The Human Stain

together, pairs of husbands and pairs of wives, pairs of widows, pairs of widowers, pairs of rearranged widows and widowers — or so Coleman took them to be — who had teamed up as couples after meeting here in their Elderhostel classes. All were neatly dressed in light summer clothes, a lot of shirts and blouses of bright pastel shades, trousers of white or light khaki, some Brooks Brothers summertime plaid. Most of the men were wearing visored caps, caps of every color, many of them stitched with the logos of professional sports teams. No wheelchairs, no walkers, no crutches, no canes that he could see. Spry people his age, seemingly no less fit than he was, some a bit younger, some obviously older but enjoying what retirement freedom was meant to provide for those fortunate enough to breathe more or less easily, to ambulate more or less painlessly, and to think more or less clearly. This was where he was supposed to be. Paired off properly. Appropriately.

Appropriate. The current code word for reining in most any deviation from the wholesome guidelines and thereby making everybody “comfortable.” Doing not what he was being judged to be doing but doing instead, he thought, what was deemed suitable by God only knows which of our moral philosophers. Barbara Walters? Joyce Brothers? William Bennett? Dateline NBC? If he were around this place as a professor, he could teach “Appropriate Behavior in Classical Greek Drama,” a course that would be over before it began.

They were on their way to lunch, passing within sight of North Hall, the ivied, beautifully weathered colonial brick building where, for over a decade, Coleman Silk, as faculty dean, had occupied the office across from the president's suite. The college's architectural marker, the six-sided clock tower of North Hall, topped by the spire that was topped by the flag — and that, from down in Athena proper, could be seen the way the massive European cathedrals are discerned from the approaching roadways by those repairing for the cathedral town — was tolling noon as he sat on a bench shadowed by the quadrangle's most famously age-gnarled oak, sat and calmly tried to consider the coercions of propriety. The tyranny of propriety. It was hard, halfway through 1998, for even him to believe in American propriety's enduring power, and he was the one who considered himself tyrannized: the bridle it still is on public rhetoric, the inspiration it provides for personal posturing, the persistence just about everywhere of this de-virilizing pulpit virtue-mongering that H. L. Mencken identified with boobism, that Philip Wylie thought of as Momism, that the Europeans unhistorically call American puritanism, that the likes of a Ronald Reagan call America's core values, and that maintains widespread jurisdiction by masquerading itself as something else — as everything else. As a force, propriety is protean, a dominatrix in a thousand disguises, infiltrating, if need be, as civic responsibility, WASP dignity, women's rights, black pride, ethnic allegiance, or emotion-laden Jewish ethical sensitivity. It's not as though Marx or Freud or Darwin or Stalin or Hitler or Mao had never happened — it's as though Sinclair Lewis had not happened. It's, he thought, as though Babbitt had never been written. It's as though not even that most basic level of imaginative thought had been admitted into consciousness to cause the slightest disturbance. A century of destruction unlike any other in its extremity befalls and blights the human race — scores of millions of ordinary people condemned to suffer deprivation upon deprivation, atrocity upon atrocity, evil upon evil, half the world or more subjected to pathological sadism as social policy, whole societies organized and fettered by the fear of violent persecution, the degradation of individual life engineered on a scale unknown throughout history, nations broken and enslaved by ideological criminals who rob them of everything, entire populations so demoralized as to be unable to get out of bed in the morning with the minutest desire to face the day ... all the terrible touchstones presented by this century, and here they are up in arms about Faunia Farley. Here in America either it's Faunia Farley or it's Monica Lewinsky! The luxury of these lives disquieted so by the inappropriate comportment of Clinton and Silk! This, in 1998, is the wickedness they have to put up with. This, in 1998, is their torture, their torment, and their spiritual death. Their source of greatest moral despair, Faunia blowing me and me fucking Faunia. I'm depraved not simply for having once said the word “spooks” to a class of white students — and said it, mind you, not while standing there reviewing the legacy of slavery, the fulminations of the Black Panthers, the metamorphoses of Malcolm X, the rhetoric of James Baldwin, or the radio popularity of Amos 'n' Andy, but while routinely calling the roll. I am depraved not merely because of...

