The Air We Breathe (16 page)

What was it, Eudora wondered, that so drew Naomi toward Leo? As she reached over for her friend's hand, she remembered an October afternoon, not long after Leo had first joined Ephraim in this room. All day rain had been falling and at four o'clock, when the shift changed, the sky had been nearly dark. Along with a few nurses and kitchen helpers and other ward maids she'd stood near the main entrance for half an hour, waiting for a break in the weather and gossiping about the doctors and patients. Leo's name kept coming up. The way he looked: not that he was so handsome, a dishwasher said—not at all, a nurse's aide agreed, he was too bony, and his hands were so large they were frightening—but more that even when he was with a group at the dinner table, he seemed alone. As if, another aide said, he needed not so much company as a companion.

Clarice, who had served Leo his dinner the first night he joined us, and who'd been married twice and widowed once, smiled slyly and said that if he was healthier, and she was younger, she'd be tempted to take advantage of him. His eyes were part of it, someone else claimed, while the rain dripped steadily from the breezeway. But not just his eyes. Eudora, listening alertly, had tried to fit this with what she'd noticed as she tidied his room each day. She hadn't seen that in Leo, herself; both Leo and Ephraim interested her but they were always talking when she came by and she hadn't wanted to interrupt them. Only after Ephraim left had she seen how solitary Leo seemed, and how Naomi's whole body tensed in his presence. Just now she was so rigid that her hand, when Eudora touched it, felt like wood.

“Let go of that,” Eudora said, tugging at the open box. Reluctantly, Naomi held it out.

On top of some newspaper articles lay a pencil. Next to it was what looked like its mate, reduced to parts: two slim wooden halves, one with a centered groove running down its entire length, the other with an identical groove that cradled a very slender tube, nipped at the middle like a waist.

Eudora leaned over and pointed at the tube. “Shouldn't the lead go there?” she asked. She picked up the intact pencil and examined the tip, which didn't look right and felt glassier than a normal pencil's tip.

Naomi held out a piece of paper. “This was in there too,” she said. “Something Leo drew, I think. Isn't that his handwriting?”

A diagram, Eudora saw, in which the wooden halves of the dissected pencil had been drawn side by side, accompanied by Leo's comments.
Pencil soaked in water until the halves came apart. That's how the lead was removed and the tube inserted. When the two halves are glued back together the pencil appears nearly normal.

He'd labeled the bottom of his drawing of the slim glass tube,
Chlorate of potash mixed with sugar;
the top,
Sulfuric acid
. A paragraph connected by an arrow to the pencil's tip noted:
Capillary action forces acid down into the mixture when the tip is broken and air is admitted. A very hot flame appears instantly.

He really
was
a chemist, Eudora thought. But how had he come by this?

“I wonder if it works,” Naomi said. She reached over and scratched the tip of the intact pencil with her thumbnail. “I can't believe this would catch fire if I just snapped off a little piece…”

Eudora snatched the box away. “Whatever this is, it's Leo's. You shouldn't even
be
here.”

As Naomi rolled her eyes, Eudora took the diagram from her, asked if it had been folded, and when Naomi said no, slipped it back in the box. “Was it under the pencils?”

“On top,” Naomi said. “Like that.” Even now, she didn't apologize.

“What else did you disturb?”

Naomi held her hands up, palm out, in front of her chest. “I just looked at that one thing.”

Eudora frowned and returned the box to the back of the locker. Then she closed the door and stood aside as Naomi moved the chair back next to the sink. “Maybe you should tell him how you feel. Either he's interested, or he isn't. Why should you live in this kind of uncertainty?”

“That's not the point,” Naomi said angrily. “He has to tell me first, for it to count. He can't just want me because I want him. He has to feel like that by
himself.
To want me worse than anything.”

Eudora let that pass, suggesting instead, “What if you did something to help him, which would also help him to notice you? You could bring him some books, maybe, from the town library…”

“I'm not interested in what he's
reading,
” Naomi said. “Why would you think—”

“—think what?” Leo said, walking in just then.

The fingers on his right hand were stained with ink and his wool pants badly needed mending. His hair was shaggy, like everyone's; our barber hadn't visited yet that month. Naomi took a step toward him, but before she could say anything, Eudora seized her arm.

“I'm so sorry,” she said, gripping Naomi just above the elbow. “We were walking down the hall together and then Naomi suddenly got dizzy”—
Me!
Naomi thought, pulling her arm free—“and she stumbled.”

