The Human Stain

However much ambition they have, however much they push their children, they bring their children up to the same litany of charity, selflessness, discipline, faith, and respect—respect not for the individual (down with the individual!) but for the traditions of the family. Superior to intelligence, to creativity, to a deep development of oneself apart from them, superior to everything, were the traditions of the stupid Walincourts! It was Delphine's mother who embodied those values, who imposed them on the household, who would have enchained her only daughter to those values from birth to the grave had her daughter been without the strength, from adolescence on, to run from her as far as she could. The Walincourt children of Delphine's generation either fell into absolute conformity or rebelled so gruesomely they were incomprehensible, and Delphine's success was to have done neither. From a background few ever even begin to recover from, Delphine had managed a unique escape. By coming to America, to Yale, to Athena, she had, in fact, surpassed her mother, who couldn't herself have dreamed of leaving France—without Delphine's father and his money, Catherine de Walincourt could hardly dream, at twenty-two, of leaving Picardy for Paris. Because if she left Picardy and the fortress of her family, who would she be? What would her name mean? I left because I wanted to have an accomplishment that nobody could mistake, that had nothing to do with them, that was my own ... Thinking that the reason she can't get an American man isn't that she can't get an American man, it's that she can't understand these men and that she will never understand these men, and the reason she can't understand these men is because she is not fluent. With all her pride in her fluency, with all her fluency, she is not fluent! I think I understand them, and I do understand; what I don't understand isn't what they say, it's everything they don't say, everything they're not saying. Here she operates at fifty percent of her intelligence, and in Paris she understood every nuance. What's the point of being smart here when, because I am not from here, I am de facto dumb ... Thinking that the only English she really understands —no, the only American she understands—is academic American, which is hardly American, which is why she can't make it in, will never make it in, which is why there'll never be a man, why this will never be her home, why her intuitions are wrong and always will be, why the cozy intellectual life she had in Paris as a student will never be hers again, why for the rest of her life she is going to understand eleven percent of this country and zero percent of these men ... Thinking that all her intellectual advantages have been muted by her being dépaysée . . . Thinking that she has lost her peripheral vision, that she sees things that are in front of her but nothing out of the corner of her eye, that what she has here is not the vision of a woman of her intelligence but a flat, a totally frontal vision, the vision of an immigrant or a displaced person, a misplaced person ... Thinking, Why did I leave? Because of my mother's shadow? This is why I gave up everything that was mine, everything that was familiar, everything that had made me a subtle being and not this mess of uncertainty that I've become. Everything that I loved I gave up. People do that when their countries are impossible to live in because the fascists have taken charge but not because of their mother's shadow . . . Thinking, Why did I leave, what have I done, this is impossible. My friends, our talk, my city, the men, all the intelligent men. Confident men I could converse with.

Mature men who could understand. Stable, passionate, masculine men. Strong, unintimidated men. Men legitimately and unambiguously men .. . Thinking, Why didn't somebody stop me, why didn't somebody say something to me? Away from home for less than ten years and it feels like two lifetimes already .. . Thinking that she's Catherine de Walincourt Roux's little daughter still, that she has not changed that by one iota. . . Thinking that being French in Athena may have made her exotic to the natives, but it hasn't made her anything more extraordinary to her mother and it never will...