“I suppose I am,” Stoner said.
There was a pause. “This is a hell of a job I have,” Finch said heavily. “Sometimes I think I’m not the man for it at all.”
Stoner smiled. “Dave Masters once said you weren’t a big enough son-of-a-bitch to be really successful.”
“Maybe he was right,” Finch said. “But I feel like one often enough.”
“Don’t worry about it, Gordon,” Stoner said. “I understand your position. And if I could make it easier for you I—” He paused and shook his head sharply. “But I can’t do anything right now. It will have to wait. Somehow ...”
Finch nodded and did not look at Stoner; he stared at his desk top as if it were a doom that approached him with slow inevitability. Stoner waited for a few moments, and when Finch did not speak he got up quietly and went out of the office.
Because of his conversation with Gordon Finch, Stoner was late that afternoon getting to Katherine’s apartment. Without bothering to look up or down the street he went down the walk and let himself in. Katherine was waiting for him; she had not changed clothes, and she waited almost formally, sitting erect and alert upon the couch.
“You’re late,” she said flatly.
“Sorry,” he said. “I got held up.”
Katherine lit a cigarette; her hand was trembling slightly. She surveyed the match for a moment, and blew it out with a puff of smoke. She said, “One of my fellow instructors made rather a point of telling me that Dean Finch called you in this afternoon.”
“Yes,” Stoner said. “That’s what held me up.”
“Was it about us?”
Stoner nodded. “He had heard a few things.”
“I imagined that was it,” Katherine said. “My instructor friend seemed to know something that she didn’t want to tell. Oh, Christ, Bill!”
“It’s not like that at all,” Stoner said. “Gordon is an old friend. I actually believe he wants to protect us. I believe he will if he can.”
Katherine did not speak for several moments. She kicked off her shoes and lay back on the couch, staring at the ceiling. She said calmly, “Now it begins. I suppose it was too much, hoping that they would leave us alone. I suppose we never really seriously thought they would.”
“If it gets too bad,” Stoner said, “we can go away. We can do something.”
“Oh, Bill!” Katherine was laughing a little, throatily and softly. She sat up on the couch. “You are the dearest love, the dearest, dearest anyone could imagine. And I will not let them bother us. I will not!”
And for the next several weeks they lived much as they had before. With a strategy that they would not have been able to manage a year earlier, with a strength they would not have known they had, they practiced evasions and withdrawals, deploying their powers like skillful generals who must survive with meager forces. They became genuinely circumspect and cautious, and got a grim pleasure from their maneuverings. Stoner came to her apartment only after dark, when no one could see him enter; in the daytime, between classes, Katherine allowed herself to be seen at coffee shops with younger male instructors; and the hours they spent together were intensified by their common determination. They told themselves and each other that they were closer than they ever had been; and to their surprise, they realized that it was true, that the words they spoke to comfort themselves were more than consolatory. They made a closeness possible and a commitment inevitable.
It was a world of half-light in which they lived and to which they brought the better parts of themselves—so that, after a while, the outer world where people walked and spoke, where there was change and continual movement, seemed to them false and unreal. Their lives were sharply divided between the two worlds, and it seemed to them natural that they should live so divided.
During the late winter and early spring months they found together a quietness they had not had before. As the outer world closed upon them they became less aware of its presence; and their happiness was such that they had no need to speak of it to each other, or even to think of it. In Katherine’s small, dim apartment, hidden like a cave beneath the massive old house, they seemed to themselves to move outside of time, in a timeless universe of their own discovery.
Then, one day in late April, Gordon Finch again called Stoner into his office; and Stoner went down with a numbness that came from a knowledge he would not admit.
What had happened was classically simple, something that Stoner should have foreseen yet had not.
“It’s Lomax,” Finch said. “Somehow the son-of-a-bitch has got hold of it and he’s not about to let go.”
Stoner nodded. “I should have thought of that. I should have expected it. Do you think it would do any good if I talked to him?”
Finch shook his head, walked across his office, and stood before the window. Early afternoon sunlight streamed upon his face, which gleamed with sweat. He said tiredly, “You don’t understand, Bill. Lomax isn’t playing it that way. Your name hasn’t even come up. He’s working through the Driscoll girl.”
“He’s what?” Stoner asked blankly.
“You almost have to admire him,” Finch said. “Somehow he knew damn well I knew all about it. So he came in yesterday, off-hand, you know, and told me he was going to have to fire the Driscoll girl and warned me there might be a stink.”
“No,” Stoner said. His hands ached where they gripped the leather arms of the easy chair.
Finch continued, “According to Lomax, there have been complaints, from students mostly, and a few townspeople. It seems that men have been seen going in and out of her apartment at all hours—flagrant misbehavior—that sort of thing. Oh, he did it beautifully; he has no personal objection—he rather admires the girl, as a matter of fact—but he has the reputation of the department and the University to think of. We commiserated upon the necessities of bowing to the dictates of middle-class morality, agreed that the community of scholars ought to be a haven for the rebel against the Protestant ethic, and concluded that practically speaking we were helpless. He said he hoped he could let it ride until the end of the semester but doubted if he could. And all the time the son-of-a-bitch knew we understood each other perfectly.”
