The Air We Breathe (11 page)

“What happened yesterday afternoon,” he said, “I—there's no excuse, I'm sorry. I haven't been sleeping well. So much bad news, lately, about the war; it wears me down. When I read certain things in the newspapers, they set off memories that upset me. That's no excuse, though. There's never an excuse for such behavior and I simply want to say again: I'm sorry.”

Our weekly sessions were far from secret—anyone might join at any time, and the solarium in which we gathered was visible from the corridor—but still, those who'd never attended had little idea of what we did and were baffled by Dr. Petrie's remarks. Some thought, as the rest of us would learn later, that he was apologizing for mistreating a patient, and that that was why his hands were shaking.

For the next few days, as he made his rounds, he was unusually attentive, lingering longer by our chairs and fussing with the blankets wrapped around our legs, but by the following Wednesday he'd put the episode behind him. Waiting impatiently in his office on the second floor of Central, one floor above the dining hall and two above the X-ray facility, he'd forgotten the look on Miles's face when he awoke from his faint, and he was wishing he hadn't promised to talk with him. Already it was several minutes past three, and the thought of wasting this precious hour, when taking two hours away from his work for our session was already such an extravagance, made him wild.

He'd stopped work precisely at three, wanting to be ready for Miles mentally as well as physically; his pen was capped and lay along the edge of the report he was writing for the next staff meeting. If he picked it up and began again, Miles would certainly appear in mid-sentence. If he sat here waiting Miles would never come, and he would have wasted a whole hour. If he got up and went to the window, scanning the grounds for Naomi's Model T, either he'd see it and be annoyed at their slow progress toward his office, or he wouldn't see it and would grow more anxious. If…

Clicking his teeth with exasperation, he sat down—eight minutes past three—uncapped his pen, and returned to the most recent set of autopsy reports. Charlie Goldstein, Frank Mistretta, Alicia Jurik; all had been in the infirmary for extended stays and each had ended by traveling late at night to the undertaker's in the village. Behind them had followed young Dr. Dorschel, who, as Tamarack State lacked a morgue, carried a suitcase with his instruments tucked into their soft padded slots and returned after dawn with his reports. Perhaps, Dr. Petrie thought, he might recommend a raise for his young colleague.

As he read he made notes for his own report on a separate sheet of paper. Tomorrow or Friday he'd sit down with Irene, retrieving all the X-rays for each of the subjects and correlating what they'd previously read from those films with what the autopsies showed to have actually happened. Settling into the report on Charlie, feeling his mind sink into its familiar groove, he was unpleasantly surprised a few minutes later to hear, not Miles's expected if tardy greeting but a conversation taking place just outside his door.

A female voice, which sounded annoyed, a male voice that seemed to be pleading; he couldn't make out the words but the sound was distracting. An entire sanatorium with all its public and private rooms, the scores of sheltered corners both inside and out in which, as everyone knew and pretended not to, acts far more private than arguments took place—and this couple had to argue a foot from his office? Once more he capped his pen and lifted his shoes from the wooden footrest that a grateful patient, long since dead and autopsied, had built especially for him.

IN THE HALL,
near two of the wooden chairs lined beneath the row of portraits on the wall, Miles—that was Miles out there—leaned closer toward Naomi.

A row of faces watched them: solemn men, in formal clothes, staring directly into the camera. Miles knew some of them—the governor, state representatives, members of the Board of Health and the Association for the Prevention of Tuberculosis—but at that moment he couldn't have recognized his own mother. His whole frame was trembling. There before him stood Naomi, whom he'd almost let escape. During the drive up the hill, he'd meant to say what he'd been rehearsing in his mind all week, but he hadn't been able to open his mouth and the ride passed silently. Then after they'd parked the automobile and walked toward Dr. Petrie's office, Naomi had announced that instead of waiting for him in the corridor, she was going to see Eudora. Only as she'd turned to leave and as he, choking on all he'd meant to say, had reached toward Dr. Petrie's door, had the words suddenly rushed from his mouth. “I'd like us to spend more time together,” he'd said. “In a different way, a more serious way—”

“My mother keeps me very busy,” she'd replied, looking toward the portraits.

