The Air We Breathe

by Andrea Barrett

  On the day Leo gave Eudora the model, she headed down into the basement to visit Irene. Inside the door she dropped the hexagon onto her coat and then forgot about it. From Leo, as from Naomi and everyone else, she’d purposefully kept any suggestion of how much time she spent here. Evening after evening she approached Irene, who welcomed her if she wasn’t too busy. Over the last few months she’d learned what a Crookes tube was, how electrodes worked, and, although she’d never held a camera before, how to negotiate a darkroom and develop film. She’d helped Irene make pictures that once, she learned, had been called skiagraphs—images of shadows—but now were roentgenograms, or radiographs, a projection of something that blocked or absorbed the X-rays. Bones and teeth cast a strong shadow; organs and tissues left shadows lighter or darker depending on their densities. “In your imagination,” Irene had said, “you have to see the three-dimensional shape creating the one-dimensional shadow. That’s why it’s so hard to interpret the images correctly. Why they can be ambiguous.”

  This made sense to Eudora, who was fascinated by the shadows of our organs. Inside the lungs of those she cleaned up after, bacilli were madly reproducing: what did the shadow of that invasion look like? In her high school biology class she’d seen bloodless drawings of human parts and also, in heavy old jars at the back of the room, preserved organs—brain, liver, and, yes, a small pair of dog’s lungs, still attached to bronchi and trachea—afloat in cloudy solutions. What she wanted to learn, though, was how lungs and heart, stomach and diaphragm, fit together within the cage of a person’s ribs. Before she started visiting Irene, her only hazy sense of this had come from the innards strewn about her father’s taxidermy shop.

  There’d been times, as she was helping out her Aunt Elizabeth, when she’d wondered if she might like to train as a nurse. Since working at Tamarack State, and discovering both how comfortable she was around us and how little she was disturbed by the blood and mess of illness, she’d begun thinking about it more seriously. In the meantime she was grateful to Irene, who let her spy on our insides without judging her ignorance. Another person might have refused to teach her anything about X-rays because she knew so little physics or chemistry, declined to show her diseased lungs when she knew so little about healthy ones, been reluctant to let her develop an X-ray image before she’d handled a camera. But Irene, whose own path had been haphazard, didn’t seem to mind Eudora’s unsystematic approach.

  Over the course of several nights, she’d told Eudora a little of her history. In Kraków, she’d been raised by her father, after her consumptive mother died. At university she’d studied chemistry and married a photographer but been widowed after only three years. Still in her twenties, she’d decided to come to America to join her sister and her husband, an energetic Czech. For a year, until she too was diagnosed with a mild case of tuberculosis, she’d shared a house with them in New York. Then, at the suggestion of her brother-in-law, who’d finished his medical training by then, all three of them had moved to Colorado Springs, which was filled with people curing in the mountain air.

  Not long after Roentgen’s discovery of the rays, she’d been drawn into the excitement. With some borrowed equipment she made plates of her brother-in-law’s chest, and then of her own; once she saw the scars left by her own disease she couldn’t stop experimenting. Her brother-in-law, equally astounded by the discovery and the new possibilities, had been eager to take advantage of the medical applications while she, with her background in chemistry to guide her, quickly learned to make the most of the equipment. Together they’d built a little studio.

  “A wonderful room,” she’d told Eudora. “In the back of Joe’s medical office; one of his patients donated the money to build it in memory of his son. Eventually I had my own darkroom, my own induction coil and a tube stand and battery; I ordered them from an advertisement in Scientific American. Later I replaced that apparatus with a much stronger one. I made my first fluoroscope, and my first plateholders. I looked into my own hands, the chests of my sister and her friends, cats and frogs and the trout we caught in the river.” She’d had work, she continued, almost as soon as she’d set up the apparatus. Joe had encouraged his associates to bring in patients with broken bones, and soon others came as well, people with old fractures that had healed poorly, those suspected of having kidney stones. It was practice, she said, that she could have gotten in no other way.

