The Human Stain

by Philip Roth

  Within the four square miles of this residential flyspeck of a Jersey town of not quite seventy thousand people, as throughout the country during Coleman’s youth, there existed these rigid distinctions between classes and races sanctified by the church and legitimized by the schools. Yet on the Silks’ own modest tree-lined side street ordinary people needed not to be quite so responsible to God and the state as those whose vocation it was to maintain a human community, swimming pool and all, untainted by the impurities, and so the neighbors were on the whole friendly with the ultra-respectable, light-skinned Silks—Negroes, to be sure, but, in the words of one tolerant mother of a kindergarten playmate of Coleman’s, “people of a very pleasing shade, rather like eggnog”—even to the point of borrowing a tool or a ladder or helping to figure out what was wrong with the car when it wouldn’t start. The big apartment house at the corner remained all white until after the war. Then, in late 1945, when colored people began coming in at the Orange end of the street—the families of professional men mainly, of teachers, doctors, and dentists—there was a moving van outside the apartment building every day, and half the white tenants disappeared within months. But things soon settled down, and, though the landlord of the apartment building began renting to colored just in order to keep the place going, the whites who remained in the immediate neighborhood stayed around until they had a reason other than Negrophobia to leave.

  Go to work. And he rang the doorbell and pushed open the front door and called, “We’re here.”

  Walt had been unable to make it up that day from Asbury Park but there, coming out of the kitchen and into the hallway, were his mother and Ernestine. And here, in their house, was his girl. She may or may not have been what they were expecting. Coleman’s mother hadn’t asked. Since he’d unilaterally made his decision to join the navy as a white man, she hardly dared ask him anything, for fear of what she might hear. She was prone now, outside the hospital—where she had at last become the first colored head floor nurse of a Newark hospital, and without help from Dr. Fensterman—to let Walt take charge of her life and of the family altogether. No, she hadn’t asked anything about the girl, politely declined to know, and encouraged Ernestine not to inquire. Coleman, in turn, hadn’t told anyone anything, and so, fair-complexioned as fair could be, and—with her matching blue handbag and pumps, in her cotton floral shirtwaist dress and her little white gloves and pillbox hat—as immaculately trim and correct as any girl alive and young in 1950, here was Steena Palsson, Iceland and Denmark’s American progeny, of the bloodline going back to King Canute and beyond.

  He had done it, got it his own way, and no one so much as flinched. Talk about the ability of the species to adapt. Nobody groped for words, nobody went silent, nor did anyone begin jabbering a mile a minute. Commonplaces, yes, cornballisms, you bet—generalities, truisms, clichés aplenty. Steena hadn’t been raised along the banks of the Otter Tail River for nothing: if it was hackneyed, she knew how to say it. Chances were that if Coleman had gotten to blindfold the three women before introducing them and to keep them blindfolded throughout the day, their conversation would have had no weightier a meaning than it had while they smilingly looked one another right in the eye. Nor would it have embodied an intention other than the standard one: namely, I won’t say anything you can possibly take offense with if you won’t say anything I can take offense with. Respectability at any cost—that’s where the Palssons and the Silks were one.

  The point at which all three got addled was, strangely enough, while discussing Steena’s height. True, she was five eleven, nearly three full inches taller than Coleman and six inches taller than either his sister or his mother. But Coleman’s father had been six one and Walt was an inch and a half taller than that, so tallness in and of itself was nothing new to the family, even if, with Steena and Coleman, it was the woman who happened to be taller than the man. Yet those three inches of Steena’s—the distance, say, from her hairline to her eyebrows—caused a careening conversation about physical anomalies to veer precipitously close to disaster for some fifteen minutes before Coleman smelled something acrid and the women—the three of them—rushed for the kitchen to save the biscuits from going up in flames.

  After that, throughout dinner and until it was time for the young couple to return to New York, it was all unflagging rectitude, externally a Sunday like every nice family’s dream of total Sunday happiness and, consequently, strikingly in contrast with life, which, as experience had already taught even the youngest of these four, could not for half a minute running be purged of its inherent instability, let alone be beaten down into a predictable essence.

  Not until the train carrying Coleman and Steena back to New York pulled into Pennsylvania Station early that evening did Steena break down in tears.

