Oh What a Paradise It Seems

by John Cheever

  Sears couldn’t help noticing that the mayor was wearing a suit that looked expensive but was plainly a size too big. Had it been given to him by a friend? This seemed improbable since Sears felt sure he could have no friends. Sears also observed that the mayor was one of those liars who speak quite directly when they are truthful but who address their falsehoods to the fingernails of their left hands. It was a phenomenon that Sears had often noticed in bankers. “Beasley’s Pond and the surrounding acreage,” said the mayor, “were purchased a year and a half ago and declared a dump by the town planning board, with the approval of the governor’s blue-ribbon committee on hazardous wastes. It was purchased by the Veterans’ Committee for”—this was addressed to his fingernails—“the sole purpose of building a monument to the forgotten dead. The site has been chosen carefully. We used the exacting criteria we use for all hazardous-waste facilities. The population density is desirable. There is a suitable body of water. The soil is tight with good bedrock.” Then he raised his left hand a little crooked, and said to his fingernails: “Exhaustive laboratory tests have proved that toxicity is no danger.”

  “May I ask to be recognized,” said Chisholm, standing. “I have no objections to this meeting or to what you’ve said but may I propose a delay until our laboratory test results have been received?”

  “Not until I’ve finished,” said the mayor. “This meeting has been called,” he said, “simply as a courtesy to placate a Communist-inspired conservationist, whose bread is buttered by an old man. Beasley’s Pond is like the mainstream of American thought. It accords with human nature. To interfere in our improvements on Beasley’s Pond is to interfere in the fruitful union between the energies of mankind and the energies of the planet. To try and regulate with government interference the spontaneity of this union will sap its natural energy and put it at the paralyzing mercy of a costly bureaucracy financed by the taxpayer. Our improvements to Beasley’s Pond are a very good example of that free enterprise that distinguishes the economy and indeed the character of this great nation.”

  “The plans for the evacuation of Janice are known to us all,” said a man who had not asked to be recognized but who stood and read from a paper. He was a tall man with gray hair and a face that, to Sears’s taste, seemed intermittently lighted.

  “I have described this meeting as a courtesy,” said the mayor. “We have nothing to do with the evacuation plans.”

  “The urgency of the evacuation plans,” said the stranger, “is a day-to-day matter but I only want to bring up the fallacy of a single point. As taxpayers we’ve been charged for these evacuation plans and as taxpayers gathered here together tonight we are entitled to discuss them.”

  “This has nothing to do with Beasley’s Pond.”

  “The possibility of detonative contaminants in the water has been admitted by your commission on hazardous wastes, and since this would put Janice into a danger area with a B classification it most definitely concerns Beasley’s Pond. But as I say my concern is over only one category in the plans. The Chamber of Commerce, the League of Women Voters and the Concerned Citizens of Janice have all expressed their objections to the abandonment of the imprisoned and the disabled and the general ignorance the evacuation plans display of the topography of Janice, its dead-end streets, inflammable buildings and high bluffs. All of this is on record. What I am here to protest is paragraph F in clause 18. This paragraph strictly forbids any congregating excepting at designated evacuation points upon designated summons. The idea here is that if a carcinogenic element is discharged into the air there will be fewer casualties if the population remains scattered. You are familiar with this clause?”

  “Of course,” said the mayor. He seemed defensive. “Of course.”

  “Under the best of circumstances the evacuation plans admit that no more than twenty percent of the population can be rescued. It seems to me that since so many of us must die we ought to be allowed to gather together in some house of worship and pray for life in the world to come.”

  “Who are you?” asked the mayor.

  “I’m minister of the First Unitarian Church on Route 328. I speak for several other clergymen in the neighborhood.”

