The Air We Breathe (26 page)

He nibbled the edge of a tawny disk: gritty, buttery, not too sweet, scented with vanilla. Something like shortbread but not as rich. In another life, in another century, his mother had made a treat with ground almonds that had tasted faintly like this and had a similar sandy texture. His mouth watered, and then his eyes.

“Then you don't believe what Miles has been saying about me?” he asked. After all, his relapse had been worth something. The moth flapped slowly back into the room, found a column of sunlight, and began spiraling up toward the ceiling, spacing its turns as closely as if it were moving through the coils of a still.

Eudora looked down at the tin. “No,” she said, more slowly than he would have wished. From that he knew he'd been right to fear the hum from our porches.

“The box belongs to a friend of Ephraim's,” he said, sketching the story of Felix's visit—but not, we have to note, telling her that the box had once held three pencils rather than two. On the other hand, she'd never admitted to him that she'd seen the box at all—and she didn't admit that now. All she said, when he was finished, was, “I knew there was an explanation. Can I tell the others?”

He shook his head. “It's too risky, the way Miles is acting. He has contacts all over the state. Maybe all over the country—I don't want anything to happen to Ephraim or his family. And you know what it's like here: tell one person, and everyone else knows in an hour. People here know me well enough; they ought to just trust me. You did.”

“But I'm not a patient here,” she said, startling him.

MILES COULDN'T PROVE
anything, especially since he couldn't question Leo further. But at both Tamarack State and throughout the village he voiced his suspicions. He told anyone who'd listen about Leo's refusal of a room at Mrs. Martin's house—some of us were indeed baffled by that, and others annoyed; no one offered
us
such things—and he harped on the box and its contents.

Finally, after Dr. Petrie found Miles discussing Leo with the milk delivery man, he asked Miles for a private meeting, much as Miles had once asked him. First Miles said he was too busy; then, relenting a bit, said he might be able to spare a few minutes but that he couldn't come to his office. “In the village, then,” Dr. Petrie said. “Tomorrow, or the next day?”

“Tomorrow,” Miles said. “At Mrs. Martin's house.”

“Not there,” Dr. Petrie said. They compromised on the picnic area at the lake's east end, not exactly convenient but easy enough for both to reach.

It was raining that Wednesday, without a breath of breeze and still very warm; Dr. Petrie, arriving first, chose a bench and covered his end with half the piece of oilcloth he'd carried down the hill. Then he sat beneath the shelter of his old umbrella, carefully keeping the rest of the cloth dry. When Miles arrived, five minutes late, he unrolled the rest of the cloth and watched, bemused, as Miles perched at the farthest end of the bench and hid under his own umbrella. Briefly the ribs of the two umbrellas clashed, so that Dr. Petrie was forced another inch away.

“What is it you want?” asked Miles, looking straight ahead. “I have another meeting in less than an hour.”

“I want you to stop bothering Leo Marburg,” Dr. Petrie said. Out on the lake young gulls, speckled like eggs, were floating in groups of three and four, apparently more interesting to Miles than anything he himself said. “I'm asking you as one professional man to another,” he went on, trying to keep his tone calm, “to do what you know is right. You've seen Irene's letter. Both Dr. Richards and I have explained the situation to you, as we understand it. Your accusations are based on nothing but your own anger.”

Beneath the umbrella's scalloped edge, he could see only part of Miles's profile: earlobe, nostril, mouth and chin, the lips drawn tight. Still, in the most annoying way, he kept staring at the seagulls.

“Miles?” Dr. Petrie said.

“You might,” Miles said distantly, “want to be a little more careful about how you talk to me.”

Dr. Petrie lowered and furled his umbrella so that the rain, falling more gently now, might cool his head. For this he needed calmness, clarity. He took two slow breaths, gripped his umbrella in both hands, and said, “You refer, I know, to your powerful friends, and to your committee. Then let me refer to them as well. What would they think if they knew you'd hired Naomi Martin as a driver only because of your infatuation? And that you kept her on—that you let her drive you to the most sensitive meetings, where she could see exactly who was present and even overhear certain things—long past the point when you knew she was untrustworthy?”

Miles's umbrella dropped another two inches, obscuring everything but his chin. “They'd say nothing. Because that's not true.”

“It
is
true,” Dr. Petrie said. On the lake a group of gulls drifted quietly toward the grass at the foot of the park. “How many times did you insist on telling me exactly how you feel about her? And the patients who attended the Wednesday sessions know how you feel, as well—did you think they didn't notice? They talk about everything.”

