The Stories of John Cheever (1979 Pulitzer Prize)

by John Cheever

  "I wish you'd asked my advice about moving companies," Chester said. "It isn't that I get a cut from them or anything, but I could have put you onto a reliable moving firm that wouldn't cost you any more than the one you got. People try to save money by getting cheap moving companies and in the end they don't save anything. Mrs. Negus—she's in 1-A—she wants to get her things in here this morning."

  Mrs. Bestwick didn't answer. "Oh, I'll miss you, Mrs. Bestwick," Chester said, feeling that he might have spoken unkindly. "There's no question about that. I'll miss you and Mr. Bestwick and the girls. You've been good tenants. During the eight years you've been here, I don't believe there's been a complaint from any of you. But things are changing, Mrs. Bestwick. Something's happening. The high cost of living. Oh, I can remember times when most of the tenants in this building wasn't rich nor poor. Now there's none but the rich. And, oh, the things they complain about, Mrs. Bestwick. You wouldn't believe me. The day before yesterday, that grass widow in 7-F called up, and you know what she was complaining about? She said the toilet seats in the apartment wasn't big enough."

  Mrs. Bestwick didn't laugh at his joke. She smiled, but her mind seemed to be on something else.

  "Well, I'll go down and tell Mrs. Negus that they'll be a delay," Chester said.

  Mrs. Negus, who was replacing Mrs. Bestwick, took piano lessons. Her apartment had an entrance off the lobby, and in the afternoon she could be heard practicing her scales. The piano was a difficult instrument for her and she had mastered only a few jingles. Piano lessons were a new undertaking for Mrs. Negus. When she first moved into the building, during the war, her name had been Mary Toms, and she had lived with Mrs. Lasser and Mrs. Dobree. Chester suspected that Mrs. Lasser and Mrs. Dobree were loose women, and when Mary Toms joined them, Chester had worried about her, because she was so young and so pretty. His anxiety was misplaced—the loose life didn't depress or coarsen her at all. Coming in there as a poor girl in a cloth coat, she had at the end of the year more furs than anybody else and she seemed to be as happy as a lark. It was in the second winter that Mr. Negus began to call. He went there by chance, Chester guessed, and the visit changed his whole life. He was a tough-looking middle-aged man, and Chester remembered him because when he came through the lobby on his way to 1-A, he used to bury his nose in the collar of his coat and pull his hat brim down over his eyes.

  As soon as Mr. Negus began to visit Mary Toms regularly, she eliminated all her other friends. One of them, a French naval officer, made some trouble, and it took a doorman and a cop to get him out. After this, Mr. Negus pointed out the door to Mrs. Lasser and Mrs. Dobree. It was nothing against Mary Toms, and she tried hard to get her friends another apartment in the building. Mr. Negus was stubborn, and the two older women packed their trunks and moved to an apartment on West Fifty-eighth Street. After they had gone, a decorator came in and overhauled the place. He was followed by the grand piano, the poodles, the Book-of-the-Month Club membership, and the crusty Irish maid. That winter, Mary Toms and Mr. Negus went down to Miami and got married there, but even after his marriage Mr. Negus still skulked through the lobby as if he was acting against his better judgment. Now the Neguses were going to move the whole caboodle up to 9-E. Chester didn't care one way or the other, but he didn't think the move was going to be permanent. Mrs. Negus was on the move. After a year or two in 9-E, he figured she'd ascend to one of the penthouses. From there, she'd probably take off for one of the fancier buildings on upper Fifth.

  WHEN CHESTER RANG the bell that morning, Mrs. Negus let him in. She was still as pretty as a picture. "Hi, Chet," she said. "Come on in. I thought you didn't want me to start moving until eleven."

  "Well, there may be a delay," Chester said. "The other lady's moving truck hasn't come."

  "I got to get this stuff upstairs, Chet."

  "Well, if her men don't come by eleven," Chester said, "I'll have Max and Delaney move the stuff down."

  "Hi, Chet," Mr. Negus said.

  "What's that on the seat of your pants, honey?" Mrs. Negus said.

  "There's nothing on my pants," Mr. Negus said.

  "Yes, there is, too," Mrs. Negus said. "There's a spot on your pants."

  "Look," Mr. Negus said, "these pants just come back from the dry cleaner's."

