“There was a cloud,” he said. “A green cloud half a mile deep and four miles long moving slowly toward the trenches, with the wind.”
During the first minutes, the survivors told Dr. Petrie, the cloud caused simply a cough and a dry mouth. Before long, though, the gas—a corrosive poison, Dr. Petrie noted—stripped the lining from the bronchial tubes and the lungs and caused an instant inflammation. Men coughed up cupfuls of foamy yellow fluid; some coughed so hard they ruptured their lungs; men frothed and drowned in their own fluid before his eyes. A few who’d had some high school chemistry recognized the smell as chlorine and remembered that the ammonia in urine would neutralize its effects. Those few had told everyone they could to piss on their socks and handkerchiefs and stuff them in their mouths. Through the clouds rolling over them, they’d seen German troops bending over cylinders while peering through the single gleaming lenses of their hoods.
But truthfully, Dr. Petrie said, most of the soldiers he saw in the hospital had told him nothing; they’d choked and gasped and coughed and heaved and died. With the other visiting doctors and scientists he’d run around, uselessly trying to ease the men’s sufferings. By the time he saw them they were drowning, lying motionless and slowly drowning, their faces first blue and then finally black. He had thought then, he said—by now he’d crushed the index cards in his hand—that a nation that could in cold blood implement such a foul method of warfare should not be permitted to exist, should itself be strangled and made to suffer.
Across the circle from him, Miles, who had grown very pale, gripped his knees. “They should,” he whispered.
Anyone might have said something here; a number of us had relatives, or had once had relatives, either in that sprawling chunk of Europe now called the Central Powers or nearby, in places overrun by them. We hadn’t done this, not us, not people we knew—but then, who? Leo and Ephraim, startled by Miles’s muffled comment, exchanged glances. Dr. Petrie took a long, raspy breath and then continued.
“Since I couldn’t help directly,” he said, more quietly than before, “I tried to learn what I could from the deaths of those men, in the hope of helping to develop suitable protection. At the autopsies I attended I saw the lungs push forward the instant the chest was opened, running with frothy yellow fluid, the sight as bad, perhaps worse, than the most grossly tubercular lung, and this made me wonder if—”
Miles’s hands slipped from his knees. His lips, turning as pale as the rest of his face, opened, and he fell to the floor in a faint.
AFTERWARDS DR. PETRIE could not believe what he had done. Our circle of wan, unhealthy faces gazing at him so earnestly—what had he been thinking, talking to us about ruptured lungs? Now, when we’re all thrown so much more closely together and have so little privacy, he will sometimes admit that back then he’d been lonely and that, although he’d worried about joining our circle on terms of such equality, at the same time he’d been unable to resist the lure of our weekly gatherings. Also he admits that, once he started, he’d simply forgotten his audience. Only when Miles slumped to the floor had he understood what he’d done.
The meeting ended in chaos, most of us stumbling out, frightened and worried, as Dr. Petrie resuscitated Miles with Eudora’s help. A few minutes later, he eased Miles into Naomi’s car and then offered to drive down with her, in case Miles felt faint again.
“He’ll be fine,” she said, at the same time squeezing Miles’s hand reassuringly. “It’s just—your story made him think about his friend Lawrence, I think. Come if you want.”
What an idiot he’d been. After stumbling out a string of apologies he sat silently in the back seat, appalled by what he’d done, and then at Mrs. Martin’s house hastily explained what had happened before escorting Miles up to his beautifully furnished room.
“I have no children,” Dr. Petrie told Miles, easing him into the clean, fresh sheets and pulling up the blankets. “No family at all. I sometimes think that makes me insensitive to the attachments of others.”
Miles reached for a light brown shawl and said, “Lawrence’s father gave me this.”
What was it made of? Dr. Petrie wondered as he draped it over Miles’s shoulders. Cashmere, musk ox, something rare and costly; it was amazingly soft: alpaca, perhaps? Everything in this room, he could not help noting, from the silver brushes to the monogrammed pajamas and fleece-lined slippers, was expensive and elegant, whereas his own rooms at the sanatorium were dreadfully bare and his few luxuries—a heavy robe, that green tartan scarf—had been left to him by grateful patients whom he’d lost.
