The Air We Breathe (12 page)

Some of us had already noticed how, no matter who was speaking, Leo studied Eudora; how he managed to post himself next to her during our coffee breaks and to sit across from her, so she was always in his gaze. Still it was Irene, new to our circle and alert to Leo after their brief exchange, who noticed his expression most clearly. At the end of the session, as we were trickling from the room, she and Eudora paused by the door. When Leo passed by them, she nodded and said, “I do hope you'll come visit.”

“I
will,
” he said. “Very soon.” He waited, but when neither woman moved, he said a few words to Miles and then reluctantly joined Ephraim and Arkady in the hall.

“You didn't tell me he was so interested in you,” Irene said to Eudora.

“Leo?” Eudora said.

“He never takes his eyes off of you.”

“Not me,” Eudora said, anxious to correct her misunderstanding. “It's Naomi he must be looking at.” She looked back over her shoulder, toward where Miles and Naomi, standing near the fireplace, seemed to be arguing.

“It's not,” Irene said, shaking her head. “But that's your business, not mine. Would you like to join me tonight? We could spend a few hours reviewing films while we gather material for Dr. Petrie's Monday meeting.”

By then she'd seen in Eudora a quality that many of us had missed: whatever absorbed her, absorbed her completely. In the laboratory, Irene had seen pictures memorized, captions inhaled, whole passages from the books on her shelves swallowed and integrated. If she hadn't learned in much the same way, first from her brother-in-law and then elsewhere, she wouldn't have thought it possible that a person could grasp so much so fast. “I can have two supper trays sent down,” she added.

Ignoring whatever was going on with Miles and Naomi, and also Irene's remark about Leo, Eudora followed Irene out the door.

F
OUR DAYS AFTER
Arkady's talk it was five below zero, and we were wearing mittens as we trotted through the halls. The library was freezing, also the dining hall, the solarium, and every place but the basement, near the furnaces. Out on the porches, where we had our elaborate layers of newspapers and blankets and hats and sometimes a glimmer of sun as well, we often felt warmer than when we were inside.

Cold awake, cold asleep; we lived in a building designed to freeze our bacilli, which also meant freezing us. Torpid as bears, we waited for the Christmas season to pass, knowing every minute that, at our distant homes and also in the village, celebrations we couldn't share were taking place. We were allowed to exchange only cards, a practice meant to make our lack of funds less painful, but elsewhere both the sick and the well were passing gifts at festive parties. Miles, still proud of himself for telling Naomi how he felt, overwhelmed everyone at Mrs. Martin's house with his generosity. The new novels, the woolen shawls, the handsome lap desks were too much, agreed the other guests, who'd given each other chocolates or playing cards or socks. Mrs. Martin was delighted with her elegant serving platter, but Naomi, who'd driven Miles on his shopping errands and thought she'd seen everything, was mortified to find, next to her plate, a necklace set with shining aquamarines.

“To match your eyes,” Miles announced.

Silently she pled with her mother, hoping to be told that it was inappropriate and she should give it back. “Very handsome,” Mrs. Martin said instead, with what Naomi knew was envy in her voice.

“I know a good jeweler in Boston,” Miles said, looking pleased.

If she'd been able to turn to Eudora, perhaps she wouldn't have felt so terrible—but on the day after Christmas Eudora was back at work, cheerfully scrubbing floors and mopping tiles and helping us tack our homemade cards to the moldings. As soon as her shift was over she sprinted to the basement, where Irene was letting her experiment with some outdated X-ray equipment. Although this had been pushed to the back of the laboratory as soon as the more powerful replacement arrived, for Eudora it was as good as new. With the manual, a handful of textbooks, and two diagrams, she set to work cleaning the knobs and filaments and investigating the properties of the rays.

For subjects she used a group of ancient, moth-eaten specimens she'd smuggled from her father's workshop: two ducks, a chipmunk missing a leg, a tattered osprey, and a little opossum. Stitches showed, seams gaped. Her father had made these as a boy, when he was learning his craft from his Uncle Ned, and by now the osprey had only one eye while the toes of the opossum were as limp and shabby as old gloves and all of them were infested with bugs. She posed them between the tube and the film holder and then varied the distance, the voltage, and the length of her exposures. The bugs disappeared. The images she developed were good, bad, better, worse; sometimes, as she noted in her ledger, the leg wires and the wing bones were perfectly crisp but the neck vertebrae, in a slightly different plane, were out of focus. Sometimes she could see every detail of the skull but sometimes not. She found a pair of scissor-handled stuffers wound by accident into the excelsior filling the opossum and learned that the toes sagged because whoever skinned the creature had discarded the littlest bones. What were those called? One of Irene's anatomical atlases revealed the answer: distal phalanges. On New Year's Eve she stayed very late, eating the apples that Irene kept in a box and forgetting entirely about the date until, halfway down the hill on her bicycle, she looked up at the crescent moon and the sparkling planet near its lower tip, and realized that the earth had completed another revolution around the sun.

