The Post Office

Frances Cole walked into the new Federal Building on South Virginia Street on a Monday in October 1934, carrying two envelopes and the small persistent ache in her left hip that had started the previous winter and had not gone away. The building was unlike anything else in Reno. She stopped inside the entrance and looked up.

The ceiling was high and skylit, the atrium open and bright in a way that made the town’s other buildings feel low and cramped by comparison. The walls were pale green terra cotta, incised to resemble quarried stone, and the aluminum panels over the doorways carried designs that mixed patriotic eagles with motifs she recognized as Indian, patterns that reminded her of the baskets the Washoe women sold at the train station. The floor was polished. The light came from above, filtered through glass, and it gave the whole interior a quality that was both grand and quiet, like a church built for mail.

Frances was fifty-one years old. She had come to Reno in 1919 as a divorce applicant, a schoolteacher from Portland who had married badly and traveled to Nevada to correct the error. The divorce had been granted in 1920, after the required six-month residency. She had intended to return to Oregon. Instead, she had found work at the Washoe County Library and stayed, the way some women stayed, not because Reno was where they wanted to be but because it had become, through accumulation of days and small decisions, the place where they were.

She had watched them build this post office. The Carnegie Library that had stood on this site since 1904 had been torn down to make room, and Frances had felt a particular grief about that, because the Carnegie Library was where she had first applied for work and where she had spent her early years in Reno reading through the stacks in the evening after her shift, teaching herself the history of the place she had accidentally made her home. The library had moved to a new location on Mill Street. The books were the same. But the building was gone, and buildings, Frances had learned, were not interchangeable the way their contents sometimes were.

The new post office had been designed by Frederic DeLongchamps, the architect whose name appeared on half the significant buildings in town. Frances had never met him but she had read about him in the Gazette. He was a local man, which mattered. The Federal government had hired a local architect to build a federal building, and DeLongchamps had convinced them to approve an Art Deco design, which was unusual for a government structure in a small western city. The result was something that looked as though it belonged in a larger place, a building that exceeded the scale of the town it served.

She posted her two envelopes. One was a letter to her sister in Portland, the monthly letter she had written without interruption for fifteen years, a record of small events and weather and the ongoing condition of her hip. The other was a payment to a dentist on Sierra Street for work done the previous month. She stood in line behind a rancher in a worn coat and a woman she recognized from the Riverside Hotel, and when she reached the counter the postal clerk stamped her letters and took her coins and she walked back through the atrium and paused again to look at the ceiling.

The building had been constructed with help from the Civil Works Administration, one of the new federal programs. President Roosevelt had been in office less than two years, and already the shape of the government’s involvement in daily life had changed in ways that Frances found both reassuring and strange. Men who had been idle were now employed by the federal government to build things. Roads. Buildings. Parks. The money came from Washington and the labor came from Nevada and the result was this building, this post office, this particular configuration of green terra cotta and aluminum and polished floors.

She walked outside into the October afternoon. The sun was warm. Virginia Street stretched north toward the river and the arch and the casinos that were multiplying along the block. The Bank Club was the largest, three years into its run as the most successful gambling establishment in town. Across the street and down a block, newer clubs were opening, smaller operations with slot machines and card tables and the perpetual sound of coins and hope.

Frances did not gamble. She had never understood the appeal of risking money you had earned through work on the chance that it might become more money without additional work. The mathematics of it seemed to her clearly unfavorable. But she understood that gambling was what kept the town alive now, gambling and divorce, the two industries that Reno had chosen to build itself on, and she accepted this the way she accepted the weather, as a condition of the place.

She walked north along Virginia Street. The new post office receded behind her. She thought about the Carnegie Library that was gone and the building that had replaced it, and she thought about how a town remakes itself over time, tearing down what it was and constructing what it wants to become, and how the people who live in it must adjust each time to the new configuration of walls and windows and light.

At the library on Mill Street, she went inside and sat at her desk and began the afternoon work. Cataloging returns. Shelving new arrivals. Helping a woman from San Francisco find a book about Nevada wildflowers. The work was quiet and precise and it suited her, the organization of information into systems that could be navigated by anyone who cared to look.

At five o’clock she closed the library and walked home to her apartment on Court Street, the same street where she had lived during her divorce residency fifteen years earlier. The apartment was small and clean and full of books. She made dinner. She read for an hour. She went to bed.

Outside, the town continued its noise, the casinos and the bars and the streets full of people who had come to Reno to dissolve marriages or try their luck, and the new post office stood on South Virginia Street, green and gleaming and Art Deco, a building designed by a local architect with federal money and the labor of men who needed work, a building that would outlast most of the people who mailed letters from its counters, including Frances Cole, who was fifty-one years old and who had come to Reno to end one life and had built, slowly and without intention, another.

---