The Human Stain

5. The Purifying Ritual

TWO FUNERALS.

Faunia's first, up at the cemetery on Battle Mountain, always for me an unnerving place to drive by, creepy even in daylight, with its mysteries of ancient gravestone stillness and motionless time, and rendered all the more ominous by the state forest preserve that abuts what was originally an Indian burial ground — a vast, densely wooded, boulder-strewn wilderness veined with streams glassily cascading from ledge to ledge and inhabited by coyote, bobcat, even black bear, and by foraging deer herds said to abound in huge, precolonial numbers. The women from the dairy farm had purchased Faunia's plot at the very edge of the dark woods and organized the innocent, empty graveside ceremony. The more outgoing of the two, the one who identified herself as Sally, delivered the first of the eulogies, introducing her farming partner and their children, then saying, “We all lived with Faunia up at the farm, and why we're here this morning is why you're here: to celebrate a life.”

She spoke in a bright, ringing voice, a smallish, hearty, round-faced woman in a long sack dress, buoyantly determined to keep to a perspective that would cause the least chagrin among the six farm-reared children, each neatly dressed in his or her best clothes, each holding a fistful of flowers to be strewn on the coffin before it was lowered into the ground.

“Which of us,” Sally asked, “will ever forget that big, warm laugh of hers? Faunia could have us in stitches as much from the infectiousness of her laugh as from some of the things she could come out with. And she was also, as you know, a deeply spiritual person. A spiritual person,” she repeated, “a spiritual seeker — the word to best describe her beliefs is pantheism. Her God was nature, and her worship of nature extended to her love for our little herd of cows, for all cows, really, for that most benevolent of creatures who is the foster mother of the human race. Faunia had an enormous respect for the institution of the family dairy farm. Along with Peg and me and the children, she helped to try to keep the family dairy farm alive in New England as a viable part of our cultural heritage. Her God was everything you see around you at our farm and everything you see around you on Battle Mountain. We chose this resting place for Faunia because it has been sacred ever since the aboriginal peoples bid farewell to their loved ones here. The wonderful stories that Faunia told our kids — about the swallows in the barn and the crows in the fields, about the red-tailed hawks that glide in the sky high above our fields — they were the same kind of stories you might have heard on this very mountaintop before the ecological balance of the Berkshires was first disturbed by the coming of...”

The coming of you-know-who. The environmentalist Rousseauism of the rest of the eulogy made it just about impossible for me to stay focused.

The second eulogist was Smoky Hollenbeck, the former Athena athletic star who was supervisor of the physical plant, Faunia's boss, and — as I knew from Coleman, who'd hired him — was for a time a bit more. It was into Smoky's Athena harem that Faunia had been conscripted practically from her first day on his custodial staff, and it was from his harem that she had been abruptly dismissed once Les Farley had somehow ferreted out what Smoky was up to with her.

Smoky didn't speak, like Sally, of Faunia's pantheistic purity as a natural being; in his capacity as representative of the college, he concentrated on her competence as a housekeeper, beginning with her influence on the undergraduates whose dormitories she cleaned.

“What changed about the students with Faunia being there,” Smoky said, “was that they had a person who, whenever they saw her, greeted them with a smile and a hello and a How are you, and Did you get over your cold, and How are classes going. She would always spend a moment talking and becoming familiar with the students before she began her work. Over time, she was no longer invisible to the student, no longer just a housekeeper, but another person whom they'd developed respect for. They were always more cognizant, as a result of knowing Faunia, of not leaving a mess behind for her to have to pick up. In contrast to that, you may have another housekeeper who never makes eye contact, really keeps a distance from the students, really doesn't care about what the students are doing or want to know what they're doing. Well, that was not Faunia — never. The condition of the student dormitories, I find, is directly related to the relationship of the students and their housekeeper. The number of broken windows that we have to fix, the number of holes in the walls that we have to repair, that are made when students kick 'em, punch 'em, take their frustration out on them ... whatever the case may be. Graffiti on walls. The full gamut. Well, if it was Faunia's building, you had none of this. You had instead a building that was conducive to good productivity, to learning and living and to feeling a part of the Athena community...”

Extremely brilliant performance by this tall, curly-haired, handsome young family man who had been Coleman's predecessor as Faunia's lover. Sensual contact with Smoky's perfect custodial worker was no more imaginable, from what he was telling us, than with Sally's storytelling pantheist. “In the mornings,” Smoky said, “she took care of North Hall and the administrative offices there. Though her routine changed slightly from day to day, there were some basic things to be done every single morning, and she did them excellently. Wastepaper baskets were emptied, the rest rooms, of which there are three in that building, were tidied up and cleaned. Damp mopping occurred wherever it was necessary. Vacuuming in high-traffic areas every day, in not-so-high-traffic areas once a week. Dusting usually on a weekly basis. The windows in the front and back door sash were cleaned by Faunia almost on a daily basis, depending on the traffic. Faunia was always very proficient, and she paid a lot of attention to details. There are certain times you can run a vacuum cleaner and there's other times you can't — and there was never once, not once, a complaint on that score about Faunia Farley. Very quickly she figured out the best time for each task to be done with the minimum inconvenience to the work force.”

Of the fourteen people, aside from the children, that I counted around the grave, the college contingent appeared to consist only of Smoky and a cluster of Faunia's coworkers, four men from maintenance who were dressed in coats and ties and who stood silently listening to the praise for her work. From what I could make out, the remaining mourners were either friends of Peg and Sally or local people who bought their milk up at the farm and who'd come to know Faunia through visiting there. Cyril Foster, our postmaster and chief of the volunteer fire department, was the only local person I recognized. Cyril knew Faunia from the little village post office where she came twice a week to clean up and where Coleman first saw her.

And there was Faunia's father, a large, elderly man whose presence had been acknowledged by Sally in her eulogy. He was seated in a wheelchair only feet from the coffin, attended by a youngish woman, a Filipino nurse or companion, who stood directly behind him and whose face remained expressionless throughout the service, though he could be seen lowering his forehead into his hands and intermittently succumbing to tears.

There was no one there whom I could identify as the person responsible for the on-line eulogy for Faunia that I'd found the evening before, posted on the Athena fac.discuss news group. The posting was headed:

From: clytemnestra@houseofatreus.com

To: fac.discuss

Subject: death of a faunia

Date: Thur 12 Nov 1998

I'd come upon it accidentally when, out of curiosity, I was checking the fac.discuss calendar to see if Dean Silk's funeral might show up under coming events. Why this scurrilous posting? Intended as a gag, as a lark? Did it signify no more (or less) than the perverse indulgence of a sadistic whim, or was it a calculated act of treachery? Could it have been posted by Delphine Roux? Another of her unascribable indictments? I didn't think so. There was nothing to be gained by her going any further with her ingenuity than the break-in story, and much to be lost if “clytemnestra@houseofatreus.com” were somehow discovered to be her brainchild. Besides, from the evidence at hand, there was nothing so crafty or contrived about a typical Delphinian intrigue — hers smacked of hasty improvisation, of hysterical pettiness, of the overexcited unthinking of the amateur that produces the kind of wacky act that seems improbable afterward even to its perpetrator: the counterattack that lacks both provocation and the refined calculation of the acidic master, however nasty its consequences may be.

No, this was mischief, more than likely, prompted by Delphine's mischief, but more artful, more confident, more professionally demonic by far — a major upgrade of the venom. And what would it now inspire? Where would this public stoning stop? Where would the gullibility stop? How can these people be repeating to one another this story told to Security by Delphine Roux — so transparently phony, so obviously a lie, how can any of them believe this thing? And how can any connection to Coleman be proved? It can't be. But they believe it anyway. Screwy as it is — that he broke in there, that he broke open the files, that he broke into her computer, e-mailed her colleagues — they believe it, they want to believe it, they can't wait to repeat it. A story that makes no sense, that is implausible, and yet nobody — certainly not publicly — raises the simplest questions. Why would the man tear apart her office and call attention to the fact that he'd broken in if he wanted to perpetrate a hoax? Why would he compose that particular ad when ninety percent of the people who saw it couldn't possibly think of it as having anything to do with him? Who, other than Delphine Roux, would read that ad and think of him? To do what she claimed he'd done, he would have had to be crazy. But where is the evidence that he was crazy? Where is the history of crazy behavior? Coleman Silk, who single-handedly turned this college around — that man is crazy? Embittered, angry, isolated, yes — but crazy? People in Athena know perfectly well that this is not the case and yet, as in the spooks incident, they willingly act as if they don't. Simply to make the accusation is to prove it. To hear the allegation is to believe it. No motive for the perpetrator is necessary, no logic or rationale is required. Only a label is required. The label is the motive. The label is the evidence. The label is the logic. Why did Coleman Silk do this? Because he is an x, because he is a y, because he is both. First a racist and now a misogynist. It is too late in the century to call him a Communist, though that is the way it used to be done. A misogynistic act committed by a man who already proved himself capable of a vicious racist comment at the expense of a vulnerable student. That explains everything. That and the craziness.

The Devil of the Little Place — the gossip, the jealousy, the acrimony, the boredom, the lies. No, the provincial poisons do not help. People are bored here, they are envious, their life is as it is and as it will be, and so, without seriously questioning the story, they repeat it — on the phone, in the street, in the cafeteria, in the classroom. They repeat it at home to their husbands and wives. It isn't just that because of the accident there isn't time to prove it's a ridiculous lie — if it weren't for the accident, she wouldn't have been able to tell the lie in the first place. But his death is her good fortune. His death is her salvation. Death intervenes to simplify everything. Every doubt, every misgiving, every uncertainty is swept aside by the greatest belittler of them all, which is death.

Walking alone to my car after Faunia's funeral, I still had no way of knowing who at the college might have had the turn of mind to conjure up the clytemnestra posting — the most diabolical of art forms, the on-line art form, because of its anonymity — nor could I have any idea of what somebody, anybody, might next come up with to disseminate anonymously. All I knew for sure was that the germs of malice were unleashed, and where Coleman's conduct was concerned, there was no absurdity out of which someone wasn't going to try to make indignant sense. An epidemic had broken out in Athena — that's how my thinking went in the immediate aftermath of his death — and what was to contain the epidemic's spreading? It was there. The pathogens were out there. In the ether. In the universal hard drive, everlasting and undeletable, the sign of the viciousness of the human creature.

Everybody was writing Spooks now — everybody, as yet, except me.

I am going to ask you to think [the fac.discuss posting began] about things that are not pleasant to think about. Not just about the violent death of an innocent woman of thirty-four, which is awful enough, but of the circumstances particular to the horror and of the man who, almost artistically, contrived those circumstances to complete his cycle of revenge against Athena College and his former colleagues.

Some of you may know that in the hours before Coleman Silk staged this murder-suicide — for that is what this man enacted on the highway by driving off the road and through the guardrail and into the river that night — he had forcefully broken into a faculty office in Barton Hall, ransacked the papers, and sent out as e-mail a communication written purportedly by a faculty member and designed to jeopardize her position. The harm he did to her and to the college was negligible. But informing that childishly spiteful act of burglary and forgery was the same resolve, the same animus, which later in the evening — having been monstrously intensified — inspired him simultaneously to kill himself while murdering in cold blood a college custodial worker whom he had cynically enticed, some months earlier, to service him sexually.

Imagine, if you will, the plight of this woman, a runaway at the age of fourteen, whose education had ended in the second year of high school and who, for the rest of her brief life, was functionally illiterate. Imagine her contending with the wiles of a retired university professor who, in his sixteen years as the most autocratic of faculty deans, wielded more power at Athena than the president of the college. What chance did she have to resist his superior force? And having yielded to him, having found herself enslaved by a perverse manly strength far exceeding her own, what chance could she possibly have had to fathom the vengeful purposes for which her hard-worked body was to be utilized by him, first in life and then in death?

Of all the ruthless men by whom she was successively tyrannized, of all the violent, reckless, ruthless, insatiable men who had tormented, battered, and broken her, there was none whose purpose could have been so twisted by the enmity of the unforgiving as the man who had a score to settle with Athena College and so took one of the college's own upon whom to wreak his vengeance, and in the most palpable manner he could devise. On her flesh. On her limbs. On her genitals. On her womb. The violating abortion into which she was forced by him earlier this year — and which precipitated her attempt at suicide — is only one of who knows how many assaults perpetrated upon the ravaged terrain of her physical being. We know by now of the awful tableau at the murder scene, of the pornographic posture in which he had arranged for Faunia to meet her death, the better to register, in a single, indelible image, her bondage, her subservience (by extension, the bondage and subservience of the college community) to his enraged contempt. We know — we are beginning to know, as the horrifying facts trickle out from the police investigation — that not all the bruise marks on Faunia's mangled body resulted from damage inflicted in the fatal accident, cataclysmic as that was. There were patches of discoloration discovered by the coroner on her buttocks and thighs that had nothing to do with the impact of the crash, contusions that had been administered, some time before the accident, by very different means: either by a blunt instrument or a human fist.

Why? A word so small, and yet large enough to drive us insane. But then a mind as pathologically sinister as Faunia's murderer's is not easy to probe. At the root of the cravings that drove this man, there is an impenetrable darkness that those who are not violent by nature or vengeful by design — those who have made their peace with the restraints imposed by civilization on what is raw and untrammeled in us all — can never know. The heart of human darkness is inexplicable. But that their car accident was no accident, that I do know, as sure as I know that I am united in grief with all who mourn the death of Athena's Faunia Farley, whose oppression began in the earliest days of her innocence and lasted to the instant of her death. That accident was no accident: it was what Coleman Silk yearned to do with all his might. Why? This “why” I can answer and I will answer. So as to annihilate not only the two of them, but, with them, all trace of his history as her ultimate tormentor. It was to prevent Faunia from exposing him for what he was that Coleman Silk took her with him to the bottom of the river.

One is left to imagine just how heinous were the crimes that he was determined to hide.

The next day Coleman was buried beside his wife in the orderly garden of a cemetery across from the level green sea of the college athletic fields, at the foot of the oak grove behind North Hall and its landmark hexagonal clock tower. I couldn't sleep the night before, and when I got up that morning, I was still so agitated over how the accident and its meaning was being systematically distorted and broadcast to the world that I was unable to sit quietly long enough even to drink my coffee. How can one possibly roll back all these lies? Even if you demonstrate something's a lie, in a place like Athena, once it's out there, it stays. Instead of pacing restlessly around the house until it was time to head for the cemetery, I dressed in a tie and jacket and went down to Town Street to hang around there — down to where I could nurse the illusion that there was something to be done with my disgust.

And with my shock. I was not prepared to think of him as dead, let alone to see him buried. Everything else aside, the death in a freak accident of a strong, healthy man already into his seventies had its own awful poignancy — there would at least have been a higher degree of rationality had he been carried off by a heart attack or cancer or a stroke. What's more, I was convinced by then — I was convinced as soon as I heard the news — that it was impossible for the accident to have occurred without the presence somewhere nearby of Les Farley and his pickup truck. Of course nothing that befalls anyone is ever too senseless to have happened, and yet with Les Farley in the picture, with Farley as primary cause, wasn't there more than just the wisp of an explanation for the violent extinction, in a single convenient catastrophe, of Farley's despised ex-wife and the enraging lover whom Farley had obsessively staked out?

To me, reaching this conclusion didn't seem at all motivated by a disinclination to accept the inexplicable for what it is — though it seemed precisely that to the state police the morning after Coleman's funeral, when I went to talk to the two officers who'd been first at the scene of the accident and who'd found the bodies. Their examination of the crash vehicle revealed nothing that could corroborate in any way the scenario I was imagining. The information I gave them — about Farley's stalking of Faunia, about his spying on Coleman, about the near-violent confrontation, just beyond the kitchen door, when Farley came roaring at the two of them out of the dark — was all patiently taken down, as were my name, address, and telephone number. I was then thanked for my cooperation, assured that everything would be held in strictest confidence, and told that if it seemed warranted they would be back in touch with me.

