“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, butter, 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 basement 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 grass 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 basement. I take just as much pains with my basement as I do with my lobby.”
“I’m not talking about the basement,” 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, passing 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 ship 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 ship was nothing. At his feet, there were thousands of arteries hammering with steam; there were hundreds of toilets, miles of drainpipe, and a passenger 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 ship’s captain taking his freighter out to sea.
When he got back to the basement, 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 shined.
But the shoeshine parlor that morning was still and empty, and Bronco, the shoeshine 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 coarse 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 pass 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.”
