The Air We Breathe

by Andrea Barrett

  For a minute, that idea hung before all of us. Then everyone was talking at once as Ephraim leaned forward in his chair, orchestrating the discussion and answering what questions he could; this was wonderful. We forgot to take our break, we forgot what time it was. When the dinner bell rang, Dr. Petrie, who’d stayed for the entire discussion, shook Ephraim’s hand and said how much he’d enjoyed himself. Ephraim beamed, and then brought him over to Miles.

  “I had my doubts about this,” Dr. Petrie said to Miles as the rest of us began heading to supper, “but I think what you’re doing here is a very good idea, as long as everyone’s health is up to it. I can see why Dr. Richards supported you, and I hope you’ll continue.”

  “It did go well,” Miles said. “Not quite what I expected, but…”

  His gaze was so openly assessing that Dr. Petrie ran his hands over his shirtfront to see if he’d lost a button. “Why don’t you join us again?” Miles asked. “Perhaps there’s something you’d like to talk to us about.”

  “I can’t talk about medicine, or treatments, or hospital policy,” Dr. Petrie said. “That would be quite against regulations.”

  “I can see that,” Miles said. “But perhaps there’s something else you’re interested in, that you’d like to share. Some travels? Something you’ve been studying?”

  Dr. Petrie considered the question. “I was in France last year. Touring battlefield hospitals, helping out where I could.”

  “I have a dear friend in France,” Miles said. “A kind of nephew. I’m always eager to learn what I can about conditions there. If you’d share your experiences, I’m sure the others would also like to be instructed.”

  Dr. Petrie said he’d think about it and moved away. Leo, who’d been eavesdropping, turned to Ephraim and said, “I hope he keeps coming. Our little learning circle expands…”

  “Did you think it went all right today?”

  “It went fine,” Leo said, patting his friend’s arm. “We all enjoyed it.”

  And in fact we had. We had a sense, then, of what our circle might be. What we might be. Suppose Bea talked about her union work and Kathleen about teaching music, Albert about the intricacies of forming incandescent lightbulbs and Pietr about his method for blanching celery? How much we might all learn! It was embarrassing that we’d needed Miles to get us started, but still here we were, and we were headed—well, someplace, though no one knew where. But after Ephraim spoke, we all felt pleased with the way we’d decided to spend our Wednesday afternoons.

  6

  YEARS AGO, A man came to Tamarack Lake from New York in the hopes of improving his health, married the undertaker’s daughter, worked in a bank, and then built the village’s telephone exchange. Resigning his position when he had a relapse, he began in 1912 to write a history of his adopted home. From deeds, contracts, old letters, newspapers, the reminiscences of guides and visitors, he reconstructed who started the bank, built the churches, organized the schools and the hospital. He wrote about when the last guest came to the Northview Inn, when the boathouse fell into the lake, what happened to Dr. Kopeckny and the first sanatoria. Who donated money to those institutions, and which doctors worked where. Comfortable in his retirement—he sold the exchange at a fine profit—and cared for by his wife, he worked at his project for years but never mentioned us.

  Sometimes we thumb through those pages, looking for traces of our lives and places where our histories overlap. Fires, accidents, holidays; holidays always bring complications, both down in the village and up here. Someone ends up in the infirmary, after having grown too melancholy to eat; someone wanders into the pond and nearly drowns; friends quarrel savagely. That Thanksgiving, which wasn’t any different, also had the disadvantage of interrupting our Wednesday sessions just as we were getting used to taking charge of the talks for ourselves.

  It didn’t help that the sanatorium staff, resentful at having to work that day, made it clear that they felt burdened. In the village, those caring for patients also felt that they were having the opposite of a holiday. More cooking, more shopping, more cleaning at the cure cottages and boardinghouses and hotels. The butcher worked overtime, extra porters unloaded extra trains, drivers took extra shifts. At Mrs. Martin’s house, Miles would spend the afternoon eating turkey with chestnut stuffing and giblet sauce, sweetbreads, tongue in aspic, duchess potatoes, and Mrs. Martin’s Nesselrode pudding served with boiled custard, quite unaware that in the kitchen, Daisy and Darlene were telling Naomi they were ready to quit. At the same time Eudora, across the village, would be wishing that she had someone to grumble to. She’d been looking forward to her days off. Irene had loaned her two textbooks, which she’d hoped to spend some quiet hours reading. Instead, as had been the case since she was old enough to wield a knife, and especially since her older sisters had married, her mother called on her to help with their elaborate meal.

