Ice Palace
FIRST VINTAGE EBOOKS EDITION, MARCH 2014
Copyright © 1958 by Edna Ferber
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday and Company, Inc., New York, in 1958.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Vintage ISBN: 978-0-345-80614-7
www.vintagebooks.com
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
1
EVERY THIRD WOMAN you passed on Gold Street in Baranof was young, pretty, and pregnant. The men, too, were young, virile, and pregnant with purpose. Each, making his or her way along the bustling business street, seemed actually to bounce with youth and vitality. Only an occasional old sourdough, relic dating back to the gold-rush days of fifty years ago, wattled and wary as a turkey cock, weaving his precarious pedestrian way in and out of the frisky motor traffic, gave the humming town a piquant touch of anachronism.
An exhilarating street, Gold, though the stores and office buildings that lined it—one- or two-story cement or wooden structures—were commonplace and even shabby. The enlivening quality was inexplicable, but ardent Alaskans sometimes attributed it to the piercing quality of the Arctic light and the dryness of the atmosphere. Middle-aged tourists, weary after thousands of miles of travel over this seemingly boundless territory—whether by plane or by a combination of plane, train, ship and automobile—were puzzled and plaintive as they viewed the haphazard town of Baranof for the first time.
“Everybody walks as if they had springs in their shoes. Or maybe it’s because you’re all so young.”
If the visitor’s guide happened to be Ott Decker, Secretary of the Baranof Chamber of Commerce, he would reject this with the mysterious lightheartedness that seemed to suffuse most near-Arctic citizens.
“Young’s got nothing to do with it. Around here you can live to be a hundred, easy, unless you’re shot, or your plane cracks up on you, or a bear sees you first.”
“Well, it’s something. A kind of a crazy something. No offense. I just mean, what makes them bounce?”
“My opinion, it’s the violet rays or the magnetic pole—we’re not so far from the North Pole, you know, when it comes right down to geography—or it’s the radiant northern, uh, isotopes or something.”
“Now wait a minute. Just a minute. Radiant. I always understood you had winter about eight months in the year, and no sun to speak of.”
“That’s right. But you feel great. And summers! Say—summers! Like today. Daylight round the clock twenty-four hours. And you know what? You don’t need sleep. You feel hopped up all the time. Take the Eskimos up there in Kotzebue and Oogruk and Barrow and around where it’s really tough going. Always laughing their heads off. For what! They got nothing to laugh at. They just feel good. Everybody feels good. I don’t know. It’s a kind of a balloon feeling.”
It was true that everything in Baranof seemed exaggerated. Edges sharper. Skies bluer. Mountains higher, snow deeper, temperature lower, daylight longer, sunlight briefer, depending on the season. The very air sometimes seemed more utterly still than anywhere else in the world, yet it pulsed almost palpably with life. When the wind blew it blew harder. Down in southeast Alaska—the region facetiously called the Banana Belt—the Taku screeched and whistled about your ears in season. In the remote north villages on the Bering Sea or the Arctic Ocean the polar blasts in February could strangle the breath in your throat and force it back into the reluctant lungs. Deceived by the dry air, you could freeze your face and walk about, unknowing. Baranof wore parkas, fur-hooded, through the winter. This gave pedestrians the anonymity of dominoes at a masquerade. There was a favorite joke, often quoted. “Winters in Baranof, speak to anything that moves. If it’s standing still, call the ambulance.”
Off to school on the bitter black winter mornings the children were round bundles of wool and fur, their eyes peering out like those of small woodland creatures in a nest. Mothers, standing briefly in the doorway, would call, “Now remember, don’t run! Even if you’re late—don’t run.” They knew the danger of the quick intake of breath like icy knives into the warm scarlet lung tissue.
Across the winter night sky swept the northern lights, eerie dazzling curtains of swaying green and blue and orange. Then, miraculously, June came, it was summer, it was daylight round the clock. The thermometer that had registered sixty below zero in January now might show ninety above. Yet there was Baranof and much more of Alaska besides, dry and cool, energetic and somewhat crazily high-keyed in an agreeable way under the constant compulsion of the weird Arctic sun. Up, up far north in Barrow on the shore of the frozen Arctic Ocean the United States flag whipped aloft in the wind for eighty days and eighty nights, for there was during that period no sunset hour in which to lower it. If you happened to be soaring in a comfortably cosy plane above Bering’s ice-locked coast, nibbling a ham sandwich and sipping hot strong coffee, you could see just over there, beyond the two island dots that were the Big Diomede and the Little Diomede, the black strangely menacing line that was the coast of Siberia.
