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.
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 a
nd 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:
I.
Like the snakes in Ireland, there is no remedy for pulmonary tuberculosis in the sense of a specific medicine or form of treatment directly applied to the exciting cause—the tubercle bacillus. Innumerable supposed specifics have been proposed and tested, but all have been found wanting. The only treatment which has successfully stood the test of time and experience is the indirect one of developing and maintaining the resistance of the individual to the toxaemia of the infection. We name it the “hygienic-dietetic” or “open-air” treatment. In brief, it consists of (a) breathing pure out-door air night and day; (b) an abundance of nourishing food; (c) rest in the open air, all the time if the patient is febrile, and at least a portion of the time if afebrile; (d) proper disposal of the sputum to avoid reinfection; (e) combating all symptoms or conditions which interfere with the main treatment.
II.
The tubercle bacillus is an infinitesimally small, slender rod, in length from one-quarter to one-half the diameter of a red blood corpuscle. It is frequently more or less curved, and sometimes it has an irregular knobbed appearance. It may occur in chains or in small clumps. It is a long-lived tough parasite that may retain its vitality for several months but does not multiply outside the body, except when grown upon a favorable medium. It reaches the lungs in two principal ways: (1) directly through the respiratory passages, by inhalation, and (2) indirectly by way of the gastro-intestinal canal, by ingestion.
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.
3
APIPE 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 ear
th. 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.
The Air We Breathe Page 3
