Stoner

VII

One evening in the spring of 1927 William Stoner came home late. The scent of budding flowers mingled and hung in the moist warm air; crickets hummed in the shadows; in the distance a lone automobile raised dust and sent into the stillness a loud, defiant clatter. He walked slowly, caught in the somnolence of a new season, bemused by the tiny green buds that glowed out of the shade of bush and tree.

When he went into the house Edith was at the far end of the living room, holding the telephone receiver to her ear and looking at him.

"You're late," she said.

"Yes," he said pleasantly. "We had doctor's orals."

She handed him the receiver. "It's for you, long distance. Someone's been trying to get you all afternoon. I told them you were at the University, but they've been calling back here every hour."

William took the receiver and spoke into the mouthpiece. No one answered. "Hello," he said again.

The thin strange voice of a man answered him.

"This Bill Stoner?"

"Yes, who is this?"

"You don't know me. I was passing by, and your ma asked me to call. I been trying all afternoon."

"Yes," Stoner said. His hand holding the mouthpiece was shaking. "What's wrong?"

"It's your pa," the voice said. "I don't rightly know how to start."

The dry, laconic, frightened voice went on, and William Stoner listened to it dully, as if it had no existence beyond the receiver that he held to his ear. What he heard concerned his father. He had been (the voice said) feeling poorly for nearly a week; and because his field hand by himself had not been able to keep up with the furrowing and planting, and even though he had a high fever, he had started out early in the morning to get some planting done. His field hand had found him at midmorning, lying face down on the broken field, unconscious. He had carried him to the house, put him in bed, and gone to fetch a doctor; but by noon he was dead.

'Thank you for calling," Stoner said mechanically. "Tell my mother that I'll be there tomorrow."

He put the receiver back on its hook and stared for a long time at the bell-shaped mouthpiece attached to the narrow black cylinder. He turned around and looked at the room. Edith was regarding him expectantly.

"Well? What is it?" she asked.

"It's my father," Stoner said. "He's dead."

"Oh, Willy!" Edith said. Then she nodded. "You'll probably be gone for the rest of the week then."

"Yes," Stoner said.

"Then I'll get Aunt Emma to come over and help with Grace."

"Yes," Stoner said mechanically. "Yes."

He got someone to take his classes for the rest of the week and early the next morning caught the bus for Booneville. The highway from Columbia to Kansas City, which cut through Booneville, was the one that he had traveled seventeen years before, when he had first come to the University; now it was wide and paved, and neat straight fences enclosed fields of wheat and corn that flashed by him outside the bus window.

Booneville had changed little during the years he had not seen it. A few new buildings had gone up, a few old ones had been torn down; but the town retained its bareness and flimsiness, and looked still as if it were only a temporary arrangement that could be dispensed with at any moment. Though most of the streets had been paved in the last few years, a thin haze of dust hung about the town, and a few horse-drawn, steel-tired wagons were still around, the wheels sometimes giving off sparks as they scraped against the concrete paving of street and curb.

Nor had the house changed substantially. It was perhaps drier and grayer than it had been; not even a fleck of paint remained on the clapboards, and the unpainted timber of the porch sagged a bit nearer to the bare earth.

There were some people in the house—neighbors—whom Stoner did not remember; a tall gaunt man in a black suit, white shirt, and string tie was bending over his mother, who sat in a straight chair beside the narrow wooden box that held the body of his father. Stoner started across the room. The tall man saw him and walked to meet him; the man's eyes were gray and flat like pieces of glazed crockery. A deep and unctuous baritone voice, hushed and thick, uttered some words; the man called Stoner "brother" and spoke of "bereavement," and "God, who hath taken away," and wanted to know if Stoner wished to pray with him. Stoner brushed past the man and stood in front of his mother; her face swam before him.

Through a blur he saw her nod to him and get up from the chair. She took his arm and said, "You'll want to see your pa."

With a touch that was so frail that he could hardly feel it, she led him beside the open coffin. He looked down. He looked until his eyes cleared, and then he started back in shock. The body that he saw seemed that of a stranger; it was shrunken and tiny, and its face was like a thin brown-paper mask, with black deep depressions where the eyes should have been. The dark blue suit which enfolded the body was grotesquely large, and the hands that folded out of the sleeves over the chest were like the dried claws of an animal. Stoner turned to his mother, and he knew that the horror he felt was in his eyes.

