Stoner

VIII

The declaration was a part of the change that Edith had started bringing about during the weeks she had spent at "home" in St. Louis after her father's death. And it was intensified, and finally given point and savagery, by that other change that came and slowly grew upon William Stoner after he discovered that he might become a good teacher.

Edith had been curiously unmoved at her father's funeral. During the elaborate ceremonies she sat erect and hard-faced, and her expression did not alter when she had to go past her father's body, resplendent and plump, in the ornate coffin. But at the cemetery, when the coffin was lowered into the narrow hole masked by mats of artificial grass, she lowered her expressionless face into her hands and did not raise it until someone touched her shoulder.

After the funeral she spent several days in her old room, the room in which she had grown up; she saw her mother only at breakfast and at dinner. It was thought by callers that she was secluded in her grief. "They were very close," Edith's mother said mysteriously. "Much closer than they seemed."

But in that room Edith walked about as if for the first time, freely, touching the walls and windows, testing their solidity. She had a trunk full of her childhood belongings brought down from the attic; she went through her bureau drawers, which had remained undisturbed for more than a decade. With a bemused air of leisure, as if she had all the time in the world, she went through her things, fondling them, turning them this way and that, examining them with an almost ritualistic care. When she came upon a letter she had received as a child, she read it through from beginning to end as if for the first time; when she came upon a forgotten doll, she smiled at it and caressed the painted bisque of its cheek as if she were a child again who had received a gift.

Finally she arranged all of her childhood belongings neatly in two piles. One of these consisted of toys and trinkets she had acquired for herself, of secret photographs and letters from school friends, of gifts she had at one time received from distant relatives; the other pile consisted of those things that her father had given her and of things with which he had been directly or indirectly connected. It was to this pile that she gave her attention. Methodically, expressionlessly, with neither anger nor joy, she took the objects there, one by one, and destroyed them. The letters and clothes, the stuffing from the dolls, the pincushions and pictures, she burned in the fireplace; the clay and porcelain heads, the hands and arms and feet of the dolls she pounded to a fine powder on the hearth; and what remained after the burning and pounding she swept into a small pile and flushed down the toilet in the bathroom that adjoined her room.

When the job was done—the room cleared of smoke, the hearth swept, the few remaining belongings returned to the chest of drawers—Edith Bostwick Stoner sat at her small dressing table and looked at herself in the mirror, the silver backing of which was thinning and flecking away, so that here and there her image was imperfectly reflected, or not reflected at all, giving her face a curiously incomplete look. She was thirty years old. The youthful gloss was beginning to fall from her hair, tiny lines were starting out from around her eyes, and the skin of her face was beginning to tighten around her sharp cheekbones. She nodded to the image in the mirror, got up abruptly, and went downstairs, where for the first time in days she talked cheerfully and almost intimately to her mother.

She wanted (she said) a change in herself. She had too long been what she was; she spoke of her childhood, of her marriage. And from sources that she could speak of but vaguely and uncertainly, she fixed an image that she wished to fulfill; and for nearly the whole of the two months that she stayed in St. Louis with her mother, she devoted herself to that fulfillment.

She asked to borrow a sum of money from her mother, who made her an impetuous gift of it. She bought a new wardrobe, burning all the clothes she had brought with her from Columbia; she had her hair cut short and fashioned in the mode of the day; she bought cosmetics and perfumes, the use of which she practiced daily in her room. She learned to smoke, and she cultivated a new way of speaking which was brittle, vaguely English, and a little shrill. She returned to Columbia with this outward change well under control, and with another change secret and potential within her.

During the first few months after her return to Columbia, she was furious with activity; no longer did it seem necessary to pretend to herself that she was ill or weak. She joined a little theater group and devoted herself to the work that was given her; she designed and painted sets, raised money for the group, and even had a few small parts in the productions. When Stoner came home in the afternoons he found the living room filled with her friends, strangers who looked at him as if he were an intruder, to whom he nodded politely and retreated to his study, where he could hear their voices, muted and declamatory, beyond his walls.

Edith purchased a used upright piano and had it put in the living room, against the wall which separated that room from William's study; she had given up the practice of music shortly before her marriage, and she now started almost anew, practicing scales, laboring through exercises that were too difficult for her, playing sometimes two or three hours a day, often in the evening, after Grace had been put to bed.

