Apathetically we drifted, at the beginning of this tenth session, into the empty circle of chairs we’d left the previous week. Several of our regulars were absent, too droopy even to rise from their beds, but this was less noticeable because we’d also gained a person: Irene Piasecka, who after listening to both Eudora and Dr. Petrie had decided to investigate our sessions for herself. Miles was sitting on one side of Dr. Petrie but the chair to his left was open, and she settled herself and then leaned over to whisper in his ear.
“You don’t mind?” she asked. “I’ve been wanting to see what this is like.”
“Of course not,” he replied. Late at night, in her laboratory, he’d talked for too long about the mistakes he’d made during his presentation and also afterwards, in Miles’s room; she’d listened patiently and tried to persuade him not to apologize publicly. Bad advice, he’d thought then, although usually he trusted her. Now, wondering if his abject little speech in the dining hall had somehow made possible Miles’s confession, he thought she’d been right but he was still taken aback by her presence. Was she here to keep an eye on him? Surely it was Miles, beaming across the circle at Naomi, who needed watching.
The rest of us missed both his moist glance and Naomi’s refusal to notice it. Irene tilted her head toward Dr. Petrie again and said, “If the talk isn’t interesting, I’ll leave at the break.”
“As you wish,” Dr. Petrie said.
But to her surprise, to everyone’s surprise, Arkady turned out to be an inspired speaker. Within minutes we were sitting upright, leaning toward him, our heads making the shape of an unfolding flower as he said he’d thought long and hard about what to discuss and had finally decided to explore something that had been on his mind since Ephraim’s talk.
Quite calmly and clearly—how had we failed, before, to realize Arkady’s strengths as a teacher?—he reminded us that Ephraim’s community at Ovid was only one in our country’s long history of communitarian and cooperative colonies. “Let me give you some context,” he said. And then, much as a teacher at his workmen’s circle might have done, he gave swift descriptions of the Shaker communities at Mount Lebanon and Niskayuna, the Owenite settlement at New Harmony in Indiana, Brook Farm in Massachusetts, and the Fourierist phalanxes in upstate New York, not so far from Ovid. He mentioned Oneida, also upstate, and the experimental colony of Topolobampo, in Mexico, about which he’d been told by a friend.
Irene sighed with pleasure, delighted to hear something, anything, clearly explained; even without having heard Ephraim’s talk she could see the connection between his community of transplanted urban Jews and the long tradition that Arkady described. Crisply he detailed still other attempts, considering the differences between the religious and the secular, the communities founded in settled areas and those on the edge of what had then been frontier. “All of them,” he said as she nodded appreciatively, “all failed despite the best intentions of their founders and participants.”
Except for the rattled quartet, the rest of us, along with Irene, listened intently until it was time to break. Over our milk and hot chocolate, Leo turned to Ephraim and asked if his community had known about all these others.
Ephraim, setting down his slice of buttered bread, said, “We didn’t think about it. We were shtetl Jews, then city Jews, before Rosa’s brothers got us involved in this—what did we know about Shakers and Harmonists? If we were thinking about anything, it was about the movements in Russia. One of Rosa’s cousins—”
But here, before Ephraim could finish his sentence, someone touched Leo’s arm. Once or twice, while Arkady was speaking, Leo had looked over at the woman with her frizzy gray hair pinned loosely above her narrow eyes: was she the person who, months ago, had taken his radiograph?
“You’re Leo Marburg, aren’t you?” she asked. She held out her right hand a few inches higher than was common, all but her index finger curved slightly toward her palm. He grasped that finger with the tips of his own, as she seemed to want, and shook it gently as she said, “I’m Irene Piasecka.”
It was her, then; the person Eudora had mentioned. Standing, she was nearly his own height. “A pleasure,” he said.