A tightness in his throat made it impossible for Stoner to speak. He swallowed twice and tested his voice; it was steady and flat. “What he wants is perfectly clear, of course.”
“I’m afraid it is,” Finch said.
“I knew he hated me,” Stoner said distantly. “But I never realized—I never dreamed he would—”
“Neither did I,” Finch said. He walked back to his desk and sat down heavily. “And I can’t do a thing, Bill. I’m helpless. If Lomax wants complainers, they’ll appear; if he wants witnesses, they will appear. He has quite a following, you know. And if word ever gets to the president—” He shook his head.
“What do you imagine will happen if I refuse to resign? If we just refuse to be scared?”
“He’ll crucify the girl,” Finch said flatly. “And as if by accident you’ll be dragged into it. It’s very neat.”
“Then,” Stoner said, “it appears there is nothing to be done.”
“Bill,” Finch said, and then was silent. He rested his head on his closed fists. He said dully, “There is a chance. There is just one. I think I can hold him off if you—if the Driscoll girl will just—”
“No,” Stoner said. “I don’t think I can do it. Literally, I don’t think I can do it.”
“God damn it!” Finch’s voice was anguished. “He’s counting on that! Think for a minute. What would you do? It’s April; almost May; what kind of job could you get this time of year—if you could get one at all?”
“I don’t know,” Stoner said. “Something ...”
“And what about Edith? Do you think she’s going to give in, give you a divorce without a fight? And Grace? What would it do to her, in this town, if you just took off? And Katherine? What kind of life would you have? What would it do to both of you?”
S
toner did not speak. An emptiness was beginning somewhere within him; he felt a withering, a falling away. He said at last, “Can you give me a week?—I’ve got to think. A week?”
Finch nodded. “I can hold him off that long at least. But not much longer. I’m sorry, Bill. You know that.”
“Yes.” He got up from the chair and stood for a moment, testing the heavy numbness of his legs. “I’ll let you know. I’ll let you know when I can.”
He went out of the office into the darkness of the long corridor and walked heavily into the sunlight, into the open world that was like a prison wherever he turned.
Years afterward, at odd moments, he would look back upon those days that followed his conversation with Gordon Finch and would be unable to recall them with any clarity at all. It was as if he were a dead man animated by nothing more than a habit of stubborn will. Yet he was oddly aware of himself and of the places, persons, and events which moved past him in these few days; and he knew that he presented to the public regard an appearance which belied his condition. He taught his classes, he greeted his colleagues, he attended the meetings he had to attend—and no one of the people he met from day to day knew that anything was wrong.
But from the moment he walked out of Gordon Finch’s office, he knew, somewhere within the numbness that grew from a small center of his being, that a part of his life was over, that a part of him was so near death that he could watch the approach almost with calm. He was vaguely conscious that he walked across the campus in the bright crisp heat of an early spring afternoon; the dogwood trees along the sidewalks and in the front yards were in full bloom, and they trembled like soft clouds, translucent and tenuous, before his gaze; the sweet scent of dying lilac blossoms drenched the air.
And when he got to Katherine’s apartment he was feverishly and callously gay. He brushed aside her questions about his latest encounter with the dean; he forced her to laugh; and he watched with an immeasurable sadness their last effort of gaiety, which was like a dance that life makes upon the body of death.
But finally they had to talk, he knew; though the words they said were like a performance of something they had rehearsed again and again in the privacies of their knowledge. They revealed that knowledge by grammatical usage: they progressed from the perfect—”We have been happy, haven’t we?”—to the past—”We were happy—happier than anyone, I think”—and at last came to the necessity of discourse.
Several days after the conversation with Finch, in a moment of quiet that interrupted the half-hysterical gaiety they had chosen as that convention most appropriate to see them through their last days together, Katherine said, “We don’t have much time, do we?”
“No,” Stoner said quietly.
“How much longer?” Katherine asked.
“A few days, two or three.”
Katherine nodded. “I used to think I wouldn’t be able to endure it. But I’m just numb. I don’t feel anything.”
“I know,” Stoner said. They were silent for a moment. “You know if there were anything— anything I could do, I’d—”
“Don’t,” she said. “Of course I know.”
He leaned back on the couch and looked at the low, dim ceiling that had been the sky of their world. He said calmly, “If I threw it all away—if I gave it up, just walked out—you would go with me, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” she said.
“But you know I won’t do that, don’t you?”
“Yes, I know.”
“Because then,” Stoner explained to himself, “none of it would mean anything—nothing we have done, nothing we have been. I almost certainly wouldn’t be able to teach, and you—you would become something else. We both would become something else, something other than ourselves. We would be—nothing.”
“Nothing,” she said.
“And we have come out of this, at least, with ourselves. We know that we are—what we are.”
“Yes,” Katherine said.
