Six Weeks Notice

Helen Marsh arrived in Reno on the four o'clock train from the east, carrying two trunks, a hatbox, and a marriage she intended to leave on the courthouse steps.

She was thirty-three years old. She had been married for eleven years to a man in Philadelphia who was, by any reasonable standard, a perfectly adequate husband. He did not drink to excess. He did not gamble. He did not beat her or speak cruelly to her. What he did, instead, was nothing. He came home from his law practice at six o'clock each evening and ate dinner in a silence that was not hostile but was, over the course of eleven years, erosive, like water running over stone. He had opinions about nothing. He occupied the house the way furniture occupies a house, solidly and without complaint.

In Philadelphia, divorce was scandal. In New York, it was worse, requiring proof of adultery argued in open court. But word had reached the better drawing rooms of the Eastern seaboard that Nevada was different. The residency requirement was six months, the grounds were broad, and the judges were discreet. A woman could go to Reno and come back free, and if the right people were told the right things, the whole business could be managed without appearing in the society pages at all.

Helen had told her husband she was visiting a friend in California for the summer. He had looked up from his newspaper and said, "That sounds pleasant."

The depot was smaller than she had expected. It was a brick building at the end of a street called Commercial Row, and when she stepped down from the train the first thing she noticed was the air, which was dry and thin and tasted of sage and dust and something mineral, like the air above a quarry. The second thing she noticed was the light. It was October, late afternoon, and the sun was low over the Sierra to the west, and it lit the town in a way that was almost violent in its clarity, every surface sharp and defined, every shadow exact.

A porter carried her trunks to the sidewalk and she stood there, looking at Virginia Street, which ran south from the depot through the center of town. It was wider than any street in Philadelphia. The buildings were one and two stories tall, wood and brick, with signs for saloons and hotels and general stores and a lawyer's office, and beyond them the sage-covered hills and above the hills a sky so large and unobstructed that Helen felt exposed by it, as if the sky could see her.

She had arranged to stay at a boarding house on Court Street, three blocks from the courthouse. The landlady, Mrs. Drummond, was a stout woman in her sixties who had been taking in divorce guests, as she called them, for four years and who had developed a brisk efficiency about the whole business.

"Breakfast at seven. Dinner at six. No gentlemen visitors after eight. The courthouse is that way." She pointed south. "Your attorney's office is on Virginia, above the druggist."

"Thank you."

"You'll want to walk along the river. Everyone does, the first week."

Helen walked along the river. The Truckee ran through the center of town, cold and clear and surprisingly fast, and there was a bridge on Virginia Street where she stopped and looked down at the water and felt, for the first time in years, something that might have been anticipation. Not happiness. Not relief. Something prior to both of those, a loosening, like the moment before a knot comes undone.

She met her attorney the next morning. He was a thin man named Hayward who specialized in divorce cases and who explained the process with the practiced calm of someone who had explained it many times. She would need to establish residency for six months. She would need grounds. Desertion was the simplest and the most dignified. Her husband did not need to contest it.

"Most of them don't," Hayward said. "The men, I mean. They're generally relieved."

Helen did not know if her husband would be relieved. She suspected he would be confused, which was worse, because confusion implied that he had been paying attention and had somehow still failed to understand.

The days settled into a routine that surprised her with its ordinariness. She walked to the river in the mornings. She had lunch at a tearoom on Virginia Street where other women in her situation gathered and talked about their attorneys and their husbands and the strangeness of the desert light. She read novels in the afternoons, sitting on the porch of the boarding house in a wicker chair, the sun on her face, the sage smell in the air.

She had expected to be lonely. She was not. The boarding house was full of women like her, and they formed a small, temporary society that was unlike anything Helen had known. No one judged. No one whispered. The common fact of their purpose made candor easy in a way that propriety at home never allowed.

In November, her luggage was stolen from the porch of the boarding house. Someone had taken one of her trunks during the night, the one with her winter clothes and a set of silver hairbrushes that had been her mother's.

Mrs. Drummond called the police. A young officer came, a serious man in his twenties with dark hair and an Irish jaw who took notes in a small book and asked careful questions.

"Can you describe the trunk, ma'am?"

"Brown leather. Brass fittings. My initials on the lid. H.M."

"Anything else inside?"

"Clothes. A set of silver hairbrushes."

The officer, whose name was Patrick Fitzgerald, wrote this down. He was Bridget Fitzgerald's son, though Helen did not know this, and he had grown up on these streets, the son of a hotel cook and a railroad man, and he had joined the police force at twenty-three because it was steady work and because he believed in order.

He found the trunk two days later, in a pawn shop on East Second Street. The clothes were there. The hairbrushes were gone.

"I'm sorry about the brushes," he said, returning the trunk to the boarding house.

"They were my mother's."

He nodded. He did not say the things people usually said, that it was a shame, that things could be replaced. He simply stood on the porch with his hat in his hands and waited to see if there was anything else he could do.

"Thank you, Officer Fitzgerald," she said.

He touched the brim of his hat and left.

Helen's divorce was granted in April of 1907, on a Tuesday morning, in a courtroom that smelled of wood polish and dust. The judge asked her three questions and signed the papers and called the next case. The whole thing took less than ten minutes.

She stood on the courthouse steps afterward and looked at Virginia Street and the river and the mountains beyond and felt the loosening complete itself, the knot undone, the rope falling away.

She took the afternoon train west, toward California, toward whatever came next. She did not look back at the depot. She did not need to. The town had done what she had come for, and she was grateful, and that was enough.

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