The Alpine Christmas

by Mary Daheim

  I was putting another slab of wood on the fire when Oscar Nyquist arrived. He looked like a snowman, having walked—uphill—the six blocks from his home on Cedar Street. Snow was caked to his overcoat, his stocking cap, his boots. I practically had to pry him loose from his outerwear. Yet at eighty-two, he seemed none the worse for his exertion.

  “I been here all my life,” he said, easing into the beige armchair. His voice bounced off the walls, but he wasn’t operating at full bellow. “You get used to the snow. The rain, too. The weather’s good for the movie business.” He nodded sagely, as if he’d invented the climate.

  “Good,” Vida retorted. “We’re going to talk about just that in a minute. Meanwhile, tell us about this pest and what’s worrying you.”

  Oscar squinted at Vida. “You think I’m nuts?”

  “Of course I do. Most people are.” Vida sounded impatient. “But why are you so concerned about your granddaughter-in-law?”

  Oscar didn’t respond immediately, but gazed into the flickering flames and barely seemed aware that I was shoving an eggnog at him. Absently, he took the mug and sipped. I’d laced it lightly with both rum and milk. I had a feeling that Oscar Nyquist could have drunk Drãno and had neither a reaction nor a complaint.

  “She’s an odd girl,” he finally said. “Different. Maybe that’s because she comes from the city.” His gaze lighted briefly on me, as if I, too, might be pretty odd. “She’s up, she’s down. You never know. She seemed so scared the other day, then she’s happy as can be. I figure it’s this fellow, hanging around and making her nervous. He can’t mean any good.”

  It was time for me, the official interviewer, to speak up. “Has Bridget expressed a fear of this man?”

  Oscar’s bald head tipped to one side. It seemed that he never answered any questions impulsively. “Not outright. But she’s scared. No doubt about it. When she isn’t being happy, she acts like she’s scared to death.”

  Scared to death. Vida and I exchanged swift glances. Two young women, approximately Bridget Nyquist’s age, were already dead. Was there a connection? If Carol Neal was missing and Bridget knew it, she had a right to be scared. To death.

  But her erratic behavior was strange. I kept thinking of Milo’s explanation. “Do you think Bridget has any idea who this person is?” I asked, hoping to sound casual.

  Oscar shook his head. “Why should she?”

  I was sitting on the sofa next to Vida. I leaned forward, trying to gauge how far I could go without riling Oscar. “Travis said Bridget didn’t want you to talk about this. Why? Is she embarrassed?”

  Oscar made a stabbing movement with his right hand. “Nyaaah! She’s silly! She’s a kid, she still thinks everybody’s decent! She’s a city girl, she ought to know better.” His voice dropped to a rumble.

  “You should give Sheriff Dodge a description,” Vida said crisply. “You and Arnie may not think much of Milo, but most people agree he’s a good lawman. It seems to me you’re making a mountain out of a molehill with all these petty complaints, and in the meantime, ignoring the mole. The deputies cruise around town all the time. They should know who to be on the lookout for.”

  Oscar all but sneered. “I did tell them, this afternoon. Tall, skinny fellow, young. Big jacket, jeans. Maybe jeans; I forget. Bridget told me.”

  I gave Oscar a skeptical look. “But told you not to tell?”

  Oscar’s chin jutted like the prow of a Viking ship. “ ‘Don’t bother, Popsy,’ ” he mimicked in a girlish voice. “ ‘This is such a little town. What else do people have to do but look in other people’s windows?’ Pah!”

  Bridget wasn’t entirely wrong. Since moving to Alpine, I’d gone on a few evening strolls with Vida. While I admired the sunset or commented on the gardens, Vida’s eyes fixated on windows. Her usual long-legged stride always slowed when we came upon a house where the drapes hadn’t been pulled. “Daleys—new picture above the mantel, a Maxfield Parrish,” she’d murmur. Or, “Eversons have company—out-of-town plates. Seattle, I’d guess.” She didn’t consider it snooping, merely doing her job of keeping up with the local news. I suspected that a lot of Alpiners did the same, but weren’t in a position to give their curiosity such a noble name.