A faint noise, which might have been a groan, emerged from the umbrella.

“And now,” Dr. Petrie continued—here he took a huge, intuitive leap at which he would later marvel—“now that we know what she took before she left…”

The umbrella rose, sending all the gulls into the air as Miles's head swiveled toward Dr. Petrie. “What do you know about that?”

Fascinated, Dr. Petrie continued to press at the same spot. “Certain things are missing from the X-ray laboratory. From other places too. I'm sure the members of your organization would find that interesting, given the access Naomi had to your room and your papers.”

Miles furled his umbrella and stood up. Instantly the rain began to dampen his hair, so that it flattened against his skull. “You would blackmail me?”

“A request, let's say. Leave Leo alone. You know he didn't do anything.”

“Why go to such extremes to protect him, if he's not guilty?”

Dr. Petrie rose, folding the oilcloth twice along its length before rolling it into a tidy cylinder. “Because someone,” he said, “has to put a stop to this.”

NONE OF US,
including Leo, learned of that discussion until much later. In the infirmary Leo had been dreading the arrival of Miles every day since the restriction on visitors was lifted, but no one came except Eudora. That Thursday, Dr. Petrie completed his examination of Leo's chest, pronounced him much improved, and then said, offhandedly, that he could return to his room tomorrow, and that Miles had finished his investigation and withdrawn his accusations.

“Has he figured out what started the fire, then?”

“Not that I know of,” Dr. Petrie said. “I still think Irene's idea—that a piece of equipment shorted out down there—seems most likely.”

“I do, too,” Leo said, even as the image of the missing pencil flashed before him. For the first time he began to think seriously about how it might have disappeared, and if it might have been involved in the fire. Even to Dr. Petrie, though, he couldn't suggest this. Instead, keeping the focus of their conversation on Miles, he said, “Maybe he just needed some time to reconsider.”

He coughed twice and sipped at the glass of water near his bed, anticipating his release. His own room, at last. His old routines, however those might have been changed by the fire. He hadn't seen the new dining room, the sealed-off central building, the curving dirt path hastily cut to provide a detour between the single, combined dormitory wing and the wing where he lay now. He imagined our days were essentially the same, except that our quarters were slightly more crowded.

“Maybe that helped,” Dr. Petrie said, fiddling with his stethoscope. “And also Irene wrote a very kind letter on your behalf.”

He said nothing about his own intervention, summarizing, instead, what Irene had written. Leo listened, amazed. Once, perhaps, one of his teachers might have done such a thing for him, or the Odessa merchant who'd sent him to school. But no one since. That Irene, still almost a stranger, could be so kind, and that her kindness could defuse Miles's heated accusations, made him think that perhaps he hadn't made such a bad decision seven years ago, when he'd crossed the ocean to come here.

That Friday, when he left the infirmary, his cough was gone, his fever was down, and Miles was nowhere in sight. Making his way through the corridors of the women's annex and then across the new dirt path—the central building looked terrible, he noted, and the garden was trampled—he felt almost hopeful despite the humming he'd heard from the porches. The covered walkway leading to the men's annex looked as it always had, and so did the stairs and the second-floor corridor. He stood before the door to his old room, delaying for a moment the pleasure of returning to the place he'd known before the fire, which he'd been used to thinking of as home. The instant he crossed the threshold, he saw that it now belonged to Arkady, Otto, and Abe.

Politely, as they might have received a guest, they made room for him. His bed was perfectly made; the clothes in his locker neatly arranged. His precious books had vanished from his bedside table, which was clean. Every other surface was covered with his roommates' belongings, as every molecule of air seemed saturated with their smells and sounds. They were patient with him, courteous, but even on the first night he sensed that they made only small talk in his presence, saving any real conversation for the times when they were alone.

At his first breakfast in the new dining room, he felt the same thing on a larger scale. Not since the night of the fire had he eaten with all of us; we might have applauded when he came in, we might have roared our approval or at least stopped what we were doing to welcome him. Instead, we carried on as if we'd never missed him. He waved across the cramped space at Kathleen, who looked remarkably well; smiled at Vivian, now walking with crutches; wedged himself into one of the tightly spaced chairs. Over our dishes of oatmeal with dried fruit and heavy cream, of eggs scrambled and heaped on toast, we nodded as he passed, said hello when he greeted us, asked politely after his health. But nothing more. No one, not even Kathleen, whose life he'd saved, came over, wrapped an arm around his shoulder, and said, “We know you haven't done anything.” No one mocked Miles, his agents, or his league, as we would have done—had done—until the moment we'd learned about the box and what was in it.