“Eudora’s told me about you,” she continued. Her left hand, he saw, was encased in a violet glove. “Your early education, your search for work in this country—”
Eudora talked about him? She’d arrived too late for him to say hello, and now she was standing with Naomi near the door. Worried that he wouldn’t get to talk with her, he shifted his weight and prepared to excuse himself. Then froze as Irene continued, “What she said made me wonder if you’d like to visit the X-ray laboratory and see some of what I’m doing.”
Him? She was inviting him? Astonishingly, she added: “You might be able to assist me, when your health permits, and if you’re interested.”
“I am,” he managed to say.
“Good,” she said. She smiled, touched his arm once more, and in response to Arkady’s gesture, headed back to our circle of chairs.
Later, Leo thought, he would find Eudora and thank her. For thinking of him, for arranging this introduction. His head hummed as he returned to the chairs, where the rest of us were also settling. How soon could he visit Irene’s lab?
Once more we bent our heads toward the center of our circle. Arkady, picking up where he’d stopped, explained that to him the most interesting thing was not the failure but the ardent idealism that, in the face of so much failure, attempted again and again to form utopian communities. Was this brave, or was it foolish? He talked about some of the people involved in those experiments, what they’d given up and what they’d hoped to gain. As his examples piled up, Leo caught one, lost the next, caught another, and half wished that Arkady would finish so that he might talk to Eudora about his prospects with Irene. Annoyingly, she was sitting three chairs away, where he could neither reach her nor see her face clearly.
She wasn’t paying attention either, although for a different reason. Arkady was talking about the same things that the book she’d taken from the village library described less elegantly, but despite her interest, she was too worried about Naomi to concentrate. Throughout the first half of the session Naomi had been drawing furiously, and now, her cheeks still pink, she was once more focused entirely on her pencil, moving it across her drawing pad. Beneath the point a building was taking shape, four wings of equal height surrounding an empty courtyard. A barracks, a prison? A version, probably, of the Fourierist compound Arkady had described—except that a figure, completely out of scale and crowned with Leo’s face and hair, filled the courtyard. Why him? But after what had happened earlier, she couldn’t blame Naomi for drawing whatever caught her eye. Anyone who wasn’t Miles must have offered some relief.
She glanced across the circle but Miles, chewing on his lips, for once wasn’t looking at Naomi. His vest was buttoned up, his shirt collar flawlessly crisp, and the color faded from his cheeks. No one could have looked more respectable—and yet he had, Naomi claimed, suddenly, horribly, declared his feelings to her as they stood outside Dr. Petrie’s office. Eudora had happened to look out a window shortly afterwards, and so she’d seen her friend striding through the frozen garden, so upset that at first, when Eudora rushed down to join her, she could only sputter.
“That stick!” she’d said indignantly, after explaining what had happened. “I held his hand after he fainted because I felt sorry for him. He’s almost old enough to be my father.”
For twenty minutes Eudora had paced with her, nodding patiently as Naomi fumed, never reminding her that she might, in first approaching Miles, have played any role in the feelings he’d developed. They’d come in for Arkady’s talk, but at the break, when Naomi continued complaining, Eudora had suggested, “Stop driving him.”
“Give up the only money I earn, because he’s a fool?” Naomi had made an unhappy face before adding, “It would be easier if you were still riding with us, and still practicing your driving.”
“I
know,” Eudora said, “but I’m here so many nights now…” Weeks ago she’d stopped the driving lessons with a casual sentence, so eager to spend more time in the laboratory that everything else was distraction. A car, compared with an X-ray apparatus, was no more mysterious than a fork; she could learn to drive anytime.
“So you say.” Naomi’s hand added shadows to Leo’s eyes. “It’s fine, though. I can manage him.”
Across the circle, Arkady said something about a boatload of naturalists moving down a river toward Harmony. Robert Owen, Arkady continued—it would be months before he understood why he was telling a story about New Harmony; months before he woke from a restless sleep thinking Nadezhda, Nadezhda and realized that he’d reproduced for the rest of us almost exactly what his teacher, Nadezhda, had recounted to his workmen’s circle five years ago: before he was sick, before she was dead, before he’d realized she knew only slightly more than her students—Owen had promised that a new society would rise from the fertile land along the Wabash. But meanwhile, he said, while Eudora continued to examine her friend and to think just for a moment that despite Leo’s unusual looks, Naomi’s hand was capturing the least interesting part of him, the settlers at New Harmony had no food, no shelter, no tools, and no materials with which to build. Owen proposed that by reasoned choice we could remake our institutions and the ways we live; that our characters were formed not by but for us, and so could be re-formed by changing the conditions of our lives. By the wide and sluggish river, though, actual people grew hungry and cold, and ultimately, Arkady said, Owen’s experiment had failed.
Naomi finished shading Leo’s cheekbones as Miles, who so far had said nothing, chimed in, “But ours won’t.” Keeping his eyes on Dr. Petrie, Miles added, “Although we are a small group, I think of this room as a kind of laboratory, and what we do here as something that might change all of us.”
“Change,” Dr. Petrie said, “is…”
“Change,” Irene said at the same moment, “follows…”
Both sentences got lost in the discussion, during which many of us spoke at once while Arkady, clearly pleased with what he’d started, did his best to orchestrate. Only Eudora and Naomi contributed nothing. Watching Naomi sketch an elaborate border, Eudora thought about the drawings Naomi had given her over the years, some of which had lost their meaning. In that way they resembled the tiny, crumpled leather boot her great-uncle Ned had pressed on her long ago. Hands shaking, eyes milky, he’d mumbled a story: he’d loved the woman to whom it had once belonged, or he’d had a friend who had loved the woman? She hadn’t paid attention, although she’d been fond of him. But because she’d been absorbed in something else, she now had the boot but not its meaning, the relic but not the story. If someday she had a daughter of her own and wanted to pass on this bit of family history, the lost context would be her fault. Naomi’s drawing, she thought, would lose its meaning in just the same way.
She was wrong about this, of course. Later we’d all know what the drawing meant, and we’d wonder what would have happened if Leo had seen it that day. But as Naomi was drawing and we were arguing and Eudora was remembering her great-uncle Ned, Leo was focused almost entirely on Eudora. If she’d mentioned him to Irene, then she must be aware of him. If she remembered that Irene might help him, then she knew who he was? He was so delighted he could hardly keep from reaching over to her.
Some of us had already noticed how, no matter who was speaking, Leo studied Eudora; how he managed to post himself next to her during our coffee breaks and to sit across from her, so she was always in his gaze. Still it was Irene, new to our circle and alert to Leo after their brief exchange, who noticed his expression most clearly. At the end of the session, as we were trickling from the room, she and Eudora paused by the door. When Leo passed by them, she nodded and said, “I do hope you’ll come visit.”
“I will,” he said. “Very soon.” He waited, but when neither woman moved, he said a few words to Miles and then reluctantly joined Ephraim and Arkady in the hall.
“You didn’t tell me he was so interested in you,” Irene said to Eudora.
“Leo?” Eudora said.
“He never takes his eyes off of you.”
“Not me,” Eudora said, anxious to correct her misunderstanding. “It’s Naomi he must be looking at.” She looked back over her shoulder, toward where Miles and Naomi, standing near the fireplace, seemed to be arguing.
“It’s not,” Irene said, shaking her head. “But that’s your business, not mine. Would you like to join me tonight? We could spend a few hours reviewing films while we gather material for Dr. Petrie’s Monday meeting.”
By then she’d seen in Eudora a quality that many of us had missed: whatever absorbed her, absorbed her completely. In the laboratory, Irene had seen pictures memorized, captions inhaled, whole passages from the books on her shelves swallowed and integrated. If she hadn’t learned in much the same way, first from her brother-in-law and then elsewhere, she wouldn’t have thought it possible that a person could grasp so much so fast. “I can have two supper trays sent down,” she added.
Ignoring whatever was going on with Miles and Naomi, and also Irene’s remark about Leo, Eudora followed Irene out the door.
10
FOUR DAYS AFTER Arkady’s talk it was five below zero, and we were wearing mittens as we trotted through the halls. The library was freezing, also the dining hall, the solarium, and every place but the basement, near the furnaces. Out on the porches, where we had our elaborate layers of newspapers and blankets and hats and sometimes a glimmer of sun as well, we often felt warmer than when we were inside.
Cold awake, cold asleep; we lived in a building designed to freeze our bacilli, which also meant freezing us. Torpid as bears, we waited for the Christmas season to pass, knowing every minute that, at our distant homes and also in the village, celebrations we couldn’t share were taking place. We were allowed to exchange only cards, a practice meant to make our lack of funds less painful, but elsewhere both the sick and the well were passing gifts at festive parties. Miles, still proud of himself for telling Naomi how he felt, overwhelmed everyone at Mrs. Martin’s house with his generosity. The new novels, the woolen shawls, the handsome lap desks were too much, agreed the other guests, who’d given each other chocolates or playing cards or socks. Mrs. Martin was delighted with her elegant serving platter, but Naomi, who’d driven Miles on his shopping errands and thought she’d seen everything, was mortified to find, next to her plate, a necklace set with shining aquamarines.
“To match your eyes,” Miles announced.
Silently she pled with her mother, hoping to be told that it was inappropriate and she should give it back. “Very handsome,” Mrs. Martin said instead, with what Naomi knew was envy in her voice.
“I know a good jeweler in Boston,” Miles said, looking pleased.
If she’d been able to turn to Eudora, perhaps she wouldn’t have felt so terrible—but on the day after Christmas Eudora was back at work, cheerfully scrubbing floors and mopping tiles and helping us tack our homemade cards to the moldings. As soon as her shift was over she sprinted to the basement, where Irene was letting her experiment with some outdated X-ray equipment. Although this had been pushed to the back of the laboratory as soon as the more powerful replacement arrived, for Eudora it was as good as new. With the manual, a handful of textbooks, and two diagrams, she set to work cleaning the knobs and filaments and investigating the properties of the rays.
For subjects she used a group of ancient, moth-eaten specimens she’d smuggled from her father’s workshop: two ducks, a chipmunk missing a leg, a tattered osprey, and a little opossum. Stitches showed, seams gaped. Her father had made these as a boy, when he was learning his craft from his Uncle Ned, and by now the osprey had only one eye while the toes of the opossum were as limp and shabby as old gloves and all of them were infested with bugs. She posed them between the tube and the film holder and then varied the distance, the voltage, and the length of her exposure
s. The bugs disappeared. The images she developed were good, bad, better, worse; sometimes, as she noted in her ledger, the leg wires and the wing bones were perfectly crisp but the neck vertebrae, in a slightly different plane, were out of focus. Sometimes she could see every detail of the skull but sometimes not. She found a pair of scissor-handled stuffers wound by accident into the excelsior filling the opossum and learned that the toes sagged because whoever skinned the creature had discarded the littlest bones. What were those called? One of Irene’s anatomical atlases revealed the answer: distal phalanges. On New Year’s Eve she stayed very late, eating the apples that Irene kept in a box and forgetting entirely about the date until, halfway down the hill on her bicycle, she looked up at the crescent moon and the sparkling planet near its lower tip, and realized that the earth had completed another revolution around the sun.
Often she and Naomi had made New Year’s resolutions together—they would read these books, travel to these places—but not this year. On her bicycle, flying past winter trees so bare they resembled ribs, Eudora had only one wish: I want more time in the lab. She remembered Naomi, of course. But the image of her was, at that moment, no more vivid than that of one of her Aunt Elizabeth’s former boarders, whose face she remembered warmly but whose last name she’d forgotten.
The Air We Breathe Page 12
