The Stories of John Cheever

by John Cheever

  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 extol 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?

  What Katie had said about the sky was true. The clouds were passing, and Chester noticed the light in the sky. The days were getting longer. The light seemed delayed. Chester went out from under the canopy to see it. He clasped his hands behind his back and stared outward and upward. He had been taught, as a child, to think of the clouds as disguising the City of God, and the low clouds still excited in him the curiosity of a child who thought that he was looking off to where the saints and the prophets lived. But it was more than the liturgical habits of thought that he retained from his pious childhood. The day had failed to have any meaning, and the sky seemed to promise a literal explanation.

  Why had it failed? Why was it unrewarding? Why did Bronco and the Bestwicks and the Neguses and the grass widow in 7-F and Katie Shay and the stranger add up to nothing? Was it because the Bestwicks and the Neguses and Chester and Bronco had been unable to help one another; because the old maid had not let the stranger help her feed the birds? Was that it? Chester asked, looking at the blue air as if he expected an answer to be written in vapor. But the sky told him only that it was a long day at the end of winter, that it was late and time to go in. THE CHILDREN

  MR. HATHERLY had many old-fashioned tastes. He wore high yellow boots, dined
at Lychow’s in order to hear the music, and slept in a woolen nightshirt. His urge to establish in business a patriarchal liaison with some young man who would serve as his descendant, in the fullest sense of the word, was another of these old-fashioned tastes. Mr. Hatherly picked for his heir a young immigrant named Victor Mackenzie, who had made the crossing from England or Scotland—a winter crossing, I think—when he was sixteen or seventeen. The winter crossing is a guess. He may have worked his way or borrowed passage money or had some relation in this country to help him, but all this was kept in the dark, and his known life began when he went to work for Mr. Hatherly. As an immigrant, Victor may have cherished an obsolete vision of the American businessman. Here and there one saw in Mr. Hatherly a touch of obsolescence. His beginnings were obscure, and, as everyone knows, he got rich enough to be an ambassador. In business, he was known as a harsh and unprincipled trader. He broke wind when he felt like it and relished the ruin of a competitor. He was very short—nearly a dwarf. His legs were spindly and his large belly had pulled his spine out of shape. He decorated his bald skull by combing across it a few threads of gray hair, and he wore an emerald fob on his watch chain. Victor was a tall man, with the kind of handsomeness that is sooner or later disappointing. His square jaw and all his other nicely proportioned features might at first have led you to expect a man of exceptional gifts of character, but you felt in the end that he was merely pleasant, ambitious, and a little ingenuous. For years, this curmudgeon and the young immigrant walked side by side confidently, as if they might have been accepted in the ark.

  Of course, it all took a long time; it took years and years. Victor began as an office boy with a hole in his sock. Like the immigrants of an earlier generation, he had released great stores of energy and naďveness through the act of expatriation. He worked cheerfully all day. He stayed cheerfully at night to decorate the showcases in the waiting room. He seemed to have no home to go to. His eagerness reminded Mr. Hatherly, happily, of the apprentices of his own youth. There was little enough in business that did remind him of the past. He kept Victor in his place for a year or two, speaking to him harshly if he spoke to him at all. Then in his crabbed and arbitrary way he began to instruct Victor in the role of an heir. Victor was sent on the road for six months. After this he worked in the Rhode Island mills. He spent a season in the advertising department and another in the sales division. His position in the business was difficult to assess, but his promotions in Mr. Hatherly’s esteem were striking. Mr. Hatherly was sensitive about the odd figure he cut, and disliked going anywhere alone. When Victor had worked with him for a few years, he was ordered to get to the old man’s apartment, on upper Fifth Avenue, at eight each morning and walk him to work. They never talked much along the way, but then Hatherly was not loquacious. At the close of the business day, Victor either put him into a taxi or walked him home. When the old man went off to Bar Harbor without his eyeglasses, it was Victor who got up in the middle of the night and put the glasses on the early-morning plane. When the old man wanted to send a wedding present, it was Victor who bought it. When the old man was ailing, it was Victor who got him to take his medicine. In the gossip of the trade Victor’s position was naturally the target for a lot of jocularity, criticism, and downright jealousy. Much of the criticism was unfair, for he was merely an ambitious young man who expressed his sense of business enterprise by feeding pills to Mr. Hatherly. Running through all his amenability was an altogether charming sense of his own identity. When he felt that he had grounds for complaint, he said so. After working for eight years under Mr. Hatherly’s thumb, he went to the old man and said that he thought his salary was inadequate. The old man rallied with a masterful blend of injury, astonishment, and tenderness. He took Victor to his tailor and let him order four suits. A few months later, Victor again complained—this time about the vagueness of his position in the firm. He was hasty, the old man said, in objecting to his lack of responsibility. He was scheduled to make a presentation, in a week or two, before the board of directors. This was more than Victor had expected, and he was content. Indeed, he was grateful. This was America! He worked hard over his presentation. He read it aloud to the old man, and Mr. Hatherly instructed him when to raise and when to lower his voice, whose eye to catch and whose to evade, when to strike the table and when to pour himself a glass of water. They discussed the clothing that he would wear. Five minutes before the directors’ meeting began, Mr. Hatherly seized the papers, slammed the door in Victor’s face, and made the presentation himself.

