“She was just about, at that.”

“And she married both of the grandfathers, I suppose, and now she lives in a log cabin, too, all alone. That right?”

“It sure isn’t. No husband now, anyway, that’s the funny part of it, though they say when she came to Alaska there were about a hundred men to every woman, she could have married any one of them except Czar and Thor, and they say she was in love with both of them. It’s all kind of mixed up, don’t expect me to straighten it out. Anyway, you don’t see Bridie living in any log cabin. The Ice Palace is quaint enough for Bridie.”

“Is that what you folks call it? The Ice Palace?”

“Mostly we do. Its real name is the Kennedy Building. When it was built and finished the opening day Thor ran an editorial in the Northern Light. Something like this: ‘Ice Palace. That could be the name of all Alaska. The people inside can see out, but the people outside can’t see in, though it looks transparent.’ He’s a wise old boy, Thor Storm. Czar too, in another way, of course. Chris has got her hands full, managing those two grandfathers.”

Nick, the proprietor of the popular Caribou Café had, appropriately enough, been responsible for the nickname by which the Kennedy Building was locally known. Nick’s café handily occupied the imposing plate-glass corner at street level just next to the entrance. On the day the Kennedy Building was opened with formal festivities, and the Governor up from Juneau, Nick mischievously had arranged an arresting display in his restaurant window. Carelessly piled in a sizable heap were Alaska native stones and metals. There were glittering quartz and mica, dull green jade, chunks of mottled marble, lumps of coal. Affably mingling with these lowly members of the native geological family were stones streaked with silver, lumps flecked with gold, chunks veined with copper; a scattering of tungsten, nickel, cobalt, chrome, tin. There were even crumbs of precious platinum, Nick being a perfectionist. It all added up to an interesting miniature display of the mineral resources of Alaska. But this had not been Nick’s pixy purpose.

Topping the haphazard mound was a large lettered sign, black on white. Nick’s unvenerable white head had waggled in an appreciation of his own humor as he outlined the letters.

STONES
Contributed by Tenants of the
ICE PALACE
As They Have
NO FURTHER USE FOR THEM

After that it never was called the Kennedy Building. The Ice Palace. No one could understand why he hadn’t improved the little joke by calling it the Glass House. Newcomers assumed that Ice Palace was the building’s real name.

For that matter, Ott Decker might have explained that Czar Kennedy’s real name wasn’t Czar; but this change had occurred half a century ago, and no one remembered it. Signing for his claim he had written his signature with a Spencerian flourish—Z. Kennedy. His Massachusetts Bible-reading parents had named the child Zebedee after the father of the apostles James and John. His school days had been tormented by the chants and horrid rhymes his schoolmates had been able to devise from its unaccustomed and, somehow, comic syllables.