The Air We Breathe (13 page)

“I thought,” he heard Irene say carefully, in the tone of someone who'd repeated a sentence more than once, “that this might be a good refresher textbook.”

“Better than you know,” he made himself say. Although the basement was delightfully warm, he was shivering. “This book—this particular edition, I mean, the Russian version—I used to know every page of it. If I could just borrow it for a while…”

“Keep it,” she said gently. “Since you cherish it so. After you've had time to study, we'll talk about some ways you might help me out here, if you're interested.”

When he seized her hand in thanks, she winced and cried out. Eudora, carrying the frozen hawk by its feet, entered the laboratory just then and said, “Oh, don't
squeeze,
you're hurting her!”

Baffled, Leo dropped Irene's hand and stepped back. Irene shook her fingers, as if trying to restore some feeling; Eudora set down the dead bird and stroked her shoulder.

“Not your fault,” Irene said. “Not at all, my hands are unusually”—she looked at the hawk, then up at Eudora—“sensitive, that's all. Eudora, I was showing Leo around and explaining some of what I do here. He might come and help out now and then. He was just leaving.”

“I'm glad you could visit,” Eudora murmured. Nodding, she picked up her latest specimen and headed for the old machine.

“Another time?” Irene said to Leo.

He nodded, embarrassed. “Thank you, again,” he said. “And I'm sorry.”

THE TEMPERATURE OUTSIDE
continued to hover near zero and the sky was its peculiar Adirondack gray. In the library Ian played laconically with the pieces of the Erector set, which had lost their charm but, because of their link to his brother, remained more interesting than nothing. Diagonally across the hall, Dr. Petrie worked on a report for the upcoming trustees' meeting, while below him Clarice and Deborah cooked our supper. Two of the maintenance men, Bronsen and Andrew, their coveralls bulging over scarves and sweaters, swept drifted snow from the walkways, the
whisk, whisk
of straw across the flagstones audible throughout the wings. Inside, irritated by the steady, gentle noise and the memory of days when we too had been able to tidy a piece of our world so casually, we were turning the pages of magazines and rereading old letters, trading gossip and marveling at the news of Rasputin's death, which had happened just before Christmas. We were playing cards or checkers or chess, regretting something that had happened at the New Year's celebration, anticipating the next movie night, wondering what our families were doing at home. Some of us, like Ephraim, were lying on our beds, concentrating only on getting better.

We were trudging off toward the dining hall, lining up and then sitting down, regarding our plates and each other; we were flirting across the invisible barrier separating women and men. Doing what we did each evening, what it seemed that we might always do. While we began our meal, someone asked Leo where he'd been and he mentioned that he'd gone to the X-ray laboratory. He didn't say why, though, nor what he'd been given. When Gordon asked if he'd learned anything about why Irene wore that violet glove, her cry of pain flashed through his mind but still he was able to say, with perfect honesty, “No.” Secretive, we thought. As we'd thought before.

Back out onto the porches, into the cold, under the covers, over the cushions: next to each other, freezing. Ephraim and Leo lay quietly after supper, Ephraim dreaming of home and Rosa and his girls, the deep snow blanketing the fields, the deer browsing through the bushes while his daughters, wrapped in layers of flannel, built a snowhouse with the help of their uncles, even as Leo—often this happened to us, this thinking or dreaming in parallel with the companions to whom we were closest—dreamed also of snow and his family. Not the second family, his stepmother's children, but his mother and her parents in Grodno where, during a winter like this, the snow piled up over the windows and the smoke from the train could be seen for miles away. He could see himself, dark hair hidden beneath a knitted cap, moving quietly between the white walls. Crows called harshly to each other from the trees. A hawk flew, casting a shadow, and the world seemed vast; so many things to do and see and he knew he would live forever. The rabbit he'd kept in a hutch out back: what had his name been?

That world had disappeared when his father took him off to Odessa. Then another had opened, only to vanish as well, but now—he turned to his green volumes, which were light enough to balance on his chest, easy to read even when he was wearing mittens. Each page begged to be lingered over. In this edition, he remembered his teacher enthusing, not only had Mendeleeff finally understood all the implications of the periodicity he'd discovered, but he'd also given himself free rein with his footnotes, which were speculative, fascinating, a parallel text taking up nearly half the book. Young and eager to learn the essentials as fast as he could, he'd skimmed over them when he'd read the text in Russian. But now—now he had nothing but time; he'd read every line, he'd take notes. He tilted the pages toward the lamp and slowly read the first footnote, inserted before Mendeleeff got halfway through his opening sentence:

He forced himself to take a breath. Perhaps this wouldn't be as easy as he'd thought? He didn't remember the language being so thorny but perhaps this was the result of the translation. He took another breath and dove in again.

