Leo looked up. “Bad?”
“Worse than bad,” Ephraim said. “But I’m at fault here too—why am I reading it?”
“Why have we been playing with an Erector set?” Leo said, making a face. “Grown men—I get so bored that parts of me aren’t even awake enough, anymore, to know what the other parts are doing.”
“I built that little model of a skyscraper,” Ephraim admitted.
“You made that?”
Ephraim nodded, wadding up a piece of paper and tossing it into the basket between their chairs. “When I was first in New York,” he said, “I was determined to work in one of those buildings someday, high up in a room with big windows, looking out on the city—”
“What did you think you’d be doing in there?”
Ephraim laughed. “That was the trouble—I didn’t even know enough to imagine the work.”
Leo waited for more—he was always interested in Ephraim’s stories—but instead Ephraim blinked, bent his head, and returned to the novel he’d just denounced. A line from a long-ago physics class appeared inside Leo’s head: A body in motion tends to stay in motion; a body at rest tends to stay at rest.
With that, his own head bent as well. Secretly pleased that he’d uncovered something better from the latest box of book donations, secretly ashamed that, having found something delightful, he hadn’t yet shared it with his friend, he returned to H. G. Wells’s The World Set Free. The first few pages had been dull but soon the pace had picked up, and now he was caught up in a futuristic world—1940, 1950, was it possible he’d live that long?—in which a new energy derived from atoms liberated people from all toil and, after one last terrible war, rendered war pointless.
He turned the pages, following the skilled bomb-thrower who, grasping the pitcher-like handles of a spherical atomic bomb, bent his head to the cold metal surface and bit off a little celluloid tab. Air rushed in, the reaction began; the thrower crouched in the flying machine and hurled the bomb down onto the target. The ground welled up in a great volcano that would seethe and seethe—forever?
That page he read again. Those used by the Allies were lumps of pure Carolinum, painted on the outside with unoxidised cydonator inducive enclosed hermetically in a case of membranium: what kind of chemistry was that? Yet so many astonishing things had been discovered in the few years he’d been away from his studies that even this might be true. Herschel, one of his companions at the polytechnic in Odessa, would know; he’d gone to England instead of America and found work as a chemist at a dye works in Manchester, from which he used to send enthusiastic letters. Once he’d described a meeting at the local literary and philosophical society, to which he’d gone expecting the usual reports on bird migration or new mining techniques. Instead a physicist named Ernest Rutherford had discussed the inner structure of the atom, which he’d proved was not a solid ball at all but a tiny nucleus tucked inside a whirling cloud of negative charge. It was so exciting, Herschel wrote, that he’d wept—which Leo, reading the page on the stone jetty at the sugar refinery, his hands black with carbonized bone from the char house, had wanted to do himself. That nucleus, it seemed, played a role in Wells’s new world. Absorbed, he continued to read, while Ephraim moved his eyes back and forth across the lumpy print, dreaming of Rosa and his girls.
WHEN MILES ANNOUNCED, at the end of our sixth session, that he was finished speaking and that it was time for the rest of us to take over, we talked for a while about who should address the group next, and in what order. Several of us wanted Leo to talk—we all longed to know more about him—but a majority felt that those who’d been confined to Tamarack State the longest should get to talk first. Finally we voted that Ephraim should begin, followed by those who’d been here more than a year. Later there’d be time for Leo and any other new residents who joined us. And so, on an afternoon when it was snowing heavily, white flakes blowing in sheets across the field, Ephraim left the boring novel on his porch and came down to tell us a story.
Sixteen of us were in the solarium that day, including the five women who’d responded to the invitation Eudora had hung in the women’s annex. Dr. Petrie, who’d dropped by out of curiosity after hearing some of us discuss the sessions, was also there; he meant to stay only a few minutes but he settled into a chair and listened intently, occasionally pushing a hand through his wiry hair. Most of us knew that Ephraim had been an apple farmer, but not how he’d become one. And although he’d spoken often of his daughters and his wife, he’d said little, until that afternoon, about his past or his daily life on the farm near Ovid.
