The Air We Breathe (2 page)

In that nurse's hurry to fill out her forms, she'd dropped Leo's diagnosis into the conversation as casually as if he already knew it and then walked from one end of the flat to the other, winding between the boarders' trunks and beds, examining the clothes hung on nails on the walls and the wash on the line in the courtyard. In the kitchen, saying nothing, she counted the plates and the cups. Back at Leo's side again, she started with the questions: How many people live here, what do they do, where do they sleep? When he explained about Tobias and Rachel and their two children, the four other boarders and the sleeping arrangements, she said, “Children, and you contagious.” From a pamphlet she handed him—
Circular #2: Advice for Patients Suffering from Pulmonary Tuberculosis (Consumption)
—he numbly read a paragraph:

As if a person like him would have a bedroom, or a window. As if his part of Williamsburg had a park. The nurse made him spit in a cup, ordered Rachel to keep his clothes and dishes separate, and referred him to a floating day camp for consumptives. There, during the hours he used to spend at work, he lay on a reclining chair on the rear deck of a ferryboat that had once crossed the East River between Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. The breeze blew through the open decks; meals appeared on a long table built in the center, where once there'd been engines and boilers; doctors examined them in rooms along the sides. Men on the lower deck, women on the upper; all of them immigrants, all of them poor. On and off the boat stepped officials from the Board of Health, visiting nurses, social workers, all trying to find placements for the patients. Prying into their backgrounds, investigating their living situations, checking their clothes for lice. After a month he chose not to remember, a woman with lopsided lips had handed him a train ticket and told him to pack his bags.

THE NURSE WHO'D
admitted him to Tamarack State was right: he needed more clothes, and he came to miss the heat he'd so hated when he arrived. The leaves turned color, far earlier than he expected; the rain and wind poured through the long windows, kept open day and night; he was constantly cold, he was freezing. Some of us had relatives who arrived on visiting days with extra clothes or treats, but he had no one, and nothing he'd brought was right. He learned to be grateful for the worn but heavy garments grudgingly doled out to the indigent patients—which, he learned, included him. What he couldn't learn, despite being chided again and again, was to stay still. He spoke to anyone near him, tossed, turned, sneaked out of bed to pick up a magazine he saw on a table at the end of the ward, and then read it, surreptitiously, beneath the covers. The nurses barked at him and Dr. Petrie came to speak to him.

“Why can't you behave?” our assistant director said. “Don't you understand how sick you are?”

“I
hate
this,” Leo said passionately, glaring at the doctor's small figure. With his crisp dark hair and pointed beard and small oval spectacles, Dr. Petrie resembled the inventor Charles Steinmetz, minus the hunchback. Not quite five feet tall, Leo guessed. No doubt with problems of his own. He yielded his left wrist to Dr. Petrie's thumb and first two fingers.

“Your lungs,” Dr. Petrie said, his gaze averted while he counted the beats of Leo's heart, “have little pockets of infection scattered through them, which your body is trying to wall off. Right now the scar tissue around each pocket of germs is fragile, like a spider's web.” He dropped Leo's hand. “If you move suddenly, or take a deep breath or stretch your arm—like you just did, when you reached for your pillow:
don't do that
—you break the scar tissue and let the germs escape. And then they make new spots of disease, and we have to start all over again. You seem like an intelligent man. Can't you understand that?”

“Of course I can,” Leo said, “but until now no one's bothered to explain the point of lying here like a corpse.”

With half a smile, Dr. Petrie said, “We'll try to keep you better informed.”

By mid-September his temperature was down, his cough had improved, he'd gained six pounds, and the nurses let him walk to the bathroom and sit, for a little longer each day, on a cure chair on the infirmary's porch. Not since first running away from home had he been so alone, for so long. One day an orderly took him in a wheelchair down the lift, through a tunnel, and into the X-ray facility beneath the dining hall. In the gloom he stood stripped to the waist, bending and turning as the technician instructed, holding his breath and then exhaling, perfectly aware what an X-ray was from his studies in Odessa, but unfamiliar with this particular apparatus. That the technician was a woman struck him as odd, as did the purple glove on her left hand and the angry sores on her right.

His radiographs, Dr. Petrie told him later, showed a small cavity near the top of his left lung.

“Am I going to die?” Leo asked.

“Much of what happens now depends on you,” the doctor answered. Always, they pretend it's up to us. “Curing is a full-time job. But you've made good progress, and there are signs that the cavity is already beginning to shrink. We're going to transfer you to the men's annex next week. You'll be allowed a little more movement, once you're there. But you'll still have to be very careful.”

