Run Cold

by Ed Ifkovic

  Now, equally spurred on by Sonia’s clippings of “White Silence” mailed to me in Manhattan, I was back. I wanted that Alaska.

  The vacant-eyed Indians on that cold street.

  “Where’s Noah?” My first question to Sonia when she met me at the airport.

  She shook her head. “Settling some Indian dispute in Valdez. He’ll fly in tomorrow morning. He’ll be at dinner tomorrow night.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Charming, no?”

  “Very.”

  “He can’t wait to see you again.” Her eyes twinkled. “You’ll be seeing too much of him, Edna. The Nordale lounge is his home away from home.”

  I loved the venerable Nordale. Not the most up-to-date hotel, a little tired and drab, but homey, like a remembered bedroom from a happy childhood. The busy lounge attracted a cross-section of Alaska. Scraggly drifters out of the Bush, their eyes with the wide-awake look of someone who’d survived an Arctic white night. Up-and-coming young professionals with their smart briefcases and California suits. Tourists from the Lower Forty-eight with their well-thumbed guidebooks, their cars parked outside bearing “Alaska or Bust” bumper stickers, their hands clutching birchwood carvings. Whole novels could be written in that room.

  Yet it was the scene at the Model Café that disturbed my late-afternoon nap—what was that all about? Jack Mabie and Preston Strange. Two unpleasant men. Unable to fall asleep, I sat by my window, staring out at the bleak, dead landscape.

  At seven Hank Petrievich sent a car for me, and I headed to the two-story clapboard Petrievich home fronting the frozen Chena River outside of downtown Fairbanks. Bundled in a hooded parka, a woolen scarf, fur-lined mittens, even the mukluks I’d been given on previous visits north—had I had a chance I would have shamelessly commandeered the coverlet from my bed at the Nordale—I thanked Henry, my driver, and rushed inside, where a fireplace blazed.

  Sonia was late. “Long, long hours at the news office,” her mother Irina whispered. “Her obsession.” She hugged me. “Good to see you again, Edna.”

  Hank came from behind me, shook my hand vigorously, and repeated what seemed to be the prevailing sentiment, “A surprise, your visit.”

  “A few loose strings.”

  Irina turned her head, her eyes cloudy.

  “Atmosphere,” I added.

  Yes, drunken Indians outside a seedy bar, clutching bottles of stale beer. A landscape of dreaming and loneliness. Despair. Even—the celebration of murder. Jack Mabie, folk hero.

  “Sonia was thrilled when she heard you were returning,” Hank said. “The two of you became so close…”

  I looked into his beaming face, this man who looked younger than his years, towering, sinewy, with an ashy face under a huge bushel of white-gray hair, a man so tall he seemed to lope when he moved, like a romping wilderness beast. His handsome face bore an old-fashioned moustache, still blackened, bushy, in sharp contrast to his hair. There was about him a hint of the old frontiersman. He’d been born in Sitka, the old Russian capital, in 1892, of a pioneering Slavic family, had drifted to Fairbanks as a young man, made a fortune in fur trading and timber, and lived a baronial life in the boom-and-bust frontier town, publisher of the weekly Fairbanks Gold Dust Gazette, which locals simply called The Gold. A pro-statehood zealot.

  Despite his money, he always appeared to be in a rumpled suit with a feathered fedora on his head. A boastful man, sure of himself—yet I liked him. Most men filled with braggadocio annoyed me, yet I found Hank amusing. Last summer, flying back to Seattle, I’d realized why I liked him: Hank Petrievich, despite his millions and his power, seemed nothing more than an eager little boy running through a backyard with his first BB gun, taking aim at birds winging their way over Fairbanks rooftops.

  I caught Irina’s eye, and the woman squinted, nervous. A small, mousy woman dressed in ill-fitting smocks that must have cost hundreds, she reminded me of a Calvinist schoolmarm with her gray hair pulled back into a neat bun, yet with hard blue eyes stuck onto a soft face. A woman who catered to a demanding husband, she spoke in a feathery, whispered voice. Perpetually dressed in black and gray and mauve, she struck me as Whistler’s Mother transplanted to a frontier and left without the rocker she craved. But there was something about Irina that I never could quite grasp. Those steely eyes suggested intelligence kept masked, deliberately hidden behind the obedience. Not quite Patient Griselda by the fireside. Something else there: a fierceness, the quiet mama bear ready to take action.

