Stoner

by John Williams

  She stiffened and pulled away from him. On trembling legs she stalked across the room and stood above Grace, who had not moved.

  “You!” she spat. “Oh, my God. Oh, Gracie. How could you—oh, my God. Like your father. Your father’s blood. Oh, yes. Filth. Filth—”

  “Edith!” Stoner spoke more sharply and strode over to her. He placed his hands firmly on her upper arms and turned her away from Grace. “Go to the bathroom and throw some cold water on your face. Then go up to your room and lie down.”

  “Oh, Willy,” Edith said pleadingly. “My own little baby. My very own. How could this happen? How could she—”

  “Go on,” Stoner said. “I’ll call you after a while.”

  She tottered out of the room. Stoner looked after her without moving until he heard the tap water start in the bathroom. Then he turned to Grace, who remained looking up at him from the easy chair. He smiled at her briefly, walked across to Edith’s work table, got a straight chair, brought it back, and placed it in front of Grace’s chair, so that he could talk to her without looking down upon her upturned face.

  “Now,” he said, “why don’t you tell me about it?”

  She gave him her small soft smile. “There isn’t much to tell,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded. “I’ve been to a doctor. I just got the report this afternoon.”

  “Well,” he said and awkwardly touched her hand. “You aren’t to worry. Everything will be all right.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He asked gently, “Do you want to tell me who the father is?”

  “A student,” she said. “At the University.”

  “Had you rather not tell me?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “It doesn’t make any difference. His name is Frye. Ed Frye. He’s a sophomore. I believe he was in your freshman comp class last year.”

  “I don’t remember him,” Stoner said. “I don’t remember him at all.”

  “I’m sorry, Father,” Grace said. “It was stupid. He was a little drunk, and we didn’t take—precautions.”

  Stoner looked away from her, at the floor.

  “I’m sorry, Father. I’ve shocked you, haven’t I?”

  “No,” Stoner said. “Surprised me, perhaps. We really haven’t known each other very well these last few years, have we?”

  She looked away and said uncomfortably, “Well—I suppose not.”

  “Do you—love this boy, Grace?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I really don’t know him very well.”

  He nodded. “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It really doesn’t matter. I don’t want to be a bother.”

  They sat without speaking for a long time. Finally Stoner said, “Well, you aren’t to worry. It will be all right. Whatever you decide—whatever you want to do, it will be all right.”

  “Yes,” Grace said. She rose from the chair. Then she looked down at her father and said, “You and I, we can talk now.”

  “Yes,” Stoner said. “We can talk.”

  She went out of the studio, and Stoner waited until he heard her bedroom door close upstairs. Then, before he went to his own room, he went softly upstairs and opened the door to Edith’s bedroom. Edith was fast asleep, sprawled fully clothed on her bed, the bedside light harsh upon her face. Stoner turned the light out and went downstairs.

  The next morning at breakfast Edith was almost cheerful; she gave no sign of her hysteria of the night before, and she spoke as if the future were a hypothetical problem to be solved. After she learned the name of the boy she said brightly, “Well, now. Do you think we ought to get in touch with the parents or should we talk to the boy first? Let’s see—this is the last week in November. Let’s say two weeks. We can make all the arrangements by then, maybe even a small church wedding. Gracie, what does your friend, what’s his name—?”

  “Edith,” Stoner said. “Wait. You’re taking too much for granted. Perhaps Grace and this young man don’t want to get married. We need to talk it out with Grace.”

  “What’s there to talk about? Of course they’ll want to get married. After all, they—they—Gracie, tell your father. Explain to him.”

  Grace said to him, “It doesn’t matter, Father. It doesn’t matter at all.”

  And it didn’t matter, Stoner realized; Grace’s eyes were fixed beyond him, into a distance she could not see and which she contemplated without curiosity. He remained silent and let his wife and daughter make their plans.

  It was decided that Grace’s “young man,” as Edith called him, as if his name were somehow forbidden, would be invited to the house and that he and Edith would “talk.” She arranged the afternoon as if it were a scene in a drama, with exits and entrances and even a line or two of dialogue. Stoner was to excuse himself, Grace was to remain for a few moments more and then excuse herself, leaving Edith and the young man alone to talk. In half an hour Stoner was to return, then Grace was to return, by which time all arrangements were to be completed.

  And it all worked out exactly as Edith planned. Later Stoner wondered, with amusement, what young Edward Frye thought when he knocked timidly on the door and was admitted to a room that seemed filled with mortal enemies. He was a tall, rather heavy young man, with blurred and faintly sullen features; he was caught in a numbing embarrassment and fear, and he would look at no one. When Stoner left the room he saw the young man sitting slumped in a chair, his forearms on his knees, staring at the floor; when, half an hour later, he came back into the room, the young man was in the same position, as if he had not moved before the barrage of Edith’s birdlike cheerfulness.

