Stoner

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.