The Human Stain

by Philip Roth

  So delighted was he by what he heard that Coleman broke loose from Ernestine’s grasp and burst away up the street, in exuberant delight running up Central to Evergreen and then back, crying aloud, “My two weakest subjects—which are those?” It was as though in attributing to Coleman an academic weakness, Dr. Fensterman had told the most hilarious joke. “What’d they say, Ern? What did Dad say?” “I couldn’t hear. He said it too low.” “What did Mom say?” “I don’t know. I couldn’t hear Mom either. But what they were saying after the doctor left, I heard that.” “Tell me! What?” “Daddy said, ‘I wanted to kill that man.’” “He did?” “Really. Yes.” “And Mom?” “‘I just bit my tongue.’ That’s what Mom said—‘I just bit my tongue.’” “But you didn’t hear what they said to him?” “No.” “Well, I’ll tell you one thing—I’m not going to do it.” “Of course not,” Ernestine said. “But suppose Dad told him I would?” “Are you crazy, Coleman?” “Ernie, three thousand dollars is more than Dad makes in a whole year. Ernie, three thousand dollars!” And the thought of Dr. Fensterman handing over to his father a big paper bag stuffed with all that money set him running again, goofily taking the imaginary low hurdles (for successive years now, he had been Essex County high school champ in low hurdles and run second in the hundred-yard dash) up to Evergreen and back. Another triumph—that’s what he was thinking. Yet another record-breaking triumph for the great, the incomparable, the one and only Silky Silk! He was class valedictorian, all right, as well as a track star, but as he was also only seventeen, Dr. Fensterman’s proposal meant no more to him than that he was of the greatest importance to just about everyone. The larger picture he didn’t get yet.

  In East Orange, where mostly everyone was white, either poor Italian—and living up at the Orange edge of town or down by Newark’s First Ward—or Episcopalian and rich—and living in the big houses out by Upsala or around South Harrison—there were fewer Jews even than there were Negroes, and yet it was the Jews and their kids who these days loomed larger than anyone in Coleman’s extracurricular life. First there was Doc Chizner, who had as good as adopted him the year before, when Coleman joined his evening boxing class, and now there was Dr. Fensterman offering three thousand dollars for Coleman to place second academically so as to enable Bert to come in first. Doc Chizner was a dentist who loved boxing. Went to the fights whenever he had a chance—in Jersey at Laurel Garden and at the Meadowbrook Bowl, to New York to the Garden and out to St. Nick’s. People would say, “You think you know fights until you sit next to Doc. Sit next to Doc Chizner, and you realize you’re not watching the same fight.” Doc officiated at amateur fights all over Essex County, including the Golden Gloves in Newark, and to his local classes in boxing Jewish parents from all over the Oranges, from Maplewood, from Irvington—from as far away as the Weequahic section over at Newark’s southwest corner—sent their sons to learn how to defend themselves. Coleman had wound up in Doc Chizner’s class not because he didn’t know how but because his own father had found out that since his second year of high school, after track practice, all on his own—and as often sometimes as three times a week—Coleman had been sneaking down to the Newark Boys Club, below High Street in the Newark slums to Morton Street, and secretly training to be a fighter. Fourteen years old when he began, a hundred and eleven pounds, and he would work out there for two hours, loosen up, spar three rounds, hit the heavy bag, hit the speed bag, skip rope, do his exercises, and then head home to do his homework. A couple of times he even got to spar with Cooper Fulham, who the year before had won the National Championships up in Boston. Coleman’s mother was working a shift and a half, even two shifts running at the hospital, his father was waiting tables on the train and hardly at home other than to sleep, his older brother, Walt, was away first at college, then in the army, and so Coleman came and went as he liked, swearing Ernestine to secrecy and making sure not to let his grades slip, in study hall, at night in bed, on the buses back and forth to Newark—two buses each way—plugging away even harder than usual at his schoolwork to be sure nobody found out about Morton Street.

