The Stories of John Cheever

The Bus to St. James’s

THE BUS to St. James’s—a Protestant Episcopal school for boys and girls—started its round at eight o’clock in the morning, from a corner of Park Avenue in the Sixties. The earliness of the hour meant that some of the parents who took their children there were sleepy and still without coffee, but with a clear sky the light struck the city at an extreme angle, the air was fresh, and it was an exceptionally cheerful time of day. It was the hour when cooks and doormen walk dogs, and when porters scrub the lobby floor mats with soap and water. Traces of the night—the parents and children once watched a man whose tuxedo was covered with sawdust wander home—were scarce.

When the fall semester began, five children waited for the school bus at this stop, and they all came from the limestone apartment houses of the neighborhood. Two of the children, Louise and Emily Sheridan, were newcomers. The others—the Pruitt boy, Katherine Bruce, and the little Armstrong girl—had met the bus for St. James’s the year before.

Mr. Pruitt brought his son to the corner each morning. They had the same tailor and they both tipped their hats to the ladies. Although Katherine Bruce was old enough to walk to the bus stop by herself, she was nearsighted and her father made the trip with her unless he was out of town on business, in which case a maid brought her. Stephen Bruce’s first wife, Katherine’s mother, had died, and he was more painstakingly attentive to his daughter than fathers usually are. She was a large girl, but he took her hand tenderly and led her across the street and sometimes stood on the corner with his arm around her shoulders. The second Mrs. Bruce had no children. Mrs. Armstrong took her daughter to the bus stop only when her maid or her cook refused. Like Mrs. Armstrong, Mrs. Sheridan shared this chore with a maid, but she was more constant. At least three mornings a week she came to the corner with her daughters and with an old Scotch terrier on a leash.

St. James’s was a small school, and the parents, waiting on the street corner until the bus arrived, spoke confidently to one another. Mr. Bruce knew Mr. Pruitt’s brother-in-law and was the second cousin of a woman who had roomed with Mrs. Armstrong in boarding school. Mrs. Sheridan and Mr. Pruitt had friends in common. “We saw some friends of yours last night,” Mr. Pruitt said one morning. “The Murchisons?” “Oh yes,” Mrs. Sheridan said, “yes.” She never gave a simple affirmative; she always said, “Oh yes, yes,” or “Oh yes, yes, yes.”

Mrs. Sheridan dressed plainly and her hair was marked with gray. She was not pretty or provocative, and compared to Mrs. Armstrong, whose hair was golden, she seemed plain; but her features were fine and her body was graceful and slender. She was a well-mannered woman of perhaps thirty-five, Mr. Bruce decided, with a well-ordered house and a perfect emotional digestion—one of those women who, through their goodness, can absorb anything. A great deal of authority seemed to underlie her mild manner. She would have been raised by solid people, Mr. Bruce thought, and would respect all the boarding-school virtues: courage, good sportsmanship, chastity, and honor. When he heard her say in the morning, “Oh yes, yes!” it seemed to him like a happy combination of manners and spirit.

Mr. Pruitt continued to tell Mrs. Sheridan that he had met her friends, but their paths never seemed to cross directly. Mr. Bruce, eavesdropping on their conversation, behind his newspaper, was gratified by this because he disliked Mr. Pruitt and respected Mrs. Sheridan; but he knew they were bound to meet somewhere other than on the street, and one day Mr. Pruitt took his hat off to Mrs. Sheridan and said, “Wasn’t it a delightful party?” “Oh, yes,” Mrs. Sheridan said, “yes.” Then Mr. Pruitt asked Mrs. Sheridan when she and her husband had left, and she said they had left at midnight. She did not seem anxious to talk about the party, but she answered all of Mr. Pruitt’s questions politely.

Mr. Bruce told himself that Mrs. Sheridan was wasting her time; Pruitt was a fool and she deserved better. His dislike of Pruitt and his respect for Mrs. Sheridan seemed idle, but he was pleased, one morning, to get to the corner and find that Mrs. Sheridan was there with her two daughters and the dog, and that Pruitt wasn’t. He wished her a good morning.

“Good morning,” she said. “We seem to be early.”

Katherine and the older Sheridan girl began to talk together.

“I think I knew Katherine’s mother,” Mrs. Sheridan said politely. “Wasn’t your first wife Martha Chase?”