Shy, he understood. And also caught off guard. He said, “Last week, when you held my hand in the car: that's when I realized you understood about Lawrence. You're the only one who does and when I'm around you I feel—you know what I'm feeling. Don't you?”

“I have to go,” she insisted. She raised her hands and held them at her waist, palms toward him. “I promised Eudora…”

“You
do
know,” he said enthusiastically. “I'm so glad—I couldn't wait anymore to tell you. It's not that I lack willpower, but since last week I have had such a sense of our fragility—do you know what I mean? Our
fragility
. Time is so short, I assume that I'm getting better each day but I could just as well be getting worse. And if I am, I don't want to die without having tried to get what I want. You must have felt this way yourself—why should we wait? Why should we put off saying what we really mean?”

He reached for one of her hands but stopped the instant she pulled back. Of course it was far too soon to touch her; she was young and it must be confusing, even embarrassing, to be talking about their feelings so directly. But the dark cloud that had filled his eyes during Dr. Petrie's talk, the sense of the cold floor drawing him magnetically and the terror of waking without knowing where he was, longing for his mother and Edward and Lawrence but finding no one who loved him, only strangers, pushed him on.

“I don't mean to rush,” he said more quietly, “but I want you to know how I feel, and I don't want to waste too much time. It's fortunate that we're in the same household and that we have so many opportunities to see each other. Perhaps, though, we could also have a meal together outside your mother's house, or take a ride together to Lake Placid?”

“I have to
go,
” she said, and darted down the hall. For a minute Miles, his body still vibrating, stood staring after her. Her shoulders, so slim and straight in her white blouse. Her waist, so small inside the belt that cinched the folds of her skirt, and below that—it wasn't his fault, surely, that he noticed this; skirts were startlingly short now—her stockings visible above the tops of her narrow boots. So finely put together, so healthy and yet so diminutive that even he might hope to pick her up. Still imagining what it might feel like to circle her waist and lift her off the ground, he tapped on Dr. Petrie's door, already twenty minutes late, and let himself inside.

There Dr. Petrie sat as Miles threw himself, without an apology, into the armchair across from the desk. There he sat, as, except for his time in France, he'd sat for nearly twenty years, listening not only to us but to our benefactors, our overseers, our families, and our enemies, listening as Miles recounted his conversation with Naomi. Once he interrupted to say, “You're not
dying,
” but otherwise he was quiet. Dr. Richards had introduced him to other rich men, who like Miles ran important companies or managed huge plants; usually their reserve was impenetrable. Perhaps Miles was sicker than he'd guessed.

Longing to take his guest's temperature and to have Irene look inside his lungs, he said, “Did you really tell her all of that?”

“It all came out of me at once,” Miles said, causing Dr. Petrie to imagine, unpleasantly, a spill of dark fluid. “But where's the harm? She needs to know that the differences between us mean nothing at all.”

“Oh, dear,” Dr. Petrie murmured. Worse than he'd thought. “What is she, nineteen?”

“Eighteen,” Miles said. “It doesn't matter. You see the way she is at our sessions, she listens with such attention, soaking in every scrap of information. She wants to learn, I know she does. And she has no money of her own. I could give her that, as soon as I'm better I could give her whatever she wanted. I know I could make her happy.”

“You want to
marry
her?”

“Twice before this has happened to me, I was very attached to two other women but both times my health interfered. I didn't think it was fair to ask either of them to wait, or to burden them with my condition. But it's different with Naomi. She's grown up among people like me. She's helped her mother all her life, she understands. And I am”—here Miles puffed out his concave chest, smoothing his thin lusterless hair with a hand on which, Dr. Petrie saw, the skin had the texture of crumpled paper—“You're the only one I can say this to. I'm in love with her. If she'd let me court her seriously, I think there's a real chance she could come to have feelings for me.”

“I don't know what your own physician tells you,” Dr. Petrie said, looking down at his legs. His suit was getting shabby, he saw. Miles's trousers were very much nicer, a soft matte herringbone. “But if you were a patient here, you would have heard me say this a hundred times: it's not your job to fall in love, or out of love, or grow anxious or over-emotional or have arguments. Your job is to lie still, to breathe the fresh air. And to get better. Really,” he said, pushing together his autopsy reports, “really I will hear no more of this. Now if you would like to talk about something sensible, I would be delighted.”

