Stoner

XV

And that was one of the legends that began to attach to his name, legends that grew more detailed and elaborate year by year, progressing like myth from personal fact to ritual truth.

In his late forties, he looked years older. His hair, thick and unruly as it had been in his youth, was almost entirely white; his face was deeply lined and his eyes were sunken in their sockets; and the deafness that had come upon him the summer after the end of his affair with Katherine Driscoll had worsened slightly year by year, so that when he listened to someone, his head cocked to one side and his eyes intent, he appeared to be remotely contemplating a puzzling species that he could not quite identify.

That deafness was of a curious nature. Though he sometimes had difficulty understanding one who spoke directly to him, he was often able to hear with perfect clarity a murmured conversation held across a noisy room. It was by this trick of deafness that he gradually began to know that he was considered, in the phrase current in his own youth, a "campus character."

Thus he overheard, again and again, the embellished tale of his teaching Middle English to a group of new freshmen and of the capitulation of Hollis Lomax. "And when the freshman class of thirty-seven took their junior English exams, you know what class had the highest score?" a reluctant young instructor of freshman English asked. "Sure. Old Stoner's Middle English bunch. And we keep on using exercises and handbooks!"

Stoner had to admit that he had become, in the regard of the young instructors and the older students, who seemed to come and go before he could firmly attach names to their faces, an almost mythic figure, however shifting and various the function of that figure was.

Sometimes he was villain. In one version that attempted to explain the long feud between himself and Lomax, he had seduced and then cast aside a young graduate student for whom Lomax had had a pure and honorable passion. Sometimes he was the fool: in another version of the same feud, he refused to speak to Lomax because once Lomax had been unwilling to write a letter of recommendation for one of Stoner's graduate students. And sometimes he was hero: in a final and not often accepted version he was hated by Lomax and frozen in his rank because he had once caught Lomax giving to a favored student a copy of a final examination in one of Stoner's courses.

The legend was defined, however, by his manner in class. Over the years it had grown more and more absent and yet more and more intense. He began his lectures and discussions fumblingly and awkwardly, yet very quickly became so immersed in his subject that he seemed unaware of anything or anyone around him. Once a meeting of several members of the board of trustees and the president of the University was scheduled in the conference room where Stoner held his seminar in the Latin Tradition; he had been informed of the meeting but had forgotten about it and held his seminar at the usual time and place. Halfway through the period a timid knock sounded at the door; Stoner, engrossed in translating extemporaneously a pertinent Latin passage, did not notice. After a few moments the door opened and a small plump middle-aged man with rimless glasses tiptoed in and lightly tapped Stoner on the shoulder. Without looking up, Stoner waved him away. The man retreated; there was a whispered conference with several others outside the open door. Stoner continued the translation. Then four men, led by the president of the University, a tall heavy man with an imposing chest and florid face, strode in and halted like a squad beside Stoner's desk. The president frowned and cleared his throat loudly. Without a break or a pause in his extemporaneous translation, Stoner looked up and spoke the next line of the poem mildly to the president and his entourage: "'Begone, begone, you bloody whoreson Gauls!'" And still without a break returned his eyes to his book and continued to speak, while the group gasped and stumbled backward, turned, and fled from the room.

Fed by such events, the legend grew until there were anecdotes to give substance to nearly all of Stoner's more typical activities, and grew until it reached his life outside the University. It finally included even Edith, who was seen with him so rarely at University functions that she was a faintly mysterious figure who flitted across the collective imagination like a ghost: she drank secretly, out of some obscure and distant sorrow; she was dying slowly of a rare and always fatal disease; she was a brilliantly talented artist who had given up her career to devote herself to Stoner. At public functions her smile flashed out of her narrow face so quickly and nervously, her eyes glinted so brightly, and she spoke so shrilly and disconnectedly that everyone was sure that her appearance masked a reality, that a self hid behind the facade that no one could believe.

After his illness, and out of an indifference that became a way of living, William Stoner began to spend more and more of his time in the house that he and Edith had bought many years ago. At first Edith was so disconcerted by his presence that she was silent, as if puzzled about something. Then, when she was convinced that his presence, afternoon after afternoon, night after night, weekend after weekend, was to be a permanent condition, she waged an old battle with new intensity. Upon the most trivial provocation she wept forlornly and wandered through the rooms; Stoner looked at her impassively and murmured a few absent words of sympathy. She locked herself in her room and did not emerge for hours at a time; Stoner prepared the meals that she would otherwise have prepared and didn't seem to have noticed her absence when she finally emerged from her room, pale and hollow of cheek and eye. She derided him upon the slightest occasion, and he hardly seemed to hear her; she screamed imprecations upon him, and he listened with polite interest. When he was immersed in a book, she chose that moment to go into the living room and pound with frenzy upon the piano that she seldom otherwise played; and when he spoke quietly to his daughter, Edith would burst into anger at either or both of them. And Stoner looked upon it all—the rage, the woe, the screams, and the hateful silences—as if it were happening to two other people, in whom, by an effort of the will, he could summon only the most perfunctory interest.