  But everything was settled. In a high, artificial, but genuinely cheerful voice Edith informed him that “Grace’s young man” came from a very good St. Louis family, his father was a broker and had probably at one time had dealings with her own father, or at least her father’s bank, that the “young people” had decided on a wedding, “as soon as possible, very informal,” that both were dropping out of school, at least for a year or two, that they would live in St. Louis, “a change of scenery, a new start,” that though they wouldn’t be able to finish the semester they would go to school until the semester break, and they would be married on the afternoon of that day, which was a Friday. And wasn’t it all sweet, really—no matter what.

  The wedding took place in the cluttered study of a justice of the peace. Only William and Edith witnessed the ceremony; the justice’s wife, a rumpled gray woman with a permanent frown, worked in the kitchen while the ceremony was performed and came out when it was over only to sign the papers as a witness. It was a cold, bleak afternoon; the date was December 12, 1941.

  Five days before the marriage took place the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor; and William Stoner watched the ceremony with a mixture of feeling that he had not had before. Like many others who went through that time, he was gripped by what he could think of only as a numbness, though he knew it was a feeling compounded of emotions so deep and intense that they could not be acknowledged because they could not be lived with. It was the force of a public tragedy he felt, a horror and a woe so all-pervasive that private tragedies and personal misfortunes were removed to another state of being, yet were intensified by the very vastness in which they took place, as the poignancy of a lone grave might be intensified by a great desert surrounding it. With a pity that was almost impersonal he watched the sad little ritual of the marriage and was oddly moved by the passive, indifferent beauty of his daughter’s face and by the sullen desperation on the face of the young man.

  After the ceremony the two young people climbed joylessly into Frye’s little roadster and left for St. Louis, where they still had to face another set of parents and where they were to live. Stoner watched them drive away from the house, and he could think of his daughter only as a very small girl who had once sat beside him in a distant room and looked at him with solemn delight, as a lovely child who l
ong ago had died.

  Two months after the marriage Edward Frye enlisted in the Army; it was Grace’s decision to remain in St. Louis until the birth of her child. Within six months Frye was dead upon the beach of a small Pacific island, one of a number of raw recruits that had been sent out in a desperate effort to halt the Japanese advance. In June of 1942 Grace’s child was born; it was a boy, and she named it after the father it had never seen and would not love.

  Though Edith, when she went to St. Louis that June to “help out,” tried to persuade her daughter to return to Columbia, Grace would not do so; she had a small apartment, a small income from Frye’s insurance, and her new parents-in-law, and she seemed happy.

  “Changed somehow,” Edith said distractedly to Stoner. “Not our little Gracie at all. She’s been through a lot, and I guess she doesn’t want to be reminded ... She sent you her love.”

  XVI

  The years of the war blurred together, and Stoner went through them as he might have gone through a driving and nearly unendurable storm, his head down, his jaw locked, his mind fixed upon the next step and the next and the next. Yet for all his stoical endurance and his stolid movement through the days and weeks, he was an intensely divided man. One part of him recoiled in instinctive horror at the daily waste, the inundation of destruction and death that inexorably assaulted the mind and heart; once again he saw the faculty depleted, he saw the classrooms emptied of their young men, he saw the haunted looks upon those who remained behind, and saw in those looks the slow death of the heart, the bitter attrition of feeling and care.

  Yet another part of him was drawn intensely toward that very holocaust from which he recoiled. He found within himself a capacity for violence he did not know he had: he yearned for involvement, he wished for the taste of death, the bitter joy of destruction, the feel of blood. He felt both shame and pride, and over it all a bitter disappointment, in himself and in the time and circumstance that made him possible.

  Week by week, month by month, the names of the dead rolled out before him. Sometimes they were only names that he remembered as if from a distant past; sometimes he could evoke a face to go with a name; sometimes he could recall a voice, a word.

  Through it all he continued to teach and study, though he sometimes felt that he hunched his back futilely against the driving storm and cupped his hands uselessly around the dim flicker of his last poor match.

  Occasionally Grace returned to Columbia for a visit with her parents. The first time she brought her son, barely a year old; but his presence seemed obscurely to bother Edith, so there-after she left him in St. Louis with his paternal grandparents when she visited. Stoner would have liked to see more of his grandson, but he did not mention that wish; he had come to realize that Grace’s removal from Columbia—perhaps even her pregnancy—was in reality a flight from a prison to which she now returned out of an ineradicable kindness and a gentle good will.

  Though Edith did not suspect it or would not admit it, Grace had, Stoner knew, begun to drink with a quiet seriousness. He first knew it during the summer of the year after the war had ended. Grace had come to visit them for a few days; she seemed particularly worn; her eyes were shadowed, and her face was tense and pale. One evening after dinner Edith went to bed early, and Grace and Stoner sat together in the kitchen, drinking coffee. Stoner tried to talk to her, but she was restless and distraught. They sat in silence for many minutes; finally Grace looked at him intently, shrugged her shoulders, and sighed abruptly.

  “Look,” she said, “do you have any liquor in the house?”

  “No,” he said, “I’m afraid not. There may be a bottle of sherry in the cupboard, but—”

  “I’ve got most desperately to have a drink. Do you mind if I call the drugstore and have them send a bottle over?”

