The Harrah Collection

Helen Kellerman was seventy years old and had spent fifty of those years working inside buildings whose whole purpose was to make you forget there was a world outside them, so it struck her as a small joke of her old age that she should end up, on a cold bright Sunday in November, standing in a new building on Lake Street looking at automobiles that had been kept precisely so that people would remember.

They had opened it that morning, the automobile museum, down where Lake Street met the river, a low pale building that had gone up on ground she could remember as something else, though she could no longer say exactly what. That was the thing about being seventy in the town where you were born. Every block was two or three blocks laid over each other, the one that was there and the ones that used to be, and you walked around all day quietly correcting the city against your own memory of it. Her granddaughter Diane had driven her down and paid the admission and then drifted off toward the newer cars, the ones with fins, and Helen had let her go and moved slowly along the rows by herself.

She had known Bill Harrah’s name her whole adult life without ever once meeting the man. You did not have to meet him. He had started with a bingo game the year Helen was still a girl and built it into the thing that half the town worked for, and he had done it, everyone agreed, by being a fanatic about the parts nobody was supposed to notice, the carpets, the lightbulbs replaced before they burned out, the girls’ uniforms pressed and the ashtrays wiped between hands. Helen had worked the Mapes, not Harrah’s, forty years at the Mapes from the night it opened, but the standard was the standard all over town in those years and everyone knew where it came from. He had died eleven years back. The company had been sold off to a hotel chain out of Tennessee, and the chain had taken his cars, all fourteen hundred of them, the largest collection of automobiles anyone had ever gathered, and sold most of them off at auctions that the car people still talked about the way old gamblers talked about famous nights. And then, having sold the rest, the company had given a hundred and seventy-five of them and the whole library back to the town, to a museum, so that they would not simply scatter into the garages of rich men and disappear.

She stopped in front of a car under a soft light, a squat black-and-yellow thing that looked more like a boat than a car, and read the little card. A 1907 Thomas Flyer. It had won a race in 1908, the card said, New York to Paris, twenty-two thousand miles, west across the whole country in the winter and then across the frozen top of the world, and it had won, and here it sat, eighty years later, in Reno, wiped down to a shine, going nowhere ever again.

Helen looked at it a long time.

She had never gone much of anywhere. That was not a complaint, or she did not intend it as one. She had been to San Francisco a handful of times and to Salt Lake once for a wedding, and otherwise she had stayed inside the three or four square miles she had been born into, and inside those miles she had worked. She had carried trays up to the Sky Room the year it was the tallest thing in the state and watched the whole valley turn on below her, and she had stood in the Mapes lobby the year they let the paint go and she could see the end coming, and she had outlasted the building, more or less, or would, she supposed, whenever they got around to it. Her grandfather Otto had come from Germany and opened a saloon on Virginia Street the year after the town got its name, and every Kellerman since had made a living off the simple fact that people would always want a drink and a game and a room and somebody gracious to bring it to them, and none of them, not one, had ever driven a car around the frozen top of the world.

And yet here was the car that had, and it had ended up exactly where she had, in a low building by the Truckee, kept and cared for and standing still. She found she did not know whether to feel sorry for it or understood by it.

She moved on down the row after a while. There was a low pale roadster shaped like a raindrop that looked as though it had been dreamed rather than built, and a coupe that a card said had belonged to a young actor who died on a California highway before Helen was thirty, and further along the cars that Diane would want to see, a president’s black limousine and a singer’s Italian two-seater and a movie idol’s Cadillac, the famous cars, the ones people came for. Helen looked at each of them and read each little card and found that what moved her was not the fame. It was the keeping. Somebody had washed and oiled and turned over every one of these engines through all the years when the easy thing, the profitable thing, would have been to let them go the way the town let everything go, to auction and scatter and forget. A whole institution had been raised for no better reason than that a few things ought to outlast the people who loved them. Helen had spent fifty years in the business of the temporary, the drink poured and gone, the hand dealt and swept, the room rented by the night. It surprised her, at seventy, how much she wanted to stand inside a building built on the opposite principle.

Diane came back and found her there. “You’ve been standing at the one ugly car for twenty minutes,” she said, not unkindly. Diane was twenty-five and dealt blackjack and had her whole life still folded up in front of her, and Helen loved her the way you love the ones who cannot yet imagine being old.

“It went around the world,” Helen said. “In 1908. And then it stopped.”

“Everything stops, Grandma.”

“That’s not the part I was thinking about.” Helen looked down the long room, at all of it, the movie stars’ cars and the presidents’ cars and the ordinary beautiful cars of ordinary years, every one of them saved out of the great sell-off by somebody deciding, at the last, that a town ought to keep a few things instead of pawning all of them. She thought of the Mapes going gray three blocks north and nobody deciding anything about it at all. “They tore down more of this town than they ever kept,” she said. “Whole streets I could show you. And then some fellow’s automobiles, of all the things in the world, that’s what somebody stood up and saved.”

“Is that bad?”

“No,” Helen said. She was surprised to find she meant it entirely. “No. I think it’s about the only hopeful thing I’ve seen all year.” She took her granddaughter’s arm, partly for the steadiness and partly because she wanted to. “Show me the one with the fins,” she said. “The one you liked. I want to see what a girl your age thinks is worth keeping.”

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