The White Columns

The key still worked, which surprised Hannah Lichtenstein a little, because she had been let into the building on Riverside Drive under so many different owners over so many years that she half expected each one to have changed the locks on the last. The city owned it now. Before the city it had been the arts festival, and before the festival a theater coalition, and before the coalition a widow’s gift and a church, and the church had built it in 1939 and worshiped in it for sixty years and sold it and moved on, and through all of that Hannah had come and gone with a key somebody handed her, because she was the one who kept showing up. She was fifty-seven. She had first walked into this building to try to save it when she was in her thirties, and she was still trying, and it was still empty, and the two facts had been true together for so long now that she no longer felt the contradiction in them.

She let herself in and stood in the cool dark of the lobby and let her eyes adjust. Outside, the Truckee ran past in the October light and the white columns of the portico threw their long shadows down the steps, the columns everyone in town knew, the ones you could see from the river path, from the bridge, from the window of a passing car. A famous architect had drawn them, a Black man out of Los Angeles who had built houses for movie stars in a country that in his own lifetime would not always rent him a room, and he had given this desert town a small white temple on a river, and a wealthy woman of the church had paid for the whole of it and hired him to do it. Then, when the church was long gone and the building sat dark and threatened, an aviator’s widow had put up better than a million dollars to keep the wreckers off it, on the condition the town matched her, and the town had, and they had named it for her husband and promised to make it a theater at last. That had been almost thirty years ago. Hannah had stood in the crowd the day they announced it, young and certain, and she had believed, the way you believe things at that age, that the saving was the hard part and the rest would follow.

The rest had not followed. They had opened it once, for a season, two decades back, put a few shows on the little stage and then run out of money and closed the doors, and the doors had stayed closed. The plaster went. The roof needed work no one could fund. It passed from the coalition to the festival, and the festival, worn down, had finally offered simply to give it away to anyone who would fix it, and no one had, and in the end the city itself had bought it, and Hannah had let herself believe again, because the city had money the volunteers never had. The city had hired the good architects and paid them to write the thick report that told everyone what everyone already knew, that the building was sound and worth saving and would cost a great deal. Then the city had put the first real work out to bid last fall and not one contractor had bid on it, not one, and over the winter the council had quietly moved the money to other things, and now, this autumn, a woman Hannah did not know, a photographer, had written the city a letter offering to buy the place and try herself, and the council was going to sit and decide whether to sell.

Hannah walked up the aisle in the dark. She knew this was not really her fight in the way people meant when they said a thing was somebody’s fight. She was not of this church. Her people had kept a different faith entirely, had come to this town as dry-goods merchants when it was young and had helped raise the first synagogue it ever had, a plain brick building on West Street a few blocks from where she now stood. She had grown up hearing about that building the way other children heard fairy tales, the high holy days in it, her grandfather on its founding board, her father a boy in its pews. And she had grown up hearing, too, how it had ended, condemned in her father’s middle age, the timbers gone soft, vacated one last New Year’s and torn down the following year, and how the ground it had stood on was now, and had been for fifty years, a parking garage for a casino. You could not put a plaque on a parking garage. There was nothing to save because there was nothing left. Her father had helped dedicate the new temple across town and had been glad of it and had never once, in Hannah’s hearing, forgiven the town for the old one.

That was the thing she had never been able to make the council members understand, the ones who asked her, kindly, in meetings, why she cared so much about a church she did not belong to. She cared because she had seen the other ending. She had seen what a town looked like after it let a building go, the flat nothing where a hundred years of somebody’s mornings had been, the way the loss did not even leave a mark you could point to, the way the young people came up not grieving it because they had never known it was there to grieve. A saved building was a quarrel that never ended, a leaking roof and a bid that came back empty and a fight you were still fighting at fifty-seven. A lost building was quiet. It was the quietest thing in the world. She had chosen the quarrel a long time ago and she did not regret it, even standing here in the dust of the thing she had not yet won.

She reached the front and turned and looked back down the length of the empty room toward the doors, the light coming gray through the high windows, the seats that had held an audience for one short season and no other, and she stood there a while in the cold. Then she went back down the aisle and crossed the lobby and put her hand on the heavy front door and pushed it open, all the way open, and propped it, the way you do when a place is about to receive people, though no people were coming, not today. The river light came up the steps and in across the floor. The columns stood white in the sun. Somewhere across town the council would meet and decide, this month or the next or the one after that, and Hannah did not know what they would choose, and she had stopped needing to know before she did the small thing in front of her. She left the door standing open to the river and went down the steps to wait, again, for the town to make up its mind about what it was willing to keep.

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