  “Of course not,” Stoner said. “It’s just that your mother and I don’t usually—”

  But she had got up and gone into the living room. She riffled through the pages of the phone book and dialed savagely. When she came back to the kitchen she passed the table, went to the cupboard, and pulled out the half-full bottle of sherry. She got a glass from the drainboard and filled it nearly to the brim with the light brown wine. Still standing, she drained the glass and wiped her lips, shuddering a little. “It’s gone sour,” she said. “And I hate sherry.”

  She brought the bottle and the glass back to the table, sat down, and placed them precisely in front of her. She half-filled the glass and looked at her father with an odd little smile.

  “I drink a little more than I ought to,” she said. “Poor Father. You didn’t know that, did you?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Every week I tell myself, next week I won’t drink quite so much; but I always drink a little more. I don’t know why.”

  “Are you unhappy?” Stoner asked.

  “No,” she said. “I believe I’m happy. Or almost happy anyway. It isn’t that. It’s—” She did not finish.

  By the time she had drunk the last of the sherry the delivery boy from the drugstore had come with her whisky. She brought the bottle into the kitchen, opened it with a practiced gesture, and poured a stiff portion of it into the sherry glass.

  They sat up very late, until the first gray crept upon the windows. Grace drank steadily, in small sips; and as the night wore on, the lines in her face eased, she grew calm and younger, and the two of them talked as they had not been able to talk for years.

  “I suppose,” she said, “I suppose I got pregnant deliberately, though I didn’t know it at the time; I suppose I didn’t even know how badly I wanted, how badly I had to get away from here. I knew enough not to get pregnant unless I wanted to, Lord knows. All those boys in high school, and”—she smiled crookedly at her father—”you and mamma, you didn’t know, did you?”

  “I suppose not,” he said.

  “Mamma wanted me to be popular, and—well, I was popular, all right. It didn’t mean anything, not anything at all.”

  “I knew you were unhappy,” Stoner said with difficulty. “But I never realized—I never knew—”

  “I suppose I didn’t either,” she said. “I couldn’t have. Poor Ed. He’s the one that got the rotten deal. I used him, you know; oh, he was the father all right—but I used him. He was a nice boy, and always so ashamed—he couldn’t stand it. He joined up six months before he had to, just to get away from it. I killed him, I suppose; he was such a nice boy, and we couldn’t even like each other very much.”

  They talked late into the night, as if they were old friends. And Stoner came to realize that she was, as she had said, almost happy with her despair; she would live her days out quietly, drinking a little more, year by year, numbing herself against the nothingness her life had become. He was glad she had that, at least; he was grateful that she could drink.

  The years immediately following the end of the Second World War were the best years of his teaching; and they were in some ways the happiest years of his life. Veterans of that war descended upon the campus and transformed it, bringing to it a quality of life it had not had before, an intensity and turbulence that amounted to a transformation. He worked harder than he had ever worked; the students, strange in their maturity, were intensely serious and contemptuous of triviality. Innocent of fashion or custom, they came to their studies as Stoner had dreamed that a student might—as if those studies were life itself and not specific means to specific ends. He knew that never, after these few years, would teaching be quite the same; and he committed himself to a happy state of exhaustion which he hoped might never end. He seldom thought of the past or the future, or of the disappointments and joys of either; he concentrated all the energies of which he was capable upon the moment of his work and hoped that he was at last defined by what he did.

  Rarely during these years was he removed from this dedication to the moment of his work. Sometimes when his daughter came back to Columbia for a visit, as if wandering aimlessly from one room to another, he had a sens
e of loss that he could scarcely bear. At the age of twenty-five she looked ten years older; she drank with the steady diffidence of one utterly without hope; and it became clear that she was relinquishing more and more control of her child to the grandparents in St. Louis.

  Only once did he have news of Katherine Driscoll. In the early spring of 1949 he received a circular from the press of a large eastern university; it announced the publication of Katherine’s book, and gave a few words about the author. She was teaching at a good liberal arts college in Massachusetts; she was unmarried. He got a copy of the book as soon as he could. When he held it in his hands his fingers seemed to come alive; they trembled so that he could scarcely open it. He turned the first few pages and saw the dedication: “To W.S.”

  His eyes blurred, and for a long time he sat without moving. Then he shook his head, returned to the book, and did not put it down until he had read it through.

  It was as good as he had thought it would be. The prose was graceful, and its passion was masked by a coolness and clarity of intelligence. It was herself he saw in what he read, he realized; and he marveled at how truly he could see her even now. Suddenly it was as if she were in the next room, and he had only moments before left her; his hands tingled, as if they had touched her. And the sense of his loss, that he had for so long dammed within him, flooded out, engulfed him, and he let himself be carried outward, beyond the control of his will; he did not wish to save himself. Then he smiled fondly, as if at a memory; it occurred to him that he was nearly sixty years old and that he ought to be beyond the force of such passion, of such love.

  But he was not beyond it, he knew, and would never be. Beneath the numbness, the indifference, the removal, it was there, intense and steady; it had always been there. In his youth he had given it freely, without thought; he had given it to the knowledge that had been revealed to him—how many years ago?—by Archer Sloane; he had given it to Edith, in those first blind foolish days of his courtship and marriage; and he had given it to Katherine, as if it had never been given before. He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.