The guests moved around him, exchanged seats, altered their inflections as they found new partners for conversation. Stoner saw them through a haze, as if he were an audience. After a while Gordon Finch came into the room, and Stoner got up from his chair and walked across the room to him. Almost rudely he interrupted Finch’s conversation with an older man. Drawing him aside but not lowering his voice, he asked to be introduced to the young woman pouring tea.
Finch looked at him for a moment, the annoyed frown that had begun to pucker his forehead smoothing as his eyes widened. “You what?” Finch said. Though he was shorter than Stoner, he seemed to be looking down on him.
“I want you to introduce me,” Stoner said. He felt his face warm. “Do you know her?”
“Sure,” Finch said. The start of a grin began to tug at his mouth. “She’s some kind of cousin of the dean’s, down from St. Louis, visiting an aunt.” The grin widened. “Old Bill. What do you know. Sure, I’ll introduce you. Come on.”
Her name was Edith Elaine Bostwick, and she lived with her parents in St. Louis, where the previous spring she had finished a two-year course of study at a private seminary for young ladies; she was visiting her mother’s older sister in Columbia for a few weeks, and in the spring they were to make the Grand Tour of Europe—an event once again possible, now that the war was over. Her father, the president of one of the smaller St. Louis banks, was a transplanted New Englander; he had come west in the seventies and married the oldest daughter of a well-to-do central Missouri family. Edith had lived all her life in St. Louis; a few years before she had gone east with her parents to Boston for the season; she had been to the opera in New York and had visited the museums. She was twenty years of age, she played the piano, and had artistic leanings which her mother encouraged.
Later, William Stoner could not remember how he learned these things, that first afternoon and early evening at Josiah Claremont’s house; for the time of his meeting was blurred and formal, like the figured tapestry on the stair wall off the foyer. He remembered that he spoke to her that she might look at him, remain near him, and give him the pleasure of hearing her soft, thin voice answering his questions and making perfunctory questions in return.
The guests began to leave. Voices called good-bys, doors slammed, and the rooms emptied. Stoner remained behind after most of the other guests had departed; and when Edith’s carriage came he followed her into the foyer and helped her with her coat. Just before she started outside he asked her if he might call on her the following evening.
As if she had not heard him she opened the door and stood for several moments without moving: the cold air swept through the doorway and touched Stoner’s hot face. She turned and looked at him and blinked several times; her pale eyes were speculative, almost bold. At last she nodded and said, “Yes. You may call.” She did not smile.
And so he called, walking across town to her aunt’s house on an intensely cold midwestern winter night. No cloud was overhead; the half-moon shone upon a light snow that had fallen earlier in the afternoon. The streets were deserted, and the muffled silence was broken by the dry snow crunching underfoot as he walked. He stood for a long while outside the large house to which he had come, listening to the silence. The cold numbed his feet, but he did not move. From the curtained windows a dim light fell upon the blue-white snow like a yellow smudge; he thought he saw movement inside, but he could not be sure. Deliberately, as if committing himself to something, he stepped forward and walked down the path to the porch and knocked on the front door.
Edith’s aunt (her name, Stoner had learned earlier, was Emma Darley, and she had been widowed for a number of years) met him at the door and asked him to come in. She was a short, plump woman with fine white hair that floated about her face; her dark eyes twinkled moistly, and she spoke softly and breathlessly as if she were telling secrets. Stoner followed her into the parlor and sat, facing her, on a long walnut sofa, the seat and back of which were covered with thick blue velvet. Snow had clung to his shoes; he watched it melt and form damp patches on the thick floral rug under his feet.
“Edith tells me you teach at the University, Mr. Stoner,” Mrs. Darley said.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said and cleared his throat.
“It’s so nice to be able to talk to one of the young professors there again,” Mrs. Darley said brightly. “My late husband, Mr. Darley, was on the board of trustees at the University for a number of years—but I guess you know that.”
“No, ma’am,” Stoner said.
“Oh,” Mrs. Darley said. “Well, we used to have some of the younger professors over for tea in the afternoons. But that was quite a few years ago, before the war. You were in the war, Professor Stoner?”
“No, ma’am,” Stoner said. “I was at the University.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Darley said. She nodded brightly. “And you teach—?”
“English,” Stoner said. “And I’m not a professor. I’m just an instructor.” He knew his voice was harsh; he could not control it. He tried to smile.
“Ah, yes,” she said. “Shakespeare ... Browning ...”
A silence came between them. Stoner twisted his hands together and looked at the floor.
Mrs. Darley said, “I’ll see if Edith is ready. If you’ll excuse me?”
Stoner nodded and got to his feet as she went out. He heard fierce whispers in a back room. He stood for several minutes more.
Suddenly Edith was standing in the wide doorway, pale and unsmiling. They looked at each other without recognition. Edith took a backward step and then came forward, her lips thin and tense. They shook hands gravely and sat together on the sofa. They had not spoken.
