The Human Stain

Thinking, yes, that's why she left, to elude her mother's fixed- forever overshadowing shadow, and that's what blocks her return, and now she's exactly nowhere, in the middle, neither there nor here ... Thinking that under her exotic Frenchness she is to herself who she always was, that all the exotic Frenchness has achieved in America is to make of her the consummate miserable misunderstood foreigner... Thinking that she's worse even than in the middle—that she's in exile, in, of all things, a stupid-making, selfimposed anguishing exile from her mother—Delphine neglects to observe that earlier, at the outset, instead of addressing the ad to the New York Review of Books, she had automatically addressed it to the recipients of her previous communication, the recipients of most of her communications—to the ten staff members of the Athena Department of Languages and Literature. She neglects first to observe that mistake and then, in her distracted, turbulent, emotionally taxing state, neglects also to observe that instead of hitting the delete button, she is adding one common-enough tiny error to another common-enough tiny error by hitting the send button instead.

And so off, irretrievably off goes the ad in quest of a Coleman Silk duplicate or facsimile, and not to the classified section of the New York Review of Books but to every member of her department.

It was past 1 A.M. when the phone rang. She had long ago fled her office—run from her office thinking only to get. her passport and flee the country—and it was already several hours after her regular bedtime, when the phone rang with the news. So anguished was she by the ad's inadvertently going out as e-mail that she was still awake and roaming her apartment, tearing at her hair, sneering in the mirror at her' face, bending her head to the kitchen table to weep into her hands, and, as though startled out of sleep—the sleep of a heretofore meticulously defended adult life—jumping up to cry aloud, "It did not happen! I did not do it!" But who had ? In the past there seemed always to be people trying their best to trample her down, to dispose somehow of the nuisance she was to them, callous people against whom she had learned the hard way to pro-tect herself. But tonight there was no one to reproach: her own hand had delivered the ruinous blow.

Frantic, in a frenzy, she tried to figure out some way, any way, to prevent the worst from happening, but in her state of incredulous despair she could envision the inevitability of only the most cataclysmic trajectory: the hours passing, the dawn breaking, the doors to Barton Hall opening, her departmental colleagues each entering his or her office, booting up the computer, and finding there, to savor with their morning coffee, the e-mail ad for a Coleman Silk duplicate that she'd had no intention of ever sending. To be read once, twice, three times over by all the members of her department and then to be e-mailed down the line to every last instructor, professor, administrator, office clerk, and student.

Everyone in her classes will read it. Her secretary will read it. Before the day is out, the president of the college will have read it, and the college trustees. And even if she were to claim that the ad had been meant as a joke, nothing more than an insider's joke, why would the trustees allow the joke's perpetrator to remain at Athena?

Especially after her joke is written up in the student paper, as it will be. And in the local paper. After it is picked up by the French papers.

Her mother! The humiliation for her mother! And her father!

The disappointment to him! All the conformist Walincourt cousins —the pleasure they will take in her defeat! All the ridiculously conservative uncles and the ridiculously pious aunts, together keeping intact the narrowness of the past—how this will please them as they sit snobbishly side by side in church! But suppose she explained that she had merely been experimenting with the ad as a literary form, alone at the office disinterestedly toying with the personal ad as . . . as utilitarian haiku. Won't help. Too ridiculous.

Nothing will help. Her mother, her father, her brothers, her friends, her teachers. Yale. Yale! News of the scandal will reach everyone she's ever known, and the shame will follow her unflaggingly forever. Where can she even run with her passport? Montreal?

Martinique? And earn her living how? No, not in the farthest