  As far as he knew, until then she had been fast asleep with her head on his shoulder all the way from Jersey—virtually from the moment they had boarded at Brick Church Station sleeping off the exhaustion of the afternoon’s effort at which she had so excelled.

  “Steena—what is wrong?”

  “I can’t do it!” she cried, and, without another word of explanation, gasping, violently weeping, clutching her bag to her chest—and forgetting her hat, which was in his lap, where he’d been holding it while she slept—she raced alone from the train as though from an attacker and did not phone him or try ever to see him again.

  It was four years later, in 1954, that they nearly collided outside Grand Central Station and stopped to take each other’s hand and to talk just long enough to stir up the original wonder they’d awakened in each other at twenty-two and eighteen and then to walk on, crushed by the certainty that nothing as statistically spectacular as this chance meeting could possibly happen again. He was married by then, an expectant father, in the city for the day from his job as a classics instructor at Adelphi, and she was working in an ad agency down the street on Lexington Avenue, still single, still pretty, but womanly now, very much a smartly dressed New Yorker and clearly someone with whom the trip to East Orange might have ended on a different note if only it had taken place further down the line.

  The way it might have ended—the conclusion against which reality had decisively voted—was all he could think about. Stunned by how little he’d gotten over her and she’d gotten over him, he walked away understanding, as outside his reading in classical Greek drama he’d never had to understand before, how easily life can be one thing rather than another and how accidentally a destiny is made . . . on the other hand, how accidental fate may seem when things can never turn out other than they do. That is, he walked away understanding nothing, knowing he could understand nothing, though with the illusion that he would have metaphysically understood something of enormous importance about this stubborn determination of his to become his own man if . . . if only such things were understandable.

  The charming two-page letter she sent the next week, care of the college, about how incredibly good he’d been at “swooping” their first time together in his Sullivan Street room—“swooping, almost like birds do when they fly over land or sea and spy something moving, something bursting with life, and dive down . . . and seize upon it”—began, “Dear Coleman, I was very happy to see you in New York. Brief as our meeting was, after I saw you I felt an autumnal sadness, perhaps because the six years since we first met make it wrenchingly obvious how many days of my life are ‘over.’ You look very good, and I’m glad you’re happy . . .” and ended in a languid, floating finale of seven little sentences and a wistful closing that, after numerous rereadings, he took as the measure of her regret for her loss, a veiled admission of remorse as well, poignantly signaling to him a subaudible apology: “Well, that’s it. That’s enough. I shouldn’t even bother you. I promise I won’t ever again. Take care. Take care. Take care. Very fondly, Steena.”

  He never threw the letter away, and when he happened upon it in his files and, in the midst of whatever else he was doing, paused to look it over—having
otherwise forgotten it for some five or six years—he thought what he thought out on the street that day after lightly kissing her cheek and saying goodbye to Steena forever: that had she married him—as he’d wanted her to—she would have known everything—as he had wanted her to—and what followed with his family, with hers, with their own children, would have been different from what it was with Iris. What happened with his mother and Walt could as easily never have occurred. Had Steena said fine, he would have lived another life.

  I can’t do it. There was wisdom in that, an awful lot of wisdom for a young girl, not the kind one ordinarily has at only twenty. But that’s why he’d fallen for her—because she had the wisdom that is solid, thinking-for-yourself common sense. If she hadn’t . . . but if she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have been Steena, and he wouldn’t have wanted her as a wife.

  He thought the same useless thoughts—useless to a man of no great talent like himself, if not to Sophocles: how accidentally a fate is made . . . or how accidental it all may seem when it is inescapable.

