Stoner

They had a cabin with a bedroom, a sitting room, and a small kitchen; it was somewhat removed from the other cabins, and it overlooked a lake that remained frozen during the winter months. In the morning they awoke to find themselves twined together, their bodies warm and luxuriant beneath the heavy blankets. They poked their heads out of the blankets and watched their breath condense in great clouds in the cold air; they laughed like children and pulled the covers back over their heads and pressed themselves more closely together. Sometimes they made love and stayed in bed all morning and talked, until the sun came through an east window; sometimes Stoner sprang out of bed as soon as they were awake and pulled the covers from Katherine's naked body and laughed at her screams as he kindled a fire in the great fireplace. Then they huddled together before the fireplace, with only a blanket around them, and waited to be warmed by the growing fire and the natural warmth of their own bodies.

Despite the cold, they walked nearly every day in the woods. The great pines, greenish-black against the snow, reared up massively toward the pale-blue cloudless sky; the occasional slither and plop of a mass of snow from one of the branches intensified the silence around them, as the occasional chatter of a lone bird intensified the isolation in which they walked. Once they saw a deer that had come down from the higher mountains in search of food. It was a doe, brilliantly yellow-tan against the starkness of dark pine and white snow. Now fifty yards away it faced them, one forepaw lifted delicately above the snow, the small ears pitched forward, the brown eyes perfectly round and incredibly soft. No one moved. The doe's delicate face tilted, as if regarding them with polite inquiry; then, unhurriedly, it turned and walked away from them, lifting its feet daintily out of the snow and placing them precisely, with a tiny sound of crunching.

In the afternoon they went to the main office of the lodge, which also served as the village's general store and restaurant. They had coffee there and talked to whoever had dropped in and perhaps picked up a few things for their evening meal, which they always took in their cabin.

In the evening they sometimes lighted the oil lamp and read; but more often they sat on folded blankets in front of the fireplace and talked and were silent and watched the flames play intricately upon the logs and watched the play of firelight upon each other's faces.

One evening, near the end of the time they had together, Katherine said quietly, almost absently, "Bill, if we never have anything else, we will have had this week. Does that sound like a girlish thing to say?"

"It doesn't matter what it sounds like," Stoner said. He nodded. "It's true."

"Then I'll say it," Katherine said. "We will have had this week."

On their last morning Katherine straightened the furniture and cleaned the place with slow care. She took off the wedding band she had worn and wedged it in a crevice between the wall and the fireplace. She smiled self-consciously. "I wanted," she said, "to leave something of our own here; something I knew would stay here, as long as this place stays. Maybe it's silly."

Stoner could not answer her. He took her arm and they walked out of the cabin and trudged through the snow to the lodge office, where the bus would pick them up and take them back to Columbia.

On an afternoon late in February, a few days after the second semester had begun, Stoner received a call from Gordon Finch's secretary; she told him that the dean would like to talk with him and asked if he would drop by that afternoon or the next morning. Stoner told her that he would--and sat for several minutes with one hand on the phone after having hung up. Then he sighed and nodded to himself and went downstairs to Finch's office.

Gordon Finch was in his shirt sleeves, his tie was loosened, and he was leaning back in his swivel chair with his hands clasped behind his head. When Stoner came into the room he nodded genially and waved toward the leather-covered easy chair set at an angle beside his desk.

"Take a load off, Bill. How have you been?"

Stoner nodded. "All right."

"Classes keeping you busy?"

Stoner said dryly, "Reasonably so. I have a full schedule."

"I know," Finch said and shook his head. "I can't interfere there, you know. But it's a damned shame."

"It's all right," Stoner said a bit impatiently.

"Well." Finch straightened in his chair and clasped his hands on the desk in front of him. "There's nothing official about this visit, Bill. I just wanted to chat with you for a while."

There was a long silence. Stoner said gently, "What is it, Gordon?"