The Human Stain

by Philip Roth

  After they were each buried four months later, I would remember that milking session as though it were a theatrical performance in which I had played the part of a walk-on, an extra, which indeed I now am. Night after night, I could not sleep because I couldn’t stop being up there on the stage with the two leading actors and the chorus of cows, observing this scene, flawlessly performed by the entire ensemble, of an enamored old man watching at work the cleaning woman–farmhand who is secretly his paramour: a scene of pathos and hypnosis and sexual subjugation in which everything the woman does with those cows, the way she handles them, touches them, services them, talks to them, his greedy fascination appropriates; a scene in which a man taken over by a force so long suppressed in him that it had all but been extinguished revealed, before my eyes, the resurgence of its stupefying power. It was something, I suppose, like watching Aschenbach feverishly watching Tadzio—his sexual longing brought to a boil by the anguishing fact of mortality—except that we weren’t in a luxury hotel on the Venice Lido nor were we characters in a novel written in German or even, back then, in one written in English: it was high summer and we were in a barn in the Northeast of our country, in America in the year of America’s presidential impeachment, and, as yet, we were no more novelistic than the animals were mythological or stuffed. The light and heat of the day (that blessing), the unchanging quiet of each cow’s life as it paralleled that of all the others, the enamored old man studying the suppleness of the efficient, energetic woman, the adulation rising in him, his looking as though nothing more stirring had ever before happened to him, and, too, my own willing waiting, my own fascination with their extensive disparity as human types, with the nonuniformity, the variability, the teeming irregularity of sexual arrangements—and with the injunction upon us, human and bovine, the highly differentiated and the all but undifferentiated, to live, not merely to endure but to live, to go on taking, giving, feeding, milking, acknowledging wholeheartedly, as the enigma that it is, the pointless meaningfulness of living—all was recorded as real by tens of thousands of minute impressions. The sensory fullness, the copiousness, the abundant—superabundant—detail of life, which is the rhapsody. And Coleman and Faunia, who are now dead, deep in the flow of the unexpected, day by day, minute by minute, themselves details in that superabundance.

  Nothing lasts, and yet nothing passes, either. And nothing passes just because nothing lasts.

  The trouble with Les Farley began later that night, when Coleman heard something stirring in the bushes outside his house, decided it wasn’t a deer or a raccoon, got up from the kitchen table where he and Faunia had just finished their spaghetti dinner, and, from the kitchen door, in the summer evening half-light, caught sight of a man running across the field back of the house and toward the woods. “Hey! You! Stop!” Coleman shouted, but the man neither stopped nor looked back and disappeared quickly into the trees. This wasn’t the first time in recent months that Coleman believed he was being watched by someone hiding within inches of the house, but previously it had been later in the evening and too dark for him to know for sure whether he had been alerted by the movements of a peeping Tom or of an animal. And previously he had always been alone. This was the first time Faunia was there, and it was she who, without having to see the man’s silhouette cutting across the field, identified the trespasser as her ex-husband.

  After the divorce, she told Coleman, Farley had spied on her all the time, but in the months following the death of the two children, when he was accusing her of having killed them by her negligence, he was frighteningly unrelenting. Twice he popped up out of nowhere—once in the parking lot of a supermarket, once when she was at a gas station—and screamed out of the pickup window, “Murdering whore! Murdering bitch! You murdered my kids, you murdering bitch!” There were many mornings when, on her way to the college, she’d look in the rearview mirror and there would be his pickup truck and, back of the windshield, his face with the lips mouthing, “You murdered my kids.” Sometimes he’d be on the road behind her when she was driving home from the college. She was then still living in the unburned half of the bungalow-garage where the children had been asphyxiated in the heater fire, and it was out of fear of him that she’d moved from there to a room in Seeley Falls and then, after a foiled suicide attempt, into the room at the dairy farm, where the two owners and their small children were almost always around and the danger was not so great of her being accosted by him. Farley’s pickup appeared in her rearview mirror less frequently after the second move, and then, when there was no sign of him for months, she hoped he might be gone for good. But now, Faunia was sure of it, he’d somehow found out about Coleman and, enraged again with everything that had always enraged him about her, he was back at his crazy spying, hiding outside Coleman’s house to see what she was doing there. What they were doing there.

