The Human Stain

by Philip Roth

  I am a crow. I know it. I know it!

  At the student union building, midway down the hill from North Hall, Coleman found a pay phone in the corridor across from the cafeteria where the Elderhostel students were having their lunch. He could see inside, through the double doorway, to the long dining tables where the couples were all mingling happily at lunch.

  Jeff wasn’t at home—it was about 10 A.M. in L.A., and Coleman got the answering machine, and so he searched his address book for the office number at the university, praying that Jeff wasn’t off in class yet. What the father had to say to his eldest son had to be said immediately. The last time he’d called Jeff in a state anything like this was to tell him that Iris had died. “They killed her. They set out to kill me and they killed her.” It was what he said to everyone, and not just in those first twenty-four hours. That was the beginning of the disintegration: everything requisitioned by rage. But this is the end of it. The end—there was the news he had for his son. And for himself. The end of the expulsion from the previous life. To be content with something less grandiose than self-banishment and the overwhelming challenge that is to one’s strength. To live with one’s failure in a modest fashion, organized once again as a rational being and blotting out the blight and the indignation. If unyielding, unyielding quietly. Peacefully. Dignified contemplation—that’s the ticket, as Faunia liked to say. To live in a way that does not bring Philoctetes to mind. He does not have to live like a tragic character in his course. That the primal seems a solution is not news—it always does. Everything changes with desire. The answer to all that has been destroyed. But choosing to prolong the scandal by perpetuating the protest? My stupidity everywhere. My derangement everywhere. And the grossest sentimentality. Wistfully remembering back to Steena. Jokingly dancing with Nathan Zuckerman. Confiding in him. Reminiscing with him. Letting him listen. Sharpening the writer’s sense of reality. Feeding that great opportunistic maw, a novelist’s mind. Whatever catastrophe turns up, he transforms into writing. Catastrophe is cannon fodder for him. But what can I transform this into? I am stuck with it. As is. Sans language, shape, structure, meaning—sans the unities, the catharsis, sans everything. More of the untransformed unforeseen. And why would anyone want more? Yet the woman who is Faunia is the unforeseen. Intertwined orgasmically with the unforeseen, and convention unendurable. Upright principles unendurable. Contact with her body the only principle. Nothing more important than that. And the stamina of her sneer. Alien to the core. Contact with that. The obligation to subject my life to hers and its vagaries. Its vagrancy. Its truancy. Its strangeness. The delectation of this elemental eros. Take the hammer of Faunia to everything outlived, all the exalted justifications, and smash your way to freedom. Freedom from? From the stupid glory of being right. From the ridiculous quest for significance. From the never-ending campaign for legitimacy. The onslaught of freedom at seventy-one, the freedom to leave a lifetime behind—known also as Aschenbachian madness. “And before nightfall”—the final words of Death in Venice—“a shocked and respectful world received the news of his decease.” No, he does not have to live like a tragic character in any course.

  “Jeff! It’s Dad. It’s your father.”

  “Hi. How’s it going?”

  “Jeff, I know why I haven’t heard from you, why I haven’t heard from Michael. Mark I wouldn’t expect to hear from—and Lisa hung up on me last time I called.”

  “She phoned me. She told me.”

  “Listen, Jeff—my affair with this woman is over.”

  “Is it? How come?”

  He thinks, Because there’s no hope for her. Because men have beaten the shit out of her. Because her kids have been killed in a fire. Because she works as a janitor. Because she has no education and says she can’t read. Because she’s been on the run since she’s fourteen. Because she doesn’t even ask me, “What are you doing with me?” Because she knows what everybody is doing with her. Because she’s seen it all and there’s no hope.

  But all he says to his son is, “Because I don’t want to lose my children.”

  With the gentlest laugh, Jeff said, “Try as you might, you couldn’t do it. You certainly aren’t able to lose me. I don’t believe you were going to lose Mike or Lisa, either. Markie is something else. Markie yearns for something none of us can give him. Not just you—none of us. It’s all very sad with Markie. But that we were losing you? That we’ve been losing you since Mother died and you resigned from the college? That is something we’ve all been living with. Dad, nobody has known what to do. Since you went on the warpath with the college, it hasn’t been easy to get to you.”

