The Air We Breathe (3 page)

For a moment, while he described his smoothly running plant, we thought we knew where he was going. His quarry, with its abundant limestone and shale; his grinding mill and his talented chemists and engineers; his vertical kilns, so technologically advanced. His special formulation for use in cement guns.

“I was one of the first to see the potential of Akeley's invention,” he explained. “After the Cement Show of 1910, when the perfected cement gun was exhibited, others hopped on the bandwagon—but my engineers had already begun to modify the device, and we've since developed varieties of gunite that exploit the qualities of our cement and also make the best possible use of the double-chambered gun. Our materials have been used in the construction of dams and water tunnels, to resurface worn buildings and coat the steel columns for new…”

We listened with interest while he spoke in this vein. But after a while—oddly, we thought; what kind of speaker turns away just as he's captured his audience?—he paused, drew a deep breath, and said, “But that's only my work, and that's enough about that. Since I was a boy, all my free time has been spent collecting and preserving the fossils of extinct vertebrates, and that's really what I want to tell you about.”

Suddenly he was describing weekend trips to New Jersey or western Pennsylvania, longer trips to Kansas, winter nights spent sorting and cataloging his finds. Not just a hobby but his passion, his chief recreation, he said, and he was sure…

When he paused again, it wasn't to ask if any of us had ever worked in a cement plant, as several had, nor to see what we, who'd had only Sundays off before arriving here, thought of having a “chief recreation,” but to ask if we knew what a fossil was. Most of us didn't—a type of rock, some thought—but no one wanted to admit it. A few were curious what Miles would say if no one interrupted him. How long will a person keep talking about himself before noticing that no one is listening?

Quite a while, as it turns out. A truth some of us had already learned from each other. Once Miles said the word “paleontology,” he was over the falls, into the rapids, and out of sight, his concave chest lifting as he waved his arms while a clump of hair, gray and fine, bobbed over his forehead. Rock formations, strata, epochs, eras: “It doesn't matter what you know or don't about such things,” Miles said dismissively. “I'll fill in the details later. My best trip was two years ago, when I spent the summer digging up dinosaur fossils buried in the western Canadian cliffs. So exhilarating!” he exclaimed, while we exchanged glances. “I brought a map of the strata to show you.”

Millions of years ago, Miles said, unfolding a small square covered with curving lines, giant creatures different from anything now living roamed the earth. In the oceans were ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs; through the air flew pterosaurs; on land, dinosaurs crashed through tropical forests. Only their spoor, their tracks, and their bones remain now, turned to stone. In Alberta, in western Canada, the Red Deer River cuts through the prairie to form an enormous canyon, exposing these bones in the cliffs. The site has been widely explored since Tyrrell's first excavations in the 1880s and…

See, we do remember. At the time, though, we stared blankly.
Ornithomimus,
bird mimic;
Trachodon,
which had webbed feet and a bill like a duck—what were we to think? On a steep cliff lay the
Ankylosaurus,
bearing a club on its tail. Miles explained that he, a friend from Doylestown, and that friend's son (this would be our first hint of the Hazeliuses) had volunteered to act as assistants to a dinosaur-hunting expedition directed by a famous Canadian team.

Our flatboat, Miles was saying, floated between the cliffs. Day after day, a speck below the prairie, the mosquitoes attacking in such great swarms that we wore gloves all the time, along with nets that fit over our hats and tucked into our shirts. The boat could carry ten tons of bones, and we dug up nearly that many. Humerus as big as a person, femur the size of a tree (here Miles thumped his upper arm and his thigh); skull like a rowboat, claw like a foot. The endless labor he described—dig, chip, wrap, lug, pack, store, ship—we understood better, the work of moving tons of something from one place to another. We'd dug tunnels for subways, poured concrete for buildings, hauled bricks and grain or cut out shirt collars by the thousands, salted down millions of fish. What we couldn't understand was what this person, speaking with so much enthusiasm and so little understanding, wanted with us.

