The Human Stain

by Philip Roth

  Why was I unwilling to believe this man? Because, by a certain age, one’s mistrust is so exquisitely refined that one is unwilling to believe anybody? Surely, two years back, when he was silent and didn’t rise to Coleman’s defense, it was for the reason that people are always silent: because it is in their interest to be silent. Expediency is not a motive that is steeped in darkness. Herb Keble was just another one out trying to kosher the record, albeit in a bold, even an interesting way, by taking the guilt upon himself, but the fact remained that he couldn’t act when it mattered, and so I thought, on Coleman’s behalf, Fuck him.

  When Keble came down from the podium and, before returning to his seat, stopped to shake the hands of each of Coleman’s children, that simple gesture served only to intensify the almost violent passion aroused by his speech. What would happen next? For a moment there was nothing. Just the silence and the coffin and the emotional intoxication of the crowd. Then Lisa stood up, mounted the few steps to the podium, and, from the lectern, said, “The last movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony.” That was it. They pulled out all the stops. They played Mahler.

  Well, you can’t listen to Mahler sometimes. When he picks you up to shake you, he doesn’t stop. By the end of it, we were all crying.

  Speaking only for myself, I don’t think anything could have torn me apart like that other than hearing Steena Palsson’s rendition of “The Man I Love” as she’d sung it from the foot of Coleman’s Sullivan Street bed in 1948.

  The three-block walk to the cemetery was memorable largely for its seemingly not having taken place. One moment we were immobilized by the infinite vulnerability of Mahler’s adagio movement, by that simplicity that is not artifice, that is not a strategy, that unfolds, it almost seems, with the accumulated pace of life and with all of life’s unwillingness to end . . . one moment we were immobilized by that exquisite juxtaposition of grandeur and intimacy that begins in the quiet, singing, restrained intensity of the strings and then rises in surges through the massive false ending that leads to the true, the extended, the monumental ending . . . one moment we were immobilized by the swelling, soaring, climaxing, and subsiding of an elegiac orgy that rolls on and on and on with a determined pace that never changes, giving way, then coming back like pain or longing that won’t disappear . . . one moment we were, at Mahler’s mounting insistence, inside the coffin with Coleman, attuned to all the terror of endlessness and to the passionate desire to escape death, and then somehow or other sixty or seventy of us had got ourselves over to the cemetery to watch as he was buried, a simple enough ritual, as sensible a solution to the problem as any ever devised but one that is never entirely comprehensible. You have to see it to believe it each time.

  I doubted that most people had been planning to accompany the body all the way to the grave. But the Silk children had a flair for drawing out and sustaining pathos, and this, I assumed, was why there were so many of us crowding around as close as we could to the hole that was to be Coleman’s eternal home, as though eager almost to crawl in there and take his place, to offer ourselves up as surrogates, as substitutes, as sacrificial offerings, if that would magically allow for the resumption of the exemplary life that, by Herb Keble’s own admission, had been as good as stolen from Coleman two years back.

  Coleman was to be buried beside Iris. The dates on her headstone read 1932-1996. His would read 1926-1998. How direct those numbers are. And how little they connote of what went on.

  I heard the Kaddish begin before I realized that somebody there was chanting it. Momentarily I imagined that it must be drifting in from another part of the cemetery, when it was coming from the other side of the grave, where Mark Silk—the youngest son, the angry son, the son who, like his twin sister, bore the strongest resemblance to his father—was standing alone, with the book in his hand and the yarmulke on his head, and chanting in a soft, tear-filled voice the familiar Hebrew prayer.

  Yisgadal, v’yiskadash . . .

  Most people in America, including myself and probably Mark’s siblings, don’t know what these words mean, but nearly everyone recognizes the sobering message they bring: a Jew is dead. Another Jew is dead. As though death were not a consequence of life but a consequence of having been a Jew.

  When Mark had finished, he shut the book and then, having induced a grim serenity in everyone else, was himself overcome by hysteria. That was how Coleman’s funeral ended—with all of us immobilized this time by watching Mark go to pieces, helplessly flailing his arms in the air and, through a wide-open mouth, wailing away. That wild sound of lamentation, older even than the prayer he’d uttered, rose in intensity until, when he saw his sister rushing toward him with arms outstretched, he turned to her his contorted Silk face, and in sheer childlike astonishment cried, “We’re never going to see him again!”

