The Stories of John Cheever (1979 Pulitzer Prize) Page 7

  "Well, I guess there's lots of money in it," the conductor said. Then he wished the Malloys luck and walked away.

  Evarts wanted to take the suitcases down at Poughkeepsie and again at Harmon, but Alice checked each place against the timetable and made him wait. Neither of them had seen New York before, and they watched its approaches greedily, for Wentworth was a dismal town and even the slums of Manhattan looked wonderful to them that afternoon. When the train plunged into the darkness beneath Park Avenue, Alice felt that she was surrounded by the inventions of giants and she roused Mildred Rose and tied the little girl's bonnet with trembling fingers.

  As the Malloys stepped from the train, Alice noticed that the paving, deep in the station, had a frosty glitter, and she wondered if diamonds had been ground into the concrete. She forbade Evarts to ask directions. "If they find out we're green, they'll fleece us," she whispered. They wandered through the marble waiting room, following the noise of traffic and klaxons as if it were the bidding of life. Alice had studied a map of New York, and when they left the station, she knew which direction to take. They walked along Forty-second Street to Fifth Avenue. The faces that passed them seemed purposeful and intent, as if they all belonged to people who were pursuing the destinies of great industries. Evarts had never seen so many beautiful women, so many pleasant, young faces, promising an easy conquest. It was a winter afternoon, and the light in the city was clear and shaded with violet, just like the light on the fields around Wentworth.

  Their destination, the Hotel Mentone, was on a side street west of Sixth Avenue. It was a dark place, with malodorous chambers, miserable food, and a lobby ceiling decorated with as much gilt and gesso as the Vatican chapels. It was a popular hotel among the old, it was attractive to the disreputable, and the Malloys had found the way there because the Mentone advertised on railroad-station boardings all through the West. Many innocents had been there before them, and their sweetness and humility had triumphed over the apparent atmosphere of ruined splendor and petty vice and had left in all the public rooms a humble odor that reminded one of a country feed store on a winter afternoon. A bellboy took them to their room. As soon as he had gone, Alice examined the bath and pulled aside the window curtains. The window looked onto a brick wall, but when she raised it, she could hear the noise of traffic, and it sounded, as it had sounded in the station, like the irresistible and titanic voice of life itself.

  The Malloys found their way, that afternoon, to the Broadway Automat. They shouted with pleasure at the magical coffee spigots and the glass doors that sprang open. "Tomorrow, I'm going to have the baked beans," Alice cried, "and the chicken pie the day after that and the fish cakes after that." When they had finished their supper, they went out into the street. Mildred-Rose walked between her parents, holding their callused hands. It was getting dark, and the lights of Broadway answered all their simple prayers. High in the air were large, brightly lighted pictures of bloody heroes, criminal lovers, monsters, and armed desperadoes. The names of movies and soft drinks, restaurants and cigarettes were written in a jumble of light, and in the distance they could see the pitiless winter afterglow beyond the Hudson River. The tall buildings in the east were lighted and seemed to burn, as if fire had fallen onto their dark shapes. The air was full of music, and the light was brighter than day. They drifted with the crowd for hours.

  Mildred-Rose got tired and began to cry, so at last her parents took her back to the Mentone. Alice had begun to undress her when someone knocked softly on the door.

  "Come in," Evarts called.

  A bellboy stood in the doorway. He had the figure of a boy, but his face was gray and lined. "I just wanted to see if you people were all right," he said. "I just wanted to see if maybe you wanted a little ginger ale or some ice water."

  "Oh, no, thank you kindly," Alice said. "It was very nice of you to ask, though."

  "You people just come to New York for the first time?" the bellboy asked. He closed the door behind him and sat on the arm of a chair.

  "Yes," Evarts said. "We left Wentworth—that's in Indiana—yesterday on the nine-fifteen for South Bend. Then we went to Chicago. We had dinner in Chicago."

  "I had the chicken pie," Alice said. "It was delicious." She slipped Mildred-Rose's nightgown over her head.

  "Then we came to New York," Evarts said.

  "What are you doing here?" the bellboy asked. "Anniversary?" He helped himself to a cigarette from a package on the bureau and slipped down into the chair.

  "Oh, no," Evarts said. "We hit the jackpot."

  "Our ship's come in," Alice said.

