The Human Stain

by Philip Roth

  I don’t know how much of the malicious gossip surrounding them and the crash you heard in Athena. I hope none. There is, however, a matter of justice to be settled which dwarfs all that stupidity. Two people have been murdered. I know who murdered them. I did not witness the murder but I know it took place. I am absolutely sure of it. But evidence is necessary if I am to be taken seriously by the police or by an attorney. If you possess anything that reveals Faunia’s state of mind in recent months or even extending back to her marriage to Farley, I ask you not to destroy it. I am thinking of letters you may have received from her over the years as well as the belongings found in her room after her death that were passed on to you by Sally and Peg.

  My telephone number and address are as follows—

  That was as far as I got. I intended to wait until they were gone, to phone the College Arms to extract from the desk clerk, with some story or other, the man’s name and address, and to send off my letter by overnight mail. I’d go to Sally and Peg for the address if I couldn’t get it from the inn. But I would, in fact, do neither the one thing nor the other. Whatever Faunia had left behind in her room had already been discarded or destroyed by Sylvia—the same way my letter would be destroyed when it arrived at its destination. This tiny being whose whole purpose was to keep the past from tormenting him further was never going to allow inside the walls of his home what she would not permit when she’d found herself up against me face to face. Moreover, her course was one that I couldn’t dispute. If suffering was passed around in that family like a disease, there was nothing to do but post a sign of the kind they used to hang in the doorways of the contagiously ill when I was a kid, a sign that read QUARANTINE or that presented to the eyes of the uninfected nothing more than a big black capital Q. Little Sylvia was that ominous Q, and there was no way that I was going to get past it.

  I tore up what I’d written and walked across town to the funeral.

  The service for Coleman had been arranged by his children, and the four of them were there at the door to Rishanger Chapel to greet the mourners as they filed in. The idea to bury him out of Rishanger, the college chapel, was a family decision, the key component of what I realized was a well-planned coup, an attempt to undo their father’s self-imposed banishment and to integrate him, in death if not in life, back into the community where he had made his distinguished career.

  When I introduced myself, I was instantly taken aside by Lisa, Coleman’s daughter, who put her arms around me and in a tearful, whispering voice said, “You were his friend. You were the one friend he had left. You probably saw him last.”

  “We were friends for a while,” I said, but explained nothing about having seen him last several months back, on that August Saturday morning at Tanglewood, and that by then he had deliberately let the brief friendship lapse.

  “We lost him,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “We lost him,” she repeated, and then she cried without attempting to speak.

  After a while I said, “I enjoyed him and I admired him. I wish I could have known him longer.”

  “Why did this happen?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did he go mad? Was he insane?”

  “Absolutely not. No.”

  “Then how could all this happen?”

  When I didn’t answer (and how could I, other than by beginning to write this book?), her arms dropped slowly away from me, and while we stood together for a few seconds more, I saw how strong was her resemblance to her father—strong as Faunia’s to her father. There were the same carved puppetlike features, the same green eyes, the same tawny skin, even a less broad-shouldered version of Coleman’s slight athletic build. The visible genetic legacy of the mother, Iris Silk, seemed to reside solely in Lisa’s prodigious tangle of dark bushy hair. In photograph after photograph of Iris—photographs I’d seen in family albums Coleman had showed me—the facial features hardly seemed to matter, so strongly did her importance as a person, if not her entire meaning, appear to be concentrated in that assertive, theatrical endowment of hair. With Lisa, the hair appeared to stand more in contrast to her character than—as with her mother—to be issuing from it.

  I had the definite impression, in just our few moments together, that the link, now broken, between Lisa and her father would not be gone from her mind for a single day throughout the remainder of her life. One way or another, the idea of him would be fused to every last thing she would ever think about or do or fail to do. The consequences of having loved him so fully as a beloved girl-child, and of having been estranged from him at the time of his death, would never let this woman be.

  The three Silk men—Lisa’s twin brother, Mark, and the two eldest, Jeffrey and Michael—were not so emotional in greeting me. I saw nothing of Mark’s angry intensity as an affronted son, and when, an hour or so later, his sober demeanor gave way at the graveside, it was with the severity of one bereft beyond redemption. Jeff and Michael were obviously the sturdiest Silk children, and in them you clearly saw the physical imprint of the robust mother: if not her hair (both men were by now bald), her height, her solid core of confidence, her open-hearted authority. These were not people who muddled through. That was apparent in just the greeting they extended and the few words they said. When you met Jeff and Michael, especially if they were standing side by side, you’d met your match. Back before I got to know Coleman—back in his heyday, before he began to spin out of control within the ever-narrowing prison of his rage, before the achievements that once particularized him, that were him, vanished from his life—you would surely have met your match in him too, which probably explains why a general willingness to compromise the dean was so quick to materialize once he was accused of uttering aloud something racially vicious.