  Last year I’d concluded that Irina would have preferred a life out of the limelight, away from the boldface newspaper world, the politics, the entrepreneurs. She didn’t want to be looked at. A life italicized unnerved her.

  Irina, smiling, told me she’d prepared a true Alaskan supper, and I quaked. I’d had my fill of moose head soup, whale blubber ice cream, bush rabbit stew with spruce root and wild celery. But Irina surprised me with a credible steak—caribou, I supposed, since I was convinced all Alaskan steak was caribou caught on the run, the misguided animal wandering down Second Avenue at midday, blinded by ice fog—a steak a little too chewy but still rich and satisfying. Robust winter potatoes doused with butter and cream, and a rare green salad, flown in from Seattle, I was told. The meal finished with wild blueberry pie, a sweet confection in a brown flaky crust, delicious with a scoop of ice cream that did not originate from some part of a beluga whale.

  Hank and Irina, and their son, Paul, were at dinner. I recalled Paul as a genial shadow, so unlike his hale fare-thee-well father. Paul simply was there, tucked into a chair in the corner. He reminded me of his mother, though he was as tall as his father, but thin, almost frail, droopy-eyed, handsome in a Sorrows of Young Werther melancholic way. A Russian blondness, pale, freckly. What little I knew of him I’d gleaned from his parents last summer. He was, Irina had whispered, unambitious. He worked on The Gold, but halfheartedly, a company drone, unhappy, and he talked constantly of abandoning Alaska. This stance, I knew, was sacrilege in a family whose members defined themselves by century-old genealogy and distance from “Outside.”

  What was clear to me was Hank’s unabashed favorite—Sonia was his darling. Yes, she mimicked his passion for news and Alaska, but she had an infectious spirit—you liked Sonia because she laughed easily, held your eye, listened to your stories. A contradiction in some ways: a fiery muckraking journalist who wanted to be your best friend. Her writing was incendiary, purposely provocative, but she came off as the girl next door—friendly, bubbly, filled with neighborhood gossip.

  Paul seemed a footnote in that family. Their mother told me, “Sometimes I despair of my two children. Paul the dark side of the moon, Sonia the noontime sun.”

  Once, having lunch with Sonia last summer, Paul nodded at us from across the room. “He doesn’t realize how much he hates my father,” Sonia had remarked.

  Her words surprised me. “Why?”

  “My father forgives Paul and me—especially me—our lapses and mistakes. I’m his…indulgence. Sometimes that’s hard to deal with. Paul, I think, wishes our father spanked him more. Dad never learned how to deal with his children.”

  Now, tonight, with Paul saying little, the conversation turned to Hank’s monomaniacal theme: statehood.

  “Within a year,” Hank crowed, his voice swelling.

  “You think so?” I asked.

  Irina added, “Richard Russell of Georgia said that no reasonable soul would consider living in Alaska.”

  No one laughed.

  “I hope you put that in your book.” Irina leaned into me.

  “No, my book is a novel, fiction, a story of a family—two families…” I paused. “A romantic tale, though with a little satirical venom. Giant with ice instead of oil.”

  Paul held up his hand. “I think Miss Ferber has heard all this before.”

  Restless, he stood and began moving around the roo
m, my eyes following him, though his parents’ didn’t. He walked to the sideboard, poured himself a drink, lingered there, then circled the table. When he walked by his mother, she instinctively reached out and gripped his wrist, a peculiar, affectionate though possessive gesture. He smiled back at her.

  His remark hung in the air.

  Hank looked at me, his face tense. “Are we boring you, Edna?” Then he glanced at his son. Standing, Hank poured himself another shot of whiskey, downing it quickly. He shivered. He was starting to slur his words, his eyes a little watery.

  “Not at all,” I lied.

  But Paul’s snide remark to his father had shifted the tone of the conversation. Tension built in the room as both men, standing, feet apart, eyed each other. Irina, nervous, jumped up, called to Millie, and the bashful woman emerged from the kitchen with a tray. The two women began clearing dishes while I sipped coffee and waited. The phone rang and Hank excused himself.

  Silence. When I glanced at Paul, he was smiling.