  That night, when Faunia got into her car—the old Chevy that Coleman preferred her to park, out of sight, inside his barn—Coleman decided to follow close behind her in his own car for the six miles until she was safely onto the dirt driveway that led past the cow barn to the farmhouse. And then all the way back to his own house he looked to see if anyone was behind him. At home, he walked from the car shed to the house swinging a tire iron in one hand, swinging it in all directions, hoping in that way to keep at bay anyone lurking in the dark.

  By the next morning, after eight hours on his bed contending with his worries, Coleman had decided against lodging a complaint with the state police. Because Farley’s identity couldn’t be positively established, the police would be unable to do anything about him anyway, and should it leak out that Coleman had contacted them, his call would have served only to corroborate the gossip already circulating about the former dean and the Athena janitor. Not that, after his sleepless night, Coleman could resign himself to doing nothing about everything: following breakfast, he phoned his lawyer, Nelson Primus, and that afternoon went down to Athena to consult with him about the anonymous letter and there, overriding Primus’s suggestion that he forget about it, prevailed on him to write, as follows, to Delphine Roux at the college: “Dear Ms. Roux: I represent Coleman Silk. Several days ago, you sent an anonymous letter to Mr. Silk that is offensive, harassing, and denigrating to Mr. Silk. The content of your letter reads: ‘Everyone knows you’re sexually exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age.’ You have, unfortunately, interjected yourself and become a participant in something that is not your business. In doing that, you have violated Mr. Silk’s legal rights and are subject to suit.”

  A few days later Primus received three curt sentences back from Delphine Roux’s lawyer. The middle sentence, flatly denying the charge that Delphine Roux was the author of the anonymous letter, Coleman underlined in red. “None of the assertions in your letter are correct,” her lawyer had written to Primus, “and, indeed, they are defamatory.”

  Immediately Coleman got from Primus the name of a certified documents examiner in Boston, a handwriting analyst who did forensic work for private corporations, U.S. government agencies, and the state, and the next day, he himself drove the three hours to Boston to deliver into the hands of the documents examiner his samples of Delphine Roux’s handwriting along with the anonymous letter and its envelope. He received the findings in the mail the next week. “At your request,” read the report, “I examined and compared copies of known handwriting of Delphine Roux with a questioned anonymous note and an envelope addressed to Coleman Silk. You asked for a determination of the authorship of the handwriting on the questioned documents. My examination covers handwriting characteristics such as slant, spacing, letter formation, line quality, pressure pattern, proportion, letter height relationship, connections and initials and terminal stroke formation. Based on the documents submitted, it is my professional opinion that the hand that penned all the known standards as Delphine Roux is one and the same hand that penned the questioned anonymous note and envelope. Sincerely, Douglas Gordon, CDE.” When Coleman turned the exa
miner’s report over to Nelson Primus, with instructions to forward a copy to Delphine Roux’s lawyer, Primus no longer put up an argument, however distressing it was to him to see Coleman nearly as enraged as he’d been back during the crisis with the college.

  In all, eight days had passed since the evening he’d seen Farley fleeing into the woods, eight days during which he had determined it would be best if Faunia stayed away and they communicated by phone. So as not to invite spying on either of them from any quarter, he didn’t go out to the farm to fetch his raw milk but stayed at home as much as he could and kept a careful watch there, especially after dark, to determine if anyone was snooping around. Faunia, in turn, was told to keep a lookout of her own at the dairy farm and to check her rearview mirror when she drove anywhere. “It’s as though we’re a menace to public safety,” she told him, laughing her laugh. “No, public health,” he replied—“we’re in noncompliance with the board of health.”

