The Human Stain

Mark Silk apparently had imagined that he was going to have his father around to hate forever. To hate and hate and hate and hate, and then perhaps, in his own good time, after the scenes of accusation had reached their crescendo and he had flogged Coleman to within an inch of his life with his knot of filial grievance, to forgive.

He thought Coleman was going to stay here till the whole play could be performed, as though he and Coleman had been set down not in life but on the southern hillside of the Athenian acropolis, in an outdoor theater sacred to Dionysus, where, before the eyes of ten thousand spectators, the dramatic unities were once rigorously observed and the great cathartic cycle was enacted annually. The human desire for a beginning, a middle, and an end—and an end appropriate in magnitude to that beginning and middle—is realized nowhere so thoroughly as in the plays that Coleman taught at Athena College. But outside the classical tragedy of the fifth century B.C., the expectation of completion, let alone of a just and perfect consummation, is a foolish illusion for an adult to hold.

People began to drift away. I saw the Hollenbecks move along the path between the gravestones and head toward the nearby street, the husband's arm around his wife's shoulder, shepherding her protectively away. I saw the young lawyer, Nelson Primus, who had represented Coleman during the spooks incident, and with him a pregnant young woman, a woman weeping, who must have been his wife. I saw Mark with his sister, still having to be consoled by her, and I saw Jeff and Michael, who had run this whole operation so expertly, talking quietly to Herb Keble a few yards from where I was standing. I couldn't myself go because of Les Farley. Away from this cemetery he muscled on undisturbed, uncharged with any crime, manufacturing that crude reality all his own, a brute of a being colliding with whomever he liked however he liked for all the inner reasons that justified anything he wanted to do.

Sure, I know there's no completion, no just and perfect consummation, but that didn't mean that, standing just feet from where the coffin rested in its freshly dug pit, I wasn't obstinately thinking that this ending, even if it were construed as having permanently reestablished Coleman's place as an admired figure in the college's history, would not suffice. Too much truth was still concealed.

I meant by this the truth about his death and not the truth that was to come to light a moment or two later. There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they've 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 is the world.

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. That's where she was.

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.