  Despite all the rumors circulating in town, the turnout for Coleman far exceeded what I’d been imagining it would be; it certainly exceeded what Coleman could have imagined. The first six or seven rows of pews were already full, and people were still streaming in behind me when I found an empty place midway up from the altar beside someone whom I recognized—from having seen him for the first time the day before—to be Smoky Hollenbeck. Did Smoky understand how close he might have come, only a year earlier, to having a funeral service of his own held here in Rishanger Chapel? Maybe he was attending the service more in gratitude for his own good luck than out of regard for the man who’d been his erotic successor.

  On Smoky’s other side was a woman I took to be his wife, a pretty blonde of about forty and, if I remembered correctly, an Athena classmate Smoky had married back in the seventies and the mother now of their five children. The Hollenbecks were among the youngest people, aside from Coleman’s family, whom I saw in the chapel when I began to look around me. Largely there were Athena elders, college faculty and staff whom Coleman had known for close to forty years before Iris’s death and his resignation. What would he think about these old-timers showing up at Rishanger to see him off could he observe them seated before his coffin? Probably something like, “What a wonderful occasion for self-approval. How virtuous they all must feel for not holding against me my contempt for them.”

  It was strange to think, while seated there with all his colleagues, that people so well educated and professionally civil should have fallen so willingly for the venerable human dream of a situation in which one man can embody evil. Yet there is this need, and it is undying and it is profound.

  When the outside door was pulled shut and the Silks took their seats in the front row, I saw that the chapel was almost two-thirds full, three hundred people, maybe more, waiting for this ancient and natural human event to absorb their terror about the end of life. I saw, too, that Mark Silk, alone among his brothers, was wearing a skullcap.

  Probably like most everyone else, I was expecting one of Coleman’s children to mount the pulpit and speak first. But there was to be only one speaker that morning, and that was Herb Keble, the political scientist hired by Dean Silk a
s Athena’s first black professor. Obviously Keble had been chosen by the family for the reason the family had chosen Rishanger for the service: to rehabilitate their father’s name, to push back the Athena calendar and restore to Coleman his former status and prestige. When I recalled the severity with which Jeff and Michael had each taken my hand and acknowledged me by name and told me, “Thank you for coming—it means everything to the family that you’re here,” and when I imagined that they must have repeated something like that to each individual mourner, among whom there were many people they had known since childhood, I thought, And they don’t intend to quit, not until the administration building is rededicated as Coleman Silk Hall.

  That the place was nearly full was probably no chance occurrence. They must have been on the phone ever since the crash, mourners being rounded up the way voters used to be herded to the polls when the old Mayor Daley was running Chicago. And how they must have worked over Keble, whom Coleman had especially despised, to induce him voluntarily to proffer himself as the scapegoat for Athena’s sins. The more I thought about these Silk boys twisting Keble’s arm, intimidating him, shouting at him, denouncing him, perhaps even outright threatening him because of the way he had betrayed their father two years back, the more I liked them—and the more I liked Coleman for having sired two big, firm, smart fellows who were not reluctant to do what had to be done to turn his reputation right side out. These two were going to help put Les Farley away for the rest of his life.

  Or so I was able to believe until the next afternoon, just before they left town, when—no less bluntly persuasive with me than I’d imagined them to have been with Keble—they let me know that I was to knock it off: to forget about Les Farley and the circumstances of the accident and about urging any further investigation by the police. They could not have made clearer that their disapproval would be boundless if their father’s affair with Faunia Farley were to become the focal point of a courtroom trial instigated by my importuning. Faunia Farley’s was a name they never wanted to hear again, least of all in a scandalous trial that would be written up sensationally in the local papers and lodged indelibly in local memory and that would leave Coleman Silk Hall forever a dream.

  “She is not the ideal woman to have linked with our father’s legacy,” Jeffrey told me. “Our mother is,” said Michael. “This cheap little cunt has nothing to do with anything.” “Nothing,” Jeffrey reiterated. It was hard to believe, given the ardor and the resolve, that out in California they were college science professors. You would have thought they ran Twentieth Century Fox.

  Herb Keble was a slender, very dark man, elderly now, a bit stiff-gaited, though seemingly in no way stooped or hobbled by illness, and with something of the earnestness of the black preacher in both the stern bearing and the ominous, hanging-judge voice. He had only to say “My name is Herbert Keble” to cast his spell; he had only, from behind the podium, to stare silently at Coleman’s coffin and then to turn to the congregation and announce who he was to invoke that realm of feeling associated with the declamation of the holy psalms. He was austere in the way the edge of a blade is austere—menacing to you if you don’t handle it with the utmost care. Altogether the man was impressive, in demeanor and appearance both, and one could see where Coleman might have hired him to break the color barrier at Athena for something like the same reasons that Branch Rickey had hired Jackie Robinson to be organized baseball’s first black. Imagining the Silk boys browbeating Herb Keble into doing their bidding wasn’t that easy, at first, not until you took into account the appeal of self-drama to a personality marked so clearly by the vanity of those authorized to administer the sacraments. He very much displayed the authority of the second in power to the sovereign.

