Before she could ask him anything else, though, Sally and her children rose and said it was time for them to go. In the confusion of farewells, Eudora made an excuse to her parents and handed Naomi her coat. Suddenly they too were outside, and alone.
“See why I came over to your house yesterday?” Eudora said as they headed for the lake. Her hair turned gold each time she entered the cone of a streetlight. “Our house, at the holidays…”
“My mother didn’t even tell me you’d come by until lunchtime today,” Naomi said. “I wish I’d heard you knock.”
“She didn’t tell you until today?”
The mist lightened as they reached the lake and a few stars appeared through the clouds, followed by the nearly full moon. Talking as swiftly as they walked, they caught each other up on the day’s events until, at the cove opposite the Northview Inn, Naomi paused and reached into her pocket.
“My mother’s contribution to the household this morning,” she said. “I had to take it down before Darlene and Daisy could see it.”
Eudora tilted the heavy piece of paper, trying to catch the moonlight. “I can’t read it,” she said. “The usual?”
“Close enough,” Naomi said, taking it back. Largely from memory, she recited what she’d found posted above the sink:
THIS WEEK’S HOUSEKEEPING NOTES
Spiderwebs—I have noticed unusual numbers of these in the corners of the ceilings, especially in the stairwells and in the hall where the kitchen meets the pantry.
Tray service—With four of our guests on trays at present, we need to be particularly careful that the last person served receives food as hot and attractively arranged as the first (Darlene, this applies especially to you).
Laundry—as always, I remind you: the water must be scalding, especially for the last rinse.
Christmas supplies—By the end of the day all seasonal decorations, inside and out, should be up and attractively arranged; all meals should be served on the Christmas linens; bud vases for the trays should be in combinations of green, red, and white.
“Your mother,” Eudora said, less amused than Naomi had expected. “Yesterday…”
She paused, looking uncomfortable. Then she continued, “She said the oddest thing to me before I left. She asked me to stop riding home with you on Wednesday evenings—because of Miles, she said. Because she wants you and Miles to have time alone together. She seems to think he’s interested in you.”
Naomi groaned. “Miles,” she said. “If she had just let me get a real job I never would have asked him for work.”
“Your mother’s not the one who’s been flirting with him,” Eudora pointed out.
“I haven’t been flirting,” Naomi said. “Not really.”
Eudora scuffed her feet through the damp leaves as if they deserved her full attention. In the silence Naomi almost believed her own words. The idea that her mother, characteristically alert to anything that might advance their lives, was pushing her and Miles together made her wince. “Whatever he’s thinking,” she said, “I’m certainly not interested in him.”
“He’s not so bad,” Eudora said. “At least he’s trying to do something.”
Naomi made a face and changed the subject, baffled that Eudora hadn’t grasped her dismay. Not a single person understood—she didn’t understand herself—how she could want and want and want. She wanted not to keep living in Tamarack Lake, under her mother’s thumb. Not to end up with some local boy, because no one else was around. And not to choose someone like Miles, just because she could make him tremble by flashing her stockings when she crossed her legs. Both she and Eudora had let the boys they’d known in school take them out to moving-picture shows, skating parties, hayrides. Some they’d kissed, but Eudora never liked to talk about that, and when Naomi tried to tell her about the time she and Liam O’Connor had done a little more than that in the woods last summer, Eudora wouldn’t listen.
But that had just been Liam, sweet and as dumb as a big yellow dog; Naomi had wanted to see what he’d do. Liam, the Dalton brothers, Mrs. Flaherty’s husband, Miles: what a waste, Naomi thought. What she really wanted was to know what being with someone felt like. What it was like to be in love, and with someone who didn’t act like a dog at the end of her leash.
