The Human Stain

Lisa, who contains within her so much concern, whose conscientiousness knows no ambivalence, who wishes to exist only to assist.

Lisa the Undisillusionable, Lisa the Unspeakably Idealistic. Phone Lisa, he told himself, little imagining that he could ever elicit from this foolishly saintly child of his the tone of steely displeasure with which she received his call.

"You don't sound like yourself."

"I'm fine," she told him.

"What's wrong, Lisa?"

"Nothing."

"How's summer school? How's teaching?"

"Fine."

"And Josh?" The latest boyfriend.

"Fine."

"How are your kids? What happened to the little one who couldn't recognize the letter n? Did he ever get to level ten? The kid with all the n's in his name—Hernando."

"Everything's fine."

He then asked lightly, "Would you care to know how I am?"

"I know how you are."

"Do you?"

No answer.

"What's eating you, sweetheart?"

"Nothing." A "nothing," the second one, that meant all too clearly, Don't you sweetheart me.

Something incomprehensible was happening. Who had told her?

What had they told her? As a high school kid and then in college after the war he had pursued the most demanding curriculum; as dean at Athena he had thrived on the difficulties of a taxing job; as the accused in the spooks incident he had never once weakened in fighting the false accusation against him; even his resignation from the college had been an act not of capitulation but of outraged protest, a deliberate manifestation of his unwavering contempt. But in all his years of holding his own against whatever the task or the setback or the shock, he had never—not even after Iris's death—felt as stripped of all defenses as when Lisa, the embodiment of an almost mockable kindness, gathered up into that one word "nothing" all the harshness of feeling for which she had never before, in the whole of her life, found a deserving object.

And then, even as Lisa's "nothing" was exuding its awful meaning, Coleman saw a pickup truck moving along the blacktop road down from the house—rolling at a crawl a couple of yards forward, braking, very slowly rolling again, then braking again ... Coleman came to his feet, started uncertainly across the mown grass, craning his head to get a look, and then, on the run, began to shout, "You!

What are you up to! Hey!" But the pickup quickly increased its speed and was out of sight before Coleman could get near enough to discern anything of use to him about either driver or truck. As he didn't know one make from another and, from where he'd wound up, couldn't even tell if the truck was new or old, all that he came away with was its color, an indeterminate gray.

And now the phone was dead. In running across the lawn, he'd inadvertently touched the off button. That, or Lisa had deliberately broken the connection. When he redialed, a man answered. "Is this Josh?" Coleman asked. "Yes," the man said. "This is Coleman Silk.

Lisa's father." After a moment's silence, the man said, "Lisa doesn't want to talk," and hung up.

Mark's doing. It had to be. Could not be anyone else's. Couldn't be this fucking Josh's—who was he? Coleman had no more idea how Mark could have found out about Faunia than how Delphine Roux or anyone else had, but that didn't matter right now—it was Mark who had assailed his twin sister with their father's crime. For crime it would be to that boy. Almost from the time he could speak, Mark couldn't give up the idea that his father was against him: for the two older sons because they were older and starred at school and imbibed without complaint their father's intellectual preten-sions; for Lisa because she was Lisa, the family's little girl, indisputably the child most indulged by her daddy; against Mark because everything his twin sister was—adorable, adoring, virtuous, touching, noble to the core—Mark was not and refused to be.

Mark's was probably the most difficult personality it was ever Coleman's lot to try, not to understand—the resentments were all too easy to understand—but to grapple with. The whining and sulking had begun before he was old enough to go off to kindergarten, and the protest against his family and their sense of things started soon after and, despite all attempts at propitiation, solidified over the years into his core. At the age of fourteen he vociferously supported Nixon during the impeachment hearings while the rest of them were rooting for the president to be imprisoned for life; at sixteen he became an Orthodox Jew while the rest of them, taking their cue from their anticlerical, atheistic parents, were Jews in little more than name; at twenty he enraged his father by dropping out of Brandeis with two semesters to go, and now, almost into his forties, having taken up and jettisoned a dozen different jobs to which he considered himself superior, he had discovered that he was a narrative poet.