When they left there late in the afternoon the sky had clouded and a thin drizzle had started; but William Stoner carried within him the warmth he had gathered in the museum. They got back to the hotel shortly after sunset; Edith went into the bedroom to rest, and William called downstairs to have a light dinner sent to their rooms; and on a sudden inspiration, he went downstairs himself into the saloon and asked for a bottle of champagne to be iced and sent up within the hour. The bartender nodded glumly and told him that it would not be a good champagne. By the first of July, Prohibition would be national; already it was illegal to brew or distill liquors; and there were no more than fifty bottles of champagne of any sort in the cellars of the hotel. And he would have to charge more than the champagne was worth. Stoner smiled and told him that would be all right.
Although on special occasions of celebration in her parents’ home Edith had taken a little wine, she had never before tasted champagne. As they ate their dinner, set up on a small square table in their sitting room, she glanced nervously at the strange bottle in its bucket of ice. Two white candles in dull brass holders glowed unevenly against the darkness; William had turned out the other lights. The candles flickered between them as they talked, and the light caught the curves of the smooth dark bottle and glittered upon the ice that surrounded it. They were nervous and cautiously gay.
Inexpertly he withdrew the cork from the champagne; Edith jumped at the loud report; white froth spurted from the bottle neck and drenched his hand. They laughed at his clumsiness. They drank a glass of the wine, and Edith pretended tipsiness. They drank another glass. William thought he saw a languor come over her, a quietness fall upon her face, a pensiveness darken her eyes. He rose and went behind her, where she sat at the little table; he put his hands upon her shoulders, marveling at the thickness and heaviness of his fingers upon the delicacy of her flesh and bone. She stiffened beneath his touch, and he made his hands go gently to the sides of her thin neck and let them brush into the fine reddish hair; her neck was rigid, the cords vibrant in their tensity. He put his hands on her arms and lifted gently, so that she rose from the chair; he turned her to face him. Her eyes, wide and pale and nearly transparent in the candlelight, looked upon him blankly. He felt a distant closeness to her, and a pity for her helplessness; desire thickened in his throat so that he could not speak. He pulled her a little toward the bedroom, feeling a quick hard resistance in her body, and feeling at the same moment a willed putting away of the resistance.
He left the door to the unlighted bedroom open; the candlelight glowed feebly in the darkness. He murmured as if to comfort and assure her, but his words were smothered and he could not hear what he said. He put his hands upon her body and fumbled for the buttons that would open her to him. She pushed him away impersonally; in the dimness her eyes were closed and her lips tight. She turned away from him and with a quick movement loosened her dress so that it fell crumpled about her feet. Her arms and shoulders were bare; she shuddered as if from cold and said in a flat voice, “Go in the other room. I’ll be ready in a minute.” He touched her arms and put his lips to her shoulder, but she would not turn to him.
In the sitting room he stared at the candles that flickered over the remains of their dinner, in the midst of which rested the bottle of champagne, still more than half full. He poured a little of the wine into a glass and tasted it; it had grown warm and sweetish.
When he returned, Edith was in bed with the covers pulled to her chin, her face turned upward, her eyes closed, a thin frown creasing her forehead. Silently, as if she were asleep, Stoner undressed and got into bed beside her. For several moments he lay with his desire, which had become an impersonal thing, belonging to himself alone. He spoke to Edith, as if to find a haven for what he felt; she did not answer. He put his hand upon her and felt beneath the thin cloth of her nightgown the flesh he had longed for. He moved his hand upon her; she did not stir; her frown deepened. Again he spoke, saying her name to silence; then he moved his body upon her, gentle in his clumsiness. When he touched the softness of her thighs she turned her head sharply away and lifted her arm to cover her eyes. She made no sound.
Afterward he lay beside her and spoke to her in the quietness of his love. Her eyes were open then, and they stared at him out of the shadow; there was no expression on her face. Suddenly she flung the covers from her and crossed swiftly to the bathroom. He saw the light go on and heard her retch loudly and agonizingly. He called to her and went across the room; the door to the bathroom was locked. He called to her again; she did not answer. He went back to the bed and waited for her. After several minutes of silence the light in the bathroom went off and the door opened. Edith came out and walked stiffly to the bed.
“It was the champagne,” she said. “I shouldn’t have had the second glass.”
She pulled the covers over her and turned away from him; in a few moments her breathing was regular and heavy in sleep.
V
They returned to Columbia two days earlier than they had planned; restless and strained by their isolation, it was as if they walked together in a prison. Edith said that they really ought to get back to Columbia so that William could prepare for his classes and so that she could begin to get them settled in their new apartment. Stoner agreed at once—and told himself that things would be better once they were in a place of their own, among people they knew and in surroundings that were familiar. They packed their belongings that afternoon and were on the train to Columbia the same evening.