Twining her hands in her ugly blue apron, Eudora continued to spin her lies. Because she knew how much of his free time Leo spent in the library now, she'd guessed that his room might be empty and had led Naomi inside for a minute's privacy: “So she wouldn't faint. So we wouldn't upset the patients.”

How ridiculous, Naomi thought. If she hadn't fainted when her brother died, when her mother took her from Chester or when she first saw a dead body, why would she start now? But Leo must have sensed that, simply from looking at her. She could feel that she was the opposite of pale, her face hot both from the thrill of being in the room with him and from knowing she had a scrap of him tucked between her waistband and her skin.

“You're welcome to use anything you need,” he said gently. “Maybe Naomi should lie down on the bed?”

He was looking at Eudora as he said this, but Naomi could feel how much he actually wanted to be looking at her, how conscious he was of her, so nearby. How much he wanted for her to lie down, for Eudora to vanish, for the door to close behind her.

“Really, I'm so sorry,” Eudora said again. She looked at him as if trying to distract attention from what Naomi had done, while he looked at Eudora as if, Naomi thought, by not looking directly at her he could deny the attraction between them. She stood there, mutely watching, until Eudora seized her elbow again and hustled her away.

THEY HAD A
few sharp words in the parking lot—Celia saw them, from her porch, also Sadie and Pearl and Bea—and then Naomi drove home alone, leaving Eudora behind to whatever she did in that basement with Irene. Eudora's annoyance was nothing, Naomi thought, a misunderstanding she could explain away later. What she wanted to think about was that brief encounter with Leo. She was so excited she stalled the car twice and bumped the fender entering the carriage house. Inside, serving dinner, her mouth responding to her mother's orders and the boarders' comments, her eyes avoiding Miles's face, she mulled over all she'd learned. She'd seen a new part of Leo, and she was sure—his eyes were the same transparent blue as her own—that for the first time, he'd really seen
her
. As if that weren't a big enough gift, she also had what she'd stolen.

She'd meant to take a scarf, or a pillowcase—something that, if he were to miss it, he could imagine had been lost in the wash. She would have, if Eudora hadn't barged in and she hadn't had to act so swiftly. On the drive home, she'd been disappointed to end up with something so impersonal, but in the dining room she reconsidered. She served the hazelnut torte, poured coffee, cleared the dishes. By the time she got up to her room and could examine her treasure, it seemed like the one perfect thing. When she rolled it in her hand she told herself:
It's not a pencil
. Then she stood it alongside the others in the cup, the point hidden and the long seam almost invisible—and it
was
a pencil, no different from any other. She could leave it anywhere without a person noticing; carry it in her pencil case or in a pocket. Holding it made her feel like she could see inside Leo's brain.

LEO, WHO DIDN'T
know the pencil was missing, went to supper and, as he had done with Miles, told no one about the visit. Not, the rest of us think, because he wanted to hide it, or because he feared what some of us might say (and it's true that any of us could have pointed out Naomi's growing interest in him), but simply because he didn't think it was important. Eudora he'd been thrilled to see, Naomi he'd hardly noticed; he'd taken Eudora's story at face value and forgotten it the minute she left. The box tucked in the back of his locker hadn't crossed his mind. Weeks ago, right after Ephraim's departure, he'd methodically examined everything in it, dissected the pencil, diagrammed its workings, and then, reassured that he knew all he could about it, put it back and moved on to more interesting matters. When he thought about pencils, he thought about a page he'd found in his Mendeleeff:
If sugar be placed in a charcoal crucible and a powerful galvanic current passed through it, it is baked into a mass similar to graphite
. If the sugar refinery in Williamsburg was hit by lightning, would it fuse into a shiny black mass? He'd turned to the footnote below, which concerned the best sources of graphite for pencils:
In Russia the so-called Aliberoffsky graphite is particularly renowned; it is found in the Altai Mountains near the Chinese frontier…

Why should those sentences, about a part of Russia he'd never seen and a substance interesting only for its unusual molecular structure, have caused such a massive fit of homesickness in him? Yet they had, they'd made him see not only the places where he'd lived as a boy but all of Russia spread out in his mind's eye, taiga and tundra and Lake Baikal, St. Petersburg and Moscow, spots as distant from his childhood homes as he was now from California. Just that afternoon, in the library, he'd found an out-of-date atlas and spent his free hour hunched over maps showing the advance and retreat of Napoleon's army, the location of salt mines, the average number of bushels of buckwheat a field might yield. He'd taken notes, without knowing why. When he'd stopped by his room to find Eudora and Naomi confused and guilty-looking inside, his imagination had been a jumble of maps and politics and molecular structures, against which the women had seemed, for a second, as insubstantial as ghosts.

