The Human Stain

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 cafe 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.