  “I realize that,” said Coleman, “I understand that,” but two minutes into the conversation and it was already insufferable to him. His reasonable, supercompetent, easygoing son, the eldest, the coolest head of the lot, speaking calmly about the family problem with the father who was the problem was as awful to endure as his irrational youngest son being enraged with him and going nuts. The excessive demand he had made on their sympathy—on the sympathy of his own children! “I understand,” Coleman said again, and that he understood made it all the worse.

  “I hope nothing too awful happened with her,” Jeff said.

  “With her? No. I just decided that enough was enough.” He was afraid to say more for fear that he might start to say something very different.

  “That’s good,” Jeff said. “I’m terrifically relieved. That there’ve been no repercussions, if that’s what you’re saying. That’s just great.”

  Repercussions?

  “I don’t follow you,” Coleman said. “Why repercussions?”

  “You’re free and clear? You’re yourself again? You sound more like yourself than you have for years. That you’ve called—this is all that matters. I was waiting and I was hoping and now you’ve called. There’s nothing more to be said. You’re back. That’s all we were worried about.”

  “I’m lost, Jeff. Fill me in. I’m lost as to what we’re going on about here. Repercussions from what?”

  Jeff paused before he spoke again, and when he did speak, it was reluctantly. “The abortion. The suicide attempt.”

  “Faunia?”

  “Right.”

  “Had an abortion? Tried to commit suicide? When?”

  “Dad, everyone in Athena knew. That’s how it got to us.”

  “Everyone? Who is everyone?”

  “Look, Dad, there are no repercussions—”

  “It never happened, my boy, that’s why there are no ‘repercussions.’ It never happened. There was no abortion, there was no suicide attempt—not that I know of. And not that she knows of. But just who is this everyone? Goddamnit, you hear a story like that, a senseless story like that, why don’t you pick up the phone, why don’t you come to me?”

  “Because it isn’t my business to come to you. I don’t come to a man your age—”

  “No, you don’t, do you? Instead, whatever you’re told about a man my age, however ludicrous, however malicious and absurd, you believe.”

  “If I made a mistake, I am truly sorry. You’re right. Of course you’re right. But it’s been a long haul for all of us. You’ve not been that easy to reach now for—”

  “Who told this to you?”

  “Lisa. Lisa heard it first.”

  “Who did Lisa hear it from?”

  “Several sources. People. Friends.”

  “I want names. I want to know who this everyone is. Which friends?”

  “Old friends. Athena friends.”

  “Her darling childhood friends. The offspring of my colleagues. Who told them, I wonder.”

  “There was no suicide attempt,” Jeff said.

  “No, Jeffrey, there wasn’t. No abortion that I know of, either.”

  “Well, fine.”

  “And if there were? If I had impregnated this woman and she’d gone for an abortion and after the abortion had attempted suicide? Suppose, Jeff, she had even succeeded at suicide. Then what?
Then what, Jeff? Your father’s mistress kills herself. Then what? Turn on your father? Your criminal father? No, no, no—let’s go back, back up a step, back up to the suicide attempt. Oh, I like that. I do wonder who came up with the suicide attempt. Is it because of the abortion that she attempts this suicide? Let’s get straight this melodrama that Lisa got from her Athena friends. Because she doesn’t want the abortion? Because the abortion is imposed on her? I see. I see the cruelty. A mother who has lost two little children in a fire turns up pregnant by her lover. Ecstasy. A new life. Another chance. A new child to replace the dead ones. But the lover—no, says he, and drags her by her hair to the abortionist, and then—of course—having worked his will on her, takes the naked, bleeding body—”

  By this time Jeff had hung up.