UNTIL THE PREVIOUS WEEK,
when he'd suddenly emerged as someone she could persuade, Naomi had thought of Miles mostly as a middle-aged man who received an inconvenient number of packages from bookshops far away, and whose linen required extra care. In the car she'd been surprised by his questions and his apparent interest in her; now she was further surprised by how much he knew and how passionately he spoke about his fossils. Old bones—who would care? Yet he seemed carried away by what he was trying to tell us. With her back to the window, facing us, she saw the same things he saw: our worn, mismatched outfits and slippers and our clumsy, nearly identical haircuts, shaped by the barber who visited monthly and cut us all at once. Our faces, which, betraying the countries where we'd started out, were unlike those she'd known before and, to her, looked dull.

One face, framed by a wheelchair, stood out from the others and caught her attention: Leo Marburg's. His flossy dark hair, so similar in color and texture to her own; his narrow, unusually long and deep-set eyes, also like hers; his bony hands and his soft rounded nose. This was her first sight of him, but none of us noticed if she stared or blushed, looked away and then looked back, and she made almost no impression then on Leo. He was listening intently to Miles and, at the same time, looking around our main solarium, which he hadn't seen before.

Two glittering rows of windows, front and back, kept perfectly clean and, except in the most bitter weather, always partway open. Six electric chandeliers, hanging from the ceiling; a piano, several round tables, plain wooden rockers and a great many lightweight bentwood chairs. The scrubbed-clean fireplace, never lit, and above it two of the framed instructional placards that dotted all our public rooms:

A, b, 1, 2, d. Naomi saw those placards too, before she turned toward the garden with its patio and central fountain. From May through September water pulsed up through pipes disguised as reeds and fell into a scallop-shaped bowl. Above the bowl rose a nearly life-size woman's figure, carved from white marble. Her open arms and upturned palms pushed aside the folds of a cape to expose the enormous cross, which had two horizontal bars rather than one, incised on her gown from belt to collar.
HYGEIA
, read the plaque at her feet.
FOUNTAIN OF HOPE
. The fountain in her mother's garden was smaller but also sported a carved inscription:
Hope Springs Eternal
. Pleasant phrase disguising what, in Naomi's view, was her mother's true self: a woman who used to have money and didn't anymore; and was proud of succeeding despite that; and hated everyone because she'd had to. The girls she hired to work in the kitchen smirked at her behind her back.

Some of us were smirking at Miles: more talk, words like a river. We listened or dreamed or dozed, with no idea where the river might lead, thinking instead of a child's face, a woman's touch, a three-legged brown dog. Jaroslav, who had once worked as a cameraman at a movie studio, was imagining a sequence in which, against a black background, an eggshell lit from above and to the left, decorated with red geometric shapes and the thinnest gold lines—one of his mother's treasured Easter eggs—would tumble delicately end over end. Albert was thinking about his father's last letter and the passage he hadn't been able to understand, not because his father's hard pencil left such a light trace but because what he remembered of his father's Norwegian vocabulary was fading, as had his knowledge of his mother's Serbian. The rest of us were occupied similarly, which wasn't unpleasant, exactly.

Finally Miles stopped, at a few minutes after six, making us late for dinner. We were split up differently then, the women and the men in separate wings, the dining hall among the few places where we met. Even there, a wide corridor patrolled by two attendants separated our territories. No talking was allowed across that borderland, no joking, no flirting, no winking nor passing of notes. Soon Miles would learn to capitalize on this separation, but that night our group still consisted only of men, arguing among ourselves about the afternoon's session.

By the time we reached the dining hall, half of us had already decided we wouldn't attend again. This Miles person, someone said—who was he? A bored boss with too much time on his hands. Someone else, annoyed by the clicking sound of Miles's fancy shoes on the wooden floor, agreed. But Leo and Ephraim and several others said we should give Miles another chance; parts of the talk had been interesting, and it was a break from our routine. How many of those did we get?

Still arguing, we entered through the big double doors, each pinned for an instant by the gaze of everyone else. We had tables for six, then, ranged in even rows on either side of a central passage, and that made it easy to see at a glance how many were present; the dining room attendants used to count us at each meal. Ephraim entered the room last, pushing Leo's chair. And Leo—this was his first public appearance, except for the meeting—looked calmly around and waved, which made some of us laugh.

