The Air We Breathe (19 page)

Time was passing, Miles was waiting—he was walking down to the corner now, already looking for her—but still she contemplated the parcel. Her truest self, she thought, had been muffled by the Naomi who lied to her mother and the one who waited on Miles. That was fear. That was what fear could do. She'd been afraid that Leo could never learn to love her, and then Miles and her mother had arranged to keep her away from him. As soon as that happened, she could see that he already
did
—if not love her, exactly, then something close to that. If they were to head together for New York, his home, it wouldn't take long before she found a way to take care of him.

Before she could even propose this, though, she had to give back what she'd taken from him. She could see, now, that this was no way to start; everything had to be honest between them and she needed to bring it back and ask him to forgive her. Then she could give him her drawings, and the warm handsome shirt, along with something to read that he couldn't have afforded himself and that would signal how much she believed in him. In a week or two she'd propose her plan, and then…She added the pencil to the pile, folded the paper around it, and tied the parcel with a string. Knowing how late she was, but hoping that Miles would still be busy, she ran out to the car and drove back to the village.

At first she didn't see him. He wasn't on the steps or at the door; she ran inside but he wasn't there either. Quickly she pushed her letter into the mail slot and then ran outside again. To the left of the steps, beyond the door to the pharmacy, was a stone bench and there, as she paused at the bottom of the steps, she finally found him. Instead of yelling at her, as she'd feared, he rose stiffly and waited for her to bring the car alongside and open the passenger door.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “Were you waiting long?”

He coughed and leaned his head back against the seat.

“Are you all right?”

“One hour,” he said quietly. “One hour I've been here, when I should have been resting. Why do you
do
this to me?”

O
N THAT
F
RIDAY
night, May 11—it's not surprising we remember the date—we filled the dining hall. By “we” we mean, here, not just the group who'd been gathering on Wednesdays but all one hundred and twenty of us, less the seven—three women, four men—lying upstairs in the infirmary, and with the addition of a handful of the evening staff and doctors. Not until after eight o'clock, when the last daylight faded from the windows, could we hope to see the screen, which two of the maintenance crew had hung on the front wall. Outside the tree frogs were racketing and the air smelled green, while inside we were reveling in our rare freedom; only during holiday parties and these occasional movie nights were we allowed to break the rigid segregation of the men's and women's tables. Now the tables had been herded toward the walls and the chairs that usually surrounded them were curved in concentric rows facing the screen. Men and women might sit where they liked, with favored friends or cousins. Those of us who'd made dates with acquaintances we hoped might turn into cousins arrived early and scrambled for seats; women had put on lipstick and done their hair while men had ironed their shirts, and we wore shoes instead of slippers. The night began with the air of a party.

Leo, who had taken a pair of seats in the back row, near the third and last door to the corridor, was waiting nervously for Eudora. Nervous because she might not come; nervous because he wasn't sure what it would mean if she did, or how he'd explain her presence. It wasn't so uncommon for us to connect with the maids, the orderlies, or the nurses, and women among us sometimes had—why shouldn't we admit it?—powerful crushes on some of the resident doctors, but none of this was officially permitted and Eudora, Leo knew, might risk her job if their behavior was seen as more than friendly.

He paced back and forth near the door, in everyone's way. Bea and Polly smiled at each other when they saw him; they knew. Most of us had, like Irene, been aware of Leo's moony glances for some time. We went, according to our inclination, to the front seats where we could stretch out and see every detail of the pictures, or to the sides and back where, if we had better things to do, we wouldn't be observed. Once the main lights were out, there was only the glow from the screen and from the hooded lamps at the back of the room, which were placed, the staff said, for our safety, to help us see the doors and each other if we needed help—but which really served to let them keep watch on us.

It was 7:45, then 7:50, and still there was no Eudora; seats were swiftly disappearing and the two Leo had marked with newspapers would soon be claimed; she had never, he realized, had any intention of coming. She'd agreed only to placate him, so she could escape his questions that afternoon in the laboratory…

But here she was. A flowered dress, green leaves and red flowers—roses?—tumbling over a creamy background, light-colored stockings and shoes with a small curved heel and a strap across the instep; he'd never seen her unwrapped from the long, shapeless blue garment that all the maids wore to protect their clothes. Her hair, usually pulled back with two combs, hung softly around her face, framing her blue-gray eyes. In her heels she was nearly as tall as he was, and when he darted forward to greet her she drew back slightly, then laughed—at herself, he thought, not him—and touched his forearm.

