THE TOWN MUSEUM, open on weekday afternoons, has two rooms, front and back. In the back room is a scale model of the Ice Palace that was my father’s inspiration and built in the town nearly sixty years ago. The once-white card has yellowed and curls at its edges but the intricate detail of the design remains. There are arches, domes, turrets and spires. Colonnaded walkways lead to descending terraces and pavilions. A flag bearing the town’s coat of arms is planted on the highest tower. Behind the model rises a gaudily painted diorama of mountains. In front, a number of tiny human figures, standing in groups or alone, look up at the structure with bland, inscrutable expressions. A display board shows a photograph of the palace taken on the day of its completion. The colours have run; the sky is light green, giving the image a fantastical, other-worldly feel. The building itself appears ghostly, insubstantial. The caption reads: J. P. Graham photograph of the historic Ice Palace built in January 1896 using 5,000 tons of ice. During an early thaw in mid-March of the same year the Ice Palace went the way of all ice.
I have always liked that: went the way of all ice. And I find the card model, limp and discoloured as it is, both sad and beautiful. Perhaps it is the innocence, the absurdity of the idea. Or perhaps the imagination and belief that turned it from idea to reality, however brief. Perhaps it is because of its role in my father’s disgrace, but the sight of it, this neglected, wilting monument to a forgotten passion, moves me in ways I cannot understand or explain.
‘This town was full of fools,’ my mother likes to say. My mother is dying. She is nothing but a bag of bones. The skin of her face is drawn tightly around her skull. Her pale blue eyes are vast in her head. A silver wedding band hangs loose on a frail, liver-spotted finger. Her hair, washed and set every morning at eleven, is candyfloss-thin but sweeps off her scalp in defiantly old-fashioned style. She sits up in her chair and stares out of the window. Her eyes, so different from mine, are the colour of the mountain skies. ‘This town was full of fools,’ she says, ‘and your father was the biggest fool of all.’
One hundred years ago there was no town here. There was nothing but the extreme cold, almost perennial snow, the barren and infertile mountainsides. Above the treeline there was no wood to burn or grass for cattle to eat. Only fugitives and herds of wandering elk were familiar with the inhospitable terrain. But in 1870, the books tell us, the Reverend Kester Swann, a defrocked clergyman, was searching for rare heathers in the mountains. In a gale he was thrown to the ground and found his nose pressed against the cool, hard surface of silver ore.
Thousands of fortune-seekers descended on the unlikely valley to claim the spoils. A town sprang up. The mountainsides were soon littered with mine entrances, joists and slag heaps. Roads connected the town to the east, the west, the north and south of the country. An extraordinary mountain railway that would link the town to the far coasts was soon under construction. Many got rich. My father, who had been scraping a living as a tenant farmer in the east, but who had always imagined such wealth to be his fate, was one of them.
‘You’ve never seen such arrogance,’ says my mother. ‘Every chancer and crook in the country came to live here. They competed with each other to build the largest, the most vulgar houses. Houses they imagined filling with their heirs. Houses so big they could shit in a different toilet every day of the week. They had their clothes made in London. They smoked Turkish tobacco. They built monuments celebrating their achievements. Their vanity was endless.’
Among my mother’s few possessions is a photograph of my father. It shows him in 1888, already a rich man, in high leather boots and a thick fur coat. He is pictured against a snowy mountainside with two other similarly attired men, holding the deeds to the claim that made his fortune. He is smiling and his free hand is held out wide in some grand gesture, the meaning of which is long forgotten. ‘A man of appetites,’ my mother has called him, her voice spikily suggestive, and I permit myself, despite the murky resolution, to see in the forward angle of his posture, the hook of the nose that is his legacy to me, and the unruly twist of his hair, the energy and folly of his character.