Ephraim wheeled him to Hiram's old place and then went to the food line. Alone at the table, Leo studied the room. Clarice, who was serving that night, brought Leo a plate: a privilege that came with the wheelchair. Stewed chicken, egg noodles in gravy, applesauce, string beans, a biscuit with butter. When Ephraim sat down with his own full plate, he saw that Leo was picking at his. “You know you have to finish that,” Ephraim said.

“She brought me too much,” Leo complained.

“It's the standard portion,” Ephraim said. He pointed to the sugar bowl, where the Daily Thought was propped. Leo read from the pink rectangle:
Food is life. Eat three times as much as you think you need: once for the fever, once for the germs, and the final time for yourself.

“I thought once I got out of the infirmary I'd be done with some of these rules,” Leo said.

“Actually there are more rules here,” said Ephraim, “but they aren't written down. We're expected to pick them up from each other, to regulate ourselves.”

“Aren't we fortunate,” Leo said, which made Ephraim laugh out loud.

A
PIPE BROKE THAT
afternoon in the village, leaving all the houses on the street below it temporarily without water. Despite Mrs. Martin's apologies, Miles, who'd been looking forward to his evening bath, felt unreasonably annoyed. In place of his excellent porcelain-lined tub, his robe warming by the radiator as he soaked, he had only the familiar curves of his cure chair, a book he'd ordered with great excitement but had since lost interest in, and the glow of a lamp that, as good as it was for reading, made invisible all that his porch screens normally revealed. Beyond its circumference stars, trees, rooftops vanished, people vanished along with their dogs, leaving him cut off from the outside world and yet completely exposed. From the street, he knew, the porches dotted the sky like movie screens, revealing every action. He crossed his eyes and waggled his fingers by his ears; let anyone walking by Mrs. Martin's house, and rude enough to look, see that. Behind the porch—men were working invisibly, still trying to fix that broken pipe—a tool clanged against the buried iron.

How did they work in the dark? Headlamps, perhaps, or miner's lanterns shining down on the water where it gushed. In the same way he'd meant to illuminate for us, earlier, the excitement that for almost thirty years had shaped his life. On his best days he still felt it: the pure delight that had swept him when, as a boy of eight, his friend Edward Hazelius had shown him a magazine article about a vanished world. Text running in double columns with colored illustrations: the artist had depicted an inland sea, covering what was presently Kansas and swarming with paddle-finned plesiosaurs, gigantic turtles, mosasaurs, and giant clams. Above the water, pterodactyls flapped while the horned
Monoclonius
lumbered on the shore. New creatures, he read with wonder, were being discovered every month, altering our ideas about the history of the earth. Instantly, he and Edward had seen their path.

For years after that, Miles had walked daily from his own family's stone mansion to the peculiar concrete home designed by Edward's father and built with cement from Miles's father's plant. The Hazelius house boasted rooms shaped like wedges of pie, others shaped like pillows or teepees, all of them studded with the colorful tiles that Edward's father had brought back from different parts of the world or manufactured in the tile works behind the house. The library was filled with natural history books and magazines, and near the fireplace, which was framed by tiles depicting the branches of knowledge, the boys devoured everything they could find. Edward's father ordered books for them, while his ancient great-aunt Grace, who lived in a separate wing of the house, fanned their interests. Although she seemed to Miles like a dinosaur herself, wrinkled and knobbed, she'd traveled in the Dakota Badlands long ago, excavating fossils with the help of her sister and accumulating the treasures now filling her rooms. The teeth of saber-toothed cats, the jaws of a primitive camel; where, Miles wanted to know, had she found these things? Neither he nor Edward knew sign language and she was deaf, so they wrote out their questions. She answered in a precise and tiny script, revealing secrets so interesting that the boys imagined lives spent hunting fossils.

Perhaps this was more appealing because they knew what really lay before them—both were only sons, the cement plant waiting for Miles as the tile works would fall to Edward. In college they dutifully studied the chemistry, physics, and engineering their futures would demand, but they also went to geology and paleontology lectures and read surreptitiously. During the summers they made field trips, camping out in Kansas or Nebraska and walking formations each day. Sun, sky, powdery earth, the feel of fossil bone and the sound of Edward's piercing whistle when, from an adjacent ridge, he signaled a find: the trips jumbled in Miles's mind but specific moments were captured whole, as if they'd tumbled intact into the tar pit of his memory.

