Oh What a Paradise It Seems Read online

  This turn of thought troubled Chisholm. The diminished responsibilities of our society—its wanderings, its dependence on acceleration, its parasitic nature—deeply troubled him. He could see it all on route 336. That a hermetic society had comparable limitations had never been called to his attention. He was a truly honest and conscientious man, but his wife had found him immobile and had left him. In fact she had obliged him to leave her and she and their two daughters were living in the house in Queens while he was living alone in a small apartment in the city. It was he who had been ousted but it was she who made the spiritual departure.

  Route 336 was a deadbeat to drive for anyone, but for an environmentalist who had just lost some wetlands it was perhaps worse. The vote for the shopping center had been determined first by a promise of reduced taxes and then by pure irresponsibility. Any display of venality is depressing. Chisholm felt quite lost. Nothing waited for him in his apartment. There was no woman, no man, no dog, no cat, and his answering tape would likely be empty and the neighborhood where he lived had become so anonymous and transient that there were no waiters or shopkeepers or bartenders who would greet him. He turned on the radio but all the music he seemed able to get was disco music, and disco music from those discos that had been closed the year before the year before last for drug pushing or nonpayment of income tax. He seemed to be searching for the memory of some place, some evidence of the fact that he had once been able to put himself into a supremely creative touch with his world and his kind. He longed for this as if it were some country which he had been forced to leave.

  He passed a blue car and was passed by a red car. Then he passed two light-gray cars and one brown van. He had gas on the stomach and a slight erection. He felt so lonely that when the car ahead of him signaled for an exit he felt as if he had been touched tenderly on the shoulder by some stranger in some place like a crowded airport, and he wanted to put on his parking lights or signal back in some way as strangers who are traveling sometimes touch one another although they will never, ever meet again. In a lonely fantasy of nomadism he imagined a world where men and women communicated with one another mostly by signal lights and where he proposed marriage to some stranger because she turned on her parking lights an hour before dusk, disclosing a supple and romantic nature.

  He passed a blue car and was passed by two black cars, a brown van and a convertible. His physical reality and the reality of the car he was driving were unassailable, but his spiritual reality seemed to be vanishing in a way that he had never before experienced. He even seemed to have lost the power to regret his past and its adventures. A pair of lovers in a car ahead of him—the girl was sticking her tongue into the driver’s ear—failed even to arouse his jealousy. He seemed about to become a cipher. The pain, perhaps the most galling he had ever known, lacked any of the attributes of pain, any of its traditional bloodiness.

  Then he seemed lost. He was lost. He had lost his crown, his kingdom, his heirs and armies, his court, his harem, his queen and his fleet. He had, of course, never possessed any of these. He was not in any way emotionally dishonest and so why should he feel as if he had been cruelly and physically stripped of what he had never claimed to possess? He seemed to have been hurled bodily from the sanctuary of some church, although he had never committed himself to anything that could be called serious prayer.

  Then he saw blackberries in the scrub along the road shoulder. He could stop and eat some blackberries. That much would be real and true. His mother had liked to pick berries when they went for a drive. She had never forgotten the quiet lanes and roads of her youth and had never understood why her husband wouldn’t stop on an expressway long enough for her to pick berries or violets. Chisholm was looking for blackberries, and blackberries that grew in a place where the road shoulder was commodious enough for him to stop safely and park his car. Then he saw the bright blue of the baby carrier. He didn’t know what it was, but its brightness and blueness seemed to declare that it was worth his attention. It could have been some wrapping paper or a scarf or some other piece of clothing that had been thrown away by an ardent lover. There was no car behind him, and he pulled over onto the shoulder to see what the bright blue thing was. When he found a clean, happy baby waving its hands and feet he exclaimed: “You must be Moses, you must be King of the Jews.”