Into her head flashed a picture of Leo Marburg, so intriguingly different from her despite his similar hair and eyes. His life before Tamarack State was a blank; no one visited him and he never mentioned brothers or sisters or parents or a girlfriend. Did he have a family? He had to be poor, or he wouldn’t be here. And smart—beyond the questions he asked Miles, he seemed to read a great deal and Eudora had shown her the toy he’d made from the Erector set. He’d been in this country for six years; he came from someplace overseas. When she was close to him she felt the way she used to feel in Chester, early in the morning, when she couldn’t imagine what the day would bring but was thrilled to get up and meet it.
He was lonely, she thought, and he had no idea how attractive he was. He seemed mystified by the way people moved toward him, often resting their hands on his arms as they talked. Sometimes she’d caught him looking her way, seeming to study her as she studied him, and she’d imagined rising, while whoever was speaking droned on, and slipping out into the garden as he followed her. There was a nook outside the solarium door, near the chimney and across from that fountain, and he pressed her into it, not clumsily like Liam but tenderly, moving his hands along her back as if he was investigating…
“…and Eugene said he’d ask you,” Eudora said. “What do you think?”
Naomi stopped. “About what?” She’d missed half a conversation, and the huge boulder, perched as casually as if a giant had dropped a pebble on the thumb of land protruding into the lake, loomed before her as if some other set of feet had carried her there.
“I’ve been talking for five minutes—what were you thinking about?”
“Just…” Naomi gestured toward the lake, the stars dimly reflected in the water but the distant shore invisible and the mountains lost as well. “Don’t you get tired of this?”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. Work. Our families, everything. How empty it is here.”
“It’s home,” Eudora said.
“Not for me,” Naomi said. “Not really.” She struggled to explain herself more clearly. “When I was tiny and we lived in Chester,” she began, “I used to wake up in my room almost wild with excitement, so anxious to run out into the garden, down to the river, everywhere, so thrilled to talk to the fishermen or the neighbors. If I found a flower that had fallen from one of the tulip trees, that was enough to make the whole day. A pinecone. The sight of the neighbor’s gray horse. Why is it different now?”
“Is it different?” Eudora asked.
“Mostly—you don’t feel that? I can see the world around me, I can draw everything in it. But now I’m outside it, on the edge somehow. It’s like being trapped on the wrong side of a window. If I could scratch through it, maybe I’d know what everyone else wants and feels.”
“You know what I feel,” Eudora said, stopping to look directly at Naomi, her expression wounded. “I tell you everything.”
Naomi shook her head. “You don’t,” she said. “No one really does, do they? That’s what I mean. You tell me lots of things but not what’s most important to you, what’s hidden inside. Everyone else I know does the same thing. We’re all like that and some days I can’t stand it, I just can’t stand it.”
Her eyes were wet, her voice was loud, she was flinging her arms about and Eudora was looking at her as though she’d hit a dog with the Model T—why was she saying this, why would she even want what she’d just said? Suppose Eudora knew what she really thought about Miles, about Leo, about Ernest or the men she passed on the street. Suppose Eudora, so helpful to the patients at Tamarack State, knew what she did to some of her mother’s boarders? The young women, especially—how she turned her back when they wanted to confide something sad,
how she dawdled over their fretful requests. It was unbearable the way that, despite all their money, they acted like their lives were over and they had nothing to look forward to. Unbearable that they confused her with the hired help and spoke to her in the same tone.
Eudora didn’t know that she sometimes stole from them. Little things, something small and part of a set, so that for months they’d go on searching for a cuff link, an earring, a lone calfskin glove. A single turquoise stocking, which wouldn’t be missed for weeks. Or letters, which she took just often enough to baffle them. The boarders left their mail in the basket on the sideboard, trusting her to deliver it to the post office. Once in a while she took a letter for herself, which was how she kept track of what they thought. Or she’d slip an incoming letter from the pile she brought home and then listen, her face blank, while they fretted about how their families never wrote.
Eudora reached for her hand, her face concerned. “What is it?” she said. “What am I missing?”