How hard it had been to leave those trips behind! During their junior year, Edward met a girl named Chloe in the fall and married her—recklessly, Miles judged; she was seventeen—in the spring. That summer Miles went to Wyoming alone, but once he graduated and returned to work at his father's plant, he too stopped traveling. Still Edward was only a few minutes' walk away, settled into the mazelike house with Chloe and their new baby, Lawrence, and although both men were busy they met almost daily to trade news from the bone-hunters' world.

Throughout their twenties they'd continued to share books and conversations. Chloe usually went her own way when they gathered; even after Lawrence's birth she wore surprising clothes and continued to act, in Miles's opinion, like a girl. She showed no interest in the family business, which expanded under Edward's direction into the manufacture of ceramic materials used in ships and automobiles. When their second son, Charles, was born, Miles bought a crib worthy of one of the heirs to such a firm. Chloe took both the crib and Charles with her when she ran away.

For a while, then, there was no discussion of the Carnegie Museum's acquisition of a nearly complete
Apatosaurus
or the newly named
Albertosaurus;
both men were focused on Lawrence, who didn't speak for almost a year after his mother left. They hid her note from him:
Lawrence can manage without me now,
she'd written.
If I stay here any longer I will die. I have taken Charles, he's too young to leave behind.
The hats she'd left on the closet shelf gathered a yellow haze of pollen before Lawrence cut them apart with the garden shears.

In their efforts to comfort the boy, and to shape a daily routine around his gaping loss, Miles and Edward drew even closer. Miles visited the Hazelius house each day, ate dinner with the pair each night, helped Lawrence with his studies and answered his questions. Still unmarried himself, he taught Lawrence everything he could and felt rushing back to him, when he showed Lawrence a set of bones or a model, the delight he'd felt at a similar age. Dinosauria, he would tell Lawrence, lit up again as he'd been as a boy. Later revised to two great orders by Seeley: Ornithischia, the bird-hipped dinosaurs; Saurischia, the lizard-hipped.

“Ni-
this
chia,” Lawrence would lisp.

He was tall for his age and loved the outdoors. When he turned eleven, Miles and Edward started taking him on fossil-collecting expeditions during their summer vacations. Miles, who by then had had enough trouble with his lungs that he'd ended two romances and given up the idea of marrying, found that camping outside helped him, and also that Lawrence flourished in the sun and the dry air. By the summer of 1914, Edward was able to arrange positions for all three of them as volunteer assistants to a collecting expedition run by a famous team of paleontologists.

Two large flatboats set off early that June, each with a center-mounted tent that sheltered cots and a cookstove and food, tools for excavating the fossils and sacks of plaster of Paris. The professionals on the first boat, searching out the fossils in the cliffs and leaving behind markers and instructions, floated so far ahead that Miles didn't see them often, but he'd found it thrilling simply to follow, digging and lugging as ordered. The two Canadian students in charge of them—Ewan and Alistair, disciples of the famous pair—praised them occasionally.

At first, Miles and Edward and Lawrence were allowed only to do the heavy digging. Once they'd proven themselves, though, they were granted the privilege of chipping away the matrix from the bones and helping apply the plaster bandages. Hot, heavy work, which Miles loved. Shoveling rocks and dirt, fetching water, cooking porridge or washing his shirts in the river: all of that was also fine. Each day brought a new discovery. The sun burned, the mosquitoes pierced their clothes. Huge hailstones fell so hard that their tents were knocked down and their arms, where they'd held canvas over their heads, were beaten black and blue. The work was so exciting that they didn't mind.

Miles, who'd turned thirty-five that summer, felt as vigorous as he had in college and lost the cough that had nagged him all winter. Lawrence, who quickly proved that he could lift as much as Ewan or Alistair, row as hard and shoot as accurately, seemed happy too. Sometimes the three youngsters would go off hunting together, leaving Miles and Edward to nap, sunburned and pleased with themselves, under the canvas awning on the boat. Their group of five men, Miles thought, formed a perfect society, sharing equally in all the tasks and teaching each other, during the long stretches when they were floating down the water, whatever they knew. Ewan taught celestial navigation, which both Miles and Edward had always meant to study. Miles taught Ewan and Alistair a way to treat fragile shale so it wouldn't splinter. Ewan and Alistair taught Lawrence how to steer the flatboat, and as Miles stood at the bow, looking back at Lawrence handling the huge steering oar, he knew that he and Edward had, even without a woman's influence, done a fine job.