It was no surprise that Miles remained suspicious of Leo even after he dropped the investigation. The surprise was that we remained suspicious too. After Dr. Petrie released Leo, he'd finally let some of us know the contents of Irene's letter; from that we knew that Leo couldn't have started the fire directly. Still, the letter didn't make us forget the horrors of that night, or bring Edith and Morris and Denis back from the clearing. The letter didn't restore our lives as we had known them, which had been far from perfect but which were at least ours. Everything familiar had vanished in the fire, which had laid bare the real nature of our confinement and still seemed related to Leo. In his secrecy, in the way he'd been so absorbed in his studies, in the way he'd stopped confiding in any of us after Ephraim left, we couldn't help feeling that he was guilty of something.

Dinner that day was the same, and so was supper. When Leo walked into the library, five or six of us were there; fifteen minutes later he was alone and he knew this was no accident. That night, when he went out to the porch and found his chair squeezed between Arkady's and Sean's, the partitions torn down and the line of bodies, stretching in both directions to the ends of the annex, so tightly formed that we looked ready to leap the railing together at the sound of a whistle, he was startled to hear himself apologize as he wedged himself into position. By nine o'clock he began to hear the humming sound, first from the porch above and the one below, finally spreading to the far ends of his own rank. Once in a while, he caught the sound of his own name.

A
FTER HIS MEETING
with Dr. Petrie, Miles had skipped dinner and spent a long night out on his porch, inspecting the wreckage of the plans he'd made a year ago. Bad enough that everything he'd hoped to do at Tamarack State had been destroyed by the fire and by Leo. But that his crucial war work was threatened and his feelings for Naomi cast into doubt made him so angry he thought his heart might burst. This from Dr. Petrie, whom he'd once counted as a friend. A little, little man after all, as small in spirit as he was in stature, who'd used Miles's feelings against him and twisted what Miles knew was a generous impulse toward a troubled young woman until it seemed like a weakness.

He couldn't stop his daily round of meetings—indeed he was busier than ever—but for the rest of the week he avoided anything to do with Leo or Dr. Petrie. When he had to pass the east end of the lake, he turned his face from the benches. At Tamarack State, where he still had duties, he timed his visits for hours when he knew Dr. Petrie was making rounds and we were on our porches. To Dr. Richards, who seemed puzzled but relieved, he explained that Irene's letter, while not completely satisfactory, had along with a lack of sufficient resources reluctantly convinced him not to pursue his investigation further. The night after he told that lie, he had such savage stomach pains that Mrs. Martin had to call in his private physician.

He was an invalid, he reminded himself then. Nowhere near as strong as he pretended, and useless to everyone if he didn't take better care of his health. He had responsibilities to the other members of his committee and he had to balance the work that only he could do with the rest his cure demanded. Mrs. Martin, ever thoughtful, put him on a special diet and guarded his rest hours fiercely, answering the telephone herself and taking messages for him. On Saturday, when he was feeling a little better, he decided in return to help her with one small task.

In preparation for their outing, she had one of the new kitchen helpers—since May there'd been five—bring him a pot of tea. From the first sip, he could tell it had been made from water that wasn't quite boiling. The girl who brought it had a long braid of brown hair that swung sullenly against her back and an expression that seemed to dare him to complain. The one before her had had grubby hands, another had flirted outrageously with several boarders, although not with him; they came, stayed for a couple of weeks, bungled their tasks, and then left. Around him were other signs that Naomi might have had more to do with the household's smooth functioning than he'd suspected. A stain on the carpet, an unrepaired tear in the dining room curtain. Also a disconcerting influx of mail: letters from booksellers, complaining that payments he knew he'd left to be mailed had never arrived; from clothing stores in Philadelphia wondering why they hadn't received his usual order for shirts and vests. In Naomi's continued absence, nothing seemed to work. He tried not to think about her, and thought about her all the time.