Often she and Naomi had made New Year's resolutions together—they would read these books, travel to these places—but not this year. On her bicycle, flying past winter trees so bare they resembled ribs, Eudora had only one wish:
I want more time in the lab.
She remembered Naomi, of course. But the image of her was, at that moment, no more vivid than that of one of her Aunt Elizabeth's former boarders, whose face she remembered warmly but whose last name she'd forgotten.

We weren't thinking about Naomi, either; she meant little to us and when we noticed her it was always as Miles Fairchild's driver, Miles's little friend. That New Year's Eve she was alone in her room, looking out the dormer window toward the same crescent moon but acutely aware of Eudora's absence. She lit a candle and swore that she'd be someplace else before the year ended. With Eudora or without, she would leave her mother's house and find a new place to live, where she could do something interesting. Something that used her talent for drawing, perhaps. She might make sketches for a clothes designer, illustrations for a magazine. Drawings for an architect: did she need to go to school for that? Last week she'd made sixteen sketches of Leo's face, from memory. Profile, three-quarter view, his eyes cast down or looking up; each one better than the last. For Christmas, Eudora had given her a thick pad of drawing paper she'd ordered specially. “You have such a gift,” she'd said—but what she'd really meant, what had filled the pause after that, was:
Why don't you draw something other than Leo?

Because I dream about him at night, Naomi had wanted to say. Dreamed about him, woke up thinking about him, served breakfast thinking about him, started the Model T and ran the errands and sorted mail for the boarders thinking about him every minute. Inside her head they had conversations in which he spoke and she responded, the clarity of what she felt and heard exactly mimicking her memories of actual conversations. How was a person to keep straight what she truly remembered, and what she remembered inventing?

Back in Chester, in the field behind her family's house, there'd been a space she sometimes visited, not far from the hedge where the deer used to sleep. The tall grass was pushed to the ground, the stems bent over and swirled to make a clearing shaped like an egg. When she could find it—it was almost invisible until she was right on top of it—she sat there for hours. The grass beyond the clearing moved in the breeze. The sun came in and the bent grass where she sat was damp and fragrant, sometimes tufted with pale hair. Always she'd fall asleep there, and when she woke there'd be a moment when she didn't know where she was, or even
that
she was: only the smells and the sounds and the movements and the feel of the sun on her skin. After her move to Tamarack Lake, nothing had made her feel that way again until she saw Leo—and that, she knew, was why she was so miserable. It wasn't just the holidays and her mother's frenzy and all the extra work, the special meals and extra decorations and the boarders' private parties. It wasn't just Miles, who'd been clinging to her like a tick. And it wasn't even that she missed Eudora, who swore she wasn't avoiding her but was never around and talked, when she could be found, only about the X-rays.

A few days ago, when the brakes on the Model T needed adjustment, Naomi had arranged to meet Eudora at the garage where Eugene worked and to take a walk with her while he did the repairs. Only after Naomi was already there had Eudora telephoned to cancel. Annoyed, Naomi had waited on the bench by the door, complaining until Eugene said he'd hardly seen his sister lately either. Busy all the time, he said. Ernest, who was back from New York for a couple of days, walked in, leaned over to inspect the brakes, and joined the conversation.

“Runs in the family,” he added, handing Eugene a wrench. “When one of us gets interested in something we really get
interested
.”

As if she didn't know that herself. Later, while Eugene was fiddling with a cable, Ernest had offered her a cigarette. She'd only smoked a few before and so she puffed at it cautiously while he talked about New York. There was nothing like the city, he said, straightening his handsome shirt. Movies every day if he wanted; the docks and the markets and the people in the streets, men working in caissons beneath the river while others moved through ironwork high in the air—just being there was exciting. And who would have expected that all the hours he'd put in with his father and his great-uncle in their taxidermy shop would have helped him get a job he liked so much!

“You're lucky,” she'd said, unable to hide her envy.