  Not simply a turkey but also a ham, cornbread stuffing with oysters and mushrooms, clear soup with homemade dumplings, roasted squash glazed with maple syrup, potatoes mashed and scalloped and baked, heaping dishes of corn and carrots, tiny onions creamed and dusted with nutmeg, three kinds of pie. Even with the whole family eating steadily, all five brothers and sisters along with Sally’s and Helen’s husbands and babies, the food left on the table when they were done would have fed another household. Eudora cooked, served, ate, cleared, washed and dried dishes and put them away as if she didn’t have a job of her own; as if she were still a girl.

  In between chores she talked with Ernest, home from New York for the holiday, and with Sally, whom she hadn’t seen in weeks. By the time she finished in the kitchen everyone had moved toward the sofas and armchairs, preparing for the naps that followed her family’s holiday feasts as reliably as dessert followed the roast. One by one they nodded off, until the house felt as dead as the Northview Inn, which was slumping into the ground. Once every few months her parents would open the inn’s main door, look at the flies and the holes in the floors, bite their lips, and then do nothing with what they’d inherited. When Eudora’s father, who’d known the place in its heyday, spoke about the guests with their guns and their guides, his uncle presiding over a dining room filled with sportsmen from New York and Boston, it was as if not thirty but a thousand years had passed.

  When her father woke—he was snoring now—he would, she knew, return to his taxidermy workshop, hinting how much he could use her help. She’d give in and sit with him, watching the whole night disappear as the day already had. Rebelliously, she hopped on her bicycle and headed away from the lake and her family, toward Mrs. Martin’s house. Naomi might, she calculated, have finished serving dinner herself and be free for an hour or two.

  It was colder outside than she expected; she’d forgotten her gloves. She passed Eugene’s garage, the firehouse, and the telephone exchange where, in an unused room two floors above her, the amateur historian wrote the pages from which we were always absent. She passed the library, the theater, two of the churches, the bank, and the electric light company. Climbing the gentle slope of the hill, she passed the rows of cottages, each tier larger and more elegant. At Mrs. Martin’s house, which was near the top, she stopped and dismounted, leaning her bicycle against the tall hedge.

  Up the neatly tended pathway, up the steps to the paneled door. She tapped a brass dolphin against the plate and considered the enormous wreath, dripping with gilded pinecones and berries and gold bows stiffened with wire, that had just been hung. Stuffed chickadees with bendable wire legs and feet—her father’s work, she saw, as clearly his as the owl in the solarium at Tamarack State was the work of Uncle Ned—dotted the branches. What would it be like to live where her family wasn’t in evidence everywhere? Again she dropped the dolphin against the plate.

  To her dismay, Mrs. Martin herself opened the door, with the discouraging news that Naomi was in the kitchen, making cinnamon rolls for tomorrow’s breakfast and busy—absolutely busy—for the rest of the day. Stepping outside and pullin
g the door shut behind her, she added, “But it’s just as well; I’ve been wanting to talk to you.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Cold, isn’t it?”

  Then why not ask me in? Eudora thought. Gesturing toward her bicycle, she said, “The exercise keeps me warm.”

  “Good,” Mrs. Martin replied. “Because I know it’s convenient for you to accept a ride home with Naomi on Wednesday evenings, when she’s bringing Mr. Fairchild back from the sanatorium, but I was hoping you could get home under your own power for a while.”

  “Of course I could, but—” Eudora said, and then stopped, realizing that Naomi hadn’t told her mother about their driving lessons.

  “I want Naomi to have some time alone with Mr. Fairchild,” Mrs. Martin continued. “When they can talk without interruption.” Blandly, as if there were nothing odd about what she’d just said, she added, “How are your parents?”

  “I don’t interrupt them,” Eudora said. “Why would I? My parents are fine.”