“Edward hates the Germans too,” Miles continued. “As much as you do.” Then, while Dr. Petrie shifted uneasily from foot to foot, Miles told him about the torpedoed ship and the sunken dinosaur bones, and he displayed first Edward Hazelius’s letter and then Lawrence’s painful note.
“I hated hearing about the gas, and what you saw,” Miles said, returning the papers to his bedside table. “But it’s a relief to know that you aren’t neutral about this war either.”
“Neutral’s an odd word,” Dr. Petrie said noncommittally. His time in France had made him furious, but not only with the Germans; everyone was to blame, he thought, the generals especially. Before Miles could assign to him more opinions he didn’t truly hold, he turned away. “You need to rest,” he said. “Is there anything else I can do for you, before I go?”
With a sigh Miles eased himself back into the soft mound of pillows. “May I come visit you before our next session? I’d enjoy some time to talk alone.”
“It would be my pleasure,” Dr. Petrie said, noting that his feet were, meanwhile, backing him efficiently from the room. He didn’t share Miles’s feelings about the Germans, and the way Miles had behaved in the car had further put him off. Carrying on about how dizzy and weak he felt; leaning into Naomi Martin’s shoulder while she tried to drive and begging for sympathy: he’d hated to see that.
All through the following day he hid in the X-ray laboratory, trying to review our films but still upset at what he’d done and disturbed by Miles’s embarrassing display in the automobile. That evening he entered our dining hall at ten minutes past six, when he knew we’d all be seated. In his clean tweed suit, with his high-collared shirt and his tidy, old-fashioned boots, he stood in front of the serving tables, so small despite his excellent posture that many couldn’t see him.
“What happened yesterday afternoon,” he said, “I—there’s no excuse, I’m sorry. I haven’t been sleeping well. So much bad news, lately, about the war; it wears me down. When I read certain things in the newspapers, they set off memories that upset me. That’s no excuse, though. There’s never an excuse for such behavior and I simply want to say again: I’m sorry.”
Our weekly sessions were far from secret—anyone might join at any time, and the solarium in which we gathered was visible from the corridor—but still, those who’d never attended had little idea of what we did and were baffled by Dr. Petrie’s remarks. Some thought, as the rest of us would learn later, that he was apologizing for mistreating a patient, and that that was why his hands were shaking.
For the next few days, as he made his rounds, he was unusually attentive, lingering longer by our chairs and fussing with the blankets wrapped around our legs, but by the following Wednesday he’d put the episode behind him. Waiting impatiently in his office on the second floor of Central, one floor above the dining hall and two above the X-ray facility, he’d forgotten the look on Miles’s face when he awoke from his faint, and he was wishing he hadn’t promised to talk with him. Already it was several minutes past three, and the thought of wasting this precious hour, when taking two hours away from his work for our session was already such an extravagance, made him wild.
He’d stopped work precisely at three, wanting to be ready for Miles mentally as well as physically; his pen was capped and lay along the edge of the report he was writing for the next staff meeting. If he picked it up and began again, Miles would certainly appear in m
id-sentence. If he sat here waiting Miles would never come, and he would have wasted a whole hour. If he got up and went to the window, scanning the grounds for Naomi’s Model T, either he’d see it and be annoyed at their slow progress toward his office, or he wouldn’t see it and would grow more anxious. If…
Clicking his teeth with exasperation, he sat down—eight minutes past three—uncapped his pen, and returned to the most recent set of autopsy reports. Charlie Goldstein, Frank Mistretta, Alicia Jurik; all had been in the infirmary for extended stays and each had ended by traveling late at night to the undertaker’s in the village. Behind them had followed young Dr. Dorschel, who, as Tamarack State lacked a morgue, carried a suitcase with his instruments tucked into their soft padded slots and returned after dawn with his reports. Perhaps, Dr. Petrie thought, he might recommend a raise for his young colleague.