“Because in the long run,” Stoner said, “it isn’t Edith or even Grace, or the certainty of losing Grace, that keeps me here; it isn’t the scandal or the hurt to you or me; it isn’t the hardship we would have to go through, or even the loss of love we might have to face. It’s simply the destruction of ourselves, of what we do.”
“I know,” Katherine said.
“So we are of the world, after all; we should have known that. We did know it, I believe; but we had to withdraw a little, pretend a little, so that we could—”
“I know,” Katherine said. “I’ve known it all along, I guess. Even with the pretending, I’ve known that sometime, sometime, we would ... I’ve known.” She halted and looked at him steadily. Her eyes became suddenly bright with tears. “But damn it all, Bill! Damn it all!”
They said no more. They embraced so that neither might see the other’s face, and made love so that they would not speak. They coupled with the old tender sensuality of knowing each other well and with the new intense passion of loss. Afterward, in the black night of the little room, they lay still unspeaking, their bodies touching lightly. After a long while Katherine’s breath came steadily, as if in sleep. Stoner got up quietly, dressed in the dark, and went out of the room without awakening her. He walked the still, empty streets of Columbia until the first gray light began in the east; then he made his way to the University campus. He sat on the stone steps in front of Jesse Hall and watched the light from the east creep upon the great stone columns in the center of the quad. He thought of the fire that, before he was born, had gutted and ruined the old building; and he was distantly saddened by the view of what remained. When it was light he let himself into the hall and went to his office, where he waited until his first class began.
He didn’t see Katherine Driscoll again. After he left her, during the night, she got up, packed all her belongings, cartoned her books, and left word with the manager of the apartment house where to send them. She mailed the English office her grades, her instructions to dismiss her classes for the week and a half that remained of the semester, and her resignation. And she was on the train, on her way out of Columbia, by two o’clock that afternoon.
She must have been planning her departure for some time, Stoner realized; and he was grateful that he had not known and that she left him no final note to say what could not be said.
XIV
That summer he did not teach; and he had the first illness of his life. It was a fever of high intensity and obscure origin, which lasted only a week; but it drained him of his strength, he became very gaunt, and suffered in its aftermath a partial loss of hearing. For the entire summer he was so weak and listless that he could walk only a few steps without becoming exhausted; he spent nearly all that time in the small enclosed porch at the back of the house, lying on the day bed or sitting in the old easy chair he had had brought up from the basement. He stared out the windows or at the slatted ceiling, and stirred himself now and then to go into the kitchen to get a bite of food.
He had hardly the energy to converse with Edith or even with Grace—though sometimes Edith came into the back room, spoke to him distractedly for a few minutes, and then left him alone as abruptly as she had intruded upon him.
Once, in the middle of summer, she spoke of Katherine.
“I just heard, a day or so ago,” she said. “So your little coed has gone, has she?”
With an effort he brought his attention away from the window and turned to Edith. “Yes,” he said mildly.
“What was her name?” Edith asked. “I never can remember her name.”
“Katherine,” he said. “Katherine Driscoll.”
“Oh, yes,” Edith said. “Katherine Driscoll. Well, you see? I told you, didn’t I? I told you these things weren’t important.”
He nodded absently. Outside, in the old elm that crowded the back-yard fence, a large black-and-white bird—a magpie—had started to chatter. He listened to the sound of its calling and watched with remote fascination the open beak as it strained
out its lonely cry.
He aged rapidly that summer, so that when he went back to his classes in the fall there were few who did not recognize him with a start of surprise. His face, gone gaunt and bony, was deeply lined; heavy patches of gray ran through his hair; and he was heavily stooped, as if he carried an invisible burden. His voice had grown a little grating and abrupt, and he had a tendency to stare at one with his head lowered, so that his clear gray eyes were sharp and querulous beneath his tangled eyebrows. He seldom spoke to anyone except his students, and he responded to questions and greetings always impatiently and sometimes harshly.
He did his work with a doggedness and resolve that amused his older colleagues and enraged the younger instructors, who, like himself, taught only freshman composition; he spent hours marking and correcting freshman themes, he had student conferences every day, and he attended faithfully all departmental meetings. He did not speak often at these meetings, but when he did he spoke without tact or diplomacy, so that among his colleagues he developed a reputation for crustiness and ill temper. But with his young students he was gentle and patient, though he demanded of them more work than they were willing to give, with an impersonal firmness that was hard for many of them to understand.
It was a commonplace among his colleagues—especially the younger ones—that he was a “dedicated” teacher, a term they used half in envy and half in contempt, one whose dedication blinded him to anything that went on outside the classroom or, at the most, outside the halls of the University. There were mild jokes: after a departmental meeting at which Stoner had spoken bluntly about some recent experiments in the teaching of grammar, a young instructor remarked that “To Stoner, copulation is restricted to verbs,” and was surprised at the quality of laughter and meaningful looks exchanged by some of the older men. Someone else once said, “Old Stoner thinks that WPA stands for Wrong Pronoun Antecedent,” and was gratified to learn that his witticism gained some currency.
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