  “Good,” Mrs. Martin repeated. “I thought your father was looking a trifle run-down.” Gazing steadily at Eudora, she added, “Miles is a wealthy man. A kind one too. I see the way he looks at Naomi. If she gave him a little encouragement—surely you want what’s best for her? You’ve always been her friend.”

  “I still am,” Eudora said stiffly, stepping back. “Would you tell her I came by?”

  She pulled her bicycle from the hedge and pedaled down the hill and back along the village streets, wondering, as she overshot the turn to her house and continued westward, how Mrs. Martin could understand so little about her own daughter. Always she seemed to miss what was most obvious, including the fact that in the past two years, Naomi had come close to running away half a dozen times.

  Ahead Baker’s Ridge loomed, black against the graying sky and already casting the village into shadow. Eudora pedaled faster, remembering how Mrs. Martin’s clumsiness had helped bring her and Naomi together. Although her aunt employed Naomi’s mother, they might not have become real friends if she hadn’t found Naomi weeping stormily one afternoon under a spruce near her Aunt Elizabeth’s house. Mrs. Martin had visited the school that day, delivering one of her lectures on home economics, and at first Eudora suspected that Naomi was weeping with annoyance; the lecture had been very dull. Instead, Naomi confessed that her mother’s newest boarder, a Mr. Elliot, had that morning pulled her into his bathroom as she’d dropped off his clean towels and then stood there, beaming and naked.

  “And then,” Naomi had said—but Eudora, transfixed by that image, had heard nothing for a minute.

  “It’s not as if this is the first time either,” Naomi added. “Other men do things like this, like they think their weekly fee covers me along with their meals. Whenever I try to tell my mother she claims I’m exaggerating, or if someone really did say or do something he didn’t mean it, it was just a passing weakness brought on by fever.”

  “They touch you?” Eudora said. They’d been, she thought now, thirteen and fourteen then.

  Naomi shook her head impatiently. “They don’t really do anything—they’re so feeble, most of them, I could push them over if I had to. But just listening to them, and the way their eyes crawl over me when I’m serving meals—and then this.” She leaned back against the tree and gestured toward the house. “I was going to see if your aunt would talk to my mother about it.”

  “Maybe,” Eudora said, thinking of her aunt’s firmness with her housekeepers, “that’s not the best idea.”

  Instead she’d talked to Naomi herself, the two of them circumnavigating the lake as Naomi complained about her mother and her chores at the house. Eudora, who had similar chores, was surprised to learn how much Naomi disliked them. At her Aunt Elizabeth’s cure cottage, where she helped out after school and on weekends, she’d found that she liked being useful. Her oldest sister, Helen, had married and had twin daughters by then; Ernest had already moved to New York and Eugene had started sharing quarters above the garage with his two friends. Sally was about to move to Plattsburgh, leaving her—always the baby, the one everyone forgot—with no one to talk to and nothing to do. Her father stayed in the shop out back, struggling to keep up with the changing fashions in taxidermy, always a few years behind. Her mother lived in the kitchen, cooking as if all seven of them were gathered at the table, surprised each time the dinner hour brought only Eudora and, blinking and covered with sawdust, her father. Only at her Aunt Elizabeth’s did she feel she was learning something new each day.

  “My aunt tells me to look closely at everything around me,” she told Naomi. At the far end of the lake, the wooden park benches were spattered with rain and so they kept walking. “Get to know the boarders and their habits, so I can anticipate what they need. Get to know the house and its needs. She says a house like hers is alive, it’s like a giant organism.”

  “Not our house,” Naomi said. She laughed and startled a handful of frogs in the reeds, who woke and plopped indignantly into the water. “Ours is just a business. Everything my mother does, including the way she uses me, is about efficiency.”

  Naomi, Eudora soon learned, shared her own curiosity about the outside world and was equally stubborn, and equally independent. Tiny, vigorous Miss Olafson, who was fluent in five languages and who taught first Eudora and then Naomi, pressed armfuls of extra-credit reading on them and encouraged their habit—broken only last year—of reading together. Tromping in the woods or bicycling together for miles, they’d talked without stopping. George Eliot’s work had propelled them up and down mountains, while Tolstoy had pushed their bicycles to Lake Placid and Samuel Butler had helped them skate in circles. From the characters revealed in books they moved on to themselves; what they were good at and what they hated, what they might do someday. Naomi was fascinated by the swirl of voices and conflicting desires that Eudora, within her large family, calmly negotiated, while Eudora was amazed by the way her new friend drew.

