The Library

Frances Cole had outlived the building and the building had outlived its purpose and now she was sitting in the new one, the replacement, which was not new at all anymore but which she still called new because when you were eighty-one years old everything built after 1940 was new and everything before it was the real thing.

The Washoe County Library at 301 South Center Street had opened in 1966, seven years ago, and Frances had been coming here three times a week since the doors opened. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. The same schedule she had kept at the old library, and the one before that, and the one before that, because Frances Cole had been a woman who read books since before she came to Reno and she would be a woman who read books until they put her in the ground, and even then she intended to be buried with one.

She sat at a table near the garden court, the interior courtyard that the architect had designed as the building’s centerpiece, a glass-walled atrium with plantings and natural light, modern and clean and nothing at all like the old Carnegie library at the corner of Mill and South Virginia where Frances had first applied for a library card in the fall of 1921. She had been twenty-nine then, just arrived from Boston for a divorce she did not want to talk about, and the library had been a small stone building that the newspaper once described as resembling a Greek temple in the midst of a sacred garden. Frances had thought that was exactly right. It had columns and a sense of quiet purpose and it smelled like binding glue and dust and the particular variety of silence that only existed in rooms full of books.

The Carnegie library was gone. It had been gone since 1931, sold for a dollar and demolished to make way for the Federal Building and Post Office that Frederic DeLongchamps designed in the Art Deco style, all clean lines and geometric ornament. Frances had worked in that building for twenty-three years, sorting mail behind the counter, watching the divorce women come in to send letters home, watching the soldiers come in during the war to mail packages to their mothers, watching the town change through the narrow frame of a post office window. She had retired in 1957 and the building was still there, still handsome, still standing at 50 South Virginia, and sometimes she walked past it on her way to the library and nodded at it the way you nod at an old colleague you have nothing left to say to but whose presence you are glad of.

She had come to Reno for six weeks and stayed fifty-two years. This was the fact of her life that still surprised her, not because the staying was strange but because the leaving had once seemed so certain. She had come for the divorce. She had gotten the divorce. She had intended to go back to Boston, to her mother’s house on Beacon Hill, to the life she had left, which was a life of luncheons and committees and a husband who drank and a silence about the drinking that was louder than the drinking itself.

She had not gone back. She had walked out of the courthouse with the decree in her handbag and walked south on Virginia Street past the hotels and the dress shops and the filling stations and the little restaurants, and somewhere between the courthouse and the river she had understood that she did not want to go back to a city where everyone knew what had happened to her. She wanted to stay in a city where no one knew and no one asked. Reno was that city. Reno was the city of people who had come from somewhere else and decided that somewhere else was finished.

The library was where she had rebuilt herself. Not the post office, though the post office had given her a paycheck and a purpose. The library. She had read her way through the shelves in the Carnegie building and then through the shelves in the Nevada State Building, where the collection moved in 1930 when it outgrew the little stone temple, and then through the shelves here at South Center Street, where the collection had room to breathe and the garden court let in the kind of light that made you want to sit down and stay.

She was reading a novel. It was not a good novel. She had read enough novels in sixty years to know the difference between a good one and a bad one, and this one was bad in the particular way that novels were bad in 1973, which was to say it was long and self-important and written by a man who believed his childhood was interesting to strangers. Frances read it anyway because she had a rule about finishing what she started, a rule she had broken exactly once in her life, when she left Boston, and that breaking had been the best thing she ever did, so perhaps the rule was not as good as she thought.

A young woman sat down at the next table with a stack of books and a spiral notebook. She was perhaps twenty, dark-haired, wearing a university sweatshirt. She opened the top book and began to take notes, and Frances watched her for a moment with the frank curiosity of an old woman who had long since stopped pretending not to look at people.

The girl was studying. Frances could see the book’s spine: an introduction to something, sociology or psychology, one of the soft sciences that Frances had never studied because when she was twenty the soft sciences did not exist and women did not go to universities and the world was a smaller and harder place. The girl wrote quickly, in a hand that Frances could not read from this distance, and she did not look up, and she did not know that an eighty-one-year-old woman was watching her and thinking about the Carnegie library and the Greek temple in the sacred garden and the fifty-two years between then and now.

Frances turned back to her novel. The man was still talking about his childhood. Frances turned the page.

Outside the garden court windows the afternoon light shifted and the shadows of the plantings moved across the table in slow arcs, and Frances read, and the girl studied, and the library held them both the way libraries do, without asking who they were or where they came from or how long they planned to stay.

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