“Yes.”

“I knew her in college. I didn’t know her well. She was in the class ahead of me. How old is Katherine now?”

“She was eight last summer,” Mr. Bruce said.

“We have a brother,” the younger Sheridan girl said, standing beside her mother. “He’s eight.”

“Yes, dear,” Mrs. Sheridan said.

“He was drowned,” the little girl said.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Mr. Bruce said.

“He was quite a good swimmer,” the little girl went on, “but we think that he must have gotten a cramp. You see, there was a thunderstorm, and we all went into the boathouse and we weren’t looking and—”

“That was a long time ago, dear,” Mrs. Sheridan said gently.

“It wasn’t so long ago,” the little girl said. “It was only last summer.”

“Yes, dear,” her mother said. “Yes, yes.”

Mr. Bruce noticed that there was no trace of pain, or of the effort to conceal it, on her face, and her composure seemed to him a feat of intelligence and grace. They continued to stand together, without talking, until the other parents arrived with their children, just as the bus came up the street. Mrs. Sheridan called to the old dog and went down Park Avenue, and Mr. Bruce got into a taxi and went to work.

Toward the end of October, on a rainy Friday night, Mr. and Mrs. Bruce took a taxi to St. James’s School. It was Parents’ Night. One of the senior boys ushered them into a pew at the rear of the chapel. The altar was stripped of its mysteries, and the rector stood on the raised floor between the choir stalls, waiting for the laggard parents to be seated. He tucked and pulled nervously at his clericals, and then signaled for silence by clearing his throat.

“On behalf of the faculty and the board of trustees,” he said, “I welcome the parents of St. James’s here this evening. I regret that we have such inclement weather, but it doesn’t seem to have kept any of you at home.” This was said archly, as if the full attendance reflected his powers of intimidation. “Let us begin,” he said, “with a prayer for the welfare of our school: Almighty Father, Creator of Heaven and earth! …” Kneeling, and with their heads bowed, the congregation looked indestructible and as if the permanence of society depended and could always depend on them. And when the prayer ended, the rector spoke to them about their durability. “I have some very interesting statistics for you all tonight,” he said. “This year we have sixteen children enrolled in the school whose parents and whose grandparents were St. James’s children. I think that’s a very impressive number. I doubt that any other day school in the city could equal it.”

During the brief speech in defense of conservative education that followed, Mr. Bruce noticed that Mrs. Sheridan was seated a few pews in front of him. With her was a tall man—her husband, presumably—with a straight back and black hair. When the talk ended, the meeting was opened for questions. The first question was from a mother who wanted advice on how to restrict her children’s use of television. While the rector was answering this question, Mr. Bruce noticed that the Sheridans were having an argument. They were whispering, and their disagreement seemed intense. Suddenly, Mrs. Sheridan separated herself from the argument. She had nothing further to say. Mr. Sheridan’s neck got red. He continued, in a whisper, to press his case, bending toward his wife, and shaking his head. Mrs. Sheridan raised her hand.

“Yes, Mrs. Sheridan,” the rector said.

Mr. Sheridan picked up his coat and his derby, and, saying “Excuse me, please,” “Thank you,” “Excuse me,” passed in front of the other people in the pew, and left the chapel.

“Yes, Mrs. Sheridan?” the rector repeated.

“I wonder, Dr. Frisbee,” Mrs. Sheridan said, “if you and the board of trustees have ever thought of enrolling Negro children in St. James’s?”

“That question came up three years ago,” the rector said impatiently, “and a report was submitted to the board of trustees on the question. There have been very few requests for it, but if you would like a copy, I will have one sent to you.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Sheridan said, “I would like to read it.”

The rector nodded and Mrs. Sheridan sat down.

“Mrs. Townsend?” the rector asked.

“I have a question about science and religion,” Mrs. Townsend said. “It seems to me that the science faculty stresses science to the detriment of religious sentiment, especially concerning the Creation. It seems to me …”

Mrs. Sheridan picked up her gloves and, smiling politely and saying “Excuse me,” “Thank you,” “Please excuse me,” she brushed past the others in the pew. Mr. Bruce heard her heels on the paved floor of the hall and, by craning his neck, was able to see her. The noise of traffic and of the rain grew louder as she pushed open one of the heavy doors, and faded as the door swung to.