And at last—wearily, almost gratefully—Edith accepted her defeat. The rages decreased in intensity until they became as perfunctory as Stoner's interest in them; and the long silences became withdrawals into a privacy at which Stoner no longer wondered, rather than offenses upon an indifferent position.

In her fortieth year, Edith Stoner was as thin as she had been as a girl, but with a hardness, a brittleness, that came from an unbending carriage, that made every movement seem reluctant and grudging. The bones of her face had sharpened, and the thin pale skin was stretched upon them as upon a framework, so that the lines upon the skin were taut and sharp. She was very pale, and she used a great deal of powder and paint in such a way that it appeared she daily composed her own features upon a blank mask. Beneath the dry hard skin, her hands seemed all bone; and they moved ceaselessly, twisting and plucking and clenching even in her quietest moments.

Always withdrawn, she grew in these middle years increasingly remote and absent. After the brief period of her last assault upon Stoner, which flared with a final, desperate intensity, she wandered like a ghost into the privacy of herself, a place from which she never fully emerged. She began to speak to herself, with the kind of soft reasonableness that one uses with a child; she did so openly and without self-consciousness, as if it were the most natural thing she could do. Of the scattered artistic endeavors with which she had occupied herself intermittently during her marriage, she finally settled upon sculpture as the most "satisfying." She modeled clay mostly, though she occasionally worked with the softer stones; busts and figures and compositions of all sorts were scattered about the house. She was very modern: the busts she modeled were minimally featured spheres, the figures were blobs of clay with elongated appendages, and the compositions were random geometric gatherings of cubes and spheres and rods. Sometimes, passing her studio—the room that had once been his study—Stoner would pause and listen to her work. She gave herself directions, as if to a child: "Now, you must put that here—not too much—here, right beside the little gouge. Oh, look, it's falling off. It wasn't wet enough, was it? Well, we can fix that, can't we? Just a little more water, and—there. You see?"

She got in the habit of talking to her husband and daughter in the third person, as if they were someone other than those to whom she spoke. She would say to Stoner: "Willy had better finish his coffee; it's almost nine o'clock, and he wouldn't want to be late to class." Or she would say to her daughter: "Grace really isn't practicing her piano enough. An hour a day at least, it ought to be two. What's going to happen to that talent? A shame, a shame."

What this withdrawal meant to Grace, Stoner did not know; for in her own way she had become as remote and withdrawn as her mother. She had got the habit of silence; and though she reserved a shy, soft smile for her father, she would not talk to him. During the summer of his illness she had, when she could do so unobserved, slipped into his little room and sat beside him and looked with him out the window, apparently content only to be with him; but even then she had been silent and had become restless when he attempted to draw her out of herself.

That summer of his illness she was twelve years old, a tall, thin girl with a delicate face and hair that was more blond than red. In the fall, during Edith's last violent assault upon her husband, her marriage, herself, and what she thought she had become, Grace had become almost motionless, as if she felt that any movement might throw her into an abyss from which she would not be able to clamber. In an aftermath of the violence, Edith decided, with the kind of sure recklessness of which she was capable, that Grace was quiet because she was unhappy and that she was unhappy because she was not popular with her schoolmates. She transferred the fading violence of her assault upon Stoner to an assault upon what she called Grace's "social life." Once again she took an "interest"; she dressed her daughter brightly and fashionably in clothes whose frilliness intensified her thinness, she had parties and played the piano and insisted brightly that everyone dance, she nagged at Grace to smile at everyone, to talk, to make jokes, to laugh.

This assault lasted for less than a month; then Edith dropped her campaign and began the long slow journey to where she obscurely was going. But the effects of the assault upon Grace were out of proportion to its duration.

After the assault, she spent nearly all her free time alone in her room, listening to the small radio her father had given her on her twelfth birthday. She lay motionless on her unmade bed, or sat motionless at her desk, and listened to the sounds that blared thinly from the scrollwork of the squat, ugly instrument on her bedside table, as if the voices, music, and laughter she heard were all that remained of her identity and as if even that were fading distantly into silence, beyond her recall.

