s attention, and the clumsy change in the way the plane was being handled connected somehow to him. He had an aura of nervous excitement; his eyes showed too much white. His eyes were all that showed; a large red bandana—a thick checked cloth, almost a scarf—concealed the lower half of his face and muffled his voice. Then another young man, plumper, came out from behind the curtains wearing another bandana and a comic apparatus around his chest; he held high one hand with a wire leading to it. He shook this hand and cried the word “Bomb! Bomb!” and then some other words in his own musical language, not trusting any other. People screamed. “Back! Back!” the thinner boy shouted, gesturing for everybody to move to the back of the plane.

  Carolyn realized that these boys knew hardly any English, so the men in front trying to argue and question them were wasting their breath. Some of the men were standing; they had been made to leave first class. Then all of them began obediently to move back down the aisle, hunched over, Carolyn thought, like animals being whipped. The strawberry blonde seated two rows in front of her—the top of her head like spun sugar, tipped toward that of the boy next to her, her husband possibly, though couples weren’t necessarily married now, her own grandchildren demonstrated that—reached out in passing and touched Carolyn on the shoulder. “You don’t have to move,” she said softly. She was already far enough back, she meant.

  “Thank you, my dear,” Carolyn responded, sounding old and foolish in her own ears.

  They—the passengers, with three female flight attendants, though there had been four—settled around her, in stricken, fearful silence at first. But when the boy with the bomb and the boy without one didn’t move back with them, staying instead in front of the first-class curtain, as if themselves paralyzed by fright, the noise of conversation among the passengers rose, like that at a cocktail party as the alcohol took hold, or in a rainy-day classroom when discipline washes away. Here and there people were talking into their cell phones, including the rugby player across the aisle, who had disbanded his little office on the lunch trays. His hand as it held the little gadget to his ear looked massive, with its red knuckles and broad wedding ring. His shirt had French cuffs with square gold links; French cuffs meant something, her son-in-law had tried to explain to her, in terms of corporate hierarchy. You could only wear them after a certain position in the firm had been attained.

  The engines spasmodically wheezed, and a sudden tilt brought Carolyn’s heart up into her throat; the plane was turning. The great wing next to her window leaned far over above the gray-green earth. The land below looked like Ohio now, flatter than the Alleghenies, and there was a smoky city that could be Akron or Youngstown. A wide piece of water, Lake Erie it must be, shone in the distance, betraying Earth’s curvature. The sun had shifted to her side of the plane, coming in at an angle that bothered her eyes. A cataract operation two years ago had restored childhood’s bright colors and sharp edges but left Carolyn’s corneas sensitive to sunlight. The plane must be heading southeast, back to Pennsylvania. She tried to think it through, to picture the plane’s exact direction, yet was unable to think. Her own fatigue dawned on her. The flight had been scheduled to leave at eight, and that had meant setting the alarm in Princeton at five. The older she became the earlier she awoke but still it was strange to go out into the dark and start the car.

  Her skin had broken out into sweat. Her body was terrified before her mind had caught up. What was foremost in her mind was the simple wish, fervent enough to be a prayer, that the plane be taken, like an easily damaged toy, out of those invisible hands that were giving it such a jerky, panicky, incompetent ride.

  Carolyn wondered why the boys up front, hijackers evidently, were letting so many passengers talk on their telephones; perhaps they thought it was a way to keep them calm. The one without the bomb came down the aisle a little way, then retreated; in warning he held up something metallic, a small knife of some sort, the kind with a cruel curved point that slides open to cut boxes, but what showed of his face, the eyes, seemed either frightened or furious, pools of ardent dark gelatin hard to decipher without the rest of the face. His mind seemed elsewhere, somewhere beyond, all that eye-white showing. He wore black jeans and a long-sleeved red-checked shirt that could have been that of a young computer whiz on his way to Silicon Valley. She had two grandsons in dot-coms; they dressed like farmhands, like hippies decades ago, when young people decided that they loved the earth when what they loved most was annoying their parents. But this boy had no pencils or pens in his shirt pocket, the way her grandsons did. He had that baby knife and eyebrows that nearly met in the middle, above his distracted, glittering gaze. Why wouldn’t he look anybody in the face? He was shy. He must be a very nice boy, at home, among people he could speak to intelligibly, in his own language, without cloth across his mouth.

  How humiliating, this sweating she was doing into her underwear. She would smell when she got off the plane, under the wool dress she had put on thinking it was always cool in Tiburon, where her daughter lived, however hot it was in Princeton. The redwoods, the Bay breezes: she realized she might not reach them today. They would land at some obscure airport and a long standoff of negotiations would begin. When they began to release hostages, however, an old lady would be among the first.

