The Air We Breathe (25 page)

IRENE HEARD THAT
noise as well, and the sound stayed with her through the next day, as she wrote to Dr. Richards in defense of Leo.

She paused for a moment, remembering the look on Leo's face when she'd given him the green volumes. The swiftness with which he'd learned, the intensity with which he'd worked; she'd been hoping to offer him an apprenticeship that might someday, after his discharge, lead to a job as satisfying as her own. If she hadn't immigrated here with money in her pocket, a married sister to greet her, and a brother-in-law willing to help fund her studies, she might easily have ended up no better off than Leo was. Firmly, she continued:

With one hand, she realized, she was clutching at her throat, her body returning before she could stop it to the fire itself. What that had felt like, which she could never write down. She dreamed, still, of expressing some confused version of this out loud, an easier task than shaping a single version on the page. She would have preferred to write nothing, waiting until her voice returned—but Dr. Petrie had said that Leo's situation was urgent, and it was possible that she wouldn't speak again. She couldn't remember breathing through the bit of tubing Dr. Petrie had pushed into the slit in her throat, but when she closed her eyes, she could still see the scalpel glitter in the moonlight. She turned to the letter again.

She folded the pages, wondering at the same time how Leo was. If she could have seen him alone in the empty ward, hearing the troubled hum from the porches as we turned against him, our ill will emanating through the corridor where not one friendly set of footsteps echoed; if she could have known how alone he felt, she would have risen despite her own exhaustion and gone to stand silently next to him.

M
ILES VISITED THE
sanatorium several times during the first two weeks after Leo's relapse, but Dr. Petrie refused to let him see Leo; an emotional upset might, he claimed, make his condition worse, and Leo had to be spared any stress. The hay was mowed in the fields while Miles came and went and came again; the hay was dried in rows and then it was baled. The creeks dried up and the locusts buzzed as day after day the sky shone imperturbably blue. In the garden the pansies wilted and we did too, in our overcrowded rooms. The rough new kitchen wasn't ventilated well, and so our densely packed dining room smelled of cooking and, on the hottest days, of us; Miles avoided that place. But everywhere else at Tamarack State continued to seem like his fair territory. Our improvised mailroom, where he looked at what came in and went out; our pitiful library, reconstituted in a former bedroom in the women's annex and reduced from its already shameful state when, after Miles's inspection, his agents removed any books by Germans, or in German, or about Germany or the Austro-Hungarian empire. We don't know if he bullied Dr. Richards into this or if Dr. Richards freely agreed, nor do we know how he arranged to have our shipments of newspapers from New York City stopped. We do know that he considered a plan to enlist the national headquarters of the American Protective League, perhaps aided by the Department of Labor, in the deportation of Leo Marburg—a plan he might have followed through on had it not been for Irene's letter and Dr. Petrie's maneuvers.

To Dr. Petrie's surprise and then dismay, Dr. Richards hadn't been convinced by Irene's letter. What seemed so obvious to him, the argument that, as he gently reminded Dr. Richards, not only supported what he himself had said about the presence of the chemistry books in Leo's room, but also made it almost impossible that Leo could have had anything to do with the fire, was for Dr. Richards apparently only one facet of something more complex.

“If you trust Irene,” Dr. Petrie had pointed out, “then you have to believe what she wrote. Which means Leo didn't do anything. He couldn't have.”

“I know that seems true,” Dr. Richards said, obviously troubled, “and I know I was the one who pushed to hire Irene; I've
always
trusted her. But Miles has raised other points.”

Whatever those were, they were enough, Dr. Petrie saw, to pressure Dr. Richards into continuing to let Miles interfere in our daily business, and to make Dr. Richards so nervous that he asked Dr. Petrie not to tell us about Irene's letter. Because Dr. Petrie honored that request, and perhaps because Irene was confined to her room in the staff cottage and still unable to talk, our information-gathering failed this once and her letter didn't immediately become public knowledge. For a little while longer, then, we were left in our uncertainty. In the new infirmary the nurses checked on Leo every few hours but refused—Dr. Petrie's orders, they said—to talk to him about Miles's investigations. Dr. Petrie himself came by twice a day but, wanting Leo to heal as quickly as possible, also said nothing about Miles or the shifting moods inside Tamarack State. Rest, he said, echoing the instructions Leo had received almost a year ago. Think only of resting.