As he read he made notes for his own report on a separate sheet of paper. Tomorrow or Friday he’d sit down with Irene, retrieving all the X-rays for each of the subjects and correlating what they’d previously read from those films with what the autopsies showed to have actually happened. Settling into the report on Charlie, feeling his mind sink into its familiar groove, he was unpleasantly surprised a few minutes later to hear, not Miles’s expected if tardy greeting but a conversation taking place just outside his door.
A female voice, which sounded annoyed, a male voice that seemed to be pleading; he couldn’t make out the words but the sound was distracting. An entire sanatorium with all its public and private rooms, the scores of sheltered corners both inside and out in which, as everyone knew and pretended not to, acts far more private than arguments took place—and this couple had to argue a foot from his office? Once more he capped his pen and lifted his shoes from the wooden footrest that a grateful patient, long since dead and autopsied, had built especially for him.
IN THE HALL, near two of the wooden chairs lined beneath the row of portraits on the wall, Miles—that was Miles out there—leaned closer toward Naomi.
A row of faces watched them: solemn men, in formal clothes, staring directly into the camera. Miles knew some of them—the governor, state representatives, members of the Board of Health and the Association for the Prevention of Tuberculosis—but at that moment he couldn’t have recognized his own mother. His whole frame was trembling. There before him stood Naomi, whom he’d almost let escape. During the drive up the hill, he’d meant to say what he’d been rehearsing in his mind all week, but he hadn’t been able to open his mouth and the ride passed silently. Then after they’d parked the automobile and walked toward Dr. Petrie’s office, Naomi had announced that instead of waiting for him in the corridor, she was going to see Eudora. Only as she’d turned to leave and as he, choking on all he’d meant to say, had reached toward Dr. Petrie’s door, had the words suddenly rushed from his mouth. “I’d like us to spend more time together,” he’d said. “In a different way, a more serious way—”
“My mother keeps me very busy,” she’d replied, looking toward the portraits.
Shy, he understood. And also caught off guard. He said, “Last week, when you held my hand in the car: that’s when I realized you understood about Lawrence. You’re the only one who does and when I’m around you I feel—you know what I’m feeling. Don’t you?”
“I have to go,” she insisted. She raised her hands and held them at her waist, palms toward him. “I promised Eudora…”
“You do know,” he said enthusiastically. “I’m so glad—I couldn’t wait anymore to tell you. It’s not that I lack willpower, but since last week I have had such a sense of our fragility—do you know what I mean? Our fragility. Time is so short, I assume that I’m getting better each day but I could just as well be getting worse. And if I am, I don’t want to die without having tried to get what I want. You must have felt this way yourself—why should we wait? Why should we put off saying what we really mean?”
He reached for one of her hands but stopped the instant she pulled back. Of course it was far too soon to touch her; she was young and it must be confusing, even embarrassing, to be talking about their feelings so directly. But the dark cloud that had filled his eyes during Dr. Petrie’s talk, the sense of the cold floor drawing him magnetically and the terror of waking without knowing where he was, longing for his mother and Edward and Lawrence but finding no one who loved him, only strangers, pushed him on.
“I don’t mean to rush,” he said more quietly, “but I want you to know how I feel, and I don’t want to waste too much time. It’s fortunate that we’re in the same household and that we have so many opportunities to see each other. Perhaps, though, we could also have a meal together outside your mother’s house, or take a ride together to Lake Placid?”
“I have to go,” she said, and darted down the hall. For a minute Miles, his body still vibrating, stood staring after her. Her shoulders, so slim and straight in her white blouse. Her waist, so small inside the belt that cinched the folds of her skirt, and below that—it wasn’t his fault, surely, that he noticed this; skirts were startlingly short now—her stockings visible above the tops of her narrow boots. So finely put together, so healthy and yet so diminutive that even he might hope to pick her up. Still imagining what it might feel like to circle her waist and lift her off the ground, he tapped on Dr. Petrie’s door, already twenty minutes late, and let himself inside.
There Dr. Petrie sat as Miles threw himself, without an apology, into the armchair across from the desk. There he sat, as, except for his time in France, he’d sat for nearly twenty years, listening not only to us but to our benefactors, our overseers, our families, and our enemies, listening as Miles recounted his conversation with Naomi. Once he interrupted to say, “You’re not dying,” but otherwise he was quiet. Dr. Richards had introduced him to other rich men, who like Miles ran important companies or managed huge plants; usually their reserve was impenetrable. Perhaps Miles was sicker than he’d guessed.