The groups of students whom Stoner invited to his study for conversation grew larger and the meetings more frequent; and no longer was Edith content to remain upstairs, away from the gatherings. She insisted upon serving them tea or coffee; and when she did she seated herself in the room. She talked loudly and gaily, managing to turn the conversation toward her work in the little theater, or her music, or her painting and sculpture, which (she announced) she was planning to take up again, as soon as she found time. The students, mystified and embarrassed, gradually stopped coming, and Stoner began meeting them for coffee in the University cafeteria or in one of the small cafes scattered around the campus.

He did not speak to Edith about her new behavior; her activities caused him only minor annoyance, and she seemed happy, though perhaps a bit desperately so. It was, finally, himself that he held responsible for the new direction her life had taken; he had been unable to discover for her any meaning in their life together, in their marriage. Thus it was right for her to take what meaning she could find in areas that had nothing to do with him and go ways he could not follow.

Emboldened by his new success as a teacher and by his growing popularity among the better graduate students, he started a new book in the summer of 1930. He now spent nearly all of his free time in his study. He and Edith kept up between themselves the pretense of sharing the same bedroom, but he seldom entered that room, and never at night. He slept on his studio couch and even kept his clothes in a small closet he constructed in one corner of the room.

He was able to be with Grace. As had become her habit during her mother's first long absence, she spent much of her time with her father in his study; Stoner even found a small desk and chair for her, so that she had a place to read and do her homework. They had their meals more often than not alone; Edith was away from the house a great deal, and when she was not away she frequently entertained her theater friends at little parties which did not admit the presence of a child.

Then, abruptly, Edith began staying home. The three of them started taking their meals together again, and Edith even made a few movements toward caring for the house. The house was quiet; even the piano was unused, so that dust gathered on the keyboard.

They had come to that point in their life together when they seldom spoke of themselves or each other, lest the delicate balance that made their living together possible be broken. So it was only after long hesitation and deliberation about consequences that Stoner finally asked her if anything was wrong.

They were at the dinner table; Grace had been excused and had taken a book into Stoner's study.

"What do you mean?" Edith asked.

"Your friends," William said. "They haven't been around for some time, and you don't seem to be so involved with your theater work any more. I was just wondering if there was anything wrong."

With an almost masculine gesture, Edith shook a cigarette from the package beside her plate, stuck it between her lips, and lighted it with the stub of another that she had half finished. She inhaled deeply without taking the cigarette from her lips and tilted her head back, so that when she looked at William her eyes were narrowed and quizzical and calculating.

"Nothing's wrong," she said. "I just got bored with them and the work. Does there always have to be something wrong?"

"No," William said. "I just thought maybe you weren't feeling well or something."

He thought no more about the conversation and shortly thereafter he left the table and went into the study, where Grace was sitting at her desk, immersed in her book. The desk light gleamed in her hair and threw her small, serious face into sharp outline. She has grown during the past year, William thought; and a small, not unpleasant sadness caught briefly at his throat. He smiled and went quietly to his desk.

Within a few moments he was immersed in his work. The evening before, he had caught up with the routine of his classwork; papers had been graded and lectures prepared for the whole week that was to follow. He saw the evening before him, and several evenings more, in which he would be free to work on his book. What he wanted to do in this new book was not yet precisely clear to him; in general, he wished to extend himself beyond his first study, in both time and scope. He wanted to work in the period of the English Renaissance and to extend his study of classical and medieval Latin influences into that area. He was in the stage of planning his study, and it was that stage which gave him the most pleasure—the selection among alternative approaches, the rejection of certain strategies, the mysteries and uncertainties that lay in unexplored possibilities, the consequences of choice. . . . The possibilities he could see so exhilarated him that he could not keep still. He got up from his desk, paced a little, and in a kind of frustrated joy spoke to his daughter, who looked up from her book and answered him.

She caught his mood, and something he said caused her to laugh. Then the two of them were laughing together, senselessly, as if they both were children. Suddenly the door to the study came open, and the hard light from the living room streamed into the shadowed recesses of the study. Edith stood outlined in that light.

"Grace," she said distinctly and slowly, "your father is trying to work. You mustn't disturb him."

For several moments William and his daughter were so stunned by this sudden intrusion that neither of them moved or spoke. Then William managed to say, "It's all right, Edith. She doesn't bother me."

As if he had not spoken, Edith said, "Grace, did you hear me? Come out of there this instant."

Bewildered, Grace got down from her chair and walked across the room. In the center she paused, looking first at her father and then at her mother. Edith started to speak again, but William managed to cut her off.