  "Well, if you had marmalade for breakfast," Mrs. Negus said, "you could have sat in that. I mean, you could have got marmalade on them."

  "I didn't have marmalade," he said.

  'Well, butter, then," she said. "It's awfully conspicuous."

  "I'll telephone you," Chester said.

  "You get her stuff out of there, Chet," Mrs. Negus said, "and I'll give you ten dollars. That's been my apartment since midnight. I want to get my things in there." Then she turned to her husband and began to rub his pants with a napkin. Chester let himself out.

  In Chester's basement office, the telephone was ringing. He picked up the receiver and a maid spoke to him and said that a bathroom in 5-A was overflowing. The telephone rang repeatedly during the time that he was in the office, and he took down several complaints of mechanical failures reported by maids or tenants—a stuck window, a jammed door, a leaky faucet, and a clogged drain. Chester got the toolbox and made the repairs himself. Most of the tenants were respectful and pleasant, but the grass widow in 7-F called him into the dining room and spoke to him curtly.

  "You are the janitor?" she asked.

  "I'm the superintendent," Chester said. "The handyman's busy."

  'Well, I want to talk with you about the back halls," she said. "I don't think this building is as clean as it should be. The maid thinks that she's seen roaches in the kitchen. We've never had roaches."

  "It's a clean building," Chester said. "It's one of the cleanest buildings in New York. Delaney washes the back stairs every second day and we have them painted whenever we get the chance. Sometime when you don't have anything better to do, you might come down cellar and see my basement. I take just as much pains with my basement as I do with my lobby."

  "I'm not talking about the basement," the woman said. "I'm talking about the back halls."

  Chester left for his office before he lost his temper. Ferarri told him that the maintenance crew had come and were up on the roof with Stanley. Chester wished that they had reported to him, for since he was the superintendent and carried the full burden of the place on his shoulders, he felt he should have been consulted before they went to work on his domain. He went up to Penthouse F and climbed the stairs from the back hall to the roof. A north wind was howling in the television antennas, and there was a little snow left on the roofs and terraces. Tarpaulins covered the porch furniture, and hanging on the wall of one of the terraces was a large straw hat, covered with ice. Chester went to the water tank and saw two men in overalls way up the iron ladder, working on the switch. Stanley stood a few rungs below them, passing up tools. Chester climbed the iron ladder and gave them his advice. They took it respectfully, but as he was going down the ladder, he heard one of the maintenance men ask Stanley, "Who's that—the janitor?"

  Hurt for the second time that day, Chester went to the edge of the roof and looked out over the city. On his right was the river. He saw a ship coming down it, a freighter pressing forward on the tide, her deck and porthole lights burning in the overcast. She was off to sea, but her lights and her quietness made her look to Chester as warmed and contained as a farmhouse in a meadow. Down the tide she came like a voyaging farmhouse. Compared to his own domain, Chester thought, a ship was nothing. At his feet, there were thousands of arteries hammering with steam; there were hundreds of toilets, miles of drainpipe, and a passenger list of over a hundred people, any one of whom might at that minute be contemplating suicide, theft, arson, or mayhem. It was a huge responsibility, and Chester thought with commiseration of the relatively paltry responsibilities of a ship's captain taking his freighter out to sea.

  When he got back to the basement, Mrs. Negus was on the telephone to ask him if Mrs. Bestwick ha
d gone. He said he would call her back, and hung up. Mrs. Negus's ten dollars seemed to commit Chester to building a fire under Mrs. Bestwick, but he didn't want to add to her troubles, and he thought with regret of what a good tenant she had been. The overcast day, the thought of Mrs. Bestwick and the people who had called him janitor convinced Chester that he needed to be cheered up, and he decided to get his shoes shined.

  But the shoeshine parlor that morning was still and empty, and Bronco, the shoeshine man, bent mournfully over Chester's shoes. "I'm sixty-two years old, Chester," Bronco said, "and I got a dirty mind. You think it's because I'm around shoes all the time? You think it has something to do with the way the polish smells?" He lathered Chester's shoes and rubbed in the polish with a coarse brush. "That's what my old lady thinks," Bronco said. "She thinks it's got something to do with being around shoes all the time. All I think about," Bronco said sadly, "is love, love, love. It's disgusting. I see in the paper a picture of a young couple eating supper. For all I know, they're nice young clean-minded people, but I've got different thoughts. A lady comes in to have a pair of heels put on her shoes. 'Yes, madam. No, madam. They'll be ready for you tomorrow, madam,' I'm saying to her, but what's going through my mind I'd be ashamed to tell you. But if it's from being around shoes all the time, how can I help myself? It's the only way I got to make a living. For a job like yours, you got to be a carpenter, a painter, a politician, a regular nursemaid. Oh, that must be some job you got, Chester! A window gets stuck. A fuse burns out. They tell you to come up and fix it. The lady of the house, she opens the door. She's all alone. She's got on her nightgown. She—" Bronco broke off and applied the shoe rag vigorously.