  “It must have been something I said, Miss Ferber.” A rascal’s twinkle in his eye.

  I smiled. “It’s usually me who clears a room, Paul.”

  A rush of movement came from the hallway as Sonia flew into the room, apologizing for her lateness, giving me a hasty hug—she smelled like lilac perfume and sweet powder—and then toppling into a chair. She poured herself a cup of coffee, leaned over to the sideboard, tipping her chair slightly. Deftly, she laced the brew with a finger of whiskey. She caught my eye and smiled. “The long, long Fairbanks winter.” She took a sip and stared at me over the rim. A lazy laugh, warm.

  I didn’t answer. Paul slumped in his seat, his tongue rolled into his cheek. Brother and sister, both blond and fair, but Paul was a pale reflection of his sunburst sister. It dawned on me—twins.

  “Twins?”

  “You didn’t know?” asked Sonia.

  Paul was frowning. He stood back up, began moving idly, his fingers straightening a painting on the wall. His back to us, his shoulders tight.

  I could hear Hank on the phone in another room, his voice rushed, anxious to end the conversation.

  “That’s why I always know what Paul is thinking,” Sonia said.

  Paul mumbled, but with a slight laugh. “If you knew what I’m thinking now…”

  Sonia ignored that, reaching out and gripping my hand. “So happy you’re here.”

  The outspoken daughter of a powerful man, Sonia had established a name for herself as an editor at The Gold. Dressed in a snug black wool dress, a gold chain around her neck, a jangling gold bracelet on her wrist, she was eye-catching. In her late thirties, perhaps, she looked as if she’d wandered away from some magazine shoot for a springtime-in-the-Rockies soap commercial—with her long blond hair, her blue eyes, her alabaster skin, her athletic body. The modern girl next door who read Cosmopolitan, tennis racket at the ready. A wicked serve. The girl who gave me heart palpitations as she drove wildly in the wilderness outside of Fairbanks. A girl who got her own pilot’s license, winging her way over the Alaskan landscape. But as her father told me one evening—and not happily—his daughter had a tough soul and a fur-trap editorial reach. She skewered souls in her editorials, circling her targets like a one-woman army, hanging her opponents out to dry in the frigid Fairbanks air.

  Last summer she’d given me sheaves of her columns, fiery exposés on the absentee salmon-canning industry, the steamship companies, the mining conglomerates, the fur-trading syndicates—their mean-spirited efforts to delay statehood. I’d saved one: “A Looted Land,” a strident polemic filled with innuendo, rich in anecdote. A prosaic paragraph would stop, midstream, and suddenly there would be a delightful Indian parable, a Tlingit folk saying, an Aleut aphorism, or even a sourdough’s pithy recollection from the gold rush days and the winter of ’03. A gold mine for me, certainly, the scrambling writer.

  “I thought Noah’d be here by now.” She glanced toward the doorway.

  “The two of you are always late,” said Paul.

  She looked up as her father returned, another drink in hand. As he slid back into his chair and apologized for the long phone call, he slurred some words. “A problem with the presses. Cheap labor.” He looked to the doorway. “I wanted to talk to Noah about it.”

  Irina poured me more coffee, even though I held up my hand. Paul was smiling at me. “Perhaps something stronger, Miss Ferber?”

  I said nothing.

  Hank began, “Sonia told me you had an interesting lunch today—with Jack Mabie.”

  Paul returned to his seat. “The meanest man in Alaska.”

  “Tell me what’s going on?” I asked. “This Preston Strange seems like a hothead.”

  Irina chuckled. “To put it mildly. To his mother’s consternation. The corporate bigwig is a street brawler. He was always a hairpin trigger boy. Fistfights in prep school.”

  With a laugh, Sonia said in a fake whisper, “Edna, some Fairbanks scandal for you. For a brief moment in time, a few years after the war ended, I permitted myself to fall into the sticky arms of that man.”

  “You? Preston?” My eyes widened.

  She sat back and sipped her coffee, watching me over the rim. “A short time, the streets like a spring carnival, the sense of relief after Japan capitulated—keep in mind Japan actually invaded parts of Alaska—and Preston wooed me. Preston had a moment of giddiness. He even sported a peach-colored scarf and a shiny Norfolk suit. Everyone was trying to look…brand-new. Like others, I was drunk with victory.”