LATE ONE AFTERNOON the following week, Mr. Bruce was called out of a stockholders’ meeting to take a telephone call from his wife. She wanted him to stop at the stable where Katherine took riding lessons and bring her home. It exasperated him to have been called from the meeting to take this message, and when he returned, the meeting itself had fallen into the hands of an old man who had brought with him Robert’s Rules of Order. Business that should have been handled directly and simply dragged, and the meeting ended in a tedious and heated argument. Immediately afterward, he took a taxi up to the Nineties, and went through the tack room of the riding stable into the ring. Katherine and some other girls, wearing hunting bowlers and dark clothes, were riding. The ring was cold and damp, its overhead lights burned whitely, the mirrors along the wall were fogged and streaked with moisture, and the riding mistress spoke to her pupils with an elaborate courteousness. Mr. Bruce watched his daughter. Katherine wore glasses, her face was plain, and her light hair was long and stringy. She was a receptive and obedient girl, and her exposure to St. James’s had begun faintly to show in her face. When the lesson ended, he went back into the tack room. Mrs. Sheridan was there, waiting for her daughters.

“Can I give you a lift home?” Mr. Bruce said.

“You most certainly can,” Mrs. Sheridan said. “We were going to take a bus.”

The children joined them and they all went out and waited for a cab. It was dark.

“I was interested in the question you asked at the parents’ meeting,” Mr. Bruce said. This was untrue. He was not interested in the question, and if Negroes had been enrolled in St. James’s, he would have removed Katherine.

“I’m glad someone was interested,” she said. “The Rector was wild.”

“That’s principally what interested me,” Mr. Bruce said, trying to approach the truth.

A cab came along, and they got into it. He let Mrs. Sheridan off at the door of her apartment house, and watched her walk with her two daughters into the lighted lobby.

MRS. SHERIDAN had forgotten her key and a maid let her in. It was late and she had asked people for dinner. The door to her husband’s room was shut, and she bathed and dressed without seeing him. While she was combing her hair, she heard him go into the living room and turn on the television set. In company, Charles Sheridan always spoke contemptuously of television. “By Jove,” he would say, “I don’t see how anyone can look at that trash. It must be a year since I’ve turned our set on.” Now his wife could hear him laughing uproariously.

She left her room and went down the hall to the dining room to check on everything there. Then she went through the pantry into the kitchen. She sensed trouble as soon as the door closed after her. Helen, the waitress, was sitting at a table near the sink. She had been crying. Anna, the cook, put down the pan she had been washing, to be sure of hearing everything that was said.

“What’s the matter, Helen?” Mrs. Sheridan asked.

“From my pie he took twelff dollars, Mrs. Seridan,” Helen said. She was Austrian.

“What for, Helen?”

“The day I burn myself. You told me to go to the doctor?”

“Yes.”

“For that he took from my pie twelff dollars.”

“I’ll give you a check tomorrow, Helen,” Mrs. Sheridan said. “Don’t worry.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Helen said. “Thank you.”

Mr. Sheridan came through the pantry into the kitchen. He looked handsome in his dark clothes. “Oh, here you are,” he said to his wife. “Let’s have a drink before they come.” Then, turning to the waitress, he asked, “Have you heard from your family recently?”

“No, Mr. Seridan,” Helen said.

“Where is it your family lives?” he asked.

“In Missigan, Mr. Seridan.” She giggled, but this joke had been made innumerable times in the past few years and she was tired of it.

“Where?” Mr. Sheridan asked.

“In Missigan, Mr. Seridan,” she repeated.

He burst out laughing. “By Jove, I think that’s funny!” he said. He put his arm around his wife’s waist and they went in to have a drink.

MR. BRUCE returned to a much pleasanter home. His wife, Lois, was a pretty woman, and she greeted him affectionately. He sat down with her for a cocktail. “Marguerite called me this morning,” she said, “and told me that Charlie’s lost his job. When I heard the phone ring, I sensed trouble; I sensed it. Even before I picked up the receiver, I knew that something was wrong. At first, I thought it was going to be poor Helen Luckman. She’s had so many misfortunes recently that she’s been on my mind a lot of the time. Then I heard Marguerite’s voice. She said that poor Charlie had been a wonderful sport about the whole thing and that he was determined to get an even better job. He’s traveled all over the United States for that firm and now they’re just letting him go. She called while I was in bed, and the reason I stayed in bed this morning is because my back’s been giving me a little trouble again. It’s nothing serious—it’s nothing serious at all—but the pain’s excruciating and I’m going to Dr. Parminter tomorrow and see if he can help me.”

