The Collected Stories

mother could bring against me in the event she died in my apartment. They might even accuse me of murder … I pressed the button for the service elevator and the pointer showed that it was standing on the seventeenth floor. I ran down the stairs, and in my mind—perhaps even aloud—I cursed the day I was born. As I ran, I heard the service elevator descending. I reached the lobby, and two moving men had the exit blocked with a sofa. Someone on the seventeenth floor was moving out. The lobby was filled with furniture, flower urns, stacks of books. I asked the men to let me pass, but they pretended not to hear. Well, I thought, this visit will be the death of me. Then I remembered that on the sixth floor lived a typesetter from the newspaper of which I was a staff member. If anyone in the family was home, he would help me call an ambulance and phone the office about a duplicate key. I started to run up the stairs to the sixth floor. My heart pounded and I broke out in a sweat. I rang the doorbell of the typesetter’s apartment, but no one answered. I was prepared to run downstairs again when the door parted the length of the chain. I saw an eye, and a female voice asked, “What do you want?”
    I began to explain to the woman what had happened. I spoke in clipped sentences and with the frenzy of one in mortal danger. The woman’s single eye bored through me. “I’m not the lady of the house. They’re abroad. I’m a cousin.”
    “I beg you to help me. Believe me that I’m no thief or robber. Your cousin sets all my manuscripts. Maybe you’ve heard my name?”
    I mentioned the name of the newspaper, I even cited the titles of several of my books, but she had never heard of me. After some hesitation she said, “I can’t let you in. You know how it is these days. Wait here, I’ll call the office on the house phone. Tell me your name again.”
    I repeated my name for her, gave her the number of my apartment, and thanked her profusely. She closed the door. I expected that any minute she would inform me she had called the office and help was on the way, but seven minutes went by and the door didn’t open. I stood there, tense and miserable, and took a quick reckoning of man and his existence. He is completely dependent, a slave to circumstance. The slightest mishap and everything goes to pieces. There is one solution—to free oneself totally from making for oneself the Sabbath that is called life and turn back to the indifference of causality, to death, which is the substance of the universe.
    Five more minutes passed and still the door didn’t open. I began to skip down the stairs again, my mind churning with images of how I would punish this heartless woman if I possessed unlimited power. I reached the lobby and the sofa was standing outside. I saw Mr. Brown, the superintendent, and frantically told him my predicament. He gazed at me in astonishment. “No one called. Come. I’ll give you the key.”
    The service elevator was free, and I rode up to the eleventh floor, opened the door, and found Elizabeth Abigail de Sollar lying on the sofa in the living room, her hair wet and disheveled, her face pale, her shoes off. I barely recognized her. She seemed to me much older—almost middle-aged. She had placed a towel under her head. She looked at me with the silent reproof of a wife whose husband has left her sick and alone and gone off somewhere for his own pleasure. I half shouted, “My dear Elizabeth, you must go home to your husband! I’m too old for such goings on.”
    She considered my words; then she said in a dull tone, “If you order me to go, I will go, but not back to him. I’m finished with him and with my mother, too. From now on, I am alone in the world.”
    “Where will you go?”
    “To a hotel.”
    “They won’t let you into a hotel without luggage. If you don’t have any money, I can—”
    “I have my checkbook with me, but why can’t I stay here with you? I’m not altogether well, but it’s nothing organic—only functional. It’s
they
who made me sick. I can type. I know a little stenography, too. Oh, I forgot that you write in Yiddish. This I don’t know, but I would learn it in time. My mother used to speak Yiddish with my grandmother when she didn’t want me to understand what they were saying, and I picked up quite a number of words. I once bought a vegetarian cookbook, and I’d cook vegetarian meals for you.”
    I looked at her in silence. Yes, she was my