To the list of things for which he blamed Leo, he added this: Leo had driven Naomi away. He blamed Eudora for failing to stop her, Mrs. Martin for overburdening her here at the house, Irene for whatever clumsiness she'd committed the night of the fire, when Naomi came looking for consolation. Dr. Richards had shown him Irene's letter, from which he remembered this:
She was upset about something when she came to see me, and still upset when she ran out
. The line made him want to weep. How was it that Irene, old enough to be Naomi's mother, supposedly so resourceful and sympathetic, had failed to comfort her?

How had he? Sometimes, as when he looked up now to see Tyler in the doorway, so eager to drive him that he was bouncing gently on his built-up shoe, he also blamed himself. Long before Naomi left he could, he saw, have freed her and hired his own permanent car and driver. Except that he had wanted her next to him. Except that he had wanted to be able to study her features in a place where, with her eyes fixed on the road before her, she wouldn't be able to turn away. Except that, worst of all, he had enjoyed making her do what he wanted. During their last weeks together, when he'd ordered her to take him somewhere and she'd curled her lip and looked down at her shoes for a second before looking back up and saying, “Of course”—that feeling moving through his veins had been pleasure.

He set down the unsatisfactory cup of tea and rose just as Mrs. Martin entered the parlor. “Ready?” he asked her.

“Ready,” she said, patting her bag. “I have my notes, I know what I want to say—really this is
so
kind of you.”

Miles nodded to Tyler, who clopped ahead to the limousine. Mrs. Martin, who hadn't ridden in it before, settled into the back seat as if she belonged there, running her hand slowly over the smooth leather upholstery. All week long she'd been talking about this meeting, which she'd organized herself. Gathering together other directors of cure cottages, along with the women who worked in the hotel kitchens and the hospital dining rooms, she planned a brisk half-hour speech, complete with diagrams, of how they might most effectively conserve food and cooking fuel. Before she started, though, Miles was to give a brief talk on the sacrifices being made by the drafted soldiers, and how every scrap saved here would directly help our men.

As they drove the short distance to the hotel, she prattled, Tyler responded attentively, and Miles, listening to their eagerness and goodwill, their obvious delight in finding a purpose, felt his own spirits plummet. How worthy both of them were, and how tiresome! Mrs. Martin with her meticulous lists and the mat of carefully plaited hair clamped to the back of her head like a trivet; Tyler with his sweaty hands and his way of brushing off the seat with a handkerchief before Miles sat down. They agreed with him on every point and anticipated most of his requests. He didn't care for either of them.

Except for the days he'd shared with Edward and Lawrence in Doylestown and their blissful summer digging fossils in Canada, he sometimes felt that he'd spent most of his life with people he didn't really like. The ones who drew him magnetically always moved just beyond his reach, living lives that seemed much more interesting and joyful than his own. They danced past, talked gaily together, burst into laughter, and then disappeared. Meanwhile he dutifully worked with the earnest ones. This, perhaps, he'd shared with Dr. Petrie; which made the betrayal worse.

“Shall I wait?” Tyler said as he parked in front of the hotel. The moon was full, illuminating the leaves swaying on the basswoods, the soft shadows of the shrubs and the darker ones of the buildings on the street. Lights were on here and there, linked by scallops of bunting strung across the façades, and porches glowed on the cure cottages marching up the hill. In some he could see figures lying on their chairs, where he'd once been. Where he should be.

“Come in and listen,” Mrs. Martin urged Tyler. “I promise it will be interesting.”

He could engage a private detective, Miles reflected as he helped Mrs. Martin from the limousine. Not for any further investigation of Leo—Dr. Petrie had closed that route—but as a way of trying to find Naomi. Several detectives, even, in different cities; one young woman with modest resources couldn't be that difficult to find. But even if he found her—what then? She didn't care for him, she never had. Let her mother find her, let her mother sort out what had happened. Already, he knew, Mrs. Martin had circulated inquiries through the web of her professional acquaintances, cure cottages here connected to boardinghouses in the Catskills, home economics instructors on Long Island in touch with hospital administrators in Vermont and far beyond.

He straightened his narrow shoulders. His job tonight was to inspire the audience so that they would all adopt, enthusiastically, Mrs. Martin's recommendations. More tasks loomed tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. Work in the village, work for the league, work related to Tamarack State; fortunate that he knew how to husband his energies. At home in Doylestown—
home,
he thought, seeing the pale, well-ordered rooms of his house, the ranks of machinery in his plant, each piece tended by his well-trained employees—other work awaited him, which only he could do. Would do, as soon as he was cured. Everyone, he thought, must do his duty.