  If you wanted to box amateur, the Newark Boys Club was where you went, and if you were good and you were between thirteen and eighteen, you got matched up against guys from the Boys Club in Paterson, in Jersey City, in Butler, from the Ironbound PAL, and so on. There were loads of kids down at the Boys Club, some from Rahway, from Linden, from Elizabeth, a couple from as far away as Morristown, there was a deaf-mute they called Dummy who came from Belleville, but mostly they were from Newark and all of them were colored, though the two guys who ran the club were white. One was a cop in West Side Park, Mac Machrone, and he had a pistol, and he told Coleman that if he ever found out Coleman wasn’t doing his roadwork, he’d shoot him. Mac believed in speed, and that’s why he believed in Coleman. Speed and pacing and counterpunching. Once he’d taught Coleman how to stand and how to move and how to throw the punches, once Mac saw how quickly the boy learned and how smart he was and how quick his reflexes were, he began to teach him the finer things. How to move his head. How to slip punches. How to block punches. How to counter. To teach him the jab, Mac repeated, “It’s like you flick a flea off your nose. Just flick it off him.” He taught Coleman how to win a fight by using only his jab. Throw the jab, knock the punch down, counter. A jab comes, you slip it, come over with the right counter. Or you slip it inside, you come over with a hook. Or you just duck down, hit him a right to the heart, a left hook to the stomach. Slight as he was, Coleman would sometimes quickly grab the jab with both his hands, pull the guy and then hook him to the stomach, come up, hook him to the head. “Knock the punch down. Counterpunch. You’re a counterpuncher, Silky. That’s what you are, that’s all you are.” Then they went to Paterson. His first amateur tournament fight. This kid would throw a jab and Coleman would lean back, but his feet would be planted and he could come back and counter the kid with a right, and he kept catching him like that for the whole fight. The kid kept doing it, so Coleman kept doing it and won all three rounds. At the Boys Club, that became Silky Silk’s style. When he threw punches, it was so nobody could say he was standing there doing nothing. Mostly he would wait for the other guy to throw, then he’d throw two, three back, and then he’d get out and wait again. Coleman could hit his opponent more by waiting for him to lead than by leading him. The result was that by the time Coleman was sixteen, in Essex and Hudson counties alone, at amateur shows at the armory, at the Knights of Pythias, at exhibitions for the veterans at the veterans hospital, he must have beaten three guys who were Golden Gloves champs. As he figured it, he could by then have won 112, 118, 126 . . . except there was no way he could fight in the Golden Gloves without its getting in the papers and his family finding out. And then they found out anyway. He didn’t know how. He didn’t have to. They found out because somebody told them. Simple as that.

  They were all sitting down to dinner on a Sunday, after church, when his father said, “How did you do, Coleman?”

  “How did I do at what?”

  “Last night. At the Knights of Pythias. How did you do?”

  “What’s the Knights of Pythias?” Coleman asked.

  “Do you think I was born yesterday, son? The Knights of Pythias is where they had the tournament last night. How many fights on the card?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “And how did you do?”

  “I won.”

  “How many fights have you won so far? In tournaments. In exhibitions. How many since you began?”

  “Eleven.”

  “And how many have you lost?”

  “So far, none.”

  “And how much did you get for the watch?”

  “What watch?”

  “The watch you won at the Lyons Veterans Hospital. The watch the vets gave you for winning the fight. The watch you hocked on Mulberry Street. Down in Newark, Coleman—the watch you hocked in Newark last week.”

  The man knew everything.

  “What do you
think I got?” Coleman dared to reply, though not looking up as he spoke—instead looking at the embroidered design on the good Sunday tablecloth.

  “You got two dollars, Coleman. When are you planning on turning pro?”

  “I don’t do it for money,” he said, still with his eyes averted. “I don’t care about money. I do it for enjoyment. It’s not a sport you take up if you don’t enjoy it.”

  “You know, if I were your father, Coleman, you know what I’d tell you now?”

  “You are my father,” Coleman said.

  “Oh, am I?” his father said.

  “Well, sure . . .”

  “Well—I’m not sure at all. I was thinking that maybe Mac Machrone, at the Newark Boys Club, was your father.”

  “Come on, Dad. Mac’s my trainer.”

  “I see. So who then is your father, if I may ask?”

  “You know. You are. You are, Dad.”

  “I am? Yes?”

  “No!” Coleman shouted. “No, you’re not!” And here, at the very start of Sunday dinner, he ran out of the house and for nearly an hour he did his roadwork, up Central Avenue and over the Orange line, and then through Orange all the way to the West Orange line, and then crossing over on Watchung Avenue to Rosedale Cemetery, and then turning south down Washington to Main, running and throwing punches, sprinting, then just running, then just sprinting, then shadowboxing all the way back to Brick Church Station, and finally sprinting the stretch, sprinting to the house, going back inside to where the family was eating their dessert and where he knew to sit back down at his place, far calmer than when he had bolted, and to wait for his father to resume where he had left off. The father who never lost his temper. The father who had another way of beating you down. With words. With speech. With what he called “the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens.” With the English language that no one could ever take away from you and that Mr. Silk richly sounded, always with great fullness and clarity and bravado, as though even in ordinary conversation he were reciting Marc Antony’s speech over the body of Caesar. Each of his three children had been given a middle name drawn from Mr. Silk’s best-memorized play, in his view English literature’s high point and the most educational study of treason ever written: the eldest Silk son was Walter Antony, the second son, Coleman Brutus; Ernestine Calpurnia, their younger sister, took her middle name from Caesar’s loyal wife.

