Philip Roth - The Human Stain

Coleman was calling Lisa because he realized that it was more than a month and maybe even two since he'd spoken to her. Perhaps he was merely surrendering to a transient feeling of loneliness that would have passed when Faunia arrived, but whatever his motive, he could have had no inkling, before the phone call, of what was in store. Surely the last thing he was looking for was yet more opposition, least of all from that child whose voice alone — soft, melodic, girlish still, despite twelve difficult years as a teacher on the Lower East Side — he could always depend on to soothe him, to calm him, sometimes to do even more: to infatuate him with this daughter all over again. He was doing probably what most any aging parent will do when, for any of a hundred reasons, he or she looks to a long-distance phone call for a momentary reminder of the old terms of reference. The unbroken, unequivocal history of tenderness between Coleman and Lisa made of her the least affrontable person still close to him.

Some three years earlier — back before the spooks incident — when Lisa was wondering if she hadn't made an enormous mistake by giving up classroom teaching to become a Reading Recovery teacher, Coleman had gone down to New York and stayed several days to see how bad off she was. Iris was alive then, very much alive, but it wasn't Iris's enormous energy Lisa had wanted — it wasn't to be put into motion the way Iris could put you in motion that she wanted — rather, it was the former dean of faculty with his orderly, determined way of untangling a mess. Iris was sure to tell her to forge ahead, leaving Lisa overwhelmed and feeling trapped; with him there was the possibility that, if Lisa made a compelling case against her own persevering, he would tell her that, if she wished, she could cut her losses and quit — which would, in turn, give her the gumption to go on.

He'd not only spent the first night sitting up late in her living room and listening to her woes, but the next day he'd gone to the school to see what it was that was burning her out. And he saw, all right: in the morning, first thing, four back-to-back half-hour sessions, each with a six- or seven-year-old who was among the lowest-achieving students in the first and second grades, and after that, for the rest of the day, forty-five-minute sessions with groups of eight kids whose reading skills were no better than those of the one-on-one kids but for whom there wasn't yet enough trained staff in the intensive program.

“The regular class sizes are too big,” Lisa told him, “and so the teachers can't reach these kids. I was a classroom teacher. The kids who are struggling — it's three out of thirty. Three or four. It's not too bad. You have the progress of all the other kids helping you along. Instead of stopping and giving the hopeless kids what they need, teachers just sort of shuffle them through, thinking — or pretending — they are moving with the continuum. They're shuffled to the second grade, the third grade, the fourth grade, and then they seriously fail. But here it's only these kids, the ones who can't be reached and don't get reached, and because I'm very emotional about my kids and teaching, it affects my whole being — my whole world. And the school, the leadership — Dad, it's not good. You have a principal who doesn't have a vision of what she wants, and you have a mishmash of people doing what they think is best. Which is not necessarily what is best. When I came here twelve years ago it was great. The principal was really good. She turned the whole school around. But now we've gone through twenty-one teachers in four years. Which is a lot. We've lost a lot of good people. Two years ago I went into Reading Recovery because I just got burnt out in the classroom. Ten years of that day in and day out. I couldn't take any more.”

He let her talk, said little, and, because she was but a few years from forty, suppressed easily enough the impulse to take in his arms this battered-by-reality daughter as he imagined she suppressed the same impulse with the six-year-old kid who couldn't read. Lisa had all of Iris's intensity without Iris's authority, and for someone whose life existed only for others — incurable altruism was Lisa's curse — she was, as a teacher, perpetually hovering at the edge of depletion. There was generally a demanding boyfriend as well from whom she could not withhold kindness, and for whom she turned herself inside out, and for whom, unfailingly, her uncontaminated ethical virginity became a great big bore. Lisa was always morally in over her head, but without either the callousness to disappoint the need of another or the strength to disillusion herself about her strength. This was why he knew she would never quit the Reading Recovery program, and also why such paternal pride as he had in her was not only weighted with fear but at times tinged with an impatience bordering on contempt.

“Thirty kids you have to take care of, the different levels that the kids come in at, the different experiences they've had, and you've got to make it all work,” she was telling him. “Thirty diverse kids from thirty diverse backgrounds learning thirty diverse ways. That's a lot of management. That's a lot of paperwork. That's a lot of everything. But that is still nothing compared to this. Sure, even with this, even in Reading Recovery, I have days when I think, Today I was good, but most days I want to jump out the window. I struggle a lot as to whether this is the right program for me. Because I'm very intense, in case you didn't know. I want to do it the right way, and there is no right way — every kid is different and every kid is hopeless, and I'm supposed to go in there and make it all work. Of course everybody always struggles with the kids who can't learn. What do you do with a kid who can't read? Think of it — a kid who can't read. It's difficult, Daddy. Your ego gets a little caught up in it, you know.”

Lisa, who contains within her so much concern, whose conscientiousness knows no ambivalence, who wishes to exist only to assist. Lisa the Undisillusionable, Lisa the Unspeakably Idealistic. Phone Lisa, he told himself, little imagining that he could ever elicit from this foolishly saintiy child of his the tone of steely displeasure with which she received his call.

“You don't sound like yourself.”

“I'm fine,” she told him.

“What's wrong, Lisa?”

“Nothing.”

“How's summer school? How's teaching?”

“Fine.”

“And Josh?” The latest boyfriend.

Fine.

“How are your kids? What happened to the little one who couldn't recognize the letter n ? Did he ever get to level ten? The kid with all the n 's in his name — Hernando.”

“Everything's fine.”

He then asked lightly, “Would you care to know how I am?”

“I know how you are.”

“Do you?”

No answer.

“What's eating you, sweetheart?”

“Nothing.” A “nothing,” the second one, that meant all too clearly, Don't you sweetheart me.

Something incomprehensible was happening. Who had told her? What had they told her? As a high school kid and then in college after the war he had pursued the most demanding curriculum; as dean at Athena he had thrived on the difficulties of a taxing job; as the accused in the spooks incident he had never once weakened in fighting the false accusation against him; even his resignation from the college had been an act not of capitulation but of outraged protest, a deliberate manifestation of his unwavering contempt. But in all his years of holding his own against whatever the task or the setback or the shock, he had never — not even after Iris's death — felt as stripped of all defenses as when Lisa, the embodiment of an almost mockable kindness, gathered up into that one word “nothing” all the harshness of feeling for which she had never before, in the whole of her life, found a deserving object.