The Last Divorce

Beverly Cartwright sat on the long oak bench in the second-floor hallway of the Washoe County Courthouse on a Wednesday morning in June 1952, a manila envelope on her lap, watching the brass clock above the courtroom doors. Her hearing was at ten. It was nine forty.

She was forty-four. She had come from Pasadena six weeks and a day ago, on the advice of a lawyer who had told her, with the slightly apologetic delicacy California lawyers had developed for this conversation, that Reno was still the cleanest option for a woman who did not wish to wait a year. The new California residency was twelve months. The Nevada residency was still six weeks. She had taken the train.

Six weeks at the Riverside Hotel. Six weeks of walking the same blocks of downtown, of taking the same cab from the same bellman to the same lunch counter on Sierra Street, of writing letters to her sister in Sacramento and receiving letters back in which her sister offered no opinion on the divorce but reported faithfully on the children and the weather. Six weeks of meeting other women at the hotel bar in the evenings and discovering, slowly, that the colony she had read about in magazines, the bright crowd of well-dressed easterners playing tennis at the divorce ranches and drinking champagne on the courthouse lawn, was not what she had walked into. The colony had been thinning for years. Of the women she had met at the Riverside in April, three had already gone home. The hotel was busy with conferees from a mining association and a wedding party from Sacramento and salesmen for a sewing-machine company. The women in the dining room with the careful posture and the unread paperback were a small minority now. Beverly was one of them.

A door opened down the hall and a man in a brown suit came out carrying a stack of files. He nodded to her without recognition and went the other way. Beverly looked at the clock. Nine forty-three.

The deputy clerk came out of the office across the hall a moment later, a woman in a dark blue dress with a manila folder under her arm. Beverly had seen her several times in the last six weeks. She was a settled-looking woman in her forties, brisk, faintly Irish around the eyes, with the slight forward attention of a person who had spent a long time at a public counter.

“Mrs. Cartwright?”

“Yes.”

“Nora Fitzgerald. We met when you filed.” The clerk sat down on the bench beside her, not too close, the folder on her own lap. “Judge Taber is running about ten minutes behind. I thought you might like to know rather than watch the clock.”

“Thank you.”

“Your witness is here? The hotel manager?”

“He came up with me on the elevator. He is in the men’s room.”

“He will do fine. He has done this before.”

“I imagine he has.”

Nora looked at her, briefly, the way Beverly had seen her look at other women in the hallway, a look that contained no judgment and no professional warmth either, only a kind of recognition. Beverly returned it.

“May I ask you something,” Beverly said.

“Of course.”

“Are there many of us, still. I mean, women who come the way I came.”

Nora considered the question. She had been asked it, Beverly understood at once, before, and had developed an honest answer.

“Fewer every year,” she said. “The peak was the late thirties. The war years were busy too. After California changed, in fifty-one, the numbers fell. We see more local filings now. Reno people getting divorced from Reno people. The out-of-state ones, the colony women, you are still here. But you are not the main business anymore.”

“What is the main business?”

“Casino licenses. Land. Probate. The county is growing very fast. The courthouse is going to need a second wing within ten years.”

“Funny,” Beverly said. “I thought of this place as just for us. For the women on the train.”

“It was, for a while. For about thirty years. That is a long time for a thing to be one thing, and not very long for a courthouse.”

The men’s room door opened and the manager came out. He saw Beverly and gave her the small, neutral, professional nod of his profession. He took a position against the opposite wall. He did not sit. He had been a witness, Nora had said, on perhaps four hundred Nevada divorces in his twelve years at the hotel.

Nora stood. “I will let you know when the judge is ready.” She paused. “Mrs. Cartwright.”

“Yes.”

“After the decree, there is a small office at the end of this hall where you can sit for a few minutes before you go down. If you need it. Most women just walk straight out and we never see them again. Some prefer the office.”

“Thank you.”

“Some prefer the office,” Nora said again, more to herself than to Beverly, and went back into the clerk’s room.

Beverly opened the manila envelope on her lap. The papers were what they always were, the affidavit, the witness statement, the bill from her lawyer, the train ticket back to Los Angeles via Sacramento. The ticket was for the four o’clock that afternoon. She had bought it three days ago. She had told herself, when she bought it, that she had bought it because the bed at the Riverside was no longer hers after eleven and there was no reason to stay another night. She told herself the same thing now and recognized that it was not entirely true.

The brass clock above the courtroom doors moved a notch.

The bailiff opened the doors and looked up the hall. He saw her, saw the manager. He nodded.

Beverly closed the envelope. She stood up. She crossed the hallway and went in.

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