Manners and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, American
Six-eighteen was a woman. She had arrived Monday morning, early. By
Monday night every girl on the switchboard had the nervous jumps when
they plugged in at her signal. She had changed her rooms, and back
again. She had quarrelled with the room clerk. She had complained to the
office about the service, the food, the linen, the lights, the noise,
the chambermaid, all the bell-boys, and the colour of the furnishings in
her suite. She said she couldn't live with that colour. It made her
sick. Between 8:30 and 10:30 that night, there had come a lull.
Six-eighteen was doing her turn at the Majestic.
Martha Foote knew that. She knew, too, that her name was Geisha McCoy,
and she knew what that name meant, just as you do. She had even laughed
and quickened and responded to Geisha McCoy's manipulation of her
audience, just as you have. Martha Foote knew the value of the personal
note, and it had been her idea that had resulted in the rule which
obliged elevator boys, chambermaids, floor clerks, doormen and waiters
if possible, to learn the names of Senate Hotel guests, no matter how
brief their stay.
"They like it," she had said, to Manager Brant. "You know that better
than I do. They'll be flattered, and surprised, and tickled to death,
and they'll go back to Burlington, Iowa, and tell how well known they
are at the Senate."
When the suggestion was met with the argument that no human being could
be expected to perform such daily feats of memory Martha Foote battered
it down with:
"That's just where you're mistaken. The first few days are bad. After
that it's easier every day, until it becomes mechanical. I remember when
I first started waiting on table in my mother's quick lunch eating house
in Sorghum, Minnesota. I'd bring 'em wheat cakes when they'd ordered
pork and beans, but it wasn't two weeks before I could take six orders,
from soup to pie, without so much as forgetting the catsup. Habit,
that's all."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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