They never were.

On the way out, I turned and said, “Can I ask one question? Can I ask about the disposition of the bodies in the car?”

“What do you want to know, sir?” said Officer Balich, the senior of the two young men, a poker-faced, quietly officious fellow whose Croatian family, I remembered, used to own the Madamaska Inn.

“What exactly did you find when you found them? Their placement. Their posture. The rumor in Athena—”

“No, sir,” Balich said, shaking his head, “that was not the case. None of that's true, sir.”

“You know what I'm referring to?”

“I do, sir. This was clearly a case of speeding. You can't take that curve at that speed. Jeff Gordon couldn't have taken that curve at that speed. For an old guy with a couple glasses of wine playing tricks on his brain to drive round that bend like a hot-rodder—”

“I don't think Coleman Silk ever in his life drove like a hot-rodder, Officer.”

“Well...,” Balich said, and put his hands up in the air, the palms to me, suggesting that, with all due respect, neither he nor I could possibly know that. “It was the professor who was behind the wheel, sir.”

The moment had arrived when I was expected by Officer Balich not to insert myself foolishly as an amateur detective, not to press my contention further, but politely to take my leave. He had called me sir more than enough times for me to have no hallucinations about who was running the show, and so I did leave, and, as I say, that was the end of it.

The day Coleman was to be buried was another unseasonably warm, crisply lit November day. With the last of the leaves having fallen from the trees during the previous week, the hard bedrock contour of the mountain landscape was now nakedly exposed by the sunlight, its joints and striations etched in the fine hatched lines of an old engraving, and as I headed to Athena for the funeral that morning, a sense of reemergence, of renewed possibility, was inappropriately aroused in me by the illuminated roughness of a distant view obscured by foliage since last spring. The no-nonsense organization of the earth's surface, to be admired and deferred to now for the first time in months, was a reminder of the terrific abrasive force of the glacier onslaught that had scoured these mountains on the far edge of its booming southward slide. Passing just miles from Coleman's house, it had spat out boulders the size of restaurant refrigerators the way an automatic pitching machine throws fastball strikes, and when I passed the steep wooded slope that is known locally as “the rock garden” and saw, starkly, undappled by the summer leaves and their gliding shadows, those mammoth rocks all tumbled sideways like a ravaged Stonehenge, crushed together and yet hugely intact, I was once again horrified by the thought of the moment of impact that had separated Coleman and Faunia from their lives in time and catapulted them into the earth's past. They were now as remote as the glaciers. As the creation of the planet. As creation itself.

This was when I decided to go to the state police. That I didn't get out there that day, that very morning, even before the funeral, was in part because, while parking my car across from the green in town, I saw in the window of Pauline's Place, eating his breakfast, Faunia's father — saw him seated at a table with the woman who'd been steering his wheelchair up at the mountain cemetery the day before. I immediately went inside, took the empty table beside theirs, ordered, and, while pretending to read the Madamaska Weekly Gazette that someone had left by my chair, caught all I could of their conversation.

They were talking about a diary. Among the things of hers that Sally and Peg had turned over to Faunia's father, there had been Faunia's diary.

“You don't want to read it, Harry. You just don't want to.”

“I have to,” he said.

“You don't have to,” the woman said. “Believe me you don't.”

“It can't be more awful than everything else.”

“You don't want to read it.”

Most people innate themselves and lie about accomplishments they have only dreamed of achieving; Faunia had lied about failing to reach proficiency at a skill so fundamental that, in a matter of a year or two, it is acquired at least crudely by nearly every school-child in the world.

And this I learned before even finishing my juice. The illiteracy had been an act, something she decided her situation demanded. But why? A source of power? Her one and only source of power? But a power purchased at what price? Think about it. Afflicts herself with illiteracy too. Takes it on voluntarily. Not to infantilize herself, however, not to present herself as a dependent kid, but just the opposite: to spotlight the barbaric self befitting the world. Not rejecting learning as a stifling form of propriety but trumping learning by a knowledge that is stronger and prior. She has nothing against reading per se — it's that pretending not to be able to feels right to her. It spices things up. She just cannot get enough of the toxins: of all that you're not supposed to be, to show, to say, to think but that you are and show and say and think whether you like it or not.

“I can't burn it,” Faunia's father said. “It's hers. I can't just throw it in the trash.”

“Well, I can,” the woman said.

“It's not right.”

“You have been walking through this mine field all your life. You don't need more.”

“It's all that's left of her.”

“There's the revolver. That's left of her. There's the bullets, Harry. She left that.”

“The way she lived,” he said, sounding suddenly at the edge of tears.

“The way she lived is the way she died. It's why she died.”

“You've got to give me the diary,” he said.

“No. It's bad enough we even came here.”

“Destroy it, destroy it, and I just don't know what.”

“I'm only doing what is best for you.”

“What does she say?”

“It doesn't bear repeating.”

“Oh, God,” he said.

“Eat. You have to eat something. Those pancakes look good.”

“My daughter,” he said.

“You did all you could.”

“I should have taken her away when she was six years old.”

“You didn't know. How could you know what was going to be?”

“I should never have left her with that woman.”

“And we should never have come up here,” his companion said. “All you have to do now is get sick up here. Then the thing will be complete.”

“I want the ashes.”

“They should have buried the ashes. In there. With her. I don't know why they didn't.”

“I want the ashes, Syl. Those are my grandkids. That's all I've got left to show for everything.”

“I've taken care of the ashes.”

“No!”

“You didn't need those ashes. You've been through enough. I will not have something happening to you. Those ashes are not coming on the plane.”

“What did you do?”

“I took care of them,” she said. “I was respectful. But they're gone.”

“Oh, my God.”

“That's over,” she told him. “It's all over. You did your duty. You did more than your duty. You don't need any more. Now let's you eat something. I packed the room up. I paid. Now there's just getting you home.”

“Oh, you are the best, Sylvia, the very best.”

“I don't want you hurt anymore. I will not let them hurt you.”

“You are the best.”

“Try and eat. Those look real good.”

“Want some?”

“No,” she said, “I want you to eat.”

“I can't eat it all.”

“Use the syrup. Here, I'll do it, I'll pour it.”

I waited for them outside, on the green, and then when I saw the wheelchair coming through the restaurant door, I crossed the street and, as she was wheeling him away from Pauline's Place, I introduced myself, walking alongside him as I spoke. “I live here. I knew your daughter. Only slightly, but I met her several times. I was at the funeral yesterday. I saw you there. I want to express my condolences.”

He was a large man with a large frame, much larger than he'd seemed slumped over in the chair at the funeral. He was probably well over six feet, but with the look on his stern, strongly boned face (Faunia's inexpressive face, hers exactly — the thin lips, the steep chin, the sharp aquiline nose, the same blue, deep-set eyes, and above them, framing the pale lashes, that same puff of flesh, that same fullness that had struck me out at the dairy farm as her one exotic marking, her face's only emblem of allure)—with the look of a man sentenced not just to imprisonment in that chair but condemned to some even greater anguish for the rest of his days. Big as he was, or once had been, there was nothing left of him but his fear. I saw that fear at the back of his gaze the instant he looked up to thank me. “You're very kind,” he said.

He was probably about my age, but there was evidence of a privileged New England childhood in his speech that dated back to long before either of us was born. I'd recognized it earlier in the restaurant — tethered, by that speech alone, by the patterns of moneyed, quasi-Anglified speech, to the decorous conventions of an entirely other America.

“Are you Faunia's stepmother?” That seemed as good a way as any to get her attention — and to get her perhaps to slow down. I assumed they were on their way back to the College Arms, around the corner from the green.

“This is Sylvia,” he said.

“I wonder if you could stop,” I said to Sylvia, “so I could talk to him.”

“We're catching a plane,” she told me.

Since she was so clearly determined to rid him of me then and there, I said — while still keeping pace with the wheelchair—“Coleman Silk was my friend. He did not drive his car off the road. He couldn't have. Not like that. His car was forced off the road. I know who is responsible for the death of your daughter. It wasn't Coleman Silk.”

“Stop pushing me. Sylvia, stop pushing a minute.”

“No,” she said. “This is insane. This is enough.”

“It was her ex-husband,” I said to him. “It was Farley.”

“No,” he said weakly, as though I'd shot him. “No — no.”

“Sir!” She had stopped, all right, but the hand that wasn't holding tight to the wheelchair had reached up to take me by the lapel. She was short and slight, a young Filipino woman with a small, implacable, pale brown face, and I could see from the dark determination of her fearless eyes that the disorder of human affairs was not allowed to intrude anywhere near what was hers to protect.

“Can't you stop for one moment?” I asked her. “Can't we go over to the green and sit there and talk?”

“The man is not well. You are taxing the strength of a man who is seriously ill.”

“But you have a diary belonging to Faunia.”

“We do not.”

“You have a revolver belonging to Faunia.”

“Sir, go away. Sir, leave him alone, I am warning you!” And here she pushed at me — with the hand that had been holding my jacket, she shoved me away.

“She got that gun,” I said, “to protect herself against Farley.”

Sharply, she replied, “The poor thing.”

I didn't know what to do then except to follow them around the corner until they reached the porch of the inn. Faunia's father was weeping openly now.

When she turned to find me still there, she said, “You have done enough damage. Go or I will call the police.” There was great ferocity in this tiny person. I understood it: keeping him alive appeared to require no less.

“Don't destroy that diary,” I said to her. “There is a record there—”

“Filth! There is a record there of filth!”

“Syl, Sylvia—”

“All of them, her, the brother, the mother, the stepfather — the whole bunch of them, trampling on this man his whole life. They have robbed him. They have deceived him. They have humiliated him. His daughter was a criminal. Got pregnant and had a child at sixteen — a child she abandoned to an orphan asylum. A child her father would have raised. She was a common whore. Guns and men and drugs and filth and sex. The money he gave her — what did she do with that money?”

“I don't know. I don't know anything about an orphan asylum. I don't know anything about any money.”

“Drugs! She stole it for drugs!”

“I don't know anything about that.”

“That whole family — filth! Have some pity, please!”

I turned to him. “I want the person responsible for these deaths to be held legally accountable. Coleman Silk did her no harm. He did not kill her. I ask to talk to you for only a minute.”

“Let him, Sylvia—”

“No! No more letting anyone! You have let them long enough!”

People were collected now on the porch of the inn watching us, and others were watching from the upper windows. Perhaps they were the last of the leafers, out to catch the little left of the autumn blaze. Perhaps they were Athena alumni. There were always a handful visiting the town, middle-aged and elderly graduates checking to see what had disappeared and what remained, thinking the best, the very best, of every last thing that had ever befallen them on these streets in nineteen hundred and whatever. Perhaps they were visitors in town to look at the restored colonial houses, a stretch of them running nearly a mile down both sides of Ward Street and considered by the Athena Historical Society to be, if not so grand as those in Salem, as important as any in the state west of the House of the Seven Gables. These people had not come to sleep in the carefully decorated period bedrooms of the College Arms so as to awaken to a shouting match beneath their windows. In a place as picturesque as South Ward Street and on a day as fine as this, the eruption of such a struggle — a crippled man crying, a tiny Asian woman shouting, a man who, from his appearance, might well have been a college professor seemingly terrifying both of them with what he was saying — was bound to seem both more stupendous and more disgusting than it would have at a big city intersection.

“If I could see the diary—”

“There is no diary,” she said, and there was nothing more to be done than to watch her push him up the ramp beside the stairway and through the main door and into the inn.

Back around at Pauline's, I ordered a cup of coffee and, on writing paper the waitress found for me in a drawer beneath the cash register, I wrote this letter:

I am the man who approached you near the restaurant on Town Street in Athena on the morning after Faunia's funeral. I live on a rural road outside Athena, a few miles from the home of the late Coleman Silk, who, as I explained, was my friend. Through Coleman I met your daughter several times. I sometimes heard him speak about her. Their affair was passionate, but there was no cruelty in it. He mainly played the part of lover with her, but he also knew how to be a friend and a teacher. If she asked for care, I can't believe it was ever withheld. Whatever of Coleman's spirit she may have absorbed could never, never have poisoned her life.

I don't know how much of the malicious gossip surrounding them and the crash you heard in Athena. I hope none. There is, however, a matter of justice to be settled which dwarfs all that stupidity. Two people have been murdered. I know who murdered them. I did not witness the murder but I know it took place. I am absolutely sure of it. But evidence is necessary if I am to be taken seriously by the police or by an attorney. If you possess anything that reveals Faunia's state of mind in recent months or even extending back to her marriage to Farley, I ask you not to destroy it. I am thinking of letters you may have received from her over the years as well as the belongings found in her room after her death that were passed on to you by Sally and Peg.

My telephone number and address are as follows—

That was as far as I got. I intended to wait until they were gone, to phone the College Arms to extract from the desk clerk, with some story or other, the man's name and address, and to send off my letter by overnight mail. I'd go to Sally and Peg for the address if I couldn't get it from the inn. But I would, in fact, do neither the one thing nor the other. Whatever Faunia had left behind in her room had already been discarded or destroyed by Sylvia — the same way my letter would be destroyed when it arrived at its destination. This tiny being whose whole purpose was to keep the past from tormenting him further was never going to allow inside the walls of his home what she would not permit when she'd found herself up against me face to face. Moreover, her course was one that I couldn't dispute. If suffering was passed around in that family like a disease, there was nothing to do but post a sign of the kind they used to hang in the doorways of the contagiously ill when I was a kid, a sign that read QUARANTINE or that presented to the eyes of the uninfected nothing more than a big black capital Q. Little Sylvia was that ominous Q, and there was no way that I was going to get past it.

I tore up what I'd written and walked across town to the funeral.

The service for Coleman had been arranged by his children, and the four of them were there at the door to Rishanger Chapel to greet the mourners as they filed in. The idea to bury him out of Rishanger, the college chapel, was a family decision, the key component of what I realized was a well-planned coup, an attempt to undo their father's self-imposed banishment and to integrate him, in death if not in life, back into the community where he had made his distinguished career.

When I introduced myself, I was instantly taken aside by Lisa, Coleman's daughter, who put her arms around me and in a tearful, whispering voice said, “You were his friend. You were the one friend he had left. You probably saw him last.”

“We were friends for a while,” I said, but explained nothing about having seen him last several months back, on that August Saturday morning at Tanglewood, and that by then he had deliberately let the brief friendship lapse.

“We lost him,” she said.

“I know.”

“We lost him,” she repeated, and then she cried without attempting to speak.

After a while I said, “I enjoyed him and I admired him. I wish I could have known him longer.”

“Why did this happen?”

“I don't know.”

“Did he go mad? Was he insane?”

“Absolutely not. No.”

“Then how could all this happen?”

When I didn't answer (and how could I, other than by beginning to write this book?), her arms dropped slowly away from me, and while we stood together for a few seconds more, I saw how strong was her resemblance to her father — strong as Faunia's to her father. There were the same carved puppetiike features, the same green eyes, the same tawny skin, even a less broad-shouldered version of Coleman's slight athletic build. The visible genetic legacy of the mother, Iris Silk, seemed to reside solely in Lisa's prodigious tangle of dark bushy hair. In photograph after photograph of Iris — photographs I'd seen in family albums Coleman had showed me — the facial features hardly seemed to matter, so strongly did her importance as a person, if not her entire meaning, appear to be concentrated in that assertive, theatrical endowment of hair. With Lisa, the hair appeared to stand more in contrast to her character than — as with her mother — to be issuing from it.

