The Stories of John Cheever

The day had got hot. A few low, swift clouds touched the city with shadow, and he could see the fast darkness traveling from block to block. The streets were crowded. He saw the city only in terms of mortal danger. Each manhole cover, excavation, and flight of stairs dominated the brilliance of the day like the reverse emphasis of a film negative, and he thought the crowds and the green trees in Central Park looked profane. The Hotel Princess was on a dingy street in the West Seventies. The air in the lobby was fetid. The desk clerk became uneasy when he saw the policeman. He looked for Mrs. Emerson’s key and said that she was in. There was no telephone in her room. They could go up.

They went up in an elevator cage of gilded iron, driven by an old man. They knocked on the door, and Mrs. Emerson told them to come in. Robert had never known the woman. He had only seen her when she stood in the doorway of the nursery and sent Deborah in to say good night. She was English, he remembered. Her voice had always sounded troubled and refined. “Oh, Mr. Tennyson,” she said when she recognized him. The sergeant asked her suddenly where she had been that morning.

“It’s all right, Mrs. Emerson,” Robert said. He was afraid she would become hysterical and tell them nothing. “Deborah ran away this morning. We thought you might know something about it. Mrs. Tennyson said you wrote her a letter.”

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry to hear about Deborah,” she said. It was the fine, small voice of someone who knew her place as a lady. “Yes, yes. Of course I wrote that letter to Mrs. Tennyson. It came to me in a dream that you would lose the little girl unless you were very careful. I have a profession, you know. I interpret dreams. I told Mrs. Tennyson when I left her that she should take very good care of the little girl. She was born, after all, under that dreadful new planet, Pluto. I was on the Riviera when they discovered it, in 1938. We knew something dreadful was going to happen then.