  In the glow of the darkroom’s ruby light, taking notes as Irene mixed the chemicals and floated the film in one solution and then another, Eudora had listened intently and tried to remember everything. Once or twice, when she’d had to ask a question, the hint of irritation she saw on Irene’s face reminded her of how patient she’d been so far. “Sometimes,” Irene had said a few days ago, “the best way to learn is just to experiment on ourselves.”

  Which was how Eudora had reached this evening, finally about to see the inside of her own chest. She’d unlaced and stepped out of her shoes, removed her blue apron so the buttons wouldn’t interfere, and slipped off her blouse. Dressed only in her skirt and stockings and camisole, she stood motionless in the darkened room between the two upright poles of the tube holder. Irene adjusted the height of the crossbar. Inside the suspended wooden box, hidden except for the rounded surface gleaming through the glass port, the powerful new tube—a high-vacuum Coolidge tube with a tungsten target that Irene had recently acquired—warmed up.

  Irene, who’d been peering at the coated cardboard of the fluoroscopic screen, moved behind Eudora and opened the port so she could replace one lead diaphragm with another. “That should work better,” she said.

  Returning to the screen, she lowered her goggles and peered through the dark red glass. “Lift your arms. When I tell you to, take a deep breath and then hold it. Ready?”

  “Ready,” Eudora said.

  “Lovely,” said Irene, before falling silent for half a minute. “Release it—good. Now just breathe normally for a bit.”

  What, Eudora wondered, was she seeing?

  “Excellent lungs,” Irene said approvingly. “If you give me another few minutes I’ll take a radiograph.”

  In the darkroom, earlier, she’d shown Eudora how to load the metal holders with the floppy sheets of nitrocellulose film. The glass plates she’d used before weren’t available anymore, she said; they were made in Belgium. But the film had its own advantages, which now, as she moved Eudora away from the tube holder, took some measurements, and positioned another stand, Eudora began to see. The film holder slipped weightlessly, easily, into the frame on the stand.

  “Hold your breath again,” Irene directed. Something whirred and she looked intently at her timer. “I like this tube, it’s so much easier to use. The exposure time is far shorter, too—but it almost makes me unnecessary. The old gas tubes were so idiosyncratic that it took a real knack to get good images using them, but these—I could train you to use this in a couple of months. You can step away, now.”

  The red goggles lay on the table; Eudora picked them up and peered through them but could see nothing. As she handed the goggles back, Irene said, shyly but also with a note of pride, that in her early days she’d done so many experiments that she’d been asked to meetings, and published papers, and consulted for doctors all over the country. “I made a reputation in Colorado,” she confided, “almost by accident. But it was enough that, when the doctors here decided they wanted someone to set up and run an X-ray facility, they contacted me despite my lack of medical training.”

  “They didn’t mind that you…?”

  “That I’m a woman?” Irene curled her lip. “They probably did mind. But not enough to keep them from hiring the best person they could for the pitiful salary they offered.”

  Interesting, Eudora thought. Those little spurts of anger, so seldom released. “Is that when you hurt your hands?” she asked. “When you were setting up the equipment here?”

  Irene tucked her gloved left hand—we’d all been curious about that glove,
which she never explained but which was always present, and always some shade of violet—into her pocket, holding out her naked right hand for Eudora’s inspection. The skin had the color and texture of leather and three nails were missing completely, while the other two were thick and misshapen, veiled by overgrown cuticles. She stretched out her stiff fingers before closing them into a fist.

  “I think I did most of the damage in Colorado,” she said, “during the late 1890s and the early years of this century, when we didn’t have any idea that the rays might be harmful. I used to test different Crookes tubes by holding my left hand between the tube and the fluorescent screen and then adjusting the anode until I got a good image.”

