"Gracie, honey," she said in a voice that seemed to William to be strained and brittle, "did you miss your mommy? Did you think she was never coming back?"
Grace kissed her mother on the cheek and looked at her solemnly. "You look different," she said.
Edith laughed and got up from the floor; she whirled around, holding her hands above her head. "I have a new dress and new shoes and a new hair-do. Do you like them?"
Grace nodded dubiously. "You look different," she said again.
Edith's smile widened; there was a pale smear of lipstick on one of her teeth. She turned to William and asked, "Do I look different?"
"Yes," William said. "Very charming. Very pretty."
She laughed at him and shook her head. "Poor Willy," she said. Then she turned again to her daughter. "I am different, I believe," she said to her. "I really believe I am."
But William Stoner knew that she was speaking to him. And at that moment, somehow, he also knew that beyond her intention or understanding, unknown to herself, Edith was trying to announce to him a new declaration of war.
VIII
The declaration was a part of the change that Edith had started bringing about during the weeks she had spent at "home" in St. Louis after her father's death. And it was intensified, and finally given point and savagery, by that other change that came and slowly grew upon William Stoner after he discovered that he might become a good teacher.
Edith had been curiously unmoved at her father's funeral. During the elaborate ceremonies she sat erect and hard-faced, and her expression did not alter when she had to go past her father's body, resplendent and plump, in the ornate coffin. But at the cemetery, when the coffin was lowered into the narrow hole masked by mats of artificial grass, she lowered her expressionless face into her hands and did not raise it until someone touched her shoulder.
After the funeral she spent several days in her old room, the room in which she had grown up; she saw her mother only at breakfast and at dinner. It was thought by callers that she was secluded in her grief. "They were very close," Edith's mother said mysteriously. "Much closer than they seemed."
But in that room Edith walked about as if for the first time, freely, touching the walls and windows, testing their solidity. She had a trunk full of her childhood belongings brought down from the attic; she went through her bureau drawers, which had remained undisturbed for more than a decade. With a bemused air of leisure, as if she had all the time in the world, she went through her things, fondling them, turning them this way and that, examining them with an almost ritualistic care. When she came upon a letter she had received as a child, she read it through from beginning to end as if for the first time; when she came upon a forgotten doll, she smiled at it and caressed the painted bisque of its cheek as if she were a child again who had received a gift.
Finally she arranged all of her childhood belongings neatly in two piles. One of these consisted of toys and trinkets she had acquired for herself, of secret photographs and letters from school friends, of gifts she had at one time received from distant relatives; the other pile consisted of those things that her father had given her and of things with which he had been directly or indirectly connected. It was to this pile that she gave her attention. Methodically, expressionlessly, with neither anger nor joy, she took the objects there, one by one, and destroyed them. The letters and clothes, the stuffing from the dolls, the pincushions and pictures, she burned in the fireplace; the clay and porcelain heads, the hands and arms and feet of the dolls she pounded to a fine powder on the hearth; and what remained after the burning and pounding she swept into a small pile and flushed down the toilet in the bathroom that adjoined her room.
When the job was done—the room cleared of smoke, the hearth swept, the few remaining belongings returned to the chest of drawers—Edith Bostwick Stoner sat at her small dressing table and looked at herself in the mirror, the silver backing of which was thinning and flecking away, so that here and there her image was imperfectly reflected, or not reflected at all, giving her face a curiously incomplete look. She was thirty years old. The youthful gloss was beginning to fall from her hair, tiny lines were starting out from around her eyes, and the skin of her face was beginning to tighten around her sharp cheekbones. She nodded to the image in the mirror, got up abruptly, and went downstairs, where for the first time in days she talked cheerfully and almost intimately to her mother.
She wanted (she said) a change in herself. She had too long been what she was; she spoke of her childhood, of her marriage. And from sources that she could speak of but vaguely and uncertainly, she fixed an image that she wished to fulfill; and for nearly the whole of the two months that she stayed in St. Louis with her mother, she devoted herself to that fulfillment.
She asked to borrow a sum of money from her mother, who made her an impetuous gift of it. She bought a new wardrobe, burning all the clothes she had brought with her from Columbia; she had her hair cut short and fashioned in the mode of the day; she bought cosmetics and perfumes, the use of which she practiced daily in her room. She learned to smoke, and she cultivated a new way of speaking which was brittle, vaguely English, and a little shrill. She returned to Columbia with this outward change well under control, and with another change secret and potential within her.
During the first few months after her return to Columbia, she was furious with activity; no longer did it seem necessary to pretend to herself that she was ill or weak. She joined a little theater group and devoted herself to the work that was given her; she designed and painted sets, raised money for the group, and even had a few small parts in the productions. When Stoner came home in the afternoons he found the living room filled with her friends, strangers who looked at him as if he were an intruder, to whom he nodded politely and retreated to his study, where he could hear their voices, muted and declamatory, beyond his walls.
Edith purchased a used upright piano and had it put in the living room, against the wall which separated that room from William's study; she had given up the practice of music shortly before her marriage, and she now started almost anew, practicing scales, laboring through exercises that were too difficult for her, playing sometimes two or three hours a day, often in the evening, after Grace had been put to bed.
The groups of students whom Stoner invited to his study for conversation grew larger and the meetings more frequent; and no longer was Edith content to remain upstairs, away from the gatherings. She insisted upon serving them tea or coffee; and when she did she seated herself in the room. She talked loudly and gaily, managing to turn the conversation toward her work in the little theater, or her music, or her painting and sculpture, which (she announced) she was planning to take up again, as soon as she found time. The students, mystified and embarrassed, gradually stopped coming, and Stoner began meeting them for coffee in the University cafeteria or in one of the small cafes scattered around the campus.
He did not speak to Edith about her new behavior; her activities caused him only minor annoyance, and she seemed happy, though perhaps a bit desperately so. It was, finally, himself that he held responsible for the new direction her life had taken; he had been unable to discover for her any meaning in their life together, in their marriage. Thus it was right for her to take what meaning she could find in areas that had nothing to do with him and go ways he could not follow.