“I lived in Minsk when I was very young,” he began, “but almost all I remember from there is the smell of the air. And our crossing.”
His Yiddish he claimed he’d learned not in Minsk but on the Lower East Side, where from the age of eleven he’d lived surrounded by people from the place his family had left behind. Like most of us, he had worked too hard, been paid too little, eaten poorly, spent hours arguing about politics but never seen anything change. After following his father and his brothers into a sock-knitting factory, he’d taken evening classes that got him nowhere; gone to the Yiddish theaters and seen plays that made him homesick but also infuriated him with their sentimentality; dreamed about escaping from his cramped flat, his cramped life—and never, until he met Rosa and her family, thought to leave the city.
We’d lived some version of that life, if not in New York then in Utica or Binghamton, Syracuse or Rochester, and we nodded; we knew how that went. While we thought about our old lives, Eudora, whose bedroom shelf was now adorned with the gleaming model Leo had given her, thought about why he’d made it. She was trying to imagine what she’d be like if, in one country, she’d been highly educated, fluent in several languages, knowledgeable about music and theater and chemistry, while in another, across the ocean, she’d been turned into someone barely fit to blast rock for a subway tunnel. Compared to Leo or Ephraim, she thought, she might have lived inside a shell. Her mother and her aunt had left England as tiny girls in the care of their parents, wanderers themselves; the gray-haired man with the deeply lined face who occasionally showed up at the house for a week, talking about a year spent in Siberia or six months in Tibet, and then looked at her mother and Aunt Elizabeth as if they were unusual rhododendrons—that was her grandfather, Max Vigne. Sometimes her grandmother Clara arrived with him, and sometimes not, but no one ever said why. On her father’s side of the family were stories about his mother, Nora MacEachern, who’d traveled from Ireland to Canada to Tamarack Lake, where she nursed consumptives and later trained Aunt Elizabeth to do the same. Nora’s brother, Ned, was born in Ireland too and before he built the Northview Inn had once traveled, as a cook on a ship, up near the North Pole.
But all that had happened so long ago. By the time she was born her relatives seemed to have lived in Tamarack Lake forever, their names—Kynd, Vigne, MacEachern—as much a part of the scenery as those who’d been here for generations. Walking through the shops downtown, she’d see an advertisement for one of Aunt Elizabeth’s cure cottages, a sample of her father’s work, or one of the placards, dusty now, which Ned had proudly hung when his nephew joined the business: Ned Kynd and Michael MacEachern, Taxidermy. Art and Craft. Everyone rooted in this small place from which she, despite her ambitious relatives, had traveled no farther than she could reach on her bicycle.
New York was his home, Ephraim continued while Eudora mused, and he’d been too ignorant to imagine a different kind of life. His whole self had been formed there, among the pushcarts and tenements and tiny stores that many of us knew well. He’d only managed to leave because of Rosa. “We met in a café,” he said, his whole face lighting up.
A sigh passed through the room as we remembered cafés, sitting in freely chosen places with our chosen friends and lovers. Or perhaps the sigh came from the obvious feeling with which Ephraim had spoken Rosa’s name. Of the husbands and wives and lovers we’d left at home, some waited patiently but others
had abandoned us; is it surprising we turned to each other? Some of the women now among us had joined the sessions not for the talks but because this was a place where we could mingle. More men had returned in their wake and among our group were now several couples—cousins, as we call them here; Polly and Frank, Nan and David—delighted to have a new meeting place.
Ephraim, who’d never chosen a cousin, went on to describe Rosa’s brothers and their friends, socialists who, in the old country, had marched in protests, distributed leaflets in factories, seen comrades exiled to Siberia—a place so enormous, they claimed, that this whole country could fit inside it with room left over. In Siberia, Leo remembered, the chemist Dmitri Mendeleeff had been born and raised and taught by his mother, who ran a glass factory and later managed to get her son across the thousands of miles to Moscow so he could go to school. Later, long before Leo was born, Mendeleeff had taught science for a few years at a school in Odessa.