  Abandonment was the first thing that occurred to him, although it was hard to imagine such a clean and happy child having been abandoned. There might be a note, he thought, to explain the forsaken child, and he rooted around in the blankets but there was nothing but a half-empty bottle. The cleanliness of the baby’s linen conveyed the fact that if the baby had been abandoned it had been a tragic abandonment—a cruelly enforced separation, a deprivation. He imagined a young, weeping mother. The sensible thing to do was to go on to the next exit and find a police station. The thought that the police might unfeelingly toss the baby into an orphanage aroused in him protective and paternal longings, although he was in no position to raise a child in his apartment.

  He put the carrier into the front seat and, after waiting his turn, joined the stream of traffic. He felt himself distinguished. He felt his to be one of the few cars on the road that was transporting a pleasant baby. The next exit said GAS, FOOD and Chisholm took this. His first stop was a garage, where he got directions to find the police. They were in a municipal building from the twenties with an image of blindfolded justice above the door. Holding the bassinet with both hands, Horace had some difficulty opening the door. No one offered to help him. In the vestibule an arrow directed him to a desk where people, he supposed, brought their troubles, but seldom a smiling infant.

  “I found this baby on route 336,” he said, “a little before the turnoff for 224.”

  “You ain’t shitting me, are you?” said the patrolman at the desk. “I been in the service thirty-seven years and no one ever told me they found a baby on route 336.”

  “Hey, Charlie,” someone called from the back. “We got a call out for a lost baby if somebody found one. We got this broad in a place called Janice who said she forgot her baby on 336. We got a number to call. She’s hysterical.”

  Chisholm was terribly happy. The baby went on cooing and gurgling and most of the staff of the station came around to look at him. To return an infant to its mother seemed to please everyone and it was decided that Chisholm should call her. “Mrs. Logan?” he asked when he heard Betsy’s voice. “I’m Horace Chisholm and you don’t know me but I found your baby on route 336. The baby is well and happy and waiting for you at the police station near exit 37.” Betsy was hysterical, but when she collected herself she explained that Henry was on the road going south to pick up route 224 northbound and she gave them his license number. They agreed to call her as soon as Henry had been located, and the radio call for Henry hadn’t been out for more than ten minutes when they picked him up. Then they called Betsy and waited around for Henry. The patrolmen had gotten possessive about the baby. “You can go now if you want,” they said to Chisholm. “There’s no point in your staying around. We’ll give the baby to its father.” “I’d like to see that the baby gets into the right hands,” said Chisholm. To see the baby and his father reunited seemed to him some important part of the afternoon.

  When Henry came rushing in and saw the baby in his blue bassinet he began to cry. He seized little Binxie in his arms and for the first time little Binxie began to cry. “I want to thank you,” said Henry. “My wife and I want to thank you. We live in Janice and I wonder if you could have dinner with us tomorrow. My wife makes wonderful fettucini. That’s green noodles. She makes them with spinach. We live in Janice, on Hitching Post Road. It’s about an hour’s drive from the city.”

  “I’d like to come for dinner,” said Chisholm.

  “We like to have dinner at around six,” said Henry. “We like to eat early.”

  Late the next afternoon in his apartment Horace bathed and dressed, contented and secure in the memory of the fact that he had fo
und a baby and restored it to its parents and would eat green noodles in their company that night. Continuity had seemed to be what he sought that afternoon when he had felt so painfully lost. Now he felt happy although he could not rig his hopes on the repetition of such an unlikely chain of events. He would settle for the evening. There wasn’t much else he could do. It was the second time he had been to Janice and he knew the way. Hitching Post Road was not far from Beasley’s Pond. When he rang the bell Henry let him in. “This is my wife, Betsy,” he said. “I know you’ve talked with her on the telephone.” Betsy looked at him shyly and said, “I don’t know whether or not I should do this but I feel that I have to.” Then she threw her arms around him and kissed him on the mouth. “Did you have any trouble finding the place?” asked Henry. “I’ve been to Janice before,” said Horace. “One of the most difficult jobs I’ve ever had is Beasley’s Pond. We’re trying to clear up the pollution there.”