ON A WEDNESDAY
morning in October, an orderly took Leo down in the lift from the fourth floor of Central, wheeled him through the corridors and across the covered walkway, and deposited him on a porch off his new room, on the second floor of the men's annex. Two cure chairs nearly filled the sliver of open space: one of them waiting for him. Company, Leo thought, as eager to meet the figure lying in the other chair as he'd once been to meet a woman. His heart raced as he introduced himself.

“Ephraim Kotov,” the man responded, waiting patiently as Leo arranged himself and struggled with his blankets. Beyond his toes and the wooden railing, Leo saw forest stretching to Canada, ranks of trees marching up hills and down, nearly black where they were shadowed by clouds, and the color of his childhood in between.

“In Minsk I was Kotovachevsky,” his new roommate continued, “but here I am cut-off. Kot-ov.” He held out his hand. “A little joke. Welcome.”

“Thank you,” Leo said, reaching across for Ephraim's palm.

Ephraim, who like the rest of us had been speculating about Leo during his weeks of isolation, said, “That was Hiram's chair. Yours now, though; he passed last week. Do you play chess?”

“Not well,” Leo admitted.

“Too bad. Hiram was good at it.”

Leo stretched his legs, wondering what else Hiram had been good at. What he'd liked and disliked, how he'd died. Should he apologize for taking Hiram's place? He looked back at the forest, seamed here and there with a birch. Below, a train pulled into the siding and tiny figures moved across the platform. For them, he must be a speck in the dog's right eye. “I came here from New York,” he said. “You too?”

“From an apple farm near Ovid,” Ephraim answered. In response to Leo's puzzled gaze, he added, “One of those little towns in central New York, near the Finger Lakes, named after classical places and writers. Troy, Ithaca, Homer, Virgil…”

“A Jew from Minsk, in the middle of farm country,” Leo said with a smile. “How did that happen?”

Quietly—conversation has always been forbidden during rest hours—the two men leaned toward each other and, breaking the first of many rules, settled in to talk.

I
N THE VILLAGE
of Tamarack Lake, which is two and a half miles west of us, private cure cottages line the roads fanning up the hills from the water. While Leo settled into his room, Naomi Martin delivered the afternoon trays at the cottage referred to as “Mrs. Martin's house”—her mother's house, not hers, eight rooms rented to invalids who needed constant care and feeding. Three times daily she served the boarders in the dining room, in between ferrying treats to the porches where they cured. What had been a weekend chore and a summer job had turned, since her high school graduation in June, into a full-time misery. Day after day, she was trapped in the house that still, after a decade, she refused to think of as home.

Home, as she'd often told her friend Eudora, was the house where she'd been born: yellow-gray stone with two chimneys, a center door with a fanlight, and a front lawn cut in half by a flagstone walk. Tulip trees and holly had dotted the lawn, while peonies and iris thickened each year in the perennial beds. The town of Chester was small and quiet but Philadelphia was close enough for shopping and special trips. Everything ran smoothly; they'd had help. A man—George, she thought his name might have been—took care of the grounds, the carriage, and the horses; also they'd had a maid named Katie, and a cook. After the accident, when the help left, her mother took over the kitchen herself and learned to make meals from a book.

What Naomi remembered of the accident was this: a spring day in 1903, when she was five and her brother Thomas was almost four months old. In the big tub, at the end of the day, in water that Katie had boiled in kettles on the stove, she'd been splashing happily. Outside, her mother was still dividing the irises. Inside, she made a mess and Katie dried her roughly and scolded her, then left to boil more water for Thomas's bath. She went to her room and brushed her hair. Her mother came in—she called her “Mama” then—and took off her gardening gloves and came upstairs to bathe Thomas, which she liked to do herself, in his special china basin. Katie poured water into the basin and turned away to get more towels. And her mother, talking to Katie about the garden and thinking, perhaps, about her plants, dunked Thomas into the basin without checking the temperature first.

Blue eyes, or brown? Brown hair, or black? After a while, she couldn't remember. She remembered Thomas's cries, and her mother's screams, and Katie sobbing. Her father's feet pounding up the stairs and the things he said to Katie and her mother. Katie, the next day, slamming out of the house after Naomi's father dismissed her. She had an uncle who was a doctor and another who was a pharmacist and neither of them could do anything; she remembered their faces. Not the funeral, though, which she wasn't allowed to attend. And not her father, after a while: or not the way he was before the accident. When she thought of him she saw him
after,
that year when he stopped going to the law office, started drinking all day, stopped telling her stories or talking to anyone else.