In the hurried, vague days before their marriage Stoner had found a vacant second-floor apartment in an old barnlike house five blocks from the University. It was dark and bare, with a small bedroom, a tiny kitchen, and a huge living room with high windows; it had at one time been occupied by an artist, a teacher at the University, who had been none too tidy; the dark, wide-planked floors were splotched with brilliant yellows and blues and reds, and the walls were smudged with paint and dirt. Stoner thought the place romantic and commodious, and he judged it to be a good place to start a new life.
Edith moved into the apartment as if it were an enemy to be conquered. Though unused to physical labor, she scraped away most of the paint from the floors and walls and scrubbed at the dirt she imagined secreted everywhere; her hands blistered and her face became strained, with dark hollows beneath the eyes. When Stoner tried to help her she became stubborn, her lips tightened, and she shook her head; he needed the time for his studies, she said; this was her job. When he forced his help upon her, she became almost sullen, thinking herself to be humiliated. Puzzled and helpless, he withdrew his aid and watched as, grimly, Edith continued awkwardly to scrub the gleaming floors and walls, to sew curtains and hang them unevenly from the high windows, to repair and paint and repaint the used furniture they had begun to accumulate. Though inept, she worked with a silent and intense ferocity, so that by the time William got home from the University in the afternoon she was exhausted. She would drag herself to prepare the evening meal, eat a few bites, and then with a murmur vanish into the bedroom to sleep like one drugged until after William had left for his classes the next morning.
Within a month he knew that his marriage was a failure; within a year he stopped hoping that it would improve. He learned silence and did not insist upon his love. If he spoke to her or touched her in tenderness, she turned away from him within herself and became wordless, enduring, and for days afterward drove herself to new limits of exhaustion. Out of an unspoken stubbornness they both had, they shared the same bed; sometimes at night, in her sleep, she unknowingly moved against him. And sometimes, then, his resolve and knowledge crumbled before his love, and he moved upon her. If she was sufficiently roused from her sleep she tensed and stiffened, turning her head sideways in a familiar gesture and burying it in her pillow, enduring violation; at such times Stoner performed his love as quickly as he could, hating himself for his haste and regretting his passion. Less frequently she remained half numbed by sleep; then she was pass
ive, and she murmured drowsily, whether in protest or surprise he did not know. He came to look forward to these rare and unpredictable moments, for in that sleep-drugged acquiescence he could pretend to himself that he found a kind of response.
And he could not speak to her of what he took to be her unhappiness. When he attempted to do so, she accepted what he said as a reflection upon her adequacy and her self, and she became as morosely withdrawn from him as she did when he made love to her. He blamed his clumsiness for her withdrawal and took upon himself the responsibility for what she felt.
With a quiet ruthlessness that came from his desperation, he experimented with small ways of pleasing her. He brought her gifts, which she accepted indifferently, sometimes commenting mildly upon their expense; he took her on walks and picnics in the wooded countryside around Columbia, but she tired easily and sometimes became ill; he talked to her of his work, as he had done in their courtship, but her interest had become perfunctory and indulgent.
At last, though he knew her to be shy, he insisted as gently as he could that they begin to entertain. They had an informal tea to which a few of the younger instructors and assistant professors in the department were invited, and they gave several small dinner parties. In no way did Edith show whether she was pleased or displeased; but her preparations for the events were so frenzied and obsessive that by the time the guests arrived she was half hysterical from strain and weariness, though no one except William was really aware of this.
She was a good hostess. She talked to her guests with an animation and ease that made her seem a stranger to William, and she spoke to him in their presence with an intimacy and fondness that always surprised him. She called him Willy, which touched him oddly, and sometimes she laid a soft hand upon his shoulder.
But when the guests left, the facade fell upon itself and revealed her collapse. She spoke bitterly of the departed guests, imagining obscure insults and slights; she quietly and desperately recounted what she thought to be unforgivable failures of her own; she sat still and brooding in the litter the guests had left and would not be roused by William and would answer him briefly and distraughtly in a flat, monotonous voice.
Only once had the facade cracked when guests were present.
Several months after Stoner’s and Edith’s marriage, Gordon Finch had become engaged to a girl whom he had met casually while he was stationed in New York and whose parents lived in Columbia. Finch had been given a permanent post as assistant dean, and it was tacitly understood that when Josiah Claremont died Finch would be among the first to be considered for the deanship of the College. Somewhat belatedly, in celebration of both Finch’s new position and the announcement of his engagement, Stoner asked him and his fiancée to dinner.
They came just before dusk on a warm evening in late May, in a shining black new touring car which gave off a series of explosions as Finch expertly brought it to a halt on the brick road in front of Stoner’s house. He honked the horn and waved gaily until William and Edith came downstairs. A small dark girl with a round, smiling face sat beside him.
He introduced her as Caroline Wingate, and the four of them talked for a moment while Finch helped her descend from the car.
“Well, how do you like it?” Finch asked, thumping the front fender of the car with his closed fist. “A beauty, isn’t it? Belongs to Caroline’s father. I’m thinking of getting one just like it, so ...” His voice trailed away and his eyes narrowed; he regarded the automobile speculatively and coolly, as if it were the future.
