The Human Stain

by Philip Roth

  She went on for nearly two hours, a long speech about his autonomy dating back to infancy, expertly taking in the pain by delineating all she was up against and couldn’t hope to oppose and would have to endure, during which Coleman did all he could not to notice—in the simplest things, like the thinning of her hair (his mother’s hair, not Iris’s hair) and the jutting of her head, the swelling of her ankles, the bloating of her belly, the exaggerated splay of her large teeth—how much further along toward her death she’d been drawn since the Sunday three years back when she’d done everything gracious she could to put Steena at her ease. At some point midway through the afternoon, she seemed to Coleman to step up to the very edge of the big change: the point of turning, as the elderly do, into a tiny, misshapen being. The longer she talked, the more he believed he was seeing this happen. He tried not to think about the disease that would kill her, about the funeral they would give her, about the tributes that would be read and the prayers offered up at the side of her grave. But then he tried not to think about her going on living either, of his leaving and her being here and alive, the years passing and her thinking about him and his children and his wife, more years passing and the connection between the two of them only growing stronger for her because of its denial.

  Neither his mother’s longevity nor her mortality could be allowed to have any bearing on what he was doing, nor could the struggles her family had been through in Lawnside, where she’d been born in a dilapidated shack and lived with her parents and four brothers until her father died when she was seven. Her father’s people had been in Lawnside, New Jersey, since 1855. They were runaway slaves, brought north on the Underground Railroad from Maryland and into southwest Jersey by the Quakers. The Negroes first called the place Free Haven. No whites lived there then, and only a handful did now, out on the fringes of a town of a couple of thousand where just about everybody was descended from runaway slaves whom the Haddonfield Quakers had protected—the mayor was descended from them, the fire chief, the police chief, the tax collector, the teachers in the grade school, the kids in the grade school. But the uniqueness of Lawnside as a Negro town had no bearing on anything either. Nor did the uniqueness of Gouldtown, farther south in Jersey, down by Cape May. That’s where her mother’s people were from, and that’s where the family went to live after the death of her father. Another settlement of colored people, many nearly white, including her own grandmother, everyone somehow related to everyone else. “Way, way back,” as she used to explain to Coleman when he was a boy—simplifying and condensing as best she could all the lore she’d ever heard—a slave was owned by a Continental Army soldier who’d been killed in the French and Indian War. The slave looked after the soldier’s widow. He did everything, from dawn to dark didn’t stop doing what needed to be done. He chopped and hauled the wood, gathered the crops, excavated and built a cabbage house and stowed the cabbages there, stored the pumpkins, buried the apples, turnips, and potatoes in the ground for winter, stacked the rye and wheat in the barn, slaughtered the pig, salted the pork, slaughtered the cow and corned the beef, until one day the widow married him and they had three sons. And those sons married Gouldtown girls whose families reached back to the settlement’s origins in the 1600s, families that by the Revolution were all intermarried and thickly intermingled. One or another or all of them, she said, were descendants of the Indian from the large Lenape settlement at Indian Fields who married a Swede—locally Swedes and Finns had superseded the original Dutch settlers—and who had five children with her; one or another or all were descendants of the two mulatto brothers brought from the West Indies on a trading ship that sailed up the river from Greenwich to Bridgeton, where they were indentured to the landowners who had paid their passage and who themselves later paid the passage of two Dutch sisters to come from Holland to become their wives; one or another or all were descendants of the granddaughter of John Fenwick, an English baronet’s son, a cavalry officer in Cromwell’s Commonwealth army and a member of the Society of Friends who died in New Jersey not that many years after New Cesarea (the province lying between the Hudson and the Delaware that was deeded by the brother of the king of England to two English proprietors) became New Jersey. Fenwick died in 1683 and was buried somewhere in the personal colony he purchased, founded, and governed, and which stretched north of Bridgeton to Salem and south and east to the Delaware.

  Fenwick’s nineteen-year-old granddaughter, Elizabeth Adams, married a colored man, Gould. “That black that hath been the ruin of her” was her grandfather’s description of Gould in the will from which he excluded Elizabeth from any share of his estate until such time as “the Lord open her eyes to see her abominable transgression against Him.” As the story had it, only one son of the five sons of Gould and Elizabeth survived to maturity, and he was Benjamin Gould, who married a Finn, Ann. Benjamin died in 1777, the year after the signing of the Declaration of Independence across the Delaware in Philadelphia, leaving a daughter, Sarah, and four sons, Anthony, Samuel, Abijah, and Elisha, from whom Gouldtown took its name.

