The Human Stain

When she turned to find me still there, she said, "You have done enough damage. Go or I will call the police." There was great ferocity in this tiny person. I understood it: keeping him alive appeared to require no less.

"Don't destroy that diary," I said to her. "There is a record there—" "Filth! There is a record there of filth!"

"Syl, Sylvia—" "All of them, her, the brother, the mother, the stepfather—the whole bunch of them, trampling on this man his whole life. They have robbed him. They have deceived him. They have humiliated him. His daughter was a criminal. Got pregnant and had a child at sixteen—a child she abandoned to an orphan asylum. A child her father would have raised. She was a common whore. Guns and men and drugs and filth and sex. The money he gave her—what did she do with that money?"

"I don't know. I don't know anything about an orphan asylum.

I don't know anything about any money."

"Drugs! She stole it for drugs!"

"I don't know anything about that."

"That whole family—filth! Have some pity, please!"

I turned to him. "I want the person responsible for these deaths to be held legally accountable. Coleman Silk 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.