The Stories of John Cheever

by John Cheever

  “Where’s Deborah?” Mrs. Harley asked.

  “I was dressing,” Renée said. “She was in here a minute ago. She must have slipped out. She could have opened the door herself.”

  “You mean you’ve lost the little girl!” Mrs. Harley shouted.

  “Please don’t get excited,” Renée said. “She can’t have gone very far. The only way she could get downstairs would be the elevators.” She went out the kitchen door and rang for the service elevator. She noticed the perilous service stairs. They were made of iron and concrete, painted a dirty gray, and they fell fifteen stories to the ground. She listened down the stairwell, but all she could hear was the hiss of cooking and someone, way below, singing,

  “I’m a soldier, in the army of the Lord,

  I’m a soldier,

  In the army…”

  The service elevator was full of stinking garbage. “There was a little girl in my apartment,” Renée said to the man who had brought the elevator up. “She’s disappeared. Would you look for her?” Then she ran into the front hall and rang for the passenger elevator. “Why, yes,” the man said. “I took a little girl down, about ten minutes ago. She had on a yellow coat.” Renée smelled whiskey on his breath. She called to Mrs. Harley. Then she went back into the apartment to get some cigarettes. “I’m not going to stay here by myself,” Mrs. Harley said. Renée pushed her into a chair. She closed the door and rode down in the elevator. “I thought it was strange, her going down by herself,” the elevator man said. “I thought maybe she was going to meet somebody in the lobby.” As he spoke, Renée smelled the whiskey on his breath again. “You’ve been drinking,” she said. “If you hadn’t been drinking, this wouldn’t have happened. You ought to know that a child of that age can’t be left alone. You ought not to drink while you’re working.”

  When he reached the ground floor, he brought the elevator to a sudden stop and slammed the door open. Renée ran into the lobby. The mirrors, the electric candles, and the doorman’s soiled ascot sickened her. “Yes,” the doorman said. “It seems to me that I saw a little girl go out. I didn’t pay much attention to it. I was out there, trying to get a cab.” Renée ran into the street. The child was not there. She ran down to where she could see the river. She felt helpless and feeble, as though she had lost her place in the city in which she had lived for fifteen years. The traffic on the street was heavy. She stood at the corner with her hands cupped to her mouth and screamed, “Deborah! Deborah!”

  The Tennysons were going out that afternoon, and they had begun to dress when the telephone rang. Robert answered. Katherine could hear Renée’s voice. “…I know it’s a terrible thing, Bob, I know I should never have done it.”

  “You mean Mrs. Harley left her with you?”

  “Yes, yes. I know it’s a terrible thing. I’ve looked everywhere. Mrs. Harley is here now. Do you want her to come over?”

  “No.”

  “Shall I call the police?”

  “No,” Robert said. “I’ll call the police. Tell me what she was wearing.” When Robert had finished talking with Renée, he called the police. “I’ll wait here until you come up,” he said. “Please come as quickly as you can.”

  Katherine was standing in the bathroom doorway. She walked over to Robert, and he took her in his arms. He held her firmly, and she began to cry. Then she left his arms and sat on the bed. He went to the open window. Down in the street he could see a truck with COMFORT CARPET COMPANY painted on its roof. There were some tennis courts in the next block, and people were playing tennis. There was a hedge of privet around the tennis courts, and an old woman was cutting some privet with a knife. She wore a round hat and a heavy winter coat that reached to her ankles. He realized that she was stealing the privet. She worked quickly and furtively, and she kept looking over her shoulder to make sure that no one saw her. When she had cut a good bunch of the green branches, she stuffed them into a bag and hurried down the street.

  The doorbell rang. A police sergeant and a plainclothesman were there. They took off their hats. “This kind of thing is hard on the ladies,” the sergeant said. “Now, if you’d give me the facts again, Mr. Tennyson. We already have men looking for her. You say she went down in the elevator herself. That was about an hour ago.” He checked all the facts with Robert. “Now, I don’t want to alarm either of you,” he said, “but would anyone have any reason to kidnap the child? We have to consider every possibility.”