And she grew fat. Between that winter and her thirteenth birthday she gained nearly fifty pounds; her face grew puffy and dry like rising dough, and her limbs became soft and slow and clumsy. She ate little more than she had eaten before, though she became very fond of sweets and kept a box of candy always in her room; it was as if something inside her had gone loose and soft and hopeless, as if at last a shapelessness within her had struggled and burst loose and now persuaded her flesh to specify that dark and secret existence.

Stoner looked upon the transformation with a sadness that belied the indifferent face he presented to the world. He did not allow himself the easy luxury of guilt; given his own nature and the circumstance of his life with Edith, there was nothing that he could have done. And that knowledge intensified his sadness as no guilt could have, and made his love for his daughter more searching and more deep.

She was, he knew—and had known very early, he supposed —one of those rare and always lovely humans whose moral nature was so delicate that it must be nourished and cared for that it might be fulfilled. Alien to the world, it had to live where it could not be at home; avid for tenderness and quiet, it had to feed upon indifference and callousness and noise. It was a nature that, even in the strange and inimical place where it had to live, had not the savagery to fight off the brutal forces that opposed it and could only withdraw to a quietness where it was forlorn and small and gently still.

When she was seventeen years old, during the first part of her senior year in high school, another transformation came upon her. It was as if her nature had found its hiding place and she was able at last to present an appearance to the world. As rapidly as she had gained it, she lost the weight she had put on three years before; and to those who had known her she seemed one whose transformation partook of magic, as if she had emerged from a chrysalis into an air for which she had been designed. She was almost beautiful; her body, which had been very thin and then suddenly very fat, was delicately limbed and soft, and it walked with a light grace. It was a passive beauty that she had, almost a placid one; her face was nearly without expression, like a mask; her light blue eyes looked directly at one, without curiosity and without any apprehension that one might see beyond them; her voice was very soft, a little flat, and she spoke rarely.

Quite suddenly she became, in Edith's word, "popular." The telephone rang frequently for her, and she sat in the living room, nodding now and then, responding softly and briefly to the voice; cars drove up in the dusky afternoons and carried her away, anonymous in the shouting and laughter. Sometimes Stoner stood at the front window and watched the automobiles screech away in clouds of dust, and he felt a small concern and a little awe; he had never owned a car and had never learned to drive one.

And Edith was pleased. "You see?" she said in absent triumph, as if more than three years had not passed since her frenzied attack upon the problem of Grace's "popularity." "You see? I was right. All she needed was a little push. And Willy didn't approve. Oh, I could tell. Willy never approves."

For a number of years, Stoner had, every month, put aside a few dollars so that Grace could, when the time came, go away from Columbia to a college, perhaps an eastern one, some distance away. Edith had known of these plans, and she had seemed to approve; but when the time came, she would not hear of it.

"Oh, no!" she said. "I couldn't bear it! My baby! And she has done so well here this last year. So popular, and so happy. She would have to adjust, and—baby, Gracie, baby"—she turned to her daughter—"Gracie doesn't really want to go away from her mommy. Does she? Leave her all alone?"

Grace looked at her mother silently for a moment. She turned very briefly to her father and shook her head. She said to her mother, "If you want me to stay, of course I will."

"Grace," Stoner said. "Listen to me. If you want to go— please, if you really want to go—"

She would not look at him again. "It doesn't matter," she said.

Before Stoner could say anything else, Edith began talking about how they could spend the money her father had saved on a new wardrobe, a really nice one, perhaps even a little car so that she and her friends could . . . And Grace smiled her slow small smile and nodded and every now and then said a word, as if it were expected of her.

It was settled; and Stoner never knew what Grace felt, whether she stayed because she wanted to, or because her mother wanted her to, or out of a vast indifference to her own fate. She would enter the University of Missouri as a freshman that fall, go there for at least two years, after which, if she wanted, she would be allowed to go away, out of the state, to finish her college work. Stoner told himself that it was better this way, better for Grace to endure the prison she hardly knew she was in for two more years, than to be torn again upon the rack of Edith's helpless will.

So nothing changed. Grace got her wardrobe, refused her mother's offer of a little car, and entered the University of Missouri as a freshman student. The telephone continued to ring, the same faces (or ones much like them) continued to appear laughing and shouting at the front door, and the same automobiles roared away in the dusk. Grace was away from home even more frequently than she had been in high school, and Edith was pleased at what she thought to be her daughter's growing popularity. "She's like her mother," she said. "Before she was married she was very popular. All the boys . . . Papa used to get so mad at them, but he was secretly very proud, I could tell."

"Yes, Edith," Stoner said gently, and he felt his heart contract.