All this after less than five minutes sitting on a bench and looking at the pretty building where he had once been dean.

But the mistake had been made. He was back. He was there. He was back on the hill from which they had driven him, and so was his contempt for the friends who hadn't rallied round him and the colleagues who hadn't cared to support him and the enemies who'd disposed so easily of the whole meaning of his professional career. The urge to expose the capricious cruelty of their righteous idiocy flooded him with rage. He was back on the hill in the bondage of his rage and he could feel its intensity driving out all sense and demanding that he take immediate action.

Delphine Roux.

He got up and started for her office. At a certain age, he thought, it is better for one's health not to do what I am about to do. At a certain age, a man's outlook is best tempered by moderation, if not resignation, if not outright capitulation. At a certain age, one should live without either harking too much back to grievances of the past or inviting resistance in the present by embodying a challenge to the pieties that be. Yet to give up playing any but the role socially assigned, in this instance assigned to the respectably retired — at seventy-one, that is surely what is appropriate, and so, for Coleman Silk, as he long ago demonstrated with requisite ruthlessness to his very own mother, that is what is unacceptable.

He was not an embittered anarchist like Iris's crazy father, Gittelman. He was not a firebrand or an agitator in any way. Nor was he a madman. Nor was he a radical or a revolutionary, not even intellectually or philosophically speaking, unless it is revolutionary to believe that disregarding prescriptive society's most restrictive demarcations and asserting independently a free personal choice that is well within the law was something other than a basic human right — unless it is revolutionary, when you've come of age, to refuse to accept automatically the contract drawn up for your signature at birth.

By now he had passed behind North Hall and was headed for the long bowling green of a lawn leading to Barton and the office of Delphine Roux. He had no idea what he was going to say should he even catch her at her desk on a midsummer day as glorious as this one, with the fall semester not scheduled to begin for another six or seven weeks — nor did he find out, because, before he got anywhere near the wide brick path encircling Barton, he noticed around at the back of North Hall, gathered on a shady patch of grass adjacent to a basement stairwell, a group of five college janitors, in custodial staff shirts and trousers of UPS brown, sharing a pizza out of a delivery box and heartily laughing at somebody's joke. The only woman of the five and the focus of her coworkers' lunchtime attention — she who had told the joke or made the wisecrack or done the teasing and who happened also to be laughing loudest — was Faunia Farley.

The men appeared to be in their early thirties or thereabouts. Two were bearded, and one of the bearded ones, sporting a long ponytail, was particularly broad and oxlike. He was the only one up on his feet, the better, it seemed, to hover directly over Faunia as she sat on the ground, her long legs stretched out before her and her head thrown back in the gaiety of the moment. Her hair was a surprise to Coleman. It was down. In his experience, it was unfailingly drawn tightly back through an elastic band — down only in bed when she removed the band so as to allow it to fall to her unclothed shoulders.

With the boys. These must be “the boys” she referred to. One of them was recently divorced, a successless one-time garage mechanic who kept her Chevy running for her and drove her back and forth from work on the days when the damn thing wouldn't start no matter what he did, and one of them wanted to take her to a porn film on the nights his wife was working the late shift at the Blackwell paper box plant, and one of the boys was so innocent he didn't know what a hermaphrodite was. When the boys came up in conversation, Coleman listened without comment, expressing no chagrin over what she had to say about them, however much he wondered about their interest in her, given the meat of their talk as Faunia reported it. But as she didn't go endlessly on about them, and as he didn't encourage her with questions about them, the boys didn't make the impression on Coleman that they would have had, say, on Lester Farley. Of course she might herself choose to be a little less carefree and feed herself less cooperatively into their fantasies, but even when Coleman was impelled to suggest that, he easily managed to restrain himself. She could speak as pointlessly or pointedly as she liked to anyone, and whatever the consequences, she would have to bear them. She was not his daughter. She was not even his “girl.” She was — what she was.

But watching unseen from where he had ducked back into the shadowed wall of North Hall, it was not nearly so easy to take so detached and tolerant a view. Because now he saw not only what he invariably saw — what