  Through his mother, Coleman learned the maze of family history going back to the days of aristocratic John Fenwick, who was to that southwestern region of New Jersey what William Penn was to the part of Pennsylvania that encompassed Philadelphia—and from whom it sometimes seemed all of Gouldtown had descended—and then he heard it again, though never the same in all its details, from great-aunts and great-uncles, from grezt-great-aunts and -uncles, some of them people close to a hundred, when, as children, he, Walt, and Ernestine went with their parents down to Gouldtown for the annual reunion—almost two hundred relatives from southwest Jersey, from Philadelphia, from Atlantic City, from as far off as Boston, eating fried bluefish, stewed chicken, fried chicken, homemade ice cream, sugared peaches, pies, and cakes—eating favorite family dishes and playing baseball and singing songs and reminiscing all day long, telling stories about the women way back spinning and knitting, boiling fat pork and baking huge breads for the men to take to the fields, making the clothes, drawing the water from the well, administering medicines obtained mainly from the woods, herb infusions to treat measles, the syrups of molasses and onions to counter whooping cough. Stories about family women who kept a dairy making fine cheeses, about women who went to the city of Philadelphia to become housekeepers, dressmakers, and schoolteachers, and about women at home of remarkable hospitality. Stories about the men in the woods, trapping and shooting the winter game for meat, about the farmers plowing the fields, cutting the cordwood and the rails for fences, buying, selling, slaughtering the cattle, and the prosperous ones, the dealers, selling tons of salt hay for packing to the Trenton pottery works, hay cut from the salt marsh they owned along the bay and river shores. Stories about the men who left the woods, the farm, the marsh, and the cedar swamp to serve—some as white soldiers, some as black—in the Civil War. Stories about men who went to sea to become blockade runners and who went to Philadelphia to become undertakers, printers, barbers, electricians, cigar makers, and ministers in the African Methodist Episcopal Church—one who went to Cuba to ride with Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, and a few men who got in trouble, ran away, and never came back. Stories about family children like themselves, often dressed poorly, without shoes sometimes or coats, asleep on winter nights in the freezing rooms of simple houses, in the heat of summer pitching, loading, and hauling hay with the men, but taught manners by their parents, and catechized in the schoolhouse by the Presbyterians—where they also learned to spell and read—and always eating all they wanted, even in those days, of pork and potatoes and bread and molasses and game, and growing up strong and healthy and honest.

  But one no more decides not to become a boxer because of the history of Lawnside’s runaway slaves, the abundance of everything at the Gouldtown reunions, and the intricacy of the family’s American genealogy—or not to become a teacher of classics because of the history of Lawnside’s runaway slaves, the abundance of the Gouldtown reunions, and
the intricacy of the family’s American genealogy—than one decides not to become anything else for such reasons. Many things vanish out of a family’s life. Lawnside is one, Gouldtown another, genealogy a third, and Coleman Silk was a fourth.

  Over these last fifty years or more, he was not the first child, either, who’d heard about the harvesting of the salt hay for the Trenton pottery works or eaten fried bluefish and sugared peaches at the Gouldtown reunions and grown up to vanish like this—to vanish, as they used to say in the family, “till all trace of him was lost.” “Lost himself to all his people” was another way they put it.

  Ancestor worship—that’s how Coleman put it. Honoring the past was one thing—the idolatry that is ancestor worship was something else. The hell with that imprisonment.

  That night after coming back to the Village from East Orange, Coleman got a call from his brother in Asbury Park that took things further faster than he had planned. “Don’t you ever come around her,” Walt warned him, and his voice was resonant with something barely suppressed—all the more frightening for being suppressed—that Coleman hadn’t heard since his father’s time. There’s another force in that family, pushing him now all the way over on the other side. The act was committed in 1953 by an audacious young man in Greenwich Village, by a specific person in a specific place at a specific time, but now he will be over on the other side forever. Yet that, as he discovers, is exactly the point: freedom is dangerous. Freedom is very dangerous. And nothing is on your own terms for long. “Don’t you even try to see her. No contact. No calls. Nothing. Never. Hear me?” Walt said. “Never. Don’t you dare ever show your lily-white face around that house again!”

  3

  What Do You Do with

  the Kid Who Can’t Read?

  ‘IF CLINTON had fucked her in the ass, she might have shut her mouth. Bill Clinton is not the man they say he is. Had he turned her over in the Oval Office and fucked her in the ass, none of this would have happened.”

  “Well, he never dominated her. He played it safe.”

  “You see, once he got to the White House, he didn’t dominate anymore. Couldn’t. He didn’t dominate Willey either. That’s why she got angry with him. Once he became president, he lost his Arkansas ability to dominate women. So long as he was attorney general and governor of an obscure little state, that was perfect for him.”

  “Sure. Gennifer Flowers.”

  “What happens in Arkansas? If you fall when you’re still back in Arkansas, you don’t fall from a very great height.”

  “Right. And you’re expected to be an ass man. There’s a tradition.”

  “But when you get to the White House, you can’t dominate. And when you can’t dominate, then Miss Willey turns against you, and Miss Monica turns against you. Her loyalty would have been earned by fucking her in the ass. That should be the pact. That should seal you together. But there was no pact.”

  “Well, she was frightened. She was close to not saying anything, you know. Starr overwhelmed her. Eleven guys in the room with her at that hotel? Hitting on her? It was a gang bang. It was a gang rape that Starr staged there at that hotel.”