  By the end of the eight days, when he had been able at least to confirm Delphine Roux’s identification as the letter writer if not yet Farley’s as the trespasser, Coleman decided to decide that he’d done everything within his power to defend against all of this disagreeable and provocative meddling. When Faunia phoned him that afternoon during her lunch break and asked, “Is the quarantine over?” he at last felt free of enough of his anxiety—or decided to decide to be—to give the all-clear sign.

  As he expected her to show up around seven that evening, he swallowed a Viagra tablet at six and, after pouring himself a glass of wine, walked outside with the phone to settle into a lawn chair and telephone his daughter. He and Iris had reared four children: two sons now into their forties, both college professors of science, married and with children and living on the West Coast, and the twins, Lisa and Mark, unmarried, in their late thirties, and both living in New York. All but one of the Silk offspring tried to get up to the Berkshires to see their father three or four times a year and stayed in touch every month by phone. The exception was Mark, who’d been at odds with Coleman all his life and sporadically cut himself off completely.

  Coleman was calling Lisa because he realized that it was more than a month and maybe even two since he’d spoken to her. Perhaps he was merely surrendering to a transient feeling of loneliness that would have passed when Faunia arrived, but whatever his motive, he could have had no inkling, before the phone call, of what was in store. Surely the last thing he was looking for was yet more opposition, least of all from that child whose voice alone—soft, melodic, girlish still, despite twelve difficult years as a teacher on the Lower East Side—he could always depend on to soothe him, to calm him, sometimes to do even more: to infatuate him with this daughter all over again. He was doing probably what most any aging parent will do when, for any of a hundred reasons, he or she looks to a long-distance phone call for a momentary reminder of the old terms of reference. The unbroken, unequivocal history of tenderness between Coleman and Lisa made of her the least affrontable person still close to him.

  Some three years earlier—back before the spooks incident—when Lisa was wondering if she hadn’t made an enormous mistake by giving up classroom teaching to become a Reading Recovery teacher, Coleman had gone down to New York and stayed several days to see how bad off she was. Iris was alive then, very much alive, but it wasn’t Iris’s enormous energy Lisa had wanted—it wasn’t to be put into motion the way Iris could put you in motion that she wanted—rather, it was the former dean of faculty with his orderly, determined way of untangling a mess. Iris was sure to tell her to forge ahead, leaving Lisa overwhelmed and feeling trapped; with him there was the possibility that, if Lisa made a compelling case against her own persevering, he would tell her that, if she wished, she could cut her losses and quit—which would, in turn, give her the gumption to go on.

  He’d not only spent the first night sitting up late in her living room and listening to her woes, but the next day he’d gone to the school to see what it was that was burning her out. And he saw, all right: in the morning, first thing, four back-to-back half-hour sessions, each with a six- or seven-year-old who was among the lowest-achieving students in the first and second grades, and after that, for the rest of the day, forty-five-minute sessions with groups of eight kids whose reading skills were no better than those of the one-on-one kids but for whom there wasn’t yet enough trained staff in the intensive program.

  “The regular class sizes are too big,” Lisa told him, “and so the teachers can’t reach these kids. I was a classroom teacher. The kids who are struggling—it’s three out of thirty. Three or four. It’s not too bad. You have the progress of all the other kids helping you along. Instead of stopping and giving the hopeless kids what they need, teachers just sort of shuffle them through, thinking—or pretending—they are moving with the continuum. They’re shuffled to the second grade, the third grade, the fourth grade, and then they seriously fail. But here it’s only these kids, the ones who can’t be reached and don’t get reached, and because I’m very emotional about my kids and teaching, it affects my whole being—my whole world. And the school, the leadership—Dad, it’s not good. You have a principal who doesn’t have a vision of what she wants, and you have a mishmash of people doing what they think is best. Which is not necessarily what is best. When I came here twelve years ago it was great. The principal was really good. She turned the whole school around. But now we’ve gone through twenty-one teachers in four years. Which is a lot. We’ve lost a lot of good people. Two years ago I went into Reading Recovery because I just got burnt out in the classroom. Ten years of that day in and day out. I couldn’t take any more.”