  “The pictures just come,” Naomi said. “My hand decides. I can be thinking about one thing and my hand will pick up a pencil and draw something entirely different.”

  My hand: she said this as someone else might say, My dog. Eudora would have found this ridiculous except for the likenesses of people and objects she’d seen pour fluently from Naomi’s pencil while they talked about something else. As a child she too had loved to draw, but her gift had abandoned her abruptly and it astonished her to see someone do without thinking what she could now do only with difficulty. Equally startling was the way that Naomi referred to the other selves jostling rebelliously inside her. The person whom Eudora knew was not, Naomi claimed, the Naomi who slaved for her mother at the house, the Naomi who’d once lived near Philadelphia, or the Naomi who stood by a frozen creek on a bitter winter’s night, baring her throat and chest to the rays of the moon.

  Those were the moments when Eudora had most fiercely wanted to understand what it felt like to be Naomi. She herself had two hands that did what she asked and were strong and competent, one self that sometimes wanted different things but was always, clearly, her self. How dull, compared with Naomi’s dramas! And how little, she thought—she’d reached the top of the ridge, where the wind cooled her face and a delicious downhill ride awaited—she knew of those dramas now. She could just barely admit to herself that, since starting work at Tamarack State, and particularly since getting to know Irene, she saw Naomi much less.

  NOT UNTIL AFTER supper the following day did Naomi escape from her mother’s house. Exasperating to be trapped for so long; more exasperating to learn only at lunch that Eudora had come by to see her yesterday. Why, Naomi thought furiously, did her mother think it was reasonable to withhold a message overnight? Through a cold mist she walked down the hill and through the village, moving between the streetlamps’ cones of light and the dark wedges by which they were separated. At the far end she turned up the flagstone walk leading to Eudora’s parents’ house.

  “Come join us,” Mrs. MacEachern said, openin
g the door and welcoming her in. “We’re just finishing supper—I know Eudora will be glad to see you.”

  Naomi moved through the cluttered hall and into the crowded, pleasantly untidy dining room, so different from her mother’s crisp arrangements. A piece of oilcloth over the table, in place of starched white linen; gingham napkins and a pair of shaded lamps; mismatched silverware and big crockery bowls. She sat in the chair Eugene pulled out for her, accepted the plate Mrs. MacEachern passed her way, and, although she’d already eaten one meal, savored the turkey hash and sautéed greens and cornbread with fresh butter. Eudora’s mother was every bit as good a cook as her own, with less fuss and, as far as she knew, no recipe books at all.

  Around the table were Eudora and her parents, Eugene and two of his friends from the garage, Sally and her children but not her husband, who’d gone out to visit someone else, and Ernest, whom Naomi almost never saw. When she and Eudora were still girls, he’d bolted from the workshop out back and, without discussing his plans with anyone, gone to New York City. Six months later, back for a visit, he announced that he’d found a place as an apprentice in the taxidermy studio at the Museum of Natural History and had no intention of returning home to live. Since then he’d done well enough that he now had several people working for him.

  If she had an older brother, she thought—older, not younger; she never thought of Thomas—whom she could ask for help and who could show her the world, everything would be different. Leaning over, she asked Ernest what he was working on now.

  “An elephant,” he said, and laughing as her eyes widened. “For a diorama, a complete African scene to go in one of the first-floor halls—it’s great fun, really. Fascinating.”

  She listened as he described the huge, heavy pieces of hide, barktanned for half a year before being hoisted, dripping wet, over a form coated with wet clay that would capture the shape of all the wrinkles. Seven years ago, when he’d left, he’d been a quiet, clumsy, somewhat lumpish boy whom everyone ignored. Now, as he leaned back in his chair, his legs spread and his arms relaxed, he exuded an easy confidence that made her wish she knew him better.