"Your pa lost a lot of weight the last week or two," she said. "I asked him not to go out in the field, but he got up before I was awake and was gone. He was out of his head. He was just so sick he was out of his head and didn't know what he was doing. The doctor said he must have been, or he couldn't have managed it."

As she spoke Stoner saw her clearly; it was as if she too were dead as she spoke, a part of her gone irretrievably into that box with her husband, not to emerge again. He saw her now; her face was thin and shrunken; even in repose it was so drawn that the tips of her teeth were disclosed beneath her thin lips. She walked as if she had no weight or strength. He muttered a word and left the parlor; he went to the room in which he had grown up and stood in its bareness. His eyes were hot and dry, and he could not weep.

He made the arrangements that had to be made for the funeral and signed the papers that needed to be signed. Like all country folk, his parents had burial policies, toward which for most of their lives they had set aside a few pennies each week, even during the times of most desperate need. There was something pitiful about the policies that his mother got from an old trunk in her bedroom; the gilt from the elaborate printing was beginning to fleck away, and the cheap paper was brittle with age. He talked to his mother about the future; he wanted her to return with him to Columbia. There was plenty of room, he said, and (he twinged at the lie) Edith would welcome her company.

But his mother would not return with him. "I wouldn't feel right," she said. "Your pa and I—I've lived here nearly all my life. I just don't think I could settle anywhere else and feel right about it. And besides, Tobe"—Stoner remembered that Tobe was the Negro field hand his father had hired many years ago—"Tobe has said he'd stay on here as long as I need him. He's got him a nice room fixed up in the cellar. We'll be all right."

Stoner argued with her, but she would not be moved. At last he realized that she wished only to die, and wished to do so where she had lived; and he knew that she deserved the little dignity she could find in doing as she wanted to do.

They buried his father in a small plot on the outskirts of Booneville, and William returned to the farm with his mother. That night he could not sleep. He dressed and walked into the field that his father had worked year after year, to the end that he now had found. He tried to remember his father, but the face that he had known in his youth would not come to him. He knelt in the field and took a dry clod of earth in his hand. He broke it and watched the grains, dark in the moonlight, crumble and flow through his fingers. He brushed his hand on his trouser leg and got up and went back to the house. He did not sleep; he lay on the bed and looked out the single window until the dawn came, until there were no shadows upon the land, until it stretched gray and barren and infinite before him.

After the death of his father Stoner made weekend trips to the farm as often as he could; and each time he saw his mother, he saw her grown thinner and paler and stiller, until at last it seemed that only her sunken, bright eyes were alive. During her last days she did not speak to him at all; her eyes flickered faintly as she stared up from her bed, and occasionally a small sigh came from her lips.

He buried her beside her husband. After the services were over and the few mourners had gone, he stood alone in a cold November wind and looked at the two graves, one open to its burden and the other mounded and covered by a thin fuzz of grass. He turned on the bare, treeless little plot that held others like his mother and father and looked across the flat land in the direction of the farm where he had been born, where his mother and father had spent their years. He thought of the cost exacted, year after year, by the soil; and it remained as it had been—a little more barren, perhaps, a little more frugal of increase. Nothing had changed. Their lives had been expended in cheerless labor, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed. Now they were in the earth to which they had given their lives; and slowly, year by year, the earth would take them. Slowly the damp and rot would infest the pine boxes which held their bodies, and slowly it would touch their flesh, and finally it would consume the last vestiges of their substances. And they would become a meaningless part of that stubborn earth to which they had long ago given themselves.

He let Tobe stay on at the farm through the winter; in the spring of 1928 he put the farm up for sale. The understanding was that Tobe was to remain on the farm until it was sold, and whatever he raised would belong to him. Tobe fixed the place up as best he could, repairing the house and repainting the small barn. Even so, it was not until early in the spring of 1929 that Stoner found a suitable buyer. He accepted the first offer he received, of a little over two thousand dollars; he gave Tobe a few hundred dollars, and in late August sent the rest of it to his father-in-law, to reduce the amount owed on the house in Columbia.

