The Ice Palace

My new heroine, Rosalie, readily told me several things about herself, and I think she could do that because she is "born," so to say, to live out the story I am creating for her. (My old heroine, Mrs. Shepard, would not even tell me her first name.)

Rosalie was born in Michigan, moved to Washington, D.C., with her parents and sister, and graduated from a good women's college nearby. In 1950, she applied for a job in the diplomatic corps and ended up working for Edmond A Gullion, the U.S. Chargé d'affaires at the American embassy in Saigon.

Soon after she moves to Saigon and finds an apartment near her office in Cholon, Saigon's Chinatown, Rosalie's parents are killed by a drunk driver in a head-on car crash in Washington, D.C. Rosalie returns home for the funerals and takes her sister Penelope, known as Pen, back to Saigon with her. Pen is only 19, not independent enough to live by herself in the states.

Do you hate it when fiction writers start talking about their characters as real people? Me, too. But I'm pretty sure it's an authentic experience, and in this case I'm going to take it as a good sign. Rosalie is going to help me tell her story.

Rosalie spent her early years in Michigan, where it was snowy and icy in winter and hot and muggy in summer. Now she lives in Saigon, where the summer monsoon season takes the weather to a whole new, tropical, level of hot and muggy.

In one scene I am thinking about, she feels especially hot and sticky, so she imagines an ice palace like the people in her home town in Charlevoix used to build in the winter. She thinks about dressing for the cold, stomping on the floor to pack it down, and putting the ice blocks into place for the foundation. Later, in her mind, she walks around inside the ice palace until she becomes deliciously chilled.

I looked up Ice Palace in Wikipedia and came up with this wonderful old bit of Russian history. In 1739 to 1740, during a particularly cold winter in St. Petersburg, the Empress Anna Ivanova (1693-1740) was celebrating Russia's victory over the Ottoman Empire. She called for an ice palace to be built. She ordered a prince, now widowed, who had angered her by marrying a woman of a different faith, to become one of her court jesters and an ugly maidservant to become the other; the two were married.

On the wedding night, the empress sealed the newlyweds up in a bedchamber in the ice palace. The couple would have died overnight of the cold, except that the bride had managed to trade her pearl necklace for a guard's sheepskin coat.

According to the Wikipedia article, we know that the architect was Pyotr Yeropkin and the construction manager was Georg Kraft, and we still have Kraft's detailed description of the ice palace (only in Russian, as far as I can see).

Unfortunately, I probably won't be able to tell the story in the book I am writing about Rosalie. So I am regaling you with it here.

Brewing Up Some Trouble

I'm the absent-minded-professor type. When I should be minding my p's and q's or making sure there are no obstacles in my path, I am thinking about the origin of the word coffee and its many wonderful synonyms. Well, yes, a cup of coffee would be good about now, and, as I told my historian friend, "More coffee, more Diane!"

Anyway, the etymology of coffee is in dispute (surprised?), but most sources agree that the word originated in Africa, where the Coffea plant grows, and came to us from the Arabic قهوة (qahwah), the Turkish kavfeh, and, through trade (ca. 1598) between the Ottoman Empire and Venice, the Italian caffè. (For another post, we got the concept of zero in much the same way.)

My favorite way to make coffee at home is right away, first thing in the morning.  Beyond that, I use a one-cup drip filter and cone. The problem here is that you have to take care of a lot of things, and without drinking any coffee first, I  might add. Find a clean cup. Boil water. Figure out where you are keeping the filters these days and fit filter paper into the cone. Measure out coffee. Pour boiling water over coffee into cup.

While my mind is in the ivory tower thinking about the origin of the word coffee, wondering if there are some lovely famous quotations about coffee like there are about tea, promising myself to look up the difference between moka and espresso, I discover that I forgot to buy coffee filters. And not for the first time, either!

What to do? Remember Harper, Paul Newman's detective character in a 1966 movie with Lauren Bacall playing his client. (Harper, directed by Jack Smight, performed by Paul Newman, Lauren Bacall, Julie Harris, and others, Warner Bros.) Harper wakes up, bleary-eyed, stumbles around the kitchen trying to make coffee, finds that he is out of Chemex filters, and goes through the trash until he finds one he can use, all the while thinking about his next move in solving the case.