Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism

When they first met in the autumn of ’10, Garrison Harper had insisted that Andrew dine with him and his wife at the sprawling mansion he’d had built overlooking the town. That meal was sumptuous—roast beef in a thick burgundy sauce with good French wine, a sugar loaf soaked in rum, followed by Napoleon brandy in wide snifters and cigars imported from Cuba at the end of it. The meal he brought with him today was simpler: mashed potatoes, some greens from Mrs. Harper’s garden and a breast of well-cooked chicken already cut into bite-sized chunks. He carried the plate in himself, withdrawing the silver cover with a flourish, then called out to the hallway when it developed that someone had forgotten to provide any silverware.

“We are,” said Mr. Harper, “a hospital in an Idaho logging town, and not a fine restaurant in Boston. I must remind myself of this daily. Is there a chair in here?”

“Beside the bureau,” said Andrew. “Thank you, Mr. Harper. This looks delicious.”

Mr. Harper scooted the chair over beside Andrew’s bed, and settled into it. Garrison Harper was not a fat man, not by any means. But he was tall—well over six feet—and he had complained to Andrew on that first night: “The years add weight to both the soul and the waist.” The combined weight made the chair creak precipitously, and that and the memory made Andrew smile.

Mr. Harper was like that, always joking with the help. Andrew understood that behaviour to be an affectation—a rich man’s hollow conscience at work. But his own father was the same way, walking through the stables and calling out the men who worked for him by name, sharing a joke or asking after their wives, acting like he was one of them. Andrew couldn’t begrudge it.

“Go,” said Mr. Harper, passing the fork from the nurse who brought it, to Andrew. “Eat a bit. You have to get your strength back.”

Andrew ate. He was famished, but he restrained himself. If he took this too fast it would come up just as fast.

“I am ashamed,” said Mr. Harper at length.

Andrew set down his fork.

“Sir, do not trouble yourself,” he said. “I will find other work.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” Harper gaped.

“Other work, sir. After I take my leave.”

“Do you imagine I am here to—to dismiss you?”

“There is no need,” said Andrew. “It is done.”

Andrew explained what had transpired between himself and Dr. Bergstrom that morning. Mr. Harper listened quietly, and when it was done, he said simply, “No.”

“Sir,” said Andrew, “I am bound to remind you that with my right arm as it is, I will be of limited use in the surgery.”

Mr. Harper blinked at him, as though this fact had been just presented him and somehow altered everything.

“My God, Dr. Waggoner, have I misread you? Do you wish to depart Eliada? I would not blame you if it were the case.”

Andrew knew there was a part of him for whom that was the case. But it was only a small part—the part of him that had been afraid of leaving his father’s home for continental Europe, the part of him that would have settled for clinic work in Harlem rather than take a train to the wilderness of northern Idaho. And that part had not had much say in how Andrew lived his life for many years.

“I would be a fool not to fear the noose,” he said. “But I have not offered my resignation either.”

“I’m glad,” said Mr. Harper. “It is too easy for civilized men to turn away when faced with depravity. When I said earlier that I was ashamed, it is to that which I referred. When I came here those seven years past, to carve this town out of the hills, I did not intend to make just another haven for depravity. When I made the decision to hire a Negro physician to tend to people, it was not to bring him to slaughter. And although I am well glad to see you here and alive, I did not intend to taint Eliada’s soil with the blood of my workers.”

Mr. Harper looked at Andrew expectantly. He’d delivered the whole speech in the manner of exactly that: a speech, written and well-rehearsed as for a university pageant, or from the stump in an election. This was a thing that Garrison Harper had done more than once since they had met. That first night over cigars and brandy, he had held forth uninterrupted for nearly three-quarters of an hour on his plans to create a paradise for workers and owners alike in Eliada: a community devoid of strife and class warfare where men happily lifted their tools at sunrise and set them down again at sunset, not once tempted by Bolshevism or bad morals—and on and on. It was a rich man’s habit, not, in this instance, shared by Andrew’s father. Of course, Andrew’s father was new to the game of wealth, and so did not have the generations of breeding that had so infected the talk of the Harper men.

“You didn’t tie the rope,” said Andrew.

“No,” said Mr. Harper, “but I might as well have loaded and aimed the guns. Why did I agree to have the Pinkertons of all people come here? This is not how I imagined my legacy.”