The Stories of John Cheever

by John Cheever

  “Come here, Clancy,” Mr. Rowantree said. Clancy didn’t answer. Mr. Rowantree put his finger on the bell and held it there. Clancy didn’t move. He heard Mr. Rowantree and his friend talking. A moment later, he heard them climb the stairs. All the solicitude he had felt for Mr. Rowantree, the times he had imagined him walking in the Park with Miss James, seemed like money lost in a terrible fraud. He was hurt and bitter. The idea of Bobbie’s being in the Building was a painful one for him to take, and he felt as if it contested his own simple view of life. He was curt with everyone for the rest of the day. He even spoke sharply to the children. When he went to the basement to take off his uniform, Mr. Coolidge, the superintendent, called him into his office.

  “Rowantree’s been trying to get you fired for the last hour, Jim,” he said. “He said you wouldn’t take him up in your car. I’m not going to fire you, because you’re a good, steady man, but I’m warning you now. He knows a lot of rich and influential people, and if you don’t mind your own business, it won’t be hard for him to get you kicked out.” Mr. Coolidge was surrounded by all the treasures he had extricated from the rubbish baskets in the back halls—broken lamps, broken vases, a perambulator with three wheels.

  “But he—” Clancy began.

  “It’s none of your business, Jim,” Mr. Coolidge said. “He’s been very quiet since he come back from Europe. You’re a good, steady man, Clancy, and I don’t want to fire you, but you got to remember that you aren’t the boss around here.”

  The next day was Palm Sunday, and, by the grace of God, Clancy did not see Mr. Rowantree. On Monday, Clancy joined his bitterness at having to live in Sodom to the deep and general grief he always felt at the commencement of those events that would end on Golgotha. It was a gloomy day. Clouds and darkness were over the city. Now and then it rained. Clancy took Mr. Rowantree down at ten. He didn’t say anything, but he gave the man a scornful look. The ladies began going off for lunch around noon. Mr. Rowantree’s friend Bobbie went out then.

  About half past two, one of the ladies came back from lunch, smelling of gin. She did a funny thing. When she got into the elevator, she stood with her face to the wall of the car, so that Clancy couldn’t see it. He was not a man to look into somebody’s face if they wanted to hide it, and this made him angry. He stopped the car. “Turn around,” he said. “Turn around. I’m ashamed of you, a woman with three grown children, standing with your face to the wall like a crybaby.” She turned around. She was crying about something. Clancy put the car into motion again. “You ought to fast,” he mumbled. “You ought to go without cigarettes or meat during Lent. It would give you something to think about.” She left the car, and he answered a ring from the first floor. It was Mr. Rowantree. He took him up. Then he took Mrs. DePaul up to 9. She was a nice woman, and he told her about John’s trip to Chicago. On the way down, he smelled gas.

  For a man who has lived his life in a tenement, gas is the odor of winter, sickness, need, and death. Clancy went up to Mr. Rowantree’s floor. That was it. He had the master key and he opened the door and stepped into that hellish breath. It was dark. He could hear the petcocks hissing in the kitchen. He put a rug against the door to keep it open and threw up a window in the hall. He stuck his head out for some air. Then, in terror of being blown into hell himself, and swearing and praying and half closing his eyes as if the poisonous air might blind him, he started for the kitchen and gave himself a cruel bang against the doorframe that made him cold all over with pain. He stumbled into the kitchen and turned off the gas and opened the doors and windows. Mr. Rowantree was on his knees with his head in the oven. He sat up. He was crying. “Bobbie’s gone, Clancy,” he said. “Bobbie’s gone.”

  Clancy’s stomach turned over, his gorge opened and filled up with bitter spit. “Dear Jesus!” he shouted. “Dear Jesus!” He stumbled out of the apartment. He was shaking all over. He took the car down and shouted for the doorman and told him what had happened.

  The doorman took the elevator, and Clancy went into the locker room and sat down. He didn’t know how long he had been there when the doorman came in and said that he smelled more gas. Clancy went up to Mr. Rowantree’s apartment again. The door was shut. He opened it and stood in the hall and heard the petcocks. “Take your Goddamned fool head out of that oven, Mr. Rowantree!” he shouted. He went into the kitchen and turned off the gas. Mr. Rowantree was sitting on the floor. “I won’t do it again, Clancy,” he said. “I promise, I promise.”