Then Eudora had solidified enough for him to realize that he'd caught her and Naomi in an awkward moment, some female difficulty perhaps, into which it was best not to pry. A waste, he thought; there was no way, given the situation, for him to ease Naomi gently from his room so that he could talk to Eudora alone, although he badly wanted her advice. The atlas, with its hints of home, had made him think about his mother and the dim hours between four and six when she used to go over his lessons with him. She sat on the green sofa with her skirts spread out, one of his books in her hands, and he stood before her. The sun slanted over her left shoulder and onto the pages and her knees. He recited a stanza of a poem or a bit of elementary German, whatever he'd studied for the day, and she read along in the book, checking his recitation. When he was done she smiled, clapped her hands softly together, and held out her arms to him.

So we might applaud, or at least understand him better, once he'd given a Wednesday talk. In the library he'd finally thought of a topic and he'd wanted Eudora's opinion: what if he talked about synthesis, the glory of chemistry? Surely everyone would be interested in that. All scientists, he imagined saying, analyze complex objects and processes, breaking them into smaller and simpler bits until they can be understood. But chemists also, thrillingly,
make
things. Even as a boy, with a schoolboy's tools, he'd made things himself. He could use examples from his Mendeleeff and the books he'd borrowed from Irene and Dr. Petrie to illustrate the process of linking small, simple molecules into larger, more complicated structures, until from what had seemed like thin air something useful arose, essential even, fertilizer or indigo dye.

B
EFORE
L
EO HAD
time to propose a talk, our Wednesday sessions were swamped by our need to talk about the war, which President Wilson had just brought us into. A munitions plant had blown up in Pennsylvania and Miles, who knew the plant's owner, was pale with fury; a hundred workers had been killed, he said, and most of the plant destroyed in what was obviously a reaction against the declaration of war, another example of blatant sabotage. None of us can remember now who was meant to speak that Wednesday. Instead, Miles talked about the need for all of us to do our share, despite being unable to fight, and then Sean and Frank started arguing about conscription.

By the time the session ended Leo was ready for supper, tired of our conversation and also of the way, each time he turned his head, he found Naomi staring at him. Afraid to embarrass her further—what had been wrong with her, he wondered, the afternoon she was in his room?—he tried to avoid her, but no matter where he looked, she seemed to be there. As he left the room he passed Eudora, who stopped him with a touch and said, “How are you doing with your chemistry books?”

“Pretty well,” he said. “I've been working every day.”

“Me too,” she said with a smile. “You should see what I've been doing in the X-ray laboratory.”

“I'd love to, if you have the time.”

The supper bell rang just as she was saying, “Why don't you let me show you?” Bodies, our bodies, streamed through the corridor. “It's too late today, I guess,” she added. “Maybe tomorrow?”

“If you think it would be all right.” He stepped into the stream, narrowly missing Pietr, and as the current caught him said, “Four o'clock?”

The next day they met in the basement. Irene was absent and the laboratory door was closed, but Eudora let herself in with her own key, so at home that Leo couldn't help but envy her. Moving past Irene's apparatus, sternly modern and encased in dark metal, she led him down the rear wall of shelves and into a shadowy corner. Outside, the late afternoon sun was still shining, but here it was dark until Eudora turned a switch.

“What do you think?” she said.

The discarded X-ray apparatus looked almost new in the glare, the metal caps gleaming where the electrodes entered the delicate transparent tube. The tube itself, grapefruit-sized, was stained a yellowish brown by the discharge. A long protuberance sprouted like a stalk from one end, with two shorter ones opposite, like roots. The cup-shaped cathode and the slanted disk of the target glittered inside. She'd remounted the whole arrangement on a new stand and placed, between the apparatus and the spot where she stood to control the current, a wooden screen faced with sheet lead. “That screen seems sensible,” he said.

“Irene's suggestion,” Eudora said. “The shielding on her appliance is built right around the tube, but this is a decent substitute.”

A cable snaked from the apparatus across the floor and toward the Snook transformer. On the wall a wooden rack cradled more handblown gas tubes, each shaped a bit differently but all sprouting cylindrical thumbs. “Also Irene's,” Eudora said. “Some are ten years old, while others have never been used. They're obsolete now that she has her new Coolidge tube, but for me—it's a wonderful way to learn. What she can do with a single tube and a rheostat, I can do a little more clumsily by finding a tube with the right amount of vacuum. The ones with the most vacuum need a higher voltage to activate them, and produce more penetrating rays.”

