Oh What a Paradise It Seems (11 page)

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 strata 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.

The visitors drifted over to the office to see the compressors and the pipe diagrams. Sears walked around the edge of the pond to the beginnings of the brook. Some mint grew here and he broke a leaf in his fingers. It was in the early summer but the sun was hot. The sound of water and the broken leaf reminded him of waking one morning with Renée. It was early. It was the first of the light. She lay in his arms and smelled of last night’s perfume and of her own mortality, her yesterday. Her eyelashes had been dyed black and these contrasted with her blondness. They seemed quite artificial. The beauty of her breasts was no longer the beauty of youth and he knew that she worried about their size. He thought this charming. Her hair was not long but it was long enough to need some restraint, and she had, the night before, pulled up her hair—he could easily imagine the gesture—and secured it with a gold buckle. He had not seen her do this but now he saw the gold buckle and the hair it contained and the strands that had escaped. He kissed the loveliness of her neck and caressed the smoothness of her back and seemed to lose himself in the utter delight of loving. It seemed, in his case, to involve some clumsiness, as if he carried a heavy trunk up a staircase with a turning.

The sky was clear that morning and there might still have been stars although he saw none. The thought of stars
contributed to the power of his feeling. What moved him was a sense of those worlds around us, our knowledge however imperfect of their nature, our sense of their possessing some grain of our past and of our lives to come. It was that most powerful sense of our being alive on the planet. It was that most powerful sense of how singular, in the vastness of creation, is the richness of our opportunity. The sense of that hour was of an exquisite privilege, the great benefice of living here and renewing ourselves with love. What a paradise it seemed!

The Salazzos packed their charcoal broiler and their stand-up swimming pool and vanished. Betsy told no one but Henry that she had threatened to poison the community, and she did not tell Henry until some time later. But, you might ask, whatever became of the true criminals, the villains who had murdered a high-minded environmentalist and seduced, bribed and corrupted the custodians of municipal welfare? Not to prosecute these wretches might seem to incriminate oneself with the guilt of complicity by omission. But that is another tale, and as I said in the beginning, this is just a story meant to be read in bed in an old house on a rainy night.

John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912, and went to school at Thayer Academy in South Braintree. He is the author of seven collections of stories and five novels. His first novel,
The Wapshot Chronicle
, won the 1958 National Book Award. In 1965 he received the Howells Medal for Fiction from the National Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1978 he won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Shortly before his death in 1982 he was awarded the National Medal for Literature