As the town’s wealth grew, so too did its infamy. Along with the mansions there were dance halls, gambling houses, theatres and brothels. It was said that the place catered to every kind of sinner. And it was true; these newly rich men gratified themselves fully and indiscriminately. They believed that wealth bought exemption from the prudery and puritanism of the day. For twenty-five years the town boomed and made no apologies for itself. Then, in 1894, the one fragile resource upon which it was all based, the hard, cold, dullish silver extracted from the unprepossessing, long-ignored mountains, ran out.
My mother is bitter. Bitter about her situation, her helplessness and dependency, bitter to be dying. She is rude to the staff here, robust, kindly girls. She curses them for their clumsiness or stupidity. She complains that the food they serve is too hot or too cold. She complains that her room is dirty though her eyes are too poor to tell.
But at other times, when I sit beside her bed, she is only serene. Oblivious to my presence she relives moments of the past aloud and in vivid detail – the surprising warmth of a winter sun on her arm, the smell at dusk of the silver-smelting factories on the edge of the town. Her voice, as she describes these memories to no one, is tender, girlish, and it is possible to imagine how she loved, even still loves, my father. These memories seem to give her peace and she drifts into silence and then sleep. I sit for a while and then stand and unhook the fingers that are curled tightly around my hand.
I picture my father standing on the opera-house stage in 1895. A spotlight picks out the elaborately designed model sitting on a dais. His eyes seem to blaze as he addresses the hushed audience of anxious silver tycoons. Such constructions, he tells them, have been built in countries in the far north. People had travelled hundreds of miles and across borders to witness the phenomena. Five thousand tons of ice – one resource, he boldly joked, that they could be certain would not abandon them – would be sculpted into a full-size replica of what they saw before them. Within the palace would be a winter carnival to rival a world fair. He already had engineers and architects on hand to make it a reality.
‘It was absurd,’ my mother says, ‘but they were putty in his hands. They had believed they were untouchable. They had persuaded themselves that it was their own talents and abilities, even genius, that had got them this far. They had forgotten that it was only luck and the generosity of the earth that had made them rich.’ Indeed, some in the town said this catastrophe was proof that the land could not be treated with such carelessness, such contempt. The pious whispered darkly of hubris and divine judgement. They pointed righteously to those inhabitants of the town who had not got rich, who had laboured in the appalling conditions of the mines and suffered crippling injuries or died early wretched deaths because of their poisoned lungs. ‘They were as bewildered as children,’ says my mother, ‘and they wanted to believe that someone, something, could save them.’
I imagine how my father flatters and cajoles his audience as he speaks. He tells them that tourism is an industry of the future. He tells them that he was once a peasant and that by seizing his opportunities he has become rich. He tells them that he is a man of progress and imagination and he believes that they are too. He insists that the Ice Palace, while extraordinary, is symbolic of something greater, is more than just a palace built of ice.
I think of my father’s dramatic statements, the rough emotion of his voice, that of a man not born to wealth. And I fancy I hear something else in his voice, in his choice of words – something coloured by hindsight perhaps, and a lifetime of wondering – the passion for an idea that can only mean one thing. My mother puts it another way. ‘There was only one explanation for your father’s foolishness,’ she says. ‘He was in love.’
There is nothing new, unusual or edifying about the story. No photographs of the woman exist but she was young of course, barely a woman, and beautiful, it was said, in the style of her trade. Town folklore has it that she was dark-skinned and thick-haired, as if that were further confirmation of her type. There is dispute about her name. Newspaper reports from my father’s trial gave it as one thing but she went by something different, something showy, something cheap. She had arrived, like everyone in the town, from somewhere else. She was poor, no doubt, and hopeful for a better life.
My father was in early middle age. He believed in indulging his desires. The circumstances and manner of their meeting are not hard to guess. My father was not discreet but his peers did not condemn him. After all, it was hardly a town of saints. Some may even have said privately that it was understandable; ten years of marriage and my mother had not given him a child.
In thinking about this woman I have looked for explanations or clues to my father’s behaviour. I have wondered what was particular about her to inspire such fervour. What, beyond the tawdry clichés – the heavy perfumes, the rehearsed compliments and easy pleasures – caused him to abandon himself to this doomed ideal? Was it more than a bloated ego that saw no end to what it was entitled to, more than a man stupefied by a professionally compliant mind and body?
