The Stories of John Cheever Part 11

"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, G.o.d d.a.m.n 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 bas.e.m.e.nt. 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 gra.s.s 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 an 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. La.s.ser and Mrs. Dobree. Chester suspected that Mrs. La.s.ser 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 coa.r.s.en 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. La.s.ser 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 members.h.i.+p, 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, b.u.t.ter, 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 gra.s.s 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 bas.e.m.e.nt. I take just as much pains with my bas.e.m.e.nt as I do with my lobby."

"I'm not talking about the bas.e.m.e.nt," 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, pa.s.sing 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p was nothing. At his feet, there were thousands of arteries hammering with steam; there were hundreds of toilets, miles of drainpipe, and a pa.s.senger 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 s.h.i.+p's captain taking his freighter out to sea.

When he got back to the bas.e.m.e.nt, 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 s.h.i.+ned.

But the shoes.h.i.+ne parlor that morning was still and empty, and Bronco, the shoes.h.i.+ne 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 coa.r.s.e 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 pa.s.s 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 gla.s.s on the hunting prints was s.h.i.+ning. He stood under the canopy long enough to see that the bra.s.s 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.

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 appet.i.te.

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 n.o.body 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 bas.e.m.e.nt, 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 b.i.t.c.h 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 gla.s.ses. 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 cla.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sing, 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 G.o.d, 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 gra.s.s 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-fas.h.i.+oned tastes. He wore high yellow boots, dined at Lychow's in order to hear the music, and slept in a woolen nights.h.i.+rt. 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 pa.s.sage 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 amba.s.sador. 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 compet.i.tor. 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 naiveness 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 a.s.sess, 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 eyegla.s.ses, it was Victor who got up in the middle of the night and put the gla.s.ses 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 ident.i.ty. 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 gla.s.s 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 d.a.m.n 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 ident.i.ty, 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 h.e.l.l 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 and 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 a.s.sumes 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..."

Theresa was always one of the last to be rescued, and these hours seemed to have left some impression on her. It was the quality of an especial sadness, a delicacy that was never forlorn, a charming air of having been wronged, that one remembered about her.

That winter, Victor went to Florida with Mr. Hatherly to hoist his beach umbrella and play rummy with him, and while they were there he said that he wanted to get married. The old man yelled his objections. Victor stood his ground. When they returned to New York, the old man invited Victor to bring Theresa to his apartment one evening. He greeted the young woman with great cordiality and then introduced her to Mrs. Hatherly-a wasted and nervous woman who kept her hands at her mouth. The old man began to prowl around the edges of the room. Then he disappeared. "It's all right," Mrs. Hatherly whispered. "He's going to give you a present." He returned in a few minutes and hung a string of amethysts around Theresa's beautiful neck. Once the old man had accepted her, he seemed happy about the marriage. He made all the arrangements for the wedding, of course, told them where to go for a honeymoon, and rented and furnished an apartment for them one day between a business lunch and a plane to California. Theresa seemed, like her husband, to be able to accommodate his interference. When her first child was born, she named it Violet-this was her own idea-after Mr. Hatherly's sainted mother.

When the Mackenzies gave a party, in those years, it was usually because Mr. Hatherly had told them to give a party. He would call Victor into his office at the end of the day, tell him to entertain, and set a date. He would order the liquor and the food, and overhaul the guest list with the Mackenzies' business and social welfare in mind. He would rudely refuse an invitation to come to the party himself, but he would appear before any of the guests, carrying a bunch of flowers that was nearly as tall as he was. He would make sure that Theresa put the flowers in the right vase. Then he would go into the nursery and let Violet listen to his watch. He would go through the apartment, moving a lamp here or an ashtray there and giving the curtains a poke. By this time the Mackenzies' guests would have begun to arrive, but Mr. Hatherly would show no signs of going. He was a distinguished old man and everyone liked to talk with him. He would circle the room, making sure that all the gla.s.ses were filled, and if Victor told an anecdote the chances were that Mr. Hatherly had drilled him in how to tell it. When the supper was served, the old man would be anxious about the food and the way the maid looked.

He was always the last to go. When the other guests had said good night, he would settle down and all three would have a gla.s.s of milk and talk about the evening. Then the old man would seem happy-with a kind of merriment that his enemies would never have believed him capable of. He would laugh until the tears rolled down his cheeks. He sometimes took off his boots. The small room seemed to be the only room in which he was content, but it must always have been at the back of Mr. Hatherly's mind that these young people were in substance nothing to him, and that it was because his own flesh and blood had been such a bitter disappointment that he found himself in so artificial a position. At last he would get up to go. Theresa would straighten the knot in his tie, brush the crumbs off his vest, and bend down to be kissed. Victor would help him into his fur coat. All three of them would be deep in the tenderness of a family parting. "Take good care of yourselves," the old man would mumble. "You're all I have."

One night, after a party at the Mackenzies, Mr. Hatherly died in his sleep. The funeral was in Worcester, where he was born. The family seemed inclined to keep the arrangements from Victor, but he found out what they were easily enough, and went, with Theresa, to the church and the cemetery. Old Mrs. Hatherly and her unhappy children gathered at the edge of the grave. They must have watched the old man's burial with such conflicting feelings that it would be impossible to extricate from the emotional confusion anything that could be named. "Goodbye, goodbye," Mrs. Hatherly called, half-heartedly, across the earth, and her hands flew to her lips-a habit that she had never been able to break, although the dead man had often threatened to strike her for it. If the full taste of grief is a privilege, this was now the privilege of the Mackenzies. They were crushed. Theresa had been too young when her parents died for her to have, as a grown person, any clear memories of grieving for them, and Victor's parents-whoever they were had died a few years back, in England or Scotland, and it seemed at Hatherly's grave that she and Victor were in the throes of an accrual of grief and that they were burying more than the bones of one old man. The real children cut the Mackenzies.