Lois had been frail when Mr. Bruce first met her. It had been one of her great charms. The extreme pallor and delicacy of her skin could be accounted for partly by a year of her life when, as she said, the doctors had given her up for dead., Her frailness was a fact, a mixture of chance and inheritance, and she could not be blamed for her susceptibility to poison oak, cold germs, and fatigue.

“I’m very sorry to hear about your back, dear,” Mr. Bruce said.

“Well, I didn’t spend the whole day in bed,” she said. “I got up around eleven and had lunch with Betty and then went shopping.”

Lois Bruce, like a great many women in New York, spent a formidable amount of time shopping along Fifth Avenue. She read the advertisements in the newspapers more intently than her husband read the financial section. Shopping was her principal occupation. She would get up from a sickbed to go shopping. The atmosphere of the department stores had a restorative effect on her disposition. She would begin her afternoon at Altman’s—buy a pair of gloves on the first floor, and then travel up on the escalator and look at andirons. She would buy a purse and some face cream at Lord & Taylor’s, and price coffee tables, upholstery fabrics, and cocktail glasses. “Down?” she would ask the elevator operator when the doors rolled open, and if the operator said “Up,” Lois would board the car anyhow, deciding suddenly that whatever it was that she wanted might be in the furniture or the linen department. She would buy a pair of shoes and a slip at Saks, send her mother some napkins from Mosse’s, buy a bunch of cloth flowers at De Pinna’s, some hand lotion at Bonwit’s, and a dress at Bendel’s. By then, her feet and her head would be pleasantly tired, the porter at Tiffany’s would be taking in the flag, the lamps on the carriages by the Plaza would be lighted. She would buy a cake at Dean’s, her last stop, and walk home through the early dark like an honest workman, contented and weary.

When they sat down to dinner, Lois watched her husband taste his soup and smiled when she saw that he was pleased. “It is good, isn’t it?” she said. “I can’t taste it myself—I haven’t been able to taste anything for a week—but I don’t want to tell Katie, bless her, because it would hurt her feelings, and I didn’t want to compliment her if it wasn’t right. Katie,” she called, through the pantry, “your soup is delicious.”

MRS. SHERIDAN did not come to the corner all the next week. On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Bruce stopped by for Katherine at her dancing class, on the way home from his office. The Sheridan girls were in the same class, and he looked for Mrs. Sheridan in the lobby of the Chardin Club, but she wasn’t there. He didn’t see her again, actually, until he went, on Sunday afternoon, to bring Katherine home from a birthday party.

Because Lois sometimes played cards until seven o’clock, it often fell to Mr. Bruce to call for Katherine at some address at the end of the day, to see her through the stiff thanks and goodbyes that end a children’s party. The streets were cold and dark; the hot rooms where the parties were smelled of candy and flowers. Among the friends and relatives there he was often pleased to meet people with whom he had summered or been to school. Some of these parties were elaborate, and he had once gone to get Katherine at an apartment in the Waldorf Towers where six little girls were being entertained by a glass blower.

In the hallway that Sunday afternoon, an Irish maid was taking up peanut shells with a carpet sweeper, lost balloons were bunched on the ceiling above her white head, and Mr. Bruce met a dwarf, dressed as a clown, who had entertained at parties in his own childhood. The old man had not changed his stock of tricks or his patter, and he was proud that he was able to remember the names and faces of most of the generations of children he had entertained. He held Mr. Bruce in the hall until, after several wrong guesses, he came up with his name. In the living room a dozen friends and relatives were drinking cocktails. Now and then, a weary child, holding a candy basket or a balloon, would wander through the crowd of grown people. At the end of the living room, a couple who worked a marionette show were dismantling their stage. The woman’s hair was dyed, and she smiled and gesticulated broadly while she worked, like a circus performer, though no one was watching her.

While Mr. Bruce was waiting for Katherine to put her coat on, Mrs. Sheridan came in from the foyer. They shook hands. “Can I take you home?” he asked.

She said, “Yes, yes,” and went in search of her older daughter.