Perhaps there is little point in imagining my father’s feelings; they were no doubt of the generic kind. Nevertheless I am curious to know his thoughts as he watched an army of men at work hauling blocks up the mountainside in creation of this bizarre and audacious totem of his ardour. What fantasies were nurtured as the blocks were placed one on top of the other and the glistening walls rose steadily from the ground? What strange expression of his infatuation with this faceless woman did he see in the vaulting arches, the smooth domes, the fragile turrets jutting up into the chill air? The woman herself remains invisible. Whether she was flattered or appalled by the erection of this monument designed to woo her is not known. Whether, impressed with the virility of my father’s intentions, she returned his feelings, I can do no more than guess.
Meanwhile the town regained its old bullishness. The tycoons, once more in love with themselves, conspired in my father’s courtship and the Ice Palace began to take shape. My father was hailed as a visionary, the saviour of the town. Moves were made to rename the opera house in his honour.
My mother is sleeping. I place my hand lightly on her chest to feel the faint rise and fall of her breathing. The breaths that she takes in are brief, shallow, her exhalations slow and never-ending; it seems that the air is gradually leaving her body.
I have always felt the burden of my mother’s love. Maybe it is because I have no brothers or sisters or maybe because of my father’s abandonment and later death, but her love has been fierce and absolute, an intensity that has sometimes troubled me and which I have not always known how to return. As a child I found her embraces smothering, her kisses hard and desperate, as if she feared that I would be taken from her, as if her love for me were in doubt. I remember once, when I was a child of seven or eight and playing in the street in the evening, she rushed suddenly from the house and wrapped her arms around me. She was shaking. I feared she might crush the life from my body.
This love has, I sometimes think, even now I am old myself, made a child of me. Perhaps it is because of this love that I have never left this town that everybody leaves. Perhaps that is why I am here, sitting by my mother’s bedside, terrified and euphoric, waiting for her death.
Even before the symbolic last block of ice was laid at the opening ceremony the edges of the walls and the tops of the towers had begun to lose their definition. The ice had taken on a slippery, translucent glow, like a weak sun shining through clouds. Inside, water dripped from the grand hall and formed pools on the ground.
Within a few days every edge had become smoothly rounded. Cracks appeared in the domes and the arches began to sag. The terraces were gradually transformed into ragged slopes, pavilions into slushy lakes. Each meticulously designed feature merged into the melting whole and five thousand tons of ice began to work its way remorselessly to the ground. The carnival was abandoned. No visitor ever entered the building.
The tycoons, the investors, appeared every day to watch their money curdle before their eyes. Day after day they watched in silence, compelled, their expressions dumb with the impossibility of what they were seeing. The rest of the town turned out too, along with the curious from further afield, to witness the spectacle. The sun was shining. The mountains were raw and beautiful. Children played in the slush. It was an event and the town was once more notorious. It was not the event they had been led to expect.
At the beginning of the third week the highest tower began to lean precariously forward. Two days later it finally toppled over, burying the town flag beneath it. Within a month the palace was simply one more hump of melting ice, on a mountainside covered with them.
‘It was ridiculous from the beginning,’ my mother says. ‘A woman would have seen that. It was the kind of vanity that men always mistake for passion or imagination.’ At first the investors told themselves they had been unlucky with the unseasonably early thaw. Then they blamed the engineers and architects for their lack of expertise and sloppy approach. But soon they settled on the figure of my father. It was, after all, his conviction, his delusion, that had led to it being built.
The pious – vindicated once more – were quick to point out that this was a mining town, a town built on solid things, things of reliable worth, things you could hold in your hand. How had they, the wealthy, the foolish, allowed themselves to be seduced by something as ephemeral as ice? They had invested in good faith, they replied. They had not known my father was a charlatan. Had anyone, besides him, ever heard of such a thing, a palace built out of ice? He was a charlatan. He was a charlatan besotted with a whore.
