The Human Stain

did her no harm. He did not kill her. I ask to talk to you for only a minute.”

“Let him, Sylvia—”

“No! No more letting anyone! You have let them long enough!”

People were collected now on the porch of the inn watching us, and others were watching from the upper windows. Perhaps they were the last of the leafers, out to catch the little left of the autumn blaze. Perhaps they were Athena alumni. There were always a handful visiting the town, middle-aged and elderly graduates checking to see what had disappeared and what remained, thinking the best, the very best, of every last thing that had ever befallen them on these streets in nineteen hundred and whatever. Perhaps they were visitors in town to look at the restored colonial houses, a stretch of them running nearly a mile down both sides of Ward Street and considered by the Athena Historical Society to be, if not so grand as those in Salem, as important as any in the state west of the House of the Seven Gables. These people had not come to sleep in the carefully decorated period bedrooms of the College Arms so as to awaken to a shouting match beneath their windows. In a place as picturesque as South Ward Street and on a day as fine as this, the eruption of such a struggle — a crippled man crying, a tiny Asian woman shouting, a man who, from his appearance, might well have been a college professor seemingly terrifying both of them with what he was saying — was bound to seem both more stupendous and more disgusting than it would have at a big city intersection.

“If I could see the diary—”

“There is no diary,” she said, and there was nothing more to be done than to watch her push him up the ramp beside the stairway and through the main door and into the inn.

Back around at Pauline's, I ordered a cup of coffee and, on writing paper the waitress found for me in a drawer beneath the cash register, I wrote this letter:

I am the man who approached you near the restaurant on Town Street in Athena on the morning after Faunia's funeral. I live on a rural road outside Athena, a few miles from the home of the late Coleman Silk, who, as I explained, was my friend. Through Coleman I met your daughter several times. I sometimes heard him speak about her. Their affair was passionate, but there was no cruelty in it. He mainly played the part of lover with her, but he also knew how to be a friend and a teacher. If she asked for care, I can't believe it was ever withheld. Whatever of Coleman's spirit she may have absorbed could never, never have poisoned her life.

I don't know how much of the malicious gossip surrounding them and the crash you heard in Athena. I hope none. There is, however, a matter of justice to be settled which dwarfs all that stupidity. Two people have been murdered. I know who murdered them. I did not witness the murder but I know it took place. I am absolutely sure of it. But evidence is necessary if I am to be taken seriously by the police or by an attorney. If you possess anything that reveals Faunia's state of mind in recent months or even extending back to her marriage to Farley, I ask you not to destroy it. I am thinking of letters you may have received from her over the years as well as the belongings found in her room after her death that were passed on to you by Sally and Peg.

My telephone number and address are as follows—

That was as far as I got. I intended to wait until they were gone, to phone the College Arms to extract from the desk clerk, with some story or other, the man's name and address, and to send off my letter by overnight mail. I'd go to Sally and Peg for the address if I couldn't get it from the inn. But I would, in fact, do neither the one thing nor the other. Whatever Faunia had left behind in her room had already been discarded or destroyed by Sylvia — the same way my letter would be destroyed when it arrived at its destination. This tiny being whose whole purpose was to keep the past from tormenting him further was never going to allow inside the walls of his home what she would not permit when she'd found herself up against me face to face. Moreover, her course was one that I couldn't dispute. If suffering was passed around in that family like a disease, there was nothing to do but post a sign of the kind they used to hang in the doorways of the contagiously ill when I was a kid, a sign that read QUARANTINE or that presented to the eyes of the uninfected nothing more than a big black capital Q. Little Sylvia was that ominous Q, and there was no way that I was going to get past it.

I tore up what I'd written and walked across town to the funeral.

The service for Coleman had been arranged by his children, and the four of them were there at the door to Rishanger Chapel to greet the mourners as they filed in. The idea to bury him out of Rishanger, the college chapel, was a family decision, the key component of what I realized was a well-planned coup, an attempt to undo their father's self-imposed banishment and to integrate him, in death if not in life, back into the community where he had made his distinguished career.

When I introduced myself, I was instantly taken aside by Lisa, Coleman's daughter, who put her arms around me and in a tearful, whispering voice said, “You were his friend. You were the one friend he had left. You probably saw him last.”

“We were friends for a while,” I said, but explained nothing about having seen him last several months back, on that August Saturday morning at Tanglewood, and that by then he had deliberately let the brief friendship lapse.

“We lost him,” she said.

“I know.”

“We lost him,” she repeated, and then she cried without attempting to speak.

After a while I said, “I enjoyed him and I admired him. I wish I could have known him longer.”

“Why did this happen?”

“I don't know.”

“Did he go mad? Was he insane?”

“Absolutely not. No.”

“Then how could all this happen?”

When I didn't answer (and how could I, other than by beginning to write this book?), her arms dropped slowly away from me, and while we stood together for a few seconds more, I saw how strong was her resemblance to her father — strong as Faunia's to her father. There were the same carved puppetiike features, the same green eyes, the same tawny skin, even a less broad-shouldered version of Coleman's slight athletic build. The visible genetic legacy of the mother, Iris Silk, seemed to reside solely in Lisa's prodigious tangle of dark bushy hair. In photograph after photograph of Iris — photographs I'd seen in family albums Coleman had showed me — the facial features hardly seemed to matter, so strongly did her importance as a person, if not her entire meaning, appear to be concentrated in that assertive, theatrical endowment of hair. With Lisa, the hair appeared to stand more in contrast to her character than — as with her mother — to be issuing from it.

I had the definite impression, in just our few moments together, that the link, now broken, between Lisa and her father would not be gone from her mind for a single day throughout the remainder of her life. One way or another, the idea of him would be fused to every last thing she would ever think about or do or fail to do. The consequences of having loved him so fully as a beloved girl-child, and of having been estranged from him at the time of his death, would never let this woman be.

The three Silk men — Lisa's twin brother, Mark, and the two eldest, Jeffrey and Michael — were not so emotional in greeting me. I saw nothing of Mark's angry intensity as an affronted son, and when, an hour or so later, his sober demeanor gave way at the graveside, it was with the severity of one bereft beyond redemption. Jeff and Michael were obviously the sturdiest Silk children, and in them you clearly saw the physical imprint of the robust mother: if not her hair (both men were by now bald), her height, her solid core of confidence, her open-hearted authority. These were not people who muddled through. That was apparent in just the greeting they extended and the few words they said. When you met Jeff and Michael, especially if they were standing side by side, you'd met your match. Back before I got to know Coleman — back in his hey-day, before he began to spin out of control within the ever-narrowing prison of his rage, before the achievements that once particularized him, that were him, vanished from his life — you would surely have met your match in him too, which probably explains why a general willingness to compromise the dean was so quick to materialize once he was accused of uttering aloud something racially vicious.

Despite all the rumors circulating in town, the turnout for Coleman far exceeded what I'd been imagining it would be; it certainly exceeded what Coleman could have imagined. The first six or seven rows of pews were already full, and people were still streaming in behind me when I found an empty place midway up from the altar beside someone whom I recognized — from having seen him for the first time the day before — to be Smoky