  "A contest?" the bellboy asked. "Something like that?"

  "No," Evarts said.

  "You tell him, Evarts," Alice said.

  "Yes," the bellboy said. "Tell me, Evarts."

  "Well, you see," Evarts said, "it began like this." He sat down on the bed and lighted a cigarette. "I was in the Army, you see, and then when I got out of the Army, I went back to Wentworth..." He repeated to the bellboy the story he had told the conductor.

  "Oh, you lucky, lucky kids!" the bellboy exclaimed when Evarts had finished. "Tracey Murchison! Madge Beatty! You lucky, lucky kids." He looked at the poorly furnished room. Alice was arranging Mildred-Rose on the sofa, where she would sleep. Evarts was sitting on the edge of the bed swinging his legs. "What you need now is a good agent," the bellboy said. He wrote a name and address on a piece of paper and gave it to Evarts. "The Hauser Agency is the biggest agency in the world," he said, "and Charlie Leavitt is the best man in the Hauser Agency. I want you to feel free to take your problems to Charlie, and if he asks who sent you, tell him Bitsey sent you." He went toward the door. "Good night, you lucky, lucky kids," he said. "Good night. Sweet dreams. Sweet dreams."

  The Malloys were the hard-working children of an industrious generation, and they were up at half past six the next morning. They scrubbed their faces and their ears and brushed their teeth with soap. At seven o'clock, they started for the Automat. Evarts had not slept that night. The noise of traffic had kept him awake, and he had spent the small hours sitting at the window. His mouth felt scorched with tobacco smoke, and the loss of sleep had left him nervous. They were all surprised to find New York still sleeping. They were shocked. They had their breakfast and returned to the Mentone. Evarts called Tracey Murchison's office, but no one answered. He telephoned the office several times after that. At ten o'clock, a girl answered the phone. "Mr. Murchison will see you at three," she said. She hung up. Since there was nothing to do but wait, Evarts took his wife and daughter up Fifth Avenue. They stared in the store windows. At eleven o'clock, when the doors of Radio City Music Hall opened, they went there.

  This was a happy choice. They prowled the lounges and toilets for an hour before they took their seats, and when, during the stage show, an enormous samovar rose up out of the orchestra pit and debouched forty men in Cossack uniform singing "Dark Eyes," Alice and Mildred-Rose shouted with joy. The stage show, beneath its grandeur, seemed to conceal a simple and familiar intelligence, as if the drafts that stirred the miles of golden curtain had blown straight from Indiana. The performance left Alice and Mildred-Rose distracted with pleasure, and on the way back to the Mentone, Evarts had to lead them along the sidewalk to keep them from walking into hydrants. It was a quarter of three when they got back to the hotel. Evarts kissed his wife and child goodbye and started for Murchison's.

  He got lost. He was afraid that he would be late. He began to run. He asked directions of a couple of policemen and finally reached the office building.

  The front room of Murchison's office was dingy—intentionally dingy, Evarts hoped—but it was not inglorious, for there were many beautiful men and women there, waiting to see Mr. Murchison. None of them were sitting down, and they chatted together as if delighted by the delay that held them there. The receptionist led Evarts into a further office. This office was also crowded, but the atmosphere was of haste and trouble, as if the place were being besieged. Murc
hison was there and he greeted Evarts strenuously. "I've got your contracts right here," he said, and he handed Evarts a pen and pushed a stack of contracts toward him. "Now I want you to rush over and see Madge," Murchison said as soon as Evarts had signed the contracts. He looked at Evarts, plucked the feather carnation out of his lapel, and tossed it into a wastebasket. "Hurry, hurry, hurry," he said. "She's at 400 Park Avenue. She's crazy to see you. She's waiting now. I'll see you later tonight—I think Madge has something planned—but hurry."

  Evarts rushed into the hall and rang impatiently for the elevator. As soon as he had left the building, he got lost and wandered into the fur district. A policeman directed him back to the Mentone. Alice and Mildred-Rose were waiting in the lobby, and he told them what had happened. "I'm on my way to see Madge Beatty now," he said. "I've got to hurry!" Bitsey, the bellboy, overheard this conversation. He dropped some bags he was carrying and joined the group. He told Evarts how to get to Park Avenue. Evarts kissed Alice and Mildred-Rose again. They waved goodbye as he ran out the door.

