by Philip Roth
And all the while he was driving home he was remembering the time he’d almost told Iris. It was after the twins were born. The family was now complete. They’d done it—he’d made it. With not a sign of his secret on any of his kids, it was as though he had been delivered from his secret. The exuberance that came of having pulled it off brought him to the very brink of giving the whole thing away. Yes, he would present his wife with the greatest gift he possessed: he would tell the mother of his four children who their father really was. He would tell Iris the truth. That was how excited and relieved he was, how solid the earth felt beneath his feet after she had their beautiful twins, and he took Jeff and Mikey to the hospital to see their new brother and sister, and the most frightening apprehension of them all had been eradicated from his life.
But he never did give Iris that gift. He was saved from doing it—or damned to leave it undone—because of the cataclysm that befell a dear friend of hers, her closest associate on the art association board, a pretty, refined amateur watercolorist named Claudia McChesney, whose husband, owner of the county’s biggest building firm, turned out to have quite a stunning secret of his own: a second family. For some eight years, Harvey McChesney had been keeping a woman years younger than Claudia, a bookkeeper at a chair factory over near the Taconic by whom he’d had two children, little kids aged four and six, living in a small town just across the Massachusetts line in New York State, whom he visited each week, whom he supported, whom he seemed to love, and whom nobody in the McChesneys’ Athena household knew anything about until an anonymous phone call—probably from one of Harvey’s building-trade rivals—revealed to Claudia and the three adolescent children just what McChesney was up to when he wasn’t out on the job. Claudia collapsed that night, came completely apart and tried to slash her wrists, and it was Iris who, beginning at 3 A.M., with the help of a psychiatrist friend, organized the rescue operation that got Claudia installed before dawn in Austin Riggs, the Stockbridge psychiatric hospital. And it was Iris who, all the while she was nursing two newborns and mothering two preschool boys, visited the hospital every day, talking to Claudia, steadying her, reassuring her, bringing her potted plants to tend and art books to look at, even combing and braiding Claudia’s hair, until, after five weeks—and as much a result of Iris’s devotion as of the psychiatric program—Claudia returned home to begin to take the steps necessary to rid herself of the man who had caused all her misery.
In just days, Iris had got Claudia the name of a divorce lawyer up in Pittsfield and, with all the Silk kids, including the infants, strapped down in the back of the station wagon, she drove her friend to the lawyer’s office to be absolutely certain that the separation arrangements were initiated and Claudia’s deliverance from McChesney was under way. On the ride home that day, there’d been a lot of bucking up to do, but bucking people up was Iris’s specialty, and she saw to it that Claudia’s determination to right her life was not washed away by her residual fears.
“What a wretched thing to do to another person,” Iris said. “Not the girlfriend. Bad enough, but that happens. And not the little children, not even that—not even the other woman’s little boy and girl, painful and brutal as that would be for any wife to discover. No, it’s the secret—that’s what did it, Coleman. That’s why Claudia doesn’t want to go on living. ‘Where’s the intimacy?’ That’s what gets her crying every time. ‘Where is the intimacy,’ she says, ‘when there is such a secret?’ That he could hide this from her, that he would have gone on hiding it from her—that’s what Claudia’s defenseless against, and that’s why she still wants to do herself in. She says to me, ‘It’s like discovering a corpse. Three corpses. Three human bodies hidden under our floor.’” “Yes,” Coleman said, “it’s like something out of the Greeks. Out of The Bacchae.” “Worse,” Iris said, “because it’s not out of The Bacchae. It’s out of Claudia’s life.”
When, after almost a year of outpatient therapy, Claudia had a rapprochement with her husband and he moved back into the Athena house and the McChesneys resumed life together as a family—when Harvey agreed to give up the other woman, if not his other children, to whom he swore to remain a responsible father—Claudia seemed no more eager than Iris to keep their friendship alive, and after Claudia resigned from the art association, the women no longer saw each other socially or at any of the organization meetings where Iris was generally kingpin.
Nor did Coleman go ahead—as his triumph dictated when the twins were born—to tell his wife his stunning secret. Saved, he thought, from the most childishly sentimental stunt he could ever have perpetrated. Suddenly to have begun to think the way a fool thinks: suddenly to think the best of everything and everyone, to shed entirely one’s mistrust, one’s caution, one’s self-mistrust, to think that all one’s difficulties have come to an end, that all complications have ceased to be, to forget not only where one is but how one has got there, to surrender the diligence, the discipline, the taking the measure of every last situation . . . As though the battle that is each person’s singular battle could somehow be abjured, as though voluntarily one could pick up and leave off being one’s self, the characteristic, the immutable self in whose behalf the battle is undertaken in the first place. The last of his children having been born perfectly white had all but driven him to taking what was strongest in him and wisest in him and tearing it to bits. Saved he was by the wisdom that says, “Don’t do anything.”