  I did not think my most generous thought. Generous thoughts were hard to come by that day. I thought, What difference should that make? You weren’t that keen on seeing him when he was here.

  Mark Silk apparently had imagined that he was going to have his father around to hate forever. To hate and hate and hate and hate, and then perhaps, in his own good time, after the scenes of accusation had reached their crescendo and he had flogged Coleman to within an inch of his life with his knot of filial grievance, to forgive. He thought Coleman was going to stay here till the whole play could be performed, as though he and Coleman had been set down not in life but on the southern hillside of the Athenian acropolis, in an outdoor theater sacred to Dionysus, where, before the eyes of ten thousand spectators, the dramatic unities were once rigorously observed and the great cathartic cycle was enacted annually. The human desire for a beginning, a middle, and an end—and an end appropriate in magnitude to that beginning and middle—is realized nowhere so thoroughly as in the plays that Coleman taught at Athena College. But outside the classical tragedy of the fifth century B.C., the expectation of completion, let alone of a just and perfect consummation, is a foolish illusion for an adult to hold.

  People began to drift away. I saw the Hollenbecks move along the path between the gravestones and head toward the nearby street, the husband’s arm around his wife’s shoulder, shepherding her protectively away. I saw the young lawyer, Nelson Primus, who had represented Coleman during the spooks incident, and with him a pregnant young woman, a woman weeping, who must have been his wife. I saw Mark with his sister, still having to be consoled by her, and I saw Jeff and Michael, who had run this whole operation so expertly, talking quietly to Herb Keble a few yards from where I was standing. I couldn’t myself go because of Les Farley. Away from this cemetery he muscled on undisturbed, uncharged with any crime, manufacturing that crude reality all his own, a brute of a being colliding with whomever he liked however he liked for all the inner reasons that justified anything he wanted to do.

  Sure, I know there’s no completion, no just and perfect consummation, but that didn’t mean that, standing just feet from where the coffin rested in its freshly dug pit, I wasn’t obstinately thinking that this ending, even if it were construed as having permanently reestablished Coleman’s place as an admired figure in the college’s history, would not suffice. Too much truth was still concealed.

  I meant by this the truth about his death and not the truth that was to come to light a moment or two later. There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they’ve got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies. Caught between, I thought. Denounced by the high-minded, reviled by the righteous—then exterminated by the criminally crazed. Excommunicated by the saved, the elect, the ever-present evangelists of the mores of the moment, then polished off by a demon of ruthlessness. Both human exigencies found their conjunction in him. The pure and the impure, in all their vehemence, on the move, akin in their common need of the enemy. Whipsawed, I thought. Whipsawed by the inimical teeth of this world. By the ant
agonism that is the world.

  One woman, by herself, had remained as close to the open grave as I was. She was silent and did not look to be crying. She didn’t even appear to be quite there—that is to say, in the cemetery, at a funeral. She could have been on a street corner, waiting patiently for the next bus. It was the way she was holding her handbag primly in front of her that made me think of someone who was already prepared to pay her fare, and then to be carried off to wherever she was going. I could tell she wasn’t white only by the thrust of her jaw and the cast of her mouth—by something suggestively protrusive shaping the lower half of her face—and, too, by the stiff texture of her hairdo. Her complexion was no darker than a Greek’s or a Moroccan’s, and perhaps I might not have added one clue to another to matter-of-factly register her as black, if it wasn’t that Herb Keble was among the very few who hadn’t yet headed for home. Because of her age—sixty-five, maybe seventy—I thought she must be Keble’s wife. No wonder, then, that she looked so strangely transfixed. It could not have been easy to listen to her husband publicly cast himself (under the sway of whatever motive) as Athena’s scapegoat. I could understand how she would have a lot to think about, and how assimilating it might take more time than the funeral had allowed. Her thoughts had still to be with what he had said back in Rishanger Chapel. That’s where she was.

  I was wrong.

  As I turned to leave, she happened to turn too, and so, with only a foot or two between us, we were facing each other.

  “My name’s Nathan Zuckerman,” I said. “I was a friend of Coleman’s near the end of his life.”