Lying there alone, Leo tried to convince himself that the situation with Miles would heal itself quietly, gradually, in the same fashion that his lung was healing. He'd insulted Miles, he saw now. Back in March, when he'd turned down Miles's generous offer to move him to Mrs. Martin's house, he should have been more delicate; he might have expected that his refusal would make Miles feel like the outsider he was. Now Miles, obviously angry about more than just the box, was paying him back for his clumsiness. He'd apologize, Leo thought, and explain why he'd wanted to stay here. Although even if that worked, it wouldn't fix what was going on with us. Until he'd heard that humming from our porches, he'd always assumed that here—up in the mountains, far from the crowds; here, where the air was clear—he was safe from the poison of his last weeks in New York, when everyone had turned from him.

Much of what happened to him then had stemmed, he thought, from his bad luck in falling ill when another disease was raging through his neighborhood, and when his landlady was already so worried about her children. The streets along which he walked to work had fallen strangely silent soon after the first cases of infantile paralysis were diagnosed. The pool had closed, then the movie house, and then the ball field had emptied; men came and shot the dogs and cats in the alleys, to keep them from spreading the disease. Silenced, the days had felt like nights. In the shops, people turned away from each other, fingering the little bags of camphor and garlic hanging from their necks and embarrassed—had they been embarrassed?—not to be able to help each other for fear of infecting their own children. Everything had seemed infected. Bricks leapt from the roof of a building struck by lightning and hit the children walking below; a hammer glancing off a pipe at the oil plant in Greenpoint set off an explosion; a subway excavation caved in and buried twenty workers. In Williamsburg, mothers carried into the clinics screaming babies who could no longer wave their arms or hold their bottles, while others hid from the nurses who knocked on doors. Rumors spread: that the doctors got a bonus for each child captured and taken to the hospital. That the children got sick from eating ice cream, which chilled their stomachs, and that stores sold them ice cream anyway. That gasoline fumes spread the disease (why were automobiles still allowed on the streets?), or commercial laundries (the germs moved in the sheets). That the mothers of stricken children shook their sleeves over the cans of purified milk at the milk stations, hoping other children might sicken as well.

He'd found those rumors terrifying. He knew what happened when they spread, and he knew how the solitary were punished. During his last year at the refinery, after he began working as Karl's assistant, he'd been neither a salaried employee nor quite one of the regular laborers. Upstairs, where the magma spun in the centrifuges and the raw-sugar crystals, separated from the syrup, tumbled into the melter, he was alone when he tested the liquor's acidity, adding milk of lime until the proteins coagulated and then telling the foreman when to release the fluid into the cloth filters packed with diatomaceous earth. Alone at the other end of the line, he tested the final product; alone on the dock, he sampled the loads of raw sugar. Only by a freakish bit of bad luck had a stranger seen him cough blood onto the crystals, and then he'd had no friend to lie for him.

The two refinery workers who brought him home and helped him up to the flat told Rachel and Tobias exactly what had happened. Rachel, whose sister had died of tuberculosis, wanted to evict him from the apartment immediately, but Tobias reminded her of how much they needed the rent. After the tuberculosis nurse made her visit, Rachel had added her own refinements to the nurse's advice. She washed Leo's plate and utensils separately and stored them in a cardboard box kept out on the fire escape, where she made him eat his meals. Her children ran, holding their breath, when they had to pass his cot to get to their own. The four other boarders, after watching this, hung a spare sheet from the ceiling between his cot and theirs. He'd learned, then, what it really meant to have no family. Not having kin here, and not having roots in a single village or city, had set him apart more than he'd understood. When the nurse found him a spot at the tuberculosis day camp, he'd been glad to go.

Sometimes he'd glimpsed men on the lower deck of the old ferryboat moored at the recreation pier, but until he was sent there he'd never known what they were doing. The boat had looked like a hulk being stripped for salvage, but instead, he learned, it salvaged consumptives, who took their daily cure behind heavy nets that screened them from passersby. Among the deck chairs he found Meyer, a man he'd once known at the char house and who, having been there for two months already, helped him settle into his new routine.

He rose when Meyer told him to, so that he could drink glasses of milk or eat boiled eggs, sit down at one o'clock to the enormous dinners somehow produced in the boat's tiny kitchen, later drink milk again. In the mornings, well-meaning women brought them stacks of newly sewn shirt collars, still inside out; each collar had to be turned, the collar points poked out with a small smooth dowel and the seams aligned to be pressed. They worked for two hours: earning their keep, said the camp director sternly. After dinner they rested until a nurse came by and took temperatures and pulses. Once a week the doctor tapped and listened to their backs and chests, looked down their throats and in their ears.