Miles looked down at his knees. “Forgive me,” he said. “I should keep my feelings to myself.”

“Better to keep them firmly in check,” Dr. Petrie said. “Best not to have them at all.” He looked at his watch. “We only have a few minutes before our session. Why don't you tell me about one of your other trips, before you went to Canada. Where else have you been?”

Obediently, his heart racing, his mind moving kaleidoscopically among images of Naomi enjoying his house in Doylestown, picking snapdragons in the garden, walking beside him to Edward's house with her narrow feet in fresh new pumps that were strapped at the instep and trimmed with bows, Miles smoothed the excitement from his face and, gazing just past Dr. Petrie's chin, talked about Nebraska.

W
E MISSED THOSE
discussions; what we saw was the two men entering the solarium together, Dr. Petrie with his lips in the thin crinkled shape they sometimes formed when he was angry with one of us but trying to conceal it, and Miles flushed and feverish-looking, his hair stuck moistly to his head. They showed up at exactly four o'clock—usually Miles was a few minutes early—and were followed five minutes later by Eudora and Naomi, one pale and worried and the other pink. Four faces, none looking quite normal, arriving at odd times and in odd pairs—usually a sight like that would have fueled gossip not only during our break but for several weeks to come. We were so lethargic, though, that we hardly noticed what was going on.

This was our last session before Christmas, and we knew that several weeks would pass before we had another. Our December movie night had been a disappointment—the drama we saw had made us all uneasy, especially when the courtroom cheered on the cheating young wife as she cast blame for her theft on a Burmese businessman—but even so, we grew bleak thinking about the time until the next distraction, especially since the weather had grown so harsh. The snow, which had fallen generously around Thanksgiving, had melted and then withdrawn itself so that now, although the temperature had not been above twenty degrees for a week, the ground was flinty and dark. The evergreens looked black against the sky, even the ice on the pond looked dark; the birds were silent and the wind droned day and night. We were a day from the winter solstice, Otto had said earlier that afternoon. A day from the shortest, darkest day of the year. That we felt so low, so empty and dull, was the combined result of our disease and of the sun's refusal to climb higher in the sky.

Apathetically we drifted, at the beginning of this tenth session, into the empty circle of chairs we'd left the previous week. Several of our regulars were absent, too droopy even to rise from their beds, but this was less noticeable because we'd also gained a person: Irene Piasecka, who after listening to both Eudora and Dr. Petrie had decided to investigate our sessions for herself. Miles was sitting on one side of Dr. Petrie but the chair to his left was open, and she settled herself and then leaned over to whisper in his ear.

“You don't mind?” she asked. “I've been wanting to see what this is like.”

“Of course not,” he replied. Late at night, in her laboratory, he'd talked for too long about the mistakes he'd made during his presentation and also afterwards, in Miles's room; she'd listened patiently and tried to persuade him not to apologize publicly. Bad advice, he'd thought then, although usually he trusted her. Now, wondering if his abject little speech in the dining hall had somehow made possible Miles's confession, he thought she'd been right but he was still taken aback by her presence. Was she here to keep an eye on him? Surely it was Miles, beaming across the circle at Naomi, who needed watching.

The rest of us missed both his moist glance and Naomi's refusal to notice it. Irene tilted her head toward Dr. Petrie again and said, “If the talk isn't interesting, I'll leave at the break.”

“As you wish,” Dr. Petrie said.

But to her surprise, to everyone's surprise, Arkady turned out to be an inspired speaker. Within minutes we were sitting upright, leaning toward him, our heads making the shape of an unfolding flower as he said he'd thought long and hard about what to discuss and had finally decided to explore something that had been on his mind since Ephraim's talk.

