The Human Stain

Because of his unshakable enmity for his father, Mark had made himself into whatever his family wasn't—more sadly to the point, into whatever he wasn't. A clever boy, well read, with a quick mind and a sharp tongue, he nonetheless could never see his way around Coleman until, at thirty-eight, as a narrative poet on biblical themes, he had come to nurse his great life-organizing aversion with all the arrogance of someone who has succeeded at nothing.

A devoted girlfriend, a humorless, high-strung, religiously observant young woman, earned their keep as a dental technician in Manhattan while Mark stayed home in their Brooklyn walk-up and wrote the biblically inspired poems that not even the Jewish magazines would publish, interminable poems about how David had wronged his son Absalom and how Isaac had wronged his son Esau and how Judah had wronged his brother Joseph and about the curse of the prophet Nathan after David sinned with Bathsheba-poems that, in one grandiosely ill-disguised way or another, harked back to the idée fixe on which Markie had staked everything and lost everything.

How could Lisa listen to him? How could Lisa take seriously any charge brought by Markie when she knew what had been driving him all his life? But then Lisa's being generous toward her brother, however misbegotten she found the antagonisms that deformed him, went back almost to their birth as twins. Because it was her nature to be benevolent, and because even as a little schoolgirl she had suffered the troubled conscience of the preferred child, she had always gently indulged her twin brother's grievances and acted as his comforter in family disputes. But must her solicitousness toward the less favored of their twosome extend even to this crazy charge? And what was the charge? What harmful act had the father committed, what injury had he inflicted on his children that should put these twins in league with Delphine Roux and Lester Farley?

And the other two, his scientist sons—were they and their scruples in on this too? When had he last heard from them?

He remembered now that awful hour at the house after Iris's funeral, remembered and was stung all over again by the charges that Mark had brought against his father before the older boys moved in and physically removed him to his old room for the rest of the afternoon.

In the days that followed, while the kids were all still around, Coleman was willing to blame Markie's grief and not Mark for what the boy had dared to say, but that didn't mean that he'd forgotten or that he ever would. Markie had begun berating him only minutes after they'd driven back from the cemetery. "The college didn't do it. The blacks didn't do it. Your enemies didn't do it.

You did it. You killed mother. The way you kill everything! Because you have to be right! Because you won't apologize, because every time you are a hundred percent right, now it's Mother who's dead!

And it all could have been settled so easily—all of it settled in twenty-four hours if you knew how once in your life to apologize.

'I'm sorry that I said "spooks."' That's all you had to do, great man, just go to those students and say you were sorry, and Mother would not be dead!"

Out on his lawn, Coleman was seized suddenly with the sort of indignation he had not felt since the day following Markie's outburst, when he'd written and submitted his resignation from the college all in an hour's time. He knew that it was not correct to have such feelings toward his children. He knew, from the spooks incident, that indignation on such a scale was a form of madness, and one to which he could succumb. He knew that indignation like this could lead to no orderly and reasoned approach to the problem. He knew as an educator how to educate and as a father how to father and as a man of over seventy that one must regard nothing, particularly within a family, even one containing a grudge-laden son like Mark, as implacably unchangeable. And it wasn't from the spooks incident alone that he knew about what can corrode and warp a man who believes himself to have been grievously wronged. He knew from the wrath of Achilles, the rage of Philoctetes, the fulminations of Medea, the madness of Ajax, the despair of Electra, and the suffering of Prometheus the many horrors that can ensue when the highest degree of indignation is achieved and, in the name of justice, retribution is exacted and a cycle of retaliation begins.

And it was lucky that he knew all this, because it took no less than this, no less than the prophylaxis of the whole of Attic tragedy and Greek epic poetry, to restrain him from phoning on the spot to remind Markie what a little prick he was and always had been.

The head-on confrontation with Farley came some four hours later.