But even earlier, after the birth of their first child, he had done something almost equally stupid and sentimental. He was a young classics professor from Adelphi down at the University of Pennsylvania for a three-day conference on The Iliad; he had given a paper, he had made some contacts, he’d even been quietly invited by a renowned classicist to apply for a position opening at Princeton, and, on the way home, thinking himself at the pinnacle of existence, instead of heading north on the Jersey Turnpike, to get to Long Island, he had very nearly turned south and made his way down along the back roads of Salem and Cumberland counties to Gouldtown, to his mother’s ancestral home where they used to hold the annual family picnic when he was a boy. Yes, then as well, having become a father, he was going to try to give himself the easy pleasure of one of those meaningful feelings that people will go in search of whenever they cease to think. But because he had a son didn’t require him to turn south to Gouldtown any more than on that same journey, when he reached north Jersey, his having had this son required him to take the Newark exit and head toward East Orange. There was yet another impulse to be suppressed: the impulse he felt to see his mother, to tell her what had happened and to bring her the boy. The impulse, two years after jettisoning her, and despite Walter’s warning, to show himself to his mother. No. Absolutely not. And instead he continued straight on home to his white wife and his white child.
And, some four decades later, all the while he was driving home from the college, besieged by recrimination, remembering some of the best moments of his life—the birth of his children, the exhilaration, the all-too-innocent excitement, the wild wavering of his resolve, the relief so great that it nearly undid his resolve—he was remembering also the worst night of his life, remembering back to his navy stint and the night he was thrown out of that Norfolk whorehouse, the famous white whorehouse called Oris’s. “You’re a black nigger, ain’t you, boy?” and seconds later the bouncers had hurled him from the open front door, over the stairs to the sidewalk and into the street. The place he was looking for was Lulu’s, over on Warwick Avenue—Lulu’s, they shouted after him, was where his black ass belonged. His forehead struck the pavement, and yet he got himself up, ran until he saw an alleyway, and there cut away from the street and the Shore Patrol, who were all over the place on a Saturday, swinging their billy clubs. He wound up in the toilet of the only bar he dared to enter looking as battered as he did—a colored bar just a few hundred feet from Hampton Roads and the Newport News ferry (the ferry conveying the sailors to Lulu’s) and some ten blocks from Oris’s. It was
his first colored bar since he was an East Orange schoolkid, back when he and a friend used to run the football pools out of Billy’s Twilight Club down on the Newark line. During his first two years of high school, on top of the surreptitious boxing, he would be in and out of Billy’s Twilight all through the fall, and it was there that he’d garnered the barroom lore he claimed to have learned—as an East Orange white kid—in a tavern owned by his Jewish old man.
He was remembering how he’d struggled to stanch his cut face and how he’d swabbed vainly away at his white jumper but how the blood dripped steadily down to spatter everything. The seatless bowl was coated with shit, the soggy plank floor awash with piss, the sink, if that thing was a sink, a swillish trough of sputum and puke—so that when the retching began because of the pain in his wrist, he threw up onto the wall he was facing rather than lower his face into all that filth.
It was a hideous, raucous dive, the worst, like no place he had ever seen, the most abominable he could have imagined, but he had to hide somewhere, and so, on a bench as far as he could get from the human wreckage swarming the bar, and in the clutches of all his fears, he tried to sip at a beer, to steady himself and dim the pain and to avoid drawing attention. Not that anyone at the bar had bothered looking his way after he’d bought the beer and disappeared against the wall back of the empty tables: just as at the white cathouse, nobody took him here for anything other than what he was.
He still knew, with the second beer, that he was where he should not be, yet if the Shore Patrol picked him up, if they discovered why he’d been thrown out of Oris’s, he was ruined: a court-martial, a conviction, a long stretch at hard labor followed by a dishonorable discharge—and all for having lied to the navy about his race, all for having been stupid enough to step through a door where the only out-and-out Negroes on the premises were either laundering the linens or mopping up the slops.
This was it. He’d serve out his stint, do his time as a white man, and this would be it. Because I can’t pull it off, he thought—I don’t even want to. He’d never before known real disgrace. He’d never before known what it was to hide from the police. Never before had he bled from taking a blow—in all those rounds of amateur boxing he had not lost a drop of blood or been hurt or damaged in any way. But now the jumper of his whites was as red as a surgical dressing, his pants were soggy with caking blood and, from where he’d landed on his knees in the gutter, they were torn and dark with grime. And his wrist had been injured, maybe even shattered, from when he’d broken the fall with his hand—he couldn’t move it or bear to touch it. He drank off the beer and then got another in order to try to deaden the pain.
This was what came of failing to fulfill his father’s ideals, of flouting his father’s commands, of deserting his dead father altogether. If only he’d done as his father had, as Walter had, everything would be happening another way. But first he had broken the law by lying to get into the navy, and now, out looking for a white woman to fuck, he had plunged into the worst possible disaster. “Let me get through to my discharge. Let me get out. Then I’ll never lie again. Just let me finish my time, and that’s it!” It was the first he’d spoken to his father since he’d dropped dead in the dining car.