  Again, I glanced at Vida. She was frowning into her eggnog. “This is all very vague. I hope Bridget uses good sense. If you’re worried about her, it’s up to her to see to her own safety.”

  With a grimace, Oscar nodded. I felt it was time to make some sort of professional commitment. He had trudged through the snow to unburden himself and not received much in return.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said, darting a quick glance at Vida. “We’re going to do an article on the Marmot. If we slant it so that it’s as much of a family story as it is about the theatre, then we can work in some of the problems you and Arnie have had with vandalism and such.”

  I couldn’t tell if Oscar Nyquist was alarmed or mollified. Something sparked in his blue eyes, but his only verbal response was a grunt. Vida was regarding me with a vexed expression. I knew she thought I was compromising myself.

  “We’ll need photos,” she said, and it was my turn to feel a sense of relief. “Old ones, as well as new ones. We have some, but yours might be better.”

  Oscar nodded again, this time with more assurance. “In the basement. At the Marmot. Come by tomorrow around nine. I can show you a lot of old stuff. If you’re interested.”

  Vida didn’t respond, but I did. “That’s wonderful,” I enthused. “If I have time, I’ll come with Vida. I like old movie mementos.”

  Now on his feet, Oscar gazed at me as if I were a bit lacking. “It’s junk,” he asserted. “We should have thrown it out a long time ago. But we didn’t.”

  Visions of lobby cards from Casablanca and Rebecca and Gone with the Wind danced in my head. Publicity stills of Chaplin, Pickford, Gable. Souvenir programs from blockbusters such as Ben-Hur, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Godfather. I am not a movie buff in the true sense, but I definitely appreciate the art form.

  “What have you got?” Vida asked dryly. “W. C. Fields’s false teeth?”

  Oscar Nyquist took Vida seriously, but at least his denseness averted bloodshed. It was probably a blessing that I intended to visit the Marmot the next morning. My House & Home editor’s lack of respect for the movies and their local purveyor might land her—or him—into trouble.

  I never thought to include myself in that equation. Foolish me.

  There were compromises to be made. In the summer, a University of Washington professor had devised a plan to thin out or prune almost two million acres of ten- to thirty-year-old forests in Washington and Oregon. The process would not only increase quantity, but would also enhance quality. If the trees were not cut, their density would choke out animal life and create a sterile environment.

  That was just one of the proposals I included in my editorial. Naturally, we had run the story when it first broke in The Seattle Times. The article had elicited enthusiasm—and criticism. While most Alpiners are pro-logging, there are quite a few people who have moved to town because they love the wilderness. They would just as soon melt every chain saw in the Pacific Northwest as prune a limb from an evergreen.

  I typed away, trying to balance my editorial, while at the same time taking a stand. I noted that one of the problems was that the spotted owls were—and I phrased this more gently—screwing themselves by not screwing each other. The birds had resorted to miscegenation, mating with different owl species. While that might not be a bad method to resolve racial tensions among human beings, it wasn’t good news for the owls.

  “Ready?” Vida stood in my doorway, muffled to the eyebrows. It was two minutes to nine.

  Out on Front Street, Oscar Nyquist was furiously shoveling the walk in front of the Marmot. The snow had finally stopped for a while, but during the night another eight inches had fallen on Alpine. Walking carefully over the frozen patches, Vida and I wished him a good morning.

  “W
hat’s good about it?” demanded Oscar, a big scowl showing under his stocking cap. He waved the shovel up at the marquee. “See that? More mischief!”

  It took some effort not to laugh or even smile. The letters of It’s A Wonderful Life had been rearranged to read Saw One IUD Triffle. Vida, however, was up for the occasion.

  “I like it,” she said. “It might be a science fiction movie about birth control.”

  Oscar looked mystified. “What’s a triffle? What’s IUD? Is it like Averill Fairbanks and his goddamned UFOs?”

  It was now Vida’s turn to hold back a smirk. “Well—not exactly.” She gave me a puckish glance. “Let’s say that it certainly beats rhythm, which is the Catholic version of science-fiction birth control. Speaking of which,” Vida went on as I raised my eyebrows, “was that what Arnie found at the bowling alley site? Birth-control devices?”