I had the definite impression, in just our few moments together, that the link, now broken, between Lisa and her father would not be gone from her mind for a single day throughout the remainder of her life. One way or another, the idea of him would be fused to every last thing she would ever think about or do or fail to do. The consequences of having loved him so fully as a beloved girl-child, and of having been estranged from him at the time of his death, would never let this woman be.

The three Silk men — Lisa's twin brother, Mark, and the two eldest, Jeffrey and Michael — were not so emotional in greeting me. I saw nothing of Mark's angry intensity as an affronted son, and when, an hour or so later, his sober demeanor gave way at the graveside, it was with the severity of one bereft beyond redemption. Jeff and Michael were obviously the sturdiest Silk children, and in them you clearly saw the physical imprint of the robust mother: if not her hair (both men were by now bald), her height, her solid core of confidence, her open-hearted authority. These were not people who muddled through. That was apparent in just the greeting they extended and the few words they said. When you met Jeff and Michael, especially if they were standing side by side, you'd met your match. Back before I got to know Coleman — back in his hey-day, before he began to spin out of control within the ever-narrowing prison of his rage, before the achievements that once particularized him, that were him, vanished from his life — you would surely have met your match in him too, which probably explains why a general willingness to compromise the dean was so quick to materialize once he was accused of uttering aloud something racially vicious.

Despite all the rumors circulating in town, the turnout for Coleman far exceeded what I'd been imagining it would be; it certainly exceeded what Coleman could have imagined. The first six or seven rows of pews were already full, and people were still streaming in behind me when I found an empty place midway up from the altar beside someone whom I recognized — from having seen him for the first time the day before — to be Smoky Hollenbeck. Did Smoky understand how close he might have come, only a year earlier, to having a funeral service of his own held here in Rishanger Chapel? Maybe he was attending the service more in gratitude for his own good luck than out of regard for the man who'd been his erotic successor.

On Smoky's other side was a woman I took to be his wife, a pretty blonde of about forty and, if I remembered correctly, an Athena classmate Smoky had married back in the seventies and the mother now of their five children. The Hollenbecks were among the youngest people, aside from Coleman's family, whom I saw in the chapel when I began to look around me. Largely there were Athena elders, college faculty and staff whom Coleman had known for close to forty years before Iris's death and his resignation. What would he think about these old-timers showing up at Rishanger to see him off could he observe them seated before his coffin? Probably something like, “What a wonderful occasion for self-approval. How virtuous they all must feel for not holding against me my contempt for them.”

It was strange to think, while seated there with all his colleagues, that people so well educated and professionally civil should have fallen so willingly for the venerable human dream of a situation in which one man can embody evil. Yet there is this need, and it is undying and it is profound.

When the outside door was pulled shut and the Silks took their seats in the front row, I saw that the chapel was almost two-thirds full, three hundred people, maybe more, waiting for this ancient and natural human event to absorb their terror about the end of life. I saw, too, that Mark Silk, alone among his brothers, was wearing a skullcap.

Probably like most everyone else, I was expecting one of Coleman's children to mount the pulpit and speak first. But there was to be only one speaker that morning, and that was Herb Keble, the political scientist hired by Dean Silk as Athena's first black professor. Obviously Keble had been chosen by the family for the reason the family had chosen Rishanger for the service: to rehabilitate their father's name, to push back the Athena calendar and restore to Coleman his former status and prestige. When I recalled the severity with which Jeff and Michael had each taken my hand and acknowledged me by name and told me, “Thank you for coming — it means everything to the family that you're here,” and when I imagined that they must have repeated something like that to each individual mourner, among whom there were many people they had known since childhood, I thought, And they don't intend to quit, not until the administration building is rededicated as Coleman Silk Hall.

That the place was nearly full was probably no chance occurrence. They must have been on the phone ever since the crash, mourners being rounded up the way voters used to be herded to the polls when the old Mayor Daley was running Chicago. And how they must have worked over Keble, whom Coleman had especially despised, to induce him voluntarily to proffer himself as the scapegoat for Athena's sins. The more I thought about these Silk boys twisting Keble's arm, intimidating him, shouting at him, denouncing him, perhaps even outright threatening him because of the way he had betrayed their father two years back, the more I liked them — and the more I liked Coleman for having sired two big, firm, smart fellows who were not reluctant to do what had to be done to turn his reputation right side out. These two were going to help put Les Farley away for the rest of his life.

Or so I was able to believe until the next afternoon, just before they left town, when — no less bluntly persuasive with me than I'd imagined them to have been with Keble — they let me know that I was to knock it off: to forget about Les Farley and the circumstances of the accident and about urging any further investigation by the police. They could not have made clearer that their disapproval would be boundless if their father's affair with Faunia Farley were to become the focal point of a courtroom trial instigated by my importuning. Faunia Farley's was a name they never wanted to hear again, least of all in a scandalous trial that would be written up sensationally in the local papers and lodged indelibly in local memory and that would leave Coleman Silk Hall forever a dream.

“She is not the ideal woman to have linked with our father's legacy,” Jeffrey told me. “Our mother is,” said Michael. “This cheap little cunt has nothing to do with anything.” “Nothing,” Jeffrey reiterated. It was hard to believe, given the ardor and the resolve, that out in California they were college science professors. You would have thought they ran Twentieth Century Fox.

Herb Keble was a slender, very dark man, elderly now, a bit stiff-gaited, though seemingly in no way stooped or hobbled by illness, and with something of the earnestness of the black preacher in both the stern bearing and the ominous, hanging-judge voice. He had only to say “My name is Herbert Keble” to cast his spell; he had only, from behind the podium, to stare silently at Coleman's coffin and then to turn to the congregation and announce who he was to invoke that realm of feeling associated with the declamation of the holy psalms. He was austere in the way the edge of a blade is austere — menacing to you if you don't handle it with the utmost care. Altogether the man was impressive, in demeanor and appearance both, and one could see where Coleman might have hired him to break the color barrier at Athena for something like the same reasons that Branch Rickey had hired Jackie Robinson to be organized baseball's first black. Imagining the Silk boys browbeating Herb Keble into doing their bidding wasn't that easy, at first, not until you took into account the appeal of self-drama to a personality marked so clearly by the vanity of those authorized to administer the sacraments. He very much displayed the authority of the second in power to the sovereign.

“My name is Herbert Keble,” he began. “I am chairman of the Political Science Department. In 1996, I was among those who did not see fit to rise to Coleman's defense when he was accused of racism — I, who had come to Athena sixteen years earlier, the very year that Coleman Silk was appointed dean of faculty; I, who was Dean Silk's first academic appointment. Much too tardily, I stand before you to censure myself for having failed my friend and patron, and to do what I can — again, much too tardily — to begin to attempt to right the wrong, the grievous, the contemptible wrong, that was done to him by Athena College”.

“At the time of the alleged racist incident, I told Coleman, 'I can't be with you on this.' I said it to him deliberately, though perhaps not entirely for the opportunistic, careerist, or cowardly reasons that he was so quick to assume to be mine. I thought then that I could do more for Coleman's cause by working behind the scenes to defuse the opposition than by openly allying myself with him in public, and being rendered impotent, as I surely would have been, by that all-purpose, know-nothing weapon of a sobriquet, ‘Uncle Tom.’ I thought that I could be the voice of reason from within — rather than without — the ranks of those whose outrage over Coleman's alleged racist remark provoked them into unfairly defaming him and the college for what were the failures of two students. I thought that if I was shrewd enough and patient enough I could cool the passions, if not of the most extreme of his adversaries, then of those thoughtful, level-headed members of our local African American community and their white sympathizers, whose antagonism was never really more than reflexive and ephemeral. I thought that, in time — and, I hoped, in less time rather than more — I could initiate a dialogue between Coleman and his accusers that would lead to the promulgation of a statement identifying the nature of the misunderstanding that had given rise to the conflict, and thereby bring this regrettable incident to something like a just conclusion”.

“I was wrong. I should never have said to my friend, 'I can't be with you on this.' I should have said, ‘I must be with you.’ I should have worked to oppose his enemies not insidiously and misguidedly from within but forthrightly and honestly from without — from where he could have taken heart at the expression of support instead of being left to nurse the crushing sense of abandonment that festered into the wound that led to his alienation from his colleagues, to his resignation from the college, and from there to the self-destructive isolation which, I am convinced — horrible as believing this is for me — led not too circuitously to his dying as tragically, wastefully, and unnecessarily as he did in that car the other night. I should have spoken up to say what I want to say now in the presence of his former colleagues, associates, and staff, and to say, especially, in the presence of his children, Jeff and Mike, who are here from California, and Mark and Lisa, who are here from New York — and to say, as the senior African American member of the Athena faculty:”

“Coleman Silk never once deviated in any way from totally fair conduct in his dealings with each and every one of his students for as long as he served Athena College. Never”.

“The alleged misconduct never took place. Never”.

“What he was forced to undergo — the accusations, the interviews, the inquiry — remains a blight on the integrity of this institution to this day, and on this day, more than ever. Here, in the New England most identified, historically, with the American individualist's resistance to the coercions of a censorious community — Hawthorne, Melville, and Thoreau come to mind — an American individualist who did not think that the weightiest thing in life were the rules, an American individualist who refused to leave unexamined the orthodoxies of the customary and of the established truth, an American individualist who did not always live in compliance with majority standards of decorum and taste — an American individualist par excellence was once again so savagely traduced by friends and neighbors that he lived estranged from them until his death, robbed of his moral authority by their moral stupidity. Yes, it is we, the morally stupid censorious community, who have abased ourselves in having so shamefully besmirched Coleman Silk's good name. I speak particularly of those like myself, who knew from close contact the depth of his commitment to Athena and the purity of his dedication as an educator, and who, out of whatever deluded motive, betrayed him nonetheless. I say it again: we betrayed him. Betrayed Coleman and betrayed Iris”.

“Iris's death, the death of Iris Silk, coming in the midst of...”

Two seats to my left, Smoky Hollenbeck's wife was in tears, as were several other of the women nearby. Smoky was himself leaning forward, his forehead resting lightly on his two hands, which were entwined at the top of the pew in front of us in a vaguely ecclesiastical manner. I suppose he wanted me or his wife or whoever else might be watching him to believe that the injustice done to Coleman Silk was unendurable to think about. I supposed he was meant to appear to be overcome by compassion, yet knowing what I did about all that he concealed, as a model family man, of the Dionysian substrata of his life, it was an inference hard to swallow.

But, Smoky aside, the attention, the concentration, the acuity of the concentration focused on Herb Keble's every word seemed genuine enough for me to imagine that any number of people present would be finding it difficult not to lament what Coleman Silk had unfairly endured. I wondered, of course, if Keble's rationalization for why he hadn't stood beside Coleman at the time of the spooks incident was of his own devising or one that the Silk boys had come up with so as to enable him to do as they demanded while still saving face. I wondered whether the rationalization could be an accurate description of his motives when he'd said the words that Coleman bitterly repeated to me so many times: “I can't be with you on this.”

Why was I unwilling to believe this man? Because, by a certain age, one's mistrust is so exquisitely refined that one is unwilling to believe anybody? Surely, two years back, when he was silent and didn't rise to Coleman's defense, it was for the reason that people are always silent: because it is in their interest to be silent. Expediency is not a motive that is steeped in darkness. Herb Keble was just another one out trying to kosher the record, albeit in a bold, even an interesting way, by taking the guilt upon himself, but the fact remained that he couldn't act when it mattered, and so I thought, on Coleman's behalf, Fuck him.

When Keble came down from the podium and, before returning to his seat, stopped to shake the hands of each of Coleman's children, that simple gesture served only to intensify the almost violent passion aroused by his speech. What would happen next? For a moment there was nothing. Just the silence and the coffin and the emotional intoxication of the crowd. Then Lisa stood up, mounted the few steps to the podium, and, from the lectern, said, “The last movement of Mahler's Third Symphony.” That was it. They pulled out all the stops. They played Mahler.

Well, you can't listen to Mahler sometimes. When he picks you up to shake you, he doesn't stop. By the end of it, we were all crying.

Speaking only for myself, I don't think anything could have torn me apart like that other than hearing Steena Palsson's rendition of “The Man I Love” as she'd sung it from the foot of Coleman's Sullivan Street bed in 1948.

The three-block walk to the cemetery was memorable largely for its seemingly not having taken place. One moment we were immobilized by the infinite vulnerability of Mahler's adagio movement, by that simplicity that is not artifice, that is not a strategy, that unfolds, it almost seems, with the accumulated pace of life and with all of life's unwillingness to end ... one moment we were immobilized by that exquisite juxtaposition of grandeur and intimacy that begins in the quiet, singing, restrained intensity of the strings and then rises in surges through the massive false ending that leads to the true, the extended, the monumental ending ... one moment we were immobilized by the swelling, soaring, climaxing, and subsiding of an elegiac orgy that rolls on and on and on with a determined pace that never changes, giving way, then coming back like pain or longing that won't disappear ... one moment we were, at Mahler's mounting insistence, inside the coffin with Coleman, attuned to all the terror of endlessness and to the passionate desire to escape death, and then somehow or other sixty or seventy of us had got ourselves over to the cemetery to watch as he was buried, a simple enough ritual, as sensible a solution to the problem as any ever devised but one that is never entirely comprehensible. You have to see it to believe it each time.

I doubted that most people had been planning to accompany the body all the way to the grave. But the Silk children had a flair for drawing out and sustaining pathos, and this, I assumed, was why there were so many of us crowding around as close as we could to the hole that was to be Coleman's eternal home, as though eager almost to crawl in there and take his place, to offer ourselves up as surrogates, as substitutes, as sacrificial offerings, if that would magically allow for the resumption of the exemplary life that, by Herb Keble's own admission, had been as good as stolen from Coleman two years back.

Coleman was to be buried beside Iris. The dates on her headstone read 1932–1996. His would read 1926–1998. How direct those numbers are. And how little they connote of what went on.

I heard the Kaddish begin before I realized that somebody there was chanting it. Momentarily I imagined that it must be drifting in from another part of the cemetery, when it was coming from the other side of the grave, where Mark Silk — the youngest son, the angry son, the son who, like his twin sister, bore the strongest resemblance to his father — was standing alone, with the book in his hand and the yarmulke on his head, and chanting in a soft, tear-filled voice the familiar Hebrew prayer. Yisgadal, v'yiskadash...

Most people in America, including myself and probably Mark's siblings, don't know what these words mean, but nearly everyone recognizes the sobering message they bring: a Jew is dead. Another Jew is dead. As though death were not a consequence of life but a consequence of having been a Jew.

When Mark had finished, he shut the book and then, having induced a grim serenity in everyone else, was himself overcome by hysteria. That was how Coleman's funeral ended — with all of us immobilized this time by watching Mark go to pieces, helplessly flailing his arms in the air and, through a wide-open mouth, wailing away. That wild sound of lamentation, older even than the prayer he'd uttered, rose in intensity until, when he saw his sister rushing toward him with arms outstretched, he turned to her his contorted Silk face, and in sheer childlike astonishment cried, “We're never going to see him again!”

I did not think my most generous thought. Generous thoughts were hard to come by that day. I thought, What difference should that make? You weren't that keen on seeing him when he was here.

Mark Silk apparently had imagined that he was going to have his father around to hate forever. To hate and hate and hate and hate, and then perhaps, in his own good time, after the scenes of accusation had reached their crescendo and he had flogged Coleman to within an inch of his life with his knot of filial grievance, to forgive. He thought Coleman was going to stay here till the whole play could be performed, as though he and Coleman had been set down not in life but on the southern hillside of the Athenian acropolis, in an outdoor theater sacred to Dionysus, where, before the eyes of ten thousand spectators, the dramatic unities were once rigorously observed and the great cathartic cycle was enacted annually. The human desire for a beginning, a middle, and an end — and an end appropriate in magnitude to that beginning and middle — is realized nowhere so thoroughly as in the plays that Coleman taught at Athena College. But outside the classical tragedy of the fifth century B.C., the expectation of completion, let alone of a just and perfect consummation, is a foolish illusion for an adult to hold.

