The Human Stain

He thought the same useless thoughts—useless to a man of no great talent like himself, if not to Sophocles: how accidentally a fate is made ... or how accidental it all may seem when it is inescapable.

As she first portrayed herself and her origins to Coleman, Iris Gittelman had grown up willful, clever, furtively rebellious-secretly plotting, from the second grade on, how to escape her oppressive surroundings—in a Passaic household rumbling with hatred for every form of social oppression, particularly the authority of the rabbis and their impinging lies. Her Yiddish-speaking father, as she characterized him, was such a thoroughgoing heretical anarchist that he hadn't even had Iris's two older brothers circumcised, nor had her parents bothered to acquire a marriage license or to submit to a civil ceremony. They considered themselves husband and wife, claimed to be American, even called themselves Jews, these two uneducated immigrant atheists who spat on the ground when a rabbi walked by. But they called themselves what they called themselves freely, without asking permission or seeking approval from what her father contemptuously described as the hypocritical enemies of everything that was natural and good—namely, officialdom, those illegitimately holding the power. On the cracking, filth-caked wall over the soda fountain of the family candy store on Myrtle Avenue—a cluttered shop so small, she said, "you couldn't bury the five of us there side by side"—hung two framed pictures, one of Sacco, the other of Vanzetti, photographs torn from the rotogravure section of the newspaper. Every August 22—the anniversary of the day in 1927 when Massachusetts executed the two anarchists for murders Iris and her brothers were taught to believe neither man had committed—business was suspended and the family retreated upstairs to the tiny, dim apartment whose lunatic disorder exceeded even the store's, so as to observe a day of fasting.

This was a ritual Iris's father had, like a cult leader, dreamed up all on his own, modeling it wackily on the Jewish Day of Atonement.

Her father had no real ideas about what he thought of as ideas—all that ran deep was desperate ignorance and the bitter hopelessness of dispossession, the impotent revolutionary hatred. Everything was said with a clenched fist, and everything was a harangue. He knew the names Kropotkin and Bakunin, but nothing of their writings, and the anarchist Yiddish weekly Freie Arbeiter Stimme, which he was always carrying around their apartment, he rarely read more than a few words of each night before dropping off to sleep. Her parents, she explained to Coleman—and all this dramatically, scandalously dramatically, in a Bleecker Street café minutes after he had picked her up in Washington Square—her parents were simple people in the grips of a pipe dream that they could not begin to articulate or rationally defend but for which they were zealously willing to sacrifice friends, relatives, business, the good will of neighbors, even their own sanity, even their children's sanity. They knew only what they had nothing in common with, which to Iris, the older she got, appeared to be everything. Society as it was constituted —its forces all in constant motion, the intricate underwebbing of interests stretched to its limit, the battle for advantage that is ongoing, the subjugation that is ongoing, the factional collisions and collusions, the shrewd jargon of morality, the benign despot that is convention, the unstable illusion of stability—society as it was made, always has been and must be made, was as foreign to them as was King Arthur's court to the Connecticut Yankee. And yet, this wasn't because they'd been bound by the strongest ties to some other time and place and then forcefully set down in a wholly alien world: they were more like people who'd stepped directly into adulthood from the cradle, having had no intervening education in how human beastliness is run and ruled. Iris could not decide, from the time she was a tot, whether she was being raised by crackpots or visionaries, or whether the passionate loathing she was meant to share was a revelation of the awful truth or utterly ridiculous and possibly insane.