The Air We Breathe (14 page)

We learned why the following week, when they returned. As David, who'd arrived at Tamarack State six months before Leo and had once worked in Mexico, explained the implications of the newly published document the newspapers called “the Zimmerman telegram,” Miles listened impassively. David read out loud the German telegram as it had been translated and printed in the papers, six weeks after it was sent:

It hadn't been even a year, David reminded us, since Pershing took American troops into Mexico in pursuit of the revolutionary general Pancho Villa; hardly a month since those troops had withdrawn; the Mexicans were eager to pay the Americans back. On a map David showed us how easily that territory might be reclaimed. We thought of Canada, just a few miles away, and how we'd feel if the Germans had proposed an alliance with them. The war, we understood then, was here.

Some of us drifted away when David finished speaking, while others continued talking in twos and threes. Only the handful of us clustered around Dr. Petrie noticed how, as Miles made his way toward us, he stepped as if the bones in his feet had been shattered. Six inches, six inches, six. Finally he reached our group and stopped.

“I have to tell you,” he began, his eyes fixed on Dr. Petrie's chest. The pause that followed was long enough to silence the rest of us and make us turn toward him.

“To tell you,” he tried again.

Dr. Petrie reached for his hand. “You don't feel well,” he said. “Please, sit down.”

Miles backed a few inches away. “My friend was killed,” he said quietly. “My friend in France. I wanted you to know.”

“Not Lawrence!” Dr. Petrie said.

Miles nodded. “Gassed,” he whispered.

Seth began to cough as the rest of us wondered whether to draw closer to Miles or to leave him and Dr. Petrie alone. We kept our places. Still looking at Dr. Petrie's chest, Miles said that since hearing the news he hadn't left his room, until today.

“I'm sorry,” Dr. Petrie said, gently touching one hand to Miles's jacket. Behind him the rest of us mumbled our regrets; this was the first personal thing Miles had ever told any of us other than Dr. Petrie, and we didn't know how to respond. “I'm glad you were able to come here.”

“It's what got me out of bed. I missed you. I missed this.”

Embarrassed, but also touched, we continued to stand there clumsily. After a minute, Miles took some folded papers from his jacket pocket and handed them to Leo, who was standing closest to Dr. Petrie. “Lawrence wrote this not long before he died,” Miles said of the first sheet, gesturing to Leo to pass it around. “You can see…”

Not what he saw, probably: but as each of us in turn read the scrawled words we grasped that the letter was terrible. Reluctantly we took the second sheet, this one the letter from Lawrence's father announcing his son's death. Together they were so sad that we didn't know where to look or what to say. Pietr rubbed his eyebrows, Arkady mumbled a word. Seth, still coughing into a paper handkerchief, stepped away. Leo put the sheets in Dr. Petrie's hand, as if he couldn't bear to give them back to Miles himself. Dr. Petrie kept up a steady murmur of consolation but the rest of us were useless. We could not, after all, touch a man like him, and we had no idea how or if he prayed.

TO OUR SURPRISE,
Miles returned the following Wednesday and sat mutely, very close to Naomi although not touching her, during Jaroslav's explanation of cinematography cameras. Until a few years ago Jaroslav had worked at a studio in New Jersey, repairing and maintaining their equipment, and although he didn't have a camera he was able, with a few sketches and some strips of paper cut to the width of film stock, to show us how the film spooled on rollers between the two magazines tucked inside each camera box. He diagrammed the sprockets and the corresponding perforations in the film, and also the clever mechanism that moved the film in synchrony with the opening of the lens shutter, exposing it at the rate of sixteen frames per second. Our eyes, he said, when confronted with images shot and projected at that speed, magically converted stillness into motion.

We listened eagerly, some of us taking notes; we loved our movie nights, which never came often enough, and it was a pleasure to know more about what we saw. Polly and Bea noticed, despite their absorption, the way Naomi kept shifting away from Miles's legs, which occasionally tilted in her direction. Zalmen and Abe saw, instead, the way that Miles, despite his recent loss, tried to concentrate on Jaroslav's explanations.

“In its essence,” Jaroslav continued, “cinematography
freezes
light, storing it like ice in an icebox. During projection, the light is released again in measured quantities, animating what would otherwise seem dead.”

He paused while Sophie, who had recently relapsed, coughed, choked, coughed more violently, shook off Bea's whispered offer of help, wiped her running eyes, and subsided. Then, thoughtfully, he tried to link his subject to what Miles had taught us. “Perhaps,” he said, “the reconstruction of living action from still images isn't so different from the effort to reconstruct creatures from fossilized bones.”

“That,” Miles said unsmilingly, “is a preposterous analogy.”

Arkady and Sean exchanged glances and Lydia frowned as Jaroslav paused, his feelings clearly hurt. He hurried through the rest of his presentation and then left the room, in the company of Pietr and Abe. The rest of us filed out more slowly. Often we left our sessions elated, hovering in the corridor or in front of the windows to talk more about what we'd just learned, but Miles's comment squelched us. He was grieving, we knew. His words had been instantaneous, unconsidered—but somehow seemed worse because of that, as if all along he'd found our presentations foolish but no longer had the energy to conceal it. Halfway down the hall, in front of a freshly painted exam room, Nan said to David, “He probably didn't mean to do that.”

“But it's who he
is,
” David replied. “That's the trouble.”