  Oscar Nyquist looked shocked. He was of a generation and a disposition that did not discuss such matters, especially between the sexes. Vida’s frankness embarrassed him.

  “Nyaaah,” he replied, shaking out rock salt in an almost frantic manner. “It was clothes, women’s clothes. A sweater. Slacks. Shoes. Underwear.” He mentioned the last item as if he shouldn’t know that women wore underwear. “Come inside, see the pictures.”

  The exterior was not what I’d call typical Alpine architecture. While less flamboyant and much smaller than many of its urban kin, the Marmot’s turrets and dome were nonetheless more evocative of the Middle East than the Central Cascades. For all the grief it was causing Oscar, the marquee was a handsome affair, running across the front of the theatre and set off with row upon row of lights. The double-deck Whistling Marmot sign stood above the marquee proper, with a carved stone marmot at each side, like bookends.

  In the lobby, Oscar flipped some switches, flooding the area with light. The concession stand had been modernized, but the Middle Eastern/art deco interior had been left mercifully intact. A wide, green carpeted staircase swept up to the auditorium, giving an illusion of vastness, despite the fact that there were a mere six steps in the ascent. Briskly, Oscar led us into the empty auditorium, down the wide aisles, and past the comparatively modern seats that had been installed in the 1960s and reupholstered two years ago. I glanced back at the balcony and the darkened projection booth. The frieze that ringed the ceiling showed a series of whistling marmots—running, jumping, sitting. On the walls, scatterings of silver specks set off dark green, three-dimensional scallop patterns, giving an impression of trees clustered in the rain. The recessed sounding board in the high arch of ceiling above the stage was dappled with silver stars and snowflakes, buffeted by the west wind at one side, caught by a crescent moon on the other. The chandelier that depended from the ceiling held tiers of petal-shaped lamps. Metallic scallops ringed the stage with its heavy midnight blue curtains edged with silver bars. I appreciated the decor anew, realizing that if Lars Nyquist wasn’t blessed with artistic taste, he’d had enough sense to hire someone who was. And Oscar Nyquist hadn’t been tempted to modernize. The Whistling Marmot was a little gem of a theatre, a reminder of the days when the movies not only had faces, but places in which to show them.

  We went out through the exit at the left of the stage, then down a flight of stairs. The air immediately turned damp and musty. Oscar turned on more lights, revealing an awesome hodgepodge of equipment, storage boxes, and just plain junk. The heating system was on our right; the old prop room used in the days of vaudeville lay dead ahead. Dressing rooms, or more precisely a changing area with a divider for males and females, could be entered by edging around a stack of discarded theatre seats, a life-sized pasteboard cutout of a zebra, a bear suit, half a dozen buckets of paint, and a large wooden barrel filled with film cans.

  I paused by the barrel. “Are these old movies?” I asked, pointing to the big tins.

  Oscar, who was clearing a path for us through the debris, looked over his shoulder. “Nyaaah. When I was a kid, my father would save any extra cans for my mother. She stored cookies in them. At Christmas, she baked so many that she gave them away, wrapped in those tins. Now, we keep little stuff in ’em.” He lifted the top tin out of the barrel and pried up the lid. Nuts, bolts, screws, rubber bands, and paper clips rested inside. “It’s the barrel I like best. In the old days, my father kept it outside the social hall, where he first showed the movies. It’d fill up with rain water. Sometimes the fellas would come by after they’d been fishing and throw their trout in there to keep while they went to the movies. ’Course, during the winter, the water would freeze. One year, after the thaw, we found a ten-inch rainbow in there. It was still alive, swimming like crazy.”

  Vida apparently had heard the story before, but I exclaimed and laughed. Oscar, however, didn’t seem to find the anecdote all that remarkable. It was merely part of Alpine’s lore, neither unusual nor amusing.

  Inside what was the real storage room, we were confronted with stacks of boxes, trunks, and grocery bags as well as shelves piled high with notebooks, ledgers, and files. Oscar scanned the boxes, finally choosing a battered cardboard container that had once held Crisco. A smiling half-moon and stars looked vaguely familiar, a logo I had seen in my childhood or perhaps in old magazines.

