We weren’t thinking about Naomi, either; she meant little to us and when we noticed her it was always as Miles Fairchild’s driver, Miles’s little friend. That New Year’s Eve she was alone in her room, looking out the dormer window toward the same crescent moon but acutely aware of Eudora’s absence. She lit a candle and swore that she’d be someplace else before the year ended. With Eudora or without, she would leave her mother’s house and find a new place to live, where she could do something interesting. Something that used her talent for drawing, perhaps. She might make sketches for a clothes designer, illustrations for a magazine. Drawings for an architect: did she need to go to school for that? Last week she’d made sixteen sketches of Leo’s face, from memory. Profile, three-quarter view, his eyes cast down or looking up; each one better than the last. For Christmas, Eudora had given her a thick pad of drawing paper she’d ordered specially. “You have such a gift,” she’d said—but what she’d really meant, what had filled the pause after that, was: Why don’t you draw something other than Leo?
Because I dream about him at night, Naomi had wanted to say. Dreamed about him, woke up thinking about him, served breakfast thinking about him, started the Model T and ran the errands and sorted mail for the boarders thinking about him every minute. Inside her head they had conversations in which he spoke and she responded, the clarity of what she felt and heard exactly mimicking her memories of actual conversations. How was a person to keep straight what she truly remembered, and what she remembered inventing?
Back in Chester, in the field behind her family’s house, there’d been a space she sometimes visited, not far from the hedge where the deer used to sleep. The tall grass was pushed to the ground, the stems bent over and swirled to make a clearing shaped like an egg. When she could find it—it was almost invisible until she was right on top of it—she sat there for hours. The grass beyond the clearing moved in the breeze. The sun came in and the bent grass where she sat was damp and fragrant, sometimes tufted with pale hair. Always she’d fall asleep there, and when she woke there’d be a moment when she didn’t know where she was, or even that she was: only the smells and the sounds and the movements and the feel of the sun on her skin. After her move to Tamarack Lake, nothing had made her feel that way again until she saw Leo—and that, she knew, was why she was so miserable. It wasn’t just the holidays and her mother’s frenzy and all the extra work, the special meals and extra decorations and the boarders’ private parties. It wasn’t just Miles, who’d been clinging to her like a tick. And it wasn’t even that she missed Eudora, who swore she wasn’t avoiding her but was never around and talked, when she could be found, only about the X-rays.
A few days ago, when the brakes on the Model T needed adjustment, Naomi had arranged to meet Eudora at the garage where Eugene worked and to take a walk with her while he did the repairs. Only after Naomi was already there had Eudora telephoned to cancel. Annoyed, Naomi had waited on the bench by the door, complaining until Eugene said he’d hardly seen his sister lately either. Busy all the time, he said. Ernest, who was back from New York for a couple of days, walked in, leaned over to inspect the brakes, and joined the conversation.
“Runs in the family,” he added, handing Eugene a wrench. “When one of us gets interested in something we really get interested.”
As if she didn’t know that herself. Later, while Eugene was fiddling with a cable, Ernest had offered her a cigarette. She’d only smoked a few before and so she puffed at it cautiously while he talked about New York. There was nothing like the city, he said, straightening his handsome shirt. Movies every day if he wanted; the docks and the markets and the people in the streets, men working in caissons beneath the river while others moved through ironwork high in the air—just being there was exciting. And who would have expected that all the hours he’d put in with his father and his great-uncle in their taxidermy shop would have helped him get a job he liked so much!
“You’re lucky,” she’d said, unable to hide her envy.
He’d given her a look and leaned in toward her, his hair hanging softly over one eye. “Why don’t you think about visiting sometime?”
Weakly she smiled and then coughed on the smoke from his cigarette.
ON THE SUNDAY after New Year’s Day, which was bitterly cold and completely still, a dead hawk appeared in the low mound of garden centered, like a bull’s-eye, inside our circular driveway. From our breakfast tables we couldn’t avoid the sight of the corpse among the stiff white stalks. Irene, who hadn’t seen the bird herself, heard about it from Leo, who arrived five minutes early for his tour of her laboratory. He chattered nervously while she showed him both her X-ray apparatus and the older equipment Eudora was playing with.
