The Sky Room

Dorothy James stood in the wings of the Sky Room on a Tuesday night in May 1949, listening to the trio finish their warm-up set, looking past the bandstand and out the long window that ran the length of the room. The window faced south, and through it she could see the lit ribbon of Virginia Street, the courthouse and the casino marquees, the dark cut of the river, and beyond that the meadow stretching to the foot of the mountains. The Sierra were a black wall to the west, the desert a flat dark plain to the east. Between them, scattered like a thrown handful of light, lay every place she had ever been in Reno.

She was forty-one. She had been singing for money since she was nineteen. She had sung at hotel lounges in Salt Lake and Boise and Spokane, at a roadhouse in Pocatello where the bandstand was set up over a trapdoor for moving liquor, at a navy officers’ club in San Diego during the war, and for two seasons at a casino in Lake Tahoe before she had taken the job at the Mapes in March. She had been at the Sky Room two months. She would be there, she expected, for as long as the Mapes would have her or her voice held out, whichever came first.

The trio finished. The piano player gave her a small nod through the window of the curtain. The emcee, who was a man named Wendell Booth and who had once been a vaudeville comic in Cleveland, stepped to the microphone and said her name in the smooth even voice that men of his profession had developed somewhere east of the Mississippi and brought west.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the Mapes Sky Room is proud to present, returning by request, Miss Dorothy James.”

She walked out onto the floor. The applause was steady and polite. She nodded to the trio and gave the piano player the count for the first number and turned to the room.

The room was about half full, which was not bad for a Tuesday at ten o’clock. The tables nearest the window were the ones people fought over, even though there was nothing on a Tuesday night to look at except the same view that any other night would have offered. Dorothy understood the appeal. She had walked the floor herself, on her first day, and stood at the glass and looked out, and she had understood at once that the view was the room’s real act, not whoever happened to be singing in front of it. The view did not need a microphone. The view did not need to be in tune.

She sang. The first number was a slow standard, a song about a woman remembering a man she had not seen in a long time and was not entirely sure she wanted to see again. It was a song for a Tuesday. It was a song for a room half full of people watching the lights of a small western city through the window behind a singer.

When she had finished she stepped back from the microphone and the applause came again, a little warmer this time, and she nodded the trio into the second number.

In the back of the room, behind the row of tables nearest the door, a young woman in the hotel’s waitress uniform was setting drinks down at a four-top. The woman moved well, with the slight forward lean of someone who had been carrying trays for a long time. Dorothy had noticed her on her first night and had asked Wendell who she was, and Wendell had said, that’s Helen Kellerman, her grandfather had a saloon down on Virginia in the seventies, you would not have known him, he died before you got here.

Dorothy had known plenty of grandfathers who had run saloons. They were a particular kind of family. The grandchildren of saloonkeepers carried trays the way the grandchildren of railroad men ran the trains: as if the work were already inside them before they had decided to take the job.

She finished the second number. Then the third. Between the third and the fourth, she stepped sideways and took a sip of water from the glass on the small table beside the bandstand, and she let her eye go past the trio and out the window again.

To the east, the lights of Sparks lay scattered along the meadow floor, bright at the railyard where the night shift was still working, dimmer in the rows of houses around it. To the south, the casino corridor of Virginia Street ran like a vein of fire toward the courthouse and stopped at the river. To the southwest, the new subdivisions had begun to fill the meadow, the streets laid out on a grid, the porch lights coming on one after the other in a pattern that, from twelve stories up, looked like something growing. To the north, beyond the river, the lights of the university campus on the hill, where her cousin had taken a doctorate two years before in soils. Beyond all of it, the dark.

She had grown up in Twin Falls, Idaho. She had never lived in any one place for more than three years at a time since she had left it. She had not expected, when she had taken the Mapes job, to feel that any view could matter to her in particular, because views had a way of becoming routine when one looked at them five nights a week. But this view had not. This view, every time she stepped to the side of the bandstand and looked at it, did something to the inside of her chest that she could not entirely name.

She sang the fourth number. It was a faster song, one she had been working into the set for two weeks, a song about not knowing what came next and being more or less at peace with that. The trio took it well. The piano player smiled at her over the top of the keyboard and gave it a little extra, and the bass player followed him, and by the bridge the room was leaning forward in the way that rooms did when something was working.

She finished the song. The applause was bigger this time. Wendell was on his feet at the bar, smiling, raising his glass in her direction.

She nodded into the room. She looked, from habit, past the audience and out the window. The lights of Sparks were still there. The lights of Virginia Street were still there. The dark was still there beyond the lights.

She turned back to the trio. She gave the piano player the count for the next number. She thought about what came next, and she did not entirely know, and she found that, for a moment that was a Tuesday night in May 1949 in a room twelve stories above a small western city, that was enough.

The piano started. She lifted the microphone.

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