  “Yes,” Katherine said suddenly and in a strong voice. She got up and began to walk back and forth in the room. “It may be unreasonable, but it’s at least worth considering. She may have been kidnapped. I’ve seen that woman in the neighborhood twice this week and I had a feeling that she was following me. I didn’t think anything about it then. And she did write me that letter. I’m not making myself clear. You see, before we had Mrs. Harley to take care of Deborah, we had a woman named Mrs. Emerson. I quarreled with her about Deborah, and she told me, while we were quarreling—I never told you any of this, darling, because I didn’t want to worry you and I didn’t think any of it was important—but when we quarreled, she said the child would be taken away from me. I tried to forget about it, because I thought she was eccentric. The city is full of strange women like that. Then I saw her on the street twice this week, and I had a sense that she was following me. She lives at the Hotel Princess. It’s on the West Side. At least, she used to live there.”

  “I’ll go over,” Robert said. “I’ll get the car.”

  “I’ll drive you over, Mr. Tennyson,” the sergeant said.

  “Do you want to come?” Robert asked Katherine.

  “No, darling,” Katherine said. “I’ll be all right.”

  Robert put on his hat, and he and the sergeant left. The elevator man spoke to Robert. “I’m very sorry, Mr. Tennyson,” he said. “We all loved her in this house. I telephoned my wife and she went right over to St. John’s and lit a vigil light for the little girl.”

  There was a police car in front of the house, and Robert and the sergeant got into it and drove west. Robert kept turning his head from side to side, and he did this to avert his eyes from the image of the child’s death. He imagined the accident in the clichés of “Drive Safely” posters, badly drawn and in crude colors. He saw a stranger carrying the limp body away from the fenders of a taxi; he saw the look of surprise and horror on a lovely face that had never known any horror; he heard the noise of horns, the shrieking of brakes; he saw a car coming over the rise of a hill. He made a physical effort to force his eyes to look beyond these images into the bright street.

  The day had got hot. A few low, swift clouds touched the city with shadow, and he could see the fast darkness traveling from block to block. The streets were crowded. He saw the city only in terms of mortal danger. Each manhole cover, excavation, and flight of stairs dominated the brilliance of the day like the reverse emphasis of a film negative, and he thought the crowds and the green trees in Central Park looked profane. The Hotel Princess was on a dingy street in the West Seventies. The air in the lobby was fetid. The desk clerk became uneasy when he saw the policeman. He looked for Mrs. Emerson’s key and said that she was in. There was no telephone in her room. They could go up.

  They went up in an elevator cage of gilded iron, driven by an old man. They knocked on the door, and Mrs. Emerson told them to come in. Robert had never known the woman. He had only seen her when she stood in the doorway of the nursery and sent Deborah in to say good night. She was English, he remembered. Her voice had always sounded troubled and refined. “Oh, Mr. Tennyson,” she said when she recognized him. The sergeant asked her suddenly where she had been that morning.

  “It’s all right, Mrs. Emerson,” Robert said. He was afraid she would become hysterical and tell them nothing. “Deborah ran away this morning. We thought you might know something about it. Mrs. Tennyson said you wrote her a letter.”

  “Oh, I’m terribly sorry to hear about Deborah,” she said. It was the fine, small voice of
someone who knew her place as a lady. “Yes, yes. Of course I wrote that letter to Mrs. Tennyson. It came to me in a dream that you would lose the little girl unless you were very careful. I have a profession, you know. I interpret dreams. I told Mrs. Tennyson when I left her that she should take very good care of the little girl. She was born, after all, under that dreadful new planet, Pluto. I was on the Riviera when they discovered it, in 1938. We knew something dreadful was going to happen then.

  “I loved the little girl dearly and I regretted my disagreement with Mrs. Tennyson,” she went on. “The little girl was one of the fire people—banked fire. I gave her palm a good deal of study. We were left alone a great deal, of course. She had a long life line and a good sense of balance and a good head. There were signs of imprudence there, but a great deal of that would depend upon you… I saw deep water there and some great danger, some great hazard. That’s why I wrote the letter to Mrs. Tennyson. I never charged Mrs. Tennyson for any of my professional services.”

  “What did you and Mrs. Tennyson fight about?” the sergeant asked.

  “We’re wasting time,” Robert said. “We’re wasting so much time. Let’s go back.” He got up and went out of the room, and the sergeant followed him. It took them a long time to drive back. The Sunday crowds crossing the streets stopped them at every intersection. The plainclothesman was waiting in front of the house. “You’d better go up and see your wife,” he told Robert. Neither the doorman nor the elevator man spoke to him. He stepped into his apartment and called to Katherine. She was in their bedroom, sitting by the window. She had a black book in her lap. He saw that it was the Bible. It was a Gideon copy that a drunken friend of theirs had stolen from a hotel. They had used it once or twice as a reference. Beyond the open window, he could see the river, a wide, bright field of light. The room was very still.

  “What about Mrs. Emerson?” Katherine asked.

  “It was a mistake. It was a mistake to think that she would hurt the child.”

  “Renée called again. She took Mrs. Harley home. She wants us to telephone her when we find Deborah. I never want to see Renée again.”

  “I know.”

  “If anything happens to Deborah,” Katherine said, “I can never forgive myself. I can never forgive myself. I’ll feel as though we had sacrificed her. I’ve been reading about Abraham.” She opened the Bible and began to read. “‘And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of. And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him.’” She closed the book. “The thing I’m afraid of is that I’ll go out of my mind. I keep repeating our address and telephone number to myself. That doesn’t make any sense, does it?”

  Robert put his hand on her forehead and ran it over her hair. Her dark hair was parted at the side and brushed simply, like a child’s.

  “I’m afraid I’m going out of my mind,” Katherine said. “You know what my first impulse was when you left me alone? I wanted to take a knife, a sharp knife, and go into my closet and destroy my clothes. I wanted to cut them to pieces. That’s because they’re so expensive. That’s not a sensible thing to want to do, is it? But I’m not insane, of course. I’m perfectly rational.

  “I had a little brother who died. His name was Charles—Charles, junior. He was named after my father and he died of some kind of sickness when he was two and a half years old, about Deborah’s age. Of course it was very hard on Mother and Dad, but it wasn’t anything as bad as this. You see, I think children mean much more to us than they did to our parents. That’s what I’ve been thinking. I suppose it’s because we’re not as religious and because the way we live makes us much more vulnerable. I feel filthy with guilt. I feel as though I’d been a rotten mother and a rotten wife and as though this were punishment. I’ve broken every vow and every promise that I’ve ever made. I’ve broken all the good promises. When I was a little girl, I used to make promises on the new moon and the first snow. I’ve broken everything good. But I’m talking as though we’d lost her, and we haven’t lost her, have we? They’ll find her, the policeman said they’d find her.”

  “They’ll find her,” Robert said.

  The room darkened. The low clouds had touched the city. They could hear the rain as it fell against the building and the windows.

  “She’s lying somewhere in the rain,” Katherine cried. She wrenched her body around in the chair and covered her face. “She’s lying in the rain.”

  “They’ll find her,” Robert said, “Other children get lost. I’ve read stories about it in the Times. This sort of thing happens to everyone who has children. My sister’s little girl fell downstairs. She fractured her skull. They didn’t think she was going to live.”