They’d reached the boulder and were heading back now, to the village and their families and their jobs and their lives that would never, Naomi thought, ever change except to grow still more confining. She drew the cool air into her lungs and tried to focus on the bare trees lining the path, so common that they’d given the village its name. Each limb lined with twigs, each twig dotted with tiny stubs from which the smallest, softest, pale green needles would sprout in the spring, darkening throughout the summer and then lightening again once the weather changed until they’d turn a beautiful yellow and, before Thanksgiving, shower to the ground. On the ground they looked like a golden veil. A hundred times she’d drawn tamaracks, which were pleasing in every season. Not once had she told Eudora or anyone else how she loved them.
“What is it?” Eudora repeated.
“Nothing,” Naomi replied. Everything, she thought.
7
DURING THAT LONG Thanksgiving weekend, the rearrangement of our chairs, which Ephraim had undertaken so casually during his talk, seemed to shake something loose in us. As we considered Miles’s assumption that each of us might know something interesting, we also began to imagine what we might polish up to share on a Wednesday afternoon. Old hobbies, new curiosities, hard-won skills. Books we’d loved in our earlier lives. Some found a new appetite for reading or conversation, some started journals, some began to think about their futures as well as their pasts: you might call this hope; it is always disturbing. Briefly the air around our porches seemed to flicker, as if the railings were electrified. On the ship from Hamburg to New York, Leo remembered, the sky had also felt like that.
His old friend Vincenzo, who worked in the char house at the sugar refinery, where Leo had started, sent him a letter that week. Three workers with Hungarian names had been dismissed after a warehouse fire, Vincenzo wrote angrily. On no more evidence than their friendship with a former crew member from one of the German merchant ships being held in the harbor. Dark thumbprints edged the sheet of paper, which was filled with large black words slanting toward the lower right corner. That’s how it is now—you’re better off out of it. Anyone born overseas falls under suspicion whenever anything happens. Sometimes I wish I was up there with you. Do they feed you well?
Leo touched the grubby sheet thoughtfully, a reminder of the days he’d spent packing bone black into the enormous filters used to purify the sugar solution. He and Vincenzo had worked side by side, so filthy they could be distinguished only by their teeth and eyes. Without Vincenzo to guide him—without Vincenzo, who’d shared his lunches of bread and cheese, shown him the cheapest place to have shoes resoled, taught him the best times at the public baths, and introduced him to the head chemist—he wouldn’t have survived.
He’d taken the job when he was starving, after weeks of searching for a position in a hospital or a university, anyplace with a laboratory. In Russian, or German, or sometimes in Yiddish, depending on the look of his prospective employer—he’d known only a little English when he’d landed—he explained the particulars of his education and his training. After a while he learned not to be surprised that no one understood. Not to be surprised that they thought he was stupid. By the time he got to the refinery, he’d learned to be grateful for anyone who’d offer a hand. New York was nothing like what he’d imagined but, crowded into the shared room at Tobias and Rachel’s flat, swilling the same cheap food and beer as his companions while working the same hard jobs, for long stretches he’d convinced himself that he was getting somewhere. He lived like the Irishmen and Sicilians and Ruthenians and Poles he met, the Finns and Jews and Germans, absorbed into the crowd—until, in the middle of a sentence or a task, he’d start thinking about something he’d read or studied, some experiment that had once captivated him completely. Then he’d stop listening to whoever was around him and withdraw his attention, feeling for those minutes utterly alone. Once more he was a boy, stirring sugar and potassium chlorate in a white porcelain bowl and trickling sulfuric acid over the mixture, stepping back as the smoke spewed and a cone of carbon rose in the dish.