  Clancy went down and got Mr. Coolidge, and they went into the basement together and turned off Mr. Rowantree’s gas. He went up again. The door was shut. When he opened it, he heard the hissing of the gas. He yanked the man’s head out of the oven. “You’re wasting your time, Mr. Rowantree!” he shouted. “We’ve turned off your gas! You’re wasting your time!” Mr. Rowantree scrambled to his feet and ran out of the kitchen. Clancy heard him running through the apartment, slamming doors. He followed him and found him in the bathroom, shaking pills out of a bottle into his mouth. Clancy knocked the pill bottle out of his hand and knocked the man down. Then he called the precinct station on Mr. Rowantree’s phone. He waited there until a policeman, a doctor, and a priest came.

  Clancy walked home at five. The sky was black. It was raining soot and ashes. Sodom, he thought, the city undeserving of clemency, the unredeemable place, and, raising his eyes to watch the rain and the ashes fall through the air, he felt a great despair for his kind. They had lost the warrants for mercy, there was no movement in the city around him but toward self-destruction and sin. He longed for the simple life of Ireland and the City of God, but he felt that he had been contaminated by the stink of gas.

  He told Nora what had happened, and she tried to comfort him. There was no letter or card from John. In the evening, Mr. Coolidge telephoned. He said it was about Mr. Rowantree.

  “Is he in the insane asylum?” Clancy asked.

  “No,” Mr. Coolidge said. “His friend came back and they went out together. But he’s been threatening to get you fired again. As soon as he felt all right again, he said he was going to get you fired. I don’t want to fire you, but you got to be careful, you got to be careful.” This was the twist that Clancy couldn’t follow, and he felt sick. He asked Mr. Coolidge to get a man from the union to take his place for a day or so, and he went to bed.

  Clancy stayed in bed the next morning. He got worse. He was cold. Nora lighted a fire in the range, but he shivered as if his heart and his bones were frozen. He doubled his knees up to his chest and snagged the blankets around him, but he couldn’t keep warm. Nora finally called the doctor, a man from Limerick. It was after ten before he got there. He said that Clancy should go to the hospital. The doctor left to make the arrangements, and Nora got Clancy’s best clothes together and helped him into them. There was still a price tag on his long underwear and there were pins in his shirt. In the end, nobody saw the new underwear and the clean shirt. At the hospital, they drew a curtain around his bed and handed the finery out to Nora. Then he stretched out in bed, and Nora gave him a kiss and went away.

  He groaned, he moaned for a while, but he had a fever and this put him to sleep. He did not know or care where he was for the next few days. He slept most of the time. When John came back from Chicago, the boy’s company and his story of the trip picked Clancy’s spirits up a little. Nora visited him every day, and one day, a couple of weeks after Clancy entered the hospital, she brought Frank Quinn, the doorman, with her. Frank gave Clancy a narrow manila envelope, and when Clancy opened it, asking crossly what it was, he saw that it was full of currency.

  “That’s from the tenants, Clancy,” Frank said.

  “Now, why did they do this?” Clancy said. He was smitten. His eyes watered and he couldn’t count the money. “Why did they do this?” he asked weakly. “Why did they go to this trouble? I’m nothing but an elevator man.”

  “It’s nearly two hundred dollars,” Frank said.

  “Who took up the collection?” Clancy
said. “Was it you, Frank?”

  “It was one of the tenants,” Frank said.

  “It was Mrs. DePaul”, Clancy said. “I’ll bet it was that Mrs. DePaul.”

  “One of the tenants,” Frank said.

  “It was you, Frank,” Clancy said warmly. “You was the one who took up the collection.”

  “It was Mr. Rowantree,” Frank said sadly. He bent his head.

  “You’re not going to give the money back, Jim?” Nora asked.

  “I’m not a Goddamned fool!” Clancy shouted. “When I pick up a dollar off the street, I’m not the man to go running down to the lost-and-found department with it!”

  “Nobody else could have gotten so much, Jim,” Frank said. “He went from floor to floor. They say he was crying.”