Behind them the solarium had emptied out except for Leo, who'd stepped into the alcove to the left of the fireplace, and Miles, who a minute later came to stand beside him. Leo was gazing out the window, and he jumped when Miles said, “Won't you be late for your supper?”

“I didn't know you were still here,” Leo said.

“I can't go anywhere until Naomi's ready. She wanted to talk with Eudora about something, so…” He gestured toward the pair outside, walking in the frozen garden. “I wish she wouldn't keep me waiting like this.”

Leo, who'd stayed behind simply to watch Eudora, nodded absently.

“It doesn't seem fair,” Miles added, clicking his fingernails against the window as if Naomi might hear him. “Especially not now. Last week I got some letters that Lawrence wrote me and never got the chance to send. One of his friends found them and mailed them on. It's so—reading words he wrote months ago, hearing his voice in my head when I know he's gone—I can't explain what that feels like.”

“I'm sorry,” Leo said, meaning it despite his absorption in the scene below, and his annoyance at the way Miles had treated Jaroslav.

“They're too grim to show anyone,” Miles said. “If people here really knew what was going on there, they would want—”

“To stay out of it?” Leo said.

Miles looked at him appraisingly. “To get
into
it. I'm sure we'll declare war any day now, but why have we already wasted so much time? We should have committed ourselves much earlier. If we had, maybe Lawrence wouldn't be dead.”

Below Leo, a shadow moved across the drift—it had finally snowed—and from above a bird plunged. Back home, he thought, in the marshes and hollows he'd known as a boy, all the men must have gone off to fight, leaving behind only the birds and the fish and the empty forest. Lawrence wouldn't be dead if he hadn't volunteered; how would it help to send more men after him?

“One thing I can't stop thinking about,” Miles said. “Jaroslav reminded me of it, when he mentioned the fossil bones. Lawrence wrote that some nights, when he was lying awake in the mud, he thought of the river we floated down as a river through time. He said for him, our boat journey might have started in the nineteenth century, in his father's world, and mine. When it ended it dropped him into another century and another world.”

They looked out the window again, eyes averted from each other, fixed on the women below. Lawrence, Miles continued, had described all too vividly the trench walls where he was stuck, slick and slippery and caving in daily, dotted with bones and body parts: a nightmare version, he'd written, of the cliffs from which they'd excavated the cleanly layered fossils.

“It makes me sick,” Miles said, slapping his hand against the windowsill. “Not just his death, but what happened before it, what's in those letters—I think he
wanted
to die. What's wrong with the French and the British, that they can't organize matters better than this? The inefficiency, the sheer waste of life and idealism—when we get over there, when Americans are in charge, things will be different.”

“Will they?” Leo said, not thinking how his words might sound.

“Of course they will,” Miles said. “If you saw the way my cement plant runs, or the way Edward's factories are organized—we'd never let men rot like this. Not just physically but morally, spiritually. Lawrence and his friends were trapped.”

Leo tried to envision Miles's cement plant in Doylestown. Different from the sugar refinery, not chaotic and filthy but well run and organized, workers calmly tending their machines before stopping for useful after-hours classes, encouraged by small rewards to produce more and still more—was that what Miles meant? Those same men, overseas, would climb docilely out of the trenches and march toward the bullets.

He glanced down and saw that Eudora was leaving the garden; the sky had darkened further and he'd missed his chance to speak with her again. “I wish I could help,” he said to Miles. “Truly.”

Miles drew himself up a bit straighter. “It was kind of you simply to listen. I expect you have to go—”

“—to supper,” Leo said. “But I'll see you next week.”

LEO TOLD NO ONE
about this conversation; only later would the rest of us hear a version of what, at the time, seemed private. His imagination was dark with those images of Lawrence, and he felt more sympathy for Miles than he would have thought possible. He was startled—all of us were—to hear later that, while we were sitting down to supper, Miles had stopped by Dr. Petrie's office. There he spoke not about Lawrence and the letters, but about Naomi.

“Maybe you could talk to her
for
me?” he asked. “Convince her to give me a chance…”

“Convince her, more likely, to avoid you completely,” Dr. Petrie said impatiently. Hadn't they already talked about this? “I know this is a terrible time for you, it's natural to look for comfort anywhere you can find it—but infatuations are as common up here as colds. You need to find some way to control this. I would never have expected you to take these feelings so seriously.”

“I gave her the book Edward gave me,” Miles said miserably. “That was terrible of me, but I thought she'd like it because it's old, and a curiosity. But she didn't, and—”

“Look
outward,
” Dr. Petrie said. Even to himself he sounded harsh, but nothing was more important than preserving Miles's health. “Stop focusing so much on yourself. Naomi can't console you for losing Lawrence. There isn't a person up here who hasn't lost a friend or a family member. Do you think you're alone?”

Miles slumped once more in the gray chair. “You think I am self-indulgent,” he said. “You think I'm ridiculous.”

“Not at all,” Dr. Petrie said wearily. “I'm only trying to help. Of course you're grieving, you've had a terrible blow. No wonder you feel confused. But sometimes the best cure is to think about other people, involve yourself in their lives. The way you helped Lawrence when he was a boy.”

“If you had lost someone,” Miles said, “I would be more sympathetic. Or if you were in love.”

Later he sent Dr. Petrie this: