“It’s a small house, Chester,” Mrs. Bestwick said.
“Well, I’m going to tell the porters to take your stuff?your things?out now and put them in the alley,” Chester said. “They’ll be just as safe there as they will be in here, and if it rains, I’ll see that everything’s covered and kept dry. Why don’t you go up to Pelham now, Mrs. Bestwick?” he asked. “I’ll take care of everything. Why don’t you just get onto a train and go up to Pelham?”
“I think I’ll wait, thank you, Chester,” Mrs. Bestwick said.
Somewhere a factory whistle blew twelve o’clock. Chester went downstairs and inspected the lobby. The rugs and the floor were clean, and the glass on the hunting prints was shining. He stood under the canopy long enough to see that the brass stanchions were polished, that the rubber doormat was scrubbed, and that his canopy was a good canopy and, unlike some others, had withstood the winter storms. “Good morning,” someone said to him elegantly while he was standing there, and he said, “Good morning, Mrs. Wardsworth,” before he realized that it was Katie Shay, Mrs. Wardsworth’s elderly maid. It was an understandable mistake, for Katie was wearing a hat and a coat that had been discarded by Mrs. Wardsworth and she wore the dregs of a bottle of Mrs. Wardsworth’s perfume. In the eclipsed light, the old woman looked like the specter of her employer.
Then a moving van, Mrs. Bestwick’s moving van, backed up to the curb. This improved Chester’s spirits, and he went in to lunch with a good appetite.
Mrs. Coolidge did not sit down at the table with Chester, and because she was wearing her purple dress, Chester guessed that she was going to the movies.
“That woman up in 7-F asked me if I was the janitor today,” Chester said.
‘Well, don’t you let it worry you, Chester,” Mrs. Coolidge said. ‘When I think of all the things you have on your mind, Chester?of all the things you have to do?it seems to me that you have more to do than almost anybody I ever knew. Why, this place might catch fire in the middle of the night, and there’s nobody here knows where the hoses are but you and Stanley. There’s the elevator machines and the electricity and the gas and the furnace. How much oil did you say that furnace burned last winter, Chester?”
“Over a hundred thousand gallons,” Chester said.
“Just think of that,” Mrs. Coolidge said.
THE MOVING was proceeding in an orderly way when Chester got downstairs again. The moving men told him that Mrs. Bestwick was still in the apartment. He lighted a cigar, sat down at his desk, and heard someone singing, “Did you ever see a dream walking?” The song, attended with laughing and clapping, came from the far end of the basement, and Chester followed the voice down the dark hall, to the laundry. The laundry was a brightly lighted room that smelled of the gas dryer. Banana peels and sandwich papers were spread over the ironing boards, and none of the six laundresses were working. In the center of the room, one of them, dressed in a negligee that someone had sent down to have washed, was waltzing with a second, dressed in a tablecloth. The others were clapping and laughing. Chester was wondering whether or not to interfere with the dance when the telephone in his office rang again. It was Mrs. Negus. “Get that bitch out of there, Chester,” she said. “That’s been my apartment since midnight. I’m going up there now.”
Chester asked Mrs. Negus to wait for him in the lobby. He found her there wearing a short fur coat and dark glasses. They went up to 9-E together and he rang Mrs. Bestwick’s front bell. He introduced the two women, but Mrs. Negus overlooked the introduction in her interest in a piece of furniture that the moving men were carrying across the hall.
“That’s a lovely piece,” she said.
“Thank you,” Mrs. Bestwick said.
“You wouldn’t want to sell it?” Mrs. Negus said.
“I’m afraid I can’t,” Mrs. Bestwick said. “I’m sorry that I’m leaving the place in such a mess,” she went on. “There wasn’t time to have someone come in and clean it up.”
“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” Mrs. Negus said. “I’m going to have the whole thing painted and redecorated anyhow. I just wanted to get my things in here.”
“Why don’t you go up to Pelham now, Mrs. Bestwick?” Chester said. “Your truck’s here, and I’ll see that all the stuff is loaded.”
“I will in a minute, Chester,” Mrs. Bestwick said.
“You’ve got some lovely stones there,” Mrs. Negus said, looking at Mrs. Bestwick’s rings.
“Thank you,” Mrs. Bestwick said.
