The Human Stain

by Philip Roth

  It was past 1 A.M. when the phone rang. She had long ago fled her office—run from her office thinking only to get her passport and flee the country—and it was already several hours after her regular bedtime, when the phone rang with the news. So anguished was she by the ad’s inadvertently going out as e-mail that she was still awake and roaming her apartment, tearing at her hair, sneering in the mirror at her face, bending her head to the kitchen table to weep into her hands, and, as though startled out of sleep—the sleep of a heretofore meticulously defended adult life—jumping up to cry aloud, “It did not happen! I did not do it!” But who had then? In the past there seemed always to be people trying their best to trample her down, to dispose somehow of the nuisance she was to them, callous people against whom she had learned the hard way to protect herself. But tonight there was no one to reproach: her own hand had delivered the ruinous blow.

  Frantic, in a frenzy, she tried to figure out some way, any way, to prevent the worst from happening, but in her state of incredulous despair she could envision the inevitability of only the most cataclysmic trajectory: the hours passing, the dawn breaking, the doors to Barton Hall opening, her departmental colleagues each entering his or her office, booting up the computer, and finding there, to savor with their morning coffee, the e-mail ad for a Coleman Silk duplicate that she’d had no intention of ever sending. To be read once, twice, three times over by all the members of her department and then to be e-mailed down the line to every last instructor, professor, administrator, office clerk, and student.

  Everyone in her classes will read it. Her secretary will read it. Before the day is out, the president of the college will have read it, and the college trustees. And even if she were to claim that the ad had been meant as a joke, nothing more than an insider’s joke, why would the trustees allow the joke’s perpetrator to remain at Athena? Especially after her joke is written up in the student paper, as it will be. And in the local paper. After it is picked up by the French papers.

  Her mother! The humiliation for her mother! And her father! The disappointment to him! All the conformist Walincourt cousins—the pleasure they will take in her defeat! All the ridiculously conservative uncles and the ridiculously pious aunts, together keeping intact the narrowness of the past—how this will please them as they sit snobbishly side by side in church! But suppose she explained that she had merely been experimenting with the ad as a literary form, alone at the office disinterestedly toying with the personal ad as . . . as utilitarian haiku. Won’t help. Too ridiculous. Nothing will help. Her mother, her father, her brothers, her friends, her teachers. Yale. Yale! News of the scandal will reach everyone she’s ever known, and the shame will follow her unflaggingly forever. Where can she even run with her passport? Montreal? Martinique? And earn her living how? No, not in the farthest Francophone outpost will she be allowed to teach once they learn of her ad. The pure, prestigious professional life for which she had done all this planning, all this grueling work, the untainted, irreproachable life of the mind . . . She thought to phone Arthur Sussman. Arthur will figure a way out for her. He can pick up the phone and talk to anyone. He’s tough, he’s shrewd, in the ways of the world the smartest, most influential American she knows. Powerful people like Arthur, however upright, are not boxed in by the need to always be telling the truth. He’ll come up with what it takes to explain everything. He’ll figure out just what to do. But when she tells him what has happened, why will he think to help her? All he’ll think is that she liked Coleman Silk more than she liked him. His vanity will do his thinking for him and lead him to the stupidest conclusion. He’ll think what everyone will think: that she is pining for Coleman Silk, that she is dreaming not of Arthur Sussman, let alone of The Diapers or The Hats, but of Coleman Silk. Imagining her in love with Coleman Silk, he’ll slam down the phone and never speak to her again.

  To recapitulate. To go over what’s happened. To try to gain sufficient perspective to do the rational thing. She didn’t want to send it. She wrote it, yes, but she was embarrassed to send it and didn’t want to send it and she didn’t send it—yet it went. The same with the anonymous letter—she didn’t want to send it, carried it to New York with no intention of ever sending it, and it went. But what’s gone off this time is much, much worse. This time she’s so desperate that by twenty after one in the morning the rational thing is to telephone Arthur Sussman regardless of what he thinks. Arthur has to help her. He has to tell her what she can do to undo what she’s done. And then, at exactly twenty past one, the phone she holds in her hand to dial Arthur Sussman suddenly begins to ring. Arthur calling her!

  But it is her secretary. “He’s dead,” Margo says, crying so hard that Delphine can’t be quite sure what she’s hearing. “Margo—are you all right?” “He’s dead!” “Who is?” “I just heard. Delphine. It’s terrible. I’m calling you, I have to, I have to call you. I have to tell you something terrible. Oh, Delphine, it’s late, I know it’s late—” “No! Not Arthur!” Delphine cries. “Dean Silk!” Margo says. “Is dead?” “A terrible crash. It’s too horrible.” “What crash? Margo, what has happened? Where? Speak slowly. Start again. What are you telling me?” “In the river. With a woman. In his car. A crash.” Margo is by now unable to be at all coherent, while Delphine is so stunned that, later, she does not remember putting down the receiver or rushing in tears to her bed or lying there howling his name.

  She put down the receiver, and then she spent the worst hours of her life.

  Because of the ad they’ll think she liked him? They’ll think she loved him because of the ad? But what would they think if they saw her now, carrying on like the widow herself? She cannot close her eyes, because when she does she sees his eyes, those green staring eyes of his, exploding. She sees the car plunge off the road, and his head is shooting forward, and in the instant of the crash, his eyes explode. “No! No!” But when she opens her eyes to stop seeing his eyes, all she sees is what she’s done and the mockery that will ensue. She sees her disgrace with her eyes open and his disintegration with her eyes shut, and throughout the night the pendulum of suffering swings her from one to the other.

