The Air We Breathe (10 page)

“More likely Joe will,” Felix said. “Or another friend of his. Someone will come for it, though.”

Without transition they talked, then, about Felix's parents and Rosa's sisters, about Ephraim's daughters and Rosa herself, and finally about Ephraim's progress and when—“Only a few more months,” Ephraim said. “I feel sure of it”—he might be released and allowed to come home.

LEO LEARNED ABOUT
the visit only after supper, when he and Ephraim returned to the room together. As soon as they were out on their cure chairs, Ephraim handed over the innocent-looking box and told Leo to look inside. Just as Ephraim had done, Leo stirred the papers—most no worse that what appeared in our own library after each visiting day—looked over the coils of wire and the piece of tile, and then picked up the peculiar pencils, listening as he did to Ephraim's account of the visit.

“How involved do you think Felix is?” Leo asked.

“I don't know,” Ephraim said. “He always exaggerates, but still—I wish I knew what he was up to. And I wish he hadn't brought this here. He's a good boy, though. Not such an odd duck as me, at any rate.”

“Well, but it's not him, necessarily,” Leo said. “Just—everything's getting so peculiar. Now some stranger is supposed to come here someday and ask for this—I wouldn't have let Felix do that.” He frowned, thinking of all the shabby items—old guns, worn knives, homemade explosives, smeared pamphlets—he had glimpsed during his last year in Odessa. People had been arrested for nothing more than being near such things.

“You would if he was family,” Ephraim said, reminding Leo yet again of what he lacked.

MILES TOO WAS
disturbed that week. Two letters made their way to him by different routes, the first enclosed in a small, heavy package. From Doylestown, his friend Edward Hazelius wrote:

Inside the package was a brown book, smelling of leather and mold. Miles felt nothing when he looked at it. No wave of nostalgia, no stab of recognition. Why would he want this old tract, more theology, really, than paleontology? Edward's great-aunt he could hardly remember; her face had vanished, and when he thought of her now he remembered only her narrow, wrinkled hands, cupping fossils or writing with her darting, vertical strokes. He wanted not reminders of his past but Arizona, the bone quarries, mountains, crisp air. Travel, freedom, work. In the absence of those he wanted, at least until he got the second letter two days later, news from Lawrence.

S
HORTLY AFTER
M
ILES
got those letters, and with no understanding of how they might affect us, we gathered for our usual Wednesday session. We were looking forward to it more eagerly than usual; it was Dr. Petrie's turn to speak, and we thought we might learn something new about him. He knew parts of us that we didn't know ourselves: not just the calcifications in our lungs, the tubercular lesions on our bones, the sores and infections we concealed from each other beneath our clothes, but also what we looked like when he gave us bad news. What happened to our faces when he said, gravely, that we must resign ourselves to another six months or a year inside these walls. For all he knew about us, though, we knew almost nothing then about his personal life.

Back then, he wouldn't have told us, for example, why he was so short. It wouldn't have seemed right to him that we should know about his own case of tuberculosis, which had infected his spine when he was a boy, permanently stopping his growth before he reached five feet tall and deforming his vertebrae. Although the pain sometimes made him absentminded and curt, he concealed the cause, just as he dressed to disguise the curve below his neck and the lump where his shoulder was misaligned. That day, in fact, he entered the room rubbing his shoulder but stopped as soon as he saw Ephraim noticing.

Christmas was only a few weeks away, and the staff had hung huge garlands from the rafters and decorated an enormous tree. The resemblance between the cloth wrapped around its base, and the green tartan scarf of the same pattern pushing out Dr. Petrie's pointed beard, distracted some of us. He smiled above the scarf, released his shoulder, and started our eighth session by saying he wanted to discuss what he'd seen in France during the spring of 1915. The French government, he explained, had asked him to visit their military hospitals and evaluate their plans for the treatment of tubercular soldiers.

“Miles has been telling me about his young friend Lawrence, who's off fighting with the Canadian forces,” he added, “and that made me think again about my own time there. I've been meaning to write this down.” He looked at something in his lap. “I know these talks are meant to be informal. But I never could speak without notes, so I hope you won't mind if I read from these.”

Usually he stood over us as we lay passively in bed; he asked and we answered; he wrote down, with sharp and vigorous strokes, what our bodies revealed. On his rounds his manner was so strong and reassuring that we often forgot how tiny he was beneath his stethoscope and starched white coat. But here, as he joined our circle as an equal, his hands shook as he fingered his index cards, his voice trembled, and he couldn't hide the fact that he had to point his toes to reach the floor. He was nervous, the rest of us realized. Perhaps because of that, his description of the spread of tuberculosis in France was a little dull.

