The Stories of John Cheever (1979 Pulitzer Prize)

by John Cheever

  "It's too hot for a mink coat, dear," Katherine told her. "Why don't you wear a mink scarf?"

  "Put on the mink scarf," Deborah said. Then the cook came into the bedroom with the coffee and orange juice, and said that Mrs. Harley was there. Robert and Katherine kissed Deborah goodbye and told her to enjoy herself in the park.

  The Tennysons had no room for a sleep-in nurse, so Mrs. Harley came to the house every morning and took care of Deborah during the day. Mrs. Harley was a widow. She had lived a hearty and comfortable life until her husband's death, but he had left her with no money and she had been reduced to working as a nursemaid. She said that she loved children and had always wanted children herself, but this was not true. Children bored and irritated her. She was a kind and ignorant woman, and this, more than any bitterness, showed in her face when she took Deborah downstairs. She was full of old-country blessings for the elevator man and the doorman. She said that it was a lovely morning, wasn't it, a morning for the gods.

  Mrs. Harley and Deborah walked to a little park at the edge of the river. The child's beauty was bright, and the old woman was dressed in black, and they walked hand in hand, like some amiable representation of winter and spring. Many people wished them good morning. "Where did you get that enchanting child?" someone asked. Mrs. Harley enjoyed these compliments. She was sometimes proud of Deborah, but she had been taking care of her for four months, and the little girl and the old woman had established a relationship that was not as simple as it appeared.

  They quarreled a good deal when they were alone, and they quarreled like adults, with a cunning knowledge of each other's frailties. The child had never complained about Mrs. Harley; it was as though she already understood the evil importance of appearances. Deborah was taciturn about the way in which she spent her days. She would tell no one where she had been or what she had done. Mrs. Harley had found that she could count on this trait, and so the child and the old woman had come to share a number of secrets.

  On several late-winter afternoons when the weather had been bitter and dark and Mrs. Harley had been ordered to keep Deborah out until five, she had taken the child to the movies. Deborah had sat beside her in the dark theatre and never complained or cried. Now and then she craned her neck to look at the screen, but most of the time she just sat quiet, listening to the voices and the music. A second secret—and one much less sinful, in Mrs. Harley's opinion—was that on Sunday mornings, sometimes, and sometimes on weekday afternoons, Mrs. Harley had left the little girl with a friend of the Tennysons. This was a woman named Renée Hall, and there was no harm in it, Mrs. Harley thought. She had never told the Tennysons, but what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them. When Renée took Deborah on Sundays, Mrs. Harley went to the eleven-o'clock Mass, and there was nothing wrong, surely, with an old woman's going into the house of God to pray for her dead.

  Mrs. Harley sat down on one of the benches in the park that morning. The sun was hot and it felt good on her old legs. The air was so clear that the perspective of the river seemed to have changed. You could throw a stone onto Welfare Island, it seemed, and a trick of the light made the downtown bridges look much closer to the center of the city. Boats were going up and down the river, and as they cut the water they left in the air a damp and succinct odor, like the smell of fresh earth that follows a plow. Another nurse and child were the only other people in the park. Mrs. Harley told Deborah to go play in the sand. Then Deborah saw the dead pigeon. "The pigeon is sleeping," Deborah said. She stooped down to touch its wings.

  "That dirty bird is dead, and don't you dare touch it!" Mrs. Harley shouted.

  "The pretty pigeon is sleeping," Deborah said. Her face clouded suddenly and tears came into her eyes. She stood with her hands folded in front of her and her head bowed, an attitude that was a comical imitation of Mrs. Harley's reaction to sorrow, but the grief in her voice and her face came straight from her heart.

  "Get away from that dirty bird!" Mrs. Harley shouted, and she got up and kicked the dead bird aside. "Go play in the sand," she told Deborah. "I don't know what's the matter with you. They must have given twenty-five dollars for that doll carriage you have up in your room, but you'd rather play with a dead bird. Go look at the river. Go look at the boats! And don't climb up on that railing, either, for you'll drop in, and with that terrible current that will be the end of you." Deborah walked obediently over to the river. "Here I am," Mrs. Harley said to the other nurse, "here I am, a woman going on sixty who lived forty years in a house of her own, sitting on a park bench like any old bum on a Sunday morning while the baby's parents are up there on the tenth floor sleeping off last night's liquor." The other nurse was a well-bred Scotch woman who was not interested in Mrs. Harley. Mrs. Harley turned her attention to the steps leading down to the park from Sutton Place, to watch for Renée Hall. The arrangement between them had been established for about a month.

  Renée Hall had met Mrs. Harley and the child at the Tennysons', where she had frequently been a guest for cocktails that winter. She had been brought there by a business friend of Katherine's. She was pleasant and entertaining, and Katherine had been impressed with her clothes. She lived around the corner and didn't object to late invitations and most men liked her. The Tennysons knew nothing about her other than that she was an attractive guest and did some radio acting.