  She wakes up in the same state of upheaval she was in when she went to sleep. She can’t remember why she is shaking. She thinks she is shaking from a nightmare. The nightmare of his eyes exploding. But no, it happened, he’s dead. And the ad—it happened. Everything has happened, and nothing’s to be done. I wanted them to say . . . and now they’ll say, “Our daughter in America? We don’t talk about her. She no longer exists for us.” When she tries to compose herself and settle on a plan of action, no thinking is possible: only the derangement is possible, the spiraling obtuseness that is terror. It is just after 5 A.M. She closes her eyes to try to sleep and make it all go away, but the instant her eyes are shut, there are his eyes. They are staring at her and then they explode.

  She is dressing. She is screaming. She is walking out her door and it’s barely dawn. No makeup. No jewelry. Just her horrified face. Coleman Silk is dead.

  When she reaches the campus there’s no one there. Only crows. It’s so early the flag hasn’t yet been raised. Every morning she looks for it atop North Hall, and every morning, upon seeing it, there is the moment of satisfaction. She left home, she dared to do it—she is in America! There is the contentment with her own courage and the knowledge that it hasn’t been easy. But the American flag’s not there, and she doesn’t see that it’s not. She sees nothing but what she must do.

  She has a key to Barton Hall and she goes in. She gets to her office. She’s done that much. She’s hanging on. She’s thinking now. Okay. But how does she get into their offices to get at their computers? It’s what she should have done last night instead of running away in a panic. To regain her self-possession, to rescue her name, to forestall the disaster of ruining her career, she must continue to think. Thinking has been her whole life. What else has she been trained to do from the time she started school? She leaves her office and walks down
the corridor. Her aim is clear now, her thinking decisive. She will just go in and delete it. It is her right to delete it—she sent it. And she did not even do that. It was not intentional. She’s not responsible. It just went. But when she tries the handle of each of the doors, they are locked. Next she tries working her keys into the locks, first her key to the building, then the key to her office, but neither works. Of course they don’t work. They wouldn’t have worked last night and they don’t work now. As for thinking, were she able to think like Einstein, thinking will not open these doors.

  Back in her own office, she unlocks her files. Looking for what? Her c.v. Why look for her c.v.? It is the end of her c.v. It is the end of our daughter in America. And because it is the end, she pulls all the hanging files out of the drawer and hurls them on the floor. Empties the entire drawer. “We have no daughter in America. We have no daughter. We have only sons.” Now she does not try to think that she should think. Instead, she begins throwing things. Whatever is piled on her desk, whatever is decorating her walls—what difference does it make what breaks? She tried and she failed. It is the end of the impeccable résumé and of the veneration of the résumé. “Our daughter in America failed.”

  She is sobbing when she picks up the phone to call Arthur. He will jump out of bed and drive straight from Boston. In less than three hours he’ll be in Athena. By nine o’clock Arthur will be here! But the number she dials is the emergency number on the decal pasted to the phone. And she had no more intention of dialing that number than of sending the two letters. All she had was the very human wish to be saved.

  She cannot speak.

  “Hello?” says the man at the other end. “Hello? Who is this?”

  She barely gets it out. The most irreducible two words in any language. One’s name. Irreducible and irreplaceable. All that is her. Was her. And now the two most ridiculous words in the world.

  “Who? Professor who? I can’t understand you, Professor.”

  “Security?”

  “Speak louder, Professor. Yes, yes, this is Campus Security.”

  “Come here,” she says pleadingly, and once again she is in tears. “Right away. Something terrible has happened.”

  “Professor? Where are you? Professor, what’s happened?”

  “Barton.” She says it again so he can understand. “Barton 121,” she tells him. “Professor Roux.”

  “What is it, Professor?

  “Something terrible.”

  “Are you all right? What’s wrong? What is it? Is somebody there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Is everything all right?”

  “Someone broke in.”

  “Broke in where?”

  “My office.”

  “When? Professor, when?”

  “I don’t know. In the night. I don’t know.”

  “You okay? Professor? Professor Roux? Are you there? Barton Hall? You sure?”

  The hesitation. Trying to think. Am I sure? Am I? “Absolutely,” she says, sobbing uncontrollably now. “Hurry, please! Get here immediately, please! Someone broke into my office! It’s a shambles! It’s awful! It’s horrible! My things! Someone broke into my computer! Hurry!”

  “A break-in? Do you know who it was? Do you know who broke in? Was it a student?”

  “Dean Silk broke in,” she said. “Hurry!”

  “Professor—Professor, are you there? Professor Roux, Dean Silk is dead.”

  “I’ve heard,” she said, “I know, it’s awful,” and then she screamed, screamed at the horror of all that had happened, screamed at the thought of the very last thing he had ever done, and to her, to her—and after that, Delphine’s day was a circus.

  The astonishing news of Dean Silk’s death in a car crash with an Athena college janitor had barely reached the last of the college’s classrooms when word began to spread of the pillaging of Delphine Roux’s office and the e-mail hoax Dean Silk had attempted to perpetrate only hours before the fatal crash. People were having trouble enough believing all of this, when another story, one about the circumstances of the crash, spread from town up to the college, further confounding just about everybody. For all its atrocious details, the story was said to have originated with a reliable source: the brother of the state trooper who had found the bodies. According to his story, the reason the dean lost control of his car was because, from the passenger seat beside him, the Athena woman janitor was satisfying him while he drove. This the police were able to infer from the disposition of his clothing and the position of her body and its location in the vehicle when the wreckage was discovered and pulled from the river.