IN CZAR KENNEDY’S HOUSE today there on the waterfront there was comfort and even luxury, gauged by Alaska standards. There was not one single object of beauty or interest. Though he owned entire ledges of jade there was not even a chunk of the gray-green stuff as a desk paperweight. No native masks or brilliant bits of handiwork adorned the walls or shelves. No intricately carved Eskimo ivories, no paintings by Lawrence, none of the Eskimo Ahgupuk’s slyly simple ink lines. The history of a thousand years in a region scarcely known to North America’s mainland had been chiseled, carved, etched, painted, stitched, sculptured, on stone, skins, pottery, furs, wood. None of that nonsense for Czar.
It was not that he disliked these evidences of a crude but vital civilization. He simply was not interested in them. They had, in his scheme of things, little actual value, as property, just as, to him, the Alaska Indians and the Eskimos had little value as human beings.
He rarely openly expressed his indifference to these objects and the people who had created them. Sometimes, when a friend or a visiting V.I.P. expressed an interest in a piece of ivory or stone or intricately patterned fur, he would stare at it impassively.
“It’s real interesting,” he said. “All that stuff. But not around the house. That junk’s for museums.”
Carefully planned, as was every move he made, Czar had married the plain daughter of Einar Wendt, the Tacoma lumberman. She was older than Czar; gaunt and prim. Even her father’s substantial wealth had not tempted the high-spirited lusty lads of Tacoma, Seattle, San Francisco. She was an easy conquest for the romantic-looking, soft-talking, ambitious Kennedy. Einar Wendt himself had been early impressed with this up-and-coming young Alaskan who seemed to have a guiding hand on every promising business venture in the Territory.
“You two young people won’t be living in Alaska for long,” Einar Wendt had said, smiling tolerantly and regarding with prideful interest the amazingly long gray cylindrical ash that protruded from the end of his very good cigar. “Baranof’s pioneer stuff, it’s for young kids like you, but you’re too smart to waste your time there, Zeb.” He never called his son-in-law Czar, as did everyone else, even the bride. “You really belong in a city like Tacoma here, I’d like to work you into the business. Alaska’s pretty rough for a girl raised the way Myrt was, and her friends are all here, all the kids she was brought up with.”
Czar Kennedy raised no objection, presented no argument to the older man. He merely said, “She’ll learn to like it there. There are plenty of fine people in Alaska.”
“Oh, sure, sure. But twenty years from now I may want to start to kind of take it easy. If you and Myrt have been living here for, say, ten years before that, why, that’s where you step in.”
Czar Kennedy appeared to be considering this, modestly, amiably. The fine eyes were glowing, he ran his hand through his wavy shock of hair as was his way when under emotion. It was not the emotion of gratitude. He was thinking, “Why, you old fool, twenty years from now, if you’re alive, you’ll be working for me, I’ll own your business and you, too, and I’ll still be living in Alaska. And I’ll maybe own that, too.”
Czar Kennedy left the log cabin that had been his home through the years since his coming to Baranof. He and his dowered bride set up housekeeping on a grand scale for the Alaska of that day. A four-room frame house, one of the few carpenter-built houses in the town. Czar had told no one of his plans. He had said that the fine four-room house was built for the occupancy of a wealthy Seattle investor who was planning to spend a year or two between Alaska and Seattle and wanted to feel sure of his accustomed comforts. Always secretive, he had had the furniture shipped in from Seattle, very solid. There even were sets of books, bought for prestige rather than for reading: a set of Shakespeare, red and gold; a set of Walter Scott, green and gold; Washington Irving, brown and gold, all preserved behind the glass front of the bookcase. Other volumes were on much cosier terms with the bride: The First Violin and Thelma and Jane Eyre and all the daring yellow-backed novels by the author known as The Duchess.
“What do you have to do to be happy in Alaska?” the somewhat apprehensive bride had asked.
“They say you have to be able to read a book,” Czar had answered. “I’m too busy to read. But that’s what they say.”
With the years the original four-room house had burgeoned into eight rooms, the bridal furniture had been twice replaced as Czar’s interests widened and his income kept pace. Now the overstuffed chairs and couches were self-descriptive, the thick brown carpets silenced the footfall, the brick-red draperies and the mammoth lamps were a background for the household’s unique treasure, a Steinway grand piano, for years the only grand piano in Baranof. Now it was a commonplace object, you saw one in every night club along the Strip, with a Negro tenor or a basso posed in its curve, singing Celeste Aïda or Ol’ Man River; or a cocoa-skinned stripper writhing atop it as she shed her garments scrap by scrap, to the cynical applause of the lonely lads from Kinkaid or Morgenstern Air Bases.