  “Here,” he said, opening the top, which was secured with ancient tape that had lost its glue. “You’ll find the pictures of the old social hall in there, then the ones while the theatre was a-building. Opening night, too, with Carl and Mrs. Clemans and a bunch of other old-timers who were the guests of honor.”

  Vida, who knew The Advocate’s morgue far better than I did, took over. The pictures were all in albums, black imitation leather with tasseled cords. But like the tape that had held the box together, the hinges had come unglued, causing many of the photos to fall out of place. Flipping through them quickly, Vida selected five.

  “I’ve never seen these,” she said, holding up an eight-by-ten sepia print documenting the early stages of the Marmot’s construction. In the background, I could see the original Methodist Church, so new that its wooden spire was still surrounded by scaffolding. At the edge of the photo, another structure was just getting underway. It was the Clemans Building, I realized, which stood directly across the street from The Advocate.

  “What was on the site of the newspaper office then?” Oddly enough, I’d never asked Vida—or anyone else—that question.

  Oscar’s endless forehead furrowed. “The Dawsons’ house. Mr. Dawson worked in the mill. He liked to act. Sometimes the townspeople put on plays, first in the social hall, then here. Mr. Dawson especially liked to play bums. His brother-in-law, Mr. Murphy, was a wonderful singer. One of them Irish tenor fellas.”

  I nodded, gazing at the photo, thinking about Alpine’s early residents with their propensity for hard work and their proclivity for home-grown entertainment. Except for Lars Nyquist and his movies, what else was there to do, particularly during those long winters? There were no radios, no TV, no electric lights in that first decade of Alpine’s existence. If Alpiners wanted to be amused, they had to amuse themselves. Obviously, they did.

  We left Oscar to fix his marquee. But Vida wasn’t inclined to return to the office. Rather, she stood at the curb, her attitude alert.

  “Travis,” she said, nodding her padre’s hat in the direction of the Venison Inn. “That’s him at a window table with Rick Erlandson. You know, Rick, with the orange sideburns, at the bank? Travis and Rick went to high school together.”

  “So?” I replied, trying to match Vida’s long strides across the sanded street. “Is Rick a lurker?”

  “Of course not,” huffed Vida. “He’s a most respectable young man, even if he does have comical hair. Especially for a loan officer. The point is, Travis is over there, and not at home. Let’s go see Bridget.” She pounced on my car. “Come on, come on. What are you waiting for?”

  It took less than five minutes to drive from The Advocate to The Pines, otherwise known as Stump Hill. The gracious homes that
nestled among the evergreens were situated between the mall and the ski lodge, with Burl Creek running through the west end of the property. Colonial, Tudor, Spanish, and Cape Cod architecture, all with a Pacific Northwest twist, somehow managed to avoid aesthetic conflict. Maybe it was the half-acre on which each house stood; maybe it was the buffer of tall trees; maybe it was the hilly ground that permitted the homes to sit on different levels. Whatever it was, it worked—and Arnie Nyquist had been responsible. It occurred to me that Tinker Toy wasn’t a complete dunce.

  We didn’t attempt to get up the steep drive, but parked behind a PUD truck across the street coyly known as Whispering Pines Drive. Even with the chains, I’d had a bit of trouble negotiating the narrow road through the development. Residents of The Pines neither sanded nor shoveled. Maybe it meant they all had four-wheel drive. Or that they didn’t have to worry about getting to work. They were too well-heeled to care.

  Travis and Bridget’s Cape Cod looked picture-perfect in the snowy landscape. The firs that had been left standing formed a semicircle around the house, as if cradling it in their snow-covered branches. Off to one side of the sloping front lawn, a single old cottonwood lifted angular limbs up to the sky. Lower down, someone had hung out suet for the birds. A huge silver wreath with a bright red bow clung to the front door, while a matching garland wound its way up the mailbox post. The two front windows, presumably in the living room, sported smaller versions of the front door wreath. The younger Nyquists’ home could have posed for a Christmas card.

  And Bridget could have posed for Playboy, I thought nastily, as she warily opened the front door and revealed just about everything in a skintight plum-colored leotard.

  “I’m exercising,” she said, somehow managing to beat Vida to the verbal punch. “Excuse me.” She started to close the door.