  “My name is Herbert Keble,” he began. “I am chairman of the Political Science Department. In 1996, I was among those who did not see fit to rise to Coleman’s defense when he was accused of racism—I, who had come to Athena sixteen years earlier, the very year that Coleman Silk was appointed dean of faculty; I, who was Dean Silk’s first academic appointment. Much too tardily, I stand before you to censure myself for having failed my friend and patron, and to do what I can—again, much too tardily—to begin to attempt to right the wrong, the grievous, the contemptible wrong, that was done to him by Athena College.

  “At the time of the alleged racist incident, I told Coleman, ‘I can’t be with you on this.’ I said it to him deliberately, though perhaps not entirely for the opportunistic, careerist, or cowardly reasons that he was so quick to assume to be mine. I thought then that I could do more for Coleman’s cause by working behind the scenes to defuse the opposition than by openly allying myself with him in public, and being rendered impotent, as I surely would have been, by that all-purpose, know-nothing weapon of a sobriquet, ‘Uncle Tom.’ I thought that I could be the voice of reason from within—rather than without—the ranks of those whose outrage over Coleman’s alleged racist remark provoked them into unfairly defaming him and the college for what were the failures of two students. I thought that if I was shrewd enough and patient enough I could cool the passions, if not of the most extreme of his adversaries, then of those thoughtful, level-headed members of our local African American community and their white sympathizers, whose antagonism was never really more than reflexive and ephemeral. I thought that, in time—and, I hoped, in less time rather than more—I could initiate a dialogue between Coleman and his accusers that would lead to the promulgation of a statement identifying the nature of the misunderstanding that had given rise to the conflict, and thereby bring this regrettable incident to something like a just conclusion.

  “I was wrong. I should never have said to my friend, ‘I can’t be with you on this.’ I should have said, ‘I must be with you.’ I should have worked to oppose his enemies not insidiously and misguidedly from within but forthrightly and honestly from without—from where he could have taken heart at the expression of support instead of being left to nurse the crushing sense of abandonment that festered into the wound that led to his alienation from his colleagues, to his resignation from the college, and from there to the self-destructive isolation which, I am convinced—horrible as believing this is for me—led not too circuitously to his dying as tragically, wastefully, and unnecessarily as he did in that car the other night. I should have spoken up to say what I want to say now in the presence of his former colleagues, associates, and staff, and to say, especially, in the presence of his children, Jeff and Mike, who are here from California, and Mark and Lisa, who are here from New York—and to say, as the senior African American member of the Athena faculty:

  “Coleman Silk never once deviated in any way from totally fair conduct in his dealings with each and every one of his students for as long as he served Athena College. Never.

  “The alleged misconduct never took place. Never.

  “What he was forced to undergo—the accusations, the interviews, the inquiry—remains a blight on the integrity of this institution to this day, and on this day, more than ever. Here, in the New England most identified, historically, with the American individualist’s resistance to the coercions of a censorious community—Hawthorne, Melville, and Thoreau come to mind—an American individualist who did not think that the weightiest thing in life were the rules, an American individualist who refused to leave unexamined the orthodoxies of the customary and of the established truth, an American individualist who did not always live in compliance with majority standards of decorum and taste—an American individualist par excellence was once again so savagely traduced by friends and neighbors that he lived estranged from them until his death, robbed of his moral authority by their moral stupidity. Yes, it is we, the morally stupid censorious community, who have abased ourselves in having so shamefully besmirched Coleman Silk’s good name. I speak particularly of those like myself, who knew from close contact the depth of his commitment to Athena and the purity of his dedication as an educator, and who, out of whatever deluded motive, betrayed h
im nonetheless. I say it again: we betrayed him. Betrayed Coleman and betrayed Iris.

  “Iris’s death, the death of Iris Silk, coming in the midst of . . .”

  Two seats to my left, Smoky Hollenbeck’s wife was in tears, as were several other of the women nearby. Smoky was himself leaning forward, his forehead resting lightly on his two hands, which were entwined at the top of the pew in front of us in a vaguely ecclesiastical manner. I suppose he wanted me or his wife or whoever else might be watching him to believe that the injustice done to Coleman Silk was unendurable to think about. I supposed he was meant to appear to be overcome by compassion, yet knowing what I did about all that he concealed, as a model family man, of the Dionysian substrata of his life, it was an inference hard to swallow.

  But, Smoky aside, the attention, the concentration, the acuity of the concentration focused on Herb Keble’s every word seemed genuine enough for me to imagine that any number of people present would be finding it difficult not to lament what Coleman Silk had unfairly endured. I wondered, of course, if Keble’s rationalization for why he hadn’t stood beside Coleman at the time of the spooks incident was of his own devising or one that the Silk boys had come up with so as to enable him to do as they demanded while still saving face. I wondered whether the rationalization could be an accurate description of his motives when he’d said the words that Coleman bitterly repeated to me so many times: “I can’t be with you on this.”