Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism

“No,” said Nurse Rowe, and she tucked her chin against her neck as she rolled the remaining gauze back up and considered. “Not for lack of trying. But it seemed my father only ever had enough money to lose. He didn’t play cards, thank Heaven. But he fancied himself a speculator. When I was a little girl, he lost a great deal of money buying a stake in a gold mine in Montana that wound up a fraud. He had more success with real estate in the crash, and he was better at being a landlord. But that is not a rich man’s avocation. Not always.”

“So he got you worried,” said Jason, “that he might go and give Garrison Harper all the rest of your property—and you came along to see that he didn’t.”

Nurse Rowe covered her mouth to stifle another laugh. “You are a wise boy,” she said. “Young man. Excuse me. You’re a wise young man.” She looked up to the skylight, and leaned back on her stool. “I went along with him for exactly that reason,” she said. “And I wanted to see the World’s Fair, or what was left of it, one more time. You’d be too young to remember it—I am barely old enough. But my goodness… what a fantastical place it once was. The whole affair was strung with wires. Wires and electric lamps. It glowed like a fairyland after dusk. And in one of the pavilions—a scientist called Tesla put giant steel globes on poles and made lightning jump between them. You don’t forget a thing like that.”

Jason could see how. He’d first seen an electric light at work less than a month ago, in Butte. That tiny spark of brightness was enough to drop a fellow’s jaw. A man directing lightning from one ball to another? That was the business of old Zeus.

“Of course, by the time Mr. Harper set up his podium there, Dr. Tesla was long, long gone. The entire place had gone to seed. Many of the buildings had been torn down, and the pavilion that Mr. Harper had hired… well, it had seen better years. The paint on its entryway was peeling, and inside the plasterwork was crumbling. The pavilion still had some electricity, though. Enough to shine a very bright spotlight on Mr. Harper, and to run a projector to show some photographs on a sheet he’d hung from an archway.”

“Sounds fancy,” said Jason. Nurse Rowe smiled, like he’d been joking.

“I went in there thinking I’d just get my father out of there as soon as possible. As it turned out, I didn’t have to worry. Nothing Mr. Harper said did anything to convince Father that the mill-town in Eliada was a sound investment. I remember the tram ride home; he listed off all the problems. Eliada would be a logging town with nowhere to market its wood: the Kootenai flows north into wilderness in the Canadian territory The railway stops fifty miles or more south of Eliada, and Sand Point was already filling whole trains with wood. And stacked against all that, he said that Harper’s scheme to pay and look after his workers—it amounted to charity! He figured Harper for a mad socialist. He used those words. ‘He’s just another mad socialist, Annie. Best keep clear.’”

“You call this keepin’ clear?” Jason gestured with his bandaged hand.

“Well, when he said that, it caused me to think maybe Garrison Harper was a mad socialist. And maybe I was too. It was a fine speech. You haven’t met Mr. Harper yet, so you don’t know how he can be.”

“He’s a convincing fellow is he?”

“He convinced me,” said Nurse Rowe. “I’d just finished learning nursing at the American Medical Missionary College and was starting work at the Hinsdale Sanatorium. Don’t suppose you know about those places either, coming from where you do?”

“I know about missionaries. They spread the word of Jesus.”

“Word and deed,” she said. “The college taught me what I know about nursing; the Sanatorium taught me the need for it. They were still working on it when I left it for Eliada, later that year. Made by good Christians, in a lovely well-off village, to minister and cure the fallen women of south Chicago. Some would come to the sanatorium. But we’d go visit more than that, in their homes… in their slums.”

“Slums?” That was a new word to Jason.

“Jason, I watched more babies born into filth and squalor—put those babies into the arms of their mothers, and left them in their cold, filthy shacks… more than I’d care to say. I don’t know if it was worse if their man had left, or if the cad was still sharing the roof. It broke my heart to see it, I swear.”

Jason put his hand on Nurse Rowe’s. “Better if they leave, if they’re that kind of pa.”

Nurse Rowe took a breath, and slipped her hand from under Jason’s. “And so,” she said, “when Mr. Harper stood in front of us, and said those three words—Community. Compassion. Hygiene.—it struck a chord in me. I remember how Father fidgeted beside me, when Harper explained how we could fiddle around the edges all we wanted—babies would still die in their mothers’ arms, until we got to work in the middle… fixed society up, top to bottom.”

“Or start a new one,” said Jason.