It was a difficult semester for Stoner; it had come his turn to administer the university-wide junior English examination, and he was at the same time engaged in directing two particularly difficult doctoral dissertations, both of which required a great deal of extra reading on his part. So he was away from home more frequently than had been his habit for the last few years.

One evening, near the end of November, he came home even later than usual. The lights were off in the living room, and the house was quiet; he supposed that Grace and Edith were in bed. He took some papers he had brought with him to his little back room, intending to read a few of them after he got into bed. He went into the kitchen to get a sandwich and a glass of milk; he had sliced the bread and opened the refrigerator door when suddenly he heard, sharp and clean as a knife, a prolonged scream from somewhere downstairs. He ran into the living room; the scream came again, now short and somehow angry in its intensity, from Edith's studio. Swiftly he went across the room and opened the door.

Edith was sitting sprawled on the floor, as if she had fallen there; her eyes were wild, and her mouth was open, ready to emit another scream. Grace sat across the room from her on an upholstered chair, her knees crossed, and looked almost calmly at her mother. A single desk lamp, on Edith's work table, was burning, so that the room was filled with harsh brightness and deep shadows.

"What is it?" Stoner asked. "What's happened?"

Edith's head swung around to face him as if it were on a loose pivot; her eyes were vacant. She said with a curious petulance, "Oh, Willy. Oh, Willy." She continued to look at him, her head shaking weakly.

He turned to Grace, whose look of calm did not change.

She said conversationally, "I'm pregnant, Father."

And the scream came again, piercing and inexpressibly angry; they both turned to Edith, who looked back and forth, from one to the other, the eyes absent and cool above the screaming mouth. Stoner went across the room, stooped behind her, and lifted her upright; she was loose in his arms, and he had to support her weight.

"Edith!" he said sharply. "Be quiet."

She stiffened and pulled away from him. On trembling legs she stalked across the room and stood above Grace, who had not moved.

"You!" she spat. "Oh, my God. Oh, Gracie. How could you —oh, my God. Like your father. Your father's blood. Oh, yes. Filth. Filth—"

"Edith!" Stoner spoke more sharply and strode over to her. He placed his hands firmly on her upper arms and turned her away from Grace. "Go to the bathroom and throw some cold water on your face. Then go up to your room and lie down."

"Oh, Willy," Edith said pleadingly. "My own little baby. My very own. How could this happen? How could she—"

"Go on," Stoner said. "I'll call you after a while."

She tottered out of the room. Stoner looked after her without moving until he heard the tap water start in the bathroom. Then he turned to Grace, who remained looking up at him from the easy chair. He smiled at her briefly, walked across to Edith's work table, got a straight chair, brought it back, and placed it in front of Grace's chair, so that he could talk to her without looking down upon her upturned face.

"Now," he said, "why don't you tell me about it?"

She gave him her small soft smile. "There isn't much to tell," she said. "I'm pregnant."

"Are you sure?"

She nodded. "I've been to a doctor. I just got the report this afternoon."

"Well," he said and awkwardly touched her hand. "You aren't to worry. Everything will be all right."

"Yes," she said.

He asked gently, "Do you want to tell me who the father is?"

"A student," she said. "At the University."

"Had you rather not tell me?"

"Oh, no," she said. "It doesn't make any difference. His name is Frye. Ed Frye. He's a sophomore. I believe he was in your freshman comp class last year."

"I don't remember him," Stoner said. "I don't remember him at all."

"I'm sorry, Father," Grace said. "It was stupid. He was a little drunk, and we didn't take—precautions."

Stoner looked away from her, at the floor.

"I'm sorry, Father. I've shocked you, haven't I?"

"No," Stoner said. "Surprised me, perhaps. We really haven't known each other very well these last few years, have we?"

She looked away and said uncomfortably, "Well—I suppose not."

"Do you—love this boy, Grace?"

"Oh, no," she said. "I really don't know him very well."

He nodded. "What do you want to do?"

"I don't know," she said. "It really doesn't matter. I don't want to be a bother."

They sat without speaking for a long time. Finally Stoner said, "Well, you aren't to worry. It will be all right. Whatever you decide—whatever you want to do, it will be all right."

"Yes," Grace said. She rose from the chair. Then she looked down at her father and said, "You and I, we can talk now."

"Yes," Stoner said. "We can talk."

She went out of the studio, and Stoner waited until he heard her bedroom door close upstairs. Then, before he went to his own room, he went softly upstairs and opened the door to Edith's bedroom. Edith was fast asleep, sprawled fully clothed on her bed, the bedside light harsh upon her face. Stoner turned the light out and went downstairs.

