Stoner

Edith had bobbed her hair and wore over it one of those hats that hugged her head so tightly that the cropped hair lay close to her face like an irregular frame; her lips were painted a bright orange-red, and two small spots of rouge sharpened her cheekbones. She wore one of those short dresses that had become fashionable among the younger women during the past few years; it hung straight down from her shoulders and ended just above her knees. She smiled self-consciously at her husband and walked across the room to her daughter, who sat on the floor and looked up at her quietly and studiously. She knelt awkwardly, her new dress tight around her legs.

"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.