Room Twenty

The rain had started around four and had not let up since. Sarah Millward could hear it from the second-floor corridor, a steady sound against the windows at the far end, and she knew without looking that Pennsylvania Avenue would have turned into a river of yellow mud where the carriages sank to the hub. It would take three days to dry. After that the guests' boots would carry all that mud up the stairs, and she would spend a week scrubbing the treads.

She was carrying a stack of sheets against her chest and counting the doors.

Twenty-two. Twenty-four. The National Hotel had three hundred and fifty-six rooms and Sarah knew seventy of them by their number, by their lock, by the way the door gave or did not give when you pushed it with your knee because both your hands were full. Twenty-four creaked. Thirty-one had not shut properly since the summer. Forty had a window that could no longer be opened, where the guests stifled from June to September without ever complaining, because you did not complain at the National, you asked for something else.

Below, the house was humming like a hive somebody had shaken.

Since the day before, the hotel had not emptied. The results had come in during the night and had taken the day to settle into people's bodies. In the dining room they were talking more quietly than usual. The bar was full and nobody was laughing. The National had always housed people from the South — Maryland families, Virginia merchants who had not budged, men from Louisiana who still owned houses somewhere and never mentioned them — and those people had just learned that the President would be President for four more years.

Sarah had no opinion. Or rather she had one, and she kept it where she kept everything else, in a part of herself she never opened between six in the morning and ten at night.

She set the sheets on the landing chest and went down.

Bunker was at the desk, bent over the register, one pen in his hand and another behind his ear. He was in his thirties, with the complexion of a man who never sees daylight, and the finest hand in Washington after that of the Treasury clerks. When he wrote a name he laid it on the line the way you set down a plate: without a sound, in its place, for good.

"There's one coming in," he said without looking up. "Second floor."

"At this hour?"

"At this hour."

She looked at the clock. Twenty past nine.

"Twenty's done."

"Do it again."

Sarah did not argue. You did not argue with Bunker, not because he was hard — he was not hard, he was exact — but because he always had a reason he did not explain. She went back up for the sheets.

The man arrived a quarter of an hour later.

She heard him before she saw him. There was a commotion on the stairs, a porter's voice, a laugh, then another voice, lower, more settled, saying something funny and not apologizing for the hour. Sarah was on her knees at the fireplace in twenty, coaxing a fire that had died. She stood, wiped her hands on her apron, and put herself against the wall beside the door, as was proper.

He came in without looking at her, which was normal, and set his hat on the table, which was normal too.

He was a man of middle height, very well built, with black hair that curled over his collar and a carefully trimmed black moustache. He had taken off his overcoat on the stairs and carried it over his arm. His boots were caked with mud to mid-calf and his trousers were soaked through. He looked at the bed.

"Have the sheets been changed?"

"This afternoon, sir."

"Change them again."

He said it without harshness, almost absently, like a man asking the time. Then he went to the window, drew the curtain aside, and stayed there.

Sarah stripped the bed.

It was work she had been doing for eleven years and could have done with her eyes shut, which was just as well, because you must never look. She pulled off the counterpane, rolled the sheets, threw them in the basket, and shook out the clean ones. The bottom sheet cracked in the air and came down. She smoothed it with her palm, tucked the wall side, went round the bed, tucked the other side. The fire was drawing badly and smoking a little. Behind her the man had not moved.

"Are you from here?"

She had not expected him to speak.

"No, sir."

"Where, then?"

"Virginia, sir."

He turned around. She saw his face by the candle for the first time: a handsome face, pale, clean-shaven but for the moustache, with very dark eyes and the shadows under them of a man who sleeps on trains.

"Virginia," he repeated. "And you make the beds of the victors."

Sarah pulled the pillow toward her and put it back in its case.

"I make the beds, sir."

There was a silence, and then he laughed. A real laugh, open, that lasted two seconds and stopped dead.

"That is the best answer I have heard all week."

He came over to the table, took out a purse, and laid something down beside the hat. Sarah did not look at what it was. You did not look.

"My name is Booth," he said. "In case you need to know it."

"Very good, sir."

"You don't need to know it."

"No, sir."

He laughed again, more briefly, and sat down to pull off his boots.

Sarah finished the bed, folded the corner of the sheet into a triangle the way she had been taught, and picked up the basket of soiled linen. She passed the table on her way out. What he had left was a banknote, and it was a large one, the kind you saw at the end of a good week at the theater and not on a Wednesday night in November.

"The fire draws badly," she said from the door. "I'll have dry coal brought up tomorrow."

"Tomorrow I'll be up early."

"Then it will be before."

He raised his head and looked at her properly, for the first time, a second too long.

"What is your name?"

She closed the door.

---

She went back down by the service stairs, the ones at the rear, which smelled of tallow and washing and whose wooden treads had been hollowed in the middle by sixty years of feet. Below, the laundry was still steaming. Two women were working there, bent over the tubs, their arms red to the elbow, and one of them was singing under her breath something that had no words.

Sarah set down her basket and went out into the yard.

The air was cold and rinsed clean. The rain fell straight, without wind, and the paving of the yard shone under the porch lantern. She stood a while under the overhang, for no reason, because she had thirteen hours in her legs and because there was nowhere else in that house where she could be alone.

Beyond the gate, out on the avenue, the carriages were waiting.

There were five or six of them, lined along the curb, the horses with their heads low and their haunches steaming. The drivers had taken shelter where they could — under the hoods, under the porches, one under his own horse's neck. There was one, though, who had stayed up on his box, out in the rain, motionless, the reins slack in his hands, his hat streaming.

Sarah looked at him because there was nothing else to look at.

He was a black man, still young, with a blanket over his shoulders. He had not taken shelter and he was not waiting for a fare — the other drivers had settled for the night, you could tell by the way they had slackened the traces. He stayed. He was watching the hotel door as though somebody were going to come out of it.

Nobody came out.

After a while he climbed down, went round his carriage, checked something at the rear wheel, and got back up. He did it with a particular slowness, the way a man makes a useless gesture so as not to be altogether still.

Sarah went in.

In the laundry passage the woman who had been singing had stopped. It was past ten. She climbed the three flights to her room — a room under the roof, on the Sixth Street side, with a bed, a chair, a basin and a window that gave onto a wall — took off her shoes, and sat in the dark before undressing.

Downstairs, a long way off, somebody was playing the piano in one of the parlors.

She was twenty-seven years old. She had a place, a roof, two meals and a name that had never been mixed up in anything. That was more than three-quarters of the women she knew had, and she knew it every day, and she thought of it every night before sleeping the way other people say a prayer.

She had already forgotten the name of the guest in twenty.