The Human Stain

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.

And all the while he was driving home he was remembering the time he'd almost told Iris. It was after the twins were born. The family was now complete. They'd done it — he'd made it. With not a sign of his secret on any of his kids, it was as though he had been delivered from his secret. The exuberance that came of having pulled it off brought him to the very brink of giving the whole thing away. Yes, he would present his wife with the greatest gift he possessed: he would tell the mother of his four children who their father really was. He would tell Iris the truth. That was how excited and relieved he was, how solid the earth felt beneath his feet after she had their beautiful twins, and he took Jeff and Mikey to the hospital to see their new brother and sister, and the most frightening apprehension of them all had been eradicated from his life.

But he never did give Iris that gift. He was saved from doing it — or damned to leave it undone — because of the cataclysm that befell a dear friend of hers, her closest associate on the art association board, a pretty, refined amateur watercolorist named Claudia McChesney, whose husband, owner of the county's biggest building firm, turned out to have quite a stunning secret of his own: a second family. For some eight years, Harvey McChesney had been keeping a woman years younger than Claudia, a bookkeeper at a chair factory over near the Taconic by whom he'd had two children, little kids aged four and six, living in a small town just across the Massachusetts line in New York State, whom he visited each week, whom he supported, whom he seemed to love, and whom nobody in the McChesneys' Athena household knew anything about until an anonymous phone call — probably from one of Harvey's building-trade rivals — revealed to Claudia and the three adolescent children just what McChesney was up to when he wasn't out on the job. Claudia collapsed that night, came completely apart and tried to slash her wrists, and it was Iris who, beginning at 3 A.M., with the help of a psychiatrist friend, organized the rescue operation that got Claudia installed before dawn in Austin Riggs, the Stockbridge psychiatric hospital. And it was Iris who, all the while she was nursing two newborns and mothering two preschool boys, visited the hospital every day, talking to Claudia, steadying her, reassuring her, bringing her potted plants to tend and art books to look at, even combing and braiding Claudia's hair, until, after five weeks — and as much a result of Iris's devotion as of the psychiatric program — Claudia returned home to begin to take the steps necessary to rid herself of the man who had caused all her misery.

In just days, Iris had got Claudia the name of a divorce lawyer up in Pittsfield and, with all the Silk kids, including the infants, strapped down in the back of the station wagon, she drove her friend to the lawyer's office to be absolutely certain that the separation arrangements were initiated and Claudia's deliverance from McChesney was under way. On the ride home that day, there'd been a lot of bucking up to do, but bucking people up was Iris's specialty, and she saw to it that Claudia's determination to right her life was not washed away by her residual fears.

“What a wretched thing to do to another person,” Iris said. “Not the girlfriend. Bad enough, but that happens. And not the little children, not even that — not even the other woman's little boy and girl, painful and brutal as that would be for any wife to discover. No, it's the secret — that's what did it, Coleman. That's why Claudia doesn't want to go on living. 'Where's the intimacy?' That's what gets her crying every time. ‘Where is the intimacy,’ she says, ‘when there is such a secret?’ That he could hide this from her, that he would have gone on hiding it from her — that's what Claudia's defenseless against, and that's why she still wants to do herself in. She says to me, 'It's like discovering a corpse. Three corpses. Three human bodies hidden under our floor.'” “Yes,” Coleman said, “it's like something out of the Greeks. Out of The Bacchae?” “Worse,” Iris said, “because it's not out of The Bacchae. It's out of Claudia's life.”

When, after almost a year of outpatient therapy, Claudia had a rapprochement with her husband and he moved back into the Athena house and the McChesneys resumed life together as a family — when Harvey agreed to give up the other woman, if not his other children, to whom he swore to remain a responsible father — Claudia