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.
IX
The interim chairmanship of the English Department, which Gordon Finch had assumed after the death of Archer Sloane, was renewed year after year, until all the members of the department grew used to a casual anarchy in which somehow classes got scheduled and taught, in which new appointments to the staff were made, in which the trivial departmental details somehow got taken care of, and in which year somehow succeeded year. It was generally understood that a permanent chairman would be appointed as soon as it became possible to make Finch the dean of Arts and Sciences, a position that he held in fact if not in office; Josiah Claremont threatened never to die, though he was seldom seen any longer wandering through the halls.
The members of the department went their ways, taught the classes they had taught the year before, and visited one another’s offices in the hours between classes. They met together formally only at the beginning of each semester when Gordon Finch called a perfunctory departmental meeting, and on those occasions when the dean of the Graduate College sent them memos requesting that they give oral and thesis examinations to graduate students who were nearing completion of their work.
Such examinations took up an increasing amount of Stoner’s time. To his surprise he began to enjoy a modest popularity as a teacher; he had to turn away students who wanted to get into his graduate seminar on the Latin Tradition and Renaissance Literature, and his undergraduate survey classes were always filled. Several graduate students asked him to direct their theses, and several more asked him to be on their thesis committees.
In the fall of 1931 the seminar was nearly filled even before registration; many students had made arrangements with Stoner at the end of the preceding year or during the summer. A week after the semester started, and after the seminar had held one meeting, a student came to Stoner’s office and asked to be let in the class.
Stoner was at his desk with a list of the seminar students before him; he was attempting to decide upon seminar tasks for them, and it was particularly difficult since many were new to him. It was a September afternoon, and he had the window next to his desk open; the front of the great building lay in shadow, so that the green lawn before it showed the precise shape of the building, with its semicircular dome and irregular roofline darkening the green and creeping imperceptibly outward over the campus and beyond. A cool breeze flowed through the window, bringing the crisp redolence of fall.
A knock came; he turned to his opened doorway and said, “Come in.”
A figure shuffled out of the darkness of the hall into the light of the room. Stoner blinked sleepily against the dimness, recognizing a student whom he had noticed in the halls but did not know. The young man’s left arm hung stiffly at his side, and his left foot dragged as he walked. His face was pale and round, his horn-rimmed eyeglasses were round, and his black thin hair was parted precisely on the side and lay close to the round skull.
“Dr. Stoner?” he asked; his voice was reedy and clipped, and he spoke distinctly.
“Yes,” Stoner said. “Won’t you have a chair?”
The young man lowered himself into the straight wooden chair beside Stoner’s desk; his leg was extended in a straight line, and his left hand, which was permanently twisted into a half-closed fist, rested upon it. He smiled, bobbed his head, and said with a curious air of self-depreciation, “You may not know me, sir; I’m Charles Walker. I’m a second-year Ph.D. candidate; I assist Dr. Lomax.”
“Yes, Mr. Walker,” Stoner said. “What can I do for you?”
“Well, I’m here to ask a favor, sir.” Walker smiled again. “I know your seminar is filled, but I want very much to get in it.” He paused and said pointedly, “Dr. Lomax suggested that I talk to you.”
“I see,” Stoner said. “What’s your specialty, Mr. Walker?”
“The Romantic poets,” Walker said. “Dr. Lomax will be the director of my dissertation.”
Stoner nodded. “How far along are you in your course work?”
“I hope to finish within two years,” Walker said.
“Well, that makes it easier,” Stoner said. “I offer the seminar every year. It’s really so full now that it’s hardly a seminar any longer, and one more person would just about finish the job. Why can’t you wait until next year if you really want the course?”
Walker’s eyes shifted away from him. “Well, frankly,” he said and flashed his smile again, “I’m the victim of a misunderstanding. All my own fault, of course. I didn’t realize that each Ph.D. student has to have at least four graduate seminars to get his degree, and I didn’t take any at all last year. And as you know, they don’t allow you to take more than one each semester. So if I’m to graduate in two years, I have to have one this semester.”
Stoner sighed. “I see. So you don’t really have a very special interest in the influence of the Latin tradition?”
“Oh, indeed I do, sir. Indeed I do. It will be most helpful in my dissertation.”
“Mr. Walker, you should know this is a rather specialized class, and I don’t encourage people to enter it unless they have a particular interest.”
“Yes, sir,” Walker said. “I assure you that I do have a particular interest.”
Stoner nodded. “How is your Latin?”
Walker bobbed his head. “Oh, it’s fine, sir. I haven’t taken my Latin exam yet, but I read it very well.”
“Do you have French or German?”
“Oh, yes, sir. Again, I haven’t taken the exams yet; I thought I’d get them all out of the way at the same time, at the end of this year. But I read them both very well.” Walker paused, then added, “Dr. Lomax said he thought I would surely be able to do the work in the seminar.”
Stoner sighed. “Very well,” he said. “Much of the reading will be in Latin, a little in French and German, though you might be able to get by without those. I’ll give you a reading list, and we’ll talk about your seminar topic next Wednesday afternoon.”
Walker thanked him effusively and arose from his chair with some difficulty. “I’ll get right on to the reading,” he said. “I’m sure you won’t regret letting me in your class, sir.”
Stoner looked at him with faint surprise. “The question had not occurred to me, Mr. Walker,” he said dryly. “I’ll see you on Wednesday.”
The seminar was held in a small basement room in the south wing of Jesse Hall. A dank but not unpleasant odor seeped from the cement walls, and feet shuffled in hollow whispers upon the bare cement floor. A single light hung from the ceiling in the center of the room and shone downward, so that those seated at desk-top chairs in the center of the room rested in a splash of brightness; but the walls were a dim gray and the corners were almost black, as if the smooth unpainted cement sucked in the light that streamed from the ceiling.
On that second Wednesday of the seminar William Stoner came into the room a few minutes late; he spoke to the students and began to arrange his books and papers on the small stained-oak desk that stood squatly before the center of a blackboard wall. He glanced at the small group scattered about the room. Some of them he knew; two of the men were Ph.D. candidates whose work he was directing; four others were M.A. students in the department who had done undergraduate work with him; of the remaining students, three were candidates for advanced degrees in modern language, one was a philosophy student doing his dissertation on the Scholastics, one was a woman of advanced middle age, a high-school teacher trying to get an M.A. during her sabbatical, and the last was a dark-haired young woman, a new instructor in the department, who had taken a job for two years while she completed a dissertat
ion she had begun after finishing her course work at an eastern university. She had asked Stoner if she might audit the seminar, and he had agreed that she might. Charles Walker was not among the group. Stoner waited a few moments more, shuffling his papers; then he cleared his throat and began the class.
“During our first meeting we discussed the scope of this seminar, and we decided that we should limit our study of the medieval Latin tradition to the first three of the seven liberal arts—that is, to grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic.” He paused and watched the faces—tentative, curious, and masklike—focus upon him and what he said.
“Such a limiting may seem foolishly rigorous to some of you; but I have no doubt that we shall find enough to keep us occupied even if we trace only superficially the course of the trivium upward into the sixteenth century. It is important that we realize that these arts of rhetoric, grammar, and dialectic meant something to a late medieval and early Renaissance man that we, today, can only dimly sense without an exercise of the historical imagination. To such a scholar, the art of grammar, for example, was not merely a mechanical disposition of the parts of speech. From late Hellenistic times through the Middle Ages, the study and practice of grammar included not only the ‘skill of letters’ mentioned by Plato and Aristotle; it included also, and this became very important, a study of poetry in its technical felicities, an exegesis of poetry both in form and substance, and nicety of style, insofar as that can be distinguished from rhetoric.”
He felt himself warming to his subject, and he was aware that several of the students had leaned forward and had stopped taking notes. He continued: “Moreover, if we in the twentieth century are asked which of these three arts is the most important, we might choose dialectic, or rhetoric—but we would be most unlikely to choose grammar. Yet the Roman and medieval scholar—and poet—would almost certainly consider grammar the most significant. We must remember—”
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