  But by this time Coleman didn’t need Jeff to keep on going. He had only to see the Elderhostel couples inside the cafeteria finishing their coffee before returning to class, he had only to hear them in there at their ease and enjoying themselves, the appropriate elderly looking as they should look and sounding as they should sound, for him to think that even the conventional things that he’d done afforded him no relief. Not just having been a professor, not just having been a dean, not just having remained married, through everything, to the same formidable woman, but having a family, having intelligent children—and it all afforded him nothing. If anybody’s children should be able to understand this, shouldn’t his? All the preschool. All the reading to them. The sets of encyclopedias. The preparation before quizzes. The dialogues at dinner. The endless instruction, from Iris, from him, in the multiform nature of life. The scrutinization of language. All this stuff we did, and then to come back at me with this mentality? After all the schooling and all the books and all the words and all the superior SAT scores, it is insupportable. After all the taking them seriously. When they said something foolish, engaging it seriously. All the attention paid to the development of reason and of mind and of imaginative sympathy. And of skepticism, of well-informed skepticism. Of thinking for oneself. And then to absorb the first rumor? All the education and nothing helps. Nothing can insulate against the lowest level of thought. Not even to ask themselves, “But does that sound like our father? Does that sound like him to me?” Instead, your father is an open-and-shut case. Never allowed to watch TV and you manifest the mentality of a soap opera. Allowed to read nothing but the Greeks or their equivalent and you make life into a Victorian soap opera. Answering your questions. Your every question. Never turning one aside. You ask about your grandparents, you ask who they were and I told you. They died, your grandparents, when I was young. Grandpa when I was in high school, Grandma when I was away in the navy. By the time I got back from the war, the landlord had long ago put everything out on the street. There was nothing left. The landlord told me he couldn’t afford to blah blah, there was no rent coming in, and I could have killed the son of a bitch. Photo albums. Letters. Stuff from my childhood, from their childhood, all of it, everything, the whole thing, gone. “Where were they born? Where did they live?” They were born in Jersey. The first of their families born here. He was a saloon keeper. I believe that in Russia his father, your great-grandfather, worked in the tavern business. Sold booze to the Russkies. “Do we have aunts and uncles?” My father had a brother who went to California when I was a little kid, and my mother was an only child, like me. After me she couldn’t have children—I never knew why that was. The brother, my father’s older brother, remained a Silberzweig—he never took the changed name as far as I know. Jack Silberzweig. Born in the old country and so kept the name. When I was shipping out from San Francisco, I looked in all the California phone books to try to locate him. He was on the outs with my father. My father considered him a lazy bum, wanted nothing to do with him, and so nobody was sure what city Uncle Jack lived in. I looked in all the phone books. I was going to tell him that his brother had died. I wanted to meet him. My one living relative on that side. So what if he’s a bum? I wanted to meet his children, my cousins, if there were any. I looked under Silberzweig. I looked under Silk. I looked under Silber. Maybe in California he’d become a Silber. I didn’t know. And I don’t know. I have no idea. And then I stopped looking. When you don’t have a family of your own, you concern yourself with these things. Then I had you and I stopped worrying about having an uncle and having cousins . . . Each kid heard the same thing. And the only one it didn’t satisfy was Mark. The older boys didn’t ask that much, but the twins were insistent. “Were there any twins in the past?” My understanding—I believe I was told this—was that there was either a great- or a great-great-grandfather who was a twin. This was the story he told Iris as well. All of it was invented for Iris. This was the story he told her on Sullivan Street when they first met and the story he stuck to, the original boilerplate. And the only one never satisfied was Mark. “Where did our great-grandparents come from?” Russia. “But what city?” I asked my father and mother, but they never seemed to know for sure. One time it was one place, one time another. There was a whole generation of Jews like that. They never really knew. The old people didn’t talk about it much, and the American children weren’t that curious, they were het up on being Americans, and so, in my family as in many families, there was a general Jewish geographical amnesia. All I got when I asked, Coleman told them, was the answer “Russia.” But Markie said, “Russia is gigantic, Dad. Where in Russia?” Markie would not be still. And why? Why? There was no answer. Markie wanted the knowledge of who they were and where they came from—all that his father could never give him. And that’s why he becomes the Orthodox Jew? That’s why he writes the biblical protest poems? That’s why Markie hates him so? Impossible. There were the Gittelmans. Gittelman grandparents. Gittelman aunts and uncles. Little Gittelman cousins all over Jersey. Wasn’t that enough? How many relatives did he need? There had to be Silks and Silberzweigs too? That made no sense at all as a grievance—it could not be! Yet Coleman wondered anyway, irrational as it might be to associate Markie’s brooding anger with his own secret. So long as Markie was at odds with him, he was never able to stop himself from wondering, and never more agonizingly than after Jeff had hung up the phone on him. If the children who carried his origins in their genes and who would pass those origins on to their own children could find it so easy to suspect him of the worst kind of cruelty to Faunia, what explanation could there be? Because he could never tell them about their family? Because he’d owed it to them to tell them? Because to deny them such knowledge was wrong? That made no sense! Retribution was not unconsciously or unknowingly enacted. There was no such quid pro quo. It could not be. And yet, after the phone call—leaving the student union, leaving the campus, all the while he was driving in tears back up the mountain—that was exactly what it felt like.