  “Do you realize,” asked the mayor forcefully, “that the people of this great nation spend fourteen times as much money on breakfast food as they do in church contributions? The marketability of the church was exploded nearly six years ago when one of you clergymen endorsed a decaffeinated coffee and the firm went bankrupt in eight months. I can give you many more examples of how little of our national income goes into church contributions—pornographic appliances, for example—but I will confine myself to the fact that we spend fourteen times as much on breakfast food as we do in church contributions.”

  The churchman sat down. He seemed to be crying. Chisholm asked again to be recognized.

  “I haven’t finished,” said the mayor. “I’ve described this meeting as a courtesy and I’ve encountered nothing but troublemakers. You, Mr. Chisholm, have, I happen to know, never served in the armed forces of your great country and you have no understanding, of course, of our wish to raise a memorial to our patriotic dead. You would like, I know, to prove that our fill in Beasley’s Pond is comprised of leachates and contaminants. My father was an honest Yankee fisherman. He was a soldier. He was a patriot. He was a churchgoer. He was the husband of a contented, loving and happy wife and the father of seven healthy and successful children. If I spoke to him about leachates and contaminants he would tell me to speak English. This is the United States of America, my son,’ he would say, ‘and I want you to speak English.’ ‘Leachates’ and ‘contaminants’ sound like a foreign language, and to bring governmental interference into our improvements of Beasley’s Pond is like the work of a foreign government.”

  “I would like to request a postponement,” Chisholm said, as politely as possible. “The Marston Laboratories are working on the specimens we gave them and they’ve promised a report by Thursday.”

  While Chisholm spoke the mayor conferred with the three members of the board and when Chisholm had finished he said, “Your request has been refused by a majority of the board, but before we close I would like to read a letter I have in my possession. This letter was written by your employer, Mr. Lemuel Sears, on the twenty-ninth of February last year and was published in the newspaper the following day. ‘Is Nothing Sacred’ was the heading of Mr. Sears’s observations.

  “‘I have been skating on weekends on Beasley’s Pond,’ he wrote, ‘in the company of perhaps fifty men and women of all ages and for all I know all walks of life, who seemed to find themselves greatly refreshed for the complexities and problems of the modern world by a few hours spent happily on ice skates. The findings of the discredited paleontologist Gardener who claimed that the skate—or shate—was the turning point in the contest for supremacy between Homo sapiens and primordial man have been proven fraudulent—but isn’t it true that we enjoy on ice skates a sense of fleetness that seems to be a primordial memory? Last Sunday, carrying my skates to the pond, I found that it had been rezoned as fill and had become a heap of rubbish, topped by a dead dog. There is little enough of innocence in the world but let us protect the innocence of ice skating.’ That is your letter, isn’t it, Mr. Sears?”

  “Yes,” said Sears.

  “On one hand we have the grief of mature and thinking men and women who hope to commemorate the sacrifice of life made by their beloved sons and husbands in the cause of freedom. On the other hand we have this. The meeting is adjourned.”

  Almost everyone in the room, including the minister, looked at Sears with contempt. “I had forgotten about the letter,” he said to Chisholm. “I wish they had,” said Chisholm. Betsy Logan joined them and Chisholm introduced her to Sears. Her view of him was obviously prejudiced by the letter. “The town board may give us another hearing,” said Chisholm, “if the laboratory reports are devastating. It is still too early to be hopeless. We can try the district atto
rney, although he’ll refer us to the governor’s commission and the governor’s looking for campaign contributions.” They were almost the last to leave the hall and go down the steep stairs. Betsy kissed Chisholm goodnight and started up the street. “I’ll call you as soon as I hear from the laboratory,” said Chisholm. They shook hands on the sidewalk, but as Chisholm started to cross the street a car that had been double-parked and was without lights came down the street at a high speed and struck Chisholm with an impact that killed him dead.

