Philip Roth - The Human Stain

She has a key to Barton Hall and she goes in. She gets to her office. She's done that much. She's hanging on. She's thinking now. Okay. But how does she get into their offices to get at their computers? It's what she should have done last night instead of running away in a panic. To regain her self-possession, to rescue her name, to forestall the disaster of ruining her career, she must continue to think. Thinking has been her whole life. What else has she been trained to do from the time she started school? She leaves her office and walks down the corridor. Her aim is clear now, her thinking decisive. She will just go in and delete it. It is her right to delete it — she sent it. And she did not even do that. It was not intentional. She's not responsible. It just went. But when she tries the handle of each of the doors, they are locked. Next she tries working her keys into the locks, first her key to the building, then the key to her office, but neither works. Of course they don't work. They wouldn't have worked last night and they don't work now. As for thinking, were she able to think like Einstein, thinking will not open these doors.

Back in her own office, she unlocks her files. Looking for what? Her c.v. Why look for her c.v.? It is the end of her c.v. It is the end of our daughter in America. And because it is the end, she pulls all the hanging files out of the drawer and hurls them on the floor. Empties the entire drawer. “We have no daughter in America. We have no daughter. We have only sons.” Now she does not try to think that she should think. Instead, she begins throwing things. Whatever is piled on her desk, whatever is decorating her walls — what difference does it make what breaks? She tried and she failed. It is the end of the impeccable résumé and of the veneration of the résumé. “Our daughter in America failed.”

She is sobbing when she picks up the phone to call Arthur. He will jump out of bed and drive straight from Boston. In less than three hours he'll be in Athena. By nine o'clock Arthur will be here! But the number she dials is the emergency number on the decal pasted to the phone. And she had no more intention of dialing that number than of sending the two letters. All she had was the very human wish to be saved.

She cannot speak.

“Hello?” says the man at the other end. “Hello? Who is this?”

She barely gets it out. The most irreducible two words in any language. One's name. Irreducible and irreplaceable. All that is her. Was her. And now the two most ridiculous words in the world.

“Who? Professor who? I can't understand you, Professor.”

“Security?”

“Speak louder, Professor. Yes, yes, this is Campus Security.”

“Come here,” she says pleadingly, and once again she is in tears. “Right away. Something terrible has happened.”

“Professor? Where are you? Professor, what's happened?”

“Barton.” She says it again so he can understand. “Barton 121,” she tells him. “Professor Roux.”

“What is it, Professor?”

“Something terrible.”

“Are you all right? What's wrong? What is it? Is somebody there?”

“ I'm here.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Someone broke in.”

“Broke in where?”

“My office.”

“When? Professor, when?”

“I don't know. In the night. I don't know.”

“You okay? Professor? Professor Roux? Are you there? Barton Hall? You sure?”

The hesitation. Trying to think. Am I sure? Am I? “Absolutely,” she says, sobbing uncontrollably now. “Hurry, please! Get here immediately, please! Someone broke into my office! It's a shambles! It's awful! It's horrible! My things! Someone broke into my computer! Hurry!”

“A break-in? Do you know who it was? Do you know who broke in? Was it a student?”

“Dean Silk broke in,” she said. “Hurry!”

“Professor — Professor, are you there? Professor Roux, Dean Silk is dead.”

“I've heard,” she said, “I know, it's awful,” and then she screamed, screamed at the horror of all that had happened, screamed at the thought of the very last thing he had ever done, and to her, to her— and after that, Delphine's day was a circus.

The astonishing news of Dean Silk's death in a car crash with an Athena college janitor had barely reached the last of the college's classrooms when word began to spread of the pillaging of Delphine Roux's office and the e-mail hoax Dean Silk had attempted to perpetrate only hours before the fatal crash. People were having trouble enough believing all of this, when another story, one about the circumstances of the crash, spread from town up to the college, further confounding just about everybody. For all its atrocious details, the story was said to have originated with a reliable source: the brother of the state trooper who had found the bodies. According to his story, the reason the dean lost control of his car was because, from the passenger seat beside him, the Athena woman janitor was satisfying him while he drove. This the police were able to infer from the disposition of his clothing and the position of her body and its location in the vehicle when the wreckage was discovered and pulled from the river.

Most of the faculty, particularly older professors who had known Coleman Silk personally for many years, refused at first to believe this story, and were outraged by the gullibility with which it was being embraced as incontrovertible truth — the cruelty of the insult appalled them. Yet as the day progressed and additional facts emerged about the break-in, and still more came out about Silk's affair with the janitor — reports from numerous people who had seen them sneaking around together — it became increasingly difficult for the elders of the faculty “to remain”—as the local paper noted the next day in its human interest feature—“heartbreakingly in denial.”

And when people began to remember how, a couple of years earlier, no one had wanted to believe that he had called two of his black students spooks; when they remembered how after resigning in disgrace he had isolated himself from his former colleagues, how on the rare occasions when he was seen in town he was abrupt to the point of rudeness with whoever happened to run into him; when they remembered that in his vociferous loathing of everything and everyone having to do with Athena he was said to have managed to estrange himself from his own children ... well, even those who had begun the day dismissing any suggestion that Coleman Silk's life could have come to so hideous a conclusion, the old-timers who found it unendurable to think of a man of his intellectual stature, a charismatic teacher, a dynamic and influential dean, a charming, vigorous man still hale and hearty in his seventies and the father of four grown, wonderful kids, as forsaking everything he'd once valued and sliding so precipitously into the scandalous death of an alienated, bizarre outsider — even those people had to face up to the thoroughgoing transformation that had followed upon the spooks incident and that had not only brought Coleman Silk to his mortifying end but led as well — led inexcusably — to the gruesome death of Faunia Farley, the hapless thirty-four-year-old illiterate whom, as everyone now knew, he had taken in old age as his mistress.

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.”