The hotel had replaced the elevators in 1978. Before that, there had been a boy in a red jacket who pulled a brass lever and said what floor. When the new elevators came, the hotel kept the boy — first because they didn’t know what else to do, and then because guests seemed to like it, and then because nobody remembered the first two reasons.
His name was Gerard. He was sixty-one. He had been the boy since 1971.
His job, as currently understood, was to stand in the lobby near the elevators and greet people. He wore the red jacket. He said good morning, good afternoon, good evening. When an elevator arrived and opened its doors, he sometimes said “going up,” even though nobody had asked, and nobody needed telling. It had become a kind of weather in him. He didn’t notice he was doing it, most days. On the days he did notice, he was a little embarrassed, and then he forgot again by the next elevator.
He knew the regulars. There was a woman on six who traveled for a pharmaceutical company and tipped him at Christmas. There was a man on fourteen who had lived in the hotel for nineteen years and never once made eye contact. There was a child in 807 who, for about a year, had believed that Gerard made the elevators go by wishing it. The child was now twelve and walked past him without looking. Gerard understood this and did not hold it against her.
In the afternoons, when the lobby was quiet, he sometimes pressed the call button himself, just to stand in the open car while it waited. The car smelled of brass polish and the perfume of whoever had ridden it last. He did not go up. He stood there until somebody came, and then he stepped aside, and he said going up, and he let them have it.
He had been asked once, in 1999, by a journalist writing a piece on vanishing trades, whether he felt his job was obsolete. He had thought about it for a while. Then he said: the elevator goes up without me. That was true in 1978. It was still true. He was not the reason it worked. He was the reason somebody said so.