Nature of Economies

From Chapter One: Damn, Another Ecologist "Hortense and Ben have broken up," said Armbruster, waving a fax at Kate as she slid into the booth, balancing her cup of coffee. "I'm sorry but not surprised," said Kate. "Remember how Ben used to gloat over industrial disasters? He thought everything industrial or technological was unnatural and that everything unnatural was bad." "He meant well," Armbruster said. "We need Jeremiahs, but it must have been depressing for Hortense to live with one. It seems the breakup happened some time ago and she's gotten over it. She's interested in a new man. Mind if I finish this fax? I only got it as I was leaving the house." In late morning they were sitting in an almost-empty coffee shop on lower Fifth Avenue, not far from Armbruster's Gramercy Square apartment. It was an unappealing restaurant in a stretch of New York rapidly going upscale. Armbruster liked it as his morning hangout because its well-deserved unpopularity guaranteed seats for acquaintances dropping by. He lived alone, and since his retirement from a small book publishing company, he missed his work and its daily give-and-take with colleagues. "Damn, Hortense has found another ecologist," Armbruster grumbled as he continued reading the fax. "That's not surprising, either," said Kate. "She's an environmental lawyer, so those are the people she talks to, consorts with. Those and other lawyers." "But listen to this: His name is Hiram Murray IV. The Fourth! What an affectation." "He's not to blame if his family ran out of names." "You drop off the numbers when they die. I dropped off my Junior when my father died. Only kings and popes hang on to numbers." "Maybe the other three are still aliveyou don't know." "Let's see," Armbruster mused aloud. "Number two would be his grandfather, and number one" His eyes widened, exaggerating his customary owlish expression. "Good heavens, Hortense is fifty. You don't suppose" "No, I don't think Hortense is running around with a kid. Read on." "Well, well, she's planning to come back from California," Armbruster read on. "He has a house in Hoboken. What's an ecologist doing in Hoboken? She says I'll like him and she's bringing him over a week from Thursday unless she hears otherwise, and so on." "May I come too?" Kate asked. "It'll be wonderful to see Hortense again. And remember, Armbruster, I'm a fringe ecologist myself." When Kate was denied tenure a few years previously in the biology department of the Long Island university where she taught and did neurobiological research, she found a job on a prospering science newsweekly, partly on the strength of her editing experience on Systems of Survival, a dialogue she and Armbruster had put together from conversations and reports by a little group Armbruster had got up to explore the different moral systems appropriate to different kinds of workerssuch as police, legislators, clergy, and others holding positions of public trust, on the one hand, and manufacturers, bankers, merchants, and others in commercial pursuits, on the other. Hortense, who was Armbruster's niece, had been one of the group. During her first several months in her unfamiliar work on the weekly, Kate had frequently asked Armbruster for help and advice with her editing. After she no longer needed his guidance, she continued to drop in on him from time to time out of friendship. A week from the following Thursday, at Armbruster's small apartmentcrowded with books and signed photographs of authors on walls and tabletopsHortense and Kate greeted each other affectionately and Hortense introduced HirJacobs, Jane is the author of 'Nature of Economies' with ISBN 9780679603405 and ISBN 0679603409.