The Human Stain

by Philip Roth

  No longer was he playing at something. With Iris—the churned-up, untamed, wholly un-Steena-like, non-Jewish Jewish Iris—as the medium through which to make himself anew, he’d finally got it right. He was no longer trying on and casting off, endlessly practicing and preparing to be. This was it, the solution, the secret to his secret, flavored with just a drop of the ridiculous—the redeeming, reassuring ridiculous, life’s little contribution to every human decision.

  As a heretofore unknown amalgam of the most unalike of America’s historic undesirables, he now made sense.

  There was an interlude, however. After Steena and before Iris there was a five-month interlude named Ellie Magee, a petite, shapely colored girl, tawny-skinned, lightly freckled across the nose and cheeks, in appearance not quite over the dividing line between adolescence and womanhood, who worked at the Village Door Shop on Sixth Avenue, excitedly selling shelving units for books and selling doors—doors on legs for desks and doors on legs for beds. The tired old Jewish guy who owned the place said that hiring Ellie had increased his business by fifty percent. “I had nothing going here,” he told Coleman. “Eking out a living. But now every guy in the Village wants a door for a desk. People come in, they don’t ask for me—they ask for Ellie. They call on the phone, they want to talk to Ellie. This little gal has changed everything.” It was true, nobody could resist her, including Coleman, who was struck, first, by her legs up on high heels and then with all her naturalness. Goes out with white NYU guys who are drawn to her, goes out with colored NYU guys who are drawn to her—a sparkling twenty-three-year-old kid, as yet wounded by nothing, who has moved to the Village from Yonkers, where she grew up, and is living the unconventional life with a small u, the Village life as advertised. She is a find, and so Coleman goes in to buy a desk he doesn’t need and that night takes her for a drink. After Steena and the shock of losing someone he’d so much wanted, he is having a good time again, he’s alive again, and all this from the moment they start flirting in the store. Does she think he’s a white guy in the store? He doesn’t know. Interesting. Then that evening she laughs and, comically squinting at him, says, “What are you anyway?” Right out she spots something and goes ahead and says it. But now the sweat is not pouring off him as it did when he misread Steena’s poem. “What am I? Play it any way you like,” Coleman says. “Is that the way you play it?” she asks. “Of course that’s the way I play it,” he says. “So white girls think you’re white?” “Whatever they think,” he says, “I let them think.” “And whatever I think?” Ellie asks. “Same deal,” Coleman says. That’s the little game they play, and that becomes the excitement for them, playing the ambiguity of it. He’s not that close to anybody particularly, but the guys he knows from school think he’s taking out a colored girl, and her friends all think she’s going around with a white guy. There’s some real fun in having other people find them important, and most everywhere they go, people do. It’s 1951. Guys ask Coleman, “What’s she like?” “Hot,” he says, drawing the word out while floppily wiggling one hand the way the Italians did back in East Orange. There’s a day-to-day, second-to-second kick in all this, a little movie-star magnitude to his life now: he’s always in a scene when he’s out with Ellie. Nobody on Eighth Street knows what the hell is going on, and he enjoys that. She’s got the legs. She laughs all the time. She’s a woman in a natural way—full of ease and a lively innocence that’s enchanting to him. Something like Steena, except she’s not white, with the result that they don’t go rushing off to visit his family and they don’t go visiting hers. Why should they? They live in the Village. Taking her to East Orange doesn’t even occur to him. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t want to hear the sigh of relief, to be told, even wordlessly, that he’s doing the right thing. He thinks about his motivation for bringing Steena home. To be honest with everyone? And what did that achieve? No, no families—not for now anyway.