“So, a shorter exposure time,” Leo said. The tiny singed spots dotting her blue wrapper made him wonder just how well she knew her way around the wiring.

She nodded. “The low-vacuum ones take less voltage and give a less penetrating ray. So those take a longer exposure, but then I get finer detail with soft tissue.”

The peculiar sensation he felt as she was talking was, as he'd tell Dr. Petrie later, a compound of admiration, envy, delight, and pure curiosity. He'd been working very hard to relearn his old chemistry, but still he could fit only a few hours of study each day into our rigid routine, and even then he didn't have the energy he'd had before getting sick. She'd obviously accomplished far more, despite having only nights and weekends to spare.

He followed her as she moved away from the machine and toward the shallow, glass-topped wooden box mounted on the wall like a picture frame. She'd designed this herself, she said proudly. Irene's handheld contraption allowed only a single image to be viewed at a time, by a single person. But this—she flipped a switch, lighting up the glass within the frame—let them to look at a film together, or at several films mounted side by side.

Among the hanging negatives he recognized the dead hawk he'd seen her bring in some weeks ago: skull, spine, wing bones, heart. Another was clearly a rabbit—he could see not only the tiny bones of the feet but also the shadowy outlines of its ears, veined like dragonflies' wings—while others, empty of organs and threaded through with wire and screws, looked like mounted specimens. “Squirrel?” he asked.

“Opossum!”

“Not a Russian animal,” he said as she laughed. Six in a row—or not six opossums, but six images of the same creature, identifiable by the pair of scissors trapped inside. The foggiest images were on the left; the sharpest, to the right.

“Different tube for each image,” she explained. “I took that last one with the tube that's mounted now.”

“Very nice,” he said. Did she know how much she'd already learned on her own, or how inventively she'd arranged her results? His teacher in Odessa, who'd had a great passion for laboratory demonstrations, claimed that the best way to remember ideas was by solving practical problems on our own. Because of him, Leo had learned chemistry not in a lecture room but standing with his classmates at a long bench, surrounded by glassware, happily setting fires and shattering beakers and shooting fumes toward the open skylights. Here Eudora, alone except for Irene, seemed to have been going through the same process, which he now remembered as the most absorbing experience of his life.

Gently, as if any false word or move might disturb her work, he said, “How did you get the scissors in there?”

“I didn't—they're stuffers, not scissors, which probably my father left in there by mistake. He made this specimen when he was a little boy.”

Leo leaned closer to the sixth and sharpest image, which wasn't perfect but still impressed him. “You've got this apparatus working as well as a new one.”

“Almost,” she said. “I think Irene will be pleased.”

“You haven't shown her yet?”

“I wanted to wait until I could reliably get a good image, and then surprise her.”

“Try it out on me,” he begged. Suddenly the idea of standing there, a living demonstration into which she could peer, was what he most desired.

She shook her head. “What if I don't have something calibrated correctly?”

“But you already do. Obviously.” He pointed at the last of the opossums. “I've been feeling better—maybe we can see what's healed on the films.”

Not since the day she and Irene had taken radiographs of each other's chests had she examined the inside of another person. But she knew more now; she'd arrange the exposure as she had with the rabbit, she thought, a soft ray beautifully revealing the blood vessels and the lungs.

“Fine,” she said, gesturing to him to stand with her behind the shield. “Take off your shirt.”

She couldn't help looking, while the tube warmed up, at the pattern of fine black hair on his chest. The transformer rumbled, the tube hissed, one end of the tube glowed purplish yellow, and the air began to smell like rain. When the tube was ready, she arranged Leo in front of the film holder.

“Hold your breath,” she said, just as Irene had once said to her. She slipped in the film and counted.

The tube was alive, he thought. A breathing thing—that was ozone he smelled—glowing and probing inside him, the rays streaming from the target and out the side of the tube, passing through him to trace his rounded image on the film.

Irene was still absent, but Eudora had developed plenty of films with her watching silently, doing no more than nodding her approval. What harm, then, in developing the image alone? In the darkroom, among the comforting eggy stink of the chemicals, she splashed through the familiar steps and was rewarded by ribs, vertebrae, collarbones. Leo's heart, his diaphragm. She was trembling, she noticed. He was standing very close to her, looking over her shoulder, and she could feel the warmth of his body on her back. On the negative she saw the clouds of his lungs, dotted with the scars of healed cavities and a few more dubious spots.

