The Arrival

Nora Fitzgerald stepped off the Southern Pacific train at the Reno depot on a Thursday afternoon in October 1937, holding a leather case in one hand and a hat in the other. She had ridden two nights from Pennsylvania Station, changing at Chicago, and the air she breathed now was high and dry and tasted of sage and something metallic she could not name. She was twenty-eight years old. She was here to dissolve a marriage that had lasted four years, and she had six weeks in which to do it.

The depot was smaller than she had expected, modest brick and a short platform with only a handful of people meeting the train. A porter helped her with her trunk. She gave him a coin and asked the way to Court Street.

“Walk north on Center to Second, then west two blocks,” he said. “It’s not far. Nothing’s far in this town.”

Nora thanked him and began to walk. The town opened in front of her in pieces as she went. The Truckee River, narrower than she had imagined, running clear over a stony bed. Across the river the casino signs on north Virginia Street already lit in the late afternoon though the sun had not yet dropped behind the mountains.

She walked slowly. She had read about the divorce trade in the magazines back east, the way the columnists wrote about Reno as if it were a sort of mill that fed in unwanted marriages and turned out freed women. She had not believed it would feel like that. It did not. It felt like a town, a place where people lived, with hardware stores and barbershops and a man washing the front window of a cafe. The casinos were part of it, but they were not all of it.

Her grandmother Bridget had come from Cork in 1874 and had cooked at a hotel here for forty years. Nora had never met her. The stories had come down through her mother in pieces, on cold afternoons in Pittsburgh. Reno was the kind of town, her mother had said, that took whoever showed up and let them be whatever they could manage. Nora had filed the description away as the kind of thing mothers said about places they were no longer in. Standing on Second Street now, she wondered if it had been the literal truth.

She did not yet plan to call on her cousin Michael. She knew from her mother’s letters that he lived south of the river and worked construction, and that his grandfather Patrick had walked these streets in a police uniform before the century turned. But she had come for a divorce and not a homecoming, and she did not want to introduce herself to a family she had never met while she still wore a wedding ring.

The boarding house on Court Street was a two-story frame building with a porch and a mailbox and a hand-lettered sign that said Rooms for Ladies. The landlady was a widow named Mrs. Hoag, sixty or so, with gray hair pinned back and an apron that smelled faintly of vinegar. She showed Nora to a small room at the back of the second floor with a bed, a writing desk, a wardrobe, and a window that looked out on a yard with a clothesline and a fig tree.

“Three meals,” Mrs. Hoag said. “Eight, twelve, and six. Lights out by eleven. No gentlemen above the first floor.”

Nora said she understood.

“Six weeks?”

“Six weeks.”

Mrs. Hoag nodded. She had said the words a thousand times. “There are four other ladies here at the moment. Most are taking the cure, as the saying goes.” She paused at the door. “Walk in daylight. The town is safe enough but it has its parts. The Colony is east across the tracks, Paiute and Washoe families, very respectable but it’s their neighborhood. South of the tracks on Virginia is garages and filling stations and not much foot traffic. You’ll do better staying north.”

Nora thanked her. Mrs. Hoag left.

She unpacked the trunk. She took her wedding ring off and put it in the small velvet bag she had carried it in from New York. She set the bag inside the desk drawer and closed the drawer.

In the late afternoon she walked. She left the boarding house and turned east on Court Street to Virginia Street, then south. The Washoe County Courthouse stood on the corner, a heavy stone building with deep windows. She would be a small file inside it before long. She did not stop. She walked past it and continued south.

Past the courthouse the buildings began to thin. There was a hardware store, a cafe, a hotel that was not a divorce hotel but only a hotel for travelers. Then the railroad tracks set into the pavement and running east into the freight yards. She crossed them and the street changed.

The neon stopped. The buildings spread out and grew lower. A new auto dealership stood at the corner with a row of polished cars in the window. Beyond it were filling stations and a tire shop and a garage with the doors thrown open and two men working on the engine of a truck. The smell was different too: gasoline and rubber and oil instead of cigar smoke and grilled meat. A boy on a bicycle rode past and lifted his cap.

Nora walked four blocks south and then turned and walked back. She felt no danger. She felt, for the first time since the train pulled out of Penn Station, that she was somewhere new and that the newness was not threatening but only itself. She had expected to feel exposed in a small western town. She felt instead the particular relief of being unknown.

By the time she got back to the boarding house the lamps were on in the windows and the supper bell was ringing. She washed her face at the basin in her room and went down to meet the four other women at the long table in the dining room. They told her their names and the cities they had come from. They were from Boston and Cincinnati and St. Louis and Hartford. None of them asked her why she had come. They did not need to.

After supper she went up to her room and wrote a short letter to her mother, telling her she had arrived safely and that the boarding house was clean and the landlady kind. She did not write that she had walked south of the tracks alone, or that the town was bigger and more layered than she had imagined, with its casino corridor and its garage corridor and its colony across the tracks and a river running through it all, and that the place, small by eastern standards, had already begun to feel like an offer she might not refuse.

She put out the lamp. She lay in the unfamiliar bed and listened. Somewhere west of the boarding house a freight train was working through a switch yard, the cars settling against each other one by one, a long patient sound that carried across the town and faded against the mountains.

Six weeks, she thought. She had six weeks.

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