  11

  SOME few hours later love music was playing at Buy Brite when Betsy chose a cart and pushed it past the fruits and vegetables that were the first things to be found on entering the place. It was well after midnight. The music was faint—too faint to be identified—but almost anyone would recognize it as a love song. The lingering ups and downs of the melody had never meant anything else. To the music of love Betsy pushed her cart through the vastness of a nearly empty market, although the place was flooded with light. She was sad and vengeful. Chisholm had saved the life of her son. She missed him painfully and felt that the world would miss this pure and helpful man. Her cart was empty and in her raincoat pocket she carried a bottle of Teriyaki Sauce to which she had added enough ant poison to kill a family. Pasted to this was a message that said: “Stop poisoning Beasley’s Pond or I will poison the food in all 28 Buy Brites.” She had made this of words cut from a newspaper while her sons and her husband slept.

  Betsy headed for the aisle where spices and extracts were displayed. She couldn’t clearly remember where she had found the Teriyaki Sauce on that rainy afternoon when she and Maria Salazzo had battled. She pushed her empty cart past the shelves of spices and extracts again and again. The search for anything, she knew, could be deceptive. How often had she looked for labels, prices and trade names in what was truly a crossroads of her time. Whenever she couldn’t find what she looked for she always seemed to hear a chorus of elderly women in her family asking for their eyeglasses, their door keys, and lamenting the loss of telephone numbers, addresses and names. Oh where was the Teriyaki Sauce? She was anxious at the thought that they might have discontinued it or exhausted their supply. That someone might seize her, find the sauce in her pocket and sentence her to jail for having threatened to poison the community was, of course, an absurd anxiety but it remained very keen.

  She went from the aisle for spices and extracts to the aisle for sauces and condiments. She had forgotten there were so many. She felt hopeful when she saw some exotic sauces and then she remembered that there was an Oriental corner between the baked goods and the dairy products. Here were the bottles of Teriyaki Sauce, and she left her bottle of poison on its side where it would be noticed. She left the store without anyone having seen her face. She climbed into bed with Henry but she felt too excited to sleep. It seemed to be the fear of being apprehended that kept her awake; but she felt that her bottle and its message would be discovered in the morning. World press would print the story since our supermarkets are such an axial part of our way of life. The story would appear everywhere including Russia and the Orient and the dumping in Beasley’s Pond would end at once.

  Nothing of the sort happened. In the evening paper the principal story was about an unidentified flying object, seen by the wife of the chief of police, and some vandalism at the high school. Why Betsy should continue this project when there was so much in her life that contented her is a mystery. Her love for Henry and the children was quite complete, it seemed happily to transcend her mortality, and yet beyond this lay some unrequited melancholy or ardor. She was one of those women whose nostalgia for a destiny, a calling, would outlast all sorts of satiation. It seemed incurable. The next day she bought and poisoned some sauce and while Henry slept she made another sign and returned to Buy Brite. Her first jar had vanished but she put her second on the shelf, bought a box of Flotilla and came home. “Where were you, my darling?” Henry asked when she returned to bed. “Oh my darling, where were you?” “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I’ve been reading.”

  In the evening paper there was still nothing but news of the customary gains and losses and the next day she poisoned a third bottle and took it to the store when Henry fell asleep. When she returned Henry was aroused and angry. “Where were you, where in hell were you? You weren’t downstairs reading. I’ve looked for you everywhere.” She calmed him—he was a most amiable man—and they returned to bed but in the next night’s paper she saw that she had been successful. POISONED FAMILY IN SATISFACTORY CONDITION, was the headline. “The Grimaldo family, disabled by a jar of poisoned Teriyaki Sauce, were reported to be satisfactorily recovering in the Janice Hospital. Whoever poisoned the sauce threatened to poison food in all the Buy Brite supermarkets until the pollution of Beasley’s Pond is ended.” This time the news went all the way around the world, and the dumping in Beasley’s Pond ended at once.

