The Specialty of the House

by Stanley Ellin

  Best of all were those afternoons when he entertained a select gathering in his own apartment, serving coffee and cake and getting as a reward the company’s unstinted admiration of his coleus. He had, as one and all agreed, the greenest of all green thumbs.

  So there it was. The coleus, the apartment, the city, the comparative good health except for a tendency to nervous stomach and occasional insomnia, neither of which, as he cheerfully recognized, was fatal. A good, contented retirement. Everything he had dreamed of during those long years grinding away at his bookkeeping.

  The trouble started – though who could predict it at the time – when Mr Ostroff died, and a few weeks later Mrs Ostroff, forlorn in her widowhood, was induced to give up the apartment and move in with a daughter and son-in-law who had a room to spare in their fine Long Island home. The day before the removal, Mrs Ostroff called Mr Hotchkiss in and weepily presented him with some gifts of remembrance which he would just as soon have done without but could ill refuse. Her few coleus, all of them now in such wretched condition from neglect that they were plainly beyond salvation, and, in remembrance of her late husband and his pharmaceutical career, the heavy brass mortar and pestle which had once ornamented the window of his store and which had then become a centerpiece on the mantel over the Ostroff fireplace.

  Mr Hotchkiss took the gifts, and when the donor was safely gone he disposed of the plants in his garbage can and, after lugging the mortar and pestle through the apartment searching for a place to store it until he could decently dispose of it, he decided to follow its donor’s example and so set it on the mantelpiece over his fireplace. He felt it struck rather an odd note there, but when one of the ladies from the Golden Age Club who knew about such esoterica commented admiringly on it, he left it there, and in a very short while it seemed as familiar and properly in place as the multitude of coleus did on their tables and shelves.

  Meanwhile, as could be seen through its frequently open door, the Ostroff apartment was undergoing a complete painting and polishing until one day a truckload of furniture was carted up the stairs to it. Mr Hotchkiss who up until now had not greatly concerned himself about the nature of his new neighbors took note that the furniture appeared to be brand-new, extremely ornate and expensive, and not in very good taste.

  On his way out he stopped on the ground floor where Mr Braun was supervising the carting in of the furniture. Mr Braun’s ordinarily sour expression now seemed almost amiable as he steered moving men and their loads through the foyer. On the other hand, Mrs Braun looked even grimmer than usual.

  ‘I see the new tenants are here,’ Mr Hotchkiss remarked.

  Mrs Braun sniffed. ‘Not them. Just one.’

  ‘One?’

  ‘By herself. An actress. She says.’

  ‘If she says, then it’s so, mama,’ Mr Braun said reprovingly. ‘You don’t call people a liar for no reason.’

  ‘Ho,’ Mrs Braun said. She turned to Mr Hotchkiss. ‘You know what is her name, she says? Choo Choo. That is a name? Choo Choo?’

  ‘If the owner says she will be a good tenant,’ said Mr Braun majestically, ‘she will be a good tenant. Enough now.’

  ‘What the owner says,’ Mrs Braun declared, ‘is only because now the apartment is no more rent controlled, he gets plenty more for it.’

  According to city law, Mr Hotchkiss knew, when leasehold was given up on a rent-controlled apartment, the apartment did become subject to a stiff increase in rental. The thought made him that much more aware of his own pleasantly rent-controlled apartment.

  He stopped at the mailboxes in the outer foyer before going out to the street. Sure enough, there was a new nameplate in the box of 2B – second floor rear – and it read C. C. Guilfoyle. C. C. for Choo Choo? Choo Choo Guilfoyle. Had the senior Guilfoyles really attached this curious name to their offspring? Unlikely, Mr Hotchkiss decided.

  He went out to the street. There, giving sharp instructions to the moving men in their coming and going, was a young woman who must be C. C. Guilfoyle. A tall, slender, red-haired young woman, extremely long-legged and full-breasted, the tightness of sweater and shortness of skirt accentuating what Mr Hotchkiss had to admit was a really remarkable figure. A pretty girl too. Strikingly pretty. Well, well, Mr Hotchkiss thought, it wouldn’t hurt the old building to have someone like this brightening it up. Indeed, from the reactions of male passersby, it was plain that he was not alone in appreciating the picture she made.

  He walked over to her. ‘Miss Guilfoyle?’

  She warily took his measure. ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘Well, in that case, ‘said Mr Hotchkiss brightly, ‘I am your hallway neighbor. Upstairs. I just wanted to wish you welcome to your new home.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Miss Guilfoyle said chillingly. ‘Well, thanks.’ Evidently, she was not keen on neighborliness. She turned away and addressed herself to the moving men again, and Mr Hotchkiss left it at that. After all, the Ostroffs had occupied the second floor rear for ten years before they and Mr Hotchkiss had even visited each other’s apartments. It was the New York style, the only way really to assure one’s privacy in an overcrowded city.

  So Miss Guilfoyle settled in, and, like the other tenants of the building, became largely invisible. And life in the building again moved on its placid course.

  Until at a few minutes after four one morning – the darkest of the dark hours – when Mr Hotchkiss’ sleep was blasted apart by a roaring and snarling which suggested nothing so much as a cageful of angry lions loosed into the bedroom and sounding off in furious temper. Two seconds later Mr Hotchkiss, sitting up in bed, his heart racing, realized that the lions were not there surrounding the bed but were outside in the street. Were not lions at all, but a car motor being raced as if the driver were warming it up for a recordbreaking run down the Indianapolis Speedway.

  Actually, the uproar below was not all that unusual. Early every weekday morning, at about the time Mr Hotchkiss was breakfasting, there would be an intermittent racket up and down the block as cars, locked bumper to bumper against the curb where they had been parked overnight, would strain to pull free of each other and be on the move. But during daylight hours one accepted such noises as part of life in the big city.

  Between midnight and dawn, however, noisy as the block might be during the day it now fell into a blessed silence. The occasional wail of a siren on an emergency vehicle rushing by, yes. The occasional loud voice of unsober revelers making their way to one of the buildings on the block, yes. But one was so accustomed to such as this that it never broke through the shell of a deep refreshing sleep.

  But this roaring and snarling below was distinctly an aberration. Ear-shattering and nerve-shattering, it went on and on until Mr Hotchkiss crawled out of bed and made his way to the window. Sure enough the car was directly below. A monstrous object, one of those oversized, overpowered sports cars with such an exaggerated sweep and curve of chassis that it resembled a gleaming, low-slung snowplow. One of those noxious contrivances so streamlined that even when at rest it appeared to be lunging full speed ahead.

  It was jockeying back and forth between the two vehicles which hemmed it in fore and aft, sometimes stopping between its small frustrated motions to crouch there and snarl savagely in resentment of its plight.

  Back and forth it went, back and forth, until at last it maneuvered free, and with a long triumphant blast on its horn by the driver it was gone.

  And, as far as Mr Hotchkiss was concerned, so was the rest of his night’s sleep. No use even getting into bed again with this blazing sense of outrage in him. Good Lord, even granting that a car like that was constructed to be extraordinarily noisy, who, for heaven’s sake, would want to own any such loud, wasteful toy unless he had no regard for his neighbors to start with? And that final blast of the horn was the most brutal stroke. The ultimate outrage.

  Oh, well, Mr Hotchkiss told himself before he finally fell asleep long after dawn, no use dwelling on it forever. It was over and done with.

  I
t was not.

  It happened the next morning a few minutes before five o’clock.

  It happened the morning after that at half-past three.

  It did not happen the following morning, although it might as well have since Mr Hotchkiss came bolt awake at three o’clock, anticipating it.

  Then, a day later, just as Mr Hotchkiss had taken desperate hope that perhaps this blight was permanently removed from his life, it happened once more.

