“Will Mr. O’Keefe be staying long?”

“I don’t know. It depends on a lot of things.”

For a moment Peter felt a surge of sympathy for the older man.

The hotel proprietor asked, “What’s our convention situation?”

“About half the chemical engineers have checked out; the rest will leave by today. Coming in – Gold Crown Cola is in and organized. They’ve taken three hundred and twenty rooms, which is better than we expected, and we’ve increased the lunch and banquet figures accordingly. The Congress of American Dentistry begins tomorrow, though some of their people checked in yesterday and there’ll be more today. They should take close to two hundred and eighty rooms.”

Warren Trent gave a satisfied grunt. At least the news was not all bad.

“We had a full house last night,” Warren Trent said. He added, “Can we handle today’s arrivals?”

“It’ll be close. Our over-bookings are a little high.”

Like all hotels, the St. Gregory accepted more reservations than it had rooms available. It gambled on the certain foreknowledge that some people who made reservations would fail to show up, so the problem resolved itself into guessing the true percentage of non-arrivals. Most times, experience and luck allowed the hotel to come out with all rooms occupied – the ideal situation.

But once in a while an estimate went wrong.

In Peter’s own experience the worst occasion was when a baker’s convention, meeting in New York, decided to remain an extra day so that some of its members could take a moonlight cruise around Manhattan. Two hundred and fifty bakers and their wives stayed on without telling the hotel, which expected them to check out so an engineers’ convention could move in. Hundreds of angry engineers and their women waited in the lobby that night, some waving reservations made two years earlier. In the end, the city’s other hotels being already filled, the new arrivals were dispersed to motels in outlying New York until next day when the bakers went innocently away. But the monumental taxi bills of the engineers were paid by the hotel and exceeded the profit on both conventions.

Peter said, “I talked with the Roosevelt. If we’re in a jam tonight, they can help us out with maybe thirty rooms.” Even fiercely competitive hotels aided each other in that kind of crisis, never knowing when the roles would be reversed.

“All right,” Warren Trent said, a cloud of cigar smoke above him, “now what’s the outlook for the fall?”

“It’s disappointing. The two big union conventions have been cancelled.”

“Why?”

“It’s the same reason I warned you about earlier. We’ve continued to discriminate. We haven’t complied with the Civil Rights Act, and the unions resent it.” Involuntarily, Peter glanced toward Aloysius Royce who had come into the room.

“More conventions, and just plain folks, are going to stay away until this hotel and others like it admit that times have changed,” remarked Royce.

“It so happens,” Peter said quietly, “that I agree with what he said.”

“You’re being fools, both of you,” grunted Warren Trent.

When Warren Trent heard the outer door close behind Peter McDermott and Aloysius Royce’s footsteps return to the small book-lined sitting room, which was the young Negro’s private domain, the hotel proprietor noticed how quiet it was in the living room. There was only a whisper from the air conditioning, and occasional stray sounds from the city below. Sitting quietly here, the memory stirred him.

More than thirty years since he had carried Hester, as a new, young bride, across the threshold of this very room. And how short a time they had had: those few brief years, joyous beyond measure, until the paralytic polio struck without warning. It had killed Hester in twenty-four hours, leaving Warren Trent, mourning and alone, and the St. Gregory Hotel. Warren Trent remembered her like a sweet spring flower, who had made his days gentle and his life richer, as no one had before or since.

In the silence, a rustle of silk seemed to come from the doorway behind him. He turned his head, but the room was empty and, unusually, moisture dimmed his eyes.

Was the hotel worth fighting for? Surrender: perhaps that was the answer. Surrender to changing times.

And yet… if he did, what else was left?

Nothing. For himself there would be nothing left, not even the ghosts that walked this floor.

No! He would not sell out. Not yet. While there was still hope, he would hold on.

When Christine Francis saw him, Sam Jakubiec, the stocky, balding credit manager, was standing at the Reception, making his daily check of the account of every guest in the hotel. There was almost nothing that the credit chief’s shrewd mind missed. In the past it had saved the hotel thousands of dollars in bad debts.

“Anything interesting this morning?”

Without pausing, Jakubiec nodded. “A few things. For example, Sanderson, room 1207. Disproportionate tipping.”