Then he became lively and jocular again. With mock secrecy he put his forefinger to his lips, looked furtively around, and took a large brown paper bag from the front seat of the car. “Hooch,” he whispered. “Just off the boat. Cover me, pal; maybe we can make it to the house.”
The dinner went well. Finch was more affable than Stoner had seen him in years; Stoner thought of himself and Finch and Dave Masters sitting together on those distant Friday afternoons after class, drinking beer and talking. The fiancée, Caroline, said little; she smiled happily as Finch joked and winked. It came to Stoner as an almost envious shock to realize that Finch was genuinely fond of this dark pretty girl, and that her silence came from a rapt affection for him.
Even Edith lost some of her strain and tenseness; she smiled easily, and her laughter was spontaneous. Finch was playful and familiar with Edith in a way, Stoner realized, that he, her own husband, could never be; and Edith seemed happier than she had been in months.
After dinner Finch removed the brown paper bag from the icebox, where he had placed it earlier to cool, and took from it a number of dark brown bottles. It was a home brew that he made with great secrecy and ceremony in the closet of his bachelor apartment.
“No room for my clothes,” he said, “but a man’s got to keep his sense of values.”
Carefully, with his eyes squinted, with the light glistening upon his fair skin and thinning blond hair, like a chemist measuring a rare substance, he poured the beer from the bottles into glasses.
“Got to be careful with this stuff,” he said. “You get a lot of sediment at the bottom, and if you pour it off too quick, you get it in the glass.”
They each drank a glass of the beer, complimenting Finch upon its taste. It was, indeed, surprisingly good, dry and light and of a good color. Even Edith finished her glass and took another.
They became a little drunk; they laughed vaguely and sentimentally; they saw each other anew.
Holding his glass up to the light, Stoner said, “I wonder how Dave would have liked this beer.”
“Dave?” Finch asked.
“Dave Masters. Remember how he used to love beer?”
“Dave Masters,” Finch said. “Good old Dave. It’s a damned shame.”
“Masters,” Edith said. She was smiling fuzzily. “Wasn’t he that friend of yours that was killed in the war?”
“Yes,” Stoner said. “That’s the one.” The old sadness came over him, but he smiled at Edith.
“Good old Dave,” Finch said. “Edie, your husband and I and Dave used to really lap it up—long before he knew of you, of course. Good old Dave ...”
They smiled at the memory of David Masters.
“He was a good friend of yours?” Edith asked.
Stoner nodded. “He was a good friend.”
“Château-Thierry.” Finch drained his glass. “War’s a hell of a thing.” He shook his head. “But old Dave. He’s probably somewhere laughing at us right now. He wouldn’t be feeling sorry for himself. I wonder if he ever really got to see any of France?”
“I don’t know,” Stoner said. “He was killed so soon after he got over.”
“Be a shame if he didn’t. I always thought that was one of the main reasons he joined up. To see some of Europe.”
“Europe,” Edith said distinctly.
“Yeah,” Finch said. “Old Dave didn’t want too many things, but he did want to see Europe before he died.”
“I was going to Europe once,” Edith said. She was smiling, and her eyes glittered helplessly. “Do you remember, Willy? I was going with my Aunt Emma just before we got married. Do you remember?”
“I remember,” Stoner said.
Edith laughed gratingly and shook her head as if she were puzzled. “It seems like a long time ago, but it wasn’t. How long has it been, Willy?”
“Edith—” Stoner said.
“Let’s see, we were going in April. And then a year. And now it’s May. I would have been ...” Suddenly her eyes filled with tears, though she was still smiling with a fixed brightness. “I’ll never get there now, I guess. Aunt Emma is going to die pretty soon, and I’ll never have a chance to ...”
Then, with the smile still tightening her lips and her eyes streaming with tears, she began to sob. Stoner and Finch rose from their chairs.
“Edith,” Stoner said helplessly.
“Oh, leave me alone!” With a curious twisting motion she stood erect before them, her eyes shut tight and h
er hands clenched at her sides. “All of you! Just leave me alone!” And she turned and stumbled into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
For a moment no one spoke; they listened to the muffled sound of Edith’s sobbing. Then Stoner said, “You’ll have to excuse her. She has been tired and not too well. The strain—”
“Sure, I know how it is, Bill.” Finch laughed hollowly. “Women and all. Guess I’ll be getting used to it pretty soon myself.” He looked at Caroline, laughed again, and lowered his voice. “Well, we won’t disturb Edie right now. You just thank her for us, tell her it was a fine meal, and you folks’ll have to come over to our place after we get settled in.”
“Thanks, Gordon,” Stoner said. “I’ll tell her.”
“And don’t worry,” Finch said. He punched Stoner on the arm. “These things happen.”
After Gordon and Caroline had left, after he heard the new car roar and sputter away into the night, William Stoner stood in the middle of the living room and listened to Edith’s dry and regular sobbing. It was a sound curiously flat and without emotion, and it went on as if it would never stop. He wanted to comfort her; he wanted to soothe her; but he did not know what to say. So he stood and listened; and after a while he realized that he had never before heard Edith cry.
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