Quite calmly and clearly—how had we failed, before, to realize Arkady's strengths as a teacher?—he reminded us that Ephraim's community at Ovid was only one in our country's long history of communitarian and cooperative colonies. “Let me give you some context,” he said. And then, much as a teacher at his workmen's circle might have done, he gave swift descriptions of the Shaker communities at Mount Lebanon and Niskayuna, the Owenite settlement at New Harmony in Indiana, Brook Farm in Massachusetts, and the Fourierist phalanxes in upstate New York, not so far from Ovid. He mentioned Oneida, also upstate, and the experimental colony of Topolobampo, in Mexico, about which he'd been told by a friend.

Irene sighed with pleasure, delighted to hear something, anything, clearly explained; even without having heard Ephraim's talk she could see the connection between his community of transplanted urban Jews and the long tradition that Arkady described. Crisply he detailed still other attempts, considering the differences between the religious and the secular, the communities founded in settled areas and those on the edge of what had then been frontier. “All of them,” he said as she nodded appreciatively, “all failed despite the best intentions of their founders and participants.”

Except for the rattled quartet, the rest of us, along with Irene, listened intently until it was time to break. Over our milk and hot chocolate, Leo turned to Ephraim and asked if his community had known about all these others.

Ephraim, setting down his slice of buttered bread, said, “We didn't think about it. We were shtetl Jews, then city Jews, before Rosa's brothers got us involved in this—what did we know about Shakers and Harmonists? If we were thinking about anything, it was about the movements in Russia. One of Rosa's cousins—”

But here, before Ephraim could finish his sentence, someone touched Leo's arm. Once or twice, while Arkady was speaking, Leo had looked over at the woman with her frizzy gray hair pinned loosely above her narrow eyes: was she the person who, months ago, had taken his radiograph?

“You're Leo Marburg, aren't you?” she asked. She held out her right hand a few inches higher than was common, all but her index finger curved slightly toward her palm. He grasped that finger with the tips of his own, as she seemed to want, and shook it gently as she said, “I'm Irene Piasecka.”

It
was
her, then; the person Eudora had mentioned. Standing, she was nearly his own height. “A pleasure,” he said.

“Eudora's told me about you,” she continued. Her left hand, he saw, was encased in a violet glove. “Your early education, your search for work in this country—”

Eudora talked about him? She'd arrived too late for him to say hello, and now she was standing with Naomi near the door. Worried that he wouldn't get to talk with her, he shifted his weight and prepared to excuse himself. Then froze as Irene continued, “What she said made me wonder if you'd like to visit the X-ray laboratory and see some of what I'm doing.”

Him? She was inviting him? Astonishingly, she added: “You might be able to assist me, when your health permits, and if you're interested.”

“I
am,
” he managed to say.

“Good,” she said. She smiled, touched his arm once more, and in response to Arkady's gesture, headed back to our circle of chairs.

Later, Leo thought, he would find Eudora and thank her. For thinking of him, for arranging this introduction. His head hummed as he returned to the chairs, where the rest of us were also settling. How soon could he visit Irene's lab?

Once more we bent our heads toward the center of our circle. Arkady, picking up where he'd stopped, explained that to him the most interesting thing was not the failure but the ardent idealism that, in the face of so much failure, attempted again and again to form utopian communities. Was this brave, or was it foolish? He talked about some of the people involved in those experiments, what they'd given up and what they'd hoped to gain. As his examples piled up, Leo caught one, lost the next, caught another, and half wished that Arkady would finish so that he might talk to Eudora about his prospects with Irene. Annoyingly, she was sitting three chairs away, where he could neither reach her nor see her face clearly.

She wasn't paying attention either, although for a different reason. Arkady was talking about the same things that the book she'd taken from the village library described less elegantly, but despite her interest, she was too worried about Naomi to concentrate. Throughout the first half of the session Naomi had been drawing furiously, and now, her cheeks still pink, she was once more focused entirely on her pencil, moving it across her drawing pad. Beneath the point a building was taking shape, four wings of equal height surrounding an empty courtyard. A barracks, a prison? A version, probably, of the Fourierist compound Arkady had described—except that a figure, completely out of scale and crowned with Leo's face and hair, filled the courtyard. Why him? But after what had happened earlier, she couldn't blame Naomi for drawing whatever caught her eye. Anyone who wasn't Miles must have offered some relief.

