The Human Stain

by Philip Roth

  One is left to imagine just how heinous were the crimes that he was determined to hide.

  The next day Coleman was buried beside his wife in the orderly garden of a cemetery across from the level green sea of the college athletic fields, at the foot of the oak grove behind North Hall and its landmark hexagonal clock tower. I couldn’t sleep the night before, and when I got up that morning, I was still so agitated over how the accident and its meaning was being systematically distorted and broadcast to the world that I was unable to sit quietly long enough even to drink my coffee. How can one possibly roll back all these lies? Even if you demonstrate something’s a lie, in a place like Athena, once it’s out there, it stays. Instead of pacing restlessly around the house until it was time to head for the cemetery, I dressed in a tie and jacket and went down to Town Street to hang around there—down to where I could nurse the illusion that there was something to be done with my disgust.

  And with my shock. I was not prepared to think of him as dead, let alone to see him buried. Everything else aside, the death in a freak accident of a strong, healthy man already into his seventies had its own awful poignancy—there would at least have been a higher degree of rationality had he been carried off by a heart attack or cancer or a stroke. What’s more, I was convinced by then—I was convinced as soon as I heard the news—that it was impossible for the accident to have occurred without the presence somewhere nearby of Les Farley and his pickup truck. Of course nothing that befalls anyone is ever too senseless to have happened, and yet with Les Farley in the picture, with Farley as primary cause, wasn’t there more than just the wisp of an explanation for the violent extinction, in a single convenient catastrophe, of Farley’s despised ex-wife and the enraging lover whom Farley had obsessively staked out?

  To me, reaching this conclusion didn’t seem at all motivated by a disinclination to accept the inexplicable for what it is—though it seemed precisely that to the state police the morning after Coleman’s funeral, when I went to talk to the two officers who’d been first at the scene of the accident and who’d found the bodies. Their examination of the crash vehicle revealed nothing that could corroborate in any way the scenario I was imagining. The information I gave them—about Farley’s stalking of Faunia, about his spying on Coleman, about the near-violent confrontation, just beyond the kitchen door, when Farley came roaring at the two of them out of the dark—was all patiently taken down, as were my name, address, and telephone number. I was then thanked for my cooperation, assured that everything would be held in strictest confidence, and told that if it seemed warranted they would be back in touch with me.

  They never were.

  On the way out, I turned and said, “Can I ask one question? Can I ask about the disposition of the bodies in the car?”

  “What do you want to know, sir?” said Officer Balich, the senior of the two young men, a poker-faced, quietly officious fellow whose Croatian family, I remembered, used to own the Madamaska Inn.

  “What exactly did you find when you found them? Their placement. Their posture. The rumor in Athena—”

  “No, sir,” Balich said, shaking his head, “that was not the case. None of that’s true, sir.”

  “You know what I’m referring to?”

  “I do, sir. This was clearly a case of speeding. You can’t take that curve at that speed. Jeff Gordon couldn’t have taken that curve at that speed. For an old guy with a couple glasses of wine playing tricks on his brain to drive round that bend like a hot-rodder—”

  “I don’t think Coleman Silk ever in his life drove like a hotrodder, Officer.”

  “Well . . .,” Balich said, and put his hands up in the air, the palms to me, suggesting that, with all due respect, neither he nor I could possibly know that. “It was the professor who was behind the wheel, sir.”

  The moment had arrived when I was expected by Officer Balich not to insert myself foolishly as an amateur detective, not to press my contention further, but politely to take my leave. He had called me sir more than enough times for me to have no hallucinations about who was running the show, and so I did leave, and, as I say, that was the end of it.

  The day Coleman was to be buried was another unseasonably warm, crisply lit November day. With the last of the leaves having fallen from the trees during the previous week, the hard bedrock contour of the mountain landscape was now nakedly exposed by the sunlight, its joints and striations etched in the fine hatched lines of an old engraving, and as I headed to Athena for the funeral that morning, a sense of reemergence, of renewed possibility, was inappropriately aroused in me by the illuminated roughness of a distant view obscured by foliage since last spring. The no-nonsense organization of the earth’s surface, to be admired and deferred to now for the first time in months, was a reminder of the terrific abrasive force of the glacier onslaught that had scoured these mountains on the far edge of its booming southward slide. Passing just miles from Coleman’s house, it had spat out boulders the size of restaurant refrigerators the way an automatic pitching machine throws fastball strikes, and when I passed the steep wooded slope that is known locally as “the rock garden” and saw, starkly, undappled by the summer leaves and their gliding shadows, those mammoth rocks all tumbled sideways like a ravaged Stonehenge, crushed together and yet hugely intact, I was once again horrified by the thought of the moment of impact that had separated Coleman and Faunia from their lives in time and catapulted them into the earth’s past. They were now as remote as the glaciers. As the creation of the planet. As creation itself.