“I'm so glad you came,” he said. He hoped she couldn't see the tear in his collar, the only defect in the shirt he had, in anticipation of this evening, retrieved from the men's donation bag.

“I said I would.”

“Yes, but—well, I'm glad. I saved us some seats here, near the door, where we won't feel so cramped.”

What unusual coloring she had! That clear pale skin, flushed so smoothly over her cheeks that the top layers seemed transparent; he'd never seen anything like it. “Take the outside seat,” he said. “You can stretch your legs.”

Perhaps whole families up here looked like her? All he knew of the people in these mountains was what he saw of the staff. “I didn't think you'd come,” he confessed as she sat and turned to him.

“I always like the movies.”

The lights went out and the projector whirred.

For weeks we'd been looking forward to the feature,
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
. Newspaper accounts had promised underwater photography and the spectacle of a submarine attacked by a giant octopus; the room would be dim for more than an hour and the background music—Kathleen, after her success demonstrating the work of Stravinsky, had been recruited to play, which was something new for us—would cover up other, subtler noises. Women, during the frightening moments, might reach for comfort; men might lean protectively. In our anticipation of those possibilities we'd managed to forget what Miles had said during his last Wednesday appearance. The whole audience groaned with disappointment when a different title flickered on the screen.

Mick, the power-plant mechanic who doubled as our projectionist, called out, “It wasn't
my
idea—don't kill the messenger!” The laugh sweeping over the room almost drowned the deep voice saying: “It was mine.”

Dr. Richards, so often in New York raising money or in Albany talking to politicians, in Colorado Springs or Arizona inspecting other sanatoria, had joined us, a rare event. “A generous friend has arranged for us to see several short films instead,” he added from his seat next to Dr. Petrie in the front row.

Miles, some of us remembered. We had Miles to thank for this.

“It's important that we keep up with events,” Dr. Richards continued. “I hope you'll all pay appropriate attention.”

We sighed and settled in. As the first reel began we saw, not actors and gorgeous sets but scenes of the fighting in France. War footage, but not a newsreel; the titles announced these as scenes from the great battles of the previous summer. The man who'd filmed them, an American traveling with the Canadian troops, must have been very brave, but even the most amazing sequences didn't impress us. Enormous guns belched enormous clouds, columns of men passed by on horses, men beat bells to signal approaching waves of gas. Kathleen played marching music over shots of battles and long waves of tangled wire; most of us, though, despite Dr. Richards' admonition, weren't watching very closely. We'd wanted the octopus and the leaden boots, something different to look at, some entertainment. Leo, distracted by Eudora's presence, studied her profile in the light reflected from the screen.

“Look at that,” she whispered, tilting her face toward the sausage-shaped observation balloon, which tugged at the men who tethered it to the ground. “I didn't know they were so big.”

“Huge,” he agreed, wondering what she'd do if he reached for her hand.

The balloon, Eudora saw, pushed like flesh through the netted ropes. Each scene was interesting in its own way; when the heavy artillery pieces were fired, the barrels moved like the plungers on hypodermic needles. Men ran through trenches, lay behind mounded sandbags, crossed open ground in great crowds, but never fell, were never shown wounded or dead although all around them—unless these scenes had been staged?—there must have been fallen soldiers. An illuminating torch drifted down from an airplane, lighting up the trenches below, but no men were caught in its beam. Miles Fairchild, she remembered, owned a factory that made cement, which went into concrete, from which bunkers were made.

The screen went blank at the end of the reel and Eudora started to say something to Leo about her latest experiment downstairs. But as the next reel started—ships attacked by submarines, sinking while passengers leapt into the ocean or scrabbled along an overturned hull—someone started coughing. The harshness, the compulsive quality, the desperation and wetness; before the overhead lights went on she'd already risen. Two figures rushed out the center door, supporting a figure between them. Those of us who'd leaned closer together straightened in the sudden cruel glare while Charlie and Zoltan, in the third row, righted the chairs that had been kicked over.
Myra,
we whispered,
that was Myra
. Although she'd been doing poorly the last few weeks, she particularly wanted to see the men walking on the ocean floor while fish swam past their helmets.