On the other side of the divider Abe and Arkady were arguing, fiercely but amiably, and in very low voices—we were not supposed to talk during this time, we were supposed to rest completely—about Chernyshevsky, who Arkady felt had been crucial in shaping revolutionary thought but who Abe thought was a fool. Sean and Otto, a few spaces down, had both dropped into a heavy sleep, which meant they'd be up and tossing restlessly all through the night, while over in the other wing Lydia was staring at a magazine, fiercely scanning a column listing new inventions—cotter pins, a peanut stemmer, a device for rolling and finishing shrapnel bars—and considering how to patent her own. Elsewhere on the women's porches, Sadie, Olga, Karin, and Pearl were whispering about their cousins or the men they hoped might become cousins, gazing at advertisements for lipsticks, reading with despair a child's misspelled note from home, watching the sliver of moon creep up on the edge of a cloud, disappear, and slowly reemerge. The stars swung slowly and in the woods an animal shrieked. Irene, alone in the basement, looked up from her desk.

If only, she thought, the moment when her two visitors had surprised each other had been more illuminating. Between the chemistry text, which distracted Leo, and her own squeal of pain, the pair had hardly interacted and she couldn't be sure what she'd seen. She might have asked Leo directly how he felt about Eudora, or at least asked Eudora more about Leo, but she hadn't had the nerve. Leo's gaze, she'd wanted to tell Eudora, might change her whole life, and pretending not to see it wouldn't help. The thing was to acknowledge it; to see what it meant and decide what she wanted. Yet instead of finding out what was going on between these two, she'd been diverted by Leo's responses. He'd once known, she now understood, at least as much chemistry and physics as she did herself; all these months she might have been training him as well as Eudora. Stupid, she thought, not to have seen that.

I
RENE ALSO DIDN'T
see—neither did we, but how could we?—how quickly one of our essential souls might disappear. On the Tuesday after Leo first visited Irene's lab, Ephraim got a frantic message from his wife. Gemma, his youngest daughter, had something that might be meningitis, a piercing endless headache and a fever that wouldn't come down, and although two doctors had seen her and everyone in the community at Ovid was trying to help, she was in grave danger and calling out for her father.
I do not want to disturb you when you are yourself so sick,
Rosa said.
But…

The thought of Gemma crying for him—Gemma, who when he left home for Tamarack State had been too young to speak—made Ephraim's hands curl as if he might still cup her head. Nothing our director, Dr. Richards, said could keep him from leaving. Nor could Dr. Petrie, to whom Ephraim had, otherwise, always listened, convince him to stay, not even when he pointed to his temperature charts for the last three months, his last radiograph, the results of his last sputum count. “You have a new spot, an active one, in your left lung,” Dr. Petrie said. “It's essential that you rest for some months. You put your own life at risk by leaving here. Not to mention your family.”

“I'll sleep on my cousin's porch,” Ephraim said. “I'll take my meals separately. You've taught us plenty about how to quarantine ourselves.”

“That wasn't so you could kill yourself,” Dr. Petrie said. “I could force you to stay, there are papers…”

Ephraim, who towered over Dr. Petrie, shook his head. “You wouldn't.”

“I might, to keep you alive.”

We don't know if it would have come to that; Ephraim arranged things otherwise. That night, after supper, he lay silently next to Leo on the porch until finally he slapped the arm of his cure chair and rose. “I can't stay,” he said. “You have to help me.”

“Whatever you want,” Leo said. Lying so close to Ephraim's chair, he'd felt the tension building in his friend.
Rosa, Gemma, Rosa, Gemma
. If he himself had someone he loved, a family and a home of his own, he too would go.

He followed Ephraim to the front of their room and held open the carpetbag that Ephraim took from his metal locker. Ephraim stuffed into it two shirts, a pair of pants, three books; because it was very cold that night—the rest of us, still on the porches, were complaining to each other—he was wearing almost everything else he owned.

“People on the outside are going to notice those,” Leo said, pointing at the pajama bottoms hanging below the hems of Ephraim's thick wool pants.

Ephraim stripped, handed the bottoms to Leo, and put the pants back on. Leo added the pajamas to the carpetbag along with a knitted scarf of his own and then stood looking at his friend.

“You'll leave tonight?”