In October of that year the stock market failed, and local newspapers carried stories about Wall Street, about fortunes ruined and great lives altered. Few people in Columbia were; touched; it was a conservative community, and almost none of the townspeople had money in stocks or bonds. But news began to come in of bank failures across the country, and the beginnings of uncertainty touched some of the townspeople; a few farmers withdrew their savings, and a few more (urged by the local bankers) increased their deposits. But no one was really apprehensive until word came of the failure of a small private bank, the Merchant's Trust, in St. Louis.

Stoner was at lunch in the University cafeteria when the news came, and he immediately went home to tell Edith. The Merchant's Trust was the bank that held the mortgage on their home, and the bank of which Edith's father was president. Edith called St. Louis that afternoon and talked to her mother; her mother was cheerful, and she told Edith that Mr. Bostwick had assured her that there was nothing to worry about, that everything would be all right in a few weeks.

Three days after that Horace Bostwick was dead, a suicide. He went to his office at the bank one morning in an unusually cheerful mood; he greeted several of the bank employees who still worked behind the closed doors of the bank, went into his office after telling his secretary that he would receive no calls, and locked his door. At about ten o'clock in the morning he shot himself in the head with a revolver he had purchased the day before and brought with him in his briefcase. He left no note behind him; but the papers neatly arranged on his desk told all that he had to tell. And what he had to tell was simply financial ruin. Like his Bostonian father, he had invested unwisely, not only his own money but also the bank's; and his ruin was so complete that he could imagine no relief. As it turned out, the ruin was not so nearly total as he thought at the moment of his suicide. After the estate was settled, the family house remained intact, and some minor real estate on the outskirts of St. Louis was sufficient to furnish his wife with a small income for the rest of her life.

But this was not known immediately. William Stoner received the telephone call that informed him of Horace Bostwick's ruin and suicide, and he broke the news to Edith as gently as his estrangement from her would allow him.

Edith took the news calmly, almost as if she had been expecting it. She looked at Stoner for several moments without speaking; then she shook her head and said absently, "Poor mother. What will she do? There has always been someone to take care of her. How will she live?"

Stoner said, "Tell her"—he paused awkwardly—"tell her that, if she wants to, she can come live with us. She will be welcome."

Edith smiled at him with a curious mixture of fondness and contempt. "Oh, Willy. She'd rather die herself. Don't you know that?"

Stoner nodded. "I suppose I do," he said.

So on the evening of the day that Stoner received the call, Edith left Columbia to go to St. Louis for the funeral and to stay there as long as she was needed. When she had been gone a week Stoner received a brief note informing him that she would remain with her mother for another two weeks, perhaps longer. She was gone for nearly two months, and William was alone in the big house with his daughter.

For the first few days the emptiness of the house was strangely and unexpectedly disquieting. But he got used to the emptiness and began to enjoy it; within a week he knew himself to be as happy as he had been in years, and when he thought of Edith 'sinevitable return, it was with a quiet regret that he no longer needed to hide from himself.

Grace had had her sixth birthday in the spring of that year, and she started her first year of school that fall. Every morning Stoner got her ready for school, and he was back from the University in the afternoon in time to greet her when she came home.

At the age of six Grace was a tall, slender child with hair that was more blond than red; her skin was perfectly fair, and her eyes were dark blue, almost violet. She was quiet and cheerful, and she had a delight in things that gave her father a feeling that was like nostalgic reverence.

Sometimes Grace played with neighbor children, but more often she sat with her father in his large study and watched him as he graded papers, or read, or wrote. She spoke to him, and they conversed—so quietly and seriously that William Stoner was moved by a tenderness that he never foresaw. Grace drew awkward and charming pictures on sheets of yellow paper and presented them solemnly to her father, or she read aloud to him from her first-grade reader. At night, when Stoner put her to bed and returned to his study, he was aware of her absence from his room and was comforted by the knowledge that she slept securely above him. In ways of which he was barely conscious he started her education, and he watched with amazement and love as she grew before him and as her face began to show the intelligence that worked within her.

Edith did not return to Columbia until after the first of the year, so William Stoner and his daughter spent Christmas by themselves. On Christmas morning they exchanged gifts; for her father, who did not smoke, Grace had modeled, at the cautiously progressive school attached to the University, a crude ashtray. William gave her a new dress that he had selected himself at a downtown store, several books, and a coloring set. They sat most of the day before the small tree, talked, and watched the lights twinkle on the ornaments and the tinsel wink from the dark green fir like buried fire.