He'd given her a look and leaned in toward her, his hair hanging softly over one eye. “Why don't you think about visiting sometime?”

Weakly she smiled and then coughed on the smoke from his cigarette.

ON THE SUNDAY
after New Year's Day, which was bitterly cold and completely still, a dead hawk appeared in the low mound of garden centered, like a bull's-eye, inside our circular driveway. From our breakfast tables we couldn't avoid the sight of the corpse among the stiff white stalks. Irene, who hadn't seen the bird herself, heard about it from Leo, who arrived five minutes early for his tour of her laboratory. He chattered nervously while she showed him both her X-ray apparatus and the older equipment Eudora was playing with.

“Since when does it get so cold here that birds fall frozen from the sky?” he said. “You'd think we were in Siberia.”

Irene shrugged, smiled, and pointed toward the new Coolidge tube. “Did you ever use one of these?”

“Not that one exactly,” he said, “but earlier versions, of course. Where I went to school, we had all the usual gadgets for studying electricity. You must have too—you studied in Kraków?”

She nodded. “A long time ago, though. Everything I've learned about the rays, I learned in this country.”

“I learned it back there,” Leo said. “What little I know. I was six when the Roentgen rays were discovered; by the time I was in school we took the rays for granted and were more interested in what we could
do
with them than simply in producing them.”

“We couldn't imagine such a thing, when I was in school,” Irene said. “Twenty years—what a difference that makes.”

Leo looked at the cabinets filled with glass plates, the long rows of chest films filed on the shelves that wound around the room, the darkroom, the chemicals and the glassware. “
Ten
years makes a difference,” he said tensely. “Two. What really made me feel old were the discoveries Moseley made in Rutherford's laboratory. That's when I realized I'd never catch up.”

“X-ray spectroscopy is really astonishing, isn't it?” Irene said. That there should be a way, now, to identify elements by their X-ray spectra and confirm their positions on the periodic table: this seemed as magical as peering through the envelope of human flesh. The papers demonstrating that each element had a specific number of electrons had been brilliantly clear, but still she was startled to think that Leo might understand them.

“You're familiar with Moseley's experiments?” she asked.

He shook his head again. “I was already in New York when he did his work,” he said bitterly. “Already no one. No lab, no books, no colleagues…”

“Such a waste,” she said, meaning Moseley's death at Gallipoli but then embarrassed that Leo might think she meant him. “Why,” she couldn't help asking, “did you come to America?”

He rubbed his thumb repeatedly down the inside surface of his index finger, a gesture she hadn't been able to make in years, and said, “Didn't we all come for similar reasons? We thought it would be different here, that we'd have a better chance.” Again his eyes wandered around the laboratory. “It worked for you. For me, it didn't.”

His hand reached toward but didn't touch three Erlenmeyer flasks drying upside down on a wooden rack, and when she saw the hunger on his face she rummaged in the shelf of books near her desk. Absently, as if the gesture meant nothing, she handed him two worn green volumes.

“My old copy,” she said, watching him. “I almost never use the set anymore, it's a little out of date.”

He turned the volumes over before setting one down and opening the cover of the other. Surely this wasn't the text from which he'd learned chemistry in Odessa? And yet it was, or a version of it—an English translation of the sixth Russian edition of Mendeleeff's
Principles of Chemistry
. His copy, in one fat blue volume, had been stolen at the docks, along with most of his belongings, on the day six years ago when he'd arrived in New York. But here, as if a piece of his old life had been returned, was the same photograph, Mendeleeff with his open mouth and badly cut hair looking more like a madman than the genius he surely was. Here were the precious words and tables, along with the scores of small engravings showing everything from Lavoisier's apparatus for determining the composition of air to the tall furnaces used in the dry distillation of bones.

Irene was looking at him, he knew, but he couldn't keep himself from reading the beginning of the translator's preface.
In the scientific work to which Professor Mendeleeff's life has been devoted, his continual endeavour has been to bring the scattered facts of chemistry within the domain of law, and accordingly in his teaching he endeavours to impress upon the student the
principles
of the science, the generalizations, so far as they have been discovered, under which the facts naturally group themselves.
That was right, exactly right, thought Leo: the
principles
of the science.
Chemistry,
he read,
offers an insight into the unchangeable substratum underlying the varying forms of matter.
He saw the lantern-jawed, goggle-eyed face of his kind young teacher and at the back of his throat he suddenly tasted ammonia.