The Human Stain

"I believe your husband changed everything today."

She did not look at me as if I were mistaken, though I was. Nor did she ignore me, decide to be rid of me, and proceed on her way.

Nor did she look as if she didn't know what to do, though that she was in a quandary had to have been so. A friend of Coleman's at the end of his life? Given her true identity, how could she have said nothing more than "I'm not Mrs. Keble" and walked off?

But all she did was to stand there, opposite me, expressionless, so profoundly struck dumb by the day's events and its revelations that not to understand who she was to Coleman would, at that moment, have been impossible. It wasn't a resemblance to Coleman that registered, and registered quickly, in rapid increments, as with a distant star seen through a lens that you've steadily magnified to the correct intensity. What I saw—when, at long last, I did see, see all the way, clear to Coleman's secret—was the facial resemblance to Lisa, who was even more her aunt's niece than she was her father's daughter.

It was from Ernestine—back at my house in the hours after the funeral —that I learned most of what I know about Coleman's growing up in East Orange: about Dr. Fensterman trying to get Coleman to take a dive on his final exams so as to let Bert Fensterman slip in ahead of him as valedictorian; about how Mr. Silk found the East Orange house in 1926, the small frame house that Ernestine still occupied and that was sold to her father "by a couple," Ernestine explained to me, "who were mad at the people next door and so were determined to sell it to colored to spite them." ("See, you can tell the generation I am," she said to me later that day. "I say 'colored' and

'Negro.'") She told me about how her father had lost the optician shop during the Depression, how it took time for him to get over the loss—"I'm not sure," she said, "he ever did"—and how he got a job as a waiter on the dining car and worked for the railroad for the rest of his life. She talked about how Mr. Silk called English "the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens," and saw to it that the children learned not just to speak properly but to think logically, to classify, to analyze, to describe, to enumerate, to learn not only English but Latin and Greek; how he took them to the New York museums and to see Broadway plays; and how, when he found out about Coleman's secret career as an amateur boxer for the Newark Boys Club, he had told him, in that voice that radiated authority without ever having to be raised, "If I were your father I would say, 'You won last night? Good. Now you can retire undefeated.' " From Ernestine I learned how Doc Chizner, my own boxing instructor during the year I took his after-school class down in Newark, had, earlier, in East Orange, laid claim to young Coleman's talent after Coleman left the Boys Club, how Doc had wanted him to box for the University of Pittsburgh, could have gotten him a scholarship to Pitt as a white boxer, but how Coleman had enrolled at Howard because that was their father's plan. How their father dropped dead while serving dinner on the train one night, and how Coleman had immediately quit Howard to join the navy, and to join as a white man. How after the navy he moved to Greenwich Village to go to NYU. How he brought that white girl home one Sunday, the pretty girl from Minnesota. How the biscuits burned that day, so preoccupied were they all with not saying the wrong thing. How, luckily for everyone, Walt, who'd begun teaching down in Asbury Park, hadn't been able to drive up for dinner, how things just went along so wonderfully that Coleman could have had nothing to complain about. Ernestine told me how gracious Coleman's mother had been to the girl. Steena. How thoughtful and kind they'd been to Steena—and Steena to them. How hardworking their mother was always, how, after their father died, she had risen, by virtue of merit alone, to become the first colored head nurse on the surgical floor of a Newark hospital. And how she had adored her Coleman, how there was nothing Coleman could do to destroy his mother's love. Even the decision to spend the rest of his life pretending his mother had been somebody else, a mother he'd never had and who had never existed, even that couldn't free Mrs. Silk of him. And after Coleman had come home to tell his mother he was marrying Iris Gittelman and that she would never be mother-inlaw to her daughter-in-law or grandmother to her grandchildren, when Walt forbade Coleman from ever contacting the family again, how Walt then made it clear to their mother—and employing the same steely authority by which his father had governed them—that she was not to contact Coleman either.