It is not known what effect the sight of the Ice Palace ebbing away had on my father. What is known is that the woman to whom this grand gesture was directed disappeared abruptly from the town. The common assumption was that after my father’s public disgrace and bankruptcy she saw no reason to stay, a view in line with her supposedly fickle nature and the habits of her profession. I have entertained other possibilities. Had his failure caused his feelings for her to wane? Or hers for him? Had the melting absurdity of the Ice Palace shown to him the frailty of his passion? The two had after all been linked – confused even – in his mind. I have entertained other possibilities, too.
My father was tried and convicted of fraud by a court and a town desperate to purge the memory of their mistake. A picture in the newspaper on the day of his release from jail shows a changed man. He was thin now and stooped, his face deeply lined, no longer the swashbuckling entrepreneur pictured on the snowy mountainside a decade before. While he was in jail my mother and father had been reconciled. But there was to be no domestic bliss. Once he was released he drank and took to morose wanderings around the sites of his old claims. In March 1900, barely four years after his conviction, he was found dead at the bottom of a mine shaft, apparently having fallen down one of the poorly marked holes. Many suggested something more premeditated.
My mother has no harsh words for the woman whom my father abandoned her for. ‘She was just a girl’, she says, ‘just a girl’, and when she says this I feel that there is a message for me, a plea for understanding. But she volunteers no more and I do not have the heart, the courage, to press her.
Our town is mentioned in guidebooks to the region. It is one feature of a scenic driving tour which includes a reservoir and a dam named after a president. The books insist that you witness the dilapidated grandeur of the mansions, the theatres and the baroque churches that front half a mile of our main street. From my mother’s room I have watched the cars slow to allow passengers to peer out of the windows. Perhaps one will be reading aloud a condensed history of the town or pointing out things of particular interest, the venue, say, of a notorious shooting or scandal. Soon the once-elegant facades falter and then cease. The books draw attention to the last building worthy of note – a former brothel, now a run-down travellers’ hostel – and the cars accelerate away. I imagine that little is said as the cars wind their way through the landscape of slag heaps that have taken root as hills. Back on the highway talk turns to the next destination. Little impression of our town remains, except an unacknowledged gladness for the warmth, the motion of the vehicle, and a trace of unease at the memory of neglect, the near empty streets.
My mother has become weaker still, though it hardly seems possible. She is no longer comfortable sitting up in her chair. Instead, she lies in bed, her shoulders and head supported on a pile of cushions. If I am there at mealtimes the staff are grateful if I feed her. Her appetite is good but it is an effort for her to eat. She is silent now, as if she has said all she wants, all she needs. She can do almost nothing for herself and I am made to think of myself as an awkward, bawling infant, dependent on the unconditional love and nurturing of others.
When she is no longer hungry she leans her head back and her eyes turn unfocused towards the window. Looking at her I am forced to contemplate, yet again, the sudden departure of the woman of whom no pictures remain. I wonder at the terms of the reconciliation between my mother and father that, I am told, brought me into the world. I am compelled to imagine the circumstances of my birth and I fantasise a Gothic scene, something from the storybooks: a new-born infant swaddled in blankets, a clandestine meeting between two women, one of them ten years without a child, the other barely more than a child herself.
I return also to the image of the Ice Palace in 1896. Like my father’s lover no pictures record its demise; even as they watched, unable to turn away, they knew they would soon wish to forget. So I am forced to imagine the rounded walls and turrets, the slow-motion collapse of the domes and the arches, the toppling tower, and I see in all this some strange and distant imprint of myself. Incongruous, bizarre, a manifestation of arrogance and greed. And yet still, for me, it remains eerily beautiful, perfect, sufficient to itself.
My mother has drifted off again still propped up on cushions, the gap between the world and sleep now so thin. I tidy her lunch away and tuck the blankets in around her. Her head has rolled to one side as if she were offering me her cheek. When I lean down to kiss her goodbye her skin is soft, always so unexpectedly soft, like a child’s.