  “Mr. Salazzo who lives next door supervises the dumping,” said Betsy.

  “We’ll have to cut the happy hour a little short,” said Henry, “because Betsy doesn’t like the fettucini to get overcooked. Her mother’s Italian and in Italy she says cooking pasta is a regular art.” They had some drinks and while Betsy was in the kitchen Henry passed a box of crackers that the label promised would stimulate conversation. There was no need for any of this, for their excitement at having reclaimed their son made their pleasure in Horace deep and spontaneous. The fettucini was good, and the fact that the light of the two candles on the table made it almost impossible for them to see one another made no difference to the pleasures of the evening. After dinner they settled down comfortably and watched their particularly favorite shows on television. At eleven o’clock when the entertainment ended Horace said goodbye and goodnight and Betsy shyly kissed him once again. It was agreed that he would call them when he next came out to Beasley’s Pond. “We don’t know how to thank you for saving Binxie’s life,” said Betsy. “Do whatever you can to save Beasley’s Pond,” said Horace.

  10

  THE hearing that Sears’s enemies had rigged was held in the Janice town hall, a brick building from the last century. Considering the power and might of the organization Chisholm had described, the building seemed very modest. In the lobby there were posters urging passers-by to enroll in classes in karate, ballet dance and remedial reading. These aroused in Sears those taxpayers’ blues that were so characteristic of his generation. There was an elevator with an OUT OF ORDER sign and he climbed a flight of uncommonly steep stairs to the hearing room. Breathing deeply—puffing—he became acutely aware of the fact that the air of the building was permeated with a disinfectant. It was pervasive and powerful and reminded him of the loneliness and regimentation of Eastern Europe, where even the grand-luxe hotel lobbies—even the Kremlin Palace—smelled of disinfectant. He was reminded again of Eastern Europe when he reached the upstairs hallway. Everybody seemed to be smoking and the hallway, filled with tobacco smoke, seemed like a glimpse at the past. How long it had been since he had seen so much cigarette smoke! He went on into the hearing room, where perhaps fifty people had already gathered. Some of them looked to Sears as if they had come in to get out of the rain that was falling and because they were welcome nowhere else. Chisholm was at the back of the room, engaged in conversation with a young woman, and Sears waved to him and sat in one of the front rows.

  The room was a little like an informal courtroom, with a raised table for the authorities. They were not yet seated but there were name signs at their places. If the power of their organization was rooted, as Chisholm claimed, in Eastern or Southern Europe, you could not tell this by their nomenclature. Their names were so conspicuously up-country that they would have served—Sears thought—for third basemen in minor-league baseball. They seemed names from that rural past when one shared one’s family name with backroads, lakes, bogs and sometimes mountains. The mayor, who according to Chisholm was a puppet of the opposition, was named Chauncey Upjohn and his lieutenants were named Copley Townsend and Harrison Porter. On the walls of the room hung two large photographs of bearded elders. Then there was a large photograph of the village after the catastrophic fire of 1832. Nothing had been left standing but chimneys. Also on the wall was a sculptured copy of the town seal. This was a portrait of one of the Nock-Sink Indians who had settled the river banks. The brave had a hook nose, a headdress of game-bird feathers and was holding a tomahawk with which, considering the bloody history of his people, he might have mutilated a Jesuit. Chisholm joined Sears a few minutes before the meeting was called to order. The two men had spent the afternoon in the wetlands around Beasley’s Pond.

  They had made the trip in waders. As they struggled through the marsh Chisholm recited a litany of the poisons the laboratory had promised to find in the water. In the water of the pond Sears saw islands of what appeared to be fermenting excrement. Where the water was clear one saw trails of vileness like the paraphernalia of witchcraft. “Pollution has brought in the rat-tailed maggot,” said Chisholm. “Two years ago you wouldn’t have found Helobdella stagnalis in a pond like this. Another newcomer is the sludge worm. Tubifex. Glossifonia complanata is also new.” The only things that cheered him were the cattails (Typha latifolia) and Phragmites communis—the reed.