  “How do you do,” she replied.

  “I believe your husband changed everything today.”

  She did not look at me as if I were mistaken, though I was. Nor did she ignore me, decide to be rid of me, and proceed on her way. Nor did she look as if she didn’t know what to do, though that she was in a quandary had to have been so. A friend of Coleman’s at the end of his life? Given her true identity, how could she have said nothing more than “I’m not Mrs. Keble” and walked off?

  But all she did was to stand there, opposite me, expressionless, so profoundly struck dumb by the day’s events and its revelations that not to understand who she was to Coleman would, at that moment, have been impossible. It wasn’t a resemblance to Coleman that registered, and registered quickly, in rapid increments, as with a distant star seen through a lens that you’ve steadily magnified to the correct intensity. What I saw—when, at long last, I did see, see all the way, clear to Coleman’s secret—was the facial resemblance to Lisa, who was even more her aunt’s niece than she was her father’s daughter.

  It was from Ernestine—back at my house in the hours after the funeral—that I learned most of what I know about Coleman’s growing up in East Orange: about Dr. Fensterman trying to get Coleman to take a dive on his final exams so as to let Bert Fensterman slip in ahead of him as valedictorian; about how Mr. Silk found the East Orange house in 1926, the small frame house that Ernestine still occupied and that was sold to her father “by a couple,” Ernestine explained to me, “who were mad at the people next door and so were determined to sell it to colored to spite them.” (“See, you can tell the generation I am,” she said to me later that day. “I say ‘colored’ and ‘Negro.’”) She told me about how her father had lost the optician shop during the Depression, how it took time for him to get over the loss—“I’m not sure,” she said, “he ever did”—and how he got a job as a waiter on the dining car and worked for the railroad for the rest of his life. She talked about how Mr. Silk called English “the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens,” and saw to it that the children learned not just to speak properly but to think logically, to classify, to analyze, to describe, to enumerate, to learn not only English but Latin and Greek; how he took them to the New York museums and to see Broadway plays; and how, when he found out about Coleman’s secret career as an amateur boxer for the Newark Boys Club, he had told him, in that voice that radiated authority without ever having to be raised, “If I were your father I would say, ‘You won last night? Good. Now you can retire undefeated.’” From Ernestine I learned how Doc Chizner, my own boxing instructor during the year I took his after-school class down in Newark, had, earlier, in East Orange, laid claim to young Coleman’s talent after Coleman left the Boys Club, how Doc had wanted him to box for the University of Pittsburgh, could have gotten him a scholarship to Pitt as a white boxer, but how Coleman had enrolled at Howard because that was their father’s plan. How their father dropped dead while serving dinner on the train one night, and how Coleman had immediately quit Howard to join the navy, and to join as a white man. How after the navy he moved to Greenwich Village to go to NYU. How he brought that white girl home one Sunday, the pretty girl from Minnesota. How the biscuits burned that day, so preoccupied were they all with not saying the wrong thing. How, luckily for everyone, Walt, who’d begun teaching down in Asbury Park, hadn’t been able to drive up for dinner, how things just went along so wonderfully that Coleman could have had nothing to complain about. Ernestine told me how gracious Coleman’s mother had been to the girl. Steena. How thoughtful and kind they’d been to Steena—and Steena to them. How hardworking their mother was always, how, after their father died, she had risen, by virtue of merit alone, to become the first colored head nurse on the surgical floor of a Newark hospital. And how she had adored her Coleman, how there was nothing Coleman could do to destroy his mother’s love. Even the decision to spend the rest of his life pretending his mother had been somebody else, a mother he’d never had and who had never existed, even that couldn’t free Mrs. Silk of him. And after Coleman had come home to tell his mother he was marrying Iris Gittelman and that she would never be mother-in-law to her daughter-in-law or grandmother to her grandchildren, when Walt forbade Coleman from ever contacting the family again, how Walt then made it clear to their mother—and employing the same steely authority by which his father had governed them—that she was not to contact Coleman either.