  The captain came on the loudspeaker again: “There is bomb on board and we go back to the airport, and to have our demands—” She lost the next words in his guttural accent. “Remain quiet, please,” the pilot concluded. Her watch said 9:40. Despite the captain’s request, eddies of communication moved through the crowded back of the plane: hand signals, eye motions, conversations increasingly blatant and emphatic as the nervous young hijacker’s obliviousness dawned on everyone. The stewardesses began to talk as if still in charge. People in first class had glimpsed something in the cabin; word of whatever it was spread back, skipping around Carolyn inaudibly yet chilling her damp skin. Others were learning things through their cell phones that they urgently had to share. The young businessmen in their white shirts held conferences, talking to each other across the heads and laps of women and the elderly. Growing impatient, some of them stood, making a huddle, right near her, around the seat of that nice rugby player. Not a huddle, a scrum—that was the word they had used in England.

  She tried to eavesdrop, and heard nothing but passionate muttering, rising to the near-shout of men energized by a decision. The distinct word “Yes” was repeated in several men’s voices. They had voted. The plumper of the two hijackers, having lowered his bandana to his throat so a pathetic small mustache showed, moved down the aisle, gesturing for people to be silent and sit down, while the apparatus he had strapped himself into looked more and more absurd and rickety. The plane was still rocking in those unseen hands, jerking and tilting, but the rugby player stood up with the others—he was taller than she had realized, in scale with that huge wrist jutting from his French cuff—and they faced forward. She accidentally caught his eye; he smiled and gave her a thumbs-up. She heard a voice, another young man’s, say, “You guys ready? Let’s do it.”

  Some seats behind her, a woman began to sob. Carolyn guessed it was the young woman who had touched her arm some minutes ago, but her instinct was to tell her to shut up, the plane was bouncing
so, she just wanted to adhere to her seat and close her eyes and beg for the motion, the demented speed, to stop. The roaring engines made the hubbub within the plane hard to sort out. The plump young man with the bomb disappeared behind the broad shoulders and white shirts of the stampeding American men. The other one, with his little hooked knife, also sank under the scrum, his silly towel of a veil torn away to reveal a red-lipped mouth open in protest. First fists and then feet in shoes silenced his ugly yells. Crush him, Carolyn thought. Kill him.

  The white shirts pushed through the blue first-class curtain. The engines did not drown out the thumping, crashing sounds from behind the curtain, the unexpected clatter of the serving cart, and a male voice shouting “Roll it!” while a fearful gabble from the passengers still in their seats arose around her.

  The airplane lurched more violently than ever before, rocking and dipping as if to shake something loose, and Carolyn felt, as sharply as if the wires and levers controlling the great mechanism were her own sinews and bones, that control had been lost, something crucial had been severed. From the wing came a high grinding noise; through her porthole she saw the flaps strain erect, exposing their valves. The vast tapering wing, with its stencilled aluminum segments and its little aerial at the very tip, seemed to stand on end; the entire stiff intricate entity bearing her and all these others was heeling beyond any angle of possible recovery. The terrible largeness of everything, the plane and the planet and the transparent miles between them, amazed her much as the shocking unclouded colors of the world had amazed her after her cataract operation. Her body was hanging sideways in the seat belt, so heavily her ribs ached. Through the scratched plastic window the earth in its rural detail—a few houses and outbuildings, a green blob of woods, a fenced field, a lonely road—swung across her vision while her ears popped, and she realized that, nightmarish though it was, this was real, the reality beneath everything, this surge into the maw of gravity. Her brain was flung into wordlessness; she was upside down, and the tortured engine near her ears was making everything shake. She was meeting the truth that her parents and husband and all the protectors of her long protected life had implied: the path of safety is narrow, it is possible to fall from it. Mercy, Carolyn managed to cry distinctly inside her pounding head. Dear, Lord, have mercy.

  Dan stood outside his daughter’s apartment, on the sooty tiled terrace from which he had seen the first tower collapse. In the six months since then, news events had tended to corroborate his revelation. A demented woman in Texas was being tried for systematically drowning her five children. Catholic priests were revealed to have molested their immature charges in numbers larger than ever imagined or confessed. Almost every week, somewhere in the United States, angry or despairing or berserk fathers murdered their wives or ex-wives and their children and then, in inadequate atonement, killed themselves. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, war had been proclaimed and pursued, with its usual toll of inane deaths—colliding helicopters, stray bombs, false intelligence, fatal muddle unmitigated by any Biblical dignity of vengeance or self-sacrifice. The masterminds of evil remained at large; the surrendered enemies appeared exhausted and confused—pathetic small fry. They complained about the climate of Cuba and their captors’ failure to provide them with sympathetic mullahs. They claimed, and others stridently claimed for them, their international legal rights. Religious slaughters occurred in India and Israel, fires and floods and plagues elsewhere. The world tumbled on, spewing out death and sparks of pain like an engine off the tracks.

  His younger granddaughter, his fellow witness to the most publicized of recent disasters, solemnly informed Dan that all the dogs of New York City had bleeding paws, from looking through wreckage for dead people.

