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.