“Rosa’s brothers told me that the climate of Siberia is horrible,” Ephraim continued, “but at least a man has room to breathe there. I don’t know if that’s true, but they convinced me that what we all needed was space.”
Why, he’d finally asked himself, had his parents settled in exactly the same place as everyone else who’d left the Pale? We knew the answer: family, familiar foods, the streets filled with languages we understood. Rosa’s brothers, Ephraim learned when he asked her to marry him, had answered the advertisements of a Jewish relief society that helped resettle families on farmlands far from the city. Free land, the brothers said. Land we will work together, crops we will sell in common. Fresh air, open space, no landlords or bosses; Siberia with a better climate. Ephraim had joined the group made up of Rosa’s extended family, three other families, and a few young men, and with them headed across the state, to the land near the Finger Lakes the society had set aside.
“I was twenty-one when we moved,” he said. “In the city, when someone said ‘farm’ to me, all I could imagine was the countryside around Minsk, which was filthy. But Ovid was beautiful. So beautiful—I felt like a fool when I saw it. I hadn’t known before there were places like that.”
Outside the sky had darkened while he spoke and we saw coming up the hill the headlamps of the night attendants, shining in the distance and then, as they reached the big curve in our road, winking out of sight. Leo, who’d chosen a seat at the end of the second row so that without being noticed he could watch Eudora at the opposite end of the front row, barely noticed the spectacle. The room smelled of scalded milk, warm chocolate, the felt in our slippers, and the disinfectant used on the floors, a trace of which clung to Eudora’s hands. The down on her cheek was visible as she turned to Naomi, who was whispering in her ear.
He’d managed, in the library, ten minutes of sensible conversation with her, after that first awkward discussion of his benzene skeleton. Enough to learn a few scant facts: she lived in the village, her aunt ran a cure cottage, she was the youngest of five. School—she’d liked school, and missed it. Didn’t he? Answering her, he’d responded to what he felt beneath the ordinary words: long, calm waves, which to him seemed to carry her real nature like music through the air.
He might, he imagined, tell her about his mother. About the forest he still dreamed of, or about the school where, briefly, he’d thrilled at the sight of Mendeleeff’s periodic table and the possibility of unknown elements that might fill the gaps in the array. Three had been found with exactly the atomic weights and properties predicted: germanium, scandium, gallium. Eudora bent her head, the clean line of her nose tilted toward Naomi’s tablet of paper, and reached for Naomi’s pencil. They were writing notes, Leo saw, half charmed and half annoyed.
Ephraim said that the deep narrow lakes had surprised him, as had the gentle, fertile land, the old farms, and the villages with their cobblestone buildings. In those surroundings they’d tried to shape a different kind of life—a commune, or so he supposed he’d have to name it. None of them had known anything about farming. In Russia they’d kept shops or traded goods; in New York they’d cut sleeves and collars and cuffs and pulled bales of fabric through the streets; in Ovid, they were supposed to grow apples. What did we know, Ephraim asked, about apples? But they’d made do, some going to work as laborers for the farmers in the area while others cleared the woods, began to build, planted vegetables and the first small trees in the orchards.
After the first crops failed, the relief society sent teachers and charities sent food; the colonists worked part-time for their neighbors and learned more as they did. Within a few years all the married couples had houses of their own and only the young men still lived communally, in the big dormitory that had been the colony’s first building. Even then, though, they’d continued the tradition established in their first days. At night, after the day’s work was done, they met in the common room of the dormitory for lectures and debates. Concerts, sometimes; several of the men had brought fiddles, others had concertinas or flutes. They’d read books out loud—together they’d assembled an excellent library—and argued over them; they’d taught English to the older people who hadn’t learned well, and Yiddish to the children who knew only English.
