Уильям Макгиверн: Summitt

Selby and Jennifer Easton walked through a wide shopping mall that stretched like a spoke from the hub of Summitt City, a complex of buildings housing the company’s headquarters. Other spokes extended from this central area to the chemical plants, to playing fields, experimental laboratories, schools and churches.

They strolled past boutiques and pharmacies, markets and grocery stores, shops full of sporting goods and electrical appliances. At an outdoor counter with a gaily striped awning, a man in a checked apron and straw hat sold ice cream and praline wafers.

The tone of the brochure was congratulatory. A picture of George Thomson, chief executive officer of Harlequin Chemicals, was featured on the inside of the front cover, with a quotation from him in boldface type: “In ten years we at Harlequin — workers and management together — have given a fresh and exciting meaning to the phrase ‘life-style.’ With respect for our work and respect for ourselves, we have created at Summitt City a pilot town and plant that is a shining example of the continuing miracle of American industry.”

Thomson was in his early or middle fifties, a vigorous man with dark hair and eyes, staring at the world (in this photograph) with a look of aggressive authority.

The pamphlet listed Harlequin’s accomplishments: homes, kitchens and greenhouses built into wall spaces, warmed by solar flues running up through the roofs and mistfed by tiny spray pipes crisscrossed through the plantings; hot water in the bathrooms supplied by solar panels; composting toilets with aerobic decomposition units that channeled household and bodily wastes into fertilizers for commercial truck gardens; a linked system of company structures applying the concept of ecological harmony to human existence; huge city-maintained tanks of tropical fish, a rapidly growing and propagating species which provided valuable edible protein for the community while subsisting healthfully itself on algae fed to them from the town’s kitchen wastes — self-contained and self-sufficient, Summitt City was an “interphased and interacting bioshelter,” recycling its own natural by-products through biological composting, eliminating polluting sewage treatment facilities while despoiling neither the soil nor the water table with toxic deposits.

The information about “aquaculture” and “homeostasis,” the “body-as-machine” and the significance of “mini-arks” in achieving environmental equipoise, this was all fascinating, Selby supposed, but none of it caught his attention as strongly as the worried frown of his brother; thin, anxious lines that were like the iceberg tips of whatever was bothering him.

Selby glanced around, impressed by the silence, the curious weight of it. He was almost lonesome for sounds he was accustomed to, the noise of traffic, automobile horns, people calling to one another, cops’ whistles. The shopping mall was full of pedestrians, women and children churning past them, but the flow was orderly and tranquil, no one riding skateboards or roller skates or moped bikes, or carrying transistor radios.

Jennifer had changed into a beige suit and boots the color of cognac. At a vendor’s cart, she bought two ice cream cones and a foil-wrapped packet of praline wafers.

She smiled at Selby as she paid the man. “There’s a place near the lake with picnic tables,” she said, “or would you rather go on reading about Summitt City’s plumbing system?”

“I was going to skip to the end and see how it turned out.”

“I can tell you about it,” she said, and hooked an arm companionably through his.

They walked from the mall and crossed a series of green belts to the lake, which glistened against the woods beyond it. The day had become pleasantly warm. A man in a rowboat cast a lure toward clumps of cattails growing along the banks. A stoutly built man in a warm-up suit was batting grounders to youngsters on a Little League diamond.

Jennifer and Selby sat at a redwood table and watched the fisherman and the boys and girls playing ball. She gave him an ice cream cone and opened the packet of wafers and spread them on the table. In profile to him, she turned her face to the sun, legs stretched and slim, boots crossed at the ankles. A faint, throbbing noise sounded rhythmically and Selby saw a gray helicopter on the horizon beyond the woods, twin rotaries flashing in the sunlight.

“How long have you known Jarrell?” he asked her.

“Four or five months, I think. We met at a jazz concert, somebody shoved some tables together and we began talking, I don’t remember about what, probably how crowded and noisy it was.”

“That was in Memphis?”

“Yes. I’d been down to visit friends.” She nibbled on a praline wafer and licked a crumb from her lips. Smiling at him, she said, “It got to be a habit. Seeing Jarrell, I mean. I flew down yesterday without telling him. It’s not a very structured relationship. But that’s how I got your bed, Harry. I picked up a car out at the airport, and I also rather dumbly picked up a speeding ticket on the way out here.”

She made a comical face, but he could see she hadn’t liked the experience; her full lower lip tightened in an exasperated line. “My Yankee sweet-talk jive didn’t cut it with the good old boys in the cruiser.”

“You work in New York?”

“I’m in fashion photography, free-lance. Eat your ice cream before it melts, Harry.”

A second helicopter flew over the lake and trees, the dark tubular shape with blades like insect feelers sharp against the white sky. Selby saw the flash of U.S. Air Force insignia then, and realized the chopper must be settling onto a military installation he had passed on the way out from Memphis, Camp Saliaris, a chemical corps unit, according to the sign he had seen above tall iron gates at a sentry’s station.

“Jennifer, is Jarrell worried about something? Did this visit of mine come at a bad time?”

Instead of answering, she straightened up and pointed to the fisherman in the boat. “Look, Harry, I think he’s caught something.”

The man was standing to reel in his line, balancing himself awkwardly in the rocking boat. The tip of his rod bent almost to the water before snapping up suddenly, causing the lure to surface and fly into the air, a red plug with a white feather tied to it, the tiny triangle of hooks shining and empty in the sun.

“Oh, damn, I wish he’d caught something,” Jennifer said. “My father used to fish a lot off the Island. They flew flags when they came home and we could tell what they’d caught by the colors while they were still miles out.” She looked sideways at him. “Which doesn’t answer your question, does it, Harry?”

“Maybe I was out of line,” he said.

She shrugged. “I don’t mind. But perhaps Jarrell’s worried about meeting you, did you think of that? One minute he was an unattached bachelor, no family of any sort. Next thing he’s got a brand-new brother, plus a full-sized niece and nephew. That could take a bit of getting used to.”

“That’s possible, of course.”

“But you don’t believe it?”

“I have no reason not to,” Selby said. “He may think I’m broke and need money. Or that I’m going to expect him to play a role he’s not interested in, the uncle showing up at Christmas in a flurry of snow, armloads of presents and so forth.”

She broke one of the pralines in two and offered him a piece. “Try it,” she suggested. “It won’t spoil your lunch. You’ll like it. How did you get that scar on your cheek?” She licked her ice cream. “I’d never ask, you know, if it wasn’t attractive.”

“A man ran into me,” Selby said. “That’s the truth.”

“No story to it?”

“Not really.”