got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies. Caught between, I thought. Denounced by the high-minded, reviled by the righteous — then exterminated by the criminally crazed. Excommunicated by the saved, the elect, the ever-present evangelists of the mores of the moment, then polished off by a demon of ruthlessness. Both human exigencies found their conjunction in him. The pure and the impure, in all their vehemence, on the move, akin in their common need of the enemy. Whipsawed, I thought. Whipsawed by the inimical teeth of this world. By the antagonism that
One woman, by herself, had remained as close to the open grave as I was. She was silent and did not look to be crying. She didn't even appear to be quite there-—that is to say, in the cemetery, at a funeral. She could have been on a street corner, waiting patiently for the next bus. It was the way she was holding her handbag primly in front of her that made me think of someone who was already prepared to pay her fare, and then to be carried off to wherever she was going. I could tell she wasn't white only by the thrust of her jaw and the cast of her mouth — by something suggestively protrusive shaping the lower half of her face — and, too, by the stiff texture of her hairdo. Her complexion was no darker than a Greek's or a Moroccan's, and perhaps I might not have added one clue to another to matter-of-factly register her as black, if it wasn't that Herb Keble was among the very few who hadn't yet headed for home. Because of her age — sixty-five, maybe seventy — I thought she must be Keble's wife. No wonder, then, that she looked so strangely transfixed. It could not have been easy to listen to her husband publicly cast himself (under the sway of whatever motive) as Athena's scapegoat. I could understand how she would have a lot to think about, and how assimilating it might take more time than the funeral had allowed. Her thoughts had still to be with what he had said back in Rishanger Chapel.
I was wrong.
As I turned to leave, she happened to turn too, and so, with only a foot or two between us, we were facing each other.
“My name's Nathan Zuckerman,” I said. “I was a friend of Coleman's near the end of his life.”
“How do you do,” she replied.
“I believe your husband changed everything today.”
She did not look at me as if I were mistaken, though I was. Nor did she ignore me, decide to be rid of me, and proceed on her way. Nor did she look as if she didn't know what to do, though that she was in a quandary had to have been so. A friend of Coleman's at the end of his life? Given her true identity, how could she have said nothing more than “I'm not Mrs. Keble” and walked off?
But all she did was to stand there, opposite me, expressionless, so profoundly struck dumb by the day's events and its revelations that
It was from Ernestine — back at my house in the hours after the funeral — that I learned most of what I know about Coleman's growing up in East Orange: about Dr. Fensterman trying to get Coleman to take a dive on his final exams so as to let Bert Fensterman slip in ahead of him as valedictorian; about how Mr. Silk found the East Orange house in 1926, the small frame house that Ernestine still occupied and that was sold to her father “by a couple,” Ernestine explained to me, “who were mad at the people next door and so were determined to sell it to colored to spite them.” (“See, you can tell the generation I am,” she said to me later that day. “I say ‘colored’ and ‘Negro.’”) She told me about how her father had lost the optician shop during the Depression, how it took time for him to get over the loss—“I'm not sure,” she said, “he ever did”—and how he got a job as a waiter on the dining car and worked for the railroad for the rest of his life. She talked about how Mr. Silk called English “the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens,” and saw to it that the children learned not just to speak properly but to think logically, to classify, to analyze, to describe, to enumerate, to learn not only English but Latin and Greek; how he took them to the New York museums and to see Broadway plays; and how, when he found out about Coleman's secret career as an amateur boxer for the Newark Boys Club, he had told him, in that voice that radiated authority without ever having to be raised, “If I were your father I would say, ‘You won last night? Good. Now you can retire undefeated.’” From Ernestine I learned how Doc Chizner, my own boxing instructor during the year I took his after- school class down in Newark, had, earlier, in East Orange, laid claim to young Coleman's talent after Coleman left the Boys Club, how Doc had wanted him to box for the University of Pittsburgh, could have gotten him a scholarship to Pitt as a white boxer, but how Coleman had enrolled at Howard because that was their father's plan. How their father dropped dead while