"It's all right, Grace," he said as gently as he could. "It's all right. Go with your mother."

As Grace went through the study door to the living room, Edith said to her husband, "The child has had entirely too much freedom. It isn't natural for her to be so quiet, so withdrawn. She's been too much alone. She should be more active, play with children her own age. Don't you realize how unhappy she has been?"

And she shut the door before he could answer.

He did not move for a long while. He looked at his desk, littered with notes and open books; he walked slowly across the room and aimlessly rearranged the sheets of paper, the books. He stood there, frowning, for several minutes more, as if he were trying to remember something. Then he turned again and walked to Grace's small desk; he stood there for some time, as he had stood at his own desk. He turned off the lamp there, so that the desk top was gray and lifeless, and went across to the couch, where he lay with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling.

The enormity came upon him gradually, so that it was several weeks before he could admit to himself what Edith was doing; and when he was able at last to make that admission, he made it almost without surprise. Edith's was a campaign waged with such cleverness and skill that he could find no rational grounds for complaint. After her abrupt and almost brutal entrance into his study that night, an entrance which in retrospect seemed to him a surprise attack, Edith's strategy became more indirect, more quiet and contained. It was a strategy that disguised itself as love and concern, and thus one against which he was helpless.

Edith was at home nearly all the time now. During the morning and early afternoon, while Grace was at school, she occupied herself with redecorating Grace's bedroom. She removed the small desk from Stoner's study, refinished and repainted it a pale pink, attaching around the top a broad ribbon of matching ruffled satin, so that it bore no resemblance to the desk Grace had grown used to; one afternoon, with Grace standing mutely beside her, she went through all the clothing William had bought for her, discarded most of it, and promised Grace that they would, this weekend, go downtown and replace the discarded items with things more fitting, something "girlish." And they did. Late in the afternoon, weary but triumphant, Edith returned with a load of packages and an exhausted daughter desperately uncomfortable in a new dress stiff with starch and a myriad of ruffles, from beneath the ballooning hem of which her thin legs stuck out like pathetic sticks.

Edith bought her daughter dolls and toys and hovered about her while she played with them, as if it were a duty; she started her on piano lessons and sat beside her on the bench as she practiced; upon the slightest occasion she gave little parties for her, which neighborhood children attended, vindictive and sullen in their stiff, formal clothing; and she strictly supervised her daughter's reading and homework, not allowing her to work beyond the time she had allotted.

Now Edith's visitors were neighborhood mothers. They came in the mornings and drank coffee and talked while their children were in school; in the afternoons they brought their children with them and watched them playing games in the large living room and talked aimlessly above the noise of games and running.

On these afternoons Stoner was usually in his study and could hear what the mothers said as they spoke loudly across the room, above their children's voices.

Once, when there was a lull in the noise, he heard Edith say, "Poor Grace. She's so fond of her father, but he has so little time to devote to her. His work, you know; and he has started a new book ..."

Curiously, almost detachedly, he watched his hands, which had been holding a book, begin to shake. They shook for several moments before he brought them under control by jamming them deep in his pockets, clenching them, and holding them there.

He saw his daughter seldom now. The three of them took their meals together, but on these occasions he hardly dared to speak to her, for when he did, and when Grace answered him, Edith soon found something wanting in Grace's table manners, or in the way she sat in her chair, and she spoke so sharply that her daughter remained silent and downcast through the rest of the meal.

Grace's already slender body was becoming thinner; Edith laughed gently about her "growing up but not out." Her eyes were becoming watchful, almost wary; the expression that had once been quietly serene was now either faintly sullen at one extreme or gleeful and animated on the thin edge of hysteria at the other; she seldom smiled any more, although she laughed a great deal. And when she did smile, it was as if a ghost flitted across her face. Once, while Edith was upstairs, William and his daughter passed each other in the living room. Grace smiled shyly at him, and involuntarily he knelt on the floor and embraced her. He felt her body stiffen, and he saw her face go bewildered and afraid. He raised himself gently away from her, said something inconsequential, and retreated to his study.

The morning after this he stayed at the breakfast table until Grace left for school, even though he knew he would be late for his nine o'clock class. After seeing Grace out the front door, Edith did not return to the dining room, and he knew that she was avoiding him. He went into the living room, where his wife sat at one end of the sofa with a cup of coffee and a cigarette.

Without preliminaries he said, "Edith, I don't like what's happening to Grace."

Instantly, as if she were picking up a cue, she said, "What do you mean?"