  “It does happen to other people, doesn’t it?” Katherine asked. She turned and looked at her husband. The rain had stopped suddenly. It left in the air a smell as powerful as though ammonia had been spilled in the streets. Robert saw the rain clouds darken the bright river. “I mean, there are all the sicknesses and the accidents,” Katherine said, “and we’ve been so lucky. You know, Deborah hasn’t had any lunch. She’ll be terribly hungry. She hasn’t had anything to eat since breakfast.”

  “I know.”

  “Darling, you go out,” Katherine said. “It will be easier for you than staying here.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I’m going to clean the living room. We left the windows open last night and everything’s covered with soot. You go out. I’ll be all right.” She smiled. Her face was swollen from crying. “You go out. It will be easier for you, and I’ll clean the room.”

  Robert went down again. The police car was still parked in front of the house. A policeman came up to Robert, and they talked for a while. “I’m going to look around the neighborhood again,” the policeman said, “if you want to come with me.” Robert said that he would go. He noticed that the policeman carried a flashlight.

  Near the apartment house was the ruin of a brewery that had been abandoned during Prohibition. The sidewalk had been inherited by the dogs of the neighborhood and was littered with their filth. The basement windows of a nearby garage were broken, and the policeman flashed his light through a window frame. Robert started when he saw some dirty straw and a piece of yellow paper. It was the color of Deborah’s coat. He said nothing and they walked along. In the distance he could hear the vast afternoon noise of the city.

  There were some tenements near the brewery. They were squalid, and over the door to one hung a crude sign: “Welcome Home Jerry.” The iron gate that led to the steep cellar stairs was open. The policeman flashed his light down the stairs. They were broken. There was nothing there.

  An old woman sat on the stoop of the next house, and she watched them suspiciously when they looked down the cellar stairs. “You’ll not find my Jimmy there,” she screamed, “you—you—” Someone threw open a window and told her to shut up. Robert saw that she was drunk. The policeman paid no attention to her. He looked methodically into the cellar of each house, and then they went around a corner. There were stores, here, along the front of an apartment house. There were no stairs or areaways.

  Robert heard a siren. He stopped, and stopped the policeman with him. A police car came around the corner and drew up to the curb where they stood. “Hop in, Mr. Tennyson,” the driver said. “We found her. She’s down at the station.” He started the siren, and they drove east, dodging through the traffic. “We found her down on Third Avenue,” the policeman said. “She was sitting out in front of an antique store, eating a piece of bread. Somebody must have given her the bread. She isn’t hungry.”

  She was waiting for him at the station house. He put his hands on her and knelt in front of her and began to laugh. His eyes were bur
ning. “Where have you been, Deborah? Who gave you the bread? Where have you been? Where have you been?”

  “The lady gave the bread,” she said. “I had to find Martha.”

  “What lady gave you the bread, Deborah? Where have you been? Who is Martha? Where have you been?” He knew that she would never tell him and that as long as he lived he would never know, and against his palm he could feel the strong beating of her heart, but he went on asking, “Where have you been? Who gave you the bread? Who is Martha?” THE SUMMER FARMER

  The Nor’easter is a train the railroad christened at a moment when its directors were imbued with the mystery of travel. Memory is often more appealing than fact, and a passenger who had long ridden the train might overlook its noise and dirt each time he entered the Grand Central Station and saw there the name of a northerly three-day rain. This, at least, was the case with Paul Hollis, who rode the Nor’easter on nearly every Thursday or Friday night of his summer. He was a bulky man, who suffered in all Pullmans, but in none so much as he did on this ride. As a rule, he stayed in the club car until ten, drinking Scotch. The whiskey ordinarily kept him asleep until they reached the tumultuous delays of Springfield, past midnight. North of Springfield, the train fell into the balky and malingering stride of an old local, and Paul lay in his berth between wakefulness and sleep, like a partially anesthetized patient. The ordeal ended when, after breakfast, he left the Nor’easter, in Meridian Junction, and was met by his gentle wife. There was this to be said about the journey: It made one fully conscious of the terrestrial distance that separated the hot city from the leafy and ingenuous streets of the junction village.