But here in mid-Alaska a kind of carefree mood took hold. Baranof stayed out of doors every possible minute. You played baseball at midnight. Your wife tended her garden at eleven P.M. Your children frisked like leprechauns far into the night. Perhaps you slept from midnight through the hour or two of rosy twilight until, like a blindingly dazzling scimitar thrust through a scarlet velvet curtain, the sun rose again at one or two o’clock in the morning. This brief interlude of repose seemed, magically, to suffice, both for the sun and you.
If you were young and in love you might stroll hand in hand down to the water’s edge to delight romantically in the glorious color above and the pastel reflection below. Mount McKinley, king of all the peaks on the North American continent, white-crowned in the summer, white-robed in the winter, looked in this midsummer midnight light like the gods’ Valhalla—or a gigantic scoop of raspberry and orange sherbet. Baranof citizens adjusted to this summer-winter variant of one hundred and fifty degrees as nonchalantly as they digested the local moose steaks in January or the monster home-grown strawberries in August.
As for grubby Gold Street—it compensated in scenery for what it lacked in architectural grace. At one end the shabby thoroughfare met the mountains that reared their incredible height, peak on peak, a screaming white. At the other end the water curved to hold the town in its icy arms. It was a setting of diamonds and pearls surrounding a blob of agate.
If you were an Important Person arriving by air to visit Baranof you were officially met at the smart little airport by Bridie Ballantyne or Ott Decker or both. If you were a Very Important Person you were met by Chris Storm. Christine Storm. Only her grandfather Czar Kennedy and her grandfather Thor Storm called her Christine. As First Assistant to the General Manager of Alaska Public Relations, Christine Storm’s appearance was likely to mislead the average tourist; but then, she never was assigned to small fry. She was reserved for any visiting President of the United States who condescended to the Territory (none in her day); Senators and Congressmen (National); Big Business Types (with Wife); Big Game Hunters (minus Wife) with guides flying small maneuverable planes in search of polar white or mammoth brown bears.
Born in Alaska, the daughter of a father and mother born in Alaska, the granddaughter of two grandfathers who were considered Alaska history, Chris Storm was almost as outstanding as Mount McKinley. Certainly in the wintertime, if assigned to a Very Distinguished Visitor, Chris was a striking figure there at the airport gateway as the big four-engine plane from Seattle drummed down out of the heights to the runway that now stretched its impressive length in what had been, less than a half century ago, literally a howling wilderness.
Dramatically, she dressed the part of native daughter. Her official winter greeting costume was a pure white fox parka intricately bordered with a delicate frieze of Eskimo symbols in black sealskin. Her grandfather Thor Storm had told her that some of these symbols were phallic or otherwise sexual, which interested her, as did all Eskimo lore, and sometimes, quite matter-of-factly, she would obligingly explain these to inquiring visitors.
“My, that’s a lovely coat!” the wife of a V.I.P. from Outside would exclaim.
“It’s called a parka, and we pronounce it parky, no one knows why.”
“All those little figures and things in the border. Now that one—it looks like two little hills with a valley between. Do the signs have any significance, do they mean anything, sort of like the writing on caves and tombs in the Orient? Mr. Rauschenbusch and I took a trip around the world last year.”
“Oh, that. That’s part of a legend in which an Eskimo sees the back of his wife as she bends over the cooking pot, he dreams he must find his way through the two hills to the valley.”
“What! Sh! The men will hear you. What’s this one?”
The white fox parka, with its hood of white wolf, was a fitting frame for the girl’s brilliant face. Slim white fur mukluks and gloves completed the dazzling effect—too dazzling, her enemies said. In the rather rueful way she sometimes had when speaking of herself Chris agreed with them. “In this outfit I look like that girl in the beer ads. But it’s good Alaska publicity.”
Then, in summer, hot or cold from June to September, Chris’s costume as Greeter and Guide was the most feminine of cottons or silks, her golden arms bare, the bodice fashionably low cut, as proof that Alaska was a summer resort.
Visitors often mistook her for something purely ornamental, like the scenery. They were completely wrong. They were wrong about the scenery too. Hidden in those fabulous peaks and creeks and torrents were copper and gold and uranium and platinum and cobalt and tin and tungsten and nickel and lead; in the tundra and flatlands coal and oil; in the vast streams and inlets and seas millions of finned and furred creatures from salmon to seals to whales. But they were not for the casual passer-by. Beneath Chris Storm’s shining surface, too, there were hidden treasures and wonders of mind and heart and spirit.
The three Baranof Professional Public Relations stars used three quite different weapons with which to do battle with the world known as Outside. Christine, deceptively blithe and débonnaire, tickled you with a poniard of gaiety, but you never felt sure that she might not drive it suddenly into your ribs. Bridie Ballantyne used a verbal shillelagh wrapped in cotton velvet. Ott Decker, good Chamber of Commerce Secretary that he was, just laid on with a shovel.
For example, though her laugh was merry, her way lighthearted, Chris’s statements were sometimes dramatic. Listeners were likely to recall them, thoughtfully, following the more spectacular moments of their trip.
“Yes,” she would agree, apparently in charming deference to the stranger’s comment. “Yes, this is a gigantic wilderness. With neon lights, of course; and hydrogen bombs and dog sleds and radar and Eskimos and crab meat au gratin and skin boats and juke boxes and art exhibits and symphony concerts; and moose sometimes ambling down Gold Street in a real tough winter.”
The Visitor from Outside, puzzled and vaguely resentful, would wave an arm with a gesture that embraced the incredible landscape.
“Some country you got here, that’s for sure. I thought it would be different. Of course, it’s different, all right, but other ways it’s more like back home than I thought. Not like it, exactly, but—–”
“We’re people—all kinds of people—just like you in the States. We’re white and black and brown and young and old and smart and dumb. But we’re absolutely different in one way.”
“How’s that?”
“Would you like to pay government taxes if you couldn’t have a voice in the state you live in, and couldn’t vote for President of the United States? Would you like taxation without representation?”
This challenge they found disconcerting in a girl as attractive as Chris. “I’ll say I wouldn’t like it. I wouldn’t stand for it. Why don’t you write your Congressman and Senator in Washington, tell ’em to get on the job, or out?”
“Don’t you know that Alaska has no Congressman or Senator in Washington! We’re a Territory. Everything we do, and everything the Territory yields, goes out. Outside. Everything goes out and nothing stays in. Gold. Copper. Timber. Fish. Millions and millions and millions a year. Outside. We’re slaves.”
“Oh, now, say!” After all, the Visitor had not come all this long distance to listen to soapbox speeches, even though delivered by a pretty girl. “What’s a girl like you bothering her head about whether you vote for President? Let him worry. I know what I’d do if I was President. I’d appoint you a Cabinet Member. Secretary of Beauty. You’d send bunches of beauty delegates over to Russia, they’d send bunches over here. No more war. The Russians keep sending over those bullet-headed fellows with eyes like mean oysters. Who loves them! Nobody.”
Perhaps, casually, an Outsider undergoing the Visitor’s Treatment might say, “Where’s your home, Miss Storm? You certainly don’t look like an Alaskan.”
They did not know that Christine Storm had been known to Alaskans since the day of her fantastic birth. She had become a legend.
“I don’t know how you think Alaskans should look. But I’m an Alaskan.”
“That right! Born right here in Baranof?”
“I was born in a caribou in a blizzard up in the Wood River country.”
Baffled, smiling uncertainly, the visitor might catch the word caribou and cling to it. “Caribou? Let’s see now, there’s a town called Caribou, I think it’s in North Dakota though. Or was it Canada I saw it? But I understood you to say you were Alaska-born.”
“I didn’t mean a town called Caribou. I meant a caribou.”
“I don’t get it. I must be dumb.”
“A caribou is a huge sort of reindeer and I was bora inside of one that my father shot when he and my mother were caught in a blizzard on a hunting trip. I wasn’t due for another three months but they say my mother was one of those dauntless girls—a kind of Alaska version of the Scott Fitzgerald type that was the fashion then. Grandpa Kennedy—her father—had sent her to Vassar, she knew Edna St. Vincent Millay. Anyway, what with the blinding blizzard and the stumbling around, and no shelter, and only the dog sled, I started ahead of time. Even if my father had had a chance to build a snow-block shelter, there wasn’t time. By some miracle he shot a caribou. He slit the caribou’s belly and gutted it and put my mother inside on the furs from the sled, it was blood-warm for a little while, and sheltered, and it kept her from freezing and me, too. And that’s where I was born.”