  I chose my words carefully. “He seems an unlikely mate for you, Sonia.”

  Hank broke in. “Tell me about it. An oily confection.”

  Sonia shot a look at her father. “Two hotheads, me and him—I admit I can be a fishwife when challenged. It didn’t last long. A couple months. I woke up and said goodbye. He returned to his undertaker’s black suit—and snippy personality. I hid at the newspaper while he fled into his bank vault, but Preston doesn’t like to be left. Deserted, dumped. There were bitter words.”

  “But that was years ago,” I insisted.

  Irina sighed. “Not for Preston. He still moons over Sonia.”

  “Every man moons over my sister,” Paul added, unhappily. “They don’t realize she’s a heartbreaker.”

  Hank was smiling at his daughter. A father pleased with his children’s antics—or at least those of one of his children. The look he tossed Paul’s way told me there was little Paul could do to please his father.

  Hank reached over to the sideboard, poured himself a tumbler of whiskey. Irina watched his movements carefully and clicked her tongue. Settled back in his chair, both hands gripping the glass, he rocked back and forth like a contented cat, purring.

  “Thank God for Noah,” he said into the dead air. “Cool and calm and…” His words trailed off.

  “Cornered,” Paul finished, and his father grunted.

  Sonia turned to me. “Edna, my work is my life. Everyone knows that. No marriage for me, no children. I’ve been saying that since I was twelve years old. The old maid. My declaration of independence from the kitchen. Yes, my dance partners, my—my foolish game with Preston. But when Noah returned from the war—battered, shattered, bandaged—suddenly we were a couple. I couldn’t help myself. I fell in love with a man I’ve known—the family has known—since he was a small boy. A shock to the system, really.”

  “So you’ll marry Noah?” I asked.

  No one said anything. Paul grumbled, “She loves me, she loves me not.”

  “She does love him,” Sonia, piqued, insisted.

  Hank sounded frustrated. “Edna, Sonia keeps refusing Noah’s proposals of marriage.”

  Again Sonia reached over and grasped my wrist. “Edna, a dilemma.” For a moment she closed her eyes. “I suppose I will. There is no one else like him.” Her index finger drummed her chin. “Yes
.”

  In a hollow voice, Paul said, “Maybe.”

  She looked at him. “Maybe.” An amused sigh. “I do love him. What a pity. Me, the career girl. I wake up and think of the newspaper—not love.”

  Irina’s voice was hesitant. “Edna, that’s one of the reasons Preston hates Noah. Even though Sonia and Preston broke up long before, Preston insists Noah—an outsider, an Indian—is to blame.”

  Hank added, “Also Noah, a lawyer for Indian rights, has challenged in court Tessa Strange’s business dealings with the Native employees. And won. Over and over. Unfair labor practices. Tessa Strange doesn’t like dissent—only money. And her toady son Preston does her bidding.”

  Sonia held up her hand, protesting. “Enough of this. Edna cannot be interested in tepid romances in the land of the tundra. Sonia’s sordid sallies.”

  “This explains part of what I witnessed today at lunch,” I began, “but the presence of Jack Mabie seemed to throw Preston into a tizzy.”

  “Because he’s his mother’s handmaiden. Or henchman. Or hyena.” Sonia laughed. “Tessa Strange snaps her fat fingers and a good part of Fairbanks trembles.”

  I turned to Hank. “You’re not friendly with her? I mean, you publish an influential newspaper…”

  He shook his head slowly. “That’s the problem. The Gold is pro-statehood. Tessa Strange is not. Not now. We once were friends.” He qualified that. “Friendly, maybe. Guarded friendly. She’s a woman never to be trusted.”

  Sonia was eager to say something, sitting at the edge of her chair. Still laughing, she said, “Edna, Tessa Strange was a hellion as a young woman. Right, Dad? The wild stories no one talks about. An Episcopalian missionary above the Arctic Circle, especially in Venetie and over to Fort Yukon where Noah’s grandfather still lives and where Noah was born, she had a profane mouth as she thumped her Bible. I would have adored her—then. Tessa was married to a weak-kneed missionary named Lionel Strange. One son, little Preston, who played with little Noah in that icy village, and then Lionel drowned.”