The Tallest Building

Michael Fitzgerald had been twelve when his grandfather died, and he remembered the funeral more for the rain than for any words spoken over the grave. Now, at twenty-eight, standing in the iron frame of what would be the Riverside Hotel, he understood that Patrick had built something different from what Michael was building. His grandfather had worn the uniform of the law. Michael wore dust.

The skeleton of the building rose six stories above Virginia Street, high enough that when Michael looked down from the upper levels, the Truckee River looked like a line drawn by someone in a hurry. It was April 1927, and the high desert wind came across the river cold and insistent, smelling of snow melt from the mountains. The scaffolding swayed in ways that made newer men nervous. Michael had learned not to notice.

He was a riveter, one of six men who worked the upper frames. The job required precision and a kind of balance that came from doing the same motion five hundred times a day. Position the rivet. Strike it. Move on. The sound of the rivet gun had become the sound of money, which was something his grandmother had taught him to recognize early. Bridget Fitzgerald, who had come from Cork with nothing but the ability to work, had raised her son to understand that a steady job was the closest thing to security a man could hold.

Patrick had believed in respectability. The uniform meant something to him. Michael had never asked his father why he had never become a policeman himself, only that he hadn’t. Instead, the men in Michael’s generation worked construction, or they drove cars, or they worked in the hotels that were changing what Reno was becoming. Those were the visible routes up.

George Wingfield owned this hotel. Everyone knew that. Wingfield owned most of Reno, or at least the parts of it that mattered. The newspapers carried his picture every few weeks, usually in connection with some new enterprise or some meeting of the bankers who answered to him. Michael had never seen him, though Frederic DeLongchamps, the architect, had walked the site twice. Michael had recognized him because the foreman had pointed him out. DeLongchamps was a small man with the kind of bearing that made him seem larger. He did not look at the workers.

The building was supposed to be the tallest in Nevada when it was finished. Six stories. Michael tried to imagine being at the top of it, looking out over the city he had grown up in, but the image would not hold in his mind. He could hold a rivet true, could read a blueprint well enough, could judge distances and weights and the integrity of a joint. But the idea of the building itself, as a whole thing, was too large for him to carry.

What he could carry was the rhythm of the work. Rise at five. Walk to the site. Check the rivets on the previous day’s work. Position the new ones. Strike them home. Five hundred times. A thousand. The men he worked with were mostly Irish like him, or Italian, or Mexican. They did not speak much. There was a radio on one of the lower levels that played through the morning. Sometimes someone brought coffee in a tin.

His mother had asked him, the night before he started, if it bothered him that the hotel would belong to Wingfield. “It will be your building too,” she had said, which was the kind of thing mothers said. Michael had not bothered to explain that this was exactly why he did not think about ownership. What mattered was that the work was sound, that the rivets held, that the iron stayed true. If Wingfield wanted to own it after that, fine.

By late April, the upper frames were nearly complete. Michael found himself looking out more often, not at the city below but at the river itself, the way it moved regardless of what men built beside it. The Truckee had been here longer than Reno. It would be here longer than the Riverside Hotel. That should have been depressing, but Michael found it clarifying. It placed things at their proper scale.

One afternoon, working the south wall, Michael noticed an older man watching from the street. Not Wingfield, not DeLongchamps. Just someone, standing and looking up. Michael had learned early that people stood and looked at construction the way they stood and looked at fires. There was something about watching a thing being made that held people’s attention.

He struck the rivet, moved on, did not look again.

By May, the real work was done. What remained was finishing, the filling in of the gaps, the interior work that did not require men like Michael. The foreman told him there would be other sites soon, other buildings. There always were. Michael nodded, collected his pay, and walked home along the river.

The Fitzgerald house was small, the way it had always been. His mother was working at one of the hotels now, had worked her way up from housekeeping to managing schedules. She had Bridget’s practical intelligence, though not her accent. Michael had no accent at all, just the speech of someone born here.

“They say it’s beautiful,” his mother said that night, meaning the hotel.

“It’s a building,” Michael said.

“Your grandfather would have been proud of you.”

Michael thought about Patrick in his uniform, about the respectability that had mattered to him. He thought about Bridget in her boarding house, cooking steadily, saving, building something smaller and more reliable than tall buildings.

“It’s just work,” he said.

But when he walked past the Riverside a month later, the exterior complete, he felt something that was not quite pride and was not quite regret. It was the recognition of having made something that would stand. For how long, he did not know. Long enough, probably. The river would still be there after. And the men who built it would move on to other sites, other rivers, other tall buildings that would eventually fall or be forgotten or just stand there in the desert, doing what buildings do.

Michael kept walking. There was always another job. There was always work that needed doing. And in that constancy, he understood, was the closest his life would come to permanence.

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