  He let her talk, said little, and, because she was but a few years from forty, suppressed easily enough the impulse to take in his arms this battered-by-reality daughter as he imagined she suppressed the same impulse with the six-year-old kid who couldn’t read. Lisa had all of Iris’s intensity without Iris’s authority, and for someone whose life existed only for others—incurable altruism was Lisa’s curse—she was, as a teacher, perpetually hovering at the edge of depletion. There was generally a demanding boyfriend as well from whom she could not withhold kindness, and for whom she turned herself inside out, and for whom, unfailingly, her uncontaminated ethical virginity became a great big bore. Lisa was always morally in over her head, but without either the callousness to disappoint the need of another or the strength to disillusion herself about her strength. This was why he knew she would never quit the Reading Recovery program, and also why such paternal pride as he had in her was not only weighted with fear but at times tinged with an impatience bordering on contempt.

  “Thirty kids you have to take care of, the different levels that the kids come in at, the different experiences they’ve had, and you’ve got to make it all work,” she was telling him. “Thirty diverse kids from thirty diverse backgrounds learning thirty diverse ways. That’s a lot of management. That’s a lot of paperwork. That’s a lot of everything. But that is still nothing compared to this. Sure, even with this, even in Reading Recovery, I have days when I think, Today I was good, but most days I want to jump out the window. I struggle a lot as to whether this is the right program for me. Because I’m very intense, in case you didn’t know. I want to do it the right way, and there is no right way—every kid is different and every kid is hopeless, and I’m supposed to go in there and make it all work. Of course everybody always struggles with the kids who can’t learn. What do you do with a kid who can’t read? Think of it—a kid who can’t read. It’s difficult, Daddy. Your ego gets a little caught up in it, you know.”

  Lisa, who contains within her so much concern, whose conscientiousness knows no ambivalence, who wishes to exist only to assist. Lisa the Undisillusionable, Lisa the Unspeakably Idealistic. Phone Lisa, he told himself, little imagining that he could ever elicit from this foolishly saintly child of his the tone of steely displeasure with which she received his call.

  “You don’t sound like yourself.”
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br />   “I’m fine,” she told him.

  “What’s wrong, Lisa?”

  “Nothing.”

  “How’s summer school? How’s teaching?”

  “Fine.”

  “And Josh?” The latest boyfriend.

  “Fine.”

  “How are your kids? What happened to the little one who couldn’t recognize the letter n? Did he ever get to level ten? The kid with all the n’s in his name—Hernando.”

  “Everything’s fine.”

  He then asked lightly, “Would you care to know how I am?”

  “I know how you are.”

  “Do you?”

  No answer.

  “What’s eating you, sweetheart?”

  “Nothing.” A “nothing,” the second one, that meant all too clearly, Don’t you sweetheart me.

  Something incomprehensible was happening. Who had told her? What they told her? As a high school kid and then in college after the war he had pursued the most demanding curriculum; as dean at Athena he had thrived on the difficulties of a taxing job; as the accused in the spooks incident he had never once weakened in fighting the false accusation against him; even his resignation from the college had been an act not of capitulation but of outraged protest, a deliberate manifestation of his unwavering contempt. But in all his years of holding his own against whatever the task or the setback or the shock, he had never—not even after Iris’s death—felt as stripped of all defenses as when Lisa, the embodiment of an almost mockable kindness, gathered up into that one word “nothing” all the harshness of feeling for which she had never before, in the whole of her life, found a deserving object.

  And then, even as Lisa’s “nothing” was exuding its awful meaning, Coleman saw a pickup truck moving along the blacktop road down from the house—rolling at a crawl a couple of yards forward, braking, very slowly rolling again, then braking again . . . Coleman came to his feet, started uncertainly across the mown grass, craning his head to get a look, and then, on the run, began to shout, “You! What are you up to! Hey!” But the pickup quickly increased its speed and was out of sight before Coleman could get near enough to discern anything of use to him about either driver or truck. As he didn’t know one make from another and, from where he’d wound up, couldn’t even tell if the truck was new or old, all that he came away with was its color, an indeterminate gray.