  “I know he meant the best,” Ernestine said. “Walt thought this was the only way to protect Mother from being hurt. From being hurt by Coleman every time there was a birthday, every time there was a holiday, every time it was Christmas. He believed that if the line of communication remained open, Coleman was going to break Mother’s heart a thousand times over, exactly the way he did it that day. Walt was enraged at Coleman for coming over to East Orange without any preparation, without warning any of us, and to tell an elderly woman, a widow like that, just what the law was going to be. Fletcher, my husband, always had a psychological reason for Walt’s doing what he did. But I don’t think Fletcher was right. I don’t think Walt was ever truly jealous of Coleman’s place in Mother’s heart. I don’t accept that. I think he was insulted and flared up—not just for Mother but for all of us. Walt was the political member of the family; of course he was going to get mad. I myself wasn’t mad that way and I never have been, but I can understand Walter. Every year, on Coleman’s birthday, I phoned Athena to talk to him. Right down to three days ago. That was his birthday. His seventy-second birthday. I would think that when he got killed, he was driving home from his birthday dinner. I phoned to wish him a happy birthday. There was no answer and so I called the next day. And that’s how I found out he was dead. Somebody there at the house picked up the phone and told me. I realize now that it was one of my nephews. I only began calling the house after Coleman’s wife died and he left the college and was living alone. Before that, I phoned the office. Never told anybody about it. Didn’t see any reason to. Phoned on his birthdays. Phoned when Mother died. Phoned when I got married. Phoned when I had my son. I phoned him when my husband died. We always had a good talk together. He always wanted to hear the news, even about Walter and his promotions. And then each of the times that Iris gave birth, with Jeffrey, with Michael, then with the twins, I got a call from Coleman. He’d call me at school. That was always a great trial for him. He was testing
fate with so many kids. Because they were genetically linked to the past he had repudiated, there was always the chance, you see, that they might be a throwback in some distinguishing way. He worried a lot about that. It could have happened—it sometimes does happen. But he went ahead and had them anyway. That was a part of the plan too. The plan to lead a full and regular and productive life. Still, I believe that, in those first years especially, and certainly whenever a new child came along, Coleman suffered for his decision. Nothing ever escaped Coleman’s attention, and that held true for his own feelings. He could cut himself away from us, but not from his feelings. And that was most true where the children were concerned. I think he himself came to believe that there was something awful about withholding something so crucial to what a person is, that it was their birthright to know their genealogy. And there was something dangerous too. Think of the havoc he could create in their lives if their children were born recognizably Negro. So far he has been lucky, and that goes for the two grandchildren out in California. But think of his daughter, who isn’t married yet. Suppose one day she has a white husband, as more than likely she will, and she gives birth to a Negroid child, as she can—as she may. How does she explain this? And what will her husband assume? He will assume that another man fathered her child. A black man at that. Mr. Zuckerman, it was frighteningly cruel for Coleman not to tell his children. That is not Walter’s judgment—that is mine. If Coleman was intent on keeping his race his secret, then the price he should have paid was not to have children. And he knew that. He had to know that. Instead, he has planted an unexploded bomb. And that bomb seemed to me always in the background when he talked about them. Especially when he talked about, not the twin girl, but the twin boy, Mark, the boy he had all the trouble with. He said to me that Markie probably hated him for his own reasons, yet it was as though he had figured out the truth. ‘I got there what I produced,’ he said, ‘even if for the wrong reason. Markie doesn’t even have the luxury of hating his father for the real thing. I robbed him,’ Coleman said, ‘of that part of his birthright, too.’ And I said, ‘But he might not have hated you at all for that, Coleman.’ And he said, ‘You don’t follow me. Not that he would have hated me for being black. That’s not what I mean by the real thing. I mean that he would have hated me for never telling him and because he had a right to know.’ And then, because there was so much there to be misunderstood, we just let the subject drop. But it was clear that he could never forget that there was a lie at the foundation of his relationship to his children, a terrible lie, and that Markie had intuited it, somehow understood that the children, who carried their father’s identity in their genes and who would pass that identity on to their children, at least genetically, and perhaps even physically, tangibly, never had the complete knowledge of who they are and who they were. This is somewhat in the nature of speculation, but I sometimes think that Coleman saw Markie as the punishment for what he had done to his own mother. Though that,” Ernestine added, scrupulously, “is not something he ever said. As for Walter, what I was getting at about Walter is that all he was trying to do was to fill our father’s shoes by making sure that Mother’s heart would not be broken time and again.”