  Meanwhile, he so enjoys being with her that one night the truth just comes bubbling out. Even about his being a boxer, which he could never tell Steena. It’s so easy to tell Ellie. That she’s not disapproving gives her another boost up in his estimation. She’s not conventional—and yet so sound. He is dealing with someone utterly unnarrow-minded. The splendid girl wants to hear it all. And so he talks, and without restraints he is an extraordinary talker, and Ellie is enthralled. He tells her about the navy. He tells her about his family, which turns out to be a family not much different from hers, except that her father, a pharmacist with a drugstore in Harlem, is living, and though he isn’t happy about her having moved to the Village, fortunately for Ellie he can’t stop himself from adoring her. Coleman tells her about Howard and how he couldn’t stand the place. They talk a lot about Howard because that was where her parents had wanted her to go too. And always, whatever they’re talking about, he finds he is effortlessly making her laugh. “I’d never seen so many colored people before, not even in south Jersey at the family reunion. Howard University looked to me like just too many Negroes in one place. Of all persuasions, of every stripe, but I just did not want to be around them like that. Did not at all see what it had to do with me. Everything there was just so concentrated that any sort of pride I ever had was diminished. Completely diminished by a concentrated, false environment.” “Like a soda that’s too sweet,” Ellie said. “Well,” he told her, “it’s not so much that too much has been put in, it’s that everything else has been taken out.” Talking openly with Ellie, Coleman finds all his relief. True, he’s not a hero anymore, but then he’s not in any way a villain either. Yes, she’s a contender, this one. Her transcendence into independence, her transformation into a Village girl, the way she handles her folks—she seems to have grown up the way you’re supposed to be able to.

  One evening she takes him around to a tiny Bleecker Street jewelry shop where the white guy who owns it makes beautiful things out of enamel. Just shopping the street, out looking, but when they leave she tells Coleman that the guy is black. “You’re wrong,” Coleman tells her, “he can’t be.” “Don’t tell me that I’m wrong”—she laughs—“you’re blind.” Another night, near midnight, she takes him to a bar on Hudson Street where painters congregate to drink. “See that one? The smoothie?” she says in a soft voice, inclining her head toward a good-looking white guy in his mid-twenties charming all the girls at the bar. “Him,” she says. “No,” says Coleman, who’s the one laughing now. “You’re in Greenwich Village, Coleman Silk, the four freest square miles in America. There’s one on every other block. You’re so vain, you thought you’d dreamed it up yourself.” And if she knows of three—which she does, positively—there are ten, if not more. “From all over everywhere,” she says, “they make straight for Eighth Street. Just like you did from little East Orange.” “And,” he says, “I don’t see it at all.” And that too makes them laugh, laugh and laugh and laugh because he is hopeless and cannot see it in others and because Ellie is his guide, pointing them out.

  In the beginning, he luxuriates in the solution to his problem. Losing the secret, he feels like a boy again. The boy he’d been before he had the secret. A kind of imp again. He gets from all her naturalness the pleasure and ease of being natural himself. If you’re going to be a knight and a hero, you’re armored, and what he gets now is the pleasure of being unarmored. “You’re a lucky man,” Ellie’s boss tells him. “A lucky man,” he repeats, and means it. With Ellie the secret is no longer operative. It’s not only that he can tell her everything and that he does, it’s that if and when he wants to, he can now go home. He can deal with his brother, and the other way, he knows, he could never have. His mother and he can go on back and resume being as close and easygoing as they always were. And then he meets Iris, and that’s it. It’s been fun with Ellie, and it continues to be fun, but some dimension is missing. The whole thing lacks the ambition—it fails to feed that conception of himself that’s been driving him all his life. Along comes Iris and he’s back in the ring. His father had said to him,
“Now you can retire undefeated. You’re retired.” But here he comes roaring out of his corner—he has the secret again. And the gift to be secretive again, which is hard to come by. Maybe there are a dozen more guys like him hanging around the Village. But not just everybody has that gift. That is, they have it, but in petty ways: they simply lie all the time. They’re not secretive in the grand and elaborate way that Coleman is. He’s back on the trajectory outward. He’s got the elixir of the secret, and it’s like being fluent in another language—it’s being somewhere that is constantly fresh to you. He’s lived without it, it was fine, nothing horrible happened, it wasn’t objectionable. It was fun. Innocent fun. But insufficiently everything else. Sure, he’d regained his innocence. Ellie gave him that all right. But what use is innocence? Iris gives more. She raises everything to another pitch. Iris gives him back his life on the scale he wants to live it.