  As she first portrayed herself and her origins to Coleman, Iris Gittelman had grown up willful, clever, furtively rebellious—secretly plotting, from the second grade on, how to escape her oppressive surroundings—in a Passaic household rumbling with hatred for every form of social oppression, particularly the authority of the rabbis and their impinging lies. Her Yiddish-speaking father, as she characterized him, was such a thoroughgoing heretical anarchist that he hadn’t even had Iris’s two older brothers circumcised, nor had her parents bothered to acquire a marriage license or to submit to a civil ceremony. They considered themselves husband and wife, claimed to be American, even called themselves Jews, these two uneducated immigrant atheists who spat on the ground when a rabbi walked by. But they called themselves what they called themselves freely, without asking permission or seeking approval from what her father contemptuously described as the hypocritical enemies of everything that was natural and good—namely, officialdom, those illegitimately holding the power. On the cracking, filth-caked wall over the soda fountain of the family candy store on Myrtle Avenue—a cluttered shop so small, she said, “you couldn’t bury the five of us there side by side”—hung two framed pictures, one of Sacco, the other of Vanzetti, photographs torn from the rotogravure section of the newspaper. Every August 22—the anniversary of the day in 1927 when Massachusetts executed the two anarchists for murders Iris and her brothers were taught to believe neither man had committed—business was suspended and the family retreated upstairs to the tiny, dim apartment whose lunatic disorder exceeded even the store’s, so as to observe a day of fasting. This was a ritual Iris’s father had, like a cult leader, dreamed up all on his own, modeling it wackily on the Jewish Day of Atonement. Her father had no real ideas about what he thought of as ideas—all that ran deep was desperate ignorance and the bitter hopelessness of dispossession, the impotent revolutionary hatred. Everything was said with a clenched fist, and everything was a harangue. He knew the names Kropotkin and Bakunin, but nothing of their writings, and the anarchist Yiddish weekly Freie Arbeiter Stimme, which he was always carrying around their apartment, he rarely read more than a few words of each night before dropping off to sleep. Her parents, she explained to Coleman—and all this dramatically, scandalously dramatically, in a Bleecker Street café minutes after he had picked her up in Washington Square—her parents were simple people in the grips of a pipe dream that they could not begin to articulate or rationally defend but for which they were zealously willing to sacrifice friends, relatives, business, the good will of neighbors, even their own sanity, even their children’s sanity. They knew only what they had nothing in common with, which to Iris, the older she got, appeared to be everything. Society as it was constituted—its forces all in constant motion, the intricate underwebbing of interests stretched to its limit, the battle for advantage that is ongoing, the subjugation that is ongoing, the factional collisions and collusions, the shrewd jargon of morality, the benign despot that is convention, the unstable illusion of stability—society as it was made, always has been and must be made, was as foreign to them as was King Arthur’s court to the Connecticut Yankee. And yet, this wasn’t because they’d been bound by the strongest ties to some other time and place and then forcefully set down in a wholly alien world: they were more like people who’d stepped directly into adulthood from the cradle, having had no intervening education in how human beastliness is run and ruled. Iris could not decide, from the time she was a tot, whether she was being raised by crackpots or visionaries, or whether the passionate loathing she was meant to share was a revelation of the awful truth or utterly ridiculous and possibly insane.

  All that afternoon she told Coleman folklorishly enchanting stories that made having survived growing up above the Passaic candy store as the daughter of such vividly benighted individualists as Morris and Ethel Gittelman appear to have been a grim adventure not so much out of Russian literature as out of the Russian funny papers, as though the Gittelmans had been the deranged next-door neighbors in a Sunday comic strip called “The Karamazov Kids.” It was a strong, brilliant performance for a girl barely nineteen years old who had fled from Jersey across the Hudson—as who among his Village acquaintances wasn’t fleeing, and from places as far away as Amarillo?—without any idea of being anything other than free, a new impoverished exotic on the Eighth Street stage, a theatrically big-featured, vivacious dark girl, emotionally a dynamic force and, in the parlance of the moment, “stacked,” a student uptown at the Art Students League who partly earned her scholarship there modeling for the life drawing classes, someone whose style was to hide nothing and who appeared to have no more fear of creating a stir in a public place than a belly dancer. Her head of hair was something, a labyrinthine, billowing wreath of spirals and ringlets, fuzzy as twine and large enough for use as Christmas ornamentation. All the disquiet of her childhood seemed to have passed into the convolutions of her sinuous thicket of hair. Her irreversible hair. You could polish pots with it and no more alter its construction than if it were harvested from the inky depths of the sea, some kind of wiry reef-building organism, a dense living onyx hybrid of coral and shrub, perhaps possessing medicinal properties.