  On the evening when Renée first went to the Tennysons', Deborah had been brought in to say good night, and the actress and the neglected child had sat together on a sofa. There was an odd sympathy between the two, and Renée let the child play with her jewelry and her furs. Renée was kind to Deborah, for she was at a time in her life when she appreciated kindness herself.

  She was about thirty-five years old, dissipated and gentle. She liked to think of the life she was living as an overture to something wonderful, final, and even conventional, that would begin with the next season or the season after that, but she was finding this hope more and more difficult to sustain. She had begun to notice that she always felt tired unless she was drinking. It was just that she didn't have the strength. When she was not drinking she was depressed, and when she was depressed she quarreled with headwaiters and hairdressers, accused people in restaurants of staring at her, and quarreled with some of the men who paid her debts. She knew this instability in her temperament well, and was clever at concealing it—among other things—from casual friends like the Tennysons.

  Renée had come to the house again a week later, and when Deborah heard her voice, she escaped from Mrs. Harley and flew down the hall. The child's adoration excited Renée. They sat together again. Renée wore a string of furs and a hat piled with cloth roses, and Deborah thought her the most beautiful lady in the world.

  After that, Renée went to the Tennysons' often. It was a standing joke that she came there to see the child and not the Tennysons or their guests. Renée had always wanted children of her own, and now all her regrets seemed centered in Deborah's bright face. She began to feel possessive toward the child. She sent her expensive clothes and toys. "Has she ever been to the dentist?" she asked Katherine. "Are you sure of your doctor? Have you entered her in nursery school?" She made the mistake one night of suggesting that Deborah saw too little of her parents and lacked the sense of security they should give her. "She has eight thousand dollars in the bank in her own name," Katherine said. She was angry. Renée continued to send Deborah elaborate presents. Deborah named all her dolls and her pleasures after Renée, and on several nights she cried for Renée after she had been put to bed. Robert and Katherine thought it would be better if they didn't see Renée any more. They stopped asking her to the house. "After all," Katherine said, "I've always felt that there was something unsavory about that girl." Renée called them twice and asked them for cocktails, and Katherine said no, no thanks, they were all suffering with colds.

  Renée knew that Katherine was lying and she determined to forget the Tennysons. She missed the little girl, but she might never have seen her again if it hadn't bee
n for something that happened later that week. One night she left a dull party early in the evening and went home by herself. She was afraid of missing telephone calls and she used a telephone-answering service. They told her that night that a Mrs. Walton had called and left a number.

  Walton, Walton, Walton, Renée thought, and then she remembered that she had once had a lover named Walton. That would have been eight or ten years ago. She had once been taken to dinner with his mother, who was visiting from Cleveland. She remembered the evening clearly then. Walton drank too much and his mother had taken Renée aside and told her what a good influence she thought she was, and couldn't she make him stop drinking and go to church oftener? Walton and she had quarreled over his drinking, in the end, Renée remembered, and she had never seen him after that. He might be sick, or drunk, or getting married. She had no idea how old he was, because the thirties were all jumbled in her memory and she could not tell the beginning of the decade from its end. She dialed the number. It was a hotel on the West Side. Mrs. Walton's voice, when she answered, was the small, cracked voice of an old woman. "Billy's dead, Renée," she said. She began to sob. "I'm so glad you called. He's going to be buried tomorrow. I wish you'd come to the funeral. I feel so alone."

  Renée put on a black dress the next day and took a cab to the funeral parlor. As soon as she opened the door, she was in the hands of a gloved and obsequious usher, ready to sympathize with a grief more profound and sedate than any grief of hers would ever be. An elevator took her up to the chapel. When she heard the electric organ playing "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning!" she thought she would have to sit down before she had the strength to see Mrs. Walton, and then she saw Mrs. Walton standing by the open door of the chapel. The two women embraced, and Renée was introduced to Mrs. Walton's sister, a Mrs. Henlein. They were the only people there. At the far end of the room, under a meager show of gladioli, lay her dead lover. "He was so alone, Renée dear," Mrs. Walton said. "He was so terribly alone. He died alone, you know, in that furnished room." Mrs. Walton began to cry. Mrs. Henlein cried. A minister came in and the service began. Renée knelt and tried to remember the Lord's Prayer, but she got no further than "... on earth as it is in Heaven." She began to cry, but not because she remembered the man tenderly; she had not remembered him for years and it was only by forcing her memory that she could recall that he sometimes brought her breakfast in bed, and that he sewed the buttons on his own shirts. She cried for herself, she cried because she was afraid that she herself might die in the night, because she was alone in the world, because her desperate and empty life was not an overture but an ending, and through it all she could see the rough, brutal shape of a coffin.