  He phoned the police and got sympathy. He got sympathy from his circle at the Golden Age Club, that and a recounting of similar blights afflicting them. He spoke to the tenant in the first floor front, elderly Mrs Gordon, and even as he put the question to her of how she bore this violent interruption to her slumbers before dawn almost every morning, he realized from her politely smiling expression of inquiry, her hand cupped to her ear, that of course it would take nothing less than an earthquake to interrupt her slumbers; she was deaf as a post.

  He spoke to the Clearys on the top floor, third floor front, and discovered that they were happily addicted to sleeping pills which their kindly doctor had long ago prescribed. If he wanted the name of the doctor—?

  As the blight continued through the second week and the third – loud mornings followed unpredictably by an occasional silent morning – Mr Hotchkiss found that his every waking moment was filled with black and vengeful thoughts of that unholy machine. There was a vampirish aspect to it, too, since the car was never in evidence during daylight hours.

  Finally, much as he detested putting himself in the same category as those old ladies on the block who spent their time seated at their windows behind flimsy curtains, keeping an eye on their neighbors, Mr Hotchkiss planted himself at the open window of his bedroom after dinner one evening and kept tedious watch until the car made its appearance a little before midnight. There was no space for it directly in front of the house that night, but there was one a short distance away. He watched it enter the space and could foresee exactly what would happen when it strove to leave it in a few hours.

  Then the driver pulled himself out of the car – a large bulky man, he needed an effort to do it – and moved down the street toward the house itself. Mr Hotchkiss heard the door below him open and close. He went quickly to his foyer door, opened it an inch, and peered out. The bulky figure tiptoed heavily up the stairway into his vision, a complete stranger, no one at all who belonged to the building, and stopped before Miss Guilfoyle’s door. He thrust a key into the door, swung it open, and disappeared within.

  Miss Guilfoyle’s apartment.

  So that was it.

  Choo Choo Guilfoyle. An actress, indeed.

  How shrewd Mrs Braun had been in her sour estimate of this new tenant.

  But that was really not the issue. Mr Hotchkiss was no prude. Since it was always the same car, Miss Guilfoyle could hardly be charged with operating on a public basis. Indeed, if her – whatever you wanted to call him – her admirer would only exit the scene quietly after each visit, one could ask little more of the young lady as a neighbor. But to have her attended to by someone who kept blasting off before dawn like an astronaut headed for the moon – well, it made life absolutely intolerable.

  And, face it, not only intolerable for him but for the coleus. Sensitive life forms that they were, responsive to every emotional current around them, they were no longer thriving. It took an eye like Mr Hotchkiss’ to detect it, but to that eye it was plain that the glow was fading, the vigor departing from those leaves. What use to put on a falsely smiling face while watering and tending these plants, what use to heap encouragement and endearments on them, when, right down to their newest, barely formed leaves they saw through the mask? As long as their beloved caretaker knew only vengeful and bitter thoughts, all the sunshine and fluorescent lighting in the world would not suffice to brighten their days.

  No, they would not long survive under these conditions.

  The time had come for action.

  But what action?

  To knock on that door this moment, have it out politely but firmly with the gentleman caller, that was the ticket.

  No, not this moment. It would be, Mr Hotchkiss suspected, the most awkward possible time for any such confrontation. But within a very few hours, the caller would be departing. He would be, to put it delicately, fulfilled. In a pleasant mood. Receptive to well-justified complaint.

  Leaving the foyer door open the merest bit, Mr Hotchkiss settled himself behind it in a straightbacked chair – no chance of dozing off that way – and waited. It was a long aching wait, but a little before four o’clock he heard the sound of the door in the rear opening and stepped out into the hallway just as the gentleman caller emerged from Miss Guilfoyle’s apartment.

  Miss Guilfoyle, standing in her doorway in negligee, made an extremely attractive appearance. The man, Mr Hotchkiss took note, certainly did not. He was very large and bulky indeed, with a moonlike face somewhat too large for its snub nose, pursy lips, and piggish eyes. The only thing on that unpleasant face in proportion to it was a sweeping mustache. The mustache was gray, as was the elaborate hairdo. This was no young buck, Mr Hotchkiss saw at a glance, not at all the sort of man one would attribute that car to, but someone who was distinctly on the downhill side of middle age.