  This was when I decided to go to the state police. That I didn’t get out there that day, that very morning, even before the funeral, was in part because, while parking my car across from the green in town, I saw in the window of Pauline’s Place, eating his breakfast, Faunia’s father—saw him seated at a table with the woman who’d been steering his wheelchair up at the mountain cemetery the day before. I immediately went inside, took the empty table beside theirs, ordered, and, while pretending to read the Madamaska Weekly Gazette that someone had left by my chair, caught all I could of their conversation.

  They were talking about a diary. Among the things of hers that Sally and Peg had turned over to Faunia’s father, there had been Faunia’s diary.

  “You don’t want to read it, Harry. You just don’t want to.”

  “I have to,” he said.

  “You don’t have to,” the woman said. “Believe me you don’t.”

  “It can’t be more awful than everything else.”

  “You don’t want to read it.”

  Most people inflate themselves and lie about accomplishments they have only dreamed of achieving; Faunia had lied about failing to reach proficiency at a skill so fundamental that, in a matter of a year or two, it is acquired at least crudely by nearly every school-child in the world.

  And this I learned before even finishing my juice. The illiteracy had been an act, something she decided her situation demanded. But why? A source of power? Her one and only source of power? But a power purchased at what price? Think about it. Afflicts herself with illiteracy too. Takes it on voluntarily. Not to infantilize herself, however, not to present herself as a dependent kid, but just the opposite: to spotlight the barbaric self befitting the world. Not rejecting learning as a stifling form of propriety but trumping learning by a knowledge that is stronger and prior. She has nothing against reading per se—it’s that pretending not to be able to feels right to her. It spices things up. She just cannot get enough of the toxins: of all that you’re not supposed to be, to show, to say, to think but that you are and show and say and think whether you like it or not.

  “I can’t burn it,” Faunia’s father said. “It’s hers. I can’t just throw it in the trash.”

  “Well, I can,” the woman said.

  “It’s not right.”

  “You have been walking through this mine field all your life. You don’t need more.”

  “It’s all that’s left of her.”

&nb
sp; “There’s the revolver. That’s left of her. There’s the bullets, Harry. She left that.”

  “The way she lived,” he said, sounding suddenly at the edge of tears.

  “The way she lived is the way she died. It’s why she died.”

  “You’ve got to give me the diary,” he said.

  “No. It’s bad enough we even came here.”

  “Destroy it, destroy it, and I just don’t know what.”

  “I’m only doing what is best for you.”

  “What does she say?”

  “It doesn’t bear repeating.”

  “Oh, God,” he said.

  “Eat. You have to eat something. Those pancakes look good.”

  “My daughter,” he said.

  “You did all you could.”

  “I should have taken her away when she was six years old.”

  “You didn’t know. How could you know what was going to be?”

  “I should never have left her with that woman.”

  “And we should never have come up here,” his companion said. “All you have to do now is get sick up here. Then the thing will be complete.”

  “I want the ashes.”

  “They should have buried the ashes. In there. With her. I don’t know why they didn’t.”

  “I want the ashes, Syl. Those are my grandkids. That’s all I’ve got left to show for everything.”

  “I’ve taken care of the ashes.”

  “No!”

  “You didn’t need those ashes. You’ve been through enough. I will not have something happening to you. Those ashes are not coming on the plane.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I took care of them,” she said. “I was respectful. But they’re gone.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “That’s over,” she told him. “It’s all over. You did your duty. You did more than your duty. You don’t need any more. Now let’s you eat something. I packed the room up. I paid. Now there’s just getting you home.”

  “Oh, you are the best, Sylvia, the very best.”

  “I don’t want you hurt anymore. I will not let them hurt you.”

  “You are the best.”

  “Try and eat. Those look real good.”

  “Want some?”

  “No,” she said, “I want you to eat.”

  “I can’t eat it all.”

  “Use the syrup. Here, I’ll do it, I’ll pour it.”

  I waited for them outside, on the green, and then when I saw the wheelchair coming through the restaurant door, I crossed the street and, as she was wheeling him away from Pauline’s Place, I introduced myself, walking alongside him as I spoke. “I live here. I knew your daughter. Only slightly, but I met her several times. I was at the funeral yesterday. I saw you there. I want to express my condolences.”

  He was a large man with a large frame, much larger than he’d seemed slumped over in the chair at the funeral. He was probably well over six feet, but with the look on his stern, strongly boned face (Faunia’s inexpressive face, hers exactly—the thin lips, the steep chin, the sharp aquiline nose, the same blue, deep-set eyes, and above them, framing the pale lashes, that same puff of flesh, that same fullness that had struck me out at the dairy farm as her one exotic marking, her face’s only emblem of allure)—with the look of a man sentenced not just to imprisonment in that chair but condemned to some even greater anguish for the rest of his days. Big as he was, or once had been, there was nothing left of him but his fear. I saw that fear at the back of his gaze the instant he looked up to thank me. “You’re very kind,” he said.

  He was probably about my age, but there was evidence of a privileged New England childhood in his speech that dated back to long before either of us was born. I’d recognized it earlier in the restaurant—tethered, by that speech alone, by the patterns of moneyed, quasi-Anglified speech, to the decorous conventions of an entirely other America.