In a light, dry voice he spoke about the rapid mobilization of the French army and the failure to thoroughly examine all the troops. Many, he explained, suffered from latent or incipient tuberculosis, which in the cold, wet conditions of the trenches had quickly developed into active disease and, in the overcrowded billets, had spread rapidly among the men. Lydia made a face at Nan, who raised her eyebrows in response—was this something we wanted to hear?—but Dr. Petrie didn't notice, instead taking encouragement from the expression of interest on Eudora's face. The sickest had been sent back home, he continued, where there were no trained tuberculosis nurses, very few sanatorium beds, and no special wards in the hospitals. Paris, where the soldiers mingled with the refugees who'd fled the German invasion, was the worst, and few of the French doctors were as experienced as any sanatorium doctor here. He'd visited hospitals and refugee centers and military encampments and prisons, making recommendations and gathering data for his reports. Some of the data he had here, summarized on these cards…

We avoided each other's eyes. For the last couple of months we'd been able to read current news about the war, thanks to a doctor in New York who, when Dr. Petrie complained to him about our wretched library, had started gathering up the daily papers and sending them in batches on the train. Now that we had those, what we most wanted was an insider's view of the war, but this wasn't it. There were charts involved, some tables and figures. Our eyes glazed over even as Miles leaned forward avidly.

When Dr. Petrie finished we murmured politely; Pietr complimented him on his scarf and Olga praised the neatness of his tables. We managed not to say to each other what we thought, or how much better we would have liked learning something about his personal life, but the following week only half of us showed up. Once more we prepared ourselves for a dry set of facts. During that second talk, though, Dr. Petrie surprised us, shedding his nervousness along with the foolish scarf. After a few sentences about the care of tubercular soldiers, he was suddenly describing the early days of that May, when along with every other available physician and scientist in the country he'd been rushed to an enormous makeshift hospital to help treat the victims of the first German gas attacks.

He spoke about his hurried journey, the sidewalk cafés crowded with little tables and the men walking with bareheaded girls, soldiers and sailors from Siam and Senegal mingled with
poilus
and Tommies. “Plane trees,” he said, looking at the wall across the room as if they were painted there, “and the gardens, the thatched roofs, the pears espaliered on the walls—you should see what they do with fruit trees over there.”

He described the fields, which like those back here were filled with clover and alfalfa and rye but dotted unfamiliarly with brilliant poppies. As he made those leap before our eyes we began to see what he'd seen—it was beautiful, he said, the undamaged parts of France were so beautiful—and so we also saw the desolation as he neared the front, the shattered trees and the churned-up ground, the twisted wrecks of automobiles and, once he reached Boulogne, the far worse wrecks of men.

Near Ypres, he said, the Germans had released a poisonous gas, which had killed thousands of French troops and wounded thousands more; a few days later more had been released, this time against a Canadian battalion (here Miles drew a sharp breath); other attacks had followed swiftly and no one knew how to care for the casualties. Those who hadn't died in the trenches or dropped as they tried to run away had collapsed in the primitive treatment posts just behind the front.

“When I saw those men,” Dr. Petrie said, “I—nothing could have prepared me for the shock.”

His feet fluttered against the lower rung of his chair. Gas warfare, he said indignantly, was the exact reverse of everything he'd spent his life learning to fight. He knew more acutely than most what those victims were suffering and he thought that we, so alert to the difficulties of living with imperfect lungs, might also sense what those men had been through. We did, we were fascinated by what he said but shaken too, and most of us would have been glad if he'd stopped then. But something about what he'd seen made him keep talking and us keep listening. We took no break, instead sitting horrified in our circle as he continued.

“There was a cloud,” he said. “A green cloud half a mile deep and four miles long moving slowly toward the trenches, with the wind.”

During the first minutes, the survivors told Dr. Petrie, the cloud caused simply a cough and a dry mouth. Before long, though, the gas—a corrosive poison, Dr. Petrie noted—stripped the lining from the bronchial tubes and the lungs and caused an instant inflammation. Men coughed up cupfuls of foamy yellow fluid; some coughed so hard they ruptured their lungs; men frothed and drowned in their own fluid before his eyes. A few who'd had some high school chemistry recognized the smell as chlorine and remembered that the ammonia in urine would neutralize its effects. Those few had told everyone they could to piss on their socks and handkerchiefs and stuff them in their mouths. Through the clouds rolling over them, they'd seen German troops bending over cylinders while peering through the single gleaming lenses of their hoods.

