The pleasures of solitude (by John Cheever)

John Cheever (1912—1982) is a well known American storyteller. He started on his literary career at the age of 16. In his works Cheever deals with the complexities of the life of the middle class, the inhabitants of small towns and suburbs of big cities.
THE PLEASURES OF SOLITUDE
One evening when Ellen Goodrich had just returned from the office to her room in Chelsea, she heard a light knock on her door. She knew no one in the city intimately; there was no one she could expect. She opened the door and found two small boys standing in the hallway. She supposed they were ten or eleven. Their clothing was thin and they were shaking with cold.
"Florence Valle live here?" one of them asked.
"I don't know anyone by that name," Ellen said. "Perhaps if you ask the landlady - she lives on the first floor."
"We're looking for Florence Valle. She's his cousin," the second boy said, pointing to his friend. " She used to live here."
"I'm very sorry," Ellen said, "but I don't know her."
"Maybe she's moved," he said. "We walked all the way over here..."
Ellen very seldom felt that she could afford pity and sympathy for other people, but the boys looked frightened and cold, and her desire to help them was stronger than her reserve. She noticed them staring beyond her to a dish of candy in the room. When she invited them to have a piece, they refused with a shy and elaborate politeness that made her want to take them in her arms. She suggested that they each take a piece of candy home and went into the room for the dish. They followed her.
"You got a nice place here, Miss."
"Yuh, you got a nice place here."
Their faces were thin and solemn and their voices were hoarse. "Haven't you any overcoats, you boys?" she asked. "Are you going around in the cold dressed like that?"
"We ain't got any overcoats, Miss."
"I should think you'd take cold, walking around like that."
"We ain't got any overcoats."
They told her their names and ages when she asked for them, and said that they lived on the lower East Side. She had walked through the slums herself and she could imagine the squalor and neglect in which they must live. While she was talking with them she realized that it was the first time in more than a year that she had allowed anyone other than the landlady to come into her room. Having the boys there pleased her and she kept asking them questions until she caught the tone of her own excited voice. She stopped abruptly. "I guess you had better go now," she said. "I have some things to do." They thanked her for the candy and backed out of the room. Altogether, the encounter left her feeling generous and happy.
Ellen was not a generous person. She lived in a Chelsea rooming house in order to bank as much of her salary as possible toward purchasing an annuity. It had always been difficult for her to find friends. During the ten years she had lived in New York she had suffered a great deal from loneliness, but this suffering was forgotten now because of the care with which she arranged her solitude. She could be unmerciful with herself and others. Her mother had once written asking if she would help her younger brother with a loan. "I think it will be better," Ellen replied, "if Harold experiences a little hardship. It is only in knowing hardship that he can understand the value of money. I don't pretend to be poor, but the little I have in the bank was put at a great sacrifice and I have no intention of lending it to Harold when we all know that he could have done as well himself if he tried. I think he owes it to you to do more than I have done, for, after all, you and Father spent more on his education than you spent on mine." She was twenty-eight at the time.
After the boys had gone that night, Ellen changed from her dress into a house coat and cooked her supper. The cold wind rattled the windows and made her appreciate the warm, light room. She washed the dishes and sat down to read a rental-library book. This was the way she spent most of her evenings, and she was proud of the fact she was no longer restless and lonely. But her mind kept returning to the boys. She saw their thin, solemn faces, and when she thought of them walking in the cold she was filled with sadness and pity. Her uneventful life led her to attach significance to the few irregular things that happened to her. There was some purpose, she felt, some reason for this accidental meeting.
A week later, at the same hour, there was a knock on the door and, she found the boys in the hallway again.
"We were walking by."
"We thought we'd come to see you."
"Well, I'm very glad you stopped," Ellen said, and realized that her voice could be heard by the other tenants whose doors opened into the hallway. There was nothing wrong in what she was doing, but at the same time she didn't want the other tenants to know that she was asking strange boys into her room, so she waited until she had closed the door after them before she spoke again. "I'm very glad you stopped," she repeated. She invited them to sit down. Then she thought of giving them a drink of Coca-Cola, but this seemed a little too forward. They told her they were Italian, and she asked them if they knew how to make a veal parmigiana, something she had always wanted to learn. They didn't know, but they told her about other Italian dishes. One of the boys, the older, seemed interested in some ornaments on Ellen's dresser and she showed them to him. The younger boy took a cigarette end from his pocket and lighted it.
"Aren't you too young to smoke?" Ellen asked.
He looked at his friend and they both giggled. Ellen colored. The looks they exchanged and their laughter frightened her. "Those are called maracas," she said nervously, pointing to a pair of painted maracas that hung on the wall. "I bought them when I went for a Caribbean cruise in 1933. They use them in orchestras in the Caribbean."