People began to drift away. I saw the Hollenbecks move along the path between the gravestones and head toward the nearby street, the husband's arm around his wife's shoulder, shepherding her protectively away. I saw the young lawyer, Nelson Primus, who had represented Coleman during the spooks incident, and with him a pregnant young woman, a woman weeping, who must have been his wife. I saw Mark with his sister, still having to be consoled by her, and I saw Jeff and Michael, who had run this whole operation so expertly, talking quietly to Herb Keble a few yards from where I was standing. I couldn't myself go because of Les Farley. Away from this cemetery he muscled on undisturbed, uncharged with any crime, manufacturing that crude reality all his own, a brute of a being colliding with whomever he liked however he liked for all the inner reasons that justified anything he wanted to do.

Sure, I know there's no completion, no just and perfect consummation, but that didn't mean that, standing just feet from where the coffin rested in its freshly dug pit, I wasn't obstinately thinking that this ending, even if it were construed as having permanently reestablished Coleman's place as an admired figure in the college's history, would not suffice. Too much truth was still concealed.

I meant by this the truth about his death and not the truth that was to come to light a moment or two later. There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they've got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies. Caught between, I thought. Denounced by the high-minded, reviled by the righteous — then exterminated by the criminally crazed. Excommunicated by the saved, the elect, the ever-present evangelists of the mores of the moment, then polished off by a demon of ruthlessness. Both human exigencies found their conjunction in him. The pure and the impure, in all their vehemence, on the move, akin in their common need of the enemy. Whipsawed, I thought. Whipsawed by the inimical teeth of this world. By the antagonism that is the world.

One woman, by herself, had remained as close to the open grave as I was. She was silent and did not look to be crying. She didn't even appear to be quite there-—that is to say, in the cemetery, at a funeral. She could have been on a street corner, waiting patiently for the next bus. It was the way she was holding her handbag primly in front of her that made me think of someone who was already prepared to pay her fare, and then to be carried off to wherever she was going. I could tell she wasn't white only by the thrust of her jaw and the cast of her mouth — by something suggestively protrusive shaping the lower half of her face — and, too, by the stiff texture of her hairdo. Her complexion was no darker than a Greek's or a Moroccan's, and perhaps I might not have added one clue to another to matter-of-factly register her as black, if it wasn't that Herb Keble was among the very few who hadn't yet headed for home. Because of her age — sixty-five, maybe seventy — I thought she must be Keble's wife. No wonder, then, that she looked so strangely transfixed. It could not have been easy to listen to her husband publicly cast himself (under the sway of whatever motive) as Athena's scapegoat. I could understand how she would have a lot to think about, and how assimilating it might take more time than the funeral had allowed. Her thoughts had still to be with what he had said back in Rishanger Chapel. That's where she was.

I was wrong.

As I turned to leave, she happened to turn too, and so, with only a foot or two between us, we were facing each other.

“My name's Nathan Zuckerman,” I said. “I was a friend of Coleman's near the end of his life.”

“How do you do,” she replied.

“I believe your husband changed everything today.”

She did not look at me as if I were mistaken, though I was. Nor did she ignore me, decide to be rid of me, and proceed on her way. Nor did she look as if she didn't know what to do, though that she was in a quandary had to have been so. A friend of Coleman's at the end of his life? Given her true identity, how could she have said nothing more than “I'm not Mrs. Keble” and walked off?

But all she did was to stand there, opposite me, expressionless, so profoundly struck dumb by the day's events and its revelations that not to understand who she was to Coleman would, at that moment, have been impossible. It wasn't a resemblance to Coleman that registered, and registered quickly, in rapid increments, as with a distant star seen through a lens that you've steadily magnified to the correct intensity. What I saw — when, at long last, I did see, see all the way, clear to Coleman's secret — was the facial resemblance to Lisa, who was even more her aunt's niece than she was her father's daughter.

It was from Ernestine — back at my house in the hours after the funeral — that I learned most of what I know about Coleman's growing up in East Orange: about Dr. Fensterman trying to get Coleman to take a dive on his final exams so as to let Bert Fensterman slip in ahead of him as valedictorian; about how Mr. Silk found the East Orange house in 1926, the small frame house that Ernestine still occupied and that was sold to her father “by a couple,” Ernestine explained to me, “who were mad at the people next door and so were determined to sell it to colored to spite them.” (“See, you can tell the generation I am,” she said to me later that day. “I say ‘colored’ and ‘Negro.’”) She told me about how her father had lost the optician shop during the Depression, how it took time for him to get over the loss—“I'm not sure,” she said, “he ever did”—and how he got a job as a waiter on the dining car and worked for the railroad for the rest of his life. She talked about how Mr. Silk called English “the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens,” and saw to it that the children learned not just to speak properly but to think logically, to classify, to analyze, to describe, to enumerate, to learn not only English but Latin and Greek; how he took them to the New York museums and to see Broadway plays; and how, when he found out about Coleman's secret career as an amateur boxer for the Newark Boys Club, he had told him, in that voice that radiated authority without ever having to be raised, “If I were your father I would say, ‘You won last night? Good. Now you can retire undefeated.’” From Ernestine I learned how Doc Chizner, my own boxing instructor during the year I took his after-school class down in Newark, had, earlier, in East Orange, laid claim to young Coleman's talent after Coleman left the Boys Club, how Doc had wanted him to box for the University of Pittsburgh, could have gotten him a scholarship to Pitt as a white boxer, but how Coleman had enrolled at Howard because that was their father's plan. How their father dropped dead while serving dinner on the train one night, and how Coleman had immediately quit Howard to join the navy, and to join as a white man. How after the navy he moved to Greenwich Village to go to NYU. How he brought that white girl home one Sunday, the pretty girl from Minnesota. How the biscuits burned that day, so preoccupied were they all with not saying the wrong thing. How, luckily for everyone, Walt, who'd begun teaching down in Asbury Park, hadn't been able to drive up for dinner, how things just went along so wonderfully that Coleman could have had nothing to complain about. Ernestine told me how gracious Coleman's mother had been to the girl. Steena. How thoughtful and kind they'd been to Steena — and Steena to them. How hardworking their mother was always, how, after their father died, she had risen, by virtue of merit alone, to become the first colored head nurse on the surgical floor of a Newark hospital. And how she had adored her Coleman, how there was nothing Coleman could do to destroy his mother's love. Even the decision to spend the rest of his life pretending his mother had been somebody else, a mother he'd never had and who had never existed, even that couldn't free Mrs. Silk of him. And after Coleman had come home to tell his mother he was marrying Iris Gittelman and that she would never be mother-in-law to her daughter-in-law or grandmother to her grandchildren, when Walt forbade Coleman from ever contacting the family again, how Walt then made it clear to their mother — and employing the same steely authority by which his father had governed them — that she was not to contact Coleman either.

“I know he meant the best,” Ernestine said. “Walt thought this was the only way to protect Mother from being hurt. From being hurt by Coleman every time there was a birthday, every time there was a holiday, every time it was Christmas. He believed that if the line of communication remained open, Coleman was going to break Mother's heart a thousand times over, exactly the way he did it that day. Walt was enraged at Coleman for coming over to East Orange without any preparation, without warning any of us, and to tell an elderly woman, a widow like that, just what the law was going to be. Fletcher, my husband, always had a psychological reason for Walt's doing what he did. But I don't think Fletcher was right. I don't think Walt was ever truly jealous of Coleman's place in Mother's heart. I don't accept that. I think he was insulted and flared up — not just for Mother but for all of us. Walt was the political member of the family; of course he was going to get mad. I myself wasn't mad that way and I never have been, but I can understand Walter. Every year, on Coleman's birthday, I phoned Athena to talk to him. Right down to three days ago. That was his birthday. His seventy-second birthday. I would think that when he got killed, he was driving home from his birthday dinner. I phoned to wish him a happy birthday. There was no answer and so I called the next day. And that's how I found out he was dead. Somebody there at the house picked up the phone and told me. I realize now that it was one of my nephews. I only began calling the house after Coleman's wife died and he left the college and was living alone. Before that, I phoned the office. Never told anybody about it. Didn't see any reason to. Phoned on his birthdays. Phoned when Mother died. Phoned when I got married. Phoned when I had my son. I phoned him when my husband died. We always had a good talk together. He always wanted to hear the news, even about Walter and his promotions. And then each of the times that Iris gave birth, with Jeffrey, with Michael, then with the twins, I got a call from Cole man. He'd call me at school. That was always a great trial for him. He was testing fate with so many kids. Because they were genetically linked to the past he had repudiated, there was always the chance, you see, that they might be a throwback in some distinguishing way. He worried a lot about that. It could have happened — it sometimes does happen. But he went ahead and had them anyway. That was a part of the plan too. The plan to lead a full and regular and productive life. Still, I believe that, in those first years especially, and certainly whenever a new child came along, Coleman suffered for his decision. Nothing ever escaped Coleman's attention, and that held true for his own feelings. He could cut himself away from us, but not from his feelings. And that was most true where the children were concerned. I think he himself came to believe that there was something awful about withholding something so crucial to what a person is, that it was their birthright to know their genealogy. And there was something dangerous too. Think of the havoc he could create in their lives if their children were born recognizably Negro. So far he has been lucky, and that goes for the two grandchildren out in California. But think of his daughter, who isn't married yet. Suppose one day she has a white husband, as more than likely she will, and she gives birth to a Negroid child, as she can — as she may. How does she explain this? And what will her husband assume? He will assume that another man fathered her child. A black man at that. Mr. Zuckerman, it was frighteningly cruel for Coleman not to tell his children. That is not Walter's judgment — that is mine. If Coleman was intent on keeping his race his secret, then the price he should have paid was not to have children. And he knew that. He had to know that. Instead, he has planted an unexploded bomb. And that bomb seemed to me always in the background when he talked about them. Especially when he talked about, not the twin girl, but the twin boy, Mark, the boy he had all the trouble with. He said to me that Markie probably hated him for his own reasons, yet it was as though he had figured out the truth. ‘I got there what I produced,’ he said, 'even if for the wrong reason. Markie doesn't even have the luxury of hating his father for the real thing. I robbed him,‘ Coleman said, of that part of his birthright, too.’ And I said, ‘But he might not have hated you at all for that, Coleman.’ And he said, 'You don't follow me. Not that he would have hated me for being black. That's not what I mean by the real thing. I mean that he would have hated me for never telling him and because he had a right to know.' And then, because there was so much there to be misunderstood, we just let the subject drop. But it was clear that he could never forget that there was a lie at the foundation of his relationship to his children, a terrible lie, and that Markie had intuited it, somehow understood that the children, who carried their father's identity in their genes and who would pass that identity on to their children, at least genetically, and perhaps even physically, tangibly, never had the complete knowledge of who they are and who they were. This is somewhat in the nature of speculation, but I sometimes think that Coleman saw Markie as the punishment for what he had done to his own mother. Though that,” Ernestine added, scrupulously, “is not something he ever said. As for Walter, what I was getting at about Walter is that all he was trying to do was to fill our father's shoes by making sure that Mother's heart would not be broken time and again.”

“And was it?” I asked.

“Mr. Zuckerman, there was no repairing it — ever. When she died in the hospital, when she was delirious, do you know what she was saying? She kept calling for the nurse the way the sick patients used to call for her. ‘Oh, nurse,’ she said, ‘oh, nurse — get me to the train. I got a sick baby at home.’ Over and over, ‘I got a sick baby at home.’ Sitting there beside her bed, holding her hand and watching her die, I knew who that sick baby was. So did Walter know. It was Coleman. Whether she would have been better off had Walt not interfered the way he did by banishing Coleman forever like that ... well, I still hesitate to say. But Walter's special talent as a man is his decisiveness. That was Coleman's as well. Ours is a family of decisive men. Daddy had it, and so did his father, who was a Methodist minister down in Georgia. These men make up their minds, and that's it. Well, there was a price to pay for their decisiveness. One thing is clear, however. And I realized that today. And I wish my parents could know it. We are a family of educators. Beginning with my paternal grandmother. As a young slave girl, taught to read by her mistress, then, after Emancipation, went to what was then called Georgia State Normal and Industrial School for Colored. That's how it began, and that's what we have turned out to be. And that is what I realized when I saw Coleman's children. All but one of them teachers. And all of us — Walt, Coleman, me, all of us teachers as well. My own son is another story. He did not finish college. We had some disagreements, and now he has a significant other, as the expression goes, and we have our disagreement about that. I should tell you that there were no colored teachers in the white Asbury Park school system when Walter arrived there in '47. You have to remember, he was the first. And subsequently their first Negro principal. And subsequently their first Negro superintendent of schools. That tells you something about Walt. There was already a well-established colored community, but it was not till Walter got there in '47 that things began to change. And that decisiveness of his had a lot to do with it. Even though you're a Newark product, I'm not sure you know that up until 1947, legally, constitutionally separate, segregated education was approved in New Jersey. You had, in most communities, schools for colored children and schools for white children. There was a distinct separation of the races in elementary education in south Jersey. From Trenton, New Brunswick, on down, you had separate schools. And in Princeton. And in Asbury Park. In Asbury Park, when Walter arrived there, there was a school called Bangs Avenue, East or West — one of them was for colored children who lived in that Bangs Avenue neighborhood and the other one was for white children who lived in that neighborhood. Now that was one building, but it was divided into two parts. There was a fence between the two sides of the building, and one side was colored kids and on the other was white kids. Likewise, the teachers on one side were white and the teachers on the other side were colored. The principal was white. In Trenton, in Princeton — and Princeton is not considered south Jersey — there were separate schools up until 1948. Not in East Orange and not in Newark, though at one time, even in Newark there was an elementary school for colored children. That was the early 1900s. But in 1947 — and I'm getting to Walter's place in all this, because I want you to understand my brother Walter, I want you to see his relationship to Coleman within the wider picture of what was going on back then. This is years before the civil rights movement. Even what Coleman did, the decision that he made, despite his Negro ancestry, to live as a member of another racial group — that was by no means an uncommon decision before the civil rights movement. There were movies about it. Remember them? One was called Pinky, and there was another, with Mel Ferrer, though I can't remember the name of it, but it was popular too. Changing your racial group — there was no civil rights to speak of, no equality, so that was on people's minds, white as well as colored. Maybe more in their minds than happening in reality, but still, it fascinated people in the way they are fascinated by a fairy tale. But then in 1947, the governor called for a constitutional convention to revise the constitution of the state of New Jersey. And that was the beginning of something. One of the constitutional revisions was that there would no longer be separated or segregated National Guard units in New Jersey. The second part, the second change in the new constitution, said that no longer shall children be forced to pass one school to get to another school in their neighborhood. The wording was something like that. Walter could tell it to you verbatim. Those amendments eliminated segregation in the public schools and in the National Guard. The governor and the boards of education were told to implement that. The state board advised all the local boards of education to set into operation plans to integrate the schools. They suggested first integrating the faculties of the schools and then slowly integrating the schools insofar as pupils were concerned. Now, even before Walt went to Asbury Park, even as a student at Montclair State when he came home from the war, he was one of those who were politically concerned — one of those ex-GIs who were already actively fighting for integration of the schools in New Jersey. Even before the constitutional revision, and after it was revised, certainly, Walter remained among the most active in the fight to integrate the schools.”