  Two years after they met, they decided to get married, and that was when, for this license he’d taken, this freedom he’d sounded, the choices he had dared to make—and could he really have been any more artful or clever in arriving at an actable self big enough to house his ambition and formidable enough to take on the world?—the first large payment was exacted.

  Coleman went over to East Orange to see his mother. Mrs. Silk did not know of Iris Gittelman’s existence, though she wasn’t at all surprised when he told her that he was going to get married and that the girl was white. She wasn’t even surprised when he told her that the girl didn’t know he was colored. If anyone was surprised, it was Coleman, who, having openly declared his intention, all at once wondered if this entire decision, the most monumental of his life, wasn’t based on the least serious thing imaginable: Iris’s hair, that sinuous thicket of hair that was far more Negroid than Coleman’s—more like Ernestine’s hair than his. As a little girl, Ernestine was famous for asking, “Why don’t I have blow hair like Mommy?”—meaning, why didn’t her hair blow in the breeze, not only like her mother’s but like the hair of all the women on the maternal side of the family.

  In the face of his mother’s anguish, there floated through Coleman the eerie, crazy fear that all that he had ever wanted from Iris Gittelman was the explanation her appearance could provide for the texture of their children’s hair.

  But how could a motive as bluntly, as dazzlingly utilitarian as that have escaped his attention till now? Because it wasn’t in any way true? Seeing his mother suffering like this—inwardly shaken by his own behavior and yet resolved, as Coleman always was, to carry through to the finish—how could this startling idea seem to him anything other than true? Even as he remained seated across from his mother in what appeared to be a state of perfect self-control, he had the definite impression that he had just chosen a wife for the stupidest reason in the world and that he was the emptiest of men.

  “And she believes your parents are dead, Coleman. That’s what you told her.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You have no brother, you have no sister. There is no Ernestine. There is no Walt.”

  He nodded.

  “And? What else did you tell her?”

  “What else do you think I told her?”

  “Whatever it suited you to tell her.” That was as harsh as she got all afternoon. Her capacity for anger never had been and never would be able to extend to him. The mere sight of him, from the moment of his birth, stimulated feelings against which she had no defenses and that had nothing to do with what he was worthy of. “I’m never going to know my grandchildren,” she said.

  He had prepared himself. The important thing was to forget about Iris’s hair and let her speak, let her find her fluency and, from the soft streaming of her own words, create for him his apologia.

  “You’re never going to let them see me,” she said. “You’re never going to let them know who I am. ‘Mom,’ you’ll tell me, ‘Ma, you come to the railroad station in New York, and you sit on the bench in the waiting room, and at eleven twenty-five A.M., I’ll walk by with my kids in their Sunday best.’ That’ll be my birthday present five years from now. ‘Sit there, Mom, say nothing, and I’ll just walk them slowly by.’ And you know very well that I will be there. The railroad station. The zoo. Central Park. Wherever you say, of course I’ll do it. You tell me the only way I can ever touch my grandchildren is for you to hire me to come over as Mrs. Brown to baby-sit and put them to bed, I’ll do it. Tell me to come over as Mrs. Brown to clean your house, I’ll do that. Sure I’ll do what you tell me. I have no choice.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “A choice? Yes? What is my choice, Coleman?”

  “To disown me.”

  Almost mockingly, she pretended to give that idea some thought. “I suppose I could be that ruthless with you. Yes, that’s possible, I suppose. But where do you think I’m going to find the strength to be that ruthless with myself?”