If he kept this up, his life would amount to nothing. How did Coleman know that? Because his father was speaking back to him—the old admonishing authority rumbling up once again from his father’s chest, resonant as always with the unequivocal legitimacy of an upright man. If Coleman kept on like this, he’d end up in a ditch with his throat slit. Look at where he was now. Look where he had come to hide. And how? Why? Because of his credo, because of his insolent, arrogant “I am not one of you, I can’t bear you, I am not part of your Negro we” credo. The great heroic struggle against their we—and look at what he now looked like! The passionate struggle for precious singularity, his revolt of one against the Negro fate—and just look where the defiant great one had ended up! Is this where you’ve come, Coleman, to seek the deeper meaning of existence? A world of love, that’s what you had, and instead you forsake it for this! The tragic, reckless thing that you’ve done! And not just to yourself—to us all. To Ernestine. To Walt. To Mother. To me. To me in my grave. To my father in his. What else grandiose are you planning, Coleman Brutus? Whom next are you going to mislead and betray?
Still, he couldn’t leave for the street because of his fear of the Shore Patrol, and of the court-martial, and of the brig, and of the dishonorable discharge that would hound him forever. Everything in him was too stirred up for him to do anything but keep on drinking until, of course, he was joined on the bench by a prostitute who was openly of his own race.
When the Shore Patrol found him in the morning, they attributed the bloody wounds and the broken wrist and the befouled, disheveled uniform to his having spent a night in niggertown, another swingin’ white dick hot for black poon who—having got himself reamed, steamed, and dry-cleaned (as well as properly tattooed in the bargain)—had been deposited for the scavengers to pick over in that glass-strewn lot back of the ferry slip.
“U.S. Navy” is all the tattoo said, the words, no more than a quarter inch high, inscribed in blue pigment between the blue arms of a blue anchor, itself a couple inches long. A most unostentatious design as military tattoos go and, discreetly positioned just below the joining of the right arm to the shoulder, a tattoo certainly easy enough to hide. But when he remembered how he’d got it, it was the mark evocative not only of the turbulence of the worst night of his life but of all that underlay the turbulence—it was the sign of the whole of his history, of the indivisibility of the heroism and the disgrace. Embedded in that blue tattoo was a true and total image of himself. The ineradicable biography was there, as was the prototype of the ineradicable, a tattoo being the very emblem of what cannot ever be removed. The enormous enterprise was also there. The outside forces were there. The whole chain of the unforeseen, all the dangers of exposure and all the dangers of concealment—even the senselessness of life was there in that stupid little blue tattoo.
His difficulties with Delphine Roux had begun the first semester he was back in the classroom, when one of his students who happened to be a favorite of Professor Roux’s went to her, as department chair, to complain about the Euripides plays in Coleman’s Greek tragedy course. One play was Hippolytus, the other Alcestis; the student, Elena Mitnick, found them “degrading to women.”
“So what shall I do to accommodate Miss Mitnick? Strike Euripides from my reading list?”
“Not at all. Clearly everything depends on how you teach Euripides.”
“And what,” he asked, “is the prescribed method these days?” thinking even as he spoke that this was not a debate for which he had the patience or the civility. Besides, confounding Delphine Roux was easier without engaging in the debate. Brimming though she was with intellectual self-importance, she was twenty-nine years old and virtually without experience outside schools, new to her job and relatively new both to the college and to the country. He understood from their previous encounters that her attempt to appear to be not merely his superior but a supercilious superior—“Clearly everything depends” and so on—was best repulsed by displaying complete indifference to her judgment. For all that she could not bear him, she also couldn’t bear that the academic credentials that so impressed other of her Athena colleagues hadn’t yet overwhelmed the ex-dean. Despite herself, she could not escape from being intimidated by the man who, five years earlier, had reluctantly hired her fresh from the Yale graduate school and who, afterward, never denied regretting it, especially when the psychological numbskulls in his department settled on so deeply confused a young woman as their chair.
To this day, she continued to be disquieted by Coleman Silk’s presence just to the degree that she wished for him now to be unsettled by her. Something about him always led her back to her childhood and the precocious child’s fear that she is being seen through; also to the precocious child’s fear that she is not being
seen enough. Afraid of being exposed, dying to be seen—there’s a dilemma for you. Something about him made her even second-guess her English, with which otherwise she felt wholly at ease. Whenever they were face to face, something made her think that he wanted nothing more than to tie her hands behind her back.
This something was what? The way he had sexually sized her up when she first came to be interviewed in his office, or the way he had failed to sexually size her up? It had been impossible to read his reading of her, and that on a morning when she knew she had maximally deployed all her powers. She had wanted to look terrific and she did, she had wanted to be fluent and she was, she had wanted to sound scholarly and she’d succeeded, she was sure. And yet he looked at her as if she were a schoolgirl, Mr. and Mrs. Inconsequential’s little nobody child.