Her point was that Coleman was not one of those ex-GIs fighting for integration and equality and civil rights; in Walt's opinion, he was never fighting for anything other than himself. Silky Silk. That's who he fought as, who he fought for, and that's why Walt could never stand Coleman, even when Coleman was a boy. In it for himself, Walt used to say. In it always for Coleman alone. All he ever wanted was out.

We had finished lunch at my house several hours earlier, but Ernestine's energy showed no signs of abating. Everything whirling inside her brain — and not just as a consequence of Coleman's death but everything about the mystery of him that she had been trying to fathom for the last fifty years — was causing her to speak in a rush that was not necessarily characteristic of the serious smalltown schoolteacher she'd been for the whole of her life. She was a very proper-looking woman, seemingly healthy if a bit drawn in the face, whose appetites you couldn't have imagined to be in any way excessive; from her dress and her posture, from the meticulous way she ate her lunch, even from the way she occupied her chair, it was clear that hers was a personality that had no difficulty subjugating itself to social convention and that her inmost reflex in any conflict would be to act automatically as the mediator — entirely the master of the sensible response, by choice more of a listener than a maker of speeches, and yet the aura of excitement surrounding the death of her self-declared white brother, the special significance of the end of a life that to her family had seemed like one long, perverse, willfully arrogant defection, could hardly be reckoned with by ordinary means.

“Mother went to her grave wondering why Coleman did it. ‘Lost himself to his own people.’ That's how she put it. He wasn't the first in Mother's family. There'd been others. But they were others. They weren't Coleman. Coleman never in his life chafed under being a Negro. Not for as long as we knew him. This is true. Being a Negro was just never an issue with him. You'd see Mother sitting in her chair at night, sitting there stock-still, and you knew what she was wondering: could it be this, could it be that? Was it to get away from Daddy? But by the time he did it, Daddy was dead. Mother would propose reasons, but none was ever adequate. Was it because he thought white people were better than us? They had more money than we did, sure — but better? Is that what he believed? We never saw the slightest evidence of that. Now, people grow up and go away and have nothing to do with their families ever again, and they don't have to be colored to act like that. It happens every day all over the world. They hate everything so much they just disappear. But Coleman as a kid was not a hater. The breeziest, most optimistic child you ever wanted to see. Growing up, I was more unhappy than Coleman. Walt was more unhappy than Coleman. What with all the success he had, with the attention people gave him ... no, it just never made sense to Mother. The pining never stopped. His photos. His report cards. His track medals. His yearbook. The certificate he got as valedictorian. There were even toys of Coleman's around, toys he'd loved as a small child, and she had all these things and she stared at them the way a mind reader stares into a crystal ball, as if they would unravel everything. Did he ever acknowledge to anyone what he'd done? Did he, Mr. Zuckerman? Did he ever acknowledge it to his wife? To his children?”

“I don't think so,” I said. “I'm sure he didn't.”

“So he was Coleman all the way. Set out to do it and did it. That was the extraordinary thing about him from the time he was a boy — that he stuck to a plan completely. There was a dogged commitment he could make to his every decision. All the lying that was necessitated by the big lie, to his family, to his colleagues, and he stuck to it right to the end. Even to be buried as a Jew. Oh, Coleman,” she said sadly, “so determined. Mr. Determined,” and in that moment, she was closer to laughter than to tears.

Buried as a Jew, I thought, and, if I was speculating correctLy, killed as a Jew. Another of the problems of impersonation.

“If he acknowledged it to anyone,” I said, “maybe it was to the woman he died with. To Faunia Farley.”

She clearly didn't want to hear about that woman. But because of her sensibleness, she had to ask, “How do you know that?”

“I don't. I don't know anything. It's a thought I have,” I said. “It ties into the pact that I sensed was between them — his telling her.” By “the pact between them” I meant their mutual recognition that there was no clean way out, but I didn't go on to explain myself, not to Ernestine. “Look, learning this from you today, there's nothing about Coleman I don't have to rethink. I don't know what to think about anything.”

“Well then, you're now an honorary member of the Silk family. Aside from Walter, in matters pertaining to Coleman none of us has ever known what to think. Why he did it, why he stuck to it, why Mother had to die the way she did. If Walt hadn't laid down the law,” she said, “who knows what would have evolved? Who knows if Coleman wouldn't have told his wife as the years passed and he got further from the decision? Maybe even told his children one day. Maybe have told the world. But Walt froze everything in time. And that is never a good idea. Coleman did this when he was still in his twenties. A firecracker of twenty-seven. But he wasn't going to be twenty-seven forever. It wasn't going to be 1953 forever. People age. Nations age. Problems age. Sometimes they age right out of existence. Yet Walt froze it. Of course, if you look at it narrowly, from the point of view simply of social advantage, of course it was advantageous in the well-spoken Negro middle class to do it Coleman's way, as it's advantageous today not to dream of doing it that way. Today, if you're a middle-class intelligent Negro and you want your kids to go to the best schools, and on full scholarship if you need it, you wouldn't dream of saying that you're not colored. That would be the last thing you'd do. White as your skin might be, now it's advantageous not to do it, just as then it was advantageous to do it. So what is the difference? But can I tell that to Walter? Can I say to him, ‘So what really is the difference?’ First because of what Coleman did to Mother, and second because in Walter's eyes there was a fight to fight then, and Coleman didn't want to fight it — for those reasons alone, I most certainly cannot. Though don't think that over the years I haven't tried. Because Walter, in fact, is not a harsh man. You want to hear about my brother Walter? In 1944 Walter was a twenty-one-year-old rifleman with a colored infantry company. He was with another soldier from his outfit. They were on a ridge in Belgium overlooking a valley that was cut through by railroad tracks. They saw a German soldier walking east along the tracks. He had a small bag slung over his shoulder and he was whistling. The other soldier with Walter took aim. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Walter said to him. ‘I'm going to kill him.’ ‘Why? Stop! What's he doing? He's walking. He's probably walking home.’ Walter had to wrestle the rifle away from this fellow. A kid from South Carolina. They went down the ridge and they stopped the German and they took him prisoner. Turned out he was walking home. He had a leave, and the only way he knew to get back to Germany was to follow the railroad tracks east. And it was Walter who saved his life. How many soldiers ever did that? My brother Walter is a determined man who can be hard if he has to be, but he is also a human being. It's because he's a human being that he believes that what you do, you do to advance the race. And so I have tried with him, tried sometimes by saying things to Walter that I only half believe myself. Coleman was a part of his time, I tell him. Coleman couldn't wait to go through civil rights to get to his human rights, and so he skipped a step. ‘See him historically,’ I say to Walt. 'You're a history teacher — see him as a part of something larger.' I've told him, ‘Neither of you just submitted to what you were given. Both of you are fighters and both of you fought. You did battle your way and Coleman did battle his.’ But that is a line of reasoning that has never worked with Walter. Nothing has ever worked. That was Coleman's way of becoming a man, I tell him — but he will not buy that. To Walt, that was Coleman's way of not becoming a man. ‘Sure,’ he says to me, ‘sure. Your brother is more or less as he would have been, except he would have been black. Except? Except? That except would have changed everything.’ Walt cannot see Coleman other than the way he always has. And what can I do about that, Mr. Zuckerman? Hate my brother Walt for what he did to Coleman by freezing our family in time like that? Hate my brother Coleman for what he did to Mother, for how he made the poor woman suffer down to the very last day of her life? Because if I'm going to hate my two brothers, why stop there? Why not hate my father for all the things that he did wrong? Why not hate my late husband? I was not married to a saint, I can assure you. I loved my husband, but I have clear vision. And what about my son? There's a boy it would not be at all hard to hate. He goes out of his way to make it easy for you. But the danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can't stop. I don't know anything harder to control than hating. Easier to kick drinking than to master hate. And that is saying something.”

“Did you know before today,” I asked her, “why it was that Coleman had resigned from the college?”

“I did not. I thought he'd reached a retirement age.”

“He never told you.”

“No.”

“So you couldn't know what Keble was talking about.”

“Not entirely.”

So I told her about the spooks business, told her that whole story then, and when I was finished she shook her head and said, straight out, “I don't believe I've ever heard of anything more foolish being perpetrated by an institution of higher learning. It sounds to me more like a hotbed of ignorance. To persecute a college professor, whoever he is, whatever color he might be, to insult him, to dishonor him, to rob him of his authority and his dignity and his prestige for something as stupid and trivial as that. I am my father's daughter, Mr. Zuckerman, the daughter of a father who was a stickler for words, and with every passing day, the words that I hear spoken strike me as less and less of a description of what things really are. Sounds from what you've told me that anything is possible in a college today. Sounds like the people there forgot what it is to teach. Sounds like what they do is something closer to buffoonery. Every time has its reactionary authorities, and here at Athena they are apparently riding high. One has to be so terribly frightened of every word one uses? What ever happened to the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America? In my childhood, as in yours, it was recommended that each student who graduated from high school in New Jersey get at graduation two things: a diploma and a copy of the Constitution. Do you recall that? You had to take a year of American history and a semester of economics — as, of course, you have to no longer: ‘have to’ is just gone out of the curriculum. At graduation it was traditional in many of our schools in those days for the principal to hand you your diploma and somebody else to give you a copy of the Constitution of the United States. So few people today have a reasonably clear understanding of the Constitution of the United States. But here in America, as far as I can see, it's just getting more foolish by the hour. All these colleges starting these remedial programs to teach kids what they should have learned in the ninth grade. In East Orange High they stopped long ago reading the old classics. They haven't even heard of Moby-Dick, much less read it. Youngsters were coming to me the year I retired, telling me that for Black History Month they would only read a biography of a black by a black. What difference, I would ask them, if it's a black author or it's a white author? I'm impatient with Black History Month altogether. I liken having a Black History Month in February and concentrating study on that to milk that's just about to go sour. You can still drink it, but it just doesn't taste right. If you're going to study and find out about Matthew Henson, then it seems to me that you do Matthew Henson when you do other explorers.”

“I don't know who Matthew Henson is,” I said to Ernestine, wondering if Coleman had known, if he had wanted to know, if not wanting to know was one of the reasons he had made his decision.

“Mr. Zuckerman...” she said, gently enough, but to shame me nonetheless.

“Mr. Zuckerman was not exposed to Black History Month as a youngster,” I said.

“Who discovered the North Pole?” she asked me.

I suddenly liked her enormously, and the more so the more pedantically teacherish she became. Though for different reasons, I was beginning to like her as much as I had liked her brother. And I saw now that if you'd put them side by side, it wouldn't have been at all difficult to tell what Coleman was. Everyone knows ... Oh, stupid, stupid, stupid Delphine Roux. One's truth is known to no one, and frequently — as in Delphine's very own case — to oneself least of all. “I forget whether it was Peary or Cook,” I said. “I forget which one got to the North Pole first.”

“Well, Henson got there before him. When it was reported in the New York Times, he was given full credit. But now when they write the history, all you hear about is Peary. It would have been the same sort of thing if Sir Edmund Hillary were said to have gotten to the top of Mount Everest and you didn't hear a word about Tenzing Norkay. My point,” said Ernestine, in her element now, all professional correctitude and instruction — and, unlike Coleman, everything her father ever wanted her to be—“my point is, if you have a course on health and whatever, then you do Dr. Charles Drew. You've heard of him?”

“No.”

“Shame on you, Mr. Zuckerman. I'll tell you in a minute. But you do Dr. Drew when you have health. You don't put him in February. You understand what I mean?”

“Yes.”

“You learn about them when you study explorers and health people and all the other people. But everything there now is black this and black that. I let it wash over me the best I could, but it wasn't easy. Years ago, East Orange High was excellent. Kids coming out of East Orange High, especially out of the honors program, would have their choice of colleges. Oh, don't get me started on this subject. What happened to Coleman with that word ‘spooks’ is all a part of the same enormous failure. In my parents' day and well into yours and mine, it used to be the person who fell short. Now it's the discipline. Reading the classics is too difficult, therefore it's the classics that are to blame. Today the student asserts his incapacity as a privilege. I can't learn it, so there is something wrong with it. And there is something especially wrong with the bad teacher who wants to teach it. There are no more criteria, Mr. Zuckerman, only opinions. I often wrestle with this question of what everything used to be. What education used to be. What East Orange High used to be. What East Orange used to be. Urban renewal destroyed East Orange, there's no doubt in my mind. They — the city fathers — talked about all the great things that were going to happen because of this urban renewal. It scared the merchants to death and the merchants left, and the more the merchants left, the less business there was. Then 280 and the parkway cut our little town in quarters. The parkway eliminated Jones Street — the center of our colored community the parkway eliminated altogether. Then 280. A devastating intrusion. What that did to that community! Because the highway had to come through, the nice houses along Oraton Parkway, Elmwood Avenue, Maple Avenue, the state just bought them up and they disappeared overnight. I used to be able to do all my Christmas shopping on Main Street. Well, Main Street and Central Avenue. Central Avenue was called the Fifth Avenue of the Oranges then. You know what we've got today? We've got a ShopRite. And we've got a Dunkin' Donuts. And there was a Domino's Pizza, but they closed. Now they've got another food place. And there's a cleaners. But you can't compare quality. It's not the same. In all honesty, I drive up the hill to West Orange to shop. But I didn't then. There was no reason to. Every night when we went out to walk the dog, I'd go with my husband, unless the weather was real bad — walk to Central Avenue, which is two blocks, then down Central Avenue for four blocks, cross over, then window-shop back, and home. There was a B. Altman. A Russek's. There was a Black, Starr, and Gorham. There was a Bachrach, the photographer. A very nice men's store, Minks, that was Jewish, that was over on Main Street. Two theaters. There was the Hollywood Theater on Central Avenue. There was the Palace Theater on Main Street. All of life was there in little East Orange...”

All of life was there in East Orange. And when? Before. Before urban renewal. Before the classics were abandoned. Before they stopped giving out the Constitution to high school graduates. Before there were remedial classes in the colleges teaching kids what they should have learned in ninth grade. Before Black History Month. Before they built the parkway and brought in 280. Before they persecuted a college professor for saying “spooks” to his class. Before she drove up the hill to West Orange to shop. Before everything changed, including Coleman Silk. That's when it all was different — before. And, she lamented, it will never be the same again, not in East Orange or anywhere else in America.

At four, when I started out of my drive for the College Arms, where she was staying, the afternoon light was ratcheting rapidly down and the day, heavy now with fearsome clouds, had turned into gusty November. That morning they'd buried Coleman — and the morning before buried Faunia — in springlike weather, but now everything was intent on announcing winter. And winter twelve hundred feet up. Here it comes.

The impulse I had then, to tell Ernestine about the summer day a mere four months earlier when Coleman had driven me out to the dairy farm to watch Faunia do the five o'clock milking in the late afternoon heat — that is, to watch him watching Faunia do the milking — did not require much wisdom to suppress. Whatever was missing from Ernestine's sense of Coleman's life, she was not driven to discover. Intelligent as she was, she hadn't asked a single question about how he had lived out his last months, let alone about what might have caused him to die in the circumstance he did; good and virtuous woman that she was, she preferred not to contemplate the specific details of his destruction. Nor did she wish to inquire into any biographical connection between the injunction to revolt that had severed him from his family in his twenties and the furious determination, some forty years on, with which he had disassociated himself from Athena, as its pariah and renegade. Not that I was sure there was any connection, any circuitry looping the one decision to the other, but we could try to look and see, couldn't we? How did such a man as Coleman come to exist? What is it that he was? Was the idea he had for himself of lesser validity or of greater validity than someone else's idea of what he was supposed to be? Can such things even be known? But the concept of life as something whose purpose is concealed, of custom as something that may not allow for thought, of society as dedicated to a picture of itself that may be badly flawed, of an individual as real apart and beyond the social determinants defining him, which may indeed be what to him seem most unreal—in short, every perplexity pumping the human imagination seemed to lie somewhat outside her own unswerving allegiance to a canon of time-honored rules.