IT WAS ON
a Wednesday that Dr. Petrie met with Miles; Leo returned to his room on Friday, the same day Miles told Dr. Richards he'd completed his investigation. On Saturday Miles went to the meeting with Mrs. Martin, after which nothing changed. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday passed, during which the news of Miles's retreat spread throughout Tamarack State. We might have welcomed Leo back then: but still nothing changed. He confided in no one; he told none of us the story he'd told Eudora about Ephraim's visitor and the box he'd left behind. Twice he walked to the clearing by himself, looking over the new stones that marked where Morris and Edith and Denis lay, and this seemed to us to signal something suspicious. By then, perhaps it wouldn't have mattered what he'd done. We no longer trusted him.

None of us slept during our afternoon rest hours that next Wednesday, the balconies so hot beneath the canvas awnings that we could feel ourselves shriveling, and when four o'clock arrived we leapt from our cure chairs and headed toward the pavilion. Even here there was only the smallest breeze, but this, combined with the shade of the pavilion roof, the smell of the cedar shakes, and the sight of the creek emptying sluggishly into the weedy mouth of the nearest pond, was still a relief. No one was feeling well. Six patients were in the infirmary Leo had so recently left; there'd been three dramatic hemorrhages in the last four days and no one had any appetite. Twice the afternoon milk had curdled. Our hearts seemed curdled as well. We sat on the pavilion benches or the balcony rails, fanning ourselves with copies of
The Kill-Gloom Gazette
while Leo paced slowly back and forth between the willow tree at the top of the pond and the three larches clustered at the first bend in the creek.

He looked, Polly remarked, as if he were attached to a pendulum. Back and forth, back and forth, thinking intently while we drooped in the shade. How long would he do this? Ian wondered. And what was he thinking about?

Us, we knew. We'd been behaving badly. Overhead a swarm of sparrows pulled tightly together only to scatter, as if even they were too warm to be near each other.

He felt, he was thinking as a larch cone crunched beneath his feet, like a stranger. A stranger to us. In the dining room he felt more alone than he had a year ago, when, during a similar heat wave, Ephraim had first wheeled him through the door of the old hall. Then we had welcomed him; now we were polite. Always, but only, polite. We never accused him of anything. Yet if he walked up to Pietr and Zalmen and Lydia and Bea and tried to join their conversation, he felt his words slide into nothingness as he spoke. If he suggested to Abe and Ian that they read a book together and discuss it, they smiled, spoke vaguely of being busy, and moved away. David and Pearl and Celia had separately offered excuses when he'd proposed walks to them; even Kathleen turned from him, although she blushed as she did. We'd all evaded him, our eyelids lowered and our real thoughts shrouded. None of us offered more than courtesy demanded and no one would say—we could not, exactly, have said—what he'd done wrong. We thought of the library books Miles's agents had earlier carried away in boxes, and of the orders to darn worn sheets instead of replacing them, change the linens less often, reuse rags that should have been burned.
It's our duty to economize,
Dr. Richards had told both the staff and us: but we sensed Miles behind the new directives. Miles, reaching for Leo, punishing us.

As Leo paced, a young fox popped up from the grass, snapping at a butterfly that lifted effortlessly just out of reach. He stopped, watched, and then watched us watching the fox, while ignoring him. If he'd known for sure how Eudora felt, perhaps he wouldn't have panicked, but he'd seen little of her since leaving the infirmary. He couldn't read her intentions any more clearly than he could read ours, and he wondered, now, if she'd really heard what he was saying when he'd asked her to the movies. He wasn't sure anymore why she'd come that night, or what might have happened between them without the fire. Apparently they were going to have to start all over again.

A handful of sparrows, one missing a foot, landed on the dusty path, and he glanced over at us again. Clumsily, obdurately, we looked away while Otto, feeling guilty because of Naomi's letter, turned his back completely. For more than a month that letter, stalled at first by her careless address and then by the chaos after the fire, had lain in the village post office with the other mail meant for here. Once the sacks were finally delivered and all the mail was sorted through, Otto had seen the envelope addressed to Leo and, well-intentioned then, had taken it back to their shared room, to deliver when Leo returned. After the humming started, though, he'd hidden it on purpose. “Not my fault,” he'd said blandly, when he finally decided to deliver it: already that line embarrassed him. “I stuck it in a book and then forgot about it.” And so it was only on the night before we gathered at the pavilion that Leo had read: