Mapes, Still Standing

Helen Kellerman worked the lobby of the Mapes on a slow Tuesday in March, twenty-seven years after she had first walked in the employee door, and she knew the building now the way you know a house you have lived in your whole life, which rooms held the morning light and which the afternoon, where the floor creaked, where the cold came in.

She was fifty-six. She had started here the winter the hotel opened, a girl off Virginia Street with a saloon-keeper grandfather and a soft-drink-parlor father, and she had worked the Coach Room and then the Sky Room up on twelve through the good years, the years of the dinner shows and the orchestra and the divorcees coming up to look at the town from the top of it on their last night in Reno. She had stood at that high window a thousand evenings with the whole valley laid out gold below her. Now she worked the front desk in the lobby, at the bottom of the building, at the level of the street, and that was all right. The town had come back down to her, was how she thought of it. She had spent her young years looking down on it and her later years standing in it, and both were the same town.

The lobby was quiet that afternoon. A few guests came and went. The Mapes still ran a good house. Mr. Mapes himself still came through most days, Charles, the son, who had built the place up from his father’s plans and run it thirty years and still walked the lobby like a man who owned it, which he did. The brass was polished. The rooms were full enough. From the outside, from Virginia Street, the Mapes still stood twelve stories over the river, the tallest thing downtown for years and years, the first of its kind in the whole state, and a person walking by would not have said anything was wrong.

But Helen had worked there twenty-seven years and she could feel the thing under the thing.

It was not money, or not yet, not that she knew of. It was something harder to name. It was that the rooms were small now, by the new measure. It was that the people who came did not come the way they used to come, dressed, expecting a show, planning to stay a week. They came for a night off the highway and they wanted a place to park, and the Mapes had no real lot, had never needed one in 1947 when people came by train. It was that the divorce trade that had filled the tower for thirty years was nearly gone, the law changed everywhere now, no reason to spend six weeks in Reno to do what you could do in an afternoon in your own state. It was that down the street they had sold Harold’s Club, the friendly club, the most famous name in Reno, sold it to the Hughes people five years back, and everyone said it had not been the same since, that the money went somewhere now instead of staying, that the men who had built these places and stood in their lobbies were being replaced by companies that had never stood in a lobby in their lives.

A young couple came to the desk to check out, and Helen took the key and ran the bill, pleasant, easy, twenty-seven years of it in her hands. They were nice. They had no idea where they were. To them it was a tall old hotel where they had spent a night, a little faded, a little out of fashion, and they would not remember its name in a month. Helen did not hold it against them. You could not ask people to be sad about a thing they had never seen in its glory. She thanked them and wished them a good drive and they went out the doors into the noon light on Virginia Street.

She heard the talk, of course. Everyone in the business heard it. There were big things coming, people said, real big, out at the edge of town, a place going up that would have two thousand rooms and a showroom that seated a thousand and acres of parking, a whole new kind of thing, a few years off yet but coming, and after that the old downtown houses would have to fight for what was left. Maybe so. Helen had heard the town declared finished a few times before and it had not been finished. The Mapes had outlasted a great deal. It might outlast this too.

Mr. Mapes came through the lobby in the middle of the afternoon, the way he often did, in a good gray suit, and he stopped at the desk for a moment the way he sometimes stopped, and looked out over the quiet room with the eye of a man checking a thing he had made and meant to keep.

“Slow today,” he said.

“Tuesday,” Helen said. “It’ll pick up Thursday.”

“It always does,” he said, and moved on across the lobby, unhurried, nodding to the bell captain, and that was the whole of it, and to Helen it was enough. He had built the place from his father’s drawings and he had run it near thirty years and he still walked it every day like it was his, because it was. As long as that stayed true, she thought, the building was still the thing it had always been, whatever was going up out at the edge of town. A hotel was not its rooms or its tower. A hotel was whether the man who owned it still came down and crossed the floor.

In the lull after the couple left she came out from behind the desk and crossed the quiet lobby to straighten a chair that did not need straightening, and she stopped for a moment at the foot of the elevators, the same elevators, the brass arrows over the doors that had carried the divorcees up to the Sky Room and back down to the morning train for thirty years. She looked up at the arrows. One of the cars was up at the top, at twelve, where the Sky Room was, where she had stood at the high window in her good years and a tired woman in a gray dress had once asked her whether this was a beautiful place, and Helen had not had an answer, and still did not.

She watched the brass arrow at the top of the building, up where the windows held the whole valley, and then it began to move, down through the numbers, twelve, eleven, ten, coming down to the lobby where she stood, where she had ended up, in the good old building that was still, for now, against all of it, standing.

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