  Mr. Silk’s life in business for himself had come to a bitter end with the closing of the banks. It had taken him quite a time to get over losing the optician’s store up in Orange, if he ever did. Poor Daddy, Mother would say, he always wanted to work for himself. He’d attended college in the South, in Georgia where he came from—Mother was from New Jersey—and took farming and animal husbandry. But then he quit and up north, in Trenton, he went to optician’s school. Then he was drafted into the army for World War I, then he met Mother, moved with her to East Orange, opened the store, bought the house, then there was the crash, and now he was a waiter on a dining car. But if he couldn’t in the dining car, at least at home he was able to speak with all his deliberateness and precision and directness and could wither you with words. He was very fussy about his children’s speaking properly. Growing up, they never said, “See the bow-wow.” They didn’t even say, “See the doggie.” They said, “See the Doberman. See the beagle. See the terrier.” They learned things had classifications. They learned the power of naming precisely. He was teaching them English all the time. Even the kids who came into the house, his children’s friends, had their English corrected by Mr. Silk.

  When he was an optician and wore a white medical smock over a ministerial dark suit and was working more or less regular hours, he would sit after dessert and read the newspaper at the dinner table. They all would read from it. Each one of the children, even the baby, even Ernestine, would have to take a turn at the Newark Evening News, and not with the funnies. His mother, Coleman’s grandmother, had been taught to read by her mistress and after Emancipation had gone to what was then called Georgia State Normal and Industrial School for Colored. His father, Coleman’s paternal grandfather, had been a Methodist minister. In the Silk family they had read all the old classics. In the Silk family the children were not taken to prizefights, they were taken to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to see the armor. They were taken to the Hayden Planetarium to learn about the solar system. Regularly they were taken to the Museum of Natural History. And then in 1937, on the Fourth of July, despite the cost, they were all taken by Mr. Silk to the Music Box Theatre on Broadway to see George M. Cohan in I’d Rather Be Right. Coleman still remembered what his father told his brother, Uncle Bobby, on the phone the next day. “When the curtain came down on George M. Cohan after all his curtain calls, do you know what the man did? He came out for an hour and sang all his songs. Every one of them. What better introduction could a child have to the theater?”

  “If I were your father,” Coleman’s father resumed, while the boy sat solemnly before his empty plate, “you know what I would tell you now?”

  “What?” said Coleman, speaking softly, and not because he was winded from all the roadwork but because he was chastened by having told his own father, who was no longer an optician but a dining car waiter and who would remain a dining car waiter till he died, that he was not his father.

  “I would say, ‘You won last night? Good. Now you can retire undefeated. You’re retired.’ That’s what I’d say, Coleman.”

  It was much easier when Coleman spoke to him later, after he had spent the afternoon doing his homework and after his mother had a chance to talk and reason with his father. They were all able to sit more or less peaceably together then in the living room and listen to Coleman describe the glories of boxing and how, given all the resources you had to call on to excel, they exceeded even winning at track.

  It was his mother who asked the questions now, and answering her was no problem. Her younger son was wrapped like a gift in every ameliorating dream Gladys Silk had ever had, and the handsomer he became and the smarter he became, the more difficult it was for her to distinguish the child from the dreams. As sensitive and gentle as she could be with the patients at the hospital, she could also be, with the other nurses, even with the doctors, with the white doctors, exacting and stern, imposing on them a code of conduct no less stringent than the one she imposed on herself. She could be that way with Ernestine as well. But never with Coleman. Coleman got what the patients got: her conscientious kindness and care. Coleman got just about anything he wanted. The father leading the way, the mother feeding the love. The old one-two.

  “I don’t see how you get mad at somebody you don’t know. You especially,” she said, “with your happy nature.”

  “You don’t get mad. You just concentrate. It’s a sport. You warm up before a fight. You shadowbox. You get yourself ready for whatever is going to come at you.”

  “If you’ve never seen the opponent before?” asked his father, with all the restraint on his sarcasm he could muster.

  “All I mean,” Coleman said, “is you don’t have to get mad.”

  “But,” his mother asked, “what if the other boy is mad?”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s brains that win, not getting mad. Let him get mad. Who cares? You have to think. It’s like a chess game. Like a cat and a mouse. You can lead a guy. Last night, I had this guy, he was about eighteen or nineteen and he was sort of slow. He hit me with a jab on the top of my head. So the next time he did it, I was ready for it, and boom. I came over with the right counter and he didn’t know where it came from. I knocked him down. I don’t knock guys down, but I knocked this guy down. And I did it because I got him into thinking that he could catch me again with this punch.”

  “Coleman,” his mother said, “I do not like the sound of what I’m hearing.”

  He stood up to demonstrate for her. “Look. It was a slow punch. You see? I saw his jab was slow and he wasn’t catching me. It was nothing that hurt me, Mom.
I just was thinking that if he does it again, I’ll slip it and bang over with the right. So when he threw it again, I saw it coming because it was so slow, and I was able to counter and catch him. I knocked him down, Mom, but not because I was angry. Because I box better.”

  “But these Newark boys you fight. They’re nothing like the friends you have,” and, with affection, she mentioned the names of the two other best-behaved, brightest Negro boys in his year at East Orange High, who were indeed the pals he had lunch with and hung around with at school. “I see these Newark boys on the street. These boys are so tough,” she said. “Track is so much more civilized than boxing, so much more like you, Coleman. Dear, you run so beautifully.”