  It was not a moment for him to be recalling his childhood. It was not a moment for him to be admiring her lucidity or her sarcasm or her courage. It was not a moment to allow himself to be subjugated by the all-but-pathological phenomenon of mother love. It was not a moment for him to be hearing all the words that she was not saying but that were sounded more tellingly even than what she did say. It was not a moment to think thoughts other than the thoughts he’d come armed with. It was certainly not a moment to resort to explanations, to start brilliantly toting up the advantages and the disadvantages and pretend that this was no more than a logical decision. There was no explanation that could begin to address the outrage of what he was doing to her. It was a moment to deepen his focus on what he was there to achieve. If disowning him was a choice foreclosed to her, then taking the blow was all she could do. Speak quietly, say little, forget Iris’s hair, and, for however long is required, let her continue to employ her words to absorb into her being the brutality of the most brutal thing he had ever done.

  He was murdering her. You don’t have to murder your father. The world will do that for you. There are plenty of forces out to get your father. The world will take care of him, as it had indeed taken care of Mr. Silk. Who there is to murder is the mother, and that’s what he saw he was doing to her, the boy who’d been loved as he’d been loved by this woman. Murdering her on behalf of his exhilarating notion of freedom! It would have been much easier without her. But only through this test can he be the man he has chosen to be, unalterably separated from what he was handed at birth, free to struggle at being free like any human being would wish to be free. To get that from life, the alternate destiny, on one’s own terms, he must do what must be done. Don’t most people want to walk out of the fucking lives they’ve been handed? But they don’t, and that’s what makes them them, and this was what was making him him. Throw the punch, do the damage, and forever lock the door. You can’t do this to a wonderful mother who loves you unconditionally and has made you happy, you can’t inflict this pain and then think you can go back on it. It’s so awful that all you can do is live with it. Once you’ve done a thing like this, you have done so much violence it can never be undone—which is what Coleman wants. It’s like that moment at West Point when the guy was going down. Only the referee could save him from what Coleman had it in him to do. Then as now, he was experiencing the power of it as a fighter. Because that is the test too, to give the brutality of the repudiation its real, unpardonable human meaning, to confront with all the realism and clarity possible the moment when your fate intersects with something enormous. This is his. This man and his mother. This woman and her beloved son. If, in the service of honing himself, he is out to do the hardest thing imaginable, this is it, short of stabbing her. This takes him right to the heart of the matter. This is the major act of his life, and vividly, consciously, he feels its immensity.

  “I don’t know why I’m not better prepared for this, Coleman. I should be,” she said. “You’ve been giving fair warning almost from the day you got here. You were seriously disinclined even to take the breast. Yes, you we
re. Now I see why. Even that might delay your escape. There was always something about our family, and I don’t mean color—there was something about us that impeded you. You think like a prisoner. You do, Coleman Brutus. You’re white as snow and you think like a slave.”

  It was not a moment to give credence to her intelligence, to take even the most appealing turn of phrase as the embodiment of some special wisdom. It often happened that his mother could say something that made it sound as though she knew more than she did. The rational other side. That was what came of leaving the orating to his father and so seeming by comparison to say what counted.

  “Now, I could tell you that there is no escape, that all your attempts to escape will only lead you back to where you began. That’s what your father would tell you. And there’d be something in Julius Caesar to back him up. But for a young man like you, whom everybody falls for? A good-looking, charming, clever young fellow with your physique, your determination, your shrewdness, with all your wonderful gifts? You with your green eyes and your long dark lashes? Why, this should cause you no trouble at all. I expect coming to see me is about as hard as it’s going to get, and look how calmly you’re sitting here. And that is because you know what you’re doing makes great sense, I know it makes sense, because you would not pursue a goal that didn’t. Of course you will have disappointments. Of course little is going to turn out as you imagine it, sitting so calmly across from me. Your special destiny will be special all right—but how? Twenty-six years old—you can’t begin to know. But wouldn’t the same be true if you did nothing? I suppose any profound change in life involves saying ‘I don’t know you’ to someone.”