The Air We Breathe (21 page)

E
ARLIER ON THE
night of the fire, before anyone was dead, Miles had indeed made Naomi drive him to his meeting. They hadn't spoken during the journey. Beside him the hills slanted up and down, trees giving way to fields, but instead of enjoying the view he'd been looking at his notes, his concentration interrupted by Naomi's low, tuneless humming. When he asked her to stop she frowned, obeyed, and then a few seconds later started tapping her thumbs against the steering wheel, increasing the speed as they pulled up at the meeting place. As she jolted to a stop he said, “Please come back at ten o'clock.” Then he stepped down from the car, one hand still on the door, and found himself surprised by the clear, soft, twilit sky.

He could hear but not see a flock of geese moving high overhead. The leaves in the trees, just opening, were small and sharp, lovely in this light, and for an instant he recognized that he should be outside, walking around the lake or lying on his porch, watching the stars appear in the darkening sky. Instead he was five miles west of Tamarack Lake and seven miles from us, about to enter the limestone hall where league members from across the county were meeting to discuss their most recent cases. He turned back to Naomi, who was smoothing the front of her dress—a new dress, he thought—and who said, “Whatever you'd like.” Her voice was peculiarly flat.

“That's what I'd like,” he said. “Ten it is, then.” He peered in through the open window but her face revealed nothing.

“Naomi?” They'd argued over every drive this week.

“What would you do if I just stopped doing this?” she asked.

Cars were drawing up to the building in twos and threes; men, streaming up the steps, were nodding seriously. Miles said, “Please.”

“You'd find someone else,” Naomi said calmly. “In a day. It's not like I'm the only person capable of driving you, it's just that you
want
to make me miserable, you like forcing me.”

“You
offered
…”

“Months ago. And I offered something different.”

A Cadillac pulled up, disgorging three men in dark suits—all strangers to Miles but all, he saw with embarrassment, looking at him and Naomi; without meaning to, he'd opened the door of the Model T, craned his head inside, and raised his voice. Carefully he closed the door and stepped back. “Let's not have this argument again,” he said. “I will expect you later.”

Naomi drove off without answering him. Throughout the meeting, which was long and complicated, only the mass of business kept him from dwelling on her. Each of the sixteen lieutenants had reports from their operatives to present, and two cases had to be discussed in detail. A man known to be a dues-paying Socialist had been overheard in a library talking about the Socialist meeting held in St. Louis. The proclamation signed there had deemed participation in the war to be a capitalist ploy, both dishonorable and unjustifiable—and the man's tone, the agent reported, suggested that he approved and would have signed himself if he'd had the chance.

Miles's attention fluctuated during the discussion that followed, but he was alert enough to hear the motion delegating an agent to befriend the suspect and try to determine his true attitudes. The motion passed. Someone who worked for the electric company next volunteered to enter the suspect's house under the pretext of reading his electric meter, and to look through his mail and his private papers. That motion passed as well. Then it was Miles's turn to present the case of the Baums.

The Baums, he said—Sidonie and Martin—had in the nineties immigrated to Tamarack Lake from Germany and had long been solid citizens. Children took piano lessons from Mrs. Baum, who taught in the music studio attached to the back of their house. “You, Charles,” he said to a man on his left, “—didn't you study with her?”

“Four years,” Charles said. The man next to him chimed in, “I took for six.”

Miles nodded. “It seems like half the village has taken lessons from her at one time or another. She has quite a number of students now from the high school. Including many boys.”

Much as he'd stood before us during our early Wednesday gatherings, he faced the men in chairs and went on to describe Mr. Baum, whose fabric and notions store was familiar to everyone but who was also known as the director of the local choral society, the Mountain-aires. For years, anyone who could carry a tune had crowded into the church hall and sung what Mr. Baum directed. Some years, when they had a good soprano, the Mountain-aires had done very well, other years less so, but no one had found them controversial until, two weeks ago, at a rehearsal for the summer concert, several members had suggested politely that the Bach and Brahms selections be removed and replaced by English works.

“And this,” Miles continued, “is where the problem arose. My agent reported to me that Mr. Baum called the member who'd suggested this an unpleasant name, in German. And then said that German music represented German culture, which in turn represented the highest level of human achievement. And that anyone who would turn their back on that culture because of a war, a war in which we had no business interfering, understood nothing.”

A hand rose in the back; Miles called on its owner. “He said ‘a war in which we had no business interfering'? Those words exactly?”

“So my agent reports,” Miles answered. The fabric in Naomi's new dress, he thought, had probably come from Mr. Baum's shop.

Charles added, “My sister talked to Mr. Baum the next day. He said he loved America, which was like his wife. But that Germany was like his mother—and how could he fight his own mother?”

“Recommendations?” someone asked.

For half an hour they discussed the Baums, who, they all agreed, had an unusual degree of access to young people in general, young men subject to the upcoming draft in particular. Against the arguments that they'd been known for decades as good neighbors and good teachers, the men weighed Mr. Baum's outburst, the couple's background, and their potential for spreading harmful attitudes. Both should be watched, the group decided. And if necessary disciplined.

An agent from a village north of Tamarack Lake then proposed that they adopt a unified warning system using color-coded cards. “Something like these,” he suggested, passing around samples.