  For three hours she held Coleman entranced by her comedy, her outrage, her hair, and by her flair for manufacturing excitement, by a frenzied, untrained adolescent intellect and an actressy ability to enkindle herself and believe her every exaggeration that made Coleman—a cunning self-concoction if ever there was one, a product on which no one but he held a patent—feel by comparison like somebody with no conception of himself at all.

  But when he got her back to Sullivan Street that evening, everything changed. It turned out that she had no idea in the world who she was. Once you’d made your way past the hair, all she was was molten. The antithesis of the arrow aimed at life who was twenty-five-year-old Coleman Silk—a self-freedom fighter too, but the agitated version, the anarchist version, of someone wanting to find her way.

  It wouldn’t have fazed her for five minutes to learn that he had been born and raised in a colored family and identified himself as a Negro nearly all his life, nor would she have been burdened in the slightest by keeping that secret for him if it was what he’d asked her to do. A tolerance for the unusual was not one of Iris Gittelman’s deficiencies—unusual to her was what most conformed to the standards of legitimacy. To be two men instead of one? To be two colors instead of one? To walk the streets incognito or in disguise, to be neither this nor that but something in between? To be possessed of a double or a triple or a quadruple personality? To her there was nothing frightening about such seeming deformities. Iris’s open-mindedness wasn’t even a moral quality of the sort liberals and libertarians pride themselves on; it was more on the order of a mania, the cracked antithesis of bigotry. The expectations indispensable to most people, the assumption of meaning, the confidence in authority, the sanctification of coherence and order, struck her as nothing else in life did
—as nonsensical, as totally nuts. Why would things happen as they do and history read as it does if inherent to existence was something called normalcy?

  And yet, what he told Iris was that he was Jewish, Silk being an Ellis Island attenuation of Silberzweig, imposed on his father by a charitable customs official. He even bore the biblical mark of circumcision, as not many of his East Orange Negro friends did in that era. His mother, working as a nurse at a hospital staffed predominantly by Jewish doctors, was convinced by burgeoning medical opinion of the significant hygienic benefits of circumcision, and so the Silks had arranged for the rite that was traditional among Jews—and that was beginning, back then, to be elected as a postnatal surgical procedure by an increasing number of Gentile parents—to be performed by a doctor on each of their infant boys in the second week of life.

  Coleman had been allowing that he was Jewish for several years now—or letting people think so if they chose to—since coming to realize that at NYU as in his café hangouts, many people he knew seemed to have been assuming he was a Jew all along. What he’d learned in the navy is that all you have to do is give a pretty good and consistent line about yourself and nobody ever inquires, because no one’s that interested. His NYU and Village acquaintances could as easily have surmised—as buddies of his had in the service—that he was of Middle Eastern descent, but as this was a moment when Jewish self-infatuation was at a postwar pinnacle among the Washington Square intellectual avant-garde, when the aggrandizing appetite driving their Jewish mental audacity was beginning to look to be uncontrollable and an aura of cultural significance emanated as much from their jokes and their family anecdotes, from their laughter and their clowning and their wisecracks and their arguments—even from their insults—as from Commentary, Midstream, and the Partisan Review, who was he not to go along for the ride, especially as his high school years assisting Doc Chizner as a boxing instructor of Essex County Jewish kids made claiming a New Jersey Jewish boyhood not so laden with pitfalls as pretending to being a U.S. sailor with Syrian or Lebanese roots. Taking on the ersatz prestige of an aggressively thinking, self-analytic, irreverent American Jew reveling in the ironies of the marginal Manhattan existence turned out to be nothing like so reckless as it might have seemed had he spent years dreaming up and elaborating the disguise on his own, and yet, pleasurably enough, it felt spectacularly reckless—and when he remembered Dr. Fensterman, who’d offered his family three thousand dollars for Coleman to take a dive on his final exams so as to make brilliant Bert the class valedictorian, it struck him as spectacularly comical too, a colossal sui generis score-settling joke. What a great all-encompassing idea the world had had to turn him into this—what sublimely earthly mischief! If ever there was a perfect one-of-a-kind creation—and hadn’t singularity been his inmost ego-driven ambition all along?—it was this magical convergence into his father’s Fensterman son.