“I shouldn't try to read this,” she said. “Irene will have to make you a better one when you're due for another consultation with Dr. Petrie.”

“How could she do any better?” Leo said, his chin near her ear. “The detail—that's marvelous.”

“I had a feeling that tube would work well with you.” Her cheeks were hot and she moved away. “Let's go see if Irene's back.”

Still the space outside the darkroom was empty except for them; still it smelled as if lightning had passed through. The machine, cold now, was only a heap of metal and wood, but Eudora's face was pink and haloed by her electrified golden hair. An idea had developed in Leo's mind as he watched the image of his chest appear, and now he blurted it out.

“Would you—we have a movie night coming up in a couple of weeks, would you join us for that? Would you go with me, I mean, that evening?”

She looked as if he'd slapped her. “You, and—me?”

“Yes,”
he replied, catching himself before he reached for her hand. “I've been wanting to ask you. I thought you knew.”

She stood, staring at the film, for what seemed to him like a long time. “I didn't,” she said. “Not at all.” More silence, more staring at the film they'd developed together. “I lied to you earlier, about Naomi,” she said. “About what she was doing in your room.”

She hadn't led Naomi in there because Naomi felt faint, she confessed; Naomi had entered the room by herself, hoping to see him, or to learn something more about him. Before Eudora completed her awkward story, Leo realized he knew what she meant and he stiffened with embarrassment.

“She's so drawn to you,” Eudora concluded. “She doesn't seem able to tell you herself and I wouldn't have told you except…”

“Except what?” Had Naomi, he suddenly wondered, written the anonymous note he'd found inside his
Kill-Gloom Gazette
?

“Except it's Naomi you should be taking to the pictures. Obviously.”

“But it's not Naomi I'm interested in. I have no interest in her. None.”

Then it was his turn to look at the film on the light box. He waited, listening to the air moving raggedly in and out of his lungs—why was he so conscious of his breathing?—until he could add, “It's you I want to see.”

“I can't,” she said.

“It's just the movies. You might come see them on your own, I know you like them.”

“Naomi's my friend,” she said.

He caught himself digging the thumbnail of one hand into the palm of the other. “It's not Naomi,” he said again. “It's not ever going to be Naomi.”

She ran her finger half an inch above the surface of the film, pausing at two different spots before moving on. “All right,” she said—a moment which, later, she'd pause over again and again. “I'll meet you there. But just to see the pictures.”

ON THE NIGHT
after Eudora X-rayed his chest, Leo slipped stealthily past the nurses' station and then down through the kitchen and out the back door, just as Ephraim had done on the night he left us. Once he was beyond the buildings, the grounds, so vast and dark, absorbed him instantly. Down the slope he moved, over the lawns and through the meadow toward the woods, passing a fox trotting up the hill. The sky was clear, the stars were blazing, a moist breeze drifted from the disk of ice still floating in the center of the pond. As he walked down into hollows and then back up, the air felt cool then warm then almost cold against his cheeks and he smelled rotted leaves, wet dirt, sap moving beneath bark, witch hazel, thawing carcasses. The moon, which was nearly full, lit the trees around him.

At dusk he'd heard a chorus of tree frogs, but now the peeping had stopped and whatever had made the slow, clacking sound—a duck, Arkady had said irritably, although Abe claimed that it too was a kind of frog—was also sleeping. A few bats swooped over his head; moths surged around him; a dead duck lay in a puddle. In the moonlight his feet glimmered oddly through the ground fog. The dirty patches of snow, he found, were easier to walk on than the mud.

At the sugar refinery in Williamsburg he'd felt ancient; the other workers had been eighteen or nineteen or even younger, boys in their early teens skittering through the machines. Up here, where most of us were around his age but where we lived at a middle-aged pace, wrapped in our blankets, endlessly resting, he'd felt younger in some ways, older in others. Now, in the cool piney breeze, he felt how young he really was. Twenty-seven! He might still do almost anything, might even without Miles's help find work related to the chemistry he'd once studied. He might find a good job, start a family. When he'd leaned over Eudora's shoulder and seen her holding his ribs in her hand, something had reacted inside him. There were different kinds of chemical reactions, his teacher in Odessa had once explained. Decomposition, displacement, exchange, rearrangement, union…