The air was stuffy inside the hall, and the light so dim that, when the cards reached Miles, he had to move closer to the shaded bulb hanging over the table. The buff card read:

A blue card offered a Second Warning; a red card announced the visit of a committee member. Miles passed the cards on, listening as his companions discussed details of wording. Should the second-to-last line include the word “please,” or should it be more abrupt? Should the committee identify itself by name? He felt his mind split in two as he listened, like a long sheet of newsprint torn lengthwise. On one side all the words he'd said and heard tonight appeared in columns, bordered by neat ruled lines: motions made and seconded and passed, rules approved, language adopted, money allocated. This was the world he'd known since childhood, orderly and businesslike. Hardworking men, whose chain of command was clear, disposed of tasks in a certain order; this was what meetings were for. The tasks might be trivial, the tasks might be crucial, but the method was the same either way, a calm discussion and assignment of duties, the items ticked off the list. The minutes ticked by, the agenda items came and went. The words continued to accumulate in one half of his mind. In the other was an image of Naomi.

HE WAITED OUTSIDE,
after the meeting ended, as the doctors and lawyers and merchants drove away. The three men in the Cadillac drove away. The mayor of Tamarack Lake, whose little dog had waited patiently on his car seat throughout the meeting—“I renamed him,” the mayor said, cradling the brown creature. “He's Fred, now. And he's not a dachshund, he's a liberty pup”—offered Miles a ride, but Miles assured him his own driver was coming and so the mayor drove away. A local man shut off the lights, locked the door, and talked for twenty minutes to one of the undertakers from Tamarack Lake. When the undertaker was ready to go, Miles finally accepted a ride with him.

Both furious and frightened, he greeted Mrs. Martin harshly when he got back to the boardinghouse. “Where is she?” he said. “I know it's late, but I want to talk to her.”

“She's not here,” Mrs. Martin said—looking, Miles thought, not half so concerned as he was himself. “She didn't pick you up?”

“Obviously not,” Miles said. “If it hadn't been for Monty I couldn't have gotten home.”

“Maybe she's doing something with Eudora, and lost track of time?”

As she said that, the powdered planes of her face shifted briefly and Miles saw something that might have been worry, or fear. Then it was gone, and she was once more wearing her pleasant, meaningless smile. At the Wednesday gatherings, he remembered, he'd often caught Naomi and Eudora whispering together. Slightly comforted, he said, “I want to speak to both of you, together, first thing in the morning.”

Coming into town from the west, he'd missed the fire trucks going to Tamarack State, which had headed up the hill while he was at the meeting. All night long he tried to sleep, leaping to the window at each slight noise, hoping to hear the grate clack as the car pulled into the carriage house. Before breakfast, he paced his porch, peering at the windows and screens of the houses nearby as if Naomi might be hiding behind one.

He entered the dining room to a flurry of excited gossip about the fire. As the facts surfaced—there weren't many, yet, but it was clear that the damage was serious—his mind once more seemed to tear into two strips. This time he forced himself to ignore the one belonging to Naomi. His league work during the past weeks had put him in contact with every important person in the county; back at home he'd not only run his plant but had been on the boards of four different charitable organizations; who was better equipped to organize help for Tamarack State?

By ten o'clock he was already at work. His lack of a driver turned out not to be a problem; one call to the chief who'd recruited him produced, half an hour later, a weedy boy with a red cowlick, a shriveled left leg, and, on his left foot, a black shoe with a thickly built-up sole. He could never serve in the military, Miles saw at a glance. And was correspondingly eager to do what he could to help at home.

“Tyler,” the boy said, introducing himself. “At your service.” The Willys-Knight limousine he'd driven over was, he proudly claimed, on loan to Miles “for the duration” from the owner of the dealership. Throughout the day, as Miles moved through his long round of visits, Tyler was so useful that Miles once or twice wondered, guiltily, why he hadn't asked his chief for a car and driver from the start. The answer was too painful to consider. Hourly he checked in with Mrs. Martin, hoping for news of Naomi. Had she been in an accident? Simply gone to visit a friend? Late that night, when he finally returned to the boardinghouse after missing all three of his rest periods and several meals, Mrs. Martin set before him a warm plate, which she'd saved from dinner. “You won't last long if you don't take care of yourself,” she said.

“Any word?” He tried not to wolf the scalloped potatoes.

“Not yet,” she said, her voice as flat as Naomi's had been the previous night. “I think she's run away.”

“Why would you think that?” Even as he spoke, he remembered Naomi's words—
What would you do if I just stopped doing this?
—and saw again her red dress with the crisp white collar, which now seemed too nice for an evening's duty driving. The baked ham he'd been enjoying suddenly seemed both dry and salty.

Looking down at a dish on which birds carrying bows of ribbon chased each other around the embossed rim, Mrs. Martin explained, never meeting his eyes, that some money, which at first she thought she'd lost, was missing from her purse.

UP ON OUR
own hill, it didn't seem possible that we'd survive. The administration building was ruined, not destroyed exactly—it stands where it always stood—but blackened with soot and so saturated with toxic fumes that no one could enter without a mask. Lost with it were our X-ray facility, our kitchen, dining hall, and reception room, our library, the infirmary, the clinical laboratories, most of the staff offices, and the solarium where our little group had met on Wednesdays. Before the night of the fire, we'd already lost to the suddenly ravenous military a number of young doctors and orderlies and maintenance staff. Now there were fewer people to take care of us just when we needed more, and no place else to send us; every place was like Tamarack State, suddenly overcrowded and understaffed. And everyone was short of money, too; funds that might have been used for rebuilding went, instead, to construct hospitals for the war wounded who would soon enough return from overseas. We were on our own.