  When Chester returned to the building, Mrs. Bestwick's moving truck still hadn't come, and he went directly to 9-E and rang the back bell. There was no answer. There was no sound. He rang and rang, and then he opened the door with the pass key, just as Mrs. Bestwick came into the kitchen. "I didn't hear the bell," she said. "I'm so upset by this delay that I didn't hear the bell. I was in the other room." She sat down at the kitchen table. She looked pale and troubled.

  "Cheer up, Mrs. Bestwick," Chester said. "You'll like it in Pelham. Isn't Pelham where you're moving to? Trees, birds. The children'll put on weight. You'll have a nice house."

  "It's a small house, Chester," Mrs. Bestwick said.

  "Well, I'm going to tell the porters to take your stuff—your things—out now and put them in the alley," Chester said. "They'll be just as safe there as they will be in here, and if it rains, I'll see that everything's covered and kept dry. Why don't you go up to Pelham now, Mrs. Bestwick?" he asked. "I'll take care of everything. Why don't you just get onto a train and go up to Pelham?"

  "I think I'll wait, thank you, Chester," Mrs. Bestwick said.

  Somewhere a factory whistle blew twelve o'clock. Chester went downstairs and inspected the lobby. The rugs and the floor were clean, and the glass on the hunting prints was shining. He stood under the canopy long enough to see that the brass stanchions were polished, that the rubber doormat was scrubbed, and that his canopy was a good canopy and, unlike some others, had withstood the winter storms. "Good morning," someone said to him elegantly while he was standing there, and he said, "Good morning, Mrs. Wardsworth," before he realized that it was Katie Shay, Mrs. Wardsworth's elderly maid. It was an understandable mistake, for Katie was wearing a hat and a coat that had been discarded by Mrs. Wardsworth and she wore the dregs of a bottle of Mrs. Wardsworth's perfume. In the eclipsed light, the old woman looked like the specter of her employer.

  Then a moving van, Mrs. Bestwick's moving van, backed up to the curb. This improved Chester's spirits, and he went in to lunch with a good appetite.

  Mrs. Coolidge did not sit down at the table with Chester, and because she was wearing her purple dress, Chester guessed that she was going to the movies.

  "That woman up in 7-F asked me if I was the janitor today," Chester said.

  'Well, don't you let it worry you, Chester," Mrs. Coolidge said. 'When I think of all the things you have on your mind, Chester—of all the things you have to do—it seems to me that you have more to do than almost anybody I ever knew. Why, this place might catch fire in the middle of the night, and there's nobody here knows where the hoses are but you and Stanley. There's the elevator machines and the electricity and the gas and the furnace. How much oil did you say that furnace burned last winter, Chester?"

  "Over a hundred thousand gallons," Chester said.

  "Just think of that," Mrs. Coolidge said.

  THE MOVING was proceeding in an orderly way when Chester got downstairs again. The moving men told him that Mrs. Bestwick was still in the apartment. He lighted a cigar, sat down at his desk, and heard someone singing, "Did you ever see a dream walking?" The song, attended with laughing and clapping, came from the far end of the basement, and Chester followed the voice down the dark hall, to the laundry. The laundry was a brightly lighted room that smelled of the gas dryer. Banana peels and sandwich papers were spread over the ironing boards, and none of the six laundresses were working. In the center of the room, one of them, dressed in a negligee that someone had sent down to have washed, was waltzing with a second, dressed in a tablecloth. The others were clapping and laughing. Chester was wondering whether or not to interfere with the dance when the telephone in his office rang again. It was Mrs. Negus. "Get that bitch out of there, Chester," she said. "That's been my apartment since midnight. I'm going up there now."