She glanced across the circle but Miles, chewing on his lips, for once wasn't looking at Naomi. His vest was buttoned up, his shirt collar flawlessly crisp, and the color faded from his cheeks. No one could have looked more respectable—and yet he had, Naomi claimed, suddenly, horribly, declared his feelings to her as they stood outside Dr. Petrie's office. Eudora had happened to look out a window shortly afterwards, and so she'd seen her friend striding through the frozen garden, so upset that at first, when Eudora rushed down to join her, she could only sputter.

“That stick!” she'd said indignantly, after explaining what had happened. “I held his hand after he fainted because I felt
sorry
for him. He's almost old enough to be my father.”

For twenty minutes Eudora had paced with her, nodding patiently as Naomi fumed, never reminding her that she might, in first approaching Miles, have played any role in the feelings he'd developed. They'd come in for Arkady's talk, but at the break, when Naomi continued complaining, Eudora had suggested, “Stop driving him.”

“Give up the only money I earn, because he's a fool?” Naomi had made an unhappy face before adding, “It would be easier if you were still riding with us, and still practicing your driving.”

“I know,” Eudora said, “but I'm here so many nights now…” Weeks ago she'd stopped the driving lessons with a casual sentence, so eager to spend more time in the laboratory that everything else was distraction. A car, compared with an X-ray apparatus, was no more mysterious than a fork; she could learn to drive anytime.

“So you say.” Naomi's hand added shadows to Leo's eyes. “It's fine, though. I can manage him.”

Across the circle, Arkady said something about a boatload of naturalists moving down a river toward Harmony. Robert Owen, Arkady continued—it would be months before he understood why he was telling a story about New Harmony; months before he woke from a restless sleep thinking
Nadezhda, Nadezhda
and realized that he'd reproduced for the rest of us almost exactly what his teacher, Nadezhda, had recounted to his workmen's circle five years ago: before he was sick, before she was dead, before he'd realized she knew only slightly more than her students—Owen had promised that a new society would rise from the fertile land along the Wabash. But meanwhile, he said, while Eudora continued to examine her friend and to think just for a moment that despite Leo's unusual looks, Naomi's hand was capturing the least interesting part of him, the settlers at New Harmony had no food, no shelter, no tools, and no materials with which to build. Owen proposed that by reasoned choice we could remake our institutions and the ways we live; that our characters were formed not by but for us, and so could be re-formed by changing the conditions of our lives. By the wide and sluggish river, though, actual people grew hungry and cold, and ultimately, Arkady said, Owen's experiment had failed.

Naomi finished shading Leo's cheekbones as Miles, who so far had said nothing, chimed in, “But
ours
won't.” Keeping his eyes on Dr. Petrie, Miles added, “Although we are a small group, I think of this room as a kind of laboratory, and what we do here as something that might change all of us.”

“Change,” Dr. Petrie said, “is…”

“Change,” Irene said at the same moment, “follows…”

Both sentences got lost in the discussion, during which many of us spoke at once while Arkady, clearly pleased with what he'd started, did his best to orchestrate. Only Eudora and Naomi contributed nothing. Watching Naomi sketch an elaborate border, Eudora thought about the drawings Naomi had given her over the years, some of which had lost their meaning. In that way they resembled the tiny, crumpled leather boot her great-uncle Ned had pressed on her long ago. Hands shaking, eyes milky, he'd mumbled a story: he'd loved the woman to whom it had once belonged, or he'd had a friend who had loved the woman? She hadn't paid attention, although she'd been fond of him. But because she'd been absorbed in something else, she now had the boot but not its meaning, the relic but not the story. If someday she had a daughter of her own and wanted to pass on this bit of family history, the lost context would be her fault. Naomi's drawing, she thought, would lose its meaning in just the same way.

She was wrong about this, of course. Later we'd all know what the drawing meant, and we'd wonder what would have happened if Leo had seen it that day. But as Naomi was drawing and we were arguing and Eudora was remembering her great-uncle Ned, Leo was focused almost entirely on Eudora. If she'd mentioned him to Irene, then she must be aware of him. If she remembered that Irene might help him, then she knew who he was? He was so delighted he could hardly keep from reaching over to her.