“It's the best thing,” Ephraim replied. “I'll get a ride into the village with someone I know, then take the first train out from there. If I try to leave from here tomorrow, Dr. Petrie is going to stop me. It's not his fault, he has to do it. But it's not my fault I have to go.”

“It's not,” Leo agreed. “But I worry about you. I have three dollars—would you take that?”

“Thank you,” Ephraim said. “You know I'd do the same for you. There's one other thing, though.”

“Should I make up a story about where you've gone?”

“They'll know,” Ephraim said. “But I don't think they'll bother to look for me once I'm safely off their hands. They just don't want to be responsible for letting me leave.”

He reached into the locker again, pulling from behind some books the small metal box Leo had last seen when the young man had visited from Ovid. “Felix said a friend of his would come for this before summer. Could you keep it until he gets here?”

“Whatever you want. You don't want to bring it home?”

“Better it should stay here,” Ephraim said. “This way I know that it will get to the right person.”

“I'll take care of it,” Leo said, embracing his friend at the door. “You have no idea how much I'm going to miss you.”

“I have an exact idea,” Ephraim said, smiling wryly. “I wish I could say I'll be back soon, but if all goes well I won't.”

“She'll get better,” Leo said, quickly stuffing the metal box into his own locker. In Odessa, in the months before he'd left, he'd known wild-eyed men with boxes hidden under their beds, boxes holding pistols, ammunition, knives, foreign currency, fevered tracts; he'd left in part to escape their frenzy and he resented Ephraim's friend for bringing that shadow here. Still, of course, he would do what Ephraim asked. “You'll get better, too,” he predicted. “I'll come and see you in Ovid as soon as I'm discharged.”

Ephraim waved, scouted the corridor to make sure it was empty, and then without a word to the rest of us—not those who'd known him since the beginning, not those who, until Leo's arrival, had thought of ourselves as his closest friends—he tiptoed along the corridor, down the stairs, and out the kitchen door.

AFTER EPHRAIM LEFT,
the women among us began to play a larger role at the Wednesday sessions. All the first speakers had been men; to make up for that imbalance, a string of women—all of whom had been here longer than Leo, which meant deferring Leo's talk yet again—now spoke as we began our new year. Sophie started, describing the settlement house she'd worked at before she became sick, and how she'd taught English and history to people like us at night. Pearl, who until her money ran out had been in a cure cottage not as fancy as Mrs. Martin's house but still nice enough, and who'd had stretches when she was nearly well, then spoke about her weeks working as an extra on a movie shot here in the village, where the frozen rivers and the gray cloudy sky had stood in for the Klondike. After that, we had some discussions in the halls and over dinner about the direction of our talks.

We'd enjoyed those last two, especially Pearl's lively account of her brief acting career, but how anecdotal and personal did we want these afternoons to become? Did we want to discuss how we treated our children's winter colds, how one of us made a tender brisket and how another turned rags into braided rugs? These matters too were important, some of us argued. And interesting. Yet they also made us miss even more the lives we'd left behind. Better, safer, to steer our talks back toward the territory Miles had first established: science, art, ideas. Celia, who was a good deal older than the rest of us and had lived in Russia until she was twenty-three, offered to discuss the work of Anton Chekhov.

“A Russian writer,” she said, one January Wednesday. Still she spoke English with a heavy accent. “Very famous there although not yet here.”

Because she'd developed symptoms in her knees and hips, she preferred to speak sitting down, moving only her hands. Against her heavy green jacket, they seemed unusually white. Like us, she said, Chekhov had suffered from tuberculosis, dying of it in his early forties but before then writing strange and wonderful plays, which at first hardly anyone understood. Stuck in sanatoria far from the city, he knew, she said, what our lives were like. “His stories are as beautiful as his plays—I like best a volume called
Khmurye liudi
. In English
Gloomy People,
” she said with a smile. “Or
Gloomy Folk,
like us.”

When she tried to summarize for us some of the stories she'd treasured, she grew frustrated and said that with all writers, but especially Chekhov, summary ruined everything: beauty lay in the story itself, the particular arrangement of sentences. But she promised that if any of us were interested, she'd try translating a story or two—and in fact Leo, whose own Russian was very rusty, and several of the rest of us took her up on this and later enjoyed the results.