  “Are you Faunia’s stepmother?” That seemed as good a way as any to get her attention—and to get her perhaps to slow down. I assumed they were on their way back to the College Arms, around the corner from the green.

  “This is Sylvia,” he said.

  “I wonder if you could stop,” I said to Sylvia, “so I could talk to him.”

  “We’re catching a plane,” she told me.

  Since she was so clearly determined to rid him of me then and there, I said—while still keeping pace with the wheelchair—“Coleman Silk was my friend. He did not drive his car off the road. He couldn’t have. Not like that. His car was forced off the road. I know who is responsible for the death of your daughter. It wasn’t Coleman Silk.”

  “Stop pushing me. Sylvia, stop pushing a minute.”

  “No,” she said. “This is insane. This is enough.”

  “It was her ex-husband,” I said to him. “It was Farley.”

  “No,” he said weakly, as though I’d shot him. “No—no.”

  “Sir!” She had stopped, all right, but the hand that wasn’t holding tight to the wheelchair had reached up to take me by the lapel. She was short and slight, a young Filipino woman with a small, implacable, pale brown face, and I could see from the dark determination of her fearless eyes that the disorder of human affairs was not allowed to intrude anywhere near what was hers to protect.

  “Can’t you stop for one moment?” I asked her. “Can’t we go over to the green and sit there and talk?”

  “The man is not well. You are taxing the strength of a man who is seriously ill.”

  “But you have a diary belonging to Faunia.”

  “We do not.”

  “You have a revolver belonging to Faunia.”

  “Sir, go away. Sir, leave him alone, I am warning you!” And here she pushed at me—with the hand that had been holding my jacket, she shoved me away.

  “She got that gun,” I said, “to protect herself against Farley.”

  Sharply, she replied, “The poor thing.”

  I didn’t know what to do then except to follow them around the corner until they reached the porch of the inn. Faunia’s father was weeping openly now.

  When she turned to find me still there, she said, “You have done enough damage. Go or I will call the police.” There was great ferocity in this tiny person. I understood it: keeping him alive appeared to require no less.

  “Don’t destroy that diary,” I said to her. “There is a record there—”

  “Filth! There is a record there of filth!”

  “Syl, Sylvia—”

  “All of them, her, the brother, the mother, the stepfather—the whole bunch of them, trampling on this man his whole life. They have robbed him. They have deceived him. They have humiliated him. His daughter was a criminal. Got pregnant and had a child at sixteen—a child she abandoned to an orphan asylum. A child her father would have raised. She was a common whore. Guns and men and drugs and filth and sex. The money he gave her—what did she do with that money?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about an orphan asylum. I don’t know anything about any money.”

  “Drugs! She stole it for drugs!”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “That whole family—filth! Have some pity, please!”

  I turned to him. “I want the person responsible for these deaths to be held legally accountable. Coleman Silk did her no harm. He did not kill her. I ask to talk to you for only a minute.”

  “Let him, Sylvia—”

  “No! No more letting anyone! You have let them long enough!”

  People were collected now on the porch of the inn watching us, and others were watching from the upper windows. Perhaps they were the last of the leafers, out to catch the little left of the autumn blaze. Perhaps they were Athena alumni. There were always a handful visiting the town, middle-aged and elderly graduates checking to see what had disappeared and what remained, thinking the best, the very best, of every last thing that had ever befallen them on these streets in nineteen hundred
and whatever. Perhaps they were visitors in town to look at the restored colonial houses, a stretch of them running nearly a mile down both sides of Ward Street and considered by the Athena Historical Society to be, if not so grand as those in Salem, as important as any in the state west of the House of the Seven Gables. These people had not come to sleep in the carefully decorated period bedrooms of the College Arms so as to awaken to a shouting match beneath their windows. In a place as picturesque as South Ward Street and on a day as fine as this, the eruption of such a struggle—a crippled man crying, a tiny Asian woman shouting, a man who, from his appearance, might well have been a college professor seemingly terrifying both of them with what he was saying—was bound to seem both more stupendous and more disgusting than it would have at a big city intersection.

  “If I could see the diary—”

  “There is no diary” she said, and there was nothing more to be done than to watch her push him up the ramp beside the stairway and through the main door and into the inn.

  Back around at Pauline’s, I ordered a cup of coffee and, on writing paper the waitress found for me in a drawer beneath the cash register, I wrote this letter:

  I am the man who approached you near the restaurant on Town Street in Athena on the morning after Faunia’s funeral. I live on a rural road outside Athena, a few miles from the home of the late Coleman Silk, who, as I explained, was my friend. Through Coleman I met your daughter several times. I sometimes heard him speak about her. Their affair was passionate, but there was no cruelty in it. He mainly played the part of lover with her, but he also knew how to be a friend and a teacher. If she asked for care, I can’t believe it was ever withheld. Whatever of Coleman’s spirit she may have absorbed could never, never have poisoned her life.