The Human Stain

And then Delphine heard about Coleman Silk's relationship with Faunia Farley, which he was doing everything possible to hide. She couldn't believe it—two years into retirement, seventy-one years old, and the man was still at it. With no more female students who dared question his bias for him to intimidate, with no more young black girls needing nurturing for him to ridicule, with no more young women professors like herself threatening his hegemony for him to browbeat and insult, he had managed to dredge up, from the college's nethermost reaches, a candidate for subjugation who was the prototype of female helplessness: a full-fledged battered wife. When Delphine stopped by the personnel office to learn what she could about Faunia's background, when she read about the exhusband and the horrifying death of the two small children—in a mysterious fire set, some suspected, by the ex-husband—when she read of the illiteracy that limited Faunia to performing only the most menial of janitorial tasks, she understood that Coleman Silk had managed to unearth no less than a misogynist's heart's desire: in Faunia Farley he had found someone more defenseless even than Elena or Tracy, the perfect woman to crush. For whoever at Athena had ever dared to affront his preposterous sense of prerogative, Faunia Farley would now be made to answer.

And no one to stop him, Delphine thought. No one to stand in his way.

With the realization that he was beyond the jurisdiction of the college and therefore restrained by nothing from taking his revenge on her—on her, yes, on her for everything she had done to prevent him from psychologically terrorizing his female students, on her for the role she had willingly played in having him stripped of authority and removed from the classroom—she was unable to contain her outrage. Faunia Farley was his substitute for her. Through Faunia Farley he was striking back at her. Who else's face and name and form does she suggest to you but mine—the mirror image of me, she could suggest to you no one else's. By luring a woman who is, as I am, employed by Athena College, who is, as I am, less than half your age—yet a woman otherwise my opposite in every way-you at once cleverly masquerade and flagrantly disclose just who it is you wish to destroy. You are not so unshrewd as not to know it, and, from your own august station, you are ruthless enough to enjoy it. But neither am I so stupid as not to recognize that it's me, in effigy, you are out to get.

Understanding had come so swiftly, in sentences so spontaneously explosive, that even as she signed her name at the bottom of the letter's second page and addressed an envelope to him in care of general delivery, she was still seething at the thought of the viciousness that could make of this dreadfully disadvantaged woman who had already lost everything a toy, that could capriciously turn a suffering human being like Faunia Farley into a plaything only so as to revenge himself on her. How could even he do this? No, she would not alter by one syllable what she'd written nor would she bother to type it up so as to make it easier for him to read. She refused to vitiate her message where it was graphically demonstrated by the propulsive, driven slant of her script. Let him not underestimate her resolve: nothing was now more important to her than exposing Coleman Silk for what he was.

But twenty minutes later she tore up the letter. And luckily.

Luckily. When the unbridled idealism swept over her, she could not always see it as fantasy. Right she was to reprimand so reprehensible a predator. But to imagine saving a woman as far gone as Faunia Farley when she hadn't been able to rescue Tracy? To imagine prevailing against a man who, in his embittered old age, was free now not only of every institutional restraint but—humanist that he was!—of every humane consideration? For her there could be no greater delusion than believing herself a match for Coleman Silk's guile. Even a letter so clearly composed in the white heat of moral repulsion, a letter unmistakably informing him that his secret was out, that he was unmasked, exposed, tracked down, would somehow, in his hands, be twisted into an indictment with which to compromise her and, if the opportunity presented itself, to outright ruin her.