  He called Victor into his office at the end of that trying day. It was past six, and the secretaries had locked up their teacups and gone home. “I’m sorry about the presentation,” the old man mumbled. His voice was heavy. Then Victor saw that he had been crying. The old man slipped off the high desk chair that he used to increase his height and walked around the large office. This was, in itself, a demonstration of intimacy and trust. “But that isn’t what I want to talk about,” he said.

  “I want to talk about my family. Oh, there’s no misery worse than bad blood in a family! My wife”—he spoke with disgust—“is a stupid woman. The hours of pleasure I’ve had from my children I can count on the fingers of one hand. It may be my fault,” he said, with manifest insincerity. “What I want you to do now is to help me with my boy, junior. I’ve brought Junior up to respect money. I made him earn every nickel he got until he was sixteen, so it isn’t my fault that he’s a damn fool with money, but he is. I just don’t have the time to bother with his bad checks any more. I’m a busy man. You know that. What I want you to do is act as junior’s business adviser. I want you to pay his rent, pay his alimony, pay his maid, pay his household expenses, and give him a cash allowance once a week.”

  For a moment, anyhow, Victor seemed to breathe the freshness of a considerable skepticism. He had been cheated, that afternoon, out of a vital responsibility and was being burdened now with a foolish one. The tears could be hypocritical. The fact that this request was made to him in a building that had been emptied and was unnaturally quiet and at a time of day when the fading light outside the windows might help to bend his decision were all tricks in the old man’s hand. But, even seen skeptically, the hold that Hatherly had on him was complete. “Mr. Hatherly told me to tell you,” Victor could always say. “I come from Mr. Hatherly.”

  “Mr. Hatherly…” Without this coupling of names his own voice would sound powerless. The comfortable and becoming shirt whose cuffs he shot in indecision had been given to him by Mr. Hatherly. Mr. Hatherly had introduced him into the 7th Regiment. Mr. Hatherly was his only business identity, and to separate himself from this source of power might be mortal. He didn’t reply.

  “I’m sorry about the presentation,” the old man repeated. “I’ll see that you make one next year. Promise.” He gave his shoulders a hitch to show that he was moving on from this subject to another. “Meet me at the Metropolitan Club tomorrow at two,” he said briskly. “I have to buy out Worden at lunch. That won’t take long. I hope he brings his lawyer with him. Call his lawyer in the morning and make sure that his papers are in order. Give him hell for me. You know how to do it. You’ll help me a great deal by taking care of Junior,” he said with great feeling. “And take care of yourself, Victor. You’re all I have.”

  After lunch the next day, the old man’s lawyer met them at the Metropolitan Club and went with them to an apartment, where Junior was waiting. He was a thickset man a good ten years older than Victor, and he seemed resigned to having his income taken out of his hands. He called Mr. Hatherly Poppa and sadly handed over to his father a bundle of unpaid bills. With Victor and the lawyer, Mr. Hatherly computed Junior’s income and his indebtedness, took into consideration his alimony payments, and arrived at a reasonable estimate for his household expenses and the size of his allowance, which he was to get at Victor’s office each Monday morning. Junior’s goose was cooked in half an hour.

  He came around for his allowance every Monday morning a
nd submitted his household bills to Victor. He sometimes hung around the office and talked about his father—uneasily, as if he might be overheard. All the minutiae of Mr. Hatherly’s life—that he was sometimes shaved three times a day and that he owned fifty pairs of shoes—interested Victor. It was the old man who cut these interviews short. “Tell him to come in and get his money and go,” the old man said. “This is a business office. That’s something he’s never understood.”

  Meanwhile, Victor had met Theresa and was thinking of getting married. Her full name was Theresa Mercereau; her parents were French but she had been born in the United States. Her parents had died when she was young, and her guardian had put her into fourth-string boarding schools. One knows what these places are like. The headmaster resigns over the Christmas holidays. He is replaced by the gymnastics instructor. The heating plant breaks down in February and the water pipes freeze. By this time, most of the parents who are concerned about their children have transferred them to other schools, and by spring there are only twelve or thirteen boarders left. They wander singly or in pairs around the campus, killing time before supper. It has been apparent to them for months that Old Palfrey Academy is dying, but in the first long, bleakly lighted days of spring this fact assumes new poignancy and force. The noise of a quarrel comes from the headmaster’s quarters, where the Latin instructor is threatening to sue for back wages. The smell from the kitchen windows indicates that there will be cabbage again. A few jonquils are in bloom, and the lingering light and the new ferns enjoin the stranded children to look ahead, ahead, but at the back of their minds there is a suspicion that the jonquils and the robins and the evening star imperfectly conceal the fact that this hour is horror, naked horror. Then a car roars up the driveway. “I am Mrs. Hubert Jones,” a woman exclaims, “and I have come to get my daughter…”