woman with a magnificent bust and a graceful way of moving. He followed her that afternoon into the living room, where an older woman was sitting on a sofa. “This is my mother, Mrs. Doubleday, Chester,” Mrs. Bestwick said. “Mother, this is Chester Coolidge, our superintendent.” Mrs. Doubleday said she was pleased to meet him, and Chester accepted her invitation to sit down. From one of the bedrooms, Chester heard the older Bestwick girl singing a song. “Up with Chapin, Down with Spence,” she sang. “Hang Miss Hewitt To a back-yard fence.”
Chester knew every living room in the building, and by his standards the Bestwicks’ was as pleasant as any of them. It was his feeling that all the apartments in his building were intrinsically ugly and inconvenient. Watching his self-important tenants walk through the lobby, he sometimes thought that they were a species of the poor. They were poor in space, poor in light, poor in quiet, poor in repose, and poor in the atmosphere of privacy?poor in everything that makes a man’s home his castle. He knew the pains they took to overcome these deficiencies: the fans, for instance, to take away the smells of cooking. A six-room apartment is not a house, and if you cook onions in one end of it, you’ll likely smell them in the other, but they all installed kitchen exhausts and kept them running, as if ventilating machinery would make an apartment smell like a house in the woods. All the living rooms were, to his mind, too high-ceilinged and too narrow, too noisy and too dark, and he knew how tirelessly the women spent their time and money in the furniture stores, thinking that another kind of carpeting, another set of end tables, another pair of lamps would make the place conform at last to their visions of a secure home. Mrs. Bestwick had done better than most, he thought, or perhaps it was because he liked her that he liked her room.
“Do you know about the new rents, Chester?” Mrs. Bestwick said.
“I never know about rents, or leases,” Chester said untruthfully. “They handle all of that at the office.”
“Our rent’s been raised,” Mrs. Bestwick said, “and we don’t want to pay that much. I thought you might know if there was a less expensive apartment vacant in the building.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Bestwick,” Chester said. “There isn’t a thing.”
“I see,” Mrs. Bestwick said.
He saw that she had something in mind; probably she hoped that he would offer to speak to the management and persuade them that the Bestwicks, as old and very desirable tenants, should be allowed to stay on at their present rental. But apparently she wasn’t going to put herself in the embarrassing position of asking for his help, and he refrained, out of tact, from telling her that there was no way of his bringing pressure to bear on the situation.
“Isn’t this building managed by the Marshall Cavises?” Mrs. Doubleday asked.
“Yes,” Chester said.
“I went to Farmington with Mrs. Cavis,” Mrs. Doubleday said to her daughter. “Do you think it would help if I spoke with her?”
“Mrs. Cavis isn’t around here very much,” Chester said. “During the fifteen years I worked here, I never laid eyes on either of them.”
“But they do manage the building?” Mrs. Doubleday said to him.
“The Marshall Cavis Corporation manages it,” Chester said.
“Maude Cavis was engaged to Benton Towler,” Mrs. Doubleday said.
“I don’t expect they have much to do with it personally,” Chester said. “I don’t know, but it seems to me I heard they don’t even live in New York.”
“Thank you very much, Chester,” Mrs. Bestwick said. “I just thought there might be a vacancy.”
WHEN THE ALARM BEGAN ringing again, this time to signify that the tank on the roof was full, Chester lit out through the lobby and down the iron stairs and turned off the pump. Stanley, the handyman, was awake and moving around in his room by then, and Chester told him he thought the float switch on the roof that controlled the pump was broken and to keep an eye on the gauge. The day in the basement had begun. The milk and the newspapers had been delivered; Delaney, the porter, had emptied the waste cans in the back halls; and now the sleep-out cooks and maids were coming to work. Chester could hear them greeting Ferarri, the back- elevator man, and their clear “Good mornings” confirmed his feeling that the level of courtesy was a grade higher in the basement than in the lobby upstairs.
At a little before nine, Chester telephoned the office management. A secretary whose voice he did not recognize took the message. “The float switch on the water tank is busted,” he told her, “and we’re working the auxiliary manually now. You tell the maintenance crew to get over here this morning.”
“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, God damn it!” Chester shouted. “I got over two hundred bathrooms here.