“I have not read any of your books,” she told me in the car. “I tend to lean toward mysteries these days, and English mysteries. But when I get home, I plan to take out something of yours.”

“You haven't told me who Dr. Charles Drew was.”

“Dr. Charles Drew,” she told me, “discovered how to prevent blood from clotting so it could be banked. Then he was injured in an automobile accident, and the hospital that was nearest would not take colored, and he died by bleeding to death.”

That was the whole of our conversation during the twenty minutes it took to drive down the mountain and into town. The torrent of disclosure was over. Ernestine had said all there was to say. With the result that the harshly ironic fate of Dr. Drew took on a significance — a seemingly special relevance to Coleman and his harshly ironic fate — that was no less disturbing for being imponderable.

I couldn't imagine anything that could have made Coleman more of a mystery to me than this unmasking. Now that I knew everything, it was as though I knew nothing, and instead of what I'd learned from Ernestine unifying my idea of him, he became not just an unknown but an uncohesive person. In what proportion, to what degree, had his secret determined his daily life and permeated his everyday thinking? Did it alter over the years from being a hot secret to being a cool secret to being a forgotten secret of no importance, something having to do with a dare he'd taken, a wager made to himself way back when? Did he get, from his decision, the adventure he was after, or was the decision in itself the adventure? Was it the misleading that provided his pleasure, the carrying off of the stunt that he liked best, the traveling through life incognito, or had he simply been closing the door to a past, to people, to a whole race that he wanted nothing intimate or official to do with? Was it the social obstruction that he wished to sidestep? Was he merely being another American and, in the great frontier tradition, accepting the democratic invitation to throw your origins overboard if to do so contributes to the pursuit of happiness? Or was it more than that? Or was it less? How petty were his motives? How pathological? And suppose they were both — what of it? And suppose they weren't — what of that? By the time I met him, was the secret merely the tincture barely tinting the coloration of the man's total being or was the totality of his being nothing but a tincture in the shoreless sea of a lifelong secret? Did he ever relax his vigilance, or was it like being a fugitive forever? Did he ever get over the fact that he couldn't get over the fact that he was pulling it off — that he could meet the world with his strength intact after doing what he had done, that he could appear to everyone, as he did appear, to be so easily at home in his own skin? Assume that, yes, at a certain point the balance shifted toward the new life and the other one receded, but did he ever completely get over the fear of exposure and the sense that he was going to be found out? When he had come to me first, crazed with the sudden loss of his wife, the murder of his wife as he conceived it, the formidable wife with whom he'd always struggled but to whom his devotion once again became profound in the instant of her death, when he came barging through my door in the clutches of the mad idea that because of her death I should write his book for him, was his lunacy not itself in the nature of a coded confession? Spooks! To be undone by a word that no one even speaks anymore. To hang him on that was, for Coleman, to banalize everything — the elaborate clockwork of his lie, the beautiful calibration of his deceit, everything. Spooks! The ridiculous trivialization of this masterly performance that had been his seemingly conventional, singularly subtle life — a life of little, if anything excessive on the surface because all the excess goes into the secret. No wonder the accusation of racism blew him sky high. As though his accomplishment were rooted in nothing but shame. No wonder all the accusations blew him sky high. His crime exceeded anything and everything they wanted to lay on him. He said “spooks,” he has a girlfriend half his age — it's all kid stuff. Such pathetic, such petty, such ridiculous transgressions, so much high school yammering to a man who, on his trajectory outward, had, among other things, done what he'd had to do to his mother, to go there and, in behalf of his heroic conception of his life, to tell her, “It's over. This love affair is over. You're no longer my mother and never were.” Anybody who has the audacity to do that doesn't just want to be white. He wants to be able to do that. It has to do with more than just being blissfully free. It's like the savagery in The Iliad, Coleman's favorite book about the ravening spirit of man. Each murder there has its own quality, each a more brutal slaughter than the last.

And yet, after that, he had the system beat. After that, he'd done it: never again lived outside the protection of the walled city that is convention. Or, rather, lived, at the same moment, entirely within and, surreptitiously, entirely beyond, entirely shut out — that was the fullness of his particular life as a created self. Yes, he'd had it beat for so very long, right down to all the kids being born white — and then he didn't. Blindsided by the uncontrollability of something else entirely. The man who decides to forge a distinct historical destiny, who sets out to spring the historical lock, and who does so, brilliantly succeeds at altering his personal lot, only to be ensnared by the history he hadn't quite counted on: the history that isn't yet history, the history that the clock is now ticking off, the history proliferating as I write, accruing a minute at a time and grasped better by the future than it will ever be by us. The we that is inescapable: the present moment, the common lot, the current mood, the mind of one's country, the stranglehold of history that is one's own time. Blindsided by the terrifyingly provisional nature of everything.

When we reached South Ward Street and I parked the car outside the College Arms, I said, “I'd like to meet Walter sometime. I'd like to talk to Walter about Coleman.”

“Walter hasn't mentioned Coleman's name since nineteen hundred and fifty-six. He won't talk about Coleman. As white a college as there was in New England, and that's where Coleman made his career. As white a subject as there was in the curriculum, and that's what Coleman chose to teach. To Walter, Coleman is more white than the whites. There is nothing beyond that for him to say.”

“Will you tell him Coleman's dead? Will you tell him where you've been?”

“No. Not unless he asks.”

“Will you contact Coleman's children?”

“Why would I?” she asked. “It was for Coleman to tell them. It's not up to me.”

“Why did you tell me, then?”

“I didn't tell you. You introduced yourself at the cemetery. You said to me, 'You're Coleman's sister.' I said yes. I simply spoke the truth. I'm not the one with something to hide.” This was as severe as she had been with me all afternoon — and with Coleman. Till that moment she had balanced herself scrupulously between the ruination of the mother and the outrage of the brother.

Here she drew a wallet out of her handbag. She unfolded the wallet to show me one of the snapshots that were tucked into a plastic sleeve. “My parents,” she said. “After World War I. He'd just come back from France.”

Two young people in front of a brick stoop, the petite young woman in a large hat and a long summer dress and the tall young man in his full-dress army uniform, with visored cap, leather bandoleer, leather gloves, and high sleek leather boots. They were pale but they were Negroes. How could you tell they were Negroes? By little more than that they had nothing to hide.

“Handsome young fellow. Especially in that outfit,” I said. “Could be a cavalry uniform.”

“Straight infantry,” she said.

“Your mother I can't see as well. Your mother's a bit shaded by the hat.”

“One can do only so much to control one's life,” Ernestine said, and with that, a summary statement as philosophically potent as any she cared to make, she returned the wallet to her handbag, thanked me for lunch, and, gathering herself almost visibly back into that orderly, ordinary existence that rigorously distanced itself from delusionary thinking, whether white or black or in between, she left the car. Instead of my then heading home, I drove cross-town to the cemetery and, after parking on the street, walked in through the gate, and not quite knowing what was happening, standing in the falling darkness beside the uneven earth mound roughly heaped over Coleman's coffin, I was completely seized by his story, by its end and by its beginning, and, then and there, I began this book.

I began by wondering what it had been like when Coleman had told Faunia the truth about that beginning — assuming that he ever had; assuming, that is, that he had to have. Assuming that what he could not outright say to me on the day he burst in all but shouting, “Write my story, damn you!” and what he could not say to me when he had to abandon (because of the secret, I now realized) writing the story himself, he could not in the end resist confessing to her, to the college cleaning woman who'd become his comrade-in-arms, the first and last person since Elbe Magee for whom he could strip down and turn around so as to expose, protruding from his naked back, the mechanical key by which he had wound himself up to set off on his great escapade. Ellie, before her Steena, and finally Faunia. The only woman never to know his secret is the woman he spent his life with, his wife. Why Faunia? As it is a human thing to have a secret, it is also a human thing, sooner or later, to reveal it. Even, as in this case, to a woman who doesn't ask questions, who, you would think, would be quite a gift to a man in possession of just such a secret. But even to her — especially to her. Because her not asking questions isn't because she's dumb or doesn't want to face things; her not asking him questions is, in Coleman's eyes, at one with her devastated dignity.

“I admit that may not be at all correct,” I said to my utterly transformed friend, “I admit that none of it may be. But here goes anyway: when you were trying to find out if she'd been a hooker ... when you were trying to uncover her secret...” Out there at his grave, where everything he ever was would appear to have been canceled out by the weight and mass of all that dirt if by nothing else, I waited and I waited for him to speak until at last I heard him asking Faunia what was the worst job she'd ever had. Then I waited again, waited some more, until little by little I picked up the sassy vibrations of that straight-out talk that was hers. And that is how all this began: by my standing alone in a darkening graveyard and entering into professional competition with death.

“After the kids, after the fire,” I heard her telling him, “I was taking any job I could. I didn't know what I was doing back then. I was in a fog. Well, there was this suicide,” Faunia said. “This was up in the woods outside of Blackwell. With a shotgun. Bird shot. Body was gone. A woman I knew, this boozer, Sissie, called me to come up and help her. She was going up there to clean the place out. ‘I know this is going to sound odd,’ Sissie says to me, ‘but I know you have a strong stomach and you can handle things. Can you help me do this?’ There was a man and woman living there, and their children, and they had an argument, and he went in the other room and blew his brains out. 'I'm going up there to clean it out,' Sissie says, so I went up there with her. I needed the money, and I didn't know what I was doing anyway, so I went. The smell of death. That's what I remember. Metallic. Blood. The smell. It came out only when we started cleaning. You couldn't get the full effect until the warm water hit the blood. This place is a log cabin. Blood on the walls everywhere. Ba-boom, he's all over the walls, all over everything. Once the warm water and disinfectant hit it ... whew. I had rubber gloves, I had to put on a mask, because even I couldn't take this anymore. Also chunks of bone on the wall, stuck in with the blood. Put the gun in his mouth. Ba-boom. Tendency to get bone and teeth out there too. Seeing it. There it all was. I remember looking at Sissie. I looked at her and she was shaking her head. ‘Why the fuck are we doing this for any amount of money?’ We finished the job as best we could. A hundred dollars an hour. Which I still don't think was enough.”

“What would have been the right price?” I heard Coleman asking Faunia.

“A thousand. Burn the fucking place down. There was no right price. Sissie went outside. She couldn't handle it anymore. But me, two little kids dead, maniac Lester following me everywhere, on my case day and night, who cares? I started snooping. Because I can be that way. I wanted to know why the hell this guy had done it. It's always fascinated me. Why people kill themselves. Why there are mass murderers. Death in general. Just fascinating. Looked at the pictures. Looked if there was any happiness there. Looked at the whole place. Until I got to the medicine cabinet. The drugs. The bottles. No happiness there. His own little pharmacy. I figure psychiatric drugs. Stuff that should have been taken and hadn't. It was clear that he was trying to get help, but he couldn't do it. He couldn't take the medication.”

“How do you know this?” Coleman asked.

“I'm assuming. I don't know. This is my own story. This is my story.”

“Maybe he took the stuff and he killed himself anyway.”

“Could be,” she said. “The blood. Blood sticks. You could not possibly get the blood off the floor. Towel after towel after towel. Still had that color. Eventually it turned more and more a salmon color, but you still couldn't get it out. Like something still alive. Heavy-duty disinfectant — didn't help. Metallic. Sweet. Sickening. I don't gag. Put my mind above it. But I came close.”

“How long did it take?” he asked her.

“We were there for about five hours. I was playing amateur detective. He was in his mid-thirties. I don't know what he did. Salesman or something. He was a woodsy-type personality. Mountain type. Big beard. Bushy hair. She was petite. Sweet face. Light skin. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Very mousy. Intimidated. This is only what I'm getting from the pictures. He was the big strong mountain type and she's this little mousy person. I don't know. But I want to know. I was an emancipated minor. Dropped out of school. I could not go to school. Aside from everything else, it was boring. All this real stuff was happening in people's houses. Sure as shit happening in my house. How could I go to school and learn what the capital of Nebraska was? I wanted to know. I wanted to get out and look around. That's why I went to Florida, and that's how I wound up all over, and that's why I snooped about that house. Just to look around. I wanted to know the worst. What is the worst? You know? She was there at the time he did it. By the time we got there, she was under psychiatric care.”

“Is that the worst thing you've ever had to do? The worst work you've ever had to do?”

“Grotesque. Yes. I've seen a lot of stuff. But that thing — it wasn't that it was only grotesque. On the other hand, it was fascinating. I wanted to know why.”

She wanted to know what is the worst. Not the best, the worst. By which she meant the truth. What is the truth? So he told it to her. First woman since Ellie to find out. First anyone since Ellie. Because he loved her at that moment, imagining her scrubbing the blood. It was the closest he ever felt to her. Could it be? It was the closest Coleman ever felt to anyone! He loved her. Because that is when you love somebody — when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game. He had no reservations about her. None. It was beyond thinking or calculating. It was instinctive. A few hours later it might turn out to be a very bad idea, but at that moment, no. He trusts her — that's what it is. He trusts her: she scrubbed the blood off the floor. She's not religious, she's not sanctimonious, she is not deformed by the fairy tale of purity, whatever other perversions may have disfigured her. She's not interested in judging — she's seen too much for all that shit. She's not going to run away like Steena, whatever I say. “What would you think,” he asked her, “if I told you I wasn't a white man?”

At first she just looked at him, if stupefied, stupefied for a split second and no more. Then she started laughing, burst into the laughter that was her trademark. “What would I think? I would think you were telling me something that I figured out a long time ago.”

“That isn't so.”

“Oh, isn't it? I know what you are. I lived down south. I met 'em all. Sure, I know. Why else could I possibly like you so much? Because you're a college professor? I'd go out of my mind if that was you.”

“I don't believe you, Faunia.”

“Suit yourself,” she said. “You done with your inquiry?”

“What inquiry?”

“About the worst job I ever had.”

“Sure,” he said. And then waited for her inquiry about his not being white. But it never came. She didn't really seem to care. And she didn't run away. When he told her the whole story, she listened all right, but not because she found it incredible or unbelievable or even strange — it certainly wasn't reprehensible. No. It sounded just like life to her.

In February, I got a call from Ernestine, maybe because it was Black History Month and she remembered having to identify for me Matthew Henson and Dr. Charles Drew. Maybe she was thinking that it was time for her to take up again my education in race, touching particularly on everything that Coleman had cut himself off from, a full-to-the-brimming ready-made East Orange world, four square miles rich in the most clinging creaturely detail, the solid, lyrical bedrock of a successful boyhood, all the safeguards, the allegiances, the battles, the legitimacy simply taken for granted, nothing theoretical about it, nothing specious or illusory about it — all the blissful stuff of a happy beginning throbbing with excitement and common sense that her brother Coleman had blotted out.

To my surprise, after telling me that Walter Silk and his wife would be up from Asbury Park on Sunday, she said that, if I didn't mind driving to Jersey, I was welcome to come for Sunday dinner. “You wanted to meet Walt. And I thought you might like to see the house. There are photograph albums. There's Coleman's room, where Coleman and Walter slept. The twin beds are still there. It was my boy's room after them, but the same maple frames are still right there.”

I was being invited to see the Family Silk plenty that Coleman jettisoned, as though it were his bondage, in order to live within a sphere commensurate with his sense of his scale — in order to become somebody other, somebody who suited him, and make his destiny by being subjugated by something else. Jettisoned it all, the whole ramified Negro thing, thinking that he could not displace it by any other means. So much yearning, so much plotting and passion and subtlety and dissembling, all of it feeding the hunger to leave the house and be transformed.