  Gray. And so was the outfit he wore, matching jacket and trousers in pale gray suede. Modish it may have been on some young cavalier, but it made this boorish hulk resemble nothing so much as a gigantic mealybug. Exactly that. A veritable two-legged mountain of a mealybug.

  The man stared as Mr Hotchkiss in robe and slippers approached him. ‘Sir,’ said Mr Hotchkiss, his voice discreetly lowered in view of the time and the place, ‘there is something I would like to settle with you. When you—’

  ‘What?’ the man said in a loud whisper. ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘I happen to live in that apartment there which overlooks the street. And every time you visit here—’

  ‘Every time I visit here?’ The piggish eyes glared. ‘What’s that to you, mister?’

  There seemed to be no way of delivering an uninterrupted sentence to this fellow. ‘Sir,’ Mr Hotchkiss said patiently, ‘please understand that I am not meddling in your affairs.’ Too late it struck him that this might not be the most politic way to put it. ‘All I ask of you—’

  This time the interruption came from a different direction. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, knock it off,’ Miss Guilfoyle told the mealybug. ‘It’s getting late.’

  The man wheeled on her. ‘Is it? You know, baby, I’m getting the idea you do a lot of talking to the neighbors, don’t you?’

  ‘Me?’ Miss Guilfoyle motioned at Mr Hotchkiss. ‘To this little creep?’ Then her lip curled scornfully. ‘You’ve got that in your mind a lot, don’t you?’ she said to the man. ‘My even saying one little word to anybody in the whole world.’

  ‘That I do,’ the man said. ‘So keep it in mind, big mouth.’ He put a hand against her overwhelming chest and thrust her back through the doorway. He turned to Mr Hotchkiss. ‘As for you—’ he said.

  Mr Hotchkiss firmly held his ground. ‘Sir, if you will hear me out—’

  ‘As for you,’ the man said, ‘you just keep that pointy nose out of other people’s business. My business especially.’ He accompanied this with a violent shove against Mr Hotchkiss’ distinctly unimpressive chest which sent Mr Hotchkiss staggering backward. ‘Look here—’ Mr Hotchkiss said in protest, but another shove sent him right through his own doorway, and then his door was pulled shut against him.

  Mr Hotchkiss stood there in his foyer shaking with impotent outrage. Literally shaking, he realized. He couldn’t even get his feet to move him off this spot.

  The Urge to Kill.

  His widowed mother, with whom he had lived and to whom he had devoted himself until her death – yes, his mother, that gentle soul, on rare occasions when she had been pushed to the point of ultimate exasperation by someone, would use that phrase, capitals and all. �
��I tell you, son, after what she did, I felt the Urge to Kill.’

  He felt it now in every wildly vibrating nerve. If he had gun in hand this moment, he would gladly use it against that monstrous mealybug and his female and never mind the consequences. Fire every bullet into both of them until they fell down and lay writhing in their final agony. A prolonged agony.

  Mr Hotchkiss stood there, his fist around the imaginary gun, and even from where he stood he suddenly heard the car snarl into action. Snarl and roar on and on endlessly until, at last, there was that familiar blast of the horn, a sound of departure, and silence.

  That did it.

  With an effort Mr Hotchkiss made his way into the living room. Wrong of him, he knew, to even enter the presence of the coleus with such waves of fury emanating from him, bewildering and terrifying them, shattering their nerves. Looking around at the row on row of plants, he had the feeling that, indiscernible as the motion might be, they were actually shrinking away from him. He, the caretaker, the fount of security and tenderness for them, was now providing what? Only catastrophe.

  Simple choice. Either he and the coleus would be driven forever from their rent-controlled Eden, or he must strike an overwhelming blow in its defence.

  But how could any effective blow be struck against a mustached and ruthless bravo who was twice one’s size and strength?

  A bullet from the bedroom window? A bomb tossed into that automobile? Ridiculous. Sheer fantasy.