The house began to fall apart, the lawn turned into a meadow, fruit rotted on the ground and weeds sprouted everywhere. One day her father ran away, and later, when someone found him in Texas, her mother divorced him. His brothers, Naomi's uncles, took the house. Lawyers and bankers came and went, also the women who'd been her mother's friends. Her mother went to Philadelphia again and again until the night she came home with her face set and made Naomi start packing. Later there was the train heading north and the gray-haired woman who met them at the station: Elizabeth Vigne, Eudora's aunt. The cure cottage, a big wooden pile made of rooms added to other rooms, porches stacked on other porches, was theirs if they wanted it; Naomi's mother accepted the job and they went to work.

She'd been eight when they reached Tamarack Lake, with nothing but some clothes and the recipe book that would make her mother's table famous. By now, prospective boarders in places as distant as Atlanta knew about “Mrs. Martin's house,” and that had been, her mother said, their salvation. Naomi thought that almost anything would have been better. Live in the woods, live by the ocean, live in another country or on a boat: anywhere but this diseased place. Up and down the hills ran the cottages, lumpy with porches, packed with the sick. Some catered to Cubans, some to vaudeville players, some to insurance workers. Their house catered to the rich.

This afternoon, she was hoping to pry a favor from Miles Fairchild, the wealthiest of her mother's boarders. Early in his stay he'd taken over their largest room, gaining with it a red armchair, a walnut bed, and paneled bookshelves near the fireplace. His radiators always worked, while his cure chair, as she was reminded when she stepped onto his porch, offered an excellent view. The lake shining at the foot of the hill was green and calm and shaped like a mitten, sprinkled here and there with boats. Nested in soft kapok cushions, Miles might have enjoyed the couples courting in sailboats, children dangling handlines from rowboats, a great blue heron rising from the reeds and flapping slowly, just above the water, to the park at the distant end—but instead, he was reading. The umbrella fixed to the back of his chair he'd angled to shade his pages, shielding his eyes from any brightness.

She straightened her shoulders and moved toward him with her tray. A red ribbon held her hair in a way she knew made her look her best. Her sleeves were turned back to expose her wrists, her apron was fresh and neatly ironed, and as she set his rice pudding down, she willed him to look at her. He was thirty-seven, nearly twenty years her senior, but not yet dead; during the last month he'd gained weight and grown restless in a way she thought she might turn to her advantage.

“Lovely,” he said, glancing first at the dish but then at her, shifting his legs and closing his book as he did. “Thank you.”

“Extra whipped cream,” she announced, stepping back and framing herself against the view. When his eyes followed her figure, she added, “What you said last night…”

At dinner, as she handed around the roast chicken and parsnips, he'd asked if anyone knew where he might hire a car and driver. He was starting a new project, he'd said, obviously pleased with himself. Something involving the inmates at Tamarack State, where he planned to visit one afternoon each week; he needed a chauffeur. She'd continued walking around the long white table, poking the platter between dark shoulders while her mother managed the gravy boat, nodding silently when a boarder thanked her, still saying nothing as she set the platter down on the sideboard and straightened the vases. Even before she pushed through the swinging door to the kitchen, though, she'd started scheming.

“Yes?” Miles said now, his spoon poised over the dish.

“I thought I might drive you to Tamarack State,” she said. “I'm an excellent driver; I already run most of the household errands but I'd like a chance to work on my own. To earn some money.”

Over the last six months, she explained, as he looked dubiously at her hands, she'd been thoroughly trained to drive by Eudora's brother, who worked at the Tamarack Garage. She'd also learned a number of basic repairs, including how to change a tire and use the instruments tucked in the toolbox on the running board. “So you won't need to worry about breaking down,” she concluded. “Also I know every road in the village, and most of what's between here and Lake Placid. I can bring you wherever you want, at any hour.”

“Wednesdays are when I'd need you,” he said. “At least at first. You're free then?”

Pushing aside her mother's endless demands, and also the fact that the Model T in the carriage house wasn't actually theirs, she said, “I can be.” The car, like all but their most personal belongings, really belonged to Eudora's aunt, along with four more of Tamarack Lake's most reputable cottages. Each was managed by an ambitious woman who, like Naomi's mother, didn't have the funds to buy a place of her own.

