The Supper Club

Helen Kellerman rode the elevator to the twelfth floor at a quarter to six with the night’s reservation book under her arm, and when the doors opened on the Sky Room the whole valley was laid out gold and blue in the window glass, the way it was every evening at this hour, and the way she had still not entirely gotten used to.

She was thirty-four. She had been working the Mapes since the winter it opened, six years now, first on the floor of the Coach Room and then up here, and she was the hostess of the supper club on the nights the headliner played and the head of the service on the nights he did not. Tonight there was no headliner. Tonight was a Tuesday in October, and the room would fill slow and quiet with the dinner trade, and that suited her.

She set the book on the stand by the door and looked at the room a moment before the staff came up. The tables were dressed. The windows ran floor to ceiling on three sides, and through them she could see the Truckee going dark under the Virginia Street bridge, and the Riverside across the water with its own lights coming on, and beyond all of it the Sierra holding the last of the sun on the snow that had come early to the high peaks. Twelve floors down, Virginia Street was already lit. From up here the arch over the street looked small, a bright little staple of light, and she could read the word RENO in it but not the rest.

Her grandfather Otto had poured beer on that street for thirty years. Her father Frank had run the same room as a soft drink parlor through the dry years and called it that with a straight face while the men drank what they drank in the back. She had grown up behind a bar on Virginia Street, at the level of the street, where you saw boots and hems and the swinging doors. She had never once, in all those years, seen the town from above. Now she saw it every night. She did not know what to do with that, exactly, except to notice it.

The staff came up at six. She walked the stations with them. The orchestra set up on the low stage, four men in white dinner jackets, and began to play soft, dinner music, nothing yet to dance to. The first guests came at half past, an insurance man from the convention downstairs and his wife, and then a party of four, and then the room began to fill the way it did.

At eight a woman came up alone.

Helen knew the type before the elevator doors had fully opened. She was perhaps fifty, in a good gray dress that had been bought somewhere that was not Reno, with a single string of pearls and a face that had been handsome and was tired. She carried a small beaded bag and nothing else. She gave no name for a reservation. She said she would like a table by the window if there was one, and Helen, who kept one back on the slow nights for exactly this, took her to it.

“Will anyone be joining you,” Helen asked, because she had to.

“No,” the woman said. “Just me. Tomorrow I go home.”

Helen had heard the sentence, or one near it, more times than she could count. The Mapes ran on it. Half the long stay guests in the tower were waiting out the six weeks, and on the last night a good many of them came up here to eat one dinner above the town that had given them the thing they came for, and then they went down to the desk in the morning and checked out and rode the train east a free woman. The bridge over the river, the one the woman could see from her table, had a name people used for what they threw off it.

“Then you’ll have the good table,” Helen said.

The woman looked out the window for a while. The room was warm and low lit and the orchestra played and below the glass the town ran its lights all the way out to where the desert took them. The woman ordered a martini and the trout, which was the thing the kitchen did best, and Helen put the order in and went on with her room.

When she brought the check, near ten, the woman was still at the window.

“I have been sitting here an hour,” the woman said, “trying to decide if this is a beautiful place.”

Helen stood with the small tray.

“I grew up down there,” she said, and tipped her head at the glass. “At the bottom of that street. My grandfather had a saloon.”

“And is it,” the woman said. “Beautiful.”

Helen looked out with her. She had been asked a great many things across a great many tables and she had a pleasant answer for almost all of them. She did not have one for this. From up here the town was only light, and the light was lovely, and she knew the light because she had grown up inside it, at the level where it was made of beer signs and pawnshops and the cold coming off the river, and she did not think the word the woman wanted was the right one for it, and she did not think the woman would believe her if she said so.

“I think it’s honest,” Helen said. “It is what it says it is. People come here to do one true thing and then they go home.”

The woman looked at her.

“That is not an answer,” she said, but she was smiling a little.

“No,” Helen said. “I know.”

The woman left a large bill on the tray and told her to keep it, and gathered the small beaded bag, and stood, and took one more look at the valley laid out in the glass. Then she went to the elevator. Helen watched the doors close on her, on the gray dress and the pearls, and watched the brass arrow over the doors swing down through the numbers, twelve, eleven, ten, carrying her down through the floors of the tower toward the desk and the morning and the train, down toward the street where Otto had poured the beer, and Helen stood at the window with the tray in her hand and the town below her full of light, and she did not yet go back to her room.

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