  “Yeah. True. But she was talking to Linda Tripp.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “She was talking to everybody. She’s part of that dopey culture. Yap, yap, yap. Part of this generation that is proud of its shallowness. The sincere performance is everything. Sincere and empty, totally empty. The sincerity that goes in all directions. The sincerity that is worse than falseness, and the innocence that is worse than corruption. All the rapacity hidden under the sincerity. And under the lingo. This wonderful language they all have—that they appear to believe—about their ‘lack of self-worth,’ all the while what they actually believe is that they’re entitled to everything. Their shamelessness they call lovingness, and the ruthlessness is camouflaged as lost ‘self-esteem.’ Hitler lacked self-esteem too. That was his problem. It’s a con these kids have going. The hyperdramatization of the pettiest emotions. Relationship. My relationship. Clarify my relationship. They open their mouths and they send me up the wall. Their whole language is a summation of the stupidity of the last forty years. Closure. There’s one. My students cannot stay in that place where thinking must occur. Closure! They fix on the conventionalized narrative, with its beginning, middle, and end—every experience, no matter how ambiguous, no matter how knotty or mysterious, must lend itself to this normalizing, conventionalizing, anchorman cliché. Any kid who says ‘closure’ I flunk. They want closure, there’s their closure.”

  “Well, whatever she is—a total narcissist, a conniving little bitch, the most exhibitionistic Jewish girl in the history of Beverly Hills, utterly corrupted by privilege—he knew it all beforehand. He could read her. If he can’t read Monica Lewinsky, how can he read Saddam Hussein? If he can’t read and outfox Monica Lewinsky, the guy shouldn’t be president. There’s genuine grounds for impeachment. No, he saw it. He saw it all. I don’t think he was hypnotized by her cover story for long. That she was totally corrupt and totally innocent, of course he saw it. The extreme innocence was the corruption—it was her corruption and her madness and her cunning. That was her force, that combination. That she had no depth, that was her charm at the end of his day of being commander in chief. The intensity of the shallowness was its appeal. Not to mention the shallowness of the intensity. The stories about her childhood. The boasting about her adorable willfulness: ‘See, I was three but I was already a personality.’ I’m sure he understood that everything he did that didn’t conform to her delusions was going to be yet another brutal blow to her self-esteem. But what he didn’t see was that he had to fuck her in the ass. Why? To shut her up. Strange behavior in our president. It was the first thing she showed him. She stuck it in his face. She offered it to him. And he did nothing about it. I don’t get this guy. Had he fucked her in the ass, I doubt she would have talked to Linda Tripp. Because she wouldn’t have wanted to talk about that.”

  “She wanted to talk about the cigar.”

  “That’s different. That’s kid stuff. No, he didn’t give her regularly something she didn’t want to talk about. Something he wanted that she didn’t. That’s the mistake.”

  “In the ass is how you create loyalty.”

  “I don’t know if that would have shut her up. I don’t know that shutting her up is humanly possible. This isn’t Deep Throat. This is Big Mouth.”

  “Still, you have to admit that this girl has revealed more about America than anybody since Dos Passos. She stuck a thermometer up the country’s ass. Monica’s U.S.A.”

  “The trouble was she was getting from Clinton what she got from all these guys. She wanted something else from him. He’s the president, she’s a love terrorist. She wanted him to be different from this teacher she had an affair with.”

  “Yeah, the niceness did him in. Interesting. Not his brutality but his niceness. Playing it not by his rules but by hers. She controls him because he wants it. Has to have it. It’s all wrong. You know what Kennedy would have told her when she came around asking for a job? You know what Nixon would have told her? Harry Truman, even Eisenhower would have told it to her. The general who ran World War II, he knew how not to be nice. They would have told her that not only would they not give her a job, but nobody would ever give her a job again as long as she lived. That she wouldn’t be able to get a job driving a cab in Horse Springs, New Mexico. Nothing. That her father’s practice would be sabotaged, and he’d be out of work. That her mother would never work again, that her brother would never work again, that nobody in her family would earn another dime, if she so much as dared to open her mouth about the eleven blow jobs. Eleven. Not even a round dozen. I don’t think under a dozen in over two years qualifies for the Heisman in debauchery, do you?”

  “His caution, his caution did him in. Absolutely. He played it like a lawyer.”

  “He didn’t want to give her any evidence. That’s why he wouldn’t come.”

 
“There he was right. The moment he came, he was finished. She had the goods. Collected a sample. The smoking come. Had he fucked her in the ass, the nation could have been spared this terrible trauma.”

  They laughed. There were three of them.

  “He never really abandoned himself to it. He had an eye on the door. He had his own system there. She was trying to up the ante.”

  “Isn’t this what the Mafia does? You give somebody something they can’t talk about. Then you’ve got them.”

  “You involve them in a mutual transgression, and you have a mutual corruption. Sure.”

  “So his problem is that he’s insufficiently corrupt.”

  “Oh, yes. Absolutely. And unsophisticated.”

  “It’s just the opposite of the charge that he’s reprehensible. He’s insufficiently reprehensible.”

  “Of course. If you’re engaged in that behavior, why draw the line there? Wasn’t that fairly artificial?”

  “Once you draw the line, you make it clear that you’re frightened. And when you’re frightened, you’re finished. Your destruction is no further than Monica’s cell phone.”