During the Christmas holiday, that curious, suspended pause in the rushing semester, William Stoner began to realize two things: he began to know how centrally important Grace had become to his existence, and he began to understand that it might be possible for him to become a good teacher.

He was ready to admit to himself that he had not been a good teacher. Always, from the time he had fumbled through his first classes of freshman English, he had been aware of the gulf that lay between what he felt for his subject and what he delivered in the classroom. He had hoped that time and experience would repair the gulf; but they had not done so. Those things that he held most deeply were most profoundly betrayed when he spoke of them to his classes; what was most alive withered in his words; and what moved him most became cold in its utterance. And the consciousness of his inadequacy distressed him so greatly that the sense of it grew habitual, as much a part of him as the stoop of his shoulders.

But during the weeks that Edith was in St. Louis, when he lectured, he now and then found himself so lost in his subject that he became forgetful of his inadequacy, of himself, and even of the students before him. Now and then he became so caught by his enthusiasm that he stuttered, gesticulated, and ignored the lecture notes that usually guided his talks. At first he was disturbed by his outbursts, as if he presumed too familiarly upon his subject, and he apologized to his students; but when they began coming up to him after class, and when in their papers they began to show hints of imagination and the revelation of a tentative love, he was encouraged to do what he had never been taught to do. The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.

He was both saddened and heartened by his discovery of what he might do; beyond his intention, he felt he had cheated both his students and himself. The students who had been able theretofore to plod through his courses by the repetition of mechanical steps began to look at him with puzzlement and resentment; those who had not taken courses from him began to sit in on his lectures and nod to him in the halls. He spoke more confidently and felt a warm hard severity gather within him. He suspected that he was beginning, ten years late, to discover who he was; and the figure he saw was both more and less than he had once imagined it to be. He felt himself at last beginning to be a teacher, which was simply a man to whom his book is true, to whom is given a dignity of art that has little to do with his foolishness or weakness or inadequacy as a man. It was a knowledge of which he could not speak, but one which changed him, once he had it, so that no one could mistake its presence.

Thus, when Edith came back from St. Louis, she found him changed in a way that she could not understand but of which she was instantly aware. She returned without warning on an afternoon train and walked through the living room into the study where her husband and her daughter quietly sat. She had meant to shock them both by her sudden presence and by her changed appearance; but when William looked up at her, and she saw the surprise in his eyes, she knew at once that the real change had come over him, and that it was so deep that the effect of her appearance was lost; and she thought to herself, a little distantly and yet with some surprise, I know him better than I ever realized.

William was surprised at her presence and her altered appearance, but neither could move him now as they might once have done. He looked at her for several moments and then got up from his desk, went across the room, and greeted her gravely.

Edith had bobbed her hair and wore over it one of those hats that hugged her head so tightly that the cropped hair lay close to her face like an irregular frame; her lips were painted a bright orange-red, and two small spots of rouge sharpened her cheekbones. She wore one of those short dresses that had become fashionable among the younger women during the past few years; it hung straight down from her shoulders and ended just above her knees. She smiled self-consciously at her husband and walked across the room to her daughter, who sat on the floor and looked up at her quietly and studiously. She knelt awkwardly, her new dress tight around her legs.

"Gracie, honey," she said in a voice that seemed to William to be strained and brittle, "did you miss your mommy? Did you think she was never coming back?"

Grace kissed her mother on the cheek and looked at her solemnly. "You look different," she said.

Edith laughed and got up from the floor; she whirled around, holding her hands above her head. "I have a new dress and new shoes and a new hair-do. Do you like them?"

Grace nodded dubiously. "You look different," she said again.

Edith's smile widened; there was a pale smear of lipstick on one of her teeth. She turned to William and asked, "Do I look different?"

"Yes," William said. "Very charming. Very pretty."

She laughed at him and shook her head. "Poor Willy," she said. Then she turned again to her daughter. "I am different, I believe," she said to her. "I really believe I am."

But William Stoner knew that she was speaking to him. And at that moment, somehow, he also knew that beyond her intention or understanding, unknown to herself, Edith was trying to announce to him a new declaration of war.