Eleven Days

The guest on the second floor arrived on the last day of the year and stayed eleven days, which was not like him.

Sarah knew it the way she knew everything: by the linen. A room that empties is one sheet in the morning and nothing after. A room that lasts is a sheet every second day, towels, hot water at irregular hours, and coal. That one lasted.

The hotel was packed to the roof. Congress had come back, the committees were sitting, the city had swollen with people come to ask something of somebody, and there were gentlemen sleeping in the parlors on camp beds because there was not a room left to sell. In the rotunda you could not hear yourself speak. Bunker's register filled at the rate of four pages a day.