serving dinner on the train one night, and how Coleman had immediately quit Howard to join the navy, and to join as a white man. How after the navy he moved to Greenwich Village to go to NYU. How he brought that white girl home one Sunday, the pretty girl from Minnesota. How the biscuits burned that day, so preoccupied were they all with not saying the wrong thing. How, luckily for everyone, Walt, who'd begun teaching down in Asbury Park, hadn't been able to drive up for dinner, how things just went along so wonderfully that Coleman could have had nothing to complain about. Ernestine told me how gracious Coleman's mother had been to the girl. Steena. How thoughtful and kind they'd been to Steena — and Steena to them. How hardworking their mother was always, how, after their father died, she had risen, by virtue of merit alone, to become the first colored head nurse on the surgical floor of a Newark hospital. And how she had adored her Coleman, how there was nothing Coleman could do to destroy his mother's love. Even the decision to spend the rest of his life pretending his mother had been somebody else, a mother he'd never had and who had never existed, even that couldn't free Mrs. Silk of him. And after Coleman had come home to tell his mother he was marrying Iris Gittelman and that she would never be mother-in-law to her daughter-in-law or grandmother to her grandchildren, when Walt forbade Coleman from ever contacting the family again, how Walt then made it clear to their mother — and employing the same steely authority by which his father had governed them — that she was not to contact Coleman either.
“I know he meant the best,” Ernestine said. “Walt thought this was the only way to protect Mother from being hurt. From being hurt by Coleman every time there was a birthday, every time there was a holiday, every time it was Christmas. He believed that if the line of communication remained open, Coleman was going to break Mother's heart a thousand times over, exactly the way he did it that day. Walt was enraged at Coleman for coming over to East Orange without any preparation, without warning any of us, and to tell an elderly woman, a widow like that, just what the law was going to be. Fletcher, my husband, always had a psychological reason for Walt's doing what he did. But I don't think Fletcher was right. I don't think Walt was ever truly jealous of Coleman's place in Mother's heart. I don't accept that. I think he was insulted and flared up — not just for Mother but for all of us. Walt was the political member of the family; of course he was going to get mad. I myself wasn't mad that way and I never have been, but I can understand Walter. Every year, on Coleman's birthday, I phoned Athena to talk to him. Right down to three days ago. That was his birthday. His seventy-second birthday. I would think that when he got killed, he was driving home from his birthday dinner. I phoned to wish him a happy birthday. There was no answer and so I called the next day. And that's how I found out he was dead. Somebody there at the house picked up the phone and told me. I realize now that it was one of my nephews. I only began calling the house after Coleman's wife died and he left the college and was living alone. Before that, I phoned the office. Never told anybody about it. Didn't see any reason to. Phoned on his birthdays. Phoned when Mother died. Phoned when I got married. Phoned when I had my son. I phoned him when my husband died. We always had a good talk together. He always wanted to hear the news, even about Walter and his promotions. And then each of the times that Iris gave birth, with Jeffrey, with Michael, then with the twins, I got a call from Cole man. He'd call me at school. That was always a great trial for him. He was testing fate with so many kids. Because they were genetically linked to the past he had repudiated, there was always the chance, you see, that they might be a throwback in some distinguishing way. He worried a lot about that. It could have happened — it sometimes does happen. But he went ahead and had them anyway. That was a part of the plan too. The plan to lead a full and regular and productive life. Still, I believe that, in those first years especially, and certainly whenever a new child came along, Coleman suffered for his decision. Nothing ever escaped Coleman's attention, and that held true for his own feelings. He could cut himself away from us, but not from his feelings. And that was most true where the children were concerned. I think he himself came to believe that there was something awful about withholding something so crucial to what a person is, that it was their birthright to know their genealogy. And there was something dangerous too. Think of the havoc he could create in their lives if their children were born recognizably Negro. So far he has been lucky, and that goes for the