Katherine went up to her hostess and dropped a curtsy. “It was nice of you to ask me to your party, Mrs. Howells,” she said, without mumbling. “And thank you very much.”

“She’s such a dear. It’s such a joy to have her!” Mrs. Howells said to Mr. Bruce, and laid a hand absent-mindedly on Katherine’s head.

Mrs. Sheridan reappeared with her daughter. Louise Sheridan curtsied and recited her thanks, but Mrs. Howells was thinking about something else and did not hear. The little girl repeated her thanks, in a louder voice.

“Why, thank you for coming!” Mrs. Howells exclaimed abruptly.

Mr. Bruce and Mrs. Sheridan and the two children went down in the elevator. It was still light when they came out of the building onto Fifth Avenue.

“Let’s walk,” Mrs. Sheridan said. “It’s only a few blocks.”

The children went on ahead. They were in the lower Eighties and their view was broad; it took in the avenue, the Museum, and the Park. As they walked, the double track of lights along the avenue went on with a faint click. There was a haze in the air that made the lamps give off a yellow light, and the colonnades of the Museum, the mansard roof of the Plaza above the trees, and the multitude of yellow lights reminded Stephen Bruce of many pictures of Paris and London (“Winter Afternoon”) that had been painted at the turn of the century. This deceptive resemblance pleased him, and his pleasure in what he could see was heightened by the woman he was with. He felt that she saw it all very clearly. They walked along without speaking most of the way. A block or two from the building where she lived, she took her arm out of his.

“I’d like to talk with you someday about St. James’s School,” Mr. Bruce said. “Won’t you have lunch with me? Could you have lunch with me on Tuesday?”

“I’d love to have lunch with you,” Mrs. Sheridan said.

THE RESTAURANT WHERE Mrs. Sheridan and Mr. Bruce met for lunch on Tuesday was the kind of place where they were not likely to see anyone they knew. The menu was soiled, and so was the waiter’s tuxedo. There are a thousand places like it in the city. When they greeted one another, they could have passed for a couple that had been married fifteen years. She was carrying bundles and an umbrella. She might have come in from the suburbs to get some clothes for the children. She said she had been shopping, she had taken a taxi, she had been rushed, she was hungry. She took off her gloves, rattled the menu, and looked around. He had a whiskey and she asked for a glass of sherry.

“I want to know what you really think about St. James’s School,” he said, and she began, animatedly, to talk.

They had moved a year earlier from New York to Long Island, she said, because she wanted to send her children to a country school. She had been to country schools herself. The Long Island school had been unsatisfactory, and they had moved back to New York in September. Her husband had gone to St. James’s, and that had determined their choice. She spoke excitedly, as Mr. Bruce had known she would, about the education of her daughters, and he guessed that this was something she couldn’t discuss with the same satisfaction with her husband. She was excited at finding someone who seemed interested in her opinions, and she put herself at a disadvantage, as he intended she should, by talking too much. The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable, even to a purblind waiter, and they both looked wonderful. He got her a taxi at the corner. They said goodbye.

“You’ll have lunch with me again?”

“Of course,” she said, “of course.”

She met him for lunch again. Then she met him for dinner—her husband was away. He kissed her in the taxi, and they said good night in front of her apartment house. When he called her a few days later, a nurse or a maid answered the telephone and said that Mrs. Sheridan was ill and could not be disturbed. He was frantic. He called several times during the afternoon, and finally Mrs. Sheridan answered. Her illness was not serious, she said. She would be up in a day or two and she would call him when she was well. She called him early the next week, and they met for lunch at a restaurant in an uptown apartment house. She had been shopping. She took off her gloves, rattled the menu, and looked around another failing restaurant, poorly lighted and with only a few customers. One of her daughters had a mild case of measles, she said, and Mr. Bruce was interested in the symptoms. But he looked, for a man who claimed to be interested in childhood diseases, bilious and vulpine. His color was bad. He scowled and rubbed his forehead as if he suffered from a headache. He repeatedly wet his lips and crossed and recrossed his legs. Presently, his uneasiness seemed to cross the table. During the rest of the time they sat there, the conversation was about commonplace subjects, but an emotion for which they seemed to have no words colored the talk and darkened and enlarged its shapes. She did not finish her dessert. She let her coffee get cold. For a while, neither of them spoke. A stranger, noticing them in the restaurant, might have thought that they were a pair of old friends who had met to discuss a misfortune. His face was gray. Her hands were trembling. Leaning toward her, he said, finally, “The reason I asked you to come here is because the firm I work for has an apartment upstairs.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better. That part of their experience that is distinct and separate, the totality of the years before they met, is changed, is redirected toward this moment. They feel they have reached an identical point of intensity, an ecstasy of rightness that they command in every part, and any recollection that occurs to them takes on this final clarity, whether it be a sweep hand on an airport clock, a snow owl, a Chicago railroad station on Christmas Eve, or anchoring a yawl in a strange harbor while all along the stormy coast strangers are blowing their horns for the yacht-club tender, or running a ski trail at that hour when, although the sun is still in the sky, the north face of every mountain lies in the dark.