  Clancy had a vision. He saw the church from the open lid of his coffin, before the altar. The sacristan had lighted only a few of the Vaseline-colored lamps, for the only mourners were those few people, all of them poor and old, who had come from Limerick with Clancy on the boat. He heard the priest’s youthful voice mingling with the thin music of the bells. Then in the back of the church he saw Mr. Rowantree and Bobbie. They were crying and crying. They were crying harder than Nora. He could see their shoulders rise and fall, and hear their sighs.

  “Does he think I’m dying, Frank?” Clancy asked.

  “Yes, Jim. He does.”

  “He thinks I’m dying,” Clancy said angrily. “He’s got one of them soft heads. Well, I ain’t dying. I’m not taking any of his grief. I’m getting out of here.” He climbed out of bed. Nora and Frank tried unsuccessfully to push him back. Frank ran out to get a nurse. The nurse pointed a finger at Clancy and commanded him to get back into bed, but he had put on his pants and was tying his shoelaces. She went out and got another nurse, and the two young women tried to hold him down, but he shook them off easily. The first nurse went to get a doctor. The doctor who returned with her was a young man, much smaller than Clancy. He said that Clancy could go home. Frank and Nora took him back in a taxi, and as soon as he got into the tenement, he telephoned Mr. Coolidge and said that he was coming back to work in the morning. He felt a lot better, surrounded by the smells and lights of his own place. Nora cooked him a nice supper and he ate it in the kitchen.

  After supper, he sat by the window in his shirtsleeves. He thought about going back to work, about the man with the cleft chin, the wife-beater, Mr. Rowantree and Bobbie. Why should a man fall in love with a monster? Why should a man try to kill himself? Why should a man try to get a man fired and then collect money for him with tears in his eyes, and then perhaps, a week later, try to get him fired again? He would not return the money, he would not thank Mr. Rowantree, but he wondered what kind of judgment he should pass on the pervert. He began to pick the words he would say to Mr. Rowantree when they met. “It’s my suggestion, Mr. Rowantree,” he would say, “that the next time you want to kill yourself, you get a rope or a gun. It’s my suggestion, Mr. Rowantree,” he would say, “that you go to a good doctor and get your head examined.”

  The spring wind, the south wind that in the city smells of drains, was blowing. Clancy’s window looked onto an expanse of clotheslines and ailanthus trees, yards that were used as dumps, and the naked backs of tenements, with their lighted and unlighted windows. The symmetry, the reality of the scene heartened Clancy, as if it conformed to something good in himself. Men with common minds like his had built these houses. Nora brought him a glass of beer and sat near the window. He put an arm around her waist. She was in her slip, because of the heat. Her hair was held down with pins. She appeared to Clancy to be one of the glorious beauties of his day, but a stranger, he guessed, might notice the tear in her slip and that her body was bent and heavy. A picture of John hung on the wall. Clancy was struck with the strength and intelligence of his son’s face, but he guessed that a stranger might notice the boy’s glasses and his bad complexion. And then, thinking of Nora and John and that this half blindness was all that he knew himself of mortal love, he decided not to say anything to Mr. Rowantree. They would pass in silence.

  CHRISTMAS IS A SAD SEASON FOR THE POOR

  Christmas is a sad season. The phrase came to Charlie an instant after the alarm clock had waked him, and named for him an amorphous depression that had troubled him all the previous evening. The sky outside his window was black. He sat up in bed and pulled the light chain that hung in front of his nose. Christmas is a very sad day of the year, he thought. Of all the millions of people in New York, I am practically the only one who has to get up in the cold black of 6 AM. on Christmas Day in the morning; I am practically the only one.

  He dressed, and when he went downstairs from the top floor of the rooming house in which he lived, the only sounds he heard were the coarse sounds of sleep; the only lights burning were lights that had been forgotten. Charlie ate some breakfast in an all-night Iunch-wagon and took an Elevated train uptown. From Third Avenue, he walked over to Sutton Place. The neighborhood was dark. House after house put into the shine of the street lights a wall of black windows. Millions and millions were sleeping, and this general loss of consciousness generated an impression of abandonment, as if this were the fall of the city, the end of time. He opened the iron-and-glass doors of the apartment building where he had been working for six months as an elevator operator, and went through the elegant lobby to a locker room at the back. He put on a striped vest with brass buttons, a false ascot, a pair of pants with a light blue stripe on the seam, and a coat. The night elevator man was dozing on the little bench in the car. Charlie woke him. The night elevator man told him thickly that the day doorman had been taken sick and wouldn’t be in that day. With the doorman sick, Charlie wouldn’t have any relief for lunch, and a lot of people would expect him to whistle for cabs.