The incident of the cigarette seemed to have made the boys feel more at ease. Ellen might have asked them to leave, but she hesitated. The younger boy put out his cigarette in her pin tray and she watched him without saying anything. She was enjoying herself in a way she could not quite understand. They told her stories about their families, about their sisters, stories that were sly and lewd and that she should have stopped them from telling. At the end of half an hour she asked them to leave. They had been gone for some time before she discovered that her purse was missing.
If they had been in the room then, she might have murdered them She took hold of the back of a chair and held it rigidly until her arms and her shoulders ached. "They don't have to steal!" she cried. "They don't have to steal! They don't have to!" She threw herself onto the bed and wept for a long time. When she sat up, she composed a discourse on honesty and imagined herself delivering it to them. She thought of calling the police, but when she tried to describe what had happened as if she were talking to the police, it sounded unconvincing and even suspicious. She went into the bathroom and washed her face with a cold cloth. "They don't have to steal," she said. "They don't have to steal. I would have given them money if they need money." She walked the floor, talking angrily to herself.
In the morning, Ellen decided to forget about the boys; it was better to lose the fifteen or twenty dollars that had been in her purse than to lose her peace of mind. Usually she could forget things that troubled her, but this time it was not so easy. In the back of her mind was the feeling she had somehow made a mistake that threatened her whole way of living. A few nights later, on a Wednesday, someone knocked on the door again. She opened it and found the two boys standing in the corridor.
She should have been prepared. She had rehearsed often enough the things she wanted to say, but now, when she tried to speak, she could think of nothing. "Come in here," she said finally. "Come in here, both of you. I want to speak to you." They followed her into the room.
"You don't have to steal," she said. "You ought to know that you don't have to steal." Her voice had risen and she was trembling so that she had to lean against the wall. "If you need money, if you really need money, there are honest ways of getting it. You stole my purse. When you were here last lime."
"We didn't steal nothing, Miss."
"We ain't thieves."
"Well, there's no use in standing here arguing about it," she said. "Get out."
"Give us five dollars. Miss."
"Get out," Ellen said. "Get out of here before I call a policeman!"
They backed out of the room and she closed and locked the door and listened to them going down the hall. That night she dreamed about them. She could not remember the details of the dream clearly, but when she woke up she was depressed and frightened. Her sleep was troubled for the rest of that week. On Friday she felt that she was coming down with a cold and got permission to leave the office at noon. She picked up a book at a rental library and bought some groceries for dinner.
In spite of her illness, she enjoyed her solitude more that afternoon than she had for some time. She read until dusk. Before turning on the light, she went to the window to draw the shade. A swift snow was falling slantwise between her window and the back yards. She bathed and went to bed at seven, slightly feverish. She was half asleep when she heard them knocking on the door. She remembered that she had forgotten to put the latch down. They talked for a while in the hall, knocked again, and then pushed the door open. When they saw her lying on the bed, they went over and stared at her.
"You sick. Miss?"
"Please leave me alone," she said weakly. "Please get out."
"We want some money. Miss."
"Can't you see that I'm sick?" she said. It was an effort for her to talk. "Please get out. I haven't any money."
One of them saw her purse on the table. He went to it, removed the change purse, and started to take out the bills. She got out of bed and struck him, but already he had the money in his hand. She tried to get it away from him, but he was stronger than she; he was able to free his hand, and both boys ran out of the room and down the hall. She stood in the doorway shouting, "Mrs. Duval, Mrs. Duval!" There was no answer, and she threw herself on the bed, too sick and tired to cry. Ten minutes later the landlady knocked on the door and asked what the matter was. Ellen told her she thought she had heard some strange men in the corridor and the lock on the front door should be fixed.
The next morning, Ellen decided to move. It was not easy for her, but she was desperate. One of the girls in her office recommended a rooming house on East Thirty-seventh Street, and Ellen went there that night and engaged a place. She took her possessions over the following night in a taxi. The new room was not as pleasant as the one she had left, but she tried hard to make it seem familiar. She felt that in a way she was beginning a new life.
She walked to the rooming house the next night from the office. It was raining hard, and as she turned off Madison Avenue onto Thirty-seventh Street she saw them standing in front of the house, staring up at the windows. The rain was cold and the boys were without hats and coats. She walked down to Thirty-fourth Street and ate her dinner in a restaurant there. It was eight o'clock before she started back, and they had gone. She went to her room, set her umbrella in a saucer, and changed from her wet dress into her house coat. Someone knocked on the door and she opened it and they were standing there.
"How did you know I was living here?"
"The lady in the other place told us."
"For once and for all, get out. Leave me alone, leave me alone, can't you?" She took her umbrella and struck the younger one on the shoulders with all her strength. He fell to his knees and then to the floor and she continued to beat him while the other began shrieking, "Help! Police! Police!" so that his voice could be heard in the street.