Someone would bark at him, disgruntled to find him daydreaming, and then the boy who’d done that experiment disappeared. In place of his clean hands, his ambitions, and the alert, chattering, clever friends who’d studied physiology or the nature of the chemical bond, he had comrades who joined the preparedness parades in the streets. Along with them came employers who contributed to the cost of the gigantic electrified sign—ABSOLUTE AND UNQUALIFIED LOYALTY TO OUR COUNTRY—hanging over Fifth Avenue, and strangers who narrowed their eyes at the sound of his name. In Brooklyn, Vincenzo reminded him, people were changing their names. The explosion of Black Tom Island, which had occurred while he was in the infirmary and had been blamed on German spies and the German-Americans who sheltered them, had made the situation even worse.
Yet still, Leo thought, he wouldn’t have left the city on his own. How had Ephraim’s Rosa and her brothers found the courage? For them, as for him, New York had been home since getting off the boat. Only after the city ejected him had he understood that he hadn’t really believed in the rest of this enormous country. West of the Adirondacks, Ephraim claimed, New York State continued for hundreds of miles, green rolling land, rivers and valleys, town after town, and beyond the border Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nebraska…who could imagine Nebraska?
Leo read the letter again and then, reluctantly, went to bed, where he slept poorly. A few days later, he received a second, even more unexpected, letter. Opening his copy of our sanatorium newsletter, The Kill-Gloom Gazette, he watched, bemused, as a small white envelope with no address and no stamp slid from the stenciled pages and landed in his lap. Inside was a note in blue ink:
I love your dark hair, I lose myself in your eyes, your hands are beautiful. I dream of touching them. The rest of you, too. I dream about you. I dream about touching you.
No signature; no salutation. Perhaps it had been meant for someone else? After trying to ignore it for a day, he showed the contents first to Ephraim and then to the rest of the dinner table. One of the patients who helped produce the weekly paper must be responsible, someone said.
“A female patient, I hope,” Ephraim said, which caused a few smiles. Ian suggested the fat woman who collated the visitors’ list, while Frank said it might be the girl who’d written the poem about the dying chrysanthemums. Or perhaps the sad woman—Abigail? Adelaide?—in her early thirties who delivered the newsletters without meeting anyone’s eye.
Leo put the note aside but still couldn’t make himself throw it out. Something about it stirred him, not the content but the cryptic delivery, which lured him into spending more time in our excuse for a library. The women had separate borrowing hours, so it wasn’t as if he’d meet anyone there. Still, he sat where he was visible from the hall, reading old copies of Scientific American magazine while wondering if the note writer, passing by, might see him and make a sign. Who would be drawn to him? His pale face, thin legs, shrunken shoulders; the weight and streng
th he’d lost: he’d been proud of his body when he was younger, but now he was sure that if someone were ever interested in him again, it wouldn’t be because of the way he looked. Still, his last romance—they’d all been brief—had ended more than a year ago, and since then there’d been only work and sickness. It was just possible, he thought, that the person who wrote him was someone he might like. He sat in the library, reading an article about the geometry of snowflakes and inspecting the photomicrographs, while waiting for the note writer to show herself. Because of this, he missed the visit of Ephraim’s friend.
VISITING HOURS: late afternoon, twice each month, the same slot of time during which we met for our sessions but fortunately not the same day. The first Tuesday in December brought a scant crowd, which we’d expected; many would wait for the third Tuesday, when we’d be closer to Christmas. Benny’s sister came, bringing a potted plant. Ian’s mother came up from Albany. Polly was visited by her former fiancé, who’d broken off their engagement when she became ill but now, having heard from a mutual friend that she was cousining with a welder from Yonkers, was interested again. Two young men from the private sanatorium across the village called on Lydia—she’d sneaked over there one night for an illicit dance—and Otto’s nephew arrived with a box of homemade gifts from his family in Utica.
Ephraim, unusually, had a visitor that afternoon as well. At his insistence Rosa seldom came to see him; their daughters home in Ovid needed her, as did her parents, and he counted on her to keep the family going until he was cured. His own parents had once traveled up from New York, and a few young men from Ovid, who had other business nearby, had also kindly come by at different times, but Felix hadn’t been among them and so Ephraim was surprised to see him now.
The Air We Breathe Page 9
