The Stories of John Cheever (23 page)

C
HRISTMAS
is a sad season. The phrase came to Charlie an instant after the alarm clock had waked him, and named for him an amorphous depression that had troubled him all the previous evening. The sky outside his window was black. He sat up in bed and pulled the light chain that hung in front of his nose. Christmas is a very sad day of the year, he thought. Of all the millions of people in New York, I am practically the only one who has to get up in the cold black of 6
A.M
. on Christmas Day in the morning; I am practically the only one.

He dressed, and when he went downstairs from the top floor of the rooming house in which he lived, the only sounds he heard were the coarse sounds of sleep; the only lights burning were lights that had been forgotten. Charlie ate some breakfast in an all-night lunchwagon and took an Elevated train uptown. From Third Avenue, he walked over to Sutton Place. The neighborhood was dark. House after house put into the shine of the street lights a wall of black windows. Millions and millions were sleeping, and this general loss of consciousness generated an impression of abandonment, as if this were the fall of the city, the end of time. He opened the iron-and-glass doors of the apartment building where he had been working for six months as an elevator operator, and went through the elegant lobby to a locker room at the back. He put on a striped vest with brass buttons, a false ascot, a pair of pants with a light-blue stripe on the seam, and a coat. The night elevator man was dozing on the little bench in the car. Charlie woke him. The night elevator man told him thickly that the day doorman had been taken sick and wouldn’t be in that day. With the doorman sick, Charlie wouldn’t have any relief for lunch, and a lot of people would expect him to whistle for cabs.

CHARLIE
had been on duty a few minutes when 14 rang—a Mrs. Hewing, who, he happened to know, was kind of immoral. Mrs. Hewing hadn’t been to bed yet, and she got into the elevator wearing a long dress under her fur coat. She was followed by her two funny-looking dogs. He took her down and watched her go out into the dark and take her dogs to the curb. She was outside for only a few minutes. Then she came in and he took her up to 14 again. When she got off the elevator, she said, “Merry Christmas, Charlie.”

“Well, it isn’t much of a holiday for me, Mrs. Hewing,” he said. “I think Christmas is a very sad season of the year. It isn’t that people around here ain’t generous—I mean, I got plenty of tips—but, you see, I live alone in a furnished room and I don’t have any family or anything, and Christmas isn’t much of a holiday for me.”

“I’m sorry, Charlie,” Mrs. Hewing said. “I don’t have any family myself. It is kind of sad when you’re alone, isn’t it?” She called her dogs and followed them into her apartment. He went down.

It was quiet then, and Charlie lighted a cigarette. The heating plant in the basement encompassed the building at that hour in a regular and profound vibration, and the sullen noises of arriving steam heat began to resound, first in the lobby and then to reverberate up through all the sixteen stories, but this was a mechanical awakening, and it didn’t lighten his loneliness or his petulance. The black air outside the glass doors had begun to turn blue, but the blue light seemed to have no source; it appeared in the middle of the air. It was a tearful light, and as it picked out the empty street he wanted to cry. Then a cab drove up, and the Walsers got out, drunk and dressed in evening clothes, and he took them up to their penthouse. The Walsers got him to brooding about the difference between his life in a furnished room and the lives of the people overhead. It was terrible.

Then the early churchgoers began to ring, but there were only three of these that morning. A few more went off to church at eight o’clock, but the majority of the building remained unconscious, although the smell of bacon and coffee had begun to drift into the elevator shaft.

At a little after nine, a nursemaid came down with a child. Both the nursemaid and the child had a deep tan and had just returned, he knew, from Bermuda. He had never been to Bermuda. He, Charlie, was a prisoner, confined eight hours a day to a six-by-eight elevator cage, which was confined, in turn, to a sixteen-story shaft. In one building or another, he had made his living as an elevator operator for ten years. He estimated the average trip at about an eighth of a mile, and when he thought of the thousands of miles he had traveled, when he thought that he might have driven the car through the mists above the Caribbean and set it down on some coral beach in Bermuda, he held the narrowness of his travels against his passengers, as if it were not the nature of the elevator but the pressure of their lives that confined him, as if they had clipped his wings.

He was thinking about this when the DePauls, on 9, rang. They wished him a merry Christmas.

“Well, it’s nice of you to think of me,” he said as they descended, “but it isn’t much of a holiday for me. Christmas is a sad season when you’re poor. I live alone in a furnished room. I don’t have any family.”