But truthfully, Dr. Petrie said, most of the soldiers he saw in the hospital had told him nothing; they'd choked and gasped and coughed and heaved and died. With the other visiting doctors and scientists he'd run around, uselessly trying to ease the men's sufferings. By the time he saw them they were drowning, lying motionless and slowly drowning, their faces first blue and then finally black. He had thought then, he said—by now he'd crushed the index cards in his hand—that a nation that could in cold blood implement such a foul method of warfare should not be permitted to exist, should itself be strangled and made to suffer.

Across the circle from him, Miles, who had grown very pale, gripped his knees. “They
should,
” he whispered.

Anyone might have said something here; a number of us had relatives, or had once had relatives, either in that sprawling chunk of Europe now called the Central Powers or nearby, in places overrun by them.
We
hadn't done this, not us, not people we knew—but then, who? Leo and Ephraim, startled by Miles's muffled comment, exchanged glances. Dr. Petrie took a long, raspy breath and then continued.

“Since I couldn't help directly,” he said, more quietly than before, “I tried to learn what I could from the deaths of those men, in the hope of helping to develop suitable protection. At the autopsies I attended I saw the lungs push forward the instant the chest was opened, running with frothy yellow fluid, the sight as bad, perhaps worse, than the most grossly tubercular lung, and this made me wonder if—”

Miles's hands slipped from his knees. His lips, turning as pale as the rest of his face, opened, and he fell to the floor in a faint.

AFTERWARDS DR. PETRIE
could not believe what he had done. Our circle of wan, unhealthy faces gazing at him so earnestly—what had he been thinking, talking to us about ruptured lungs? Now, when we're all thrown so much more closely together and have so little privacy, he will sometimes admit that back then he'd been lonely and that, although he'd worried about joining our circle on terms of such equality, at the same time he'd been unable to resist the lure of our weekly gatherings. Also he admits that, once he started, he'd simply forgotten his audience. Only when Miles slumped to the floor had he understood what he'd done.

The meeting ended in chaos, most of us stumbling out, frightened and worried, as Dr. Petrie resuscitated Miles with Eudora's help. A few minutes later, he eased Miles into Naomi's car and then offered to drive down with her, in case Miles felt faint again.

“He'll be fine,” she said, at the same time squeezing Miles's hand reassuringly. “It's just—your story made him think about his friend Lawrence, I think. Come if you want.”

What an idiot he'd been. After stumbling out a string of apologies he sat silently in the back seat, appalled by what he'd done, and then at Mrs. Martin's house hastily explained what had happened before escorting Miles up to his beautifully furnished room.

“I have no children,” Dr. Petrie told Miles, easing him into the clean, fresh sheets and pulling up the blankets. “No family at all. I sometimes think that makes me insensitive to the attachments of others.”

Miles reached for a light brown shawl and said, “Lawrence's father gave me this.”

What was it made of? Dr. Petrie wondered as he draped it over Miles's shoulders. Cashmere, musk ox, something rare and costly; it was amazingly soft: alpaca, perhaps? Everything in this room, he could not help noting, from the silver brushes to the monogrammed pajamas and fleece-lined slippers, was expensive and elegant, whereas his own rooms at the sanatorium were dreadfully bare and his few luxuries—a heavy robe, that green tartan scarf—had been left to him by grateful patients whom he'd lost.

“Edward hates the Germans too,” Miles continued. “As much as you do.” Then, while Dr. Petrie shifted uneasily from foot to foot, Miles told him about the torpedoed ship and the sunken dinosaur bones, and he displayed first Edward Hazelius's letter and then Lawrence's painful note.

“I hated hearing about the gas, and what you saw,” Miles said, returning the papers to his bedside table. “But it's a relief to know that you aren't neutral about this war either.”

“Neutral's an odd word,” Dr. Petrie said noncommittally. His time in France had made him furious, but not only with the Germans; everyone was to blame, he thought, the generals especially. Before Miles could assign to him more opinions he didn't truly hold, he turned away. “You need to rest,” he said. “Is there anything else I can do for you, before I go?”

With a sigh Miles eased himself back into the soft mound of pillows. “May I come visit you before our next session? I'd enjoy some time to talk alone.”

“It would be my pleasure,” Dr. Petrie said, noting that his feet were, meanwhile, backing him efficiently from the room. He
didn't
share Miles's feelings about the Germans, and the way Miles had behaved in the car had further put him off. Carrying on about how dizzy and weak he felt; leaning into Naomi Martin's shoulder while she tried to drive and begging for sympathy: he'd hated to see that.

All through the following day he hid in the X-ray laboratory, trying to review our films but still upset at what he'd done and disturbed by Miles's embarrassing display in the automobile. That evening he entered our dining hall at ten minutes past six, when he knew we'd all be seated. In his clean tweed suit, with his high-collared shirt and his tidy, old-fashioned boots, he stood in front of the serving tables, so small despite his excellent posture that many couldn't see him.