“DO YOU WANT to go downstairs alone? The elevator men in these buildings—” Stephen Bruce said when they had dressed.

“I don’t care about the elevator men in these buildings,” she said lightly.

She took his arm, and they went down in the elevator together. When they left the building, they were unwilling to part, and they decided on the Metropolitan Museum as a place where they were not likely to be seen by anyone they knew. The nearly empty rotunda looked, at that hour of the afternoon, like a railroad station past train time. It smelled of burning coal. They looked at stone horses and pieces of cloth. In a dark passage, they found a prodigal representation of the Feast of Love. The god—disguised now as a woodcutter, now as a cowherd, a sailor, a prince—came through every open door. Three spirits waited by a holly grove to lift the armor from his shoulders and undo his buckler. A large company encouraged his paramour. The whole creation was in accord—the civet and the bear, the lion and the unicorn, fire and water.

Coming back through the rotunda, Mr. Bruce and Mrs. Sheridan met a friend of Lois’s mother. It was impossible to avoid her and they said How-do-you-do and I’m-happy-to-meet-you, and Stephen promised to remember the friend to his mother-in-law. Mr. Bruce and Mrs. Sheridan walked over to Lexington and said goodbye. He returned to his office and went home at six. Mrs. Bruce had not come in, the maid told him. Katherine was at a party, and he was supposed to bring her home. The maid gave him the address and he went out again without taking off his coat. It was raining. The doorman, in a white raincoat, went out into the storm, and returned riding on the running board of a taxi. The taxi had orange seats, and as it drove uptown, he heard the car radio playing a tango. Another doorman let him out and he went into a lobby that, like the one in the building where he lived, was meant to resemble the hall of a manor house. Upstairs, there were peanut shells on the rug, balloons on the ceiling; friends and relatives were drinking cocktails in the living room, and at the end of the room, the marionette stage was again being dismantled. He drank a Martini and talked with a friend while he waited for Katherine to put her coat on. “Oh yes, yes!” he heard Mrs. Sheridan say, and then he saw her come into the room with her daughters.

Katherine came between them before they spoke, and he went, with his daughter, over to the hostess. Katherine dropped her curtsy and said brightly, “It was very nice of you to ask me to your party, Mrs. Bremont, and thank you very much.” As Mr. Bruce started for the elevator, the younger Sheridan girl dropped her curtsy and said, “It was a very nice party, Mrs. Bremont….”

He waited downstairs, with Katherine, for Mrs. Sheridan, but something or someone delayed her, and when the elevator had come down twice without bringing her, he left.

MR. BRUCE AND MRS. SHERIDAN met at the apartment a few days later. Then he saw her in a crowd at the Rockefeller Center skating rink, waiting for her children. He saw her again in the lobby of the Chardin Club, among the other parents, nursemaids, and chauffeurs who were waiting for the dancing class to end. He didn’t speak to her, but he heard her at his back, saying to someone, “Yes, Mother’s very well, thank you. Yes, I will give her your love.” Then he heard her speaking to someone farther away from him and then her voice fell below the music. That night, he left the city on business and did not return until Sunday, and he went Sunday afternoon to a football game with a friend. The game was slow and the last quarter was played under lights. When he got home, Lois met him at the door of the apartment. The fire in the living room was lighted. She fixed their drinks and then sat across the room from him in a chair near the fire. “I forgot to tell you that Aunt Helen called on Wednesday. She’s moving from Gray’s Hill to a house nearer the shore.”