Myrtle Kennedy adored her handsome and successful husband and hated Alaska to the day she died. She blamed this savage country for the tragedies in her life, as well she might. Certainly her daughter, the one child of her marriage, met her sordid end because of it, and her son-in-law his hideous death. Her mental and emotional equipment were not strong enough to meet this double horror. It was not only the shock of the tragedies. Her conventional belief in the fundamental decencies of life was outraged by the very crudeness of the circumstance. Perhaps she sensed that there was something almost comic in the macabre form of this double calamity.
“I always tried to have everything nice for her,” she whimpered, “and it wasn’t easy, let me tell you, in this crazy wilderness. Her dresses, and trips Outside, and piano lessons—that’s why we got the baby grand—and she could have married to Tacoma or Seattle or even San Francisco. But no, she had to marry Thor Storm’s son, and what is he, anyway! Nobody knows, rightly. I never wrote the truth to Tacoma about the way she died, I was ashamed to. Or about him, either. Wild animals. Moose and bears. They wouldn’t believe it. I heard it was in the newspapers, but I never looked. I couldn’t. I don’t believe it yet. Nobody would believe it. Only Alaska.”
Alaska not only believed this gruesome double horror, it accepted it almost matter-of-factly. Alaska was familiar with death in violent and bizarre forms. Alaska accepted almost any human manifestation as probable and even normal. When, for example, the premature infant persisted in living. It was fantastic, it was incredible; but it was true. Baranof said that it had been Thor Storm and Bridie Ballantyne who had kept alive the faint spark in the tiny and seemingly bloodless bundle of gristle that was Christine Storm. Thor, they said in Baranof, had used some kind of hocus-pocus he’d learned up north when he used to live right there studying the Eskimos in their huts. It had been Thor who had gone up to fetch his grief-stricken son and the newborn infant, and they say one of the native women was nursing her at the breast, along with one of her own. And in Baranof, they said, there was Bridie, she certainly knew what to do, wasn’t she a nurse, and came to Baranof from the Seattle hospital?—or anyway, said she did.
In Czar Kennedy’s wife the shock and grief of the two tragedies took the form of melancholia.
“She won’t even look at the baby … A girl, and they say her eyes were dark even when she was bora … Hardly bigger than a picked chicken, and they rigged up a kind of incubator, Bridie knew how—–”
The scrawny infant was brought to the Kennedy house. It was agreed that this was the natural haven for her. Certainly Thor Storm’s womanless cabin was not the place. And Christopher Storm, the young widower, was numb with guilt and sorrow. He absented himself from Baranof for days at a time. “Off hunting,” the town said. “Or says. Off alone. Even Thor don’t know where. You’d think he’d had enough of hunting, after this. Maybe he’s looking for her spirit. After all, he’s one fourth Eskimo, they say. You know how the Eskimos go on about spirits.”
The grapevine of gossip and conjecture spread and became a canopy that enshrouded the Kennedy house. “They say Myrtle doesn’t even look at the baby … She acts as if it wasn’t even in the house, half the time.… Hardly bigger than a spider and she looks like one, they say, and now they’ve got Bridie in. Well, she used to be a nurse in Seattle, didn’t she? And here in Baranof, too, the first years.… They say Bridie keeps the baby’s room boiling hot and feeds her from a medicine dropper. That’s the second one in the family Bridie raised up. She was the one looked after Christopher Storm when Thor brought him down from up north, a baby, wrapped up in wolf skins. Nobody ever got the real story of that. They say Thor married a girl up there, her mother was Eskimo and her father was a Polish trapper and fur trader.”
But Baranof accepted all this as it had, for years, accustomed itself to the fantastic contrasts of life in Alaska. On the surface there was the life of any conventional American small town. Church on Sunday, card parties, ice cream and layer cake; school, business, club meetings for men and women. Underneath all this, and surrounding it loomed a menace greater than pioneers had ever endured in the history of this dramatic America. Here Nature was the killer, like a living murderous enemy surrounding a stockade—Nature, and Distance, and Loneliness and Cold. They were lurking always, waiting to pounce on you and destroy you. Locked in by gigantic mountains and endless tundra and glaciers and snow and strangling cold in the eight months of winter; or heat and killing clouds of mosquitoes in the brief summer, those days before the coming of the airplane and the mechanized United States Army and Air Forces, actually tainted an entire population with claustrophobia. Sudden and violent death was of less news value in those days than the announcement that a shipment of beef and allegedly fresh eggs had arrived from Seattle.
The Baranof of that time accepted the fact of Christine Storm’s incredible naissance, and her mother’s savage confinement, and the gruesome death of her father so soon to follow. The circumstance was more dramatic than usual, perhaps. But at least, the stories and facts were known. Alaskans often disappeared and never were heard of again. Simply gone. Frozen, drowned, mangled, eaten by wild creatures, no one knew. In the household of Czar Kennedy the infant Christine owed her life, perhaps, to Bridie Ballantyne.
It was in the spring following his wife’s death that Christopher Storm had gone with his friend Len Fraser on the bear-hunting trip. They were after brown Alaska bear, those monolithic creatures said to be the largest carnivorous animal on earth.
The two men, experienced hunters both, had momentarily separated. They had left their boat and gone inland. Christopher Storm must have come unexpectedly upon the monster. Perhaps, startled by the sound of humans in that wilderness, it was instinctively protecting its cubs. Alone and caught off guard, young Storm had scarcely time to raise his gun and fire. He aimed between the eyes. The monster came on, its speed was incredible. He fired again. The animal came on.
“Len!” the man called as he fled now. “Len! Len!” Christopher felt the creature upon him, he thought, This can’t happen to me. With the first movement, with a gesture that was almost playful, the mammoth paw lifted the man’s scalp and tore it off as a skin might be peeled from an orange. When Len, hearing the shots and the cries, crashed through the brush Christopher Storm was still conscious and even fairly articulate. Fraser picked him up and tried to carry him to the boat as best he could. They even managed to reach a nearby cabin just before he died. In a kind of muted scream, while he still was conscious, he begged of them, “Shoot me! Len, for God’s sake! Shoot me!”
It was after this second horror that melancholia settled like a numbing drug over Czar Kennedy’s wife. She had no interest in the infant Christine, in her husband, in her household, in the small world of Baranof. Czar took her Outside, to Tacoma. There they ministered to her with such unavailing means as science and the medical arts commanded almost a quarter of a century ago. There, briefly, she continued to live, and there she died.
Years later, when Chris, in exhibitionistic and self-conscious mood, sometimes was impelled to shock conventional society with the story of her infancy, these two gory tales of her parents’ death were met with a sort of hysterical mirth. It was too macabre, too repulsive to be borne. She told it rather well. After all, a tiny infant when they died, she never had known her mother or father. It had been Bay Husack who had, for a time at least, put a stop to that form of exhibitionism.
So there was Czar Kennedy in his roomy overstuffed house on the waterfront, and there, incredibly, was the infant Christine, watched over by the indomitable, the invincible, the omniscient Bridie Ballantyne.
Now, almost a quarter of a century later, Czar lived alone in the house except for the dour servant Gus, who cooked, cleaned, drove the car when needed, expertly and with an inexplicable air of resentment. There were times when Czar did not use his house for a week, two weeks. He had an office and a small bedroom on the top floor of the Lode Building. Baranof said he took refuge there when the cold and fishy eye of Gus became too depressing.
“He’s a grand gifted cook, that Gus,” Bridie said. “He can make anything you want to name, elegant. I bet he could take Eskimo food, a handful of willow-bush switches and bears’ feet, or an owl, and make it tasty as if a French chef had dreamed it up. But I don’t know, all the time he’s serving you it’s like he was breathing hate down your neck. I’d rather eat at the Caribou Café, and Nick smiling and visiting table to table, you feel like the guest of honor at a banquet. It’s in the Bible, says, better a meal of herbs where love is than a stalled ox and hatred. Though I must say I wouldn’t care to sit down to a dinner of herbs, with or without love. Not that I’d care for a stalled ox, either.”
It was to Czar’s house that the three men fled—Dave Husack, Sid Kleet, and Czar himself, though the Chamber of Commerce luncheon hour gave them barely fifteen minutes of grace. They were like small boys crawling under the porch or into the woodshed to hatch their plots. The big crowded empty living room awaited them.
“What’ll it be?” Czar asked. “Bourbon, Dave? Sid?”
“Well, I don’t know. I had a little snort on the plane, there, before we landed down,” Dave said.
“You won’t get anything at the luncheon, that’s for sure,” Kleet warned him.
Gus was there to perform a grudging service. A bony evasive man with a curiously clay-colored skin in which were imbedded two utterly expressionless pale gray-white eyes like the eyes of a dead carp. No other house in all Alaska, perhaps, except the Governor’s mansion in Juneau, boasted a manservant. If a newcomer remarked this, Baranof, quick to come to Czar’s defense, said, “Somebody’s got to do for Czar. All the big shots come to see him when they visit Alaska, they even come specially. He tried native help. Well, you know the way they do, come one week, get their pay, and stay away till the money’s gone.”
A little water on the side, Gus. No. No ice. Husack and Kleet drank, tossing the amber stuff down their throats with one quick backward jerk of the head, the gulp of water, the handkerchief at the lips, the exhaled breath. The smell of the whiskey, the scent of Husack’s cologne, pricked the air. Silently the three men settled into the vast chairs. The dim midday Arctic twilight gave their faces, their motions, a strange dreamlike quality.
“We’ve barely got fifteen minutes,” Czar said. “Gus, you come in here at twelve-thirty sharp and remind us.” He had poured himself a bourbon, had carried it to his chair and placed it on the table beside him. He did not drink it. He picked up the glass now, and held it to the waning light, and put it down. “Just who’s this girl, anyway?” he said. “I know who she is. But who is she?”
Dave Husack shifted his big frame in the deep chair. “Now, Czar, I told you all that, she’s a smart girl, she knows the score, she knows why she’s here in Baranof and all, you wouldn’t think a girl looks like she does could be so smart. Her mother and Louise were school friends in Kansas City. You know. But what I want to talk about now, these few minutes, is what line do I take if they ask me for a few remarks at this luncheon?”
“You know what you say, Dave. You say what you always say.”
Czar’s tone was bland, but a little flame of suspicion darted from Husack’s eyes. “Looka here, Czar—–”
Sid Kleet’s steely voice cut the tension. “That’s right, Dave. Give them the old blueplate. It went down all right in Juneau.” Deftly he extracted a typed sheet of paper from the brief case at his feet. “Here it is. Uh—‘This vast northern empire, now a Territory struggling toward manhood among the family of the United States, will someday achieve that adult goal and will stand forth, a great state among great states—one of the greatest, in my humble opinion, if it is allowed to mature. But that time has not yet come, it should not be forced—–’ ”
“Sounds all right,” Dave agreed.
Kleet thrust it toward him. “It’s as good as the day I wrote it. Better brush up on it. You should have done that on the plane.”
“Never mind about that,” Czar said, gently. “Who is that girl, exactly, Dave?”
“You know as well as I do. What in hell’s got into you, Czar! All right, she’s crazy about Bay, too. That’s what gave me the idea. All right, she’s my assistant secretary, but no hanky-panky.”
“Mink coat.”
“Louise’s—or was. You know Etta Gurkin’s getting too old for these jaunts, and crotchety, of course Etta’s a cracker-jack secretary when it comes to business details and so on, but the going’s too rugged on trips for a woman her age, and Dina, it kind of rests the boys’ eyes just to look at her, know what I mean.”
“I didn’t ask you for a sketch of Etta Gurkin, I’ve known that old battle-ax for twenty-five years. Who is this girl exactly, Dave?”
“Oh. Well.” Dave Husack slumped in his chair, he took out the fine linen handkerchief and wiped his forehead. “She’s no tramp. Her folks are fine people, she comes from Kansas City. Anyway, she had two years of college and then she came east to New York, she wanted to be an actress, she did some modeling, and she had a couple of little jobs in the movies—what they call an extra, I guess it was—and then she went back to modeling, fashion modeling, that is”—hastily—“I went into this very thoroughly, she got to be one of the biggest models in the Paxton Agency, they only take the best, commercial photographs and so on, she rates fifty—seventy-five—a hundred dollars an hour, she could go back there tomorrow, she’s as nice and sweet a girl as you’d—–”
“Married at one time, wasn’t she?”
“She was. You wouldn’t want a kid who—–”
“Older than she looks, isn’t she?”
“Well, personally, looking at her—–”
A gently tolerant laugh from Czar. “Mm. Looking at her with my eyes, impersonally, the way you’d look at any strictly business proposition, not suspicious but not dazzled, either, why, what would you say? Twenty-seven, would you say? Twenty-eight, outside figure?”
Dave shrugged. “Thereabouts. She don’t look over twenty-two.”
“Eyes,” Czar said. “Eyes.” His right foot, in the shabby scuffed shoe, began to waggle now as it dangled, the right knee crossed over the left. “You fit her up with that coat and so on, Dave? That’s a real nice coat.”
“Say, she’s the girl supposed to be marrying Bay, what do you think I’d fix her up with! One of those Eskimo parkas? We’re paying her good for this, Bay don’t know that. You know why she’s here and she knows why, and it looks like everybody’ll know why pretty soon if we don’t look out. Well, Bay’s consented to go through with this little hocus-pocus, set him up for Governor of Alaska and so on, so Chris will maybe change her mind about him, marry him. He’s still stuck on her—if he’s stuck on anybody—sometimes I wonder if he’s—I swear to God—anyway, Dina’s made a play for him for two three years now, the damn little bitch.”