“Who do you have dinner with, Charlie?” Mrs. DePaul asked.

“I don’t have any Christmas dinner,” Charlie said. “I just get a sandwich.”

“Oh, Charlie!” Mrs. DePaul was a stout woman with an impulsive heart, and Charlie’s plaint struck at her holiday mood as if she had been caught in a cloudburst. “I do wish we could share our Christmas dinner with you, you know,” she said. “I come from Vermont, you know, and when I was a child, you know, we always used to have a great many people at our table. The mailman, you know, and the schoolteacher, and just anybody who didn’t have any family of their own, you know, and I wish we could share our dinner with you the way we used to, you know, and I don’t see any reason why we can’t. We can’t have you at the table, you know, because you couldn’t leave the elevator—could you?—but just as soon as Mr. DePaul has carved the goose, I’ll give you a ring, and I’ll arrange a tray for you, you know, and I want you to come up and at least share our Christmas dinner.”

Charlie thanked them, and their generosity surprised him, but he wondered if, with the arrival of friends and relatives, they wouldn’t forget their offer.

Then old Mrs. Gadshill rang, and when she wished him a merry Christmas, he hung his head.

“It isn’t much of a holiday for me, Mrs. Gadshill,” he said. “Christmas is a sad season if you’re poor. You see, I don’t have any family. I live alone in a furnished room.”

“I don’t have any family either, Charlie,” Mrs. Gadshill said. She spoke with a pointed lack of petulance, but her grace was forced. “That is, I don’t have any children with me today. I have three children and seven grandchildren, but none of them can see their way to coming East for Christmas with me. Of course, I understand their problems. I know that it’s difficult to travel with children during the holidays, although I always seemed to manage it when I was their age, but people feel differently, and we mustn’t condemn them for the things we can’t understand. But I know how you feel, Charlie. I haven’t any family either. I’m just as lonely as you.”

Mrs. Gadshill’s speech didn’t move him. Maybe she was lonely, but she had a ten-room apartment and three servants and bucks and bucks and diamonds and diamonds, and there were plenty of poor kids in the slums who would be happy at a chance at the food her cook threw away. Then he thought about poor kids. He sat down on a chair in the lobby and thought about them.

They got the worst of it. Beginning in the fall, there was all this excitement about Christmas and how it was a day for them. After Thanksgiving, they couldn’t miss it. It was fixed so they couldn’t miss it. The wreaths and decorations everywhere, and bells ringing, and trees in the park, and Santa Clauses on every corner, and pictures in the magazines and newspapers and on every wall and window in the city told them that if they were good, they would get what they wanted. Even if they couldn’t read, they couldn’t miss it. They couldn’t miss it even if they were blind. It got into the air the poor kids inhaled. Every time they took a walk, they’d see all the expensive toys in the store windows, and they’d write letters to Santa Claus, and their mothers and fathers would promise to mail them, and after the kids had gone to sleep, they’d burn the letters in the stove. And when it came Christmas morning, how could you explain it, how could you tell them that Santa Claus only visited the rich, that he didn’t know about the good? How could you face them when all you had to give them was a balloon or a lollipop?

On the way home from work a few nights earlier, Charlie had seen a woman and a little girl going down Fifty-ninth Street. The little girl was crying. He guessed she was crying, he knew she was crying, because she’d seen all the things in the toy-store windows and couldn’t understand why none of them were for her. Her mother did housework, he guessed, or maybe was a waitress, and he saw them going back to a room like his, with green walls and no heat, on Christmas Eve, to eat a can of soup. And he saw the little girl hang up her ragged stocking and fall asleep, and he saw the mother looking through her purse for something to put into the stocking—This reverie was interrupted by a bell on 11. He went up, and Mr. and Mrs. Fuller were waiting. When they wished him a merry Christmas, he said, “Well, it isn’t much of a holiday for me, Mrs. Fuller. Christmas is a sad season when you’re poor.”

“Do you have any children, Charlie?” Mrs. Fuller asked.

“Four living,” he said. “Two in the grave.” The majesty of his lie overwhelmed him. “Mrs. Leary’s a cripple,” he added.

“How sad, Charlie,” Mrs. Fuller said. She started out of the elevator when it reached the lobby, and then she turned. “I want to give your children some presents, Charlie,” she said. “Mr. Fuller and I are going to pay a call now, but when we come back, I want to give you some things for your children.”

He thanked her. Then the bell rang on 4, and he went up to get the Westons.