  The wetlands drained into a stream that had for Sears the appearance of a traditional trout brook. It flowed over stones—glacial rubble—it formed deep pools, its breadth was variable, one could not quite anticipate its variety as it followed gravity through the woods to some destination of its own. The illusion of eternal purity the stream possessed, its music and the greenery of its banks, reminded Sears of pictures he had seen of paradise. The sacred grove was no legitimate part of his thinking, but the whiteness of falling water, the variety of its sounds, the serenity of the pools he saw corresponded to a memory as deep as any he possessed. He had on his knees in countless cavernous and ill-ventilated Episcopal churches praised the beginning of things. He had heard this described in Revelation as a sea of crystal and living creatures filled with eyes, but it seemed that he had never believed it to be anything but a fountainhead.

  On and on went Chisholm’s recitation of poisons. Polychlorinated biphenyls. Dioxin. Chloroform. Thoroviven. Clorestemy, Mustin and Thraxon. As they moved from the wetlands to the charming brook he recited the diseases these chemicals produced in men. Rickets. Blindness. Brain tumor. Impotence. Sterility. And these were all more desirable than what happened to the woman in Mitcheville who miscarried a child that looked more like a dog than a human.

  Now and then the voice of the brook was louder than Chisholm’s voice. A trout stream in a forest, a traverse of potable water, seemed for Sears to be the bridge that spans the mysterious abyss between our spiritual and our carnal selves. How contemptible this made his panic about his own contamination. When he was young, brooks had seemed to speak to him in the tongues of men and angels. Now that he was an old man who spoke five or six languages—all of them poorly—the sound of water seemed to be the language of his nativity, some tongue he had spoken before his birth. Soft and loud, high and low, the sound of water reminded him of eavesdropping in some other room than where the party was.

  He remembered other voices he had overheard. One was at the end of some war in which he had been a soldier and was spending a day or two waiting reassignment or transportation, in a furnished room in some city where he was a stranger. He had been unable to sleep and had gone to the window to hear the strange city and had heard, instead, the voice of a woman from some nearby window. The voice was quite clear, weak with suffering and very appealing. “I don’t feel like myself anymore, Charlie,” the woman said. “I don’t feel like myself anymore.” The second voice that he remembered was very different. He had been a guest in a palace in Rome and had taken a bath in a room with a terrace. He had stepped out onto the terrace with a towel to dry himself and to see the view. It was a truly Roman view with clouds of swallows in the twilight and gr
ass, weeds and flowers growing vigorously from every crack and orifice in the roofs and church spires that he saw. Then across the roofs he heard a man shouting. “I will not put my prick in your martini,” he said and slammed a door. Sears then heard the laughter of a woman although whether or not her laughter was felicitous or bitter he had never decided. He felt like an eavesdropper that afternoon, hearing the voices of the brook.

  “That’s the mayor, the one in the gray suit,” said Chisholm. “He’s the worst of the lot, although the others will do anything he tells them to. What our enemies have is a great deal of money. They were taking twelve and fourteen thousand dollars a day out of Beasley’s Pond until we got the hold order, and that expires at midnight.” Sears regarded the mayor. He judged faces, it seemed, on their capacity to contain light. It was lightlessness in a face—the absence even of the promise of light—that reminded him unhappily of man’s inhumanity to man. It was not, of course, in his power or his disposition to judge the faces of strangers, but walking down the streets of any city in the world he sought in the faces of strangers the quality of light. Sears looked for light in the faces of the mayor and his associates when the meeting was called to order. There was an unfurled American flag to the left of the table but the meeting did not begin with a pledge of allegiance but with their singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The tape of an operatic soprano’s voice led them on. Sears had never before seen a thing like this but then he had never before been to such a meeting.