The Human Stain

"If I made a mistake, I am truly sorry. You're right. Of course you're right. But it's been a long haul for all of us. You've not been that easy to reach now for—" "Who told this to you?"

"Lisa. Lisa heard it first."

"Who did Lisa hear it from?"

"Several sources. People. Friends."

"I want names. I want to know who this everyone is. Which friends?"

"Old friends. Athena friends."

"Her darling childhood friends. The offspring of my colleagues.

Who told them, I wonder."

"There was no suicide attempt," Jeff said.

"No, Jeffrey, there wasn't. No abortion that I know of, either."

"Well, fine."

"And if there were? If I had impregnated this woman and she'd gone for an abortion and after the abortion had attempted suicide?

Suppose, Jeff, she had even succeeded at suicide. Then what? Then what, Jeff? Your father's mistress kills herself. Then what? Turn on your father? Your criminal father? No, no, no—let's go back, back up a step, back up to the suicide attempt. Oh, I like that. I do wonder who came up with the suicide attempt. Is it because of the abortion that she attempts this suicide? Let's get straight this melodrama that Lisa got from her Athena friends. Because she doesn't want the abortion? Because the abortion is imposed on her? I see. I see the cruelty. A mother who has lost two little children in a fire turns up pregnant by her lover. Ecstasy. A new life. Another chance.

A new child to replace the dead ones. But the lover—no, says he, and drags her by her hair to the abortionist, and then—of course-having worked his will on her, takes the naked, bleeding body—" By this time Jeff had hung up.

But by this time Coleman didn't need Jeff to keep on going. He had only to see the Elderhostel couples inside the cafeteria finishing their coffee before returning to class, he had only to hear them in there at their ease and enjoying themselves, the appropriate elderly looking as they should look and sounding as they should sound, for him to think that even the conventional things that he'd done afforded him no relief. Not just having been a professor, not just having been a dean, not just having remained married, through everything, to the same formidable woman, but having a family, having intelligent children—and it all afforded him nothing. If anybody's children should be able to understand this, shouldn't his? All the preschool. All the reading to them. The sets of encyclopedias. The preparation before quizzes. The dialogues at dinner. The endless instruction, from Iris, from him, in the multiform nature of life.

The scrutinization of language. All this stuff we did, and then to come back at me with this mentality? After all the schooling and all the books and all the words and all the superior SAT scores, it is insupportable.

After all the taking them seriously. When they said something foolish, engaging it seriously. All the attention paid to the development of reason and of mind and of imaginative sympathy.

And of skepticism, of well-informed skepticism. Of thinking for oneself. And then to absorb the first rumor? All the education and nothing helps. Nothing can insulate against the lowest level of thought. Not even to ask themselves, "But does that sound like our father? Does that sound like him to me?" Instead, your father is an open-and-shut case. Never allowed to watch TV and you manifest the mentality of a soap opera. Allowed to read nothing but the Greeks or their equivalent and you make life into a Victorian soap opera. Answering your questions. Your every question. Never turning one aside. You ask about your grandparents, you ask who they were and I told you. They died, your grandparents, when I was young. Grandpa when I was in high school, Grandma when I was away in the navy. By the time I got back from the war, the landlord had long ago put everything out on the street. There was nothing left. The landlord told me he couldn't afford to blah blah, there was no rent coming in, and I could have killed the son of a bitch. Photo albums. Letters. Stuff from my childhood, from their childhood, all of it, everything, the whole thing, gone. "Where were they born?

Where did they live?" They were born in Jersey. The first of their families born here. He was a saloon keeper. I believe that in Russia his father, your great-grandfather, worked in the tavern business.