The Human Stain

Jeff and Michael were obviously the sturdiest Silk children, and in them you clearly saw the physical imprint of the robust mother: if not her hair (both men were by now bald), her height, her solid core of confidence, her open-hearted authority. These were not people who muddled through. That was apparent in just the greeting they extended and the few words they said. When you met Jeff and Michael, especially if they were standing side by side, you'd met your match. Back before I got to know Coleman—back in his hey-day, before he began to spin out of control within the ever-narrowing prison of his rage, before the achievements that once particularized him, that were him, vanished from his life—you would surely have met your match in him too, which probably explains why a general willingness to compromise the dean was so quick to materialize once he was accused of uttering aloud something racially vicious.

Despite all the rumors circulating in town, the turnout for Coleman far exceeded what I'd been imagining it would be; it certainly exceeded what Coleman could have imagined. The first six or seven rows of pews were already full, and people were still streaming in behind me when I found an empty place midway up from the altar beside someone whom I recognized—from having seen him for the first time the day before—to be Smoky Hollenbeck. Did Smoky understand how close he might have come, only a year earlier, to having a funeral service of his own held here in Rishanger Chapel?

Maybe he was attending the service more in gratitude for his own good luck than out of regard for the man who'd been his erotic successor.

On Smoky's other side was a woman I took to be his wife, a pretty blonde of about forty and, if I remembered correctly, an Athena classmate Smoky had married back in the seventies and the mother now of their five children. The Hollenbecks were among the youngest people, aside from Coleman's family, whom I saw in the chapel when I began to look around me. Largely there were Athena elders, college faculty and staff whom Coleman had known for close to forty years before Iris's death and his resignation. What would he think about these old-timers showing up at Rishanger to see him off could he observe them seated before his coffin? Probably something like, "What a wonderful occasion for self-approval.

How virtuous they all must feel for not holding against me my contempt for them."

It was strange to think, while seated there with all his colleagues, that people so well educated and professionally civil should have fallen so willingly for the venerable human dream of a situation in which one man can embody evil. Yet there is this need, and it is undying and it is profound.

When the outside door was pulled shut and the Silks took their seats in the front row, I saw that the chapel was almost two-thirds full, three hundred people, maybe more, waiting for this ancient and natural human event to absorb their terror about the end of life. I saw, too, that Mark Silk, alone among his brothers, was wearing a skullcap.

Probably like most everyone else, I was expecting one of Coleman's children to mount the pulpit and speak first. But there was to be only one speaker that morning, and that was Herb Keble, the political scientist hired by Dean Silk as Athena's first black professor.

Obviously Keble had been chosen by the family for the reason the family had chosen Rishanger for the service: to rehabilitate their father's name, to push back the Athena calendar and restore to Coleman his former status and prestige. When I recalled the severity with which Jeff and Michael had each taken my hand and acknowledged me by name and told me, "Thank you for coming—it means everything to the family that you're here," and when I imagined that they must have repeated something like that to each individual mourner, among whom there were many people they had known since childhood, I thought, And they don't intend to quit, not until the administration building is rededicated as Coleman Silk Hall.

That the place was nearly full was probably no chance occurrence.

They must have been on the phone ever since the crash, mourners being rounded up the way voters used to be herded to the polls when the old Mayor Daley was running Chicago. And how they must have worked over Keble, whom Coleman had especially despised, to induce him voluntarily to proffer himself as the scapegoat for Athena's sins. The more I thought about these Silk boys twisting Keble's arm, intimidating him, shouting at him, denouncing him, perhaps even outright threatening him because of the way he had betrayed their father two years back, the more I liked them—and the more I liked Coleman for having sired two big, firm, smart fellows who were not reluctant to do what had to be done to turn his reputation right side out. These two were going to help put Les Farley away for the rest of his life.