“Since when does it get so cold here that birds fall frozen from the sky?” he said. “You’d think we were in Siberia.”
Irene shrugged, smiled, and pointed toward the new Coolidge tube. “Did you ever use one of these?”
“Not that one exactly,” he said, “but earlier versions, of course. Where I went to school, we had all the usual gadgets for studying electricity. You must have too—you studied in Kraków?”
She nodded. “A long time ago, though. Everything I’ve learned about the rays, I learned in this country.”
“I learned it back there,” Leo said. “What little I know. I was six when the Roentgen rays were discovered; by the time I was in school we took the rays for granted and were more interested in what we could do with them than simply in producing them.”
“We couldn’t imagine such a thing, when I was in school,” Irene said. “Twenty years—what a difference that makes.”
Leo looked at the cabinets filled with glass plates, the long rows of chest films filed on the shelves that wound around the room, the darkroom, the chemicals and the glassware. “Ten years makes a difference,” he said tensely. “Two. What really made me feel old were the discoveries Moseley made in Rutherford’s laboratory. That’s when I realized I’d never catch up.”
“X-ray spectroscopy is really astonishing, isn’t it?” Irene said. That there should be a way, now, to identify elements by their X-ray spectra and confirm their positions on the periodic table: this seemed as magical as peering through the envelope of human flesh. The papers demonstrating that each element had a specific number of electrons had been brilliantly clear, but still she was startled to think that Leo might understand them.
“You’re familiar with Moseley’s experiments?” she asked.
He shook his head again. “I was already in New York when he did his work,” he said bitterly. “Already no one. No lab, no books, no colleagues…”
“Such a waste,” she said, meaning Moseley’s death at Gallipoli but then embarrassed that Leo might think she meant him. “Why,” she couldn’t help asking, “did you come to America?”
He rubbed his thumb repeatedly down the inside surface of his index finger, a gesture she hadn’t been able to make in years, and said, “Didn’t we all come for similar reasons? We thought it would be different here, that we’d have a better chance.” Again his eyes wandered around the laboratory. “It worked for you. For me, it didn’t.”
His hand reached toward but didn’t touch three Erlenmeyer flasks drying upside down on a wooden rack, and when she saw the hunger on his face she rummaged in the shelf of books near her desk. Absently, as if the gesture meant nothing, she handed him two worn green volumes.
“My old copy,” she said, watching him. “I almost never use the set anymore, it’s a little out of date.”
He turned the volumes over before setting one down and opening the cover of the other. Surely this wasn’t the text from which he’d learned chemistry in Odessa? And yet it was, or a version of it—an English translation of the sixth Russian edition of Mendeleeff’s Principles of Chemistry. His copy, in one fat blue volume, had been stolen at the docks, along with most of his belongings, on the day six years ago when he’d arrived in New York. But here, as if a piece of his old life h
ad been returned, was the same photograph, Mendeleeff with his open mouth and badly cut hair looking more like a madman than the genius he surely was. Here were the precious words and tables, along with the scores of small engravings showing everything from Lavoisier’s apparatus for determining the composition of air to the tall furnaces used in the dry distillation of bones.
Irene was looking at him, he knew, but he couldn’t keep himself from reading the beginning of the translator’s preface. In the scientific work to which Professor Mendeleeff’s life has been devoted, his continual endeavour has been to bring the scattered facts of chemistry within the domain of law, and accordingly in his teaching he endeavours to impress upon the student the principles of the science, the generalizations, so far as they have been discovered, under which the facts naturally group themselves. That was right, exactly right, thought Leo: the principles of the science. Chemistry, he read, offers an insight into the unchangeable substratum underlying the varying forms of matter. He saw the lantern-jawed, goggle-eyed face of his kind young teacher and at the back of his throat he suddenly tasted ammonia.
“I thought,” he heard Irene say carefully, in the tone of someone who’d repeated a sentence more than once, “that this might be a good refresher textbook.”
