The switchboard lit up all at once, the whole face of it, and Lucy knew before anyone told her.
She worked the board at the hotel on the river, evenings mostly, plugging the calls through and taking the room numbers and saying the hotel’s name in the bright even voice they wanted, and she had learned every ordinary rhythm the board had, the dinner rush and the late slow hours and the dead middle of the afternoon. This was no rhythm she knew. Every light on the board came up together, the outside lines and the house lines both, guests calling down and the town calling in, and under her feet through the floor she felt rather than heard the first of it start, a sound going up out of the street like water coming to a boil.
“It’s the Japanese,” the day girl said, who had stayed past her shift with her coat already on. “They’ve quit. It came over the radio. Truman said it. They’ve surrendered.”
Lucy plugged a line and unplugged it. Her hands kept working while the rest of her caught up. Four years. She had been twenty-two when it started and she was twenty-six now, and it had been the whole shape of her grown life, the rationing and the flags in the windows and the boys from the air base out east coming through town in their uniforms, and the lists in the paper, and now a man on the radio had said a word and it was over, just like that, on a warm night in August.
The street would not let her think. It came up through the building louder and louder, car horns first, a few, then all of them, and then the sirens from the firehouse, and then something she took a moment to place and then knew was people, thousands of people, pouring out onto Virginia Street under the arch and simply making noise because there was nothing else large enough to do. The board went quiet as fast as it had lit, the guests all gone downstairs and out, and the outside lines stopped ringing because everyone who might have called was already in the street. Lucy sat alone in front of the dark board for a moment in the emptied office. Then she took off the headset and set it down and went to see.
The lobby was streaming out the doors. She let it carry her, out under the marquee and into it, and the town she had lived in all her life was gone and this other town stood in its place, every light burning, the casino doors thrown open, strangers with their arms around strangers, a soldier kissing a girl he could not have known against a lamppost, paper coming down out of the upper windows like snow, torn adding-machine tape and shredded telephone books and whatever people could find to throw. Over the whole of it the arch blazed across the street with the town’s own boast strung along it in lights, the biggest little city, and tonight it did not seem like a boast, it seemed like the plain truth, that the whole world had ended its war and here was Reno saying so with every bulb it owned.
She stood at the edge of it and let it wash over her and felt her eyes go hot, and it was joy, most of it was joy, she would not pretend it was not. But there was something in it that was only hers, standing in that crowd, that none of the kissing strangers could have known was there.
It was Japan they had beaten. That was the thing. For everyone around her the enemy had been an idea, a headline, the far side of an ocean. For Lucy’s people it had been longer and closer than that. Her father still had cousins in the villages the Japanese army had gone through, in the years before this country was even in the war, and the letters had stopped coming a long time ago, and no one in her family said out loud what they thought the silence meant. Tonight the thing that had done that was finished. She stood in the roaring street and thought of the cousins whose faces she had never seen and would now perhaps never learn the fate of, and the joy and the grief came up together and she could not have told anyone which was which.
And there was the other thing, quieter still. Her great-grandfather Wei had come to this country to lay the railroad and had stayed and washed other men’s shirts in a laundry down by the river his whole life, and he had never once been allowed to become a citizen of the place, because the law had said a man like him could not, no matter how long he lived here or how well. That law had only just been struck down, two years back, in the middle of all this, when it turned out the country needed China for a friend against Japan and could no longer afford to say to the whole world that the Chinese were unfit. Her father could put in his papers now. She could. Wei never could, and Wei was gone, and it had taken a war on the far side of the earth to change a single line in a book, and Lucy stood in the celebrating street and held both of those facts at once, that it was too late for the old man and not too late for her.
Somebody pressed a bottle into her hand and she passed it on. Somebody else was crying and laughing at the same time, which seemed to her exactly right, the only sane way to take a night like this. The band from one of the clubs had come out onto the sidewalk and was playing without much agreement about the key.
She did not want to stand at the edge anymore. She wanted her family. Her sister Helen would be somewhere in this, she had worked the servicemen’s canteen the whole war and she would not have missed the end of it for anything, and their father would be at home down near Lake Street where the last of the old quarter still stood, sitting up, too old and too careful to come out into a crowd like this but wanting to hear it told. Lucy could take him the night. She could sit on the step with him where the laundry used to be and tell him what the street looked like, and they could say Wei’s name between them, which was a thing you were allowed to do on a night when a war had ended.
She turned out of the crowd and started walking toward the river and the old streets on the far side of it, the noise falling away a little behind her with every block, the paper still drifting down through the lit air, and she went to find the people she wanted to be standing next to when the noise finally stopped.
Japan’s surrender was announced in the United States on the evening of August 14, 1945; the formal signing came weeks later, on September 2. Celebrations broke out that night in cities and towns across the country. In 1945 Reno’s downtown was anchored by the Riverside and Golden hotels, Harolds Club, and the arch spanning Virginia Street; the Reno Army Air Base lay to the southeast, and a remnant of the city’s old Chinese quarter still stood along Lake Street. The Chinese Exclusion Act, which had long barred Chinese immigrants from citizenship, had been repealed in December 1943 as the United States and China fought Japan as allies.