Stoner

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.

Emboldened by his new success as a teacher and by his growing popularity among the better graduate students, he started a new book in the summer of 1930. He now spent nearly all of his free time in his study. He and Edith kept up between themselves the pretense of sharing the same bedroom, but he seldom entered that room, and never at night. He slept on his studio couch and even kept his clothes in a small closet he constructed in one corner of the room.

He was able to be with Grace. As had become her habit during her mother's first long absence, she spent much of her time with her father in his study; Stoner even found a small desk and chair for her, so that she had a place to read and do her homework. They had their meals more often than not alone; Edith was away from the house a great deal, and when she was not away she frequently entertained her theater friends at little parties which did not admit the presence of a child.