“Better than you know,” he made himself say. Although the basement was delightfully warm, he was shivering. “This book—this particular edition, I mean, the Russian version—I used to know every page of it. If I could just borrow it for a while…”
“Keep it,” she said gently. “Since you cherish it so. After you’ve had time to study, we’ll talk about some ways you might help me out here, if you’re interested.”
When he seized her hand in thanks, she winced and cried out. Eudora, carrying the frozen hawk by its feet, entered the laboratory just then and said, “Oh, don’t squeeze, you’re hurting her!”
Baffled, Leo dropped Irene’s hand and stepped back. Irene shook her fingers, as if trying to restore some feeling; Eudora set down the dead bird and stroked her shoulder.
“Not your fault,” Irene said. “Not at all, my hands are unusually”—she looked at the hawk, then up at Eudora—“sensitive, that’s all. Eudora, I was showing Leo around and explaining some of what I do here. He might come and help out now and then. He was just leaving.”
“I’m glad you could visit,” Eudora murmured. Nodding, she picked up her latest specimen and headed for the old machine.
“Another time?” Irene said to Leo.
He nodded, embarrassed. “Thank you, again,” he said. “And I’m sorry.”
THE TEMPERATURE OUTSIDE continued to hover near zero and the sky was its peculiar Adirondack gray. In the library Ian played laconically with the pieces of the Erector set, which had lost their charm but, because of their link to his brother, remained more interesting than nothing. Diagonally across the hall, Dr. Petrie worked on a report for the upcoming trustees’ meeting, while below him Clarice and Deborah cooked our supper. Two of the maintenance men, Bronsen and Andrew, their coveralls bulging over scarves and sweaters, swept drifted snow from the walkways, the whisk, whisk of straw across the flagstones audible throughout the wings. Inside, irritated by the steady, gentle noise and the memory of days when we too had been able to tidy a piece of our world so casually, we were turning the pages of magazines and rereading old letters, trading gossip and marveling at the news of Rasputin’s death, which had happened just before Christmas. We were playing cards or checkers or chess, regretting something that had happened at the New Year’s celebration, anticipating the next movie night, wondering what our families were doing at home. Some of us, like Ephraim, were lying on our beds, concentrating only on getting better.
We were trudging off toward the dining hall, lining up and then sitting down, regarding our plates and each other; we were flirting across the invisible barrier separating women and men. Doing what we did each evening, what it seemed that we might always do. While we began our meal, someone asked Leo where he’d been and he mentioned that he’d gone to the X-ray laboratory. He didn’t say why, though, nor what he’d been given. When Gordon asked if he’d learned anything about why Irene wore that violet glove, her cry of pain flashed through his mind but still he was able to say, with perfect honesty, “No.” Secretive, we thought. As we’d thought before.
Back out onto the porches, into the cold, under the covers, over the cushions: next to each other, freezing. Ephraim and Leo lay quietly after supper, Ephraim dreaming of home and Rosa and his girls, the deep snow blanketing the fields, the deer browsing through the bushes while his daughters, wrapped in layers of flannel, built a snowhouse with the help of their uncles, even as Leo—often this happened to us, this thinking or dreaming in parallel with the companions to whom we were closest—dreamed also of snow and his family. Not the second family, his stepmother’s children, but his mother and her parents in Grodno where, during a winter like this, the snow piled up over the windows and the smoke from the train could be seen for miles away. He could see himself, dark hair hidden beneath a knitted cap, moving quietly between the white walls. Crows called harshly to each other from the trees. A hawk flew, casting a shadow, and the world seemed vast; so many things to do and see and he knew he would live forever. The rabbit he’d kept in a hutch out back: what had his name been?