She was even taller than he remembered, and more fragile. Her face was long and slender, and she kept her lips closed over rather strong teeth. Her skin had the kind of transparency that shows a hint of color and warmth upon any provocation. Her hair was a light reddish-brown, and she wore it piled in thick tresses upon her head. But it was her eyes that caught and held him, as they had done the day before. They were very large and of the palest blue that he could imagine. When he looked at them he seemed drawn out of himself, into a mystery that he could not apprehend. He thought her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and he said impulsively, “I—I want to know about you.” She drew back from him a little. He said hastily, “I mean—yesterday, at the reception, we didn’t really have a chance to talk. I wanted to talk to you, but there were so many people. People sometimes get in your way.”
“It was a very nice reception,” Edith said faintly. “I thought everyone was very nice.”
“Oh, yes, of course,” Stoner said. “I meant ...” He did not go on. Edith was silent.
He said, “I understand you and your aunt will be going to Europe in a little while.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Europe ...” He shook his head. “You must be very excited.”
She nodded reluctantly.
“Where will you go? I mean—what places?”
“England,” she said. “France. Italy.”
“And you’ll be going—in the spring?”
“April,” she said.
“Five months,” he said. “It isn’t very long. I hope that in that time we can—”
“I’m only here for three more weeks,” she said quickly. “Then I go back to St. Louis. For Christmas.”
“That is a short time.” He smiled and said awkwardly, “Then I’ll have to see you as often as I can, so that we can get to know each other.”
She looked at him almost with horror. “I didn’t mean that,” she said. “Please ...”
Stoner was silent for a moment. “I’m sorry, I—But I do want to call on you again, as often as you’ll let me. May I?”
“Oh,” she said. “Well.” Her thin fingers were laced together in her lap, and her knuckles were white where the skin was stretched. She had very pale freckles on the backs of her hands.
Stoner said, “This is going
badly, isn’t it? You must forgive me. I haven’t known anyone like you before, and I say clumsy things. You must forgive me if I’ve embarrassed you.”
“Oh, no,” she said. She turned to him and pulled her lips in what he knew must be a smile. “Not at all. I’m having a lovely time. Really.”
He did not know what to say. He mentioned the weather outside and apologized for having tracked snow upon the rug; she murmured something. He spoke of the classes he had to teach at the University, and she nodded, puzzled. At last they sat in silence. Stoner got to his feet; he moved slowly and heavily, as if he were tired. Edith looked up at him expressionlessly.
“Well,” he said and cleared his throat. “It’s getting late, and I—Look. I’m sorry. May I call on you again in a few days? Perhaps ...”
It was as if he had not spoken to her. He nodded, said, “Good night,” and turned to go.
Edith Bostwick said in a high shrill voice without inflection, “When I was a little girl about six years old I could play the piano and I liked to paint and I was very shy so my mother sent me to Miss Thorndyke’s School for Girls in St. Louis. I was the youngest one there, but that was all right because Daddy was a member of the board and he arranged it. I didn’t like it at first but finally I just loved it. They were all very nice girls and well-to-do and I made some lifelong friends there, and—”
Stoner had turned back when she began to speak, and he looked at her with an amazement that did not show on his face. Her eyes were fixed straight before her, her face was blank, and her lips moved as if, without understanding, she read from an invisible book. He walked slowly across the room and sat down beside her. She did not seem to notice him; her eyes remained fixed straight ahead, and she continued to tell him about herself, as he had asked her to do. He wanted to tell her to stop, to comfort her, to touch her. He did not move or speak.
She continued to talk, and after a while he began to hear what she was saying. Years later it was to occur to him that in that hour and a half on that December evening of their first extended time together, she told him more about herself than she ever told him again. And when it was over, he felt that they were strangers in a way that he had not thought they would be, and he knew that he was in love.
Edith Elaine Bostwick was probably not aware of what she said to William Stoner that evening, and if she had been she could not have realized its significance. But Stoner knew what she said, and he never forgot it; what he heard was a kind of confession, and what he thought he understood was a plea for help.
As he got to know her better, he learned more of her childhood; and he came to realize that it was typical of that of most girls of her time and circumstance. She was educated upon the premise that she would be protected from the gross events that life might thrust in her way, and upon the premise that she had no other duty than to be a graceful and accomplished accessory to that protection, since she belonged to a social and economic class to which protection was an almost sacred obligation. She attended private schools for girls where she learned to read, to write, and to do simple arithmetic; in her leisure she was encouraged to do needlepoint, to play the piano, to paint water colors, and to discuss some of the more gentle works of literature. She was also instructed in matters of dress, carriage, ladylike diction, and morality.
Her moral training, both at the schools she attended and at home, was negative in nature, prohibitive in intent, and almost entirely sexual. The sexuality, however, was indirect and unacknowledged; therefore it suffused every other part of her education, which received most of its energy from that recessive and unspoken moral force. She learned that she would have duties toward her husband and family and that she must fulfill them.
Her childhood was an exceedingly formal one, even in the most ordinary moments of family life. Her parents behaved toward each other with a distant courtesy; Edith never saw pass between them the spontaneous warmth of either anger or love. Anger was days of courteous silence, and love was a word of courteous endearment. She was an only child, and loneliness was one of the earliest conditions of her life.