  Sears’s business associates respected his success but those who knew him intimately—those who played bridge with him, for example—thought him not terribly intelligent. However, he was trusted and as soon as he learned that the dumping at Beasley’s Pond had ended, he organized the Beasley Foundation. This took hours of tiring work with lawyers and was one of the most difficult projects he had ever accomplished or—he liked to think—that he had ever seen accomplished. The foundation was financed with assets taken from the Cleveland branch of the Computer Container Intrusion System. This subdivision then became a holding company with the status of a tax shelter and short-term bonds that enjoyed a triple-A rating.

  Only a third of the pond had been filled, the despoiled end was dredged and an innovative aeration system was installed to cure the water of its toxicity. At the time of which I’m writing most of our great rivers and bodies of water were in serious danger, and when engineers from other countries came to assess the system, Sears sometimes joined them as a guide. His grasp of the language was rather like a tourist’s grasp of another language. “After the dumping had ended,” he could be heard to say, “we were faced with eutrophication. The end result of the eutrophication process is the development of a swamp or bog, which eventually dries into organic mulch, devoid of water. Historically the eutrophication and decay of a lake required tens and thousands of years, but with the increase of man-made contaminants and leachates it can be accomplished in no time at all.” Sears liked to think that the resurrection of Beasley’s Pond had taught him some humility, but his humility was not very apparent. When a visiting engineer offered to help him across a stream he said: “No thank you. I’m wearing the same belt I wore when I played football in college.”

  The loveliness of the landscape had been restored. It was in no way distinguished, but it could, a century earlier, have served as a background for Eden or even the fields of Eleusis if you added some naked goddesses and satyrs. “Our first approach to the problem was to pump bottom water to the surface, where it could absorb oxygen,” said Sears. “As well as poisons, the dumping had brought nutrient chemicals into the water. These increased the algae and weeds. We had anaerobic conditions in the bottom water since it was completely devoid of oxygen. Hydrogen sulfide was released and manganese, iron and phosphates were dissolved from the underlying soil. Organic acids were produced and the pH of the water decreased. This destroyed all crustacea and other animals and ended the pond’s life cycle.

  “Bringing bottom water to the surface,” he went on,” had worked well in small impoundments but this required considerable amounts of power per unit volume. We needed a new approach. We needed increased horsepower efficiency—we needed to move ten to one thousand times as much water per horsepower as provided by old techniques. We needed to reduce the bubble-rise rate—if the bubble-rise rate could be reduced to less than one fps, turbulent flow would be eliminated and a laminar uplift effect would be created. We needed to reduce bubble size. If the air were introduced in tiny bubbles at bottom level not only would oxygen be dissolved quickly and laminar uplift produced, but stra
ta turnover would be continuous and the cold water of the bottom layer would be distributed into the surface. This would prevent water-quality deterioration.

  “Our engineers developed a small-diameter plastic pipe with tiny apertures in a straight line. This can be seen in the office. The piping made for easy installation, reasonable cost and small-bubble formation. We put down 4,500 feet of this valved polyethylene tubing. The permanence of this was made possible by embedding a continuous lead line in a thickened portion of the pipe wall, opposite the line of apertures. The diameter of the tubing is 0.5 inch. The apertures—which are die-formed check valves—were sized and spaced to meet water depths and desired circulation rates. The weight of the lead keel embedded in the tubing was heavier than the water despite the advanced stagnation in Beasley’s Pond. We then connected this piping to nine three-quarter-horsepower compressors with nine thousand feet of weighted feeder tubing. Air delivered by blowers at 4.4 cfm 30 psi continuously mix and turn over upward of three hundred million gallons of water. We have two auxiliary blower units in case of mechanical trouble. Fish kill has been cut by two-thirds and last month we ran tests at four water levels. These showed water temperatures of eighty-four degrees and dissolved oxygen of seven to nine mgl at all levels. A year ago the water was poison. Now it is quite potable.” Sears spoke with an enthusiasm that sprang from the fact that he had found some sameness in the search for love and the search for potable water. The clearness of Beasley’s Pond seemed to have scoured his consciousness of the belief that his own lewdness was a profound contamination.