He tried to find something to say to this item of news and couldn’t. After five years of marriage he seemed to have been left with nothing to say. It was like being embarrassed by a shortage of money. He looked desperately back to the football game and the trip to Chicago for something that might please her, and couldn’t find a word. Lois felt his struggle and his failure. She stopped talking herself. I haven’t had anyone to talk to since Wednesday, she thought, and now he has nothing to say. “While you were away, I strained my back again, reaching for a hatbox,” she said. “The pain is excruciating, and Dr. Parminter doesn’t seem able to help me, so I’m going to another doctor, named Walsh, who—”

“I’m terribly sorry your back is bothering you,” he said. “I hope Dr. Walsh will be able to help.”

The lack of genuine concern in his voice hurt her feelings. “Oh, and I forgot to tell you—there’s been some trouble,” she said crossly. “Katherine spent the afternoon with Helen Woodruff and some other children. There were some boys. When the maid went into the playroom to call them for supper, she found them all undressed. Mrs. Woodruff was very upset and I told her you’d call.”

“Where is Katherine?”

“She’s in her room. She won’t speak to me. I don’t like to be the one to say it, but I think you ought to get a psychiatrist for that girl.”

“I’ll go and speak to her,” Mr. Bruce said.

“Well, will you want any supper?” Lois asked.

“Yes,” he said, “I would like some supper.”

Katherine had a large room on the side of the building. Her furniture had never filled it. When Mr. Bruce went in, he saw her sitting on the edge of her bed, in the dark. The room smelled of a pair of rats that she had in a cage. He turned on the light and gave her a charm bracelet that he had bought at the airport, and she thanked him politely. He did not mention the trouble at the Woodruffs’, but when he put his arm around her shoulders, she began to cry bitterly.

“I didn’t want to do it this afternoon,” she said, “but she made me, and she was the hostess, and we always have to do what the hostess says.”

“It doesn’t matter if you wanted to or not,” he said. “You haven’t done anything terribly wrong.”

He held her until she was quiet, and then left her and went into his bedroom and telephoned Mrs. Woodruff. “This is Katherine Bruce’s father,” he said. “I understand that there was some difficulty there this afternoon. I just wanted to say that Katherine has been given her lecture, and as far as Mrs. Bruce and I are concerned, the incident has been forgotten.”

“Well, it hasn’t been forgotten over here,” Mrs. Woodruff said. “I don’t know who started it, but I’ve put Helen to bed without any supper. Mr. Woodruff and I haven’t decided how we’re going to punish her yet, but we’re going to punish her severely.” He heard Lois calling to him from the living room that his supper was ready. “I suppose you know that immorality is sweeping this country,” Mrs. Woodruff went on. “Our child has never heard a dirty word spoken in her life in this household. There is no room for filth here. If it takes fire to fight fire, that’s what I’m going to do!”

The ignorant and ill-tempered woman angered him, but he listened helplessly to her until she had finished, and then went back to Katherine.

Lois looked at the clock on the mantelpiece and called to her husband sharply, a second time. She had not felt at all like making his supper. His lack of concern for her feelings and then her having to slave for him in the kitchen had seemed like an eternal human condition. The ghosts of her injured sex thronged to her side when she slammed open the silver drawer and again when she poured his beer. She set the tray elaborately, in order to deepen her displeasure in doing it at all. She heaped cold meat and salad on her husband’s plate as if they were poisoned. Then she fixed her lipstick and carried the heavy tray into the dining room herself, in spite of her lame back.

Now, smoking a cigarette and walking around the room, she let five minutes pass. Then she carried the tray back to the kitchen, dumped the beer and coffee down the drain, and put the meat and salad in the icebox. When Mr. Bruce came back from Katherine’s room he found her sobbing with anger—not at him but at her own foolishness. “Lois?” he asked, and she ran out of the room and into her bedroom and slammed the door.

DURING the next two months, Lois Bruce heard from a number of sources that her husband had been seen with a Mrs. Sheridan. She confided to her mother that she was losing him and, at her mother’s insistence, employed a private detective. Lois was not vindictive; she didn’t want to trap or intimidate her husband; she had, actually, a feeling that this maneuver would somehow be his salvation.