  Before long, the skin on her left hand had dried and cracked, and then the hand had swollen as if she’d burned herself. Later the skin came off completely along with her fingernails and the little hairs. But this, she explained, had happened to everyone; it had seemed like a bad sunburn and everyone assumed that the effects of the Roentgen-ray dermatitis were temporary. They’d used petroleum jelly to protect themselves, and gloves. Later, when news began to spread about some who’d worked with the machines, she’d covered her hands with tinfoil and also built some different shielding for the beam. Perhaps those efforts had saved her right hand from the worst damage.

  “Probably I was too late for this one, though,” she said, freeing her left hand from her pocket and turning it front to back as if inspecting the dark violet cloth for holes.

  “Can I see?” Eudora asked.

  Irene shrugged. Until then, she’d shown only Dr. Petrie what lay beneath the glove. “If you want.” Slowly, pulling from the tip of each finger, she peeled off the glove, taking with it three of the fingers as well.

  “Surgical cotton,” she noted, holding the glove out for Eudora’s inspection. “I stuff the finger holes to look like a normal hand, so people don’t have to think about what’s underneath.”

  Raw-looking stumps where the three middle fingers had been amputated; open sores on the little finger, which was also missing its top joint; dark thickened patches, like calluses, in places where no callus would ever be. On the back of the hand and thumb, Eudora saw crusty growths, but nothing anywhere resembling normal skin.

  “For years,” Irene said, looking down at her hand, “I corresponded with a woman in San Francisco, another early experimenter with X-rays. Before I came here I learned that her hands, which had been very bad for some time, had gotten much worse and that she had a kind of cancer. She had her fingers amputated, then her left hand at the wrist, then at the elbow, and finally at the shoulder, but by then the cancer had already spread to the nodes in her armpit. A year later she died. Almost the same thing happened to Mr. Edison’s assistant. The last time I saw him he’d lost his whole left hand. Before he died the doctors had taken one arm off at the shoulder, the other at the elbow.”

  She looked down at her ungloved hand as Eudora tried to imagine the whole thing gone, and then the arm: impossible. “Not long after I came here the trouble with my own hands began,” Irene continued. “I had first my index finger and then these other two amputated. It’s happened to so many of us—doctors, people who manufactured and tested the tubes, other technicians: how can I complain? I can still remember the first exhibition of the rays I saw, at a county fair. A line of us, walking one at a time before the open fluorescent screen: on one side people clothed in their flesh, on the other the bones revealed. After that, all I wanted to do was learn how to control those rays, so that I’d be able to see inside.”

  “Does it hurt?” Eudora asked.

  “More than you can imagine,” Irene said calmly. “It keeps me from sleeping. At night I walk around my room with one hand or the other held up above my head, wrapped in wet bandages or slathered with different ointments. Even Dr. Petrie doesn’t know what will happen next, what part will have to come off.”

  She peered sharply at Eudora and then reached for her glove, adding, “But we never do know what will happen to us, really—and nothing like this will happen to you, the equipment is perfectly safe now. That’s what the lead lining in the tube holder is for. And the diaphragm. Why don’t you move over here and take a turn yourself?”

  Following her careful instructions, Eudora exposed a film of Irene’s chest. They skipped dinner, nibbling instead on some chocolate and crackers Irene kept in a drawer, and then Irene said that, although it was late, they might go into the darkroom and develop the images. When they were done they inspected the films with Irene’s viewing box.

  “Hold the narrow part up to your eyes,” Irene said.

  Obediently, Eudora grasped the handle and brought the black pyramid over her face. The bottom, covered by a sheet of glass, formed a rectangle eleven by fourteen inches, the same size as their largest sheets of film. The top narrowed and then flared out again into a shape like an eye mask, its rim padded with black fur that tickled her skin.

  “Now press the film against the glass, and face the electric light.”

  At first, as Eudora turned her head and the box uncertainly, she saw nothing. Then she found the light and the film lit up, the shadows varied and subtle. Sternum, diaphragm, and encircling ribs, also a thickened central area, which meant nothing to her inexperienced eyes. When she asked what that was, Irene took the box and held it to her own face. Then Eudora saw what she’d looked like: a chimera with a woman’s body and a woman’s mouth, eyeless above a flared black snout that shimmered and refracted light and seemed, as it moved this way and that, to be sniffing for food.