The next morning at breakfast Edith was almost cheerful; she gave no sign of her hysteria of the night before, and she spoke as if the future were a hypothetical problem to be solved. After she learned the name of the boy she said brightly, "Well, now. Do you think we ought to get in touch with the parents or should we talk to the boy first? Let's see—this is the last week in November. Let's say two weeks. We can make all the arrangements by then, maybe even a small chinch wedding. Gracie, what does your friend, what's his name—?"

"Edith," Stoner said. "Wait. You're taking too much for granted. Perhaps Grace and this young man don't want to get married. We need to talk it out with Grace."

"What's there to talk about? Of course they'll want to get married. After all, they—they— Gracie, tell your father. Explain to him."

Grace said to him, "It doesn't matter, Father. It doesn't matter at all."

And it didn't matter, Stoner realized; Grace's eyes were fixed beyond him, into a distance she could not see and which she contemplated without curiosity. He remained silent and let his wife and daughter make their plans.

It was decided that Grace's "young man," as Edith called him, as if his name were somehow forbidden, would be invited to the house and that he and Edith would "talk." She arranged the afternoon as if it were a scene in a drama, with exits and entrances and even a line or two of dialogue. Stoner was to excuse himself, Grace was to remain for a few moments more and then excuse herself, leaving Edith and the young man alone to talk. In half an hour Stoner was to return, then Grace was to return, by which time all arrangements were to be completed.

And it all worked out exactly as Edith planned. Later Stoner wondered, with amusement, what young Edward Frye thought when he knocked timidly on the door and was admitted to a room that seemed filled with mortal enemies. He was a tall, rather heavy young man, with blurred and faintly sullen features; he was caught in a numbing embarrassment and fear, and he would look at no one. When Stoner left the room he saw the young man sitting slumped in a chair, his forearms on his knees, staring at the floor; when, half an hour later, he came back into the room, the young man was in the same position, as if he had not moved before the barrage of Edith's birdlike cheerfulness.

But everything was settled. In a high, artificial, but genuinely cheerful voice Edith informed him that "Grace's young man" came from a very good St. Louis family, his father was a broker and had probably at one time had dealings with her own father, or at least her father's bank, that the "young people" had decided on a wedding, "as soon as possible, very informal," that both were dropping out of school, at least for a year or two, that they would live in St. Louis, "a change of scenery, a new start," that though they wouldn't be able to finish the semester they would go to school until the semester break, and they would be married on the afternoon of that day, which was a Friday. And wasn't it all sweet, really—no matter what.

The wedding took place in the cluttered study of a justice of the peace. Only William and Edith witnessed the ceremony; the justice's wife, a rumpled gray woman with a permanent frown, worked in the kitchen while the ceremony was performed and came out when it was over only to sign the papers as a witness. It was a cold, bleak afternoon; the date was December 12, 1941.

Five days before the marriage took place the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor; and William Stoner watched the ceremony with a mixture of feeling that he had not had before. Like many others who went through that time, he was gripped by what he could think of only as a numbness, though he knew it was a feeling compounded of emotions so deep and intense that they could not be acknowledged because they could not be lived with. It was the force of a public tragedy he felt, a horror and a woe so all-pervasive that private tragedies and personal misfortunes were removed to another state of being, yet were intensified by the very vastness in which they took place, as the poignancy of a lone grave might be intensified by a great desert surrounding it. With a pity that was almost impersonal he watched the sad little ritual of the marriage and was oddly moved by the passive, indifferent beauty of his daughter's face and by the sullen desperation on the face of the young man.

After the ceremony the two young people climbed joylessly into Frye's little roadster and left for St. Louis, where they still had to face another set of parents and where they were to live. Stoner watched them drive away from the house, and he could think of his daughter only as a very small girl who had once sat beside him in a distant room and looked at him with solemn delight, as a lovely child who long ago had died.

Two months after the marriage Edward Frye enlisted in the Army; it was Grace's decision to remain in St. Louis until the birth of her child. Within six months Frye was dead upon the beach of a small Pacific island, one of a number of raw recruits that had been sent out in a desperate effort to halt the Japanese advance. In June of 1942 Grace's child was born; it was a boy, and she named it after the father it had never seen and would not love.

Though Edith, when she went to St. Louis that June to "help out," tried to persuade her daughter to return to Columbia, Grace would not do so; she had a small apartment, a small income from Frye's insurance, and her new parents-in-law, and she seemed happy.

"Changed somehow," Edith said distractedly to Stoner. "Not our little Gracie at all. She's been through a lot, and I guess she doesn't want to be reminded . . . She sent you her love."