  Emily, the tough-minded survivor of divorce, had not prevented the child from gathering what she could from the newspapers and television: “It’s turned her into a real news hawk,” she dryly explained. “Hilary, on the other hand,” she went on, “has refused from Day One to have anything to do with it. It wasn’t ladylike, she decided, and disdained it all. She says such things aren’t appropriate for children. She can actually pronounce ‘appropriate.’ But for Vicky, it would have been unhealthy, really, Daddy, to try to shelter her from what everybody knew, what all her schoolmates would be talking about. After all, compared to children in Bosnia and Afghanistan she’s still pretty well off.”

  “Not all the dogs, Victoria,” Dan reassured his granddaughter, “just a few trained for a certain special job, and wearing little leather booties that nice people made for them. Most people are very nice,” he promised her.

  The child stared up at him pugnaciously, a bit doubtful but wanting to agree. In six months, she had grown; her eyes, a translucent pale blue beneath level bangs, entertained more subtle expressions. At moments, especially when she was thinking to herself, he could see, in the childishly fine perfection of her face, the seeds of feminine mystery and of her mature beauty.

  Lucille, within earshot, said, so the child would overhear, “Vicky, she so interested in all the developments. She know how that terrible mess almost cleaned up now, and the two blue floodlights there as a monument, we see them every night.”

  Victoria explained to her grandfather, “They mean all the people in there have gone up to Heaven.”

  By daylight, from the terrace, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were simply not there. Their stark form, like that of two cubes projected skyward by some computer command, had registered but delicately above the old-fashioned brick thicket of lower Manhattan. Rectangular clouds of glass and aluminum, they had been wiped from the city’s silhouette. They were not there, but Dan was here, and God with him; his conversion to atheism had not lasted. His church pledge needed to be delivered in its weekly envelopes; a minor committee (Property Maintenance and Improvement) of which he was a member continued to meet. The Episcopal church, high in Cincinnati but not evangelical, presented a stream of Cranmer’s words in which the mind could lose itself. Dan would have missed the mild-mannered fellowship—the handshakes under the vaulted ceiling, the awkward passing of the peace. Why punish with his non-attendance, in protest of something God and not they had done, a flock of potential probate clients for whom periodically chorusing the Nicene Creed was part, and not the very least part, of getting along, of doing their best, of being decent citizens? He would miss the Sunday-morning congregation, the smell of waxed pews and musty kneeling cushions, the radiators that knocked on winter Sunday mornings after a week of cool disuse, the taste of the tasteless wafer in his mouth.

  While he stood there ten stories above the Brooklyn alley (where the two attendants, in the mild March air, again sat joshing at the entrance to their parking garage), the towers’ distant absence seemed a light throwing a shadow behind him, a weak shadow, but inextricable from his presence—the price, it could be said, of his being alive. He was alive, and a shadowy God with him, behind him. Human consciousness had curious properties. However big things were, it could encompass them, as if it were even bigger. And it kept insisting on making a narrative of Dan’s life, however nonsensically truncated the lives of others—crushed in an instant, or snapped off on the birthing-bed—had been.

  Emily and Victoria, his progeny, his tickets to genetic perpetuation, ventured out gingerly onto the terrace, to be with him in the open air. “Amazing,” his daughter said, seeking to read his thoughts, “how the not-thereness remains so haunting. Sometimes you still see the towers in old ads, where the admen haven’t noticed or taken the trouble to airbrush them out of the background. It feels illicit. A lot of these yuppie movies and TV serials have a shot of them, from SoHo or the Staten Island Ferry or wherever, and I hear they’ve been collected on tape, like the kisses in Cinema Paradiso. They’ve become a kind of cult.”

  Victoria eagerly volunteered, “Some day, when all the bad men are killed, they’ll put them back, just exactly the way they were.” She gestured appropriately wide and high, standing on tiptoe.

  Dan
tended to discourage other people’s illusions, though he was cherishing of his own. “I don’t think that would be very sensible,” he stated to the child. “Or very American.”

  “Why not American?” Emily asked, with an oppositional, possibly aggrieved edge. If her parents hadn’t divorced, her marriage might have held together; a bad precedent had been set.

  “We move on, don’t we?” Dan tactfully answered. “As a nation. We try to learn from our mistakes. Those towers were taller than they needed to be. The Arabs weren’t wrong to feel them as a boast.”

  Hilary, barefoot, peeked out from one of the penthouse doors, but did not venture out onto the sooty tiles. She admonished them, “Children shouldn’t see what you’re all looking at. It’s scary.”

  “Don’t be scared,” her younger sister told her, and then half to Dan: “My teacher at school says the lights are like the rainbow. They mean it won’t happen again.”

  Spanish Prelude

  to a Second Marriage

  “YOU’LL GET LOST,” she told him. “The same way you do in Brookline or the South End. It’s your style, you think it’s cute. But look outside! It’s pouring cats and dogs.”