He let himself down on the other end of the sofa, away from Edith. A feeling of helplessness came over him. "You know what I mean," he said wearily. "Let up on her. Don't drive her so hard."

Edith ground her cigarette out in her saucer. "Grace has never been happier. She has friends now, things to occupy her. I know you're too busy to notice these things, but—surely you must realize how much more outgoing she's been recently. And she laughs. She never used to laugh. Almost never."

William looked at her in quiet amazement. "You believe that, don't you?"

"Of course I do," Edith said. "I'm her mother."

And she did believe it, Stoner realized. He shook his head.

"I've never wanted to admit it to myself," he said with something like tranquillity, "but you really do hate me, don't you, Edith?"

"What?" The amazement in her voice was genuine. "Oh, Willy!" She laughed clearly and unrestrainedly. "Don't be foolish. Of course not. You're my husband."

"Don't use the child." He could not keep his voice from trembling. "You don't have to any longer; you know that. Anything else. But if you keep on using Grace, I'll—" He did not finish.

After a moment Edith said, "You'll what?" She spoke quietly and without challenge. "All you could do is leave me, and you'd never do that. We both know it."

He nodded. "I suppose you're right." He got up blindly and went into his study. He got his coat from the closet and picked up his briefcase from beside his desk. As he crossed the living room Edith spoke to him again.

"Willy, I wouldn't hurt Grace. You ought to know that. I love her. She's my very own daughter."

And he knew that it was true; she did love her. The truth of the knowledge almost made him cry out. He shook his head and went out into the weather.

When he got home that evening he found that during the day Edith had, with the help of a local handyman, moved all of his belongings out of his study. Jammed together in one corner of the living room were his desk and couch, and surrounding them in a careless jumble were his clothes, his papers, and all of his books.

Since she would be home more now, she had (she told him) decided to take up her painting and her sculpting again; and his study, with its north light, would give her the only really decent illumination the house had. She knew he wouldn't mind a move; he could use the glassed-in sun porch at the back of the house; it was farther away from the living room than his study had been, and he would have more quiet in which to do his work.

But the sun porch was so small that he could not keep his books in any order, and there was no room for either the desk or the couch that he had had in the study, so he stored both of them in the cellar. It was difficult to warm the sun porch in the winter, and in the summer, he knew, the sun would beat through the glass panes that enclosed the porch, so that it would be nearly uninhabitable. Yet he worked there for several months. He got a small table and used it as a desk, and he purchased a portable radiant heater to mitigate a little the cold that in the evenings seeped through the thin clapboard sidings. At night he slept wrapped in a blanket on the sofa in the living room.

After a few months of relative though uncomfortable peace, he began finding, when he returned in the afternoon from the University, odds and ends of discarded household goods— broken lamps, scatter rugs, small chests, and boxes of bric-a-brac—left carelessly in the room that now served as his study.

"It's so damp in the cellar," Edith said, "they'd be ruined. You don't mind if I keep them in here for a while, do you?"

One spring afternoon he returned home during a driving rainstorm and discovered that somehow one of the panes had got broken and that the rain had damaged several of his books and had rendered many of his notes illegible; a few weeks later he came in to find that Grace and a few of her friends had been allowed to play in the room and that more of his notes and the first pages of the manuscript of his new book had been torn and mutilated. "I only let them go in there a few minutes," Edith said. "They have to have someplace to play. But I had no idea. You ought to speak to Grace. I've told her how important your work is to you."

He gave up then. He moved as many of his books as he could to his office at the University, which he shared with three younger instructors; thereafter he spent much of the time that he had formerly spent at home at the University, coming home early only when his loneliness for a brief glimpse of his daughter, or a word with her, made it impossible for him to stay away.

But he had room in his office for only a few of his books, and his work on his manuscript was often interrupted because he did not have the necessary texts; moreover one of his office mates, an earnest young man, had the habit of scheduling student conferences in the evenings, and the sibilant, labored conversations carried on across the room distracted him, so that he found it difficult to concentrate. He lost interest in his book; his work slowed and came to a halt. Finally he realized that it had become a refuge, a haven, an excuse to come to the office at night. He read and studied, and at last came to find some comfort, some pleasure, and even a ghost of the old joy in that which he did, a learning toward no particular end.

And Edith had relaxed her pursuit and obsessive concern for Grace, so that the child was beginning occasionally to smile and even to speak to him with some ease. Thus he found it possible to live, and even to be happy, now and then.