Longing to take his guest’s temperature and to have Irene look inside his lungs, he said, “Did you really tell her all of that?”
“It all came out of me at once,” Miles said, causing Dr. Petrie to imagine, unpleasantly, a spill of dark fluid. “But where’s the harm? She needs to know that the differences between us mean nothing at all.”
“Oh, dear,” Dr. Petrie murmured. Worse than he’d thought. “What is she, nineteen?”
“Eighteen,” Miles said. “It doesn’t matter. You see the way she is at our sessions, she listens with such attention, soaking in every scrap of information. She wants to learn, I know she does. And she has no money of her own. I could give her that, as soon as I’m better I could give her whatever she wanted. I know I could make her happy.”
“You want to marry her?”
“Twice before this has happened to me, I was very attached to two other women but both times my health interfered. I didn’t think it was fair to ask either of them to wait, or to burden them with my condition. But it’s different with Naomi. She’s grown up among people like me. She’s helped her mother all her life, she understands. And I am”—here Miles puffed out his concave chest, smoothing his thin lusterless hair with a hand on which, Dr. Petrie saw, the skin had the texture of crumpled paper—“You’re the only one I can say this to. I’m in love with her. If she’d let me court her seriously, I think there’s a real chance she could come to have feelings for me.”
“I don’t know what your own physician tells you,” Dr. Petrie said, looking down at his legs. His suit was getting shabby, he saw. Miles’s trousers were very much nicer, a soft matte herringbone. “But if you were a patient here, you would have heard me say this a hundred times: it’s not your job to fall in love, or out of love, or grow anxious or over-emotional or have arguments. Your job is to lie still, to breathe the fresh air. And to get better. Really,” he said, pushing together his autopsy reports, “really I will hear no more of this. Now if you would like to talk about something sensible, I would be delighted.”
“Better to keep them firmly in check,” Dr. Petrie said. “Best not to have them at all.” He looked at his watch. “We only have a few minutes before our session. Why don’t you tell me about one of your other trips, before you went to Canada. Where else have you been?”
Obediently, his heart racing, his mind moving kaleidoscopically among images of Naomi enjoying his house in Doylestown, picking snapdragons in the garden, walking beside him to Edward’s house with her narrow feet in fresh new pumps that were strapped at the instep and trimmed with bows, Miles smoothed the excitement from his face and, gazing just past Dr. Petrie’s chin, talked about Nebraska.
9
WE MISSED THOSE discussions; what we saw was the two men entering the solarium together, Dr. Petrie with his lips in the thin crinkled shape they sometimes formed when he was angry with one of us but trying to conceal it, and Miles flushed and feverish-looking, his hair stuck moistly to his head. They showed up at exactly four o’clock—usually Miles was a few minutes early—and were followed five minutes later by Eudora and Naomi, one pale and worried and the other pink. Four faces, none looking quite normal, arriving at odd times and in odd pairs—usually a sight like that would have fueled gossip not only during our break but for several weeks to come. We were so lethargic, though, that we hardly noticed what was going on.
This was our last session before Christmas, and we knew that several weeks would pass before we had another. Our December movie night had been a disappointment—the drama we saw had made us all uneasy, especially when the courtroom cheered on the cheating young wife as she cast blame for her theft on a Burmese businessman—but even so, we grew bleak thinking about the time until the next distraction, especially since the weather had grown so harsh. The snow, which had fallen generously around Thanksgiving, had melted and then withdrawn itself so that now, although the temperature had not been above twenty degrees for a week, the ground was flinty and dark. The evergreens looked black against the sky, even the ice on the pond looked dark; the birds were silent and the wind droned day and night. We were a day from the winter solstice, Otto had said earlier that afternoon. A day from the shortest, darkest day of the year. That we felt so low, so empty and dull, was the combined result of our disease and of the sun’s refusal to climb higher in the sky.
The Air We Breathe Page 11