So she grew up with a frail talent in the more genteel arts, and no knowledge of the necessity of living from day to day. Her needlepoint was delicate and useless, she painted misty landscapes of thin water-color washes, and she played the piano with a forceless but precise hand; yet she was ignorant of her own bodily functions, she had never been alone to care for her own self one day of her life, nor could it ever have occurred to her that she might become responsible for the well-being of another. Her life was invariable, like a low hum; and it was watched over by her mother, who, when Edith was a child, would sit for hours watching her paint her pictures or play her piano, as if no other occupation were possible for either of them.
At the age of thirteen Edith went through the usual sexual transformation; she also went through a physical transformation that was more uncommon. In the space of a few months she grew almost a foot, so that her height was near that of a grown man. And the association between the ungainliness of her body and her awkward new sexual estate was one from which she never fully recovered. These changes intensified a natural shyness—she was distant from her classmates at school, she had no one at home to whom she could talk, and she turned more and more inward upon herself.
Upon that inner privacy William Stoner now intruded. And something unsuspected within her, some instinct, made her call him back when he started to go out the door, made her speak quickly and desperately, as she had never spoken before, and as she would never speak again.
During the next two weeks he saw her nearly every evening. They went to a concert sponsored by the new music department at the University; on evenings when it was not too cold they took slow, solemn walks through the streets of Columbia; but more often they sat in Mrs. Darley’s parlor. Sometimes they talked, and Edith played for him, while he listened and watched her hands move lifelessly over the keys. After that first evening together their conversation was curiously impersonal; he was unable to draw her out of her reserve, and when he saw that his efforts to do so embarrassed her, he stopped trying. Yet there was a kind of ease between them, and he imagined that they had an understanding. Less than a week before she was to return to St. Louis he declared his love to her and proposed marriage.
Though he did not know exactly how she would take the declaration and proposal, he was surprised at her equanimity. After he spoke she gave him a long look that was deliberative and curiously bold; and he was reminded of the first afternoon, after he had asked permission to call on her, when she had looked at him from the doorway where a cold wind was blowing upon them. Then she dropped her glance; and the surprise that came upon her face seemed to him unreal. She said she had never thought of him that way, that she had never imagined, that she did not know.
“You must have known I loved you,” he said. “I don’t see how I could have hidden it.”
She said with some hint of animation, “I didn’t. I don’t know anything about that.”
“Then I must tell you again,” he said gently. “And you must get used to it. I love you, and I cannot imagine living without you.”
She shook her head, as if confused. “My trip to Europe,” she said faintly. “Aunt Emma ...”
He felt a laugh come up in his throat, and he said in happy confidence, “Ah, Europe. I’ll take you to Europe. We’ll see it together someday.”
She pulled away from him and put her fingertips upon her forehead. “You must give me time to think. And I would have to talk to Mother and Daddy before I could even consider ...”
And she would not commit herself further than that. She was not to see him again before she left for St. Louis in a few days, and she would write him from there after she talked to her parents and had things settled in her mind. When he left that evening he stooped to kiss her; she turned her head, and his lips brushed her cheek. She gave his hand a little squeeze and let him out the front door without looking at him again.
Ten days
later he got his letter from her. It was a curiously formal note, and it mentioned nothing that had passed between them; it said that she would like him to meet her parents and that they were all looking forward to seeing him when he came to St. Louis, the following weekend if that was possible.
Edith’s parents met him with the cool formality he had expected, and they tried at once to destroy any sense of ease he might have had. Mrs. Bostwick would ask him a question, and upon his answer would say, “Y-e-es,” in a most doubtful manner, and look at him curiously, as if his face were smudged or his nose were bleeding. She was tall and thin like Edith, and at first Stoner was startled by a resemblance he had not anticipated; but Mrs. Bostwick’s face was heavy and lethargic, without any strength or delicacy, and it bore the deep marks of what must have been a habitual dissatisfaction.
Horace Bostwick was also tall, but he was curiously and unsubstantially heavy, almost corpulent; a fringe of gray hair curled about an otherwise bald skull, and folds of skin hung loosely around his jaws. When he spoke to Stoner he looked directly above his head as if he saw something behind him, and when Stoner answered he drummed his thick fingers upon the center piping of his vest.
Edith greeted Stoner as if he were a casual visitor and then drifted away unconcernedly, busying herself with inconsequential tasks. His eyes followed her, but he could not make her look at him.
It was the largest and most elegant house that Stoner had ever been in. The rooms were very high and dark, and they were crowded with vases of all sizes and shapes, dully gleaming silverwork upon marble-topped tables and commodes and chests, and richly tapestried furniture with most delicate lines. They drifted through several rooms to a large parlor, where, Mrs. Bostwick murmured, she and her husband were in the habit of sitting and chatting informally with friends. Stoner sat in a chair so fragile that he was afraid to move upon it; he felt it shift beneath his weight.
Stoner Page 6