  Irene returned the box. “Look at that thickened area again,” she said. “Can you see it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good—now follow my hand.” Reaching around the bottom of the box and into the illuminated field, her finger moving like a submarine through the shadows, Irene pointed out Eudora’s backbone and the outlines of her heart.

  After Eudora had studied the film a bit longer, Irene took it away and replaced it with the image of her own chest. “See the faint shadows clustered between the ribs? Those are tubercular scars, from when I was sick; that’s a classic presentation.”

  Again Eudora inspected the image closely. After a few minutes she removed that film from the glass, replaced it with the first one, and then exchanged them again, memorizing the differences.

  “You seem to have a gift for this,” Irene said. “Do you know who Madame Curie is?”

  Eudora nodded. “The Frenchwoman who discovered radioactivity with her husband.”

  “Polish,” Irene said. “But the Curies have long been heroes of mine, especially Marie. I’ve always remembered what she said about coming into her workroom at night and seeing her jars glowing on the shelves. That’s what made me study chemistry—I wanted my own life to be like that. Hard work but then, afterwards, something I’d made glowing in the dark.”

  Not once during the evening had Eudora thought of the metal hexagon lying on her coat, but now she remembered what Leo had said about his own years studying chemistry. For a second she wished he were here with her, listening to Irene.

  With her gloved hand Irene tapped the image of Eudora’s chest and said, “In the end, though, I decided to stick with Roentgen’s rays. They’re mysterious and powerful enough for me.”

  “For me too,” Eudora echoed, thinking: Compared to what?

  “Madame Curie has embraced the X-rays now,” Irene said. “Even though she never studied them before. When the war started, she taught herself what she needed. Then she got various manufacturers to donate parts, and got rich women to give her their automobiles, and she turned them into mobile radiological units. Little curies, the soldiers call them. Each one is fully equipped, the dynamo driven by the automobile’s motor. She takes them to the field hospitals and helps the surgeons locate bullets and shell fragments. The soldiers think she’s a saint. When she can, she leaves fixed radiological stations behind. And she trains technicians, scores of them—she’s trained over a hundred peopl
e so far.”

  “Who?” Eudora said, struck by the idea.

  “Anyone willing,” Irene said. “Nurses, of course, and engineers—but also soldiers and others with only an elementary education. Photographers make excellent X-ray technicians, they’re already familiar with glass plates and film and how to use a darkroom and develop the pictures.”

  “Could I do that?” Eudora asked.

  “Anyone could,” Irene repeated.

  5

  SOMETIMES WE SPLIT into factions, half of us disagreeing with the other half over how to relate these events: should this come first or that, should this be emphasized more, or less?

  Show them, one side insists. Morris, Edith, Denis. Before they’re gone.

  We can’t, the rest of us argue.

  Why not? It would mean more, if they stood out.

  Less. It would mean less.

  Eventually we reach some agreement and move on. We can’t show everyone, and some—Irene was long overdue—have to show up before others. Days and nights that aren’t interesting, we skip. We do our best.

  Skip our fifth session then, which was only Miles saying more of the same. And although we love our movies—we don’t have much to look at here, beyond our own rooms, our slivers of porch, the walkways connecting the buildings, and the view which, although beautiful, is hemmed tightly by mountains and trees—skip November’s movie night, during which there were no raging quarrels and no new romances. Skip that weekend, too, which, without the gossip that usually followed a movie night, was unusually dull. By Monday we were already back to our routine, lying cold and damp on the porches. Reading, most of us: plodding through whatever we’d found, longing for something better. Ephraim looked up from the pages of the novel he’d been struggling with for a week and said out loud what he’d meant only to think: “Why would someone write this?” Beyond the railing, branches drooped.