The Human Stain

A campus scene that would have seemed without significance had Coleman encountered it on a summer day back when he was dean—as he undoubtedly had numerous times—a campus scene that would have seemed back then not merely harmless but appealingly expressive of the pleasure to be derived from eating out of doors on a beautiful day was freighted now with nothing but significance. Where neither Nelson Primus nor his beloved Lisa nor even the cryptic denunciation anonymously dispatched by Delphine Roux had convinced him of anything, this scene of no great moment on the lawn back of North Hall exposed to him at last the underside of his own disgrace.

Lisa. Lisa and those kids of hers. Tiny little Carmen. That's who came flashing into his thoughts, tiny Carmen, six years old but, in Lisa's words, like a much younger kid. "She's cute," Lisa said, "but she's like a baby." And adorably cute Carmen was when he saw her: pale, pale brown skin, pitch-black hair in two stiff braids, eyes unlike any he'd ever seen on another human being, eyes like coals blue with heat and lit from within, a child's quick and flexible body, attired neatly in miniaturized jeans and sneakers, wearing colorful socks and a white tube of a T-shirt nearly as narrow as a pipe cleaner—a frisky little girl seemingly attentive to everything, and particularly to him. "This is my friend Coleman," Lisa said when Carmen came strolling into the room, on her small, scrubbed firstthing-in-the-morning face a slightly amused, self-important mock smile. "Hello, Carmen," Coleman said. "He just wanted to see what we do," Lisa explained. "Okay," said Carmen, agreeably enough, but she studied him no less carefully than he was studying her, seemingly with the smile. "We're just gonna do what we always do," said Lisa. "Okay," Carmen said, but now she was trying out on him a rather more serious version of the smile. And when she turned and got to handling the movable plastic letters magnetized to the low little blackboard and Lisa asked her to begin sliding them around to make the words "want," "wet," "wash," and "wipe"—"I always tell you," Lisa was saying, "that you have to look at the first letters.

Let's see you read the first letters. Read it with your finger"-Carmen kept periodically swiveling her head, then her whole body, to look at Coleman and stay in touch with him. "Anything is a distraction," Lisa said softly to her father. "Come on, Miss Carmen.

Come on, honey. He's invisible." "What's that?" "Invisible," Lisa repeated, "you can't see him." Carmen laughed—"I can see him."

"Come on. Come on back to me. The first letters. That's it. Good work. But you also have to read the rest of the word too. Right? The first letter—and now the rest of the word. Good—'wash.' What's this one? You know it. You know that one. 'Wipe.' Good." Twentyfive weeks in the program on the day Coleman came to sit in on Reading Recovery, and though Carmen had made progress, it wasn't much. He remembered how she had struggled with the word "your" in the illustrated storybook from which she was reading aloud—scratching with her fingers around her eyes, squeezing and balling up the midriff of her shirt, twisting her legs onto the rung of her kiddie-sized chair, slowly but surely working her behind farther and farther off the seat of the chair—and was still unable to recognize "your" or to sound it out. "This is March, Dad. Twenty-five weeks. It's a long time to be having trouble with 'your.' It's a long time to be confusing 'couldn't' with 'climbed,' but at this point I'll settle for 'your.' It's supposed to be twenty weeks in the program, and out. She's been to kindergarten—she should have learned some basic sight words. But when I showed her a list of words back in September—and by then she was entering first grade—she said, 'What are these?' She didn't even know what words were. And the letters: h she didn't know, j she didn't know, she confused u for c.