Stoner

It was decided that Grace's "young man," as Edith called him, as if his name were somehow forbidden, would be invited to the house and that he and Edith would "talk." She arranged the afternoon as if it were a scene in a drama, with exits and entrances and even a line or two of dialogue. Stoner was to excuse himself, Grace was to remain for a few moments more and then excuse herself, leaving Edith and the young man alone to talk. In half an hour Stoner was to return, then Grace was to return, by which time all arrangements were to be completed.

And it all worked out exactly as Edith planned. Later Stoner wondered, with amusement, what young Edward Frye thought when he knocked timidly on the door and was admitted to a room that seemed filled with mortal enemies. He was a tall, rather heavy young man, with blurred and faintly sullen features; he was caught in a numbing embarrassment and fear, and he would look at no one. When Stoner left the room he saw the young man sitting slumped in a chair, his forearms on his knees, staring at the floor; when, half an hour later, he came back into the room, the young man was in the same position, as if he had not moved before the barrage of Edith's birdlike cheerfulness.

But everything was settled. In a high, artificial, but genuinely cheerful voice Edith informed him that "Grace's young man" came from a very good St. Louis family, his father was a broker and had probably at one time had dealings with her own father, or at least her father's bank, that the "young people" had decided on a wedding, "as soon as possible, very informal," that both were dropping out of school, at least for a year or two, that they would live in St. Louis, "a change of scenery, a new start," that though they wouldn't be able to finish the semester they would go to school until the semester break, and they would be married on the afternoon of that day, which was a Friday. And wasn't it all sweet, really--no matter what.

The wedding took place in the cluttered study of a justice of the peace. Only William and Edith witnessed the ceremony; the justice's wife, a rumpled gray woman with a permanent frown, worked in the kitchen while the ceremony was performed and came out when it was over only to sign the papers as a witness. It was a cold, bleak afternoon; the date was December 12, 1941.

Five days before the marriage took place the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor; and William Stoner watched the ceremony with a mixture of feeling that he had not had before. Like many others who went through that time, he was gripped by what he could think of only as a numbness, though he knew it was a feeling compounded of emotions so deep and intense that they could not be acknowledged because they could not be lived with. It was the force of a public tragedy he felt, a horror and a woe so all-pervasive that private tragedies and personal misfortunes were removed to another state of being, yet were intensified by the very vastness in which they took place, as the poignancy of a lone grave might be intensified by a great desert surrounding it. With a pity that was almost impersonal he watched the sad little ritual of the marriage and was oddly moved by the passive, indifferent beauty of his daughter's face and by the sullen desperation on the face of the young man.

After the ceremony the two young people climbed joylessly into Frye's little roadster and left for St. Louis, where they still had to face another set of parents and where they were to live. Stoner watched them drive away from the house, and he could think of his daughter only as a very small girl who had once sat beside him in a distant room and looked at him with solemn delight, as a lovely child who long ago had died.

Two months after the marriage Edward Frye enlisted in the Army; it was Grace's decision to remain in St. Louis until the birth of her child. Within six months Frye was dead upon the beach of a small Pacific island, one of a number of raw recruits that had been sent out in a desperate effort to halt the Japanese advance. In June of 1942 Grace's child was born; it was a boy, and she named it after the father it had never seen and would not love.

Though Edith, when she went to St. Louis that June to "help out," tried to persuade her daughter to return to Columbia, Grace would not do so; she had a small apartment, a small income from Frye's insurance, and her new parents-in-law, and she seemed happy.

"Changed somehow," Edith said distractedly to Stoner. "Not our little Gracie at all. She's been through a lot, and I guess she doesn't want to be reminded . . . She sent you her love."

XVI