To become a new being. To bifurcate. The drama that underlies America's story, the high drama that is upping and leaving — and the energy and cruelty that rapturous drive demands.

“I'd like to come,” I said.

“I can't guarantee anything,” she said. “But you're a grown man. You can look after yourself.”

I laughed. “What are you telling me?”

“Walter may be getting up on eighty, but he is still a large and roaring furnace. What he says you're not going to like.”

“About whites?”

“About Coleman. About the calculating liar. About the heartless son. About the traitor to his race.”

“You told him he was dead.”

“I decided to. Yes, I told Walter. We're a family. I told him everything.”

A few days later, a photograph arrived in the mail with a note from Ernestine: “I came upon this and thought of our visit. Please keep it, if you like, as a memento of your friend Coleman Silk.” It was a faded black-and-white photograph measuring about four by five inches, a blown-up snapshot, more than likely taken originally in somebody's backyard with a Brownie box camera, of Coleman as the fighting machine that his opponent will find facing him when the bell sounds. He couldn't have been more than fifteen, though with those small carved features that in the man had been so engagingly boyish looking mannishly adult in the boy. He sports, like a pro, the whammy glare, the unwavering gaze of the prowling carnivore, everything eradicated but the appetite for victory and the finesse to destroy. That look is level, issuing straight out of him like a command, even while the sharp little chin is steeply tucked into the skinny shoulder. His gloves are at the ready in the classic position — out in front as though loaded not merely with fists but with all the momentum of his one and a half decades — and each is larger in circumference than his face. One gets the subliminal sense of a kid with three heads. I am a boxer, the menacing pose cockily announces, I don't knock 'em out—I cut 'em up. I outclass 'em till they stop the fight. Unmistakably the brother she had christened Mr. Determined; indeed, “Mr. Determined,” in what must have been Ernestine's girlhood hand, was inscribed in faint blue fountain-pen ink across the back of the picture.

She's something too, I thought, and found a clear plastic frame for the boy boxer and set him on my writing desk. The audacity of that family did not begin and end with Coleman. It's a bold gift, I thought, from a deceptively bold woman. I wondered what she had in mind by inviting me to the house. I wondered what I might have in mind by accepting the invitation. Strange to think that Coleman's sister and I had been taken so by each other's company — though strange only if you remembered that everything about Coleman was ten, twenty, a hundred thousand times stranger.

Ernestines invitation, Coleman's photograph — this was how I came to set out for East Orange on the first February Sunday after the Senate had voted not to remove Bill Clinton from office, and how I came to be on a remote mountain road that ordinarily I never take on my local back-and-forth driving but that serves as a shortcut from my house to Route 7. And that was how I came to notice, parked at the edge of a wide field I would otherwise have shot right by, the dilapidated gray pickup truck with the POW/MIA bumper sticker that, I was sure, had to be Les Farley's. I saw that pickup, somehow knew it was his, and unable just to keep on going, incapable of recording its presence and continuing on, I braked to a halt. I backed up until my car was in front of his, and, at the side of the road, I parked.

I suppose I was never altogether convinced that I was doing what I was doing — otherwise how could I have done it?—but it was by then nearly three months during which time Coleman Silk's life had become closer to me than my own, and so it was unthinkable that I should be anywhere other than there in the cold, atop that mountain, standing with my gloved hand on the hood of the very vehicle that had come barreling down the wrong side of the road and sent Coleman swerving through the guardrail and, with Faunia beside him, into the river on the evening before his seventy-second birthday. If this was the murder weapon, the murderer couldn't be far away.

When I realized where I was headed — and thought again of how surprising it was to hear from Ernestine, to be asked to meet Walter, to be thinking all day and often into the night about someone I'd known for less than a year and never as the closest of friends — the course of events seemed logical enough. This is what happens when you write books. There's not just something that drives you to find out everything — something begins putting everything in your path. There is suddenly no such thing as a back road that doesn't lead headlong into your obsession.

And so you do what I was doing. Coleman, Coleman, Coleman, you who are now no one now run my existence. Of course you could not write the book. You'd written the book — the book was your life. Writing personally is exposing and concealing at the same time, but with you it could only be concealment and so it would never work. Your book was your life — and your art? Once you set the thing in motion, your art was being a white man. Being, in your brother's words, “more white than the whites.” That was your singular act of invention: every day you woke up to be what you had made yourself.

There was hardly any snow left on the ground, only patches of it cobwebbing the stubble of the open field, no trail to follow, so I started bang across to the other side, where there was a thin wall of trees, and through the trees I could see another field, so I kept going until I reached the second field, and I crossed that, and through another, a deeper wall of trees, thick with high evergreens, and there at the other side was the shining eye of a frozen lake, oval and pointed at either end, with snow-freckled brownish hills rising all around it and the mountains, caressable-looking, curving away in the distance. Having walked some five hundred yards from the road, I'd intruded upon — no, trespassed upon; it was almost an unlawful sense that I had ... I'd trespassed upon a setting as pristine, I would think, as unviolated, as serenely unspoiled, as envelops any inland body of water in New England. It gave you an idea, as such places do — as they're cherished for doing — of what the world was like before the advent of man. The power of nature is sometimes very calming, and this was a calming place, calling a halt to your trivial thinking without, at the same time, overawing you with reminders of the nothingness of a life span and the vastness of extinction. It was all on a scale safely this side of the sublime. A man could absorb the beauty into his being without feeling belittled or permeated by fear.

Almost midway out on the ice there was a solitary figure in brown coveralls and a black cap seated on a low yellow bucket, bending over an ice hole with an abbreviated fishing rod in his gloved hands. I didn't step onto the ice until I saw that he'd looked up and spotted me. I didn't want to come upon him unawares, or in any way look as though I intended to, not if the fisherman really was Les Farley. If this was Les Farley, he wasn't someone you wanted to take by surprise.

Of course I thought about turning back. I thought about heading back to the road, about getting into my car, about proceeding on to Route 7 South and down through Connecticut to 684 and from there onto the Garden State Parkway. I thought about getting a look at Coleman's bedroom. I thought about getting a look at Coleman's brother, who, for what Coleman did, could not stop hating him even after his death. I thought about that and nothing else all the way across the ice to get my look at Coleman's killer. Right up to the point where I said, “Hi. How's it goin'?” I thought: Steal up on him or don't steal up on him, it makes no difference. You're the enemy either way. On this empty, ice-whitened stage, the only enemy.

“The fish biting?” I said.

“Oh, not too good, not too bad.” He did no more than glance my way before focusing his attention back on the ice hole, one of twelve or fifteen identical holes cut into rock-hard ice and spread randomly across some forty or so square feet of lake. Most likely the holes had been drilled by the device that was lying just a few steps away from his yellow bucket, which was itself really a seven-gallon detergent pail. The drilling device consisted of a metal shaft about four feet long ending in a wide, cylindrical length of corkscrew blade, a strong, serious boring tool whose imposing bit — rotated by turning the cranked handle at the top — glittered like new in the sunlight. An auger.

“It serves its purpose,” he mumbled. “Passes the time.”

It was as though I weren't the first but more like the fiftieth person who'd happened out on the ice midway across a lake five hundred yards from a backcountry road in the rural highlands to ask about the fishing. As he wore a black wool watch cap pulled low on his forehead and down over his ears, and as he sported a dark, graying chin beard and a thickish mustache, there was only a narrow band of face on display. If it was remarkable in any way, that was because of its broadness — on the horizontal axis, an open oblong plain of a face. His dark eyebrows were long and thick, his eyes were blue and noticeably widely spaced, while centered above the mustache was the unsprouted, bridgeless nose of a kid. In just this band of himself Farley exposed between the whiskered muzzle and the woolen cap, all kinds of principles were at work, geometric and psychological both, and none seemed congruent with the others.

“Beautiful spot,” I said.

“Why I'm here.”

“Peaceful.”

“Close to God,” he said.

“Yes? You feel that?”

Now he shed the outer edge, the coating of his inwardness, shed something of the mood in which I'd caught him, and looked as if he were ready to link up with me as more than just a meaningless distraction. His posture didn't change — still very much fishing rather than gabbing — but at least a little of the antisocial aura was dissipated by a richer, more ruminative voice than I would have expected. Thoughtful, you might even call it, though in a drastically impersonal way.

“It's way up on top of a mountain,” he said. “There's no houses anywhere. No dwellings. There's no cottages on the lake.” After each declaration, a brooding pause — declarative observation, supercharged silence. It was anybody's guess, at the end of a sentence, whether or not he was finished with you. “Don't have a lot of activity out here. Don't have a lot of noise. Thirty acres of lake about. None of those guys with their power augers. None of their noise and the stink of their gasoline. Seven hundred acres of just open good land and woods. It's just a beautiful area. Just peace and quiet. And clean. It's a clean place. Away from all the hustle and bustle and craziness that goes on.” Finally the upward glance to take me in. To assess me. A quick look that was ninety percent opaque and unreadable and ten percent alarmingly transparent. I couldn't see where there was any humor in this man.

“As long as I can keep it secret,” he said, “it'll stay the way it is.”

“True enough,” I said.

“They live in cities. They live in the hustle and bustle of the work routine. The craziness goin' to work. The craziness at work. The craziness comin' home from work. The traffic. The congestion. They're caught up in that. I'm out of it.”

I hadn't to ask who “they” were. I might live far from any city, I might not own a power auger, but I was they, we all were they, everyone but the man hunkered down on this lake jiggling the shortish fishing rod in his hand and talking into a hole in the ice, by choice communicating less with me — as they — than to the frigid water beneath us.

“Maybe a hiker'll come through here, or a cross-country skier, or someone like you. Spots my vehicle, somehow they spot me out here, so they'll come my way, and seems like when you're out on the ice — people like you who don't fish—” and here he looked up to take in again, to divine, gnostically, my unpardonable theyness. “I'm guessin' you don't fish.”

“I don't. No. Saw your truck. Just driving around on a beautiful day.”

“Well, they're like you,” he told me, as though there'd been no uncertainty about me from the time I'd appeared on the shore. “They'll always come over if they see a fisherman, and they're curious, and they'll ask what he caught, you know. So what I'll do...” But here the mind appeared to come to a halt, stopped by his thinking, What am I doing? What the hell am I going on about?When he started up again, my heart all at once started racing with fear. Now that his fishing has been ruined, I thought, he's decided to have some fun with me. He's into his act now. He's out of the fishing and into being Les and all the many things that is and is not.

“So what I'll do,” he resumed, “if I have fish layin' on the ice, I'll do what I did when I saw you. I'll pick all the fish up right away that I caught and I'll put 'em in a plastic bag and put 'em in my bucket, the bucket I'm sittin' on. So now the fish are concealed. And when the people come over and say, ‘How are they bitin’,' I say, ‘Nothin’. I don't think there's anything in here.' I caught maybe thirty fish already. Excellent day. But I'll tell 'em, 'Naw, I'm gettin' ready to leave. I been here two hours and I haven't gotten a bite yet.' Every time they'll just turn around and leave. They'll go somewhere else. And they'll spread the word that that pond up there is no good. That's how secret it is. Maybe I end up tending to be a little dishonest. But this place is like the best-kept secret in the whole world.”

“And now I know,” I said. I saw that there was no possible way to get him to laugh along conspiratorially at his dissembling with interlopers like myself, no way I was going to get him to ease up by smiling at what he'd said, and so I didn't try. I realized that though nothing may have passed between us of a truly personal nature, by his decision, if not mine, we two were further along than smiling could help. I was in a conversation that, out in this remote, secluded, frozen place, seemed suddenly to be of the greatest importance. “I also know you're sitting on a slew of fish,” I said. “In that bucket. How many today?”

“Well, you look like a man who can keep a secret. About thirty, thirty-five fish. Yeah, you look like an upright man. I think I recognize you anyway. Aren't you the author?”

“That I am.”

“Sure. I know where you live. Across from the swamp where the heron is. Dumouchel's place. Dumouchel's cabin there.”

“Dumouchel's who I bought it from. So tell me, since I'm a man who can keep a secret, why are you sitting right here and not over there? This whole big frozen lake. How'd you choose this one spot to fish?” Even if he really wasn't doing everything he could to keep me there, I seemed on my own to be doing everything I could not to leave.

“Well, you never know,” he told me. “You start out where you got 'em the last time. If you caught fish the last time, you always start out at that spot.”

“So that solves that. I always wondered.” Go now, I thought. That's all the conversation necessary. More than is necessary. But the thought of who he was drew me on. The fact of him drew me on. This was not speculation. This was not meditation. This was not that way of thinking that is fiction writing. This was the thing itself. The laws of caution that, outside my work, had ruled my life so strictly for the last five years were suddenly suspended. I couldn't turn back while crossing the ice and now I couldn't turn and flee. It had nothing to do with courage. It had nothing to do with reason or logic. Here he is. That's all it had to do with. That and my fear. In his heavy brown coveralls and his black watch cap and his thick-soled black rubber boots, with his two big hands in a hunter's (or a soldier's) camouflage-colored fingertipless gloves, here is the man who murdered Coleman and Faunia. I'm sure of it. They didn't drive off the road and into the river. Here is the killer. He is the one. How can I go?

“Fish always there?” I asked him. “When you return to your spot from the time before?”

“No, sir. The fish move in schools. Underneath the ice. One day they'll be at the north end of the pond, the next day they might be at the south end of the pond. Maybe sometimes two times in a row they'll be at that same spot. They'll still be there. What they tend to do, the fish tend to school up and they don't move very much, because the water's so cold. They're able to adjust to water temperature, and the water being so cold, they don't move so much and they don't require as much food. But if you get in an area where the fish are schooled up, you will catch a lot of fish. But some days you can go out in the same pond — you can never cover the entire thing — so you might try about five or six different places, drill holes, and never get a hit. Never catch a fish. You just didn't locate the school. And so you just sit here.”

“Close to God,” I said.

“You got it.”

His fluency — because it was the last thing I was expecting — fascinated me, as did the thoroughness with which he was willing to explain the life in a pond when the water's cold. How did he know I was “the author”? Did he also know I was Coleman's friend? Did he also know I was at Faunia's funeral? I supposed there were now as many questions in his mind about me — and my mission here — as there were in mine about him. This great bright arched space, this cold aboveground vault of a mountaintop cradling at its peak a largish oval of fresh water frozen hard as rock, the ancient activity that is the life of a lake, that is the formation of ice, that is the metabolism of fish, all the soundless, ageless forces unyieldingly working away — it is as though we have encountered each other at the top of the world, two hidden brains mistrustfully ticking, mutual hatred and paranoia the only introspection there is anywhere.

“And so what do you think about,” I asked, “if you don't get a fish? What do you think about when they're not biting?”

“Tell you what I was just thinking about. I was thinking a lot of things. I was thinking about Slick Willie. I was thinking about our president — his freakin' luck. I was thinkin' about this guy who gets off everything, and I was thinkin' about the guys who didn't get off nothin'. Who didn't dodge the draff and didn't get off. It doesn't seem right.”

“Vietnam,” I said.

“Yeah. We'd go up in the freakin' helicopters — in my second tour I was a door gunner — and what I was thinking about was this one time we went into North Vietnam to pick up these two pilots. I was sitting out here thinking about that time. Slick Willie. That son of a bitch. Thinkin' about that scumbag son of a bitch gettin' his dick sucked in the Oval Office on the taxpayer's money, and then thinkin' about these two pilots, they were on an air strike over Hanoi harbor, these guys were hit real bad, and we picked up the signal on the radio. We weren't even a rescue helicopter, but we were in the vicinity, and they were giving a mayday that they were goin' to bail out, because they were at the altitude point where if they didn't bail out they were goin' to crash. We weren't even a rescue helicopter — we were a gunship — we were just taking a chance that we could save a couple of lives. We didn't even get permission to get up there, we just went. You act on instinct like that. We just all agreed, two door gunners, the pilot, the copilot, though the chances weren't that good because we had no cover. But we went in anyway — to try to pick 'em up.”