Those days floating down the river, between the fossil-laden cliffs; how delicious they'd been! He'd followed his father into the cement plant, rising through the ranks until he was ready to take over, but that was his duty: this, he loved. In early September, they finally reached the tiny town where they had to unload the specimens and prepare them for shipment east. Only then did they learn about the war.

Miles couldn't blame Ewan and Alistair for running off to join the Canadian forces as soon as they heard; nor could he blame them for leaving him and Edward to manage the crating and shipment of the tons of specimens. But he couldn't forgive them for encouraging Lawrence. One day Lawrence was on the boat and the next they found, where he should have been, an excited, apologetic note, more well-meaning than his mother's but equally devastating. No one could track him down. Only after months, during which Miles and Edward took turns blaming each other—who had had the idea for the trip? Both of them, they finally agreed—did Lawrence write from France. Having lied about both his age and his citizenship, he'd succeeded in getting shipped off with a Canadian battalion dotted with other eager, illicit American volunteers.

Night after night Miles and Edward talked about what to do. They weren't powerless; they could have forced Lawrence home. But his letters sang with hope and a desire to prove himself.
Let me stay,
he wrote.
Let me do this. It's what I have to do, what I want to do.
Chloe had disappeared completely—she never wrote Edward and no one knew where she was, only that she'd run off with some stranger—and in her absence the men talked as any two parents might. In the end they agreed that they had to let him stay.

IN ALBERTA,
Miles had felt so well that he'd considered once more trying to find a suitable wife and then, with her assistance, selling off the cement plant and devoting himself wholly to working with fossils. The feel of the bones under his hands, their hot, crumbling, dusty surfaces and the sense that he was holding the earth's history, stroking the hidden parts of an animal no one had ever seen or could see, seemed like the only thing that had ever made him happy. In the days before they'd docked the flatboat and learned about the war, he'd stretched out on the deck at night and imagined changing his life. Just for once, he'd thought—during those months when he'd felt so strong and well, before the war started, before Lawrence left—he would leave his duties behind.

Instead, his lung complaint returned and he'd ended up at Mrs. Martin's house, pampered and stuffed with her wonderful food, but bored beyond words. He had books shipped in by the carton, a dozen magazine subscriptions; Edward wrote weekly and he wrote back, but none of this was a substitute for real conversation. One day, after a restless night during which he recalled the pleasures of teaching Lawrence, a plan for Tamarack State had drifted into his mind. Immediately, he recognized that this was what he needed. Most of us were younger than Lawrence in terms of what we knew, even if we were older in years; he assumed that if he could teach Lawrence, he could teach us.

How mystifying, then, that only twelve of us came to his second session, most looking for that promised “exchange of work experience.” Failing that, we hoped for more talk about gunite; after Miles's first presentation, Ephraim had mentioned that one of his wife's cousins had worked with a cement gun while lining a siphon supplying water to New York, and that had made Miles's work seem more interesting. Instead we got a talk about the process of excavating bones. On he went about the needed skills, the special tools, the patience. Special whisk brooms with stiff, flexible bristles were apparently helpful, and also some little awls, which were used to follow bits of bone in from the surface while being careful not to disturb the bone itself.

Still pacing back and forth, wearing a suit cut like the previous week's but brown instead of gray, he described in detail the process of freeing one particular specimen and encasing the blocks in plaster-and-burlap jackets. Twenty or thirty minutes into this, Naomi slipped off the window seat and went outside; three-quarters of us envied her, although Leo and Ephraim continued to listen. Afterwards, at dinner that night, more of us decided to drop out.

AT THE THIRD SESSION,
on October 25, only six of us were present besides Miles and Naomi. A few minutes after the session started, we were joined by Eudora MacEachern, whom we knew then only as one of the ward maids. When she stepped inside the doorway, we learned from the way she smiled and the swiftness with which Naomi leapt from the ledge and moved to greet her that she was also Naomi's friend.