That world had disappeared when his father took him off to Odessa. Then another had opened, only to vanish as well, but now—he turned to his green volumes, which were light enough to balance on his chest, easy to read even when he was wearing mittens. Each page begged to be lingered over. In this edition, he remembered his teacher enthusing, not only had Mendeleeff finally understood all the implications of the periodicity he’d discovered, but he’d also given himself free rein with his footnotes, which were speculative, fascinating, a parallel text taking up nearly half the book. Young and eager to learn the essentials as fast as he could, he’d skimmed over them when he’d read the text in Russian. But now—now he had nothing but time; he’d read every line, he’d take notes. He tilted the pages toward the lamp and slowly read the first footnote, inserted before Mendeleeff got halfway through his opening sentence:
1The investigation of a substance or a natural phenomenon consists (a) in determining the relation of the object under examination to that which is already known, either from previous researches, or from experiment, or from the knowledge of the common surroundings of life—that is, in determining and expressing the quality of the unknown by the aid of that which is known; (b) in measuring all that which can be subjected to measurement, and thereby denoting the quantitative relation of that under investigation to that already known and its relation to the categories of time, space, temperature, mass, &c.; (c) in determining the position held by the object under investigation in the system of known objects guided by both qualitative and quantitative data; (d ) in determining, from the quantities which have been measured, the empirical (visible) dependence (function, or “law,” as it is sometimes termed) of variable factors—for instance, the dependence of the composition of the substance on its properties, of temperature on time, of time on locality, &c.; (e) in framing hypotheses or propositions as to the actual cause and true nature of the relation between that studied (measured or observed) and that which is known of the categories of time, space, &c.; ( f ) in verifying the logical consequences of the hypotheses by experiment; and ( g ) in advancing a theory which shall account for the nature of the properties of that studied in its relations with things already known and with those conditions or categories among which it exists.
He forced himself to take a breath. Perhaps this wouldn’t be as easy as he’d thought? He didn’t remember the language being so thorny but perhaps this was the result of the translation. He took another breath and dove in again.
On the other side of the divider Abe and Arkady were arguing, fiercely but amiably, and in very low voices—we were not supposed to talk during this time, we were supposed to rest completely—about Cher
nyshevsky, who Arkady felt had been crucial in shaping revolutionary thought but who Abe thought was a fool. Sean and Otto, a few spaces down, had both dropped into a heavy sleep, which meant they’d be up and tossing restlessly all through the night, while over in the other wing Lydia was staring at a magazine, fiercely scanning a column listing new inventions—cotter pins, a peanut stemmer, a device for rolling and finishing shrapnel bars—and considering how to patent her own. Elsewhere on the women’s porches, Sadie, Olga, Karin, and Pearl were whispering about their cousins or the men they hoped might become cousins, gazing at advertisements for lipsticks, reading with despair a child’s misspelled note from home, watching the sliver of moon creep up on the edge of a cloud, disappear, and slowly reemerge. The stars swung slowly and in the woods an animal shrieked. Irene, alone in the basement, looked up from her desk.
If only, she thought, the moment when her two visitors had surprised each other had been more illuminating. Between the chemistry text, which distracted Leo, and her own squeal of pain, the pair had hardly interacted and she couldn’t be sure what she’d seen. She might have asked Leo directly how he felt about Eudora, or at least asked Eudora more about Leo, but she hadn’t had the nerve. Leo’s gaze, she’d wanted to tell Eudora, might change her whole life, and pretending not to see it wouldn’t help. The thing was to acknowledge it; to see what it meant and decide what she wanted. Yet instead of finding out what was going on between these two, she’d been diverted by Leo’s responses. He’d once known, she now understood, at least as much chemistry and physics as she did herself; all these months she might have been training him as well as Eudora. Stupid, she thought, not to have seen that.
11
IRENE ALSO DIDN’T see—neither did we, but how could we?—how quickly one of our essential souls might disappear. On the Tuesday after Leo first visited Irene’s lab, Ephraim got a frantic message from his wife. Gemma, his youngest daughter, had something that might be meningitis, a piercing endless headache and a fever that wouldn’t come down, and although two doctors had seen her and everyone in the community at Ovid was trying to help, she was in grave danger and calling out for her father. I do not want to disturb you when you are yourself so sick, Rosa said. But…
The Air We Breathe Page 13
