She stood there a moment, eyes watering, and I grabbed her empty wineglass.
“Here, let me freshen this for you,” I said, and beat it across the gallery, into the hall, and out the back door to the parking lot. The old “refill” move was one of my smarmy maneuvers from those dark Depletionists days, and it shamed me how easily it came back.
I ditched the plastic wineglasses in the snow and made for the van. Before I’d even found the right key, I looked over my shoulder to that helicopter, silently looming in the dark snow. Through the smoked bubble glass of its windows, I thought I saw the glow of a cigarette burning, like the tiny red brain behind the eyes of a giant insect. It was probably just a blinking instrument light, but the thought that Eggers’ parents could be sitting comfortably inside such a craft while their son walked alone made me want to go up and pound their windows. Yet what would I say to Eggers’ parents? What had I ever said to my own?
I climbed in the van and drove to the old Odd Fellows building, where my father now lived. Downtown, the commotion of Glacier Days seemed to roost in the trees — lights shot grotesque shadows high on brick buildings, and the mixing sounds of humans and carnival machinery keened through the streets. The midway throbbed near the gates — that huge 4-H building outlined beyond — and the plunge of a coaster sent a shiver through me. I would forever hear in any scream that skittish, porcine whine.
The Parkton chapter of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows had gone the way of the Masons and the Moose and the Elks. The customs and rituals of their aging members were dying with them, and their brick buildings were now being parceled into apartments. I parked in the street and entered through the great hall, its wide expanse still filled with the same red couches, elbow-worn and smoke-darkened. I made for the elevators across a marble floor inset with a ring of the order’s symbols: the lamb and rod, pyramid and sun, eye and rook. In the center was an owl, body facing away, head swiveled back to eye you.
Instead of numbers, the elevator had buttons that read “Mezzanine” (which housed all the social halls), “Lodging,” “Executive Council,” and then a final, unmarked black button that brought me to the top floor, where all the order’s secret business had once been conducted. This was where my father lived, in a loft converted from their former initiation room.
His apartment had a massive, reinforced door, hung on industrial hinges. Instead of a key lock, it opened with a large combination wheel, the kind you see on safes. He never locked it, though. He’d repeat some insurance-industry baloney about more people dying from fires than from burglaries, but this door bothered him, and even though I knew the secret combo, it was always open. Did he hear his own heartbeat when it was locked? Did it speak of the crypt? I placed my palms on the door, felt the faint rumor of music vibrating within, and then swung it open to a sight I have never forgotten:
The apartment was a large studio with a high, vaulted ceiling that arced from wall to wall, firmamentlike, and my father was in the middle of the room steadying the base of a ladder, head craned back, looking straight up a woman’s skirt as if contemplating the mystery of the heavens. Dad wore a loose double-breasted suit and sipped a gimlet almost phosphorescent with lime. His head bobbed with the beat of a rumba, and as I followed his look of conjectural joy up the rungs of the ladder, I realized the woman was Trudy, stocking-footed in a black, skintight cocktail dress, straining atop the steps to inspect the ceiling. Her rhinestone earrings were shimmering, and in her hand, a cosmopolitan glowed as opaque-pink as Chinese jade. Beads of water condensed on the glass — when a drop ran down the stem and fell on my father’s forehead, he closed his eyes and smiled.
Then Dad noticed me. He turned away from Trudy’s powerful legs, and in his eyes was not so much surprise, or even shame, as the sparkle of a challenge.
“There you are, my boy,” he said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
Trudy smiled down, surprised to see me. “Hey, your father said you were going to meet us later, at dinner,” she said. “God, have you seen this ceiling?”
I walked closer. With each step, my view began to resemble my father’s, until I, too, stood under Trudy, an arm’s reach from the mid-thigh cut of her dress, beholding the way her tidy breasts rose with each breath. I could feel my lungs constrict. I hadn’t seen a woman’s body in some time. In winter, women wore everything from parkas and pantaloons to sweaters and socks. After entering a building, they’d remove a powder jacket, blizzard bibs, a long coat, and a scarf, only to reveal they were dressed in fabrics like flannel and denim, with the bitter promise of long johns below. So, as Trudy stepped down from the ladder, I could see perfectly outlined in Lycra the powerful breadth of her back, her padded torso, and then those hips — articulated, capable, thick with possibility.
My father smiled. “Bourbon, right?” he asked as he folded the ladder.
“Sure,” I said, only half hearing him. “Trudy, what are you doing here?”
Dad carried the ladder off across a room furnished only with a stereo on a stool, a set of chairs — black leather, chrome tubing — and a Japanese screen that cordoned off a makeshift bedroom. He leaned the ladder in a corner and made steam for his “bar”—a line of bottles along the windowsill.
“Well,” Trudy said, scooching her dress back into place. “Your father said our reservations got pushed back at the Red Dakotan, so we decided to have a drink in the meantime.”
“Reservations, at the Red Dakotan?” I asked.
“Look,” she said, “I know I kind of blew off our lunch yesterday, and I guess I owe you an apology for that. I wasn’t sure about this fellowship thing, but I checked with the USSD Foundation, and it’s for real. I feel pretty stupid. I mean, once I talked to your father, it was obvious how interested he was in my dissertation. I brought some of my research abstracts, and he was really into them.” She nodded to her briefcase on the floor. “Then I saw this ceiling. Have you seen this thing? I could write a whole paper on it. It’s a complete history of an all-male secret society, half of it in code. I bet I’m the first woman who’s ever set foot in this room.”
I didn’t say anything to that.
Trudy went on to describe how the entire ceiling was covered with finely printed initiation rosters, membership rolls, and codes of male behavior, but I refused to look up. It was to her briefcase that my eyes were drawn. I’d never seen it before. It was simple and businesslike, with a faux gold handle and spring-loaded hasps, the kind your aunts and uncles chip in for when you go off to college. It spoke of the dreams of many, riding on the success of one, and knowing that it was filled with all of Trudy’s ideas made the bourbon in my stomach flare.
“Trudy,” I said in a stern whisper, “can’t you see the way my father’s leering at you? He doesn’t care about your ideas. Looks like I came over just in time.”
“Oh, please, Dr. Hannah,” she said. “Remember my master’s thesis topic?” She put a hand on her hip.
“Sure, sure,” I said. “You compared symbolism in tribal tattoos to gang tattoos.”
“I’ve walked the entire length of Sec-Ward in Angola Prison. I took five hundred Polaroids in Marion Penitentiary.” She cocked her head and looked at me. “Don’t think I don’t know when a man is leering at me, Dr. Hannah,” she said.
“Ice?” Dad called to us, clicking a set of tongs over a silver bucket. It was a rhetorical question. Beyond him, in the window, spread the blanketing flicker of town, bordered by the ropy dark of the river valley. Past that was Hormel’s flashing smokestack and the sodium glow of Parkton Prison. In my mind, I began following Trudy down cellblocks made from epoxy-sealed cement and bars painted maritime-green. I imagined her walking past inmate after inmate without fear, even as they pointed their wrought hands and small mirrors at her.