The Mackenzies were indifferent to the fact that they were not mentioned in Mr. Hatherly's will. A week or so after the funeral, the directors elected Junior to the presidency of the firm, and one of the first things he did was to fire Victor. He had been compared with this industrious immigrant for years, and his resentment was understandable and deep. Victor found another job, but his intimate a.s.sociation with Mr. Hatherly was held against him in the trade. The old man had a host of enemies, and Victor inherited them all. He lost his new job after six or eight months, and found another that he regarded as temporary-an arrangement that would enable him to meet his monthly bills while he looked around for something better. Nothing better turned up. He and Theresa gave up the apartment that Mr. Hatherly had taken for them, sold all their furniture, and moved around from place to place, but all this-the ugly rooms they lived in, the succession of jobs that Victor took-is not worth going into. To put it simply, the Mackenzies had some hard times; the Mackenzies dropped out of sight.

THE SCENE CHANGES to a fund-raising party for the Girl Scouts of America, in a suburb of Pittsburgh. It is a black-tie dance in a large house-Salisbury Hall-that has been picked by the dance committee with the hope that idle curiosity about this edifice will induce a lot of people to buy the twenty-five-dollar tickets. Mrs. Brownlee, the nominal hostess, is the widow of a pioneer steel magnate. Her house is strung for half a mile along the spine of one of the Allegheny hills. Salisbury Hall is a castle, or, rather, a collection of parts of castles and houses. There is a tower, a battlement, and a dungeon, and the postern gate is a reproduction of the gate at Chateau Gaillard. The stones and timber for the Great Hall and the armory were brought from abroad. Like most houses of its kind, Salisbury Hall presents insuperable problems of maintenance. Touch a suit of chain mail in the armory and your hand comes away black with rust. The copy of a Mantegna fresco in the ballroom is horribly stained with water. But the party is a success. A hundred couples are dancing. The band is playing a rhumba. The Mackenzies are here.

Theresa is dancing. Her hair is still fair-it may be dyed by now-and her arms and her shoulders are still beautiful. The air of sadness, of delicacy, still clings to her. Victor is not on the dance floor. He is in the orangery, where watery drinks are being sold. He pays for four drinks, walks around the edge of the crowded dance floor, and goes through the armory, where a stranger stops to ask him a question. "Why, yes," Victor says courteously, "I do happen to know about it. It's a suit of mail that was made for the coronation of Philip II. Mr. Brownlee had it copied..." He continues along another quarter of a mile of halls and parlors, through the Great Hall, to a small parlor, where Mrs. Brownlee is sitting with some friends. "Here's Vic with our drinks!" she cries. Mrs. Brownlee is an old lady, plucked and painted and with her hair dyed an astonis.h.i.+ng shade of pink. Her fingers and her forearms are loaded with rings and bracelets. Her diamond necklace is famous. So, indeed, are most of her jewels-most of them have names. There are the Taphir emeralds, the Bertolotti rubies, and the Demidoff pearls, and, feeling that a look at this miscellany should be included in the price of admission, she has loaded herself unsparingly for the benefit of the Girl Scouts. "Everybody's having a good time, aren't they, Vic?" she asks. "Well, they should be having a good time. My house has always been known for its atmosphere of hospitality as well as for its wealth of artistic treasures. Sit down, Vic," she says. "Sit down. Give yourself a little rest. I don't know what I'd do without you and Theresa." But Victor doesn't have time to sit down. He has to run the raffle. He goes back through the Great Hall, the Venetian Salon, and the armory, to the ballroom. He climbs onto a chair. There is a flourish of music. "Ladies and gentlemen!" he calls through a megaphone. "Ladies and gentlemen, can I have your attention for a few minutes..." He raffles off a case of Scotch, a case of bourbon, a Waring mixer, and a power lawn mower.

When the raffle is over and the dancing begins again, he goes out onto the terrace for a breath of air, and we follow him and speak to him there.

"Victor?"

"Oh, how nice to see you again," he exclaims. "What in the world are you doing in Pittsburgh?" His hair has grayed along conventionally handsome lines. He must have had some work done on his teeth, because his smile is whiter and more dazzling than ever. The talk is the conversation of acquaintances who have not met for ten or fifteen years-it has been that long-about this and that, then about Theresa, then about Violet. At the mention of Violet, he seems very sad. He sets the megaphone on the stone terrace and leans on its metal rim. He bows his head. "Well, Violet is sixteen now, you know," he says. "She's given me a lot to worry about. She was suspended from school about six weeks ago. Now I've got her into a new school in Connecticut. It took a lot of doing." He sniffs.

"How long have you been in Pittsburgh, Victor?"

"Eight years," he says. He swings the megaphone into the air and peers through it at a star. "Nine, actually," he says.

"What are you doing, Victor?"

"I'm between jobs now." He lets the megaphone fall.

"Where are you living, Victor?"

"Here," he says.

"I know. But where in Pittsburgh?"