“It isn’t much of a holiday for me,” he told them when they wished him a merry Christmas. “Christmas is a sad season when you’re poor. You see, I live alone in a furnished room.”

“Poor Charlie,” Mrs. Weston said. “I know just how you feel. During the war, when Mr. Weston was away, I was all alone at Christmas. I didn’t have any Christmas dinner or a tree or anything. I just scrambled myself some eggs and sat there and cried.” Mr. Weston, who had gone into the lobby, called impatiently to his wife. “I know just how you feel, Charlie,” Mrs. Weston said.

BY NOON
, the climate in the elevator shaft had changed from bacon and coffee to poultry and game, and the house, like an enormous and complex homestead, was absorbed in the preparations for a domestic feast. The children and their nursemaids had all returned from the Park. Grandmothers and aunts were arriving in limousines. Most of the people who came through the lobby were carrying packages wrapped in colored paper, and were wearing their best furs and new clothes. Charlie continued to complain to most of the tenants when they wished him a merry Christmas, changing his story from the lonely bachelor to the poor father, and back again, as his mood changed, but this outpouring of melancholy, and the sympathy it aroused, didn’t make him feel any better.

At half past one, 9 rang, and when he went up, Mr. DePaul was standing in the door of their apartment holding a cocktail shaker and a glass. “Here’s a little Christmas cheer, Charlie,” he said, and he poured Charlie a drink. Then a maid appeared with a tray of covered dishes, and Mrs. DePaul came out of the living room. “Merry Christmas, Charlie,” she said. “I had Mr. DePaul carve the goose early, so that you could have some, you know. I didn’t want to put the dessert on the tray, because I was afraid it would melt, you know, so when we have our dessert, we’ll call you.”

“And what is Christmas without presents?” Mr. DePaul said, and he brought a large, flat box from the hall and laid it on top of the covered dishes.

“You people make it seem like a real Christmas to me,” Charlie said. Tears started into his eyes. “Thank you, thank you.”

“Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!” they called, and they watched him carry his dinner and his present into the elevator. He took the tray and the box into the locker room when he got down. On the tray, there was a soup, some kind of creamed fish, and a serving of goose. The bell rang again, but before he answered it, he tore open the DePauls’ box and saw that it held a dressing gown. Their generosity and their cocktail had begun to work on his brain, and he went jubilantly up to 12. Mrs. Gadshill’s maid was standing in the door with a tray, and Mrs. Gadshill stood behind her. “Merry Christmas, Charlie!” she said. He thanked her, and tears came into his eyes again. On the way down, he drank off the glass of sherry on Mrs. Gadshill’s tray. Mrs. Gadshill’s contribution was a mixed grill. He ate the lamb chop with his fingers. The bell was ringing again, and he wiped his face with a paper towel and went up to 11. “Merry Christmas, Charlie,” Mrs. Fuller said, and she was standing in the door with her arms full of packages wrapped in silver paper, just like a picture in an advertisement, and Mr. Fuller was beside her with an arm around her, and they both looked as if they were going to cry. “Here are some things I want you to take home to your children,” Mrs. Fuller said. “And here’s something for Mrs. Leary and here’s something for you. And if you want to take these things out to the elevator, we’ll have your dinner ready for you in a minute.” He carried the things into the elevator and came back for the tray. “Merry Christmas, Charlie!” both of the Fullers called after him as he closed the door. He took their dinner and their presents into the locker room and tore open the box that was marked for him. There was an alligator wallet in it, with Mr. Fuller’s initials in the corner. Their dinner was also goose, and he ate a piece of the meat with his fingers and was washing it down with a cocktail when the bell rang. He went up again. This time it was the Westons. “Merry Christmas, Charlie!” they said, and they gave him a cup of eggnog, a turkey dinner, and a present. Their gift was also a dressing gown. Then 7 rang, and when he went up, there was another dinner and some more toys. Then 14 rang, and when he went up, Mrs. Hewing was standing in the hall, in a kind of negligee, holding a pair of riding boots in one hand and some neckties in the other. She had been crying and drinking. “Merry Christmas, Charlie,” she said tenderly. “I wanted to give you something, and I’ve been thinking about you all morning, and I’ve been all over the apartment, and these are the only things I could find that a man might want. These are the only things that Mr. Brewer left. I don’t suppose you’d have any use for the riding boots, but wouldn’t you like the neckties?” Charlie took the neckties and thanked her and hurried back to the car, for the elevator bell had rung three times.