authority by their moral stupidity. Yes, it is we, the morally stupid censorious community, who have abased ourselves in having so shamefully besmirched Coleman Silk's good name. I speak particularly of those like myself, who knew from close contact the depth of his commitment to Athena and the purity of his dedication as an educator, and who, out of whatever deluded motive, betrayed him nonetheless. I say it again: we betrayed him. Betrayed Coleman and betrayed Iris”.
“Iris's death, the death of Iris Silk, coming in the midst of...”
Two seats to my left, Smoky Hollenbeck's wife was in tears, as were several other of the women nearby. Smoky was himself leaning forward, his forehead resting lightly on his two hands, which were entwined at the top of the pew in front of us in a vaguely ecclesiastical manner. I suppose he wanted me or his wife or whoever else might be watching him to believe that the injustice done to Coleman Silk was unendurable to think about. I supposed he was meant to appear to be overcome by compassion, yet knowing what I did about all that he concealed, as a model family man, of the Dionysian substrata of his life, it was an inference hard to swallow.
But, Smoky aside, the attention, the concentration, the
Why was I unwilling to believe this man? Because, by a certain age, one's mistrust is so exquisitely refined that one is unwilling to believe anybody? Surely, two years back, when he was silent and didn't rise to Coleman's defense, it was for the reason that people are always silent: because it is in their interest to be silent. Expediency is not a motive that is steeped in darkness. Herb Keble was just another one out trying to kosher the record, albeit in a bold, even an interesting way, by taking the guilt upon himself, but the fact remained that he couldn't act when it mattered, and so I thought, on Coleman's behalf, Fuck him.
When Keble came down from the podium and, before returning to his seat, stopped to shake the hands of each of Coleman's children, that simple gesture served only to intensify the almost violent passion aroused by his speech. What would happen next? For a moment there was nothing. Just the silence and the coffin and the emotional intoxication of the crowd. Then Lisa stood up, mounted the few steps to the podium, and, from the lectern, said, “The last movement of Mahler's Third Symphony.” That was it. They pulled out all the stops. They played Mahler.
Well, you can't listen to Mahler sometimes. When he picks you up to shake you, he doesn't stop. By the end of it, we were all crying.
Speaking only for myself, I don't think anything could have torn me apart like that other than hearing Steena Palsson's rendition of “The Man I Love” as she'd sung it from the foot of Coleman's Sullivan Street bed in 1948.
The three-block walk to the cemetery was memorable largely for its seemingly not having taken place. One moment we were immobilized by the infinite vulnerability of Mahler's adagio movement, by that simplicity that is not artifice, that is not a strategy, that unfolds, it almost seems, with the accumulated pace of life and with all of life's unwillingness to end ... one moment we were immobilized by that exquisite juxtaposition of grandeur and intimacy that begins in the quiet, singing, restrained intensity of the strings and then rises in surges through the massive false ending that leads to the true, the extended, the monumental ending ... one moment we were immobilized by the swelling, soaring, climaxing, and subsiding of an elegiac orgy that rolls on and on and on with a determined pace that never changes, giving way, then coming back like pain or longing that won't disappear ... one moment we were, at Mahler's mounting insistence, inside the coffin with Coleman, attuned to all the terror of endlessness and to the passionate desire to escape death, and then somehow or other sixty or seventy of us had got ourselves over to the cemetery to watch as he was buried, a simple enough ritual, as sensible a solution to the problem as any ever devised but one that is never entirely comprehensible. You have to see it to believe it each time.
I doubted that most people had been planning to accompany the body all the way to the grave. But the Silk children had a flair for drawing out and sustaining pathos, and this, I assumed, was why there were so many of us crowding around as close as we could to the hole that was to be Coleman's eternal home, as though eager almost to crawl in there and take his place, to offer ourselves up as surrogates, as substitutes, as sacrificial offerings, if that would magically allow for the resumption of the exemplary life that, by Herb Keble's own admission, had been as good as stolen from Coleman two years back.
Coleman was to be buried beside Iris. The dates on her headstone read 1932–1996. His would read 1926– 1998. How direct those numbers are. And how little they connote of what went on.
I heard the Kaddish begin before I realized that somebody there was chanting it. Momentarily I imagined that it must be drifting in from another part of the cemetery, when it was coming from the other side of the grave, where Mark Silk — the youngest son, the angry son, the son who, like his twin sister, bore the strongest resemblance to his father — was standing alone, with the book in his hand and the yarmulke on his head, and chanting in a soft, tear-filled voice the familiar Hebrew prayer.
Most people in America, including myself and probably Mark's siblings, don't know what these words mean, but nearly everyone recognizes the sobering message they bring: a Jew is dead. Another Jew is dead. As though death were not a consequence of life but a consequence of having been a Jew.
When Mark had finished, he shut the book and then, having induced a grim serenity in everyone else, was himself overcome by hysteria. That was how Coleman's funeral ended — with all of us immobilized this time by watching Mark go to pieces, helplessly flailing his arms in the air and, through a wide-open mouth, wailing away. That wild sound of lamentation, older even than the prayer he'd uttered, rose in intensity until, when he saw his sister rushing toward him with arms outstretched, he turned to her his contorted Silk face, and in sheer childlike astonishment cried, “We're never going to see him again!”
I did not think my most generous thought. Generous thoughts were hard to come by that day. I thought, What difference should that make? You weren't that keen on seeing him when he was here.
Mark Silk apparently had imagined that he was going to have his father around to hate forever. To hate and hate and hate and hate, and then perhaps, in his own good time, after the scenes of accusation had reached their crescendo and he had flogged Coleman to within an inch of his life with his knot of filial grievance, to forgive. He thought Coleman was going to stay here till the whole play could be performed, as though he and Coleman had been set down not in life but on the southern hillside of the Athenian acropolis, in an outdoor theater sacred to Dionysus, where, before the eyes of ten thousand spectators, the dramatic unities were once rigorously observed and the great cathartic cycle was enacted annually. The human desire for a beginning, a middle, and an end — and an end appropriate in magnitude to that beginning and middle — is realized nowhere so thoroughly as in the plays that Coleman taught at Athena College. But outside the classical tragedy of the fifth century B.C., the expectation of completion, let alone of a just and perfect consummation, is a foolish illusion for an adult to hold.
People began to drift away. I saw the Hollenbecks move along the path between the gravestones and head toward the nearby street, the husband's arm around his wife's shoulder, shepherding her protectively away. I saw the young lawyer, Nelson Primus, who had represented Coleman during the spooks incident, and with him a pregnant young woman, a woman weeping, who must have been his wife. I saw Mark with his sister, still having to be consoled by her, and I saw Jeff and Michael, who had run this whole operation so expertly, talking quietly to Herb Keble a few yards from where I was standing. I couldn't myself go because of Les Farley. Away from this cemetery he muscled on undisturbed, uncharged with any crime, manufacturing that crude reality all his own, a brute of a being colliding with whomever he liked however he liked for all the inner reasons that justified anything he wanted to do.
Sure, I know there's no completion, no just and perfect consummation, but that didn't mean that, standing just feet from where the coffin rested in its freshly dug pit, I wasn't obstinately thinking that this ending, even if it were construed as having permanently reestablished Coleman's place as an admired figure in the college's history, would not suffice. Too much truth was still concealed.
I meant by this the truth about his death and not the truth that was to come to light a moment or two later. There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they've