“Learning circles,” Ephraim said, “workmen’s circles—some of you will know what I mean, do you remember these?”
Again we nodded in recognition, laughing when Ephraim, inspired by his own words, had us rise from our wooden chairs and rearrange into a loose circle the two stiff rows in which we’d sat for weeks. Naomi fussed with her tablet as she stood up, tugging free the top sheet and slipping it under the others. Dr. Petrie joined instantly but Miles seemed ready to protest, clamping his hands to the seat of his chair until, seeing the rest of us move, he shrugged and moved as well. When we sat again Ephraim was among us instead of before us, describing how such circles had been part of daily life in Ovid, and how much he missed them. We might not have raised apples, but we knew what he meant.
Some of us remembered going to the Educational Alliance as children, learning English and American history and using the shower baths and the gymnasium, while others remembered adult classes there and elsewhere: a George Eliot circle, a mechanics circle. Those clubs and classes had changed our lives, but until Ephraim spoke, we’d forgotten how much we missed them. Everything here existed in lines. Our chairs lined up on the porches, our tables lined up in the dining room, the beds lined up in the infirmary, and the pictures of our lungs lined up in the files downstairs—isn’t it natural we’d forget what it was like to gather as equals and teach ourselves? For weeks we’d been like students peering up at a teacher, but now we entered as a group into the experience of one of us. For the first time we felt ourselves both inside and outside, here and there.
“We were poor,” Ephraim said, “but we made a good life.”
“But when,” Miles interrupted, “did your crops finally turn a profit? When did your colony become self-sustaining?”
“That was the fly in the ointment,” Ephraim said with a wry face.
They’d had houses, he explained, and a school and some scraps of culture, but they hadn’t made money. For a while they’d struggled on, until finally—we should have thought of this ourselves, he said—two Jewish industrialists from Syracuse, not so far away, had come to visit the colony and, after seeing the problems, decided to build a canning factory that would employ some of the colonists and provide a market for their produce.
“We canned apples,” Ephraim said. “We made applesauce and apple butter. All of us made the same wage and the owners marketed the goods; we turned a profit the first year the factory was running, which was a kind of miracle.” A few people left but most stayed, and as the cannery grew, some of the Ovid natives came to work there, while others attended the night school for adults.
“We ended up being part of the town,” Ephraim concluded, “and actually I know quite a lot about growing apples now. I never could have imagined this, but I’ve turned into a farmer.”
&n
bsp; “Not quite,” Leo said, and everyone laughed.
“He’s funny,” Naomi whispered to Eudora. “I like that about him.”
Eudora nodded but, having seen Naomi’s drawing pad as we rearranged our chairs, turned away before her friend could say more. She’d noticed Naomi flirting with Miles during their shared rides down the hill after the Wednesday sessions. A finger brushing the back of his hand, a gaze held a second too long—none of it, Eudora suspected, meant in the least. She’d done that herself when she was younger, testing her new powers as her father might test the edge of a knife. The instant Miles had responded and shown signs of finding her attractive, Naomi had drawn back, amused and, or so Eudora thought, a little repelled. Now her attention seemed, annoyingly, to have bounced to Leo. Following her friend’s covert glances, Eudora had also followed the moving pencil as it touched the pad; the page Naomi had hidden was covered with drawings of him. Leo in profile, Leo in three-quarters view, a study of Leo’s left ear.
The rest of us, who hadn’t seen those drawings, ignored the two young women and enjoyed our new seating arrangement. Miles had fallen silent after his question about money and seemed to be studying us; we ignored him too. Bea pushed her heavy red hair off her face and said, “Imagine what we could make of this place if it was just us, if all the doctors and administrators were gone and we had the land to raise food on, the laundry and the dining facilities to use; if somehow we could take care of each other…”
The Air We Breathe Page 7