Still, despite those diverting sessions, we missed Ephraim more than we might have expected. His steadiness and his easy sense of humor, which had often lightened our moods, disappeared just when they were most needed. Week after week, the news from the outside world was bad, and we found ourselves talking constantly about the war. In New Jersey an enormous shell-assembly plant blew up, half a million shells exploding while people all over the area trembled at the noise. After we heard that, Lydia, with her great gift for practical invention, brought to her session a working model of a sprayer she'd originally designed to mist fruit trees. If the country went to war, she said, she'd submit the model and her patent application to the War Department, along with notes on how to adapt it to spread an ignitable fog of gasoline.

We tried to imagine such a device and shuddered when we did. Our concentration wavered; how could we appreciate Nan's discussion about the suffrage movement when just before that the German government announced that their submarines would now attack all ships, including American ships, entering the blockade zone surrounding Great Britain, and when the president severed relations with Germany in response? Passenger ships were being torpedoed, people were drowning: it was as if the German government
wanted
the United States to enter the war, and that, we thought, made no sense at all. In the library we passed sections of our newspapers back and forth and sometimes smuggled them into our rooms.

A week after Valentine's Day, Kathleen, who'd been a music teacher at a progressive elementary school in Utica, wheeled into the solarium an upright piano, which the women among us knew as well as we knew our own cure chairs; it came from our sitting room. We'd spent hours playing it, cursing the sour notes, singing in groups around it, but for the men it was a surprise. Thumping, pounding, singing loudly over her own playing and shouting directions as she played—
Here
you must imagine woodwinds,
daaaah, da-da-da-da da-daaah,
calling and answering like birds…Now the strings! All at once,
DUM, dum-dum-dum-dum; DUM
—Kathleen squeezed through that worn old instrument a reduction of Stravinsky's shocking ballet,
Le Sacre du printemps
. The orchestral version, she assured us, was just as chaotic and fragmented as what she rendered for us. More so really—a new kind of music, which she was just beginning to learn for herself from a recording.

We remember that session with particular clearness, and not only because of what Kathleen's playing would later signify. The men were dazzled by her knowledge and skill, while the women, who'd earlier heard her distill Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky, were fascinated by the music itself, and by our growing realization that life in the men's and women's annexes had been more different than we'd thought.

We questioned each other, and her, intently. We had a wonderful talk. Gleaming beneath it was an intuition that time would later confirm: Kathleen's session was one of the few when we were nearly whole. Except for Ephraim, all the members of our little group were present that day: Leo, Dr. Petrie, Irene, and Eudora; Celia, in the first stages of translating her Chekhov stories, and Polly, getting ready to talk the following week about poetry; also Sophie, Pearl, and Lydia, who'd already surprised us with their talks. Ian was there, with new advertisements his brother had sent from the Erector plant; Arkady and Abe, now arguing over every page of something Celia had given them to read about a penal colony on Sakhalin Island; Pietr, who'd been in bed for six weeks, talking to David, who was doing so well he dreamed of being discharged; Olga and Nan, who despite having quarreled had each refused to miss a session and so sat on opposite sides of our circle. Jaroslav, who played the violin, was discussing the possibility of duets with Kathleen. Bea was showing off the embroidered slippers she'd been given for her thirty-first birthday to Sean, who was wishing he'd given them to her. Zalmen, Frank, Otto, and Seth, united by their joint plan to settle in Utica and start a tool-and-die shop once they were cured, leaned toward each other while Albert, always dreamy, wondered under the influence of the music how his mother and father had met. We were all there, with our hopes and plans, our clashing and mingling purposes, our delight in what Kathleen had done and—Naomi was sitting near Eudora but Miles was off to one side, alone; how did none of us see it?—our shared neglect of Miles.

WHEN MILES SKIPPED
the next session, on the last day of February, we hardly noticed at first. That day Polly told us about Carl Sandburg, a performance as surprising in its own way as Kathleen's. Only Polly's two closest friends, Olga and Nan (they'd made up by then), had known before that Polly wrote poems herself, or that she followed new poetry as avidly as our library and her own very limited budget permitted. From Sandburg's book
Chicago Poems,
she read pieces nothing like those we'd learned in school. No fancy language, no kings and floating princesses or holy grails. These were about the copper wire strung between the telephone poles and carrying our voices. About hoboes and soldiers and factory workers, ships that heaved like mastodons, the windows shining in railroad cars, the mist and the fog and prairie cornfields and, yes, the war—but not what the men who sat safely in warm rooms imagined it to be. These poems described the war as it looked to men fighting it, and we had never heard anything like them. We listened—Polly read well—and then pulled our chairs into a tighter circle to look at some passages more closely. Only as we bent our heads together did we realize that Miles was absent and with him, of course, Naomi.