  Evarts had seen so many movies of Park Avenue that he observed its breadth and bleakness with a sense of familiarity. He took an elevator to the Murchisons' apartment and was led by a maid into a pretty living room. A fire was burning, and there were flowers on the mantel. He sprang to his feet when Madge Beatty came in. She was frail, animated, and golden, and her hoarse and accomplished voice made him feel naked. "I read your play, Evarts," she said, "and I loved it, I loved it, I loved it." She moved lightly around the room, talking now directly at him, now over her shoulder. She was not as young as she had first appeared to be, and in the light from the windows she looked almost wizened. "You're going to do more with my part when you write the second act, I hope," she said. "You're going to build it up and build it up and build it up."

  "I'll do anything you want, Miss Beatty," Evarts said.

  She sat down and folded her beautiful hands. Her feet were very big, Evarts noticed. Her shins were thin, and this made her feet seem very big. "Oh, we love your play, Evarts," she said. "We love it, we want it, we need it. Do you know how much we need it? We're in debt, Evarts, we're dreadfully in debt." She laid a hand on her breast and spoke in a whisper. "We owe one million nine hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars." She let the precious light flood her voice again. "But now I'm keeping you from writing your beautiful play," she said. "I'm keeping you from work, and I want you to go back and write and write and write, and I want you and your wife to come here any time after nine tonight and meet a few of our warmest friends."

  Evarts asked the doorman how to get back to the Mentone, but he misunderstood the directions and got lost again. He walked around the East Side until he found a policeman, who directed him back to the hotel. It was so late when he returned that Mildred-Rose was crying with hunger. The three of them washed and went to the Automat and walked up and down Broadway until nearly nine. Then they went back to the hotel. Alice put on her evening dress, and she and Evarts kissed Mildred-Rose good night. In the lobby, they met Bitsey and told him where they were going. He promised to keep an eye on Mildred-Rose.

  The walk over to the Murchisons' was longer than Evarts remembered. Alice's wrap was light. She was blue with cold when they reached the apartment building. They could hear in the distance, as they left the elevator, someone playing a piano and a woman singing "A kiss is but a kiss, a sigh is but a sigh..." A maid took their wraps, and Mr. Murchison greeted them from a farther door. Alice ruffled and arranged the cloth peony that hung from the front of her dress, and they went in.

  The room was crowded, the lights were dim, the singer was ending her song. There was a heady smell of animal skins and astringent perfume in the air. Mr. Murchison introduced the Malloys to a couple who stood near the door, and abandoned them. The couple turned their backs on the Malloys. Evarts was shy and quiet, but Alice was excited and began to speculate, in a whisper, about the identities of the people around the piano. She felt sure that they were all movie stars, and she was right.

  The singer finished her song, got up from the piano, and walked away. There was a little applause and then a curious silence. Mr. Murchison asked another woman to sing. "I'm not going to go on after her," the woman said. The situation, whatever it was, had stopped conversation. Mr. Murchison asked several people to perform, but they all refused. "Perhaps Mrs. Malloy will sing for us," he said bitterly.

  "All right," Alice said. She walked to the center of the room. She took a position and, folding her hands and holding them breast high, began to sing.

  Alice's mother had taught her to sing whenever her host asked, and Alice had never violated any of her mother's teachings. As a child, she had taken singing lessons from Mrs. Bachman, an elderly widow who lived in Wentworth. She had sung in grammar-school assemblies and in high-school assemblies. On family holidays, there had always come a time, in the late afternoon, when she would be asked to sing; then she would rise from her place on the hard sofa near the stove or come from the kitchen, where she had been washing dishes, to sing the songs Mrs. Bachman had taught her.

  The invitation that night had been so unexpected that Evarts had not had a chance to stop his wife. He had felt the bitterness in Murchison's voice, and he would have stopped her, but as soon as she began to sing, he didn't care. Her voice was well pitched, her figure was stern and touching, and she sang for those people in obedience to her mannerly heart. When he had overcome his own bewilderment, he noticed the respect and attention the Murchisons' guests were giving her music. Many of them had come from towns as small as Wentworth; they were good-hearted people, and the simple air, rendered in Alice's fearless voice, reminded them of their beginnings. None of them were whispering or smiling. Many of them had lowered their heads, and he saw a woman touch her eyes with a handkerchief. Alice had triumphed, he thought, and then he recognized the song as "Annie Laurie."