“Why, you’re real touchy, Dave, a person would think you were the one supposed to be in love with the girl.” At a snort from Dave, Czar raised a placating palm. “Just my little joke, boy.” His hand now went to his head, he ruffled the silver plumes of his hair. “Truth is, I don’t know as I really go along with this little plan.”
“What’s that!” Husack yelled. “Last month in Seattle—–”
“I know, I know. But I’m not sure that I can see my granddaughter mixed up in a plant like this. She’s difficult at times, and she’s under the influence of Thor and those Barnetts, and that bunch of—uh—radicals, shall we say? But this little sight-seeing tour, with that girl supposed to drive Chris crazy with jealousy, or something. Why, say, Chris is too smart for that. That’s like a movie plot in the old days before the talkies came in. Christine is headstrong and impractical and high-falutin sometimes, but she isn’t dumb.”
“Why, you double-crossing bastard!” Dave Husack pulled his huge bulk out of the deep-cushioned chair. A curious lavender-red flush mottled his cheeks. “I get this all set, I come up to this Godforsaken dump, I haul Bay up here, we know we can get this whole thing set so we’ll have the whole Territory sewed up, from Juneau to Barrow, and from Bristol Bay to Demarcation Point. All of it. Fish and fur and oil and metals and timber.”
“Got it now,” Czar said, sweetly.
“We’ll have it cinched for the next God knows how long. Twenty-five years. Fifty.”
“I sometimes wonder why we do it,” Czar mused. “You’ve got more money than you know what to do with, now.”
“Oh, Christ’s sake, Czar, who do you think you’re talking to! Don’t try to make with that dreamy stuff. Not with me. This is Dave Husack. Remember?”
He was breathing hard, and thumping his chest.
“Boys, boys!” said Sid Kleet.
He had quietly taken a sheaf of papers out of his brief case. He was matter-of-fact, precise, no trace of emotion of any kind marked his expression or his speech.
“Charm, gentlemen. Charm charm charm, remember. You are supposed to work it that way. When thieves fall to quarreling among themselves you know what happens. It says.”
“Take it up with Czar, he’s the charm department,” Dave said, sulkily.
“Just please remember,” Kleet continued, like a patient teacher drilling a familiar lesson into dull ears, “that this is the biggest stake yet. You’ve got the Northwest sewed up, you can sew up the whole country and have it in the bag. Only you’ve got to start now and keep going. Bay isn’t important and your granddaughter isn’t important. It’s us. There’ll be plenty of young fellows presidential timber four—eight—twelve years from now. The young guys are going in for politics nowadays, maybe they don’t like the mess the country’s been in since the Twenties. Anyway, they’re getting younger and younger in politics, you can see for yourself. It isn’t just that we’re getting older so that anybody under sixty looks younger to us. They damn well are younger. It used to be, running for Governor or Congress or Senate, you had to have hammocks under your eyes and a couple of chins and no hair. Not any more. Now it’s young and tough and hep. Look at Nixon and young Kennedy—no offense, Czar—and Meyner and that kid been Michigan Governor for God knows how long—Williams, isn’t it? Even Stevenson was youngish the first run—no kid, but youngish—and he damn near made it. It’s getting tougher all the time. What you want is somebody young for Front Man and us older boys to pull the strings. Young, they can take the punishment. The old ones crack up. Look at Wilson, look at Harding, look at Roosevelt, look at Ike. You take a kid like Bay, start him out Governor of Alaska, no trouble with that, then Washington State Congressman, then the Senate, he’s well known by that time—–”
“By that time I’ll be a nice ninety-eight, if I’m alive,” Czar said.
“I’ll be alive!” bellowed Husack, empurpled. “I don’t know about you two mealymouths, but I’ll be alive.”
“The way you look,” Czar observed, mildly, “I’d say you’re likely to fall down with a stroke this minute, Dave, if you don’t watch it.”
“Yes, and I’ll bet you damn well would like—–”
“Gentlemen! Gentlemen!” Kleet purred.
The putty-faced Gus stood in the doorway. “It is half past twelve o’clock,” he said. He began to gather up the glasses as though the room were empty.
“Etta Gurkin,” said Czar, musingly, as they walked toward the car. “I never believed in keeping a secretary around that long. They know too much. Get them married off—or marry them. Maybe you can’t fire Etta. Maybe she’s got too much on you—or something. And this girl, too.”
“I’ve heard of old men like you, what happens to them. Their mind gets dirty.”
“Gentlemen! Gentlemen!” Sid Kleet implored again.