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 sense 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.
He could not think of himself as old. Sometimes, in the morning when he shaved, he looked at his image in the glass and felt no identity with the face that stared back at him in surprise, the eyes clear in a grotesque mask; it was as if he wore, for an obscure reason, an outrageous disguise, as if he could, if he wished, strip away the bushy white eyebrows, the rumpled white hair, the flesh that sagged around the sharp bones, the deep lines that pretended age.
Yet his age, he knew, was not pretense. He saw the sickness of the world and of his own country during the years after the great war; he saw hatred and suspicion become a kind of madness that swept across the land like a swift plague; he saw young men go again to war, marching eagerly to a senseless doom, as if in the echo of a nightmare. And the pity and sadness he felt were so old, so much a part of his age, that he seemed to himself nearly untouched.
The years went swiftly, and he was hardly aware of their passing. In the spring of 1954 he was sixty-three years old; and he suddenly realized that he had at the most four years of teaching left to him. He tried to see beyond that time; he could not see, and had no wish to do so.
That fall he received a note from Gordon Finch's secretary, asking him to drop by to see the dean whenever it was convenient. He was busy, and it was several days before he found a free afternoon.
Every time he saw Gordon Finch, Stoner was conscious of a small surprise at how little he had aged. A year younger than Stoner, he looked no more than fifty. He was wholly bald, his face was heavy and unlined, and it glowed with an almost cherubic health; his step was springy, and in these later years he had begun to affect a casualness of dress; he wore colorful shirts and odd jackets.
He seemed embarrassed that afternoon when Stoner came in to see him. They talked casually for a few moments; Finch asked him about Edith's health and mentioned that his own wife, Caroline, had been talking just the other day about how they all ought to get together again. Then he said, "Time. My God, how it flies!"
Stoner nodded.
Finch sighed abruptly. "Well," he said, "I guess we've got to talk about it. You'll be—sixty-five next year. I suppose we ought to be making some plans."
Stoner shook his head. "Not right away. I intend to take advantage of the two-year option, of course."