Stoner

They invited all those members of the department who had returned from their summer vacations as well as a few town acquaintances of Edith; Hollis Lomax surprised everyone by accepting the invitation, the first he had accepted since his arrival in Columbia a year earlier. Stoner found a bootlegger and bought several bottles of gin; Gordon Finch promised to bring some beer; and Edith's Aunt Emma contributed two bottles of old sherry for those who would not drink hard liquor. Edith was reluctant to serve liquor at all; it was technically illegal to do so. But Caroline Finch intimated that no one at the University would think it really improper, and so she was persuaded.

Fall came early that year. A light snow fell on the tenth of September, the day before registration; during the night a hard freeze gripped the land. By the end of the week, the time of the party, the cold weather had lifted, so that there was only a chill in the air; but the trees were leafless, the grass was beginning to brown, and there was a general bareness that presaged a hard winter. By the chill weather outside, by the stripped poplars and elms that stood starkly in their yard, and by the warmth and the ranked implements of the impending party inside, William Stoner was reminded of another day. For some time he could not decide what he was trying to remember--then he realized that it was on such a day, almost seven years before, that he had gone to Josiah Claremont's house and had seen Edith for the first time. It seemed far away to him, and long ago; he could not reckon the changes that these few years had wrought.

For nearly the whole week before the party Edith lost herself in a frenzy of preparation; she hired a Negro girl for a week to help with the preparations and to serve, and the two of them scrubbed the floors and the walls, waxed the wood, dusted and cleaned the furniture, arranged it and rearranged it--so that on the night of the party Edith was in a state of near exhaustion. There were dark hollows under her eyes, and her voice was on the quiet edge of hysteria. At six o'clock--the guests were supposed to arrive at seven--she counted the glasses once again and discovered that she did not have enough for the guests expected. She broke into tears, rushed upstairs, sobbing that she didn't care what happened, she wasn't coming back down. Stoner tried to reassure her, but she would not answer him. He told her not to worry, that he would get the glasses. He told the maid that he would return soon and hurried out of the house. For nearly an hour he searched for a store still open where he could purchase glasses; by the time he found one, selected the glasses, and returned to the house it was well after seven, and the first guests had arrived. Edith was among them in the living room, smiling and chatting as if she had no care or apprehension; she greeted William casually and told him to take the package into the kitchen.

The party was like many another. Conversation began desultorily, gathered a swift but feeble energy, and trailed irrelevantly into other conversations; laughter was quick and nervous, and it burst like tiny explosives in a continuous but unrelated barrage all over the room; and the members of the party flowed casually from one place to another, as if quietly occupying shifting positions of strategy. A few of them, like spies, wandered through the house, led by either Edith or William, and commented upon the superiority of such older houses as this over the new, flimsier structures going up here and there on the outskirts of town.

By ten o'clock most of the guests had taken plates piled with sliced cold ham and turkey, pickled apricots, and the varied garniture of tiny tomatoes, celery stalks, olives, pickles, crisp radishes, and little raw cauliflower ears; a few were drunk and would not eat. By eleven most of the guests had gone; among those who remained were Gordon and Caroline Finch, a few members of the department whom Stoner had known for several years, and Hollis Lomax. Lomax was quite drunk, though not ostentatiously so; he walked carefully, as if he carried a burden over uneven terrain, and his thin pale face shone through a film of sweat. The liquor loosened his tongue; and though he spoke precisely, his voice lost its edge of irony, and he appeared without defenses.