Last year Eudora's aunt had coerced all five managers into buying identical Model Ts, the loans to be paid off in monthly installments added to the house rent. The car, meant to please prospective boarders who might be swayed at the thought of a doctor fetched more swiftly, had unexpectedly offered Naomi a scrap of freedom when her mother refused to learn to drive it. Yearningly the boarders, their own cars left at home, stroked the black fenders, but they weren't allowed the exercise of turning the steering wheel and it sat until Naomi saw her opportunity. Within the month she'd appeared at the Tamarack Garage and persuaded Eugene to give her driving lessons. Soon she was picking up groceries and dropping off laundry, fetching packages from the station and sometimes driving a boarder to church or to visit a friend: all with her mother's grudging approval. If she occasionally took a few minutes for herself during one of those errands, that was no one's business but hers.

She smoothed her hair and turned toward Miles. “You'd be doing me a favor,” she said. “For me to have some time in your company, away from my work here…”

“You do work very hard,” he observed. “I see you working all the time.”

She shrugged, smiling, as if she were the sort of person who would never complain. A few more minutes of conversation, an easy negotiation about her wages, and they were agreed. With a smile she left his room, slipped out the front door without her mother noticing, and walked down to the garage to tell Eugene what she'd just done. A small job now might lead to something larger later; who knew what would happen once Miles was cured and back home running his business? She imagined herself in a city, typing in a handsome office; perhaps she could follow Miles back to Pennsylvania. Any road out of the mountains seemed appealing.

AT OUR END
of the road, on the bulletin board in the dining hall, Miles had several weeks earlier persuaded Dr. Richards, our director, to pin this notice:

“Miles Fairchild,” one of us had said then. “Who's that?”

“Who's the
us
?” asked someone else.

No one knew, although we saw that he'd done his research; the time he proposed fit into the only possible spot in our routine. Every day, then as now, we woke to a bell at six-thirty. After that, it was wash, dress, and breakfast at eight; doctors' rounds and procedures until ten; rest cure until lunch at twelve; back to the porches after lunch to rest until four. We ate dinner at six and then cured again from seven to nine, with lights-out at nine-thirty. Our only free time, very precious, was that slot between four and six: which twenty-two of us offered up on the Wednesday following Leo's release from the infirmary.

The sun was shining that afternoon, but the air streaming through the open windows already had a bite to it and we entered the solarium to find a slight man, with the same concave chest that many of us had and one shoulder drooping slightly lower than the other, standing in front of the fireplace with his jacket buttoned against the cold. A decade or so older than most of us, he wore a gray wool suit that looked new and expensive despite its old-fashioned cut. While we filed in he turned his head away from us, studying the framed documents above the mantel. Perched on the window seat nearest him was a slim girl—sixteen, we guessed; really she was eighteen—with flossy dark hair, an olive complexion, and deeply set blue eyes. She examined us as we settled hesitantly into the rows of chairs.

“Good afternoon,” the man said, turning back to scan our faces. “My name is Miles Fairchild, and this”—he gestured at the girl—“is my driver, Naomi Martin. Thank you for letting us join you today.”

Pacing confidently back and forth, with the sun glinting off his face, he said he wanted to start by giving us a little background about himself. He was thirty-seven years old and had been sick on and off for some time. A little more than a year ago, both his regular doctor and a consultant in Philadelphia had advised him to seek a cure in the Adirondacks. Since then he'd lived at Mrs. Martin's boarding cottage in the village, which he was sure we knew.

A small slip, but we noticed it; we seldom went to the village, although it was so near. Who had money to shop? That Miles didn't grasp this suggested how little he knew about our lives.

“Recently my health has improved,” he continued, “which has made it possible for me to think how I might be of use to others. Being sick is lonely, in addition to everything else. Boring, too. All of us need conversation, and instruction—which is what I hope to offer. It's my idea that we'll teach each other, thereby widening our horizons.”

As he spoke he moved from the window—nearly brushing, several of us noted, the skirt of his dark-haired driver, who nonetheless looked away from him—and then to the fireplace; to the window and back again, as regularly as a shuttle. We might, he continued, while we pondered his use of the word “thereby,” be in a public institution while he was in a private cure cottage; our means might be strained as his were not; perhaps we hadn't attended school for long: none of this mattered. We all knew things of value, which we might share. At his home outside Doylestown, Pennsylvania, he, for instance, now managed the cement plant he'd inherited from his father.