The Riverside Hotel

George Turk checked the dining room twice before the doors opened, the way he checked everything twice, because in a hotel the difference between good and adequate was the things nobody noticed.

The tablecloths were straight. The silver was polished. The water glasses were filled to the same level, which George measured by eye and which his waiters measured by pouring to the second line on their thumbs. The flowers on each table were fresh, replaced that morning by a boy who came from a house on Ralston Street where a woman grew roses and carnations in a garden that should not have existed in the high desert but did because she was stubborn about it.

George was forty-four years old. He had managed hotels in San Francisco and Sacramento and Virginia City, where the silver money was loud and the guests were louder, and now he managed the Riverside Hotel in Reno, which sat on the north bank of the Truckee River at the foot of Virginia Street and was, by George's estimation, the finest hotel between Sacramento and Salt Lake City.

This was not an extravagant claim. The competition was thin.

The new building had opened that spring of 1907, and George had been there from the beginning, hired by Harry Gosse, who owned the hotel and who had the money and ambition to build something that would last. The old Riverside had been a wooden structure, charming in the way that old wooden structures in Western towns are charming, which is to say it leaked and creaked and would have burned to the ground in a stiff wind. Gosse had replaced it with three stories of brick, a hundred and ten rooms, a barroom that the Reno Evening Gazette had praised as among the very best in Nevada, and a wide veranda that faced the river and caught the afternoon light.

George loved the building. He would not have used that word, because he was not a man who used words like that about buildings, but he walked through its rooms and hallways with a proprietary tenderness that was unmistakable to anyone paying attention. He checked the hinges on the doors. He ran his finger along the windowsills. He stood in the lobby at odd hours and listened to the way sound moved through the space, the way voices carried and the way the front door closed, solidly, without slamming, because he had adjusted the pneumatic closer himself.

The hotel's guests fell into three categories. There were the railroad travelers, who stayed one night and left on the morning train and wanted nothing more than a clean bed and a hot meal. There were the businessmen, cattlemen and mining investors and land speculators who came to Reno for the courthouse or the banks and who stayed a few days and drank in the barroom and talked about money in voices that carried to the lobby. And there were the women.

The women were new. They had started arriving in the past year, one or two at a time, from Eastern cities, and they stayed not for a night or a week but for months. They were generally well-dressed and well-spoken and they had a particular quality that George had come to recognize, a quality of determined patience, the look of people who were waiting for something specific and who intended to wait as long as necessary.

They were here for divorces. George did not discuss this. He did not ask their business, just as he did not ask the business of the cattlemen or the mining investors. A hotel manager's job was to make people comfortable, not to interrogate them. But he understood the situation, and he had made certain adjustments.

He had added a writing desk to every room on the second floor, because the women wrote letters constantly, to their attorneys and their families and their friends back East. He had instructed the dining room staff to seat the women by the windows, which overlooked the river, because he had noticed that they preferred it. He had placed a small bookshelf in the lobby, stocked with novels and periodicals, because the women read the way other guests drank, steadily and with evident need.

On a Tuesday in May, a woman named Mrs. Collins checked in with three trunks and a look on her face that George had seen before, a mixture of exhaustion and resolve that was particular to women who had traveled two thousand miles to undo something.

"How long will you be staying, Mrs. Collins?"

"Six months. Perhaps longer."

"We'll make you comfortable."

He said this to all of them, and he meant it every time. Comfort was not a small thing. It was, in George's experience, the foundation on which everything else rested. A person who was comfortable could think clearly. A person who could think clearly could make decisions. And the women who came to the Riverside were there to make the most consequential decision of their lives, and George believed they deserved a clean room and a straight tablecloth and a window that looked out on a river while they did it.

He walked through the hotel in the evenings after the dining room closed, checking the locks on the exterior doors, turning down the gas lamps in the hallways, listening. The building settled at night the way all buildings settle, with small sounds that were not quite silence. The river was audible from the lobby, a low murmur that came through the walls and never stopped.

Sometimes he stood on the veranda and looked at the river and the bridge and the lights of Virginia Street and thought about how strange it was that a hotel could serve so many different purposes at once. It was a place to sleep. It was a place to eat. It was a place where cattle deals were made and railroad schedules were argued over and, now, a place where women came to end their marriages and begin whatever followed.

The building did not care what happened inside it. George cared. He cared the way a good host cares, not about the details of his guests' lives but about the conditions under which those lives were being lived, at least for the duration of their stay. He could not fix their marriages or their money or their loneliness. He could fix a squeaking hinge. He could make sure the water glasses were full.

In the mornings, he opened the dining room at seven and stood by the door and greeted each guest by name. He had a memory for names that his wife said was unnatural and that George thought of as simply necessary. Mrs. Collins. Mr. Hargrove. The Bennett family, who were passing through on their way to California. The two cattlemen from Winnemucca who had been arguing about grazing rights since Monday.

He greeted them, and they sat down, and the waiters brought coffee and eggs and toast, and the sun came through the east windows and lit the tablecloths, and the river ran past outside, and the hotel did what hotels do, which is hold people in place for a while before letting them go.

George checked the silver. He checked the flowers. He checked the water glasses. Everything was in order, and the day began.

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