And that was it, not bad at all; the routine passed the time. The most difficult part was returning each night to Rachel's domain and the glare of all those nervous eyes. Meyer, cared for at night by the three cousins, the aunt, and the grandmother with whom he shared an apartment, couldn't understand why Leo lived like that.

“But you have countrymen,” he'd said. “People from your home, who'd be glad to welcome you; a
landsmanschaft,
surely? I belong to the Young Men of Poniewiez and they've helped me with everything. They help my family, and they're making arrangements to get me into a Jewish sanatorium. Someplace where the doctors speak Yiddish. And where the food is more what I'm used to.”

When Leo explained, yet again, that he didn't speak Yiddish and that he was an atheist, Meyer said, “You Russians who aren't Jews—how do you live?”

During his third week on the boat, the polio epidemic spread to New Rochelle, carried, or so the newspapers claimed, by four Italian families. On Long Island, Boy Scouts went house to house, searching for children visiting from New York and, with the help of their parents, driving them back beyond the city line—and still, Leo had imagined that he'd be returning to work as soon as his coughing stopped. On the ferryboat, a social worker told him that she could get him a place at the Municipal Sanatorium in the Catskills but Leo said he'd prefer to stay in Williamsburg—learning only then that the Board of Health could send him wherever they chose, that he'd never been free to leave, and that the refinery would never take him back.

That night, when he returned to his cot in the small apartment, Rachel refused to wash his clothes although this was included in his weekly rent. On Sunday Tobias, speaking from the door of his and Rachel's room, finally told him that they'd done what they could and that he had to find someplace else to live. By the end of July he'd been out of money, out of work, and about to lose his lodging. Just in time, his placement up here had come through.

On his last night in Williamsburg, he'd slipped outside after everyone was asleep. Where the streets should have been packed with people trying to catch a breeze, the fire escapes carpeted with children lying on folded blankets, the rooftops covered with older people trying to sleep and younger ones hoping to find some privacy, instead he'd found almost no one. A few young men were drinking; piano music rose from the bars. By the waterfront he saw the flare of matches, three or four people sitting out on the wharves to fish and smoke cigarettes, and although it was nearly two in the morning he'd walked that way, through the gentle breeze, to the water. His last night, as he remembered it, of freedom.

HE MULLED OVER
those experiences during his first, solitary week. Midway through the second week, after his temperature had come back down, he was allowed his first visitor: not Miles, thankfully, but Eudora. From his bed he saw her pause in the doorway, looking up and down the corridor as if to make sure she was unobserved. As she turned her head, a moth detached itself from the lampshade and drifted her way, passing so close to her neck that he could feel the touch on his own skin.

“How are you feeling?” she asked. “Better?”

“Better,” he agreed. When she smiled he felt, at first, only the pleasure of seeing her. Then he saw that she held one hand pressed over the side pocket of her blue wrapper, as if she had a pain there. Still working double shifts, six days a week—suppose she was getting sick? He said, “But how are
you
?”

She shrugged, looking back toward the door. “Busy,” she said, “but fine. I was very relieved when Dr. Petrie said yesterday that you could have visitors.” With her hand flattened along the top of her thigh, she continued, “It's not as if this is my first time—I came to see you a lot when you were first sick. Don't you remember?”

“Not exactly.” He sat up a little straighter, smoothing the front of the white shift required in the infirmary. Beneath the blanket, his legs were humiliatingly bare. “I couldn't always tell what I was dreaming and what was real. But I thought I remembered you sitting next to me, wearing a mask.”

She nodded. “I stopped by most days to see you and Irene. She still can't talk, but she's doing much better.”

“I heard.”

He waited for a moment, wondering when she'd ask him about what Miles had found, hoping she'd leap into the silence. Instead she looked around again and then drew from her wrapper pocket an oblong tin. “For you,” she said.

A smaller, more delicate version of the box Miles had taken from his locker—for a second, he wondered if she was mocking him. As he pried at the lid, she said, “I baked them.”

“Cookies,” he said, wonderingly.

She made a wry face. “I hope they're all right; I'm not much of a baker but I wanted to make you something.”