How Quickly She Disappears by Raymond Fleischmann

Author:Raymond Fleischmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-01-13T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 22

Fairbanks, as it happened, had been Elisabeth’s first impression of Alaska. They had flown from Philadelphia to Chicago, then from Chicago to Denver, then from Denver to Seattle, and then finally—finally, after more than twenty hours of airports and airplanes and deafening propeller engines—from Seattle to Alaska. They touched down in Fairbanks on a Friday just like this one, and were set to fly into Tanacross that Sunday.

Fairbanks. The largest city in the interior. That was what she had known about it, and that was the fact that had shaped her expectations. She expected a city not too dissimilar from Pittsburgh: gritty and industrial, certainly, but a city not without its share of energy and verve and hard-nosed charm. Perhaps, she thought, before setting out for Tanacross, the three of them could catch a movie—Clark Gable’s Test Pilot had just come out—and afterward, perhaps they could do a bit of shopping. They could pick up a few things for the new house. John’s post with the Office of Indian Affairs had filled them with an almost childish sense of hope and enthusiasm. It had seemed serendipitous when John first secured the job: One morning he saw the ad affixed to the employment board in the post office; then three days after that he interviewed by phone; then the day after that he had an offer in hand. Their lives were going to be an adventure, and adventures always ended happily, didn’t they?

Their arrival in Fairbanks was Elisabeth’s first indication that Alaska had a tendency of defeating expectations in all their varied forms. In her mind, she had seen Pittsburgh; in reality, Fairbanks wasn’t much larger than Lititz, and any vestige of its vitality had long ago worn away. The streets were wide and nearly free of cars. Paved sidewalks petered out at random into pitted lanes of dirt. The city’s only movie theater had recently burned to the ground, and they were told it would be months until the new one would be finished. It didn’t seem justified to call Fairbanks a city. If Fairbanks was a city, Pittsburgh was a world-class metropolis.

Since then, however, Fairbanks had grown, not in truth but in its impression. Each time they visited, the city felt richer and livelier and vastly more inviting than it had that distant afternoon when they first arrived. There were drugstores, grocery stores, doctors, dentists, restaurants. There was electricity. There were toilets that flushed and showers that rained hot water. But this time, more than any luxury, the thing that Elisabeth relished was the presence of strangers—guarded, hurried strangers. She was far from Tanacross, and she was anonymous here. No one was watching her, judging her, gossiping about her. They stayed at the Emerald Hotel, and when a young man in the lobby snubbed Elisabeth’s perfunctory smile, she felt an unexpected flutter of delight in her stomach.

John set out immediately for his meeting with the OIA, an office of which was housed in the basement of a building on the east side of town.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.