“A friend of yours?” Eudora asked Leo. By now she was looking expectantly toward the door.

He shook his head. The night nurse stepped in from the corridor, scanned the crowd, and then gestured toward Eudora.

“I have to go help,” she told Leo. “I'll try to come back later.”

He watched her pass into the brightly lit corridor. Somewhere Myra, whom he hadn't gotten to know, was being lowered onto a bed with ice packed over her chest to stop the bleeding; in a room or a corridor close to here was the mess she'd left behind, which Eudora was cleaning up. He slumped in his chair, watching the images flicker on the screen and trying to calculate how much longer was left on the reel, and what the chances were that he and Eudora might still have some time to talk between reels. When a hand fell on his shoulder he was so pleased that she was already back, so grateful that they still had part of the evening, that he forgot his need for caution and closed his fingers around hers. It took a second for his grasp to loosen when he heard the words, “You got my letter!”

Kathleen's accompaniment, crashing chords that punctuated the sinking ships and exploding torpedoes, muffled the words but still Leo recognized Naomi's voice before she sat in the empty chair beside him.

“What letter?” In the glow from the hooded lamps behind him he could see how carefully she'd arranged her hair. “What are you doing here?”

“The letter I sent you Wednesday,” she said, reaching again for his hand. “I said I'd meet you here, and here you are. I was afraid you wouldn't come.”

“I came to watch the
pictures,
” Leo said. “I didn't get any letter.”

“But you're here,” Naomi said, swinging a large cloth bag onto her knees. “Where I asked you to be. And I brought back what I took from you—I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done that.” She extracted from the bag a parcel wrapped in brown paper. “Open it.”

Nan and Pietr, beside Leo, were peering his way, while Albert, in the next row, turned to see what was going on.

“Please?” Naomi said. When he crossed his arms over his chest and stared at the screen she said, “I can do it for you.”

“Be
quiet,
” he said, sure that some of us could hear despite Kathleen's vigorous playing. If not their words, then the great rustlings of paper.

“Here,” Naomi said.

On his lap she placed a shirt—she was giving him clothes?—and a sheaf of papers. The sheet he tilted toward the nearest lamp might have been a clouded mirror. He lifted another, another: his eyes, his chin, his face from the front and from the side. “Why would you do this?” he whispered.

“I made them on Wednesdays,” she said. Against his ear, her breath was unpleasantly warm.

He squared the pile of papers and inched his chair away. In the X-ray laboratory, when Eudora had told him about Naomi, he'd dismissed the idea: preposterous that someone should feel that way about him. He should, he saw now, have taken her warnings more seriously.

“It's just something I do,” Naomi said. “I've always been good at capturing faces.” He let that pass. “Say
something
.”

Her hands, which she'd been squeezing together, separated. One headed for his knee and he flinched and pushed it away, gathering everything on his lap and stuffing it back in the bag she still held. Nan and Pietr looked over again at the rustling, catching the abrupt movement of Leo's left arm and the way Naomi leaned toward him. The rest of us saw almost nothing. Yet even if we'd understood what was happening, we wouldn't have interfered. These were the dramas of movie nights, also of holiday parties, secret walks in the woods, late night meetings. With so much time to brood and dream, great dramas, based on a single word or a tiny gesture, sometimes unfurled in our fantasies. Often the object of someone's deepest desires was unaware, or uninterested. Or incapable; we all hid secrets beneath our clothes.

Leo crossed his legs, raising his knees to prevent Naomi from giving him anything else. “You don't even know me,” he said.

She clutched her bag. “I know how you look at me.”

He spread his hands, palm up, miserably.

“You don't think I saw you writing about me? Pretending to be taking notes on those stupid talks…”

“I was taking notes,” Leo said slowly, “
on what my friends were saying
. I'm sorry for the misunderstanding but that's what it is—a misunderstanding.”

Once more the door to Leo's left opened and then closed.

LATER, EUDORA TOLD
herself she'd had no way of knowing that Naomi had sneaked into the building and found Leo. No way of knowing that, when she returned and went to sit beside Leo once more, she'd find Naomi weeping at Leo's side. And no way of knowing that, when Leo saw her, he'd say to Naomi, “That's Eudora's seat you're in,” reaching as he did for Eudora's hand.