  The three women left the chapel, helped by the obsequious usher, and rode down in the elevator. Renée said she couldn't go to the cemetery, that she had an appointment. Her hands were shaking with fright. She kissed Mrs. Walton goodbye and took a taxi to Sutton Place. She walked down to the little park where Deborah and Mrs. Harley would be.

  Deborah saw Renée first. She called Renée's name and ran toward her, struggling up the steps one at a time. Renée picked her up. "Pretty Renée," the little girl said. "Pretty, pretty Renée." Renée and the child sat down beside Mrs. Harley. "If you want to go shopping," she said, "I'll take Deborah for a few hours."

  "Now, I don't know whether I ought to or not," Mrs. Harley said.

  "She'll be perfectly safe with me," Renée said. "I'll take her up to my apartment and you can call for her there at five. Mr. and Mrs. Tennyson needn't know."

  "Well, maybe I'll do that, now," Mrs. Harley said. In this way, Mrs. Harley had begun an arrangement that gave her a few free hours each week.

  When Renée hadn't come by half past ten that Sunday, Mrs. Harley knew that she wasn't coming, and she was disappointed because she had counted on going to church that morning. She thought of the Latin and the bells, and the exhilarating sense of having been sanctified and cleansed that she always felt when she got up from her knees. It angered her to think that Renée was lying in bed and that only Renée's laziness was keeping her from prayer. As the morning passed, a lot of children had come to the park, and now she looked for Deborah's yellow coat in the crowd.

  The warm sun excited the little girl. She was running with a few children of her age. They were skipping and singing and circling the sand pile with no more purpose than swallows. Deborah tagged a little behind the others, because her coordination was still impulsive and she sometimes threw herself to the ground with her own exertions. Mrs. Harley called to her, and she ran obediently to the old woman and leaned on her knees and began to talk about some lions and little boys. Mrs. Harley asked if she would like to go and see Renée. "I want to go and stay with Renée," the little girl said. Mrs. Harley took her hand and they climbed the steps out of the playground and walked to the apartment house where Renée lived. Mrs. Harley called upstairs on the house phone, and Renée answered after a little delay. She sounded sleepy. She said she would be glad to watch the child for an hour if Mrs. Harley would bring her upstairs. Mrs. Harley took Deborah up to the fifteenth floor and said goodbye to her there. Renée was wearing a negligee trimmed with feathers, and her apartment was dark.

  Renée closed the door and picked the little girl up in her arms. Deborah's skin and hair were soft and fragrant, and Renée kissed her, tickled her, and blew down her neck until the child nearly suffocated with laughter. Then Renée pulled up the blinds and let some light into the room. The place was dirty and the air was sour. There were whiskey glasses and spilled ashtrays, and some dead roses in a tarnished silver bowl.

  Renée had a lunch date, and she explained this to Deborah. "I'm going to the Plaza for lunch," she said. "I'm going to take a bath and dress, and you'll have to be a good girl." She gave Deborah her jewel box and turned on the water in the bathtub. Deborah sat quietly at the dressing table and loaded herself with necklaces and clips. While Renée was drying herself, the doorbell rang, and she put on a wrapper and went out to the living room. Deborah followed her. A man was there.

  "I'm driving up to Albany," he told Renée. "Why don't you put some things in a bag and come on up with me? I'll drive you back on Wednesday."

  "I'd love to, darling," Renée said, "but I can't. I'm having lunch with Helen Foss. She thinks she might be able to get me some work."

  "Call off the lunch," the man said. "Come on."

  "I can't, darling," Renée said. "I'll see you on Wednesday."

  "Who's the kid?" the man asked.

  "It's the Tennysons' little girl. I take care of her while the nurse goes to church." The man embraced Renée vigorously and kissed her and left after they had arranged to meet Wednesday night.

  "That was your rich Uncle Loathsome," Renée told the child.

  "I have a friend. Her name is Martha," the little girl said.

  "Yes, I'm sure you have a friend named Martha," Renée said. She noticed that the child was scowling and that her eyes were full of tears. "What's the matter, darling?" she asked. "What is the matter? Here, here, you sit on the sofa and listen to the radio. I've got to fix my face." She went into the bedroom to arrange her face and brush her hair.

  A few minutes later the doorbell rang again. This time it was Mrs. Harley. "Did you enjoy the service?" Renée asked. "I'll put on Deborah's coat." She looked for the hat and coat. They were not where she had left them, and the child was not in the living room. Her heart began to beat fiercely. She went into her bedroom. "It does my soul so much good to go to church," she heard Mrs. Harley say. Renée thought in terror of the open windows. The window in her bedroom was open. She looked out, and fifteen stories below she could see the sidewalk and the canopy and the doorman at the corner whistling for a cab and a blonde walking a poodle. Renée ran back to the living room.

  "Where's Deborah?" Mrs. Harley asked.

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

  "You mean you've
lost the little girl!" Mrs. Harley shouted.

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

  "I'm a soldier, in the army of the Lord,

  I'm a soldier,

  In the army..."

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