The Man Who Goes Up

On Monday evening the hotel was full again, and the house had its voice back.

It was a thing Sarah had learned to hear in eleven years: the National had a voice that changed with the week. On Sunday it was muffled. On Monday it picked up. By Wednesday it was at full strength, a continuous murmur of doors, of bells, of boots on the stairs, of conversations in the rotunda rising up the well to the third floor. On Friday it emptied and rang hollow.

That Monday, November fourteenth, the hotel was in full voice.

The victory had been celebrated in the city the Thursday before. A crowd had gone up to the White House with a band, and the President had appeared at a window and spoken. Sarah had not gone. She had worked, as she did every evening, and she had heard the music from a long way off, through two streets and closed windows, while she counted towels.

The next day, in the dining room, two gentlemen from Baltimore had argued about what he had said. One thought it was well put. The other thought it was easy to talk about charity when you had won. Sarah had served the coffee and changed the ashtrays.

She was in the second-floor corridor, around eight, carrying a tray down, when the man came up to the landing.

He stopped at the top of the stairs, a little out of breath, and looked both ways.

He was about twenty-five. Heavy black side-whiskers, a round face, an overcoat that did not fit him — too wide at the shoulders, as though he had shrunk inside it or it were not his. He was holding his hat in both hands, which men who stay in hotels do not do; guests keep their hats on until they reach their room.

He saw Sarah and looked relieved.

"Mr. Booth's room?"

She pointed with her chin, because she had the tray.

"At the end. The last one before the window."

"Thank you."

He did not move at once. He looked in the direction she had indicated, then back toward the stairs, as though he were still weighing something.

"Is he in?"

"I don't know, sir."

It was true and it was the only possible answer. You never said whether a guest was in. One day in ’62, a woman had asked whether her husband had gone up, and the girl who had answered yes had been let go before the end of the week, not because she had lied, but because she had told the truth.

The man with the side-whiskers went off toward the end of the corridor.

Sarah went down with her tray.

She passed him twice more that week, and others besides. A great many people went up to that floor. It was winter, Congress was about to come in, the city was filling up; the second-floor rooms were the best in the house and received the most visitors. Cards were carried up, and letters, and bottles. Down in the rotunda a public scrivener set up near the door wrote out visiting cards for two cents and had them sent up by a boy, and the boy came back down with an answer or without one, and it went on like that all day.

On Thursday, Maggie Cleary found her in the linen room.

Maggie was fifty-two, with nineteen years in the house and a knee that now kept her from going above the second floor. She sat down on the bench, carefully, in two stages.

"You look at people too much," she said.

Sarah was folding pillowcases.

"I look at the corridor."

"You look at the people in the corridor. It isn't the same."

Sarah did not answer. Maggie took a pillowcase from the pile and began folding it, badly, the way she folded everything since her hands had stiffened.

"The first year, you look," she said. "That's natural, you want to know whose house you're in. The second, you look less. The third, you stop looking, and that's when you begin to last. You've lasted eleven years and you're still looking. It will play you a trick one day."

"What trick?"

"One day somebody will ask you something and you'll know the answer."

Maggie set the badly folded case back on the pile. Sarah took it up again and did it over without a word.

"It isn't unkindness, child. It's the house. In this house, the best thing you can have in your head is nothing at all."

She got up, in two stages again, and went out leaning on the door frame.

Sarah stayed with her piles.

She tried, going up the stairs, to think of nothing at all. She managed it for a step and a half. Then she thought of her sister's rent in Fredericksburg, of a letter she had not written in six weeks, of the coal that still had not been carried up to the third floor, and of a man who had asked her her name and had the door shut in his face.

On the second floor she passed the last room before the window. The door was closed. Somebody inside was speaking low, and somebody else was answering.

She went on up to the third without slowing. She did not look at the door.

She practiced, step after step, having already forgotten it. By the third floor she had managed it.