The Human Stain

In the middle of the next week, Coleman got the anonymous letter, one sentence long, subject, predicate, and pointed modifiers boldly inscribed in a large hand across a single sheet of white typing paper, the twelve-word message, intended as an indictment, filling the sheet from top to bottom: Everyone knows you're sexually exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age.

The writing on both the envelope and the letter was in red ballpoint ink. Despite the envelope's New York City postmark, Coleman recognized the handwriting immediately as that of the young French woman who'd been his department chair when he'd returned to teaching after stepping down from the deanship and who, later, had been among those most eager to have him exposed as a racist and reprimanded for the insult he had leveled at his absent black students.

In his Spooks files, on several of the documents generated by his case, he found samples of handwriting that confirmed his identification of Professor Delphine Roux, of Languages and Literature, as the anonymous letter writer. Aside from her having printed rather than written in script the first couple of words, she hadn't made any effort that Coleman could see to put him off the trail by falsifying her hand. She might have begun with that intention but appeared to have abandoned it or forgotten about it after getting no further than "Everyone knows." On the envelope, the French-born professor hadn't even bothered to eschew the telltale European sevens in Coleman's street address and zip code. This laxness, an odd disregard—in an anonymous letter—for concealing the signs of one's identity, might have been explained by some extreme emotional state she was in that hadn't allowed her to think through what she was doing before firing off the letter, except that it hadn't been posted locally—and hastily—but appeared from the postmark to have been transported some hundred and forty miles south before being mailed. Maybe she had figured that there was nothing distinctive or eccentric enough in her handwriting for him to be able to recognize it from his days as dean; maybe she had failed to remember the documents pertaining to his case, the notes of her two interviews with Tracy Cummings that she had passed on to the faculty investigating committee along with the final report that bore her signature. Perhaps she didn't realize that, at Coleman's request, the committee had provided him with a photocopy of her original notes and all the other data pertinent to the complaint against him. Or maybe she didn't care if he did determine who out there had uncovered his secret: maybe she wanted both to taunt him with the menacing aggressiveness of an anonymous indictment and, at the same time, to all but disclose that the indictment had been brought by someone now far from powerless.

The afternoon Coleman called and asked me to come over to see the anonymous letter, all the samples of Delphine Roux's handwriting from the Spooks files were neatly laid out on the kitchen table, both the originals and copies of the originals that he'd already run off and on which he'd circled, in red, every stroke of the pen that he saw as replicating the strokes in the anonymous letter. Marked off mainly were letters in isolation—a y, an s, an x, here a word-ending e with a wide loop, here an e looking something like an i when nestled up against an adjacent d but more like a conventionally written e when preceding an r—and, though the similarities in writing between the letter and the Spooks documents were noteworthy, it wasn't until he showed me where his full name appeared on the envelope and where it appeared in her interview notes with Tracy Cummings that it seemed to me indisputable that he had nailed the culprit who'd set out to nail him.

Everyone knows you're sexually exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age.

While I held the letter in my hand and as carefully as I could-and as Coleman would have me do—appraised the choice of words and their linear deployment as if they'd been composed not by Delphine Roux but by Emily Dickinson, Coleman explained to me that it was Faunia, out of that savage wisdom of hers, and not he who had sworn them both to the secrecy that Delphine Roux had somehow penetrated and was more or less threatening to expose. "I don't want anybody butting in my life. All I want is a no-pressure bang once a week, on the sly, with a man who's been through it all and is nicely cooled out. Otherwise it's nobody's fucking business."