  Chester asked Mrs. Negus to wait for him in the lobby. He found her there wearing a short fur coat and dark glasses. They went up to 9-E together and he rang Mrs. Bestwick's front bell. He introduced the two women, but Mrs. Negus overlooked the introduction in her interest in a piece of furniture that the moving men were carrying across the hall.

  "That's a lovely piece," she said.

  "Thank you," Mrs. Bestwick said.

  "You wouldn't want to sell it?" Mrs. Negus said.

  "I'm afraid I can't," Mrs. Bestwick said. "I'm sorry that I'm leaving the place in such a mess," she went on. "There wasn't time to have someone come in and clean it up."

  "Oh, that doesn't matter," Mrs. Negus said. "I'm going to have the whole thing painted and redecorated anyhow. I just wanted to get my things in here."

  "Why don't you go up to Pelham now, Mrs. Bestwick?" Chester said. "Your truck's here, and I'll see that all the stuff is loaded."

  "I will in a minute, Chester," Mrs. Bestwick said.

  "You've got some lovely stones there," Mrs. Negus said, looking at Mrs. Bestwick's rings.

  "Thank you," Mrs. Bestwick said.

  "Now, you come down with me, Mrs. Bestwick," Chester said, "and I'll get you a taxi and I'll see that. everything gets into the moving van all right."

  Mrs. Bestwick put on her hat and coat. "I suppose there are some things I ought to tell you about the apartment," she said to Mrs. Negus, "but I can't seem to remember any of them. It was very nice to meet you. I hope you'll enjoy the apartment as much as we have." Chester opened the door and she went into the hall ahead of him. "Wait just a minute, Chester," she said. "Wait just a minute, please." Chester was afraid then that she was going to cry, but she opened her purse and went through its contents carefully.

  Her unhappiness at that moment, Chester knew, was more than the unhappiness of leaving a place that seemed familiar for one that seemed strange; it was the pain of leaving the place where her accent and her looks, her worn suit and her diamond rings could still command a trace of respect; it was the pain of parting from one class and going into another, and it was doubly painful because it was a parting that would never be completed. Somewhere in Pelham she would find a neighbor who had been to Farmingdale or wherever it was; she would find a friend with diamonds as big as filberts and holes in her gloves.

  In the foyer, she said goodbye to the elevator man and the doorman. Chester went outside with her, expecting that she would say goodbye to him under the canopy, and he was prepared again to ext
ol her as a tenant, but she turned her back on him without speaking and walked quickly to the corner. Her neglect surprised and wounded him, and he was looking after her with indignation when she turned suddenly and came back. "But I forgot to say goodbye to you, Chester, didn't I?" she said. "Goodbye, and thank you, and say goodbye to Mrs. Coolidge for me. Give Mrs. Coolidge my best regards." Then she was gone.

  "WELL, it looks as though it was trying to clear up, doesn't it?" Katie Shay said as she came out the door a few minutes later. She was carrying a paper bag full of grain. As soon as Katie crossed the street, the pigeons that roost on the Queensboro Bridge recognized her, but she did not raise her head to see them, a hundred of them, leave their roost and fly loosely in a circle, as if they were windborne. She heard the roar of their wings pass overhead and saw their shadows darken the puddles of water in the street, but she seemed unconscious of the birds. Her approach was firm and gentle, like that of a nursemaid with importunate children, and when the pigeons landed on the sidewalk and crowded up to her feet, she kept them waiting. Then she began to scatter the yellow grain, first to the old and the sick, at the edges of the flock, and then to the others.

  A workman getting off a bus at the corner noticed the flock of birds and the old woman. He opened his lunch pail and dumped onto the sidewalk the crusts from his meal. Katie was at his side in a minute. "I'd rather you didn't feed them," she said sharply. "I'd just as soon you didn't feed them. You see, I live in that house over there, and I can keep an eye on them, and I see that they have everything they need. I give them fresh grain twice a day. Corn in the winter. It costs me nine dollars a month. I see that they have everything they need and I don't like to have strangers feed them." As she spoke, she kicked the stranger's crusts into the gutter. "I change their water twice a day, and in the winter I always see that the ice is broken on it. But I'd just as soon that strangers didn't feed them. I know you'll understand." She turned her back on the workman and dumped the last of the feed out of her bag. She was queer, Chester thought, she was as queer as the Chinese language. But who was queerer—she, for feeding the birds, or he, for watching her?