The Stories of John Cheever

by John Cheever

  Mrs. Bestwick had called Chester late one afternoon about a month before and asked him if he would come upstairs. It was not urgent, she explained in her pleasant voice, but if it was not inconvenient, she would like to see him. She let him in graciously, as she did everything. She was a slender woman—a too slender woman with a magnificent bust and a graceful way of moving. He followed her that afternoon into the living room, where an older woman was sitting on a sofa. “This is my mother, Mrs. Doubleday, Chester,” Mrs. Bestwick said. “Mother, this is Chester Coolidge, our superintendent.” Mrs. Doubleday said she was pleased to meet him, and Chester accepted her invitation to sit down. From one of the bedrooms, Chester heard the older Bestwick girl singing a song. “Up with Chapin, Down with Spence,” she sang. “Hang Miss Hewitt To a back-yard fence.”

  Chester knew every living room in the building, and by his standards the Bestwicks’ was as pleasant as any of them. It was his feeling that all the apartments in his building were intrinsically ugly and inconvenient. Watching his self-important tenants walk through the lobby, he sometimes thought that they were a species of the poor. They were poor in space, poor in light, poor in quiet, poor in repose, and poor in the atmosphere of privacy—poor in everything that makes a man’s home his castle. He knew the pains they took to overcome these deficiencies: the fans, for instance, to take away the smells of cooking. A six-room apartment is not a house, and if you cook onions in one end of it, you’ll likely smell them in the other, but they all installed kitchen exhausts and kept them running, as if ventilating machinery would make an apartment smell like a house in the woods. All the living rooms were, to his mind, too high-ceilinged and too narrow, too noisy and too dark, and he knew how tirelessly the women spent their time and money in the furniture stores, thinking that another kind of carpeting, another set of end tables, another pair of lamps would make the place conform at last to their visions of a secure home. Mrs. Bestwick had done better than most, he thought, or perhaps it was because he liked her that he liked her room.

  “Do you know about the new rents, Chester?” Mrs. Bestwick said.

  “I never know about rents, or leases,” Chester said untruthfully. “They handle all of that at the office.”

  “Our rent’s been raised,” Mrs. Bestwick said, “and we don’t want to pay that much. I thought you might know if there was a less expensive apartment vacant in the building.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Bestwick,” Chester said. “There isn’t a thing.”

  “I see,” Mrs. Bestwick said.

  He saw that she had something in mind; probably she hoped that he would offer to speak to the management and persuade them that the Bestwicks, as old and very desirable tenants, should be allowed to stay on at their present rental. But apparently she wasn’t going to put herself in the embarrassing position of asking for his help, and he refrained, out of tact, from telling her that there was no way of his bringing pressure to bear on the situation.

  “Isn’t this building managed by the Marshall Cavises?” Mrs. Doubleday asked.

  “Yes,” Chester said.

  “I went to Farmington with Mrs. Cavis,” Mrs. Doubleday said to her daughter. “Do you think it would help if I spoke with her?”

  “Mrs. Cavis isn’t around here very much,” Chester said. “During the fifteen years I worked here, I never laid eyes on either of them.”

  “But they do manage the building?” Mrs. Doubleday said to him.

  “The Marshall Cavis Corporation manages it,” Chester said.

  “Maude Cavis was engaged to Benton Towler,” Mrs. Doubleday said.

  “I don’t expect they have much to do with it personally,” Chester said. “I don’t know, but it seems to me I heard they don’t even live in New York.”

  “Thank you very much, Chester,” Mrs. Bestwick said. “I just thought there might be a vacancy.”

  WHEN THE ALARM BEGAN ringing again, this time to signify that the tank on the roof was full, Chester lit out through the lobby and down the iron stairs and turned off the pump. Stanley, the handyman, was awake and moving around in his room by then, and Chester told him he thought the float switch on the roof that controlled the pump was broken and to keep an eye on the gauge. The day in the basement had begun. The milk and the newspapers had been delivered; Delaney, the porter, had emptied the waste cans in the back halls; and now the sleep-out cooks and maids were coming to work. Chester could hear them greeting Ferarri, the back-elevator man, and their clear “Good mornings” confirmed his feeling that the level of courtesy was a grade higher in the basement than in the lobby upstairs.

  At a little before nine, Chester telephoned the office management. A secretary whose voice he did not recognize took the message. “The float switch on the water tank is busted,” he told her, “and we’re working the auxiliary manually now. You tell the maintenance crew to get over here this morning.”

  “The maintenance crew is at one of the other buildings,” the unfamiliar voice said, “and we don’t expect them back until four o’clock.”

  “This is an emergency, God damn it!” Chester shouted. “I got over two hundred bathrooms here. This building’s just as important as those buildings over on Park Avenue. If my bathrooms run dry, you can come over here and take the complaints yourself. It’s a moving day, and the handyman and me have got too much to do to be sitting beside the auxiliary all the time.” His face got red. His voice echoed through the basement. When he hung up, he felt uncomfortable and his cigar burned his mouth. Then Ferarri came in with a piece of bad news. The Bestwicks’ move would be delayed. They had arranged for a small moving company to move them to Pelham, and the truck had broken down in the night, bringing a load south from Boston.

  Ferarri took Chester up to 9-E in the service car. One of the cheap, part-time maids that Mrs. Bestwick had been hiring recently had thumb-tacked a sign onto the back door. “To Whom It May Concern,” she had printed. “I never play the numbers and I never will play the numbers and I never played the numbers.” Chester put the sign in the waste can and rang the back bell. Mrs. Bestwick opened the door. She was holding a cracked cup full of coffee in one hand, and Chester noticed that her hand was trembling. “I’m terribly sorry about the moving truck, Chester,” she said. “I don’t quite know what to do. Everything’s ready,” she said, gesturing toward the china barrels that nearly filled the kitchen. She led Chester across the hall into the living room, where the walls, windows, and floors were bare. “Everything’s ready,” she repeated. “Mr. Bestwick has gone up to Pelham to wait for me. Mother took the children.”

  “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 a
n 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 had 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.