  CHARLIE had been on duty a few minutes when 14 rang—a Mrs. Hewing, who, he happened to know, was kind of immoral. Mrs. Hewing hadn’t been to bed yet, and she got into the elevator wearing a long dress under her fur coat. She was followed by her two funny-looking dogs. He took her down and watched her go out into the dark and take her dogs to the curb. She was outside for only a few minutes. Then she came in and he took her up to 14 again. When she got off the elevator, she said, “Merry Christmas, Charlie.”

  “Well, it isn’t much of a holiday for me, Mrs. Hewing,” he said. “I think Christmas is a very sad season of the year. It isn’t that people around here ain’t generous—I mean, I got plenty of tips—but, you see, I live alone in a furnished room and I don’t have any family or anything, and Christmas isn’t much of a holiday for me.”

  “I’m sorry, Charlie,” Mrs. Hewing said. “I don’t have any family myself. It is kind of sad when you’re alone, isn’t it?” She called her dogs and followed them into her apartment. He went down.

  It was quiet then, and Charlie lighted a cigarette. The heating plant in the basement encompassed the building at that hour in a regular and profound vibration, and the sullen noises of arriving steam heat began to resound, first in the lobby and then to reverberate up through all the sixteen stories, but this was a mechanical awakening, and it didn’t lighten his loneliness or his petulance. The black air outside the glass doors had begun to turn blue, but the blue light seemed to have no source; it appeared in the middle of the air. It was a tearful light, and as it picked out the empty street he wanted to cry. Then a cab drove up, and the Walsers got out, drunk and dressed in evening clothes, and he took them up to their penthouse. The Walsers got him to brooding about the difference between his life in a furnished room and the lives of the people overhead. It was terrible.

  Then the early churchgoers began to ring, but there were only three of these that morning. A few more went off to church at eight o’clock, but the majority of the building remained unconscious, although the smell of bacon and coffee had begun to drift into the elevator shaft.

  At a little after nine, a nursemaid came down with a child. Both the nursemaid and the child had a deep tan an
d had just returned, he knew, from Bermuda. He had never been to Bermuda. He, Charlie, was a prisoner, confined eight hours a day to a six-by-eight elevator cage, which was confined, in turn, to a sixteen-story shaft. In one building or another, he had made his living as an elevator operator for ten years. He estimated the average trip at about an eighth of a mile, and when he thought of the thousands of miles he had traveled, when he thought that he might have driven the car through the mists above the Caribbean and set it down on some coral beach in Bermuda, he held the narrowness of his travels against his passengers, as if it were not the nature of the elevator but the pressure of their lives that confined him, as if they had clipped his wings.

  He was thinking about this when the DePauls, on 9, rang. They wished him a merry Christmas.

  “Well, it’s nice of you to think of me,” he said as they descended, “but it isn’t much of a holiday for me. Christmas is a sad season when you’re poor. I live alone in a furnished room. I don’t have any family.”

  “Who do you have dinner with, Charlie?” Mrs. DePaul asked.

  “I don’t have any Christmas dinner,” Charlie said. “I just get a sandwich.”

  “Oh, Charlie!” Mrs. DePaul was a stout woman with an impulsive heart, and Charlie’s plaint struck at her holiday mood as if she had been caught in a cloudburst. “I do wish we could share our Christmas dinner with you, you know,” she said. “I come from Vermont, you know, and when I was a child, you know, we always used to have a great many people at our table. The mailman, you know, and the schoolteacher, and just anybody who didn’t have any family of their own, you know, and I wish we could share our dinner with you the way we used to, you know, and I don’t see any reason why we can’t. We can’t have you at the table, you know, because you couldn’t leave the elevator—could you?—but just as soon as Mr. DePaul has carved the goose, I’ll give you a ring, and I’ll arrange a tray for you, you know, and I want you to come up and at least share our Christmas dinner.”