"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; tbat 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 pageboy, 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 nephews-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 die lake of rubble, and down the great front steps, gabbing and catcalling 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 tfren slashed at this margin, widening Tilden Avenue (defiandy thus renamed by die solidly Democratic board of aldermen in the wake of the 1877 theft of die 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 die 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 otlier 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, witb 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,' die dark men at the mills, but of course they all weren't. I was thinking, / 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."