He's telling me a war story, I thought. He knows he's doing it. There's a point here that he's going to make. Something he wants me to carry away with me, to the shore, to my car, to the house whose location he knows and wishes me to understand that he knows. To carry away as “the author”? Or as somebody else — somebody who knows a secret of his that is even bigger than the secret of this pond. He wants me to know that not many people have seen what he's seen, been where he's been, done what he's done and, if required to, can do again. He's murdered in Vietnam and he's brought the murderer back with him to the Berkshires, back with him from the country of war, the country of horror, to this completely uncomprehending other place.

The auger out on the ice. The candor of the auger. There could be no more solid embodiment of our hatred than the merciless steel look of that auger out in the middle of nowhere.

“We figure, okay, we're gonna die, we're gonna die. So we went up there and we homed in on their signals, we saw one parachute, and we went down in the clearing, and we picked that guy up with no trouble at all. He jumped right in, we dragged him right in and took off, no opposition whatsoever. So we said to him, ‘You have any idea?’ and he said, ‘Well, he drifted off that way.’ So we went up in the air, but by then they knew we were there. We went over a little farther looking for the other parachute, and all freakin' hell broke loose. I'm telling you, it was unbelievable. We never picked up the other guy. The helicopter was gettin' hit like you wouldn't believe it. Ting ping ping boom. Machine guns. Ground fire. We just had to turn around and get the hell out of there as fast as we could. And I remember the guy we picked up started to cry. This is what I'm getting at. He was a navy pilot. They were off the Forrestal. And he knew the other guy was either killed or captured, and he started to bawl. It was horrible for him. His buddy. But we couldn't go back. We couldn't risk the chopper and five guys. We were lucky we got one. So we got back to our base and we got out and we looked at the chopper and there were a hundred and fifty-one bullet holes in it. Never hit a hydraulic line, a fuel line, but the rotors were all pinged up, a lot of bullets hit the rotors. Bent them a little bit. If they hit the tail rotor, you go right down, but they didn't. You know they shot down five thousand helicopters during that war? Twenty-eight hundred jet fighters we lost. They lost two hundred fifty B-52S in high-altitude bombing over North Vietnam. But the government'll never tell you that. Not that. They tell you what they want to tell you. Never Slick Willie who gets caught. It's the guy who served who gets caught. Over and over. Nope, doesn't seem right. You know what I was thinking? I was thinking that if I had a son he'd be out here with me now. Ice fishin'. That's what I was thinking when you walked out here. I looked up and I saw someone comin', and I'm sort of daydreamin', and I thought, That could be my son. Not you, not a man like you, but my son.”

“Don't you have a son?”

“No.”

“Never married?” I asked.

This time he didn't answer me right off. He looked at me, homed in on me as though I had a signal that was going off like the two pilots bailing out, but he didn't answer me. Because he knows, I thought. He knows I was at Faunia's funeral. Somebody told him that “the author” was there. What kind of author does he think I am? An author who writes books about crimes like his? An author who writes books about murderers and murder?

“Doomed,” he said finally, staring back into the hole and jiggling his rod, jerking it with a flick of his wrist a dozen or so times. “Marriage was doomed. Came back from Vietnam with too much anger and resentment. Had PTSD. I had what they call post-traumatic stress disorder. That's what they told me. When I come back, I didn't want to know anybody. I come back, I couldn't relate to anything that was going on around here, as far as civilized living. It's like I was there so long, it was totally insane. Wearing clean clothes, and people saying hello, and people smiling, and people going to parties, and people driving cars — I couldn't relate to it anymore. I didn't know how to talk to anybody, I didn't know how to say hello to anybody. I withdrew for a long time. I used to get in my car, drive around, go in the woods, walk in the woods — it was the weirdest thing. I withdrew from myself. I had no idea what I was going through. My buddies would call me, I wouldn't call back. They were afraid I was going to die in a car accident, they were afraid I was—”

I interrupted. “Why were they afraid you were going to die in a car accident?”

“I was drinking. I was driving around and drinking.”

“Did you ever get into a car accident?”

He smiled. Didn't take a pause and stare me down. Didn't give me an especially threatening look. Didn't jump up and go for my throat. Just smiled a little, more good nature in the smile than I could have believed he had in him to show. In a deliberately light-hearted way, he shrugged and said, “Got me. I didn't know what I was going through, you know? Accident? In an accident? I wouldn't know if I did. I suppose I didn't. You're going through what they call post-traumatic stress disorder. Stuff keeps coming back into your subconscious mind that you're back in Vietnam, that you're back in the army again. I'm not an educated guy. I didn't even know that. People were so pissed at me for this and that, and they didn't even know what I was going through and J didn't even know — you know? I don't have educated friends who know these things. I got assholes for friends. Oh, man, I mean real guaranteed hundred percent assholes or double your money back.” Again the shrug. Comical? Intended to be comical? No, more a happy-go-lucky strain of sinisterness. “So what can I do?” he asked helplessly.

Conning me. Playing with me. Because he knows I know. Here we are alone up where we are, and I know, and he knows I know. And the auger knows. All ye know and all ye need to know, all inscribed in the spiral of its curving steel blade.

“How'd you find out you had PTSD?”

“A colored girl at the VA. Excuse me. An African American. A very intelligent African American. She's got a master's degree. You got a master's degree?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, she's got one, and that's how I found out what I had. Otherwise I still wouldn't know. That's how I started learning about myself, what I was going through. They told me. And not just me. Don't think it was just me. Thousands and thousands of guys were going through what I was going through. Thousands and thousands of guys waking up in the middle of the night back in Vietnam. Thousands and thousands of guys people are calling up and they don't call them back. Thousands and thousands of guys having these real bad dreams. And so I told that to this African American and she understood what it was. Because she had that master's degree, she told me how it was going through my subconscious mind, and that it was the same with thousands and thousands of other guys. The subconscious mind. You can't control it. It's like the government. It is the government. It's the government all over again. It gets you to do what you don't want to do. Thousands and thousands of guys getting married and it's doomed, because they have this anger and this resentment about Vietnam in their subconscious mind. She explained all this to me. They just popped me from Vietnam onto a C-41 air force jet to the Philippines, then on a World Airways jet to Travis Air Force Base, then they gave me two hundred dollars to go home. So it took me, like, from the time I left Vietnam to go home, it took about three days. You're back in civilization. And you're doomed. And your wife, even if it's ten years later, she's doomed. She's doomed, and what the hell did she do? Nothin'.”

“Still have the PTSD?”

“Well, I still tend to isolate, don't I? What do you think I'm doin' out here?”

“But no more drinking and driving,” I heard myself saying. “No more accidents.”

“There were never accidents. Don't you listen? I already told you that. Not that I know of.”

“And the marriage was doomed.”

“Oh yeah. My fault. Hundred percent. She was a lovely woman. Entirely blameless. All me. Always all me. She deserved a helluva lot better than me.”

“What happened to her?” I asked.

He shook his head. A sad shrug, a sigh — complete bullshit, deliberately transparent bullshit. “No idea. Ran away, I scared her so. Scared the woman shitless. My heart goes out to her, wherever she may be. Completely blameless person.”

“No kids.”

“Nope. No kids. You?” he asked me.

“No.”

“Married?”

“No more,” I said.

“So, you and me in the same boat. Free as the wind. What kind of books do you write? Whodunits?”

“I wouldn't say that.”

“True stories?”

“Sometimes.”

“What? Romance?” he asked, smiling. “Not pornography, I hope.” He pretended that that was an unwanted idea it vexed him even to entertain. “I sure hope our local author is not up there in Mike Dumouchel's place writing and publishing pornography.”

“I write about people like you,” I said.

“Is that right?”

“Yes. People like you. Their problems.”

“What's the name of one of your books?”

“ The Human Stain.”

“Yeah? Can I get it?”

“It's not out yet. It's not finished yet.”

“I'll buy it.”

“I'll send you one. What's your name?”

“Les Farley. Yeah, send it. When you finish it, send it care of the town garage. Town Garage. Route 6. Les Farley.” Needling me again, sort of needling everyone — himself, his friends, “our local author”—he said, even as he began laughing at the idea, “Me and the guys'll read it.” He didn't so much laugh aloud as nibble at the bait of an out-loud laugh, work up to and around the laugh without quite sinking his teeth in. Close to the hook of dangerous merriment, but not close enough to swallow it.

“I hope you will,” I said.

I couldn't just turn and go then. Not on that note, not with him shedding ever so slightly a bit more of the emotional incognito, not with the possibility raised of peering a little further into his mind. “What were you like before you went into the service?” I asked him.

“Is this for your book?”

“Yes. Yes.” I laughed out loud. Without even intending to, with a ridiculous, robust burst of defiance, I said, foolishly, “It's all for my book.”

And he now laughed with more abandon too. On this loony bin of a lake.

“Were you a gregarious guy, Les?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I was.”

“With people?”

“Yeah.”

“Like to have a good time with them?”

“Yeah. Tons of friends. Fast cars. You know, all that stuff. I worked all the time. But when I wasn't working, yeah.”

“And all you Vietnam veterans ice fish?”

“I don't know.” The nibbling laughter once again. I thought, It's easier for him to kill somebody than to cut loose with real amusement.

“I started ice fishing,” he told me, “not that long ago. After my wife ran away. I rented a little shack, back in the woods, on Dragonfly. Back in the woods, right on the water, Dragonfly Pond, and I always summer fished, all my life, but I was never too interested in ice fishing. I always figure it's too cold out there, you know? So the first winter I lived on the pond, and I wasn't myself that winter — goddamn PTSD — I was watching this ice fisherman walk out there and go out fishing. So I watched this a couple of times, so one day I put on my clothes and took a walk out there and this guy was catching a lot of fish, yellow perch and trout and everything. So I figure, this fishin' is just as good as the summertime, if not better. All you have to do is get the right amount of clothing on and get the right equipment. So I did. I went down and bought an auger, a nice auger”—he points—“jiggin rod, lures. Hundreds of different kinds of lures you can get. Hundreds of different manufacturers and makes. All various sizes. You drill a hole through the ice, and you drop your favorite lure down there with the bait on it — it's just a hand movement, you just make that jig move up and down, you know. Because it's dark down underneath the ice. Oh, it is dark all right,” he told me, and, for the first time in the conversation, he looked at me with not too much but too little opacity in his face, too little deceit, too little duplicity. In his voice there was a chilling resonance when he said, “It's real dark.” A chilling and astonishing resonance that made everything about Coleman's accident clear. “So any kind of a flash down there,” he added, “the fish are attracted to it. I guess they're adaptable to that dark environment.”

No, he's not stupid. He's a brute and he's a killer but not so dumb as I thought. It isn't a brain that is missing. Beneath whatever the disguise, it rarely is.

“Because they have to eat,” he's explaining to me, scientifically. “They find food down there. And their bodies are able to adapt to that extracold water and their eyes adapt to the dark. They're sensitive to movement. If they see any kind of flashes or they maybe feel the vibrations of your lure moving, they're attracted to it. They know that it's something alive and it might be edible. But if you don't jig it, you'll never get a hit. If I had a son, you see, which is what I was thinkin', I'd be teachin' him how to jig it. I'd be teachin' him how to bait the lure. There's different kinds of baits, you see, most of them are fly larvae or bee larvae that they raise for ice fishin'. And we'd go down to the store, me and Les Junior, and we'd buy 'em at the ice fishin' store. And they come in a little cup, you know. If I had Little Les right now, a son of my own, you know, if I wasn't doomed instead for life with this freakin' PTSD, I'd be out here with him teachin' him all this stuff. I'd teach him how to use the auger.” He pointed to the tool, still just out of reach behind him on the ice. “I use a five-inch auger. They come from four inches up to eight inches. I prefer a five-inch hole. It's perfect. I never had a problem yet gettin' a fish through a five-inch hole. Six is a little too big. The reason six is too big, the blades are another inch wider, which doesn't seem like much, but if you look at the five-inch auger — here, let me show you.” He got up and went over and he got the auger. Despite the padded coveralls and the boots that added to his bulk as a shortish, stocky man, he moved deftly across the ice, sweeping up the auger in one hand the way you might sweep the bat up off the field while jogging back to the bench after running out a fly ball. He came up to me and raised the auger's long bright bit right up to my face. “Here.”

Here. Here was the origin. Here was the essence. Here.

“If you look at the five-inch auger compared to the six-inch auger,” he said, “it's a big difference. When you're hand drilling through a foot to eighteen inches of ice, it takes a lot more effort to use a six-inch than a five-inch. With this here I can drill through a foot and a half of ice in about twenty seconds. If the blades are good and sharp. The sharpness is everything. You always gotta keep your blades sharp.”

I nodded. “It's cold out here on the ice.”

“You better believe it.”

“Didn't notice till now. I'm getting cold. My face. It's getting to me. I should be going.” And I took my first step backward and away from the thin slush surrounding him and the hole he was fishing.

“Good enough. And you know your ice fishing now, don't you? Maybe you want to write a book about that instead of a whodunit.”

Shuffling backward a half-step at a time, I'd retreated toward the shore some four or five feet, but he was still holding the auger up in his one hand, the corkscrew blade raised still to the level where my eyes had been before. Completely bested, I'd begun backing away. “And now you know my secret spot. That too. You know everything,” he said. “But you won't tell nobody, will you? It's nice to have a secret spot. You don't tell anybody about 'em. You learn not to say anything.”

“It's safe with me,” I said.

“There's a brook that comes in down off the mountain, it flows over ledges. Did I tell you that?” he said. “I never traced its source. It's a constant flow of water that comes down into the lake here from there. And there's a spillway on the south side of the lake, which is where the water flows out.” He pointed, still with that auger. He was holding it tight in the fingertipless glove of one big hand. “And then there's numerous springs underneath the lake. The water comes up from underneath, so the water constantly turns over. It cleans itself. And fish have to have clean water to survive and get big and healthy. And this place has all of those ingredients. And they're all God-made. Nothing man had to do with it. That's why it's clean and that's why I come here. If man has to do with it, stay away from it. That's my motto. The motto of a guy with a subconscious mind full of PTSD. Away from man, close to God. So don't you forget to keep this my secret place. The only time a secret gets out, Mr. Zuckerman, is when you tell that secret.”

“I hear ya.”

“And, hey, Mr. Zuckerman — the book.”

“What book?”

“Your book. Send the book.”

“You got it,” I said, “it's in the mail,” and started back across the ice. He was behind me, still holding that auger as slowly I started away. It was a long way. If I even made it, I knew that my five years alone in my house here were over. I knew that if and when I finished the book, I was going to have to go elsewhere to live.

I turned from the shore, once I was safely there, to look back and see if he was going to follow me into the woods after all and to do me in before I ever got my chance to enter Coleman Silk's boyhood house and, like Steena Palsson before me, to sit with his East Orange family as the white guest at Sunday dinner. Just facing him, I could feel the terror of the auger — even with him already seated back on his bucket: the icy white of the lake encircling a tiny spot that was a man, the only human marker in all of nature, like the X of an illiterate's signature on a sheet of paper. There it was, if not the whole story, the whole picture. Only rarely, at the end of our century, does life offer up a vision as pure and peaceful as this one: a solitary man on a bucket, fishing through eighteen inches of ice in a lake that's constantly turning over its water atop an arcadian mountain in America.