The detective telephoned her one day when she was having lunch at home, and told her that her husband and Mrs. Sheridan had just gone upstairs in a certain hotel. He was telephoning from the lobby, he said. Lois left her lunch unfinished but changed her clothes. She put on a hat with a veil, because her face was strained, and she was able because of the veil to talk calmly with the doorman, who got her a taxi. The detective met her on the sidewalk. He told her the floor and the number of the apartment, and offered to go upstairs with her. She dismissed him officiously then, as if his offer was a reflection on her ability to handle the situation competently. She had never been in the building before, but the feeling that she was acting on her rights kept her from being impressed at all with the building’s strangeness.

The elevator man closed the door after her when she got off at the tenth floor, and she found herself alone in a long, windowless hall. The twelve identical doors painted dark red to match the dusty carpet, the dim ceiling lights, and the perfect stillness of the hall made her hesitate for a second, and then she went directly to the door of the apartment, and rang the bell. There was no sound, no answer. She rang the bell several times. Then she spoke to the shut door. “Let me in, Stephen. It’s Lois. Let me in. I know you’re in there. Let me in.”

She waited. She took off her gloves. She put her thumb on the bell and held it there. Then she listened. There was still no sound. She looked at the shut red doors around her. She jabbed the bell. “Stephen!” she called. “Stephen. Let me in there. Let me in. I know you’re in there. I saw you go in there. I can hear you. I can hear you moving around. I can hear you whispering. Let me in, Stephen. Let me in. If you don’t let me in, I’ll tell her husband.”

She waited again. The silence of the early afternoon filled the interval. Then she attacked the door handle. She pounded on the door with the frame of her purse. She kicked it. “You let me in there, Stephen Bruce!” she screamed. “You let me in there, do you hear! Let me in, let me in, let me in!”

Another door into the hallway opened, and she turned and saw a man in his shirtsleeves, shaking his head. She ran into the back hall and, crying, started down the fire stairs. Like the stairs in a monument, they seemed to have no beginning and no end, but at last she came down into a dark hall where tricycles and perambulators were stored, and found her way into the lobby.

WHEN Mr. Bruce and Mrs. Sheridan left the hotel, they walked through the Park, which, in the late-winter sunshine, smelled faintly like a wood. Crossing a bridle path, they saw Miss Prince, the children’s riding mistress. She was giving a lesson to a fat little girl whose horse was on a lead. “Mrs. Sheridan!” she said. “Mr. Bruce! Isn’t this fortunate!” She stopped the horses. “I wanted to speak to both of you,” she said. “I’m having a little gymkhana next month, and I want your children to ride in it. I want them all three to ride in the good-hands class…. And perhaps the next year,” she said, turning to the fat little girl, “you too may ride in the good-hands class.”

They promised to allow their children to take part in the gymkhana, and Miss Prince said goodbye and resumed her riding lesson. In the Seventies they heard the roaring of a lion. They walked to the southern edge of the Park. It was then late in the afternoon. From the Plaza he telephoned his office. Among the messages was one from the maid; he was to stop at the Chardin Club and bring Katherine home.

From the sidewalk in front of the dancing school they could hear the clatter of the piano. The Grand March had begun. They moved through the crowd in the vestibule and stood in the door of the ballroom, looking for their children. Through the open door they could see Mrs. Bailey, the dancing teacher, and her two matrons curtsying stiffly as the children came to them in couples. The boys wore white gloves. The girls were simply dressed. Two by two the children bowed, or curtsied, and joined the grown people at the door. Then Mr. Bruce saw Katherine. As he watched his daughter doing obediently what was expected of her, it struck him that he and the company that crowded around him were all cut out of the same cloth. They were bewildered and confused in principle, too selfish or too unlucky to abide by the forms that guarantee the permanence of a society, as their fathers and mothers had done. Instead, they put the burden of order onto their children and filled their days with specious rites and ceremonies.

One of the dancing teachers came up to them and said, “Oh, I’m so glad to see you, Mrs. Sheridan. We were afraid that you’d been taken sick. Very soon after the class began this afternoon, Mr. Sheridan came and got the two girls. He said he was going to take them out to the country, and we wondered if you were ill. He seemed very upset.”

The assistant smiled and wandered off.

Mrs. Sheridan’s face lost its color and got dark. She looked very old. It was hot in the ballroom, and Mr. Bruce led her out the door into the freshness of a winter evening, holding her, supporting her really, for she might have fallen. “It will be all right,” he kept saying, “it will be all right, my darling, it will be all right.”