The Human Stain

Sold booze to the Russkies. "Do we have aunts and uncles?" My father had a brother who went to California when I was a little kid, and my mother was an only child, like me. After me she couldn't have children—I never knew why that was. The brother, my father's older brother, remained a Silberzweig—he never took the changed name as far as I know. Jack Silberzweig. Born in the old country and so kept the name. When I was shipping out from San Francisco, I looked in all the California phone books to try to locate him. He was on the outs with my father. My father considered him a lazy bum, wanted nothing to do with him, and so nobody was sure what city Uncle Jack lived in. I looked in all the phone books.

I was going to tell him that his brother had died. I wanted to meet him. My one living relative on that side. So what if he's a bum? I wanted to meet his children, my cousins, if there were any.

I looked under Silberzweig. I looked under Silk. I looked under Silber. Maybe in California he'd become a Silber. I didn't know. And I don't know. I have no idea. And then I stopped looking. When you don't have a family of your own, you concern yourself with these things. Then I had you and I stopped worrying about having an uncle and having cousins ... Each kid heard the same thing. And the only one it didn't satisfy was Mark. The older boys didn't ask that much, but the twins were insistent. "Were there any twins in the past?" My understanding—I believe I was told this—was that there was either a great- or a great-great-grandfather who was a twin.

This was the story he told Iris as well. All of it was invented for Iris.

This was the story he told her on Sullivan Street when they first met and the story he stuck to, the original boilerplate. And the only one never satisfied was Mark. "Where did our great-grandparents come from?" Russia. "But what city?" I asked my father and mother, but they never seemed to know for sure. One time it was one place, one time another. There was a whole generation of Jews like that. They never really knew. The old people didn't talk about it much, and the American children weren't that curious, they were het up on being Americans, and so, in my family as in many families, there was a general Jewish geographical amnesia. All I got when I asked, Coleman told them, was the answer "Russia." But Markie said, "Russia is gigantic, Dad. Where in Russia?" Markie would not be still. And why? Why? There was no answer. Markie wanted the knowledge of who they were and where they came from—all that his father could never give him. And that's why he becomes the Orthodox Jew? That's why he writes the biblical protest poems? That's why Markie hates him so? Impossible. There were the Gittelmans.

Gittelman grandparents. Gittelman aunts and uncles. Little Gittelman cousins all over Jersey. Wasn't that enough? How many relatives did he need? There had to be Silks and Silberzweigs too? That made no sense at all as a grievance—it could not be! Yet Coleman wondered anyway, irrational as it might be to associate Markie's brooding anger with his own secret. So long as Markie was at odds with him, he was never able to stop himself from wondering, and never more agonizingly than after Jeff had hung up the phone on WHAT DO YOU DO . . . I him. If the children who carried his origins in their genes and who would pass those origins on to their own children could find it so easy to suspect him of the worst kind of cruelty to Faunia, what explanation could there be? Because he could never tell them about their family? Because he'd owed it to them to tell them? Because to deny them such knowledge was wrong? That made no sense! Retribution was not unconsciously or unknowingly enacted. There was no such quid pro quo. It could not be. And yet, after the phone call—leaving the student union, leaving the campus, all the while he was driving in tears back up the mountain—that was exactly what it felt like.

And all the while he was driving home he was remembering the time he'd almost told Iris. It was after the twins were born. The family was now complete. They'd done it—he'd made it. With not a sign of his secret on any of his kids, it was as though he had been delivered from his secret. The exuberance that came of having pulled it off brought him to the very brink of giving the whole thing away. Yes, he would present his wife with the greatest gift he possessed: he would tell the mother of his four children who their father really was. He would tell Iris the truth. That was how excited and relieved he was, how solid the earth felt beneath his feet after she had their beautiful twins, and he took Jeff and Mikey to the hospital to see their new brother and sister, and the most frightening apprehension of them all had been eradicated from his life.