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 long 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 thereafter 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.