  Years ago, when Mrs. Bachman had taught Alice the song, she had taught her to close it with a piece of business that brought her success as a child, as a girl, as a high-school senior, but that, even in the stuffy living room in Wentworth, with its inexorable smells of poverty and cooking, had begun to tire and worry her family. She had been taught on the closing line, "Lay me doun and dee," to fall in a heap on the floor. She fell less precipitously now that she had got older, but she still fell, and Evarts could see that night, by her serene face, that a fall was in her plans. He considered going to her, embracing her, and whispering to her that the hotel was burning or that Mildred-Rose was sick. Instead, he turned his back.

  Alice took a quick breath and attacked the last verse. Evarts had begun to sweat so freely that the brine got into his eyes. "I'll lay me doun and dee," he heard her sing; he heard the loud crash as she hit the floor; he heard the screams of helpless laughter, the tobacco coughs, and the oaths of a woman who laughed so hard she broke her pearl bib. The Murchisons' guests seemed bewitched. They wept, they shook, they stooped, they slapped one another on the back, and walked, like the demented, in circles. When Evarts faced the scene, Alice was sitting on the floor. He helped her to her feet. "Come, darling," he said. "Come." With his arm around her, he led her into the hall.

  "Didn't they like my song?" she asked. She began to cry.

  "It doesn't matter, my darling," Evarts said, "it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter." They got their wraps and walked back through the cold to the Mentone.

  Bitsey was waiting for them in the corridor outside their room. He wanted to hear all about the party. Evarts sent Alice into the room and talked with the bellboy alone. He didn't feel like describing the party. "I don't think I want to have anything more to do with the Murchisons," he said. "I'm going to get a new producer."

  "That's the boy, that's the boy," Bitsey said. "Now you're talking. But, first, I want you to go up to the Hauser Agency and see Charlie Leavitt."

  "All right," Evarts said. "All right, I'll go and see Charlie Leavitt."

  Alice cried herself to sleep that night. Again, Evar
ts couldn't sleep. He sat in a chair by the window. He fell into a doze, a little before dawn, but not for long. At seven o'clock, he led his family off to the Automat.

  Bitsey came up to the Malloys' room after breakfast. He was very excited. A columnist in one of the four-cent newspapers had reported Evarts' arrival in New York. A cabinet member and a Balkan king were mentioned in the same paragraph. Then the telephone began to ring. First, it was a man who wanted to sell Evarts a secondhand mink coat. Then a lawyer and a dry cleaner called, a dressmaker, a nursery school, several agencies, and a man who said he could get them a good apartment. Evarts said no to all these importunities, but in each case he had to argue before he could hang up. Bitsey had made a noon appointment for him with Charlie Leavitt, and when it was time, he kissed Alice and Mildred-Rose and went down to the street.

  The Hauser Agency was located in one of the buildings in Radio City. Now Evarts' business took him through the building's formidable doors as legitimately, he told himself, as anyone else. The Hauser offices were on the twenty-sixth floor. He didn't call his floor until the elevator had begun its ascent. "It's too late now," the operator said. "You got to tell me the number of the floor when you get in." This branded him as green to all the other people in the car, Evarts knew, and he blushed. He rode to the sixtieth floor and then back to the twenty-sixth. As he left the car, the elevator operator sneered.

  At the end of a long corridor, there was a pair of bronze doors, fastened by a bifurcated eagle. Evarts turned the wings of the imperial bird and stepped into a lofty manor hall. The paneling on its walls was worm-pitted and white with rot. In the distance, behind a small glass window, he saw a woman wearing earphones. He walked over to her, told her his business, and was asked to sit down. He sat on a leather sofa and lighted a cigarette. The richness of the hall impressed him profoundly. Then he noticed that the sofa was covered with dust. So were the table, the magazines on it, the lamp, the bronze cast of Rodin's "Le Baiser"—everything in the vast room was covered with dust. He noticed at the same time the peculiar stillness of the hall. All the usual noises of an office were lacking. Into this stillness, from the distant earth, rose the recorded music from the skating rink, where a carillon played "Joy to the World! The Lord Is Come!" The magazines on the table beside the sofa were all five years old.