Pietro Sartori set the last stone of his working life on a cold morning in March of 1962, and it took him most of an hour, because the stone was heavy and he was seventy-eight and there was no longer any reason to hurry.
The building was going up on a corner two blocks off Virginia Street, a low commercial block of concrete and steel and glass, and Pietro had been hired for one thing only, which was the entrance. The owner had wanted stone around the door. Real stone, cut and set by hand, the way the banks used to be done, because the owner was a man of a certain age who remembered when a building announced itself with stone, and he had asked around, and the answer had come back the way it always came back now: if you want it cut by hand, you want the old Italian, Sartori, he is still alive, he still has the tools.
So Pietro had cut the granite in his yard over the winter, sitting on a stool with the chisel and the wooden mallet his father had carried out of the Piedmont in 1888, and now he was setting the pieces around the doorway while above him and behind him the rest of the building stood already finished, poured and bolted and glazed in a matter of weeks by men who would never touch a chisel in their lives. He did not resent them. He had stopped resenting them a long time ago. A man cannot resent the weather, and the men with the concrete forms were the weather now.
He had come to Reno in 1905, a young man of twenty-one, by way of the railroad that needed strong backs and did not ask many questions. His father had been a mason in a village under the mountains, and Pietro had grown up watching the old man split granite along its grain, reading the stone the way other men read a letter, and Pietro had thought he was leaving all of that behind when he got on the boat. But Reno had wanted backs, and then it had wanted hands, and a man who knew stone could always find work in a town that was forever building itself, and so the trade his father had given him in a village he never saw again had fed Pietro for fifty-seven years in the high desert.
He set the stone. He checked it with the level, the long iron level worn smooth at the ends, and it was true, and he buttered the next piece and lifted it and set it, and while his hands did the work that they no longer needed his attention to do, his mind walked through the town he had built.
The bungalows, mostly. That was where the work had been, in the years between the wars, in the Powning Addition north of the river where the Italians had settled because the dry land under the mountains looked like home. He had laid up a hundred foundations there, two hundred, the little Craftsman houses that the families ordered out of catalogs and put up with their own hands and their cousins’ hands and the hands of any countryman who could be paid in wine and a Sunday dinner. He had built porch piers and chimneys and garden walls all through those blocks, and the men he had built them with were dead now, most of them, the Pincolinis and the men who had worked the Reno Public Market and opened the groceries on Fourth Street, the whole generation that had come over young and stayed and made a Little Italy out of a few streets of bungalows and a church.
The church he had not built. He had wanted to. They had brought a company out from North Dakota for the cathedral in 1908, and the great architect, the Frenchman’s son, DeLongchamps, had done the fine buildings downtown, the bank and the apartments out on California Avenue that the Vacchinas had put up, and Pietro had never been asked to do a building like that, with his name on it, designed and drawn. He had been the man who did the stone on other men’s drawings. He had made his peace with that too. The bank still stood. The apartments still stood. A man who had set the stone in buildings that outlived him had not wasted his hands, whatever name was on the cornerstone.
The young foreman came over while Pietro was mixing the last of the mortar. His name was Don, a big easy man of forty with a clipboard, and he crouched down to watch the way men always watched, because there were not many left who could see stone set by hand and most of them knew they were watching something that would not be there much longer.
“That’s nice work, Pete,” Don said. “That’s real nice.”
“It is finished,” Pietro said. “One more, and it is finished.”
Don nodded and turned the clipboard over in his hands the way a man does when he has come to ask for something. “We got the medical building starting in May,” he said. “Out on the south end. All block and curtain wall, nothing like this, but there’s a lobby they want dressed up. Some kind of facing. The architect’s asking for somebody who knows the material.” He paused. “I told them about you.”
Pietro troweled the mortar onto the bed and reached for the last stone, the keystone, the one his father would have set with a word and a small private satisfaction, and he lifted it and brought it to the gap above the door and pressed it home, and he worked it with the heel of his hand until it sat the way it wanted to sit, and then he took up the level one more time and laid it across the top and watched the bubble find its center and stay there.
True. The last one true.
He sat back on his heels. His knees did not like it and he let them complain. The doorway stood finished above him, gray granite cut and coursed and squared, eight pieces and a keystone, the only thing on the whole building that a man’s two hands had shaped, and it would frame every person who walked through that door for as long as the building stood, and not one of them would know his name, and that was all right. That had always been all right.
Don was still crouched there, waiting on his answer about the medical building, about the lobby, about the facing the architect wanted.
Pietro began to clean his tools. He wiped the trowel and the level and laid them in the wooden box, and he picked up the chisel and the mallet his father had carried out of the mountains, and he held them a moment in the cold sun before he set them down with the others, and he did not yet say yes and he did not yet say no, because there were some questions a man was allowed to sit with a while longer before he gave them up to the answer they already had.
Italians settled the Truckee Meadows beginning in the late 1860s, drawn first by railroad and ranch work, and made the Powning Addition north of the river, between Keystone and Arlington Avenues, into Reno’s “Little Italy,” a neighborhood of Craftsman bungalows often ordered from catalogs and built by Italian-American hands. St. Thomas Aquinas was built in 1907 to 1908 and became a cathedral in 1931. Architect Frederic DeLongchamps designed the California Apartments on California Avenue, built around 1921 to 1922 for Edward and Cora Vacchina, Piedmont immigrants. By the 1960s, poured concrete, steel, and curtain wall had largely replaced cut stone and hand-laid masonry in commercial construction.