Judge Bartlett's Docket

Frances Cole arrived in Reno on a Wednesday in October of 1921 and went directly to her attorney's office, because she was not a woman who wasted time, and because the sooner she started the clock on her residency, the sooner the clock would stop.

She was twenty-nine years old. She had been married for six years to a surgeon in Boston who was, by all external measures, a success. He had a practice on Beacon Street. He had a house in Brookline. He had opinions about wine and opera and the proper way to raise children, of which they had none, because the proper way, in his view, required a level of moral preparation that Frances had not yet demonstrated. What this moral preparation consisted of, he did not specify. Frances had stopped asking.

Her attorney was a man named Thatcher, who kept an office on Virginia Street above a druggist and who handled divorce cases with the quiet competence of a man who had seen every variety of marital unhappiness and no longer found any of them surprising. He was fifty, thin, with spectacles that he cleaned constantly, a habit that Frances would come to recognize as his way of thinking.

"The residency requirement is six months," he said, cleaning his spectacles. "You'll need to establish a genuine residence. A hotel room is sufficient, provided you can demonstrate continuous occupancy. You'll need witnesses who can attest to your presence in Washoe County."

"I understand."

"The grounds?"

"Cruelty."

He looked at her over the top of his spectacles, which he had just replaced on his face. "Mental or physical?"

"Mental."

He wrote something in a leather notebook. "Judge Bartlett will hear the case, when the time comes. He's efficient. He won't ask you to elaborate beyond what's necessary."

Frances had heard of Judge Bartlett. Everyone in certain circles back East had heard of Judge Bartlett. He was spoken of in the drawing rooms of Boston and New York and Philadelphia the way one speaks of a surgeon who performs a particular operation that polite society does not name but occasionally requires. He was known to be fair. He was known to be fast. He was known to process a morning's worth of divorce cases with a dispatch that Eastern judges would have found unseemly but that, in Reno, was understood as a practical mercy.

She took a room at the Riverside Hotel, on the second floor, with a writing desk by the window and a view of the river and the bridge and the hills beyond. She unpacked her two trunks and sat on the bed and listened to the river through the window, which was open because the October air was dry and warm in a way that October air in Boston was not.

The six months passed the way six months pass when you are waiting for something specific. Slowly at first, then with a kind of gathering momentum.

She walked along the Truckee in the mornings and along Virginia Street in the afternoons and through the residential streets west of the courthouse in the evenings, streets lined with small wooden houses and cottonwood trees that turned gold in November and stood bare through the winter. She read, working through the hotel's small lobby library methodically, novel by novel, not for pleasure exactly but for the occupation of her mind, which, left unoccupied, tended to rehearse conversations she had already had and could not change.

She wrote letters to her mother in Boston, careful letters that said she was well and that Reno was interesting and that the weather was dry, which were all true and none of which constituted the thing she actually wanted to say, which was that she had never in her life felt as calm as she felt in this town where nobody knew her and nobody expected anything of her except that she remain, physically, within the borders of Washoe County.

Spring came. The cottonwoods leafed out. The river ran higher with snowmelt from the Sierra. Her attorney sent word that her case was on the docket for a Thursday in April.

She dressed carefully that morning. Not for the judge and not for the courtroom but for herself, because she believed that the way you dressed for a consequential moment was a form of respect for the moment itself.

The Washoe County Courthouse was a brick building on Court Street, solid and plain, with none of the marble grandeur of the courthouses she had known in Boston. The courtroom was on the second floor. It smelled of wood polish and dust and the faint bitterness of old paper.

Judge George Bartlett sat at the bench. He was a man of about fifty, with a broad face and steady eyes and the bearing of someone who had spent years listening to people describe the worst parts of their lives and had learned to receive this information without flinching. He had a reputation for moving through his docket quickly, not because he was indifferent but because he had come to believe that prolonging the proceedings served no one, least of all the people standing before him.

There were four cases before hers. She sat in the gallery and watched. Each case took between five and ten minutes. The judge asked questions. The attorneys responded. Papers were signed. The petitioners left the courtroom with a particular expression that Frances would later recognize on her own face, an expression that was not happiness and not relief but something closer to bewilderment, the look of someone who has been carrying something heavy for so long that they have forgotten what it felt like to stand up straight, and who now, standing up straight, does not quite trust the sensation.

Her case was called. She stood. Her attorney spoke. The judge asked three questions. She answered them. The judge signed the decree.

The whole thing took seven minutes.

She walked out of the courthouse and down the steps and stood on the sidewalk on Court Street and looked at the sky, which was the wide, pale blue of a Nevada spring, the kind of sky that has nothing in it, no clouds, no haze, nothing between you and the upper atmosphere, and which for that reason feels less like a ceiling and more like an opening.

She had planned to take the afternoon train to San Francisco and then east to Boston. Instead, she walked to the river and stood on the Virginia Street bridge and watched the water move beneath her, fast and clear and indifferent to everything that had happened and was happening and would happen on its banks.

She did not throw her wedding ring into the river. She had heard that some women did this. It seemed to her a waste of gold and a gesture that belonged to someone else's story.

She took the evening train instead. An extra few hours in a town where the sky was open and the air was clean and nobody asked her to explain herself seemed, on balance, like a reasonable thing.

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