The Exposition

Clara Reinholt walked down Virginia Street from her shop on the morning of June twenty-fifth, 1927, in a pale linen suit she had cut and sewn the week before, with her hat in her hand and her gloves folded over the strap of her purse, on her way to the opening day of the Transcontinental Highways Exposition at Idlewild Park.

She was thirty-eight. She had come to Reno from Cincinnati seven years before for the six months’ residency, had taken her decree on the appointed Tuesday in October 1920, and had stayed instead of going home. She had opened a dress shop on Sierra Street four months later with the last six hundred dollars of the settlement her former husband’s attorney had wired her through the Wells Fargo office. The shop had paid its rent every month since. She lived above it in two rooms with a small kitchen that overlooked an alley and the back of the bakery.

She walked the eight blocks south to the river and crossed the bridge.

The new arch was over the street at Virginia and Commercial Row. It had gone up two weeks before, a frame of white painted wood with electric bulbs along the curve of it and the words RENO across the top and NEVADA across the bottom, and on the morning she walked under it the bulbs were not yet lit. The arch was the work of a committee. The committee had thought to put a slogan along the bottom rail and had announced a contest in the Gazette for the best one, with a prize of one hundred dollars, and the entries had been arriving at the Chamber of Commerce by post for the past month. The Gazette had been printing the more amusing ones in a daily column. Clara had read them at breakfast and had not entered.

Beyond the arch the street was full of out-of-town cars. There were touring sedans from California with their tops folded down and travel cases strapped to the running boards, and there were Model T trucks from the ranch country with bedrolls in the beds, and there were a pair of long open cars from Sacramento with banners stretched along their sides reading HIGHWAY 40 BOOSTERS in red paint. The drivers were honking at one another in the way that drivers honk when they have come to a place they have read about in their hometown papers and are pleased to be there.

She turned west on Riverside Drive and walked along the river.

Idlewild Park was a half-mile up the south bank. She had walked there many times in the seven summers she had lived in the city, and she knew the cottonwoods and the willow stand and the slow bend of the Truckee where a heron sometimes stood. The park she was walking into now was not the park she knew. It had been remade for the exposition. The lawn had been graded. White board fences ran along the new walks. Pavilions had been raised over the past four months in white-painted lumber and stucco panels, each one with a state name or a railroad name or the name of an automobile manufacturer over its door. She recognized the largest of them at once. It was a long building with a tiled roof in the California-mission style and a tower at one end and a row of arched openings along the long face of it, and a small plaque set into the wall by the entrance attributed the design to Frederic DeLongchamps. She had been in two of DeLongchamps’s buildings in Reno already, the Reno National Bank and the new post office that had gone up four years before on the south side of the Truckee, and she had admired both. The California Building looked, from where she stood, like a building that would still be standing in a hundred years.

She went up the steps and through the arched doorway.

The inside of the building was cool. A long room ran the length of the structure, with exhibits set out under banners. There was a display of California citrus crated in pale wood. There was a display of California oil in glass tubes of varying colors. There was a model of the new bridge across the bay at Carquinez, which had opened five weeks before. There was a tall map of the highway system of California painted on a board, with the new pavement marked in red and the proposed pavement marked in green, and the green lines ran east into Nevada and joined the Reno arch at the center of the map.

She read the placards. She moved along the wall.

A small group of women in light dresses was clustered around the citrus display. One of them, a woman in her thirties with a kind face and a notebook, turned and saw Clara’s suit and smiled.

“Did you sew that.”

“I did.”

“Where do you keep shop.”

“Sierra Street.”

“I will come this afternoon.”

“You will be welcome.”

The woman nodded and went back to the citrus and the notebook. Clara moved on.

She left the California Building by the side door and walked through the park. A bandstand had been built at the center of the lawn. A band was playing under it, the men in pale uniforms with brass instruments catching the morning sun. The flag of Nevada and the flag of the United States hung from the bandstand’s eaves. Around the lawn, in front of the smaller pavilions, men in shirtsleeves were setting out brochures on folding tables. A man at the Oregon table looked up and nodded as she passed. A man at the Idaho table did not look up.

She walked the full circuit of the park. She read the placards at the Utah pavilion and at the Wyoming pavilion. She stopped at the small Nevada pavilion, which was less well attended than the rest, and read the materials. The materials described Reno as the gateway to the new highway system and listed the state’s mineral resources and grazing acreage and the average annual rainfall in inches by county. She read all of it. She thought about the dress shop and about the seven years and about the city she had come to expecting to leave.

She had not expected, when she had stepped off the train at the depot in April 1920, to be in a city. She had expected, from what she had read in the Cincinnati papers, to be in a town. The city she was standing in on the morning of June twenty-fifth, 1927, was not a town. It was a place that was telling itself, on a board fence at the back of a graded park, that it was going to be the center of a continent.

She did not entirely believe the board fence.

But the building behind her, the long white DeLongchamps building with the tile roof and the arched openings, looked like a building made by a man who had believed.

She walked back along the river to Virginia Street. She passed under the unlit arch. She climbed the stairs to her two rooms above the shop and hung her hat on the hook by the door and stood at the window above the alley for a long time, looking down at nothing in particular. Then she went down to the shop and unlocked the door and turned the sign in the window from CLOSED to OPEN, and she sat down at her sewing machine, and she began the morning’s work.

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