The Stories of John Cheever

“Please don’t get excited,” Renée said. “She can’t have gone very far. The only way she could get downstairs would be the elevators.” She went out the kitchen door and rang for the service elevator. She noticed the perilous service stairs. They were made of iron and concrete, painted a dirty gray, and they fell fifteen stories to the ground. She listened down the stairwell, but all she could hear was the hiss of cooking and someone, way below, singing,

 

“I’m a soldier, in the army of the Lord,

I’m a soldier,

In the army…”

 

The service elevator was full of stinking garbage. “There was a little girl in my apartment,” Renée said to the man who had brought the elevator up. “She’s disappeared. Would you look for her?” Then she ran into the front hall and rang for the passenger elevator. “Why, yes,” the man said. “I took a little girl down, about ten minutes ago. She had on a yellow coat.” Renée smelled whiskey on his breath. She called to Mrs. Harley. Then she went back into the apartment to get some cigarettes. “I’m not going to stay here by myself,” Mrs. Harley said. Renée pushed her into a chair. She closed the door and rode down in the elevator. “I thought it was strange, her going down by herself,” the elevator man said. “I thought maybe she was going to meet somebody in the lobby.” As he spoke, Renée smelled the whiskey on his breath again. “You’ve been drinking,” she said. “If you hadn’t been drinking, this wouldn’t have happened. You ought to know that a child of that age can’t be left alone. You ought not to drink while you’re working.”

When he reached the ground floor, he brought the elevator to a sudden stop and slammed the door open. Renée ran into the lobby. The mirrors, the electric candles, and the doorman’s soiled ascot sickened her. “Yes,” the doorman said. “It seems to me that I saw a little girl go out. I didn’t pay much attention to it. I was out there, trying to get a cab.” Renée ran into the street. The child was not there. She ran down to where she could see the river. She felt helpless and feeble, as though she had lost her place in the city in which she had lived for fifteen years. The traffic on the street was heavy. She stood at the corner with her hands cupped to her mouth and screamed, “Deborah! Deborah!”

 

The Tennysons were going out that afternoon, and they had begun to dress when the telephone rang. Robert answered. Katherine could hear Renée’s voice. “…I know it’s a terrible thing, Bob, I know I should never have done it.”