The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Friday, April 11, 2025

Storytime: They call it billionaires’ row, a stretch of skinny skyscrapers along 57th Street along the south edge of Central Park, each apartment worth millions–a penthouse just went on sale for $110 million–some of them built more shoddily than others. Their consierges, or superintendents, must themselves be millionaires, tending to that nouveaux-riche class that rose, like the towers, with the speed and substanceless of the stock market since the Reagan years. Chester Coolidge–his last name can’t possibly be chance–is not a millionaire. He is the quietly heroic, slightly vain superintendent at the center of Cheever’s 1952 story who gets depressed when he’s mistaken for the janitor as he manages a 12-story building on Manhattan’s East Side, facing the Queensboro Bridge and the East River–not necessarily the wealthy East Side we know today. Turtle Bay, the site of the United Nations, had been home to slaughterhouses and industry. But Coolidge’s building posh enough, at least to his tenants: “Watching his self-important tenants walk through the lobby, he sometimes thought that they were a species of the poor. They were poor in space, poor in light, poor in quiet, poor in repose, and poor in the atmosphere of privacy–poor in everything that makes a man’s home his castle. He knew the pains they took to overcome these deficiencies.” Cheever was writing The Bonfire of the Vanities 35 years before Tom Wolfe. A driving tension in the story, which takes place on a single day–moving day–is the departure of the Bestwicks, whose falling fortunes are expelling them from the neighborhood, and the move up into their more expensive apartment by the insufferable new-monied Neguses. Classes in our mythical classless society are trading places. Mrs. Bestwick is moving to an apartment in Pelham in the Bronx. She is having a hard time letting go. The cheap, unreliable moving company she hired is upsetting Chester’s schedule and delaying Mrs. Negus’s move. Mrs. Negus calls Mrs. Bestwick a bitch behind her back. Cheever was writing a few stories like that at the time, “The Enormous Radio” his most famous from the period–the story of a woman whose radio set starts picking up all the errant conversations and conflicts and scabrous plots from different apartments in her building. Here Chester is the radio, picking up scraps of lives as he drops in and out of apartments to take care of problems, like the “grass widow” in 7-F who treats him like dirt and complains about the uncleanliness of a back hallway (I did not know the term “grass widow” until this story: a person–a woman at the time–whose spouse is absent most of the time), or glimpsing Katie the maid from one of the apartments, who has taken on the appearances of her employer (as is so often the case), getting upset with a passerby for feeding the pigeons she spends $9 a month feeding. It’s an overcast day, further depressing Chester. His wife, whom he loves, bucks him up, tells him how the hundred thousand gallons of fuel the furnace burnt through the previous month should tell him what an important enterprise he’s running. He tries to convince himself that his building is more complex than the ship he sees sailing on the East River: “Compared to his own domain, Chester thought, a ship was nothing. At his feet, there were thousands of arteries hammering with steam; there were hundreds of toilets, miles of drainpipe, and a passenger list of over a hundred people, any one of whom might at that minute be contemplating suicide, theft, arson, or mayhem. It was a huge responsibility, and Chester thought with commiseration of the relatively paltry responsibilities of a ship’s captain taking his freighter out to sea.” We all superintend our lives with this kind of gentle, harmless delusion, making ourselves believe we matter more than those brainless pigeons on the Queensboro Bridge. The day’s lacking kindnesses makes it a failure. Chester looks to the sky for an explanation, “as if he expected an answer to be written in vapor.” He gets none. He walks back into his building.

—P.T.