The Human Stain

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.

And now the phone was dead. In running across the lawn, he'd inadvertently touched the off button. That, or Lisa had deliberately broken the connection. When he redialed, a man answered. “Is this Josh?” Coleman asked. “Yes,” the man said. “This is Coleman Silk. Lisa's father.” After a moment's silence, the man said, “Lisa doesn't want to talk,” and hung up.

Mark's doing. It had to be. Could not be anyone else's. Couldn't be this fucking Josh's — who was he? Coleman had no more idea how Mark could have found out about Faunia than how Delphine Roux or anyone else had, but that didn't matter right now — it was Mark who had assailed his twin sister with their father's crime. For crime it would be to that boy. Almost from the time he could speak, Mark couldn't give up the idea that his father was against him: for the two older sons because they were older and starred at school and imbibed without complaint their father's intellectual pretensions; for Lisa because she was Lisa, the family's little girl, indisputably the child most indulged by her daddy; against Mark because everything his twin sister was — adorable, adoring, virtuous, touching, noble to the core — Mark was not and refused to be.

Mark's was probably the most difficult personality it was ever Coleman's lot to try, not to understand — the resentments were all too easy to understand — but to grapple with. The whining and sulking had begun before he was old enough to go off to kindergarten, and the protest against his family and their sense of things started soon after and, despite all attempts at propitiation, solidified over the years into his core. At the age of fourteen he vociferously supported Nixon during the impeachment hearings while the rest of them were rooting for the president to be imprisoned for life; at sixteen he became an Orthodox Jew while the rest of them, taking their cue from their anticlerical, atheistic parents, were Jews in little more than name; at twenty he enraged his father by dropping out of Brandeis with two semesters to go, and now, almost into his forties, having taken up and jettisoned a dozen different jobs to which he considered himself superior, he had discovered that he was a narrative poet.

Because of his unshakable enmity for his father, Mark had made himself into whatever his family wasn't — more sadly to the point, into whatever he wasn't. A clever boy, well read, with a quick mind and a sharp tongue, he nonetheless could never see his way around Coleman until, at thirty-eight, as a narrative poet on biblical themes, he had come to nurse his great life-organizing aversion with all the arrogance of someone who has succeeded at nothing. A devoted girlfriend, a humorless, high-strung, religiously observant young woman, earned their keep as a dental technician in Manhattan while Mark stayed home in their Brooklyn walk-up and wrote the biblically inspired poems that not even the Jewish magazines would publish, interminable poems about how David had wronged his son Absalom and how Isaac had wronged his son Esau and how Judah had wronged his brother Joseph and about the curse of the prophet Nathan after David sinned with Bathsheba — poems that, in one grandiosely ill-disguised way or another, harked back to the idee fixe on which Markie had staked everything and lost everything.

How could Lisa listen to him? How could Lisa take seriously any charge brought by Markie when she knew what had been driving him all his life? But then Lisa's being generous toward her brother, however misbegotten she found the antagonisms that deformed him, went back almost to their birth as twins. Because it was her nature to be benevolent, and because even as a little schoolgirl she had suffered the troubled conscience of the preferred child, she had always gently indulged her twin brother's grievances and acted as his comforter in family disputes. But must her solicitousness toward the less favored of their twosome extend even to this crazy charge? And what was the charge? What harmful act had the father committed, what injury had he inflicted on his children that should put these twins in league with Delphine Roux and Lester Farley? And the other two, his scientist sons — were they and their scruples in on this too? When had he last heard from them?

He remembered now that awful hour at the house after Iris's funeral, remembered and was stung all over again by the charges that Mark had brought against his father before the older boys moved in and physically removed him to his old room for the rest of the afternoon. In the days that followed, while the kids were all still around, Coleman was willing to blame Markie's grief and not Mark for what the boy had dared to say, but that didn't mean that he'd forgotten or that he ever would. Markie had begun berating him only minutes after they'd driven back from the cemetery. “The college didn't do it. The blacks didn't do it. Your enemies didn't do it. You did it. You killed mother. The way you kill everything! Because you have to be right! Because you won't apologize, because every time you are a hundred percent right, now it's Mother who's dead! And it all could have been settled so easily — all of it settled in twenty-four hours if you knew how once in your life to apologize. 'I'm sorry that I said ”spooks.“' That's all you had to do, great man, just go to those students and say you were sorry, and Mother would not be dead!”

Out on his lawn, Coleman was seized suddenly with the sort of indignation he had not felt since the day following Markie's outburst, when he'd written and submitted his resignation from the college all in an hour's time. He knew that it was not correct to have such feelings toward his children. He knew, from the spooks incident, that indignation on such a scale was a form of madness, and one to which he could succumb. He knew that indignation like this could lead to no orderly and reasoned approach to the problem. He knew as an educator how to educate and as a father how to father and as a man of over seventy that one must regard nothing, particularly within a family, even one containing a grudge-laden son like Mark, as implacably unchangeable. And it wasn't from the spooks incident alone that he knew about what can corrode and warp a man who believes himself to have been grievously wronged. He knew from the wrath of Achilles, the rage of Philoctetes, the fulminations of Medea, the madness of Ajax, the despair of Electra, and the suffering of Prometheus the many horrors that can ensue when the highest degree of indignation is achieved and, in the name of justice, retribution is exacted and a cycle of retaliation begins.

And it was lucky that he knew all this, because it took no less than this, no less than the prophylaxis of the whole of Attic tragedy and Greek epic poetry, to restrain him from phoning on the spot to remind Markie what a little prick he was and always had been.

The head-on confrontation with Farley came some four hours later. As I reconstruct it, Coleman, so as to be certain that no one was spying on the house, was himself in and out the front door and the back door and the kitchen door some six or seven times in the hours after Faunia's arrival. It wasn't until somewhere around ten, when the two of them were standing together inside the kitchen screen door, holding each other before parting for the night, that he was able to rise above all the corroding indignation and to allow the really serious thing in his life — the intoxication with the last fling, what Mann, writing of Aschenbach, called the “late adventure of the feelings”—to reassert itself and take charge of him. As she was about to leave, he at last found himself craving for her as though nothing else mattered — and none of it did, not his daughter, not his sons, not Faunia's ex-husband or Delphine Roux. This is not merely life, he thought, this is the end of life. What was unendurable wasn't all this ridiculous antipathy he and Faunia had aroused; what was unendurable was that he was down to the last bucket of days, to the bottom of the bucket, the time if there ever was a time to quit the quarrel, to give up the rebuttal, to undo himself from the conscientiousness with which he had raised the four lively children, persisted in the combative marriage, influenced the recalcitrant colleagues, and guided Athena's mediocre students,