The Air We Breathe

by Andrea Barrett

  The thought of Gemma crying for him—Gemma, who when he left home for Tamarack State had been too young to speak—made Ephraim’s hands curl as if he might still cup her head. Nothing our director, Dr. Richards, said could keep him from leaving. Nor could Dr. Petrie, to whom Ephraim had, otherwise, always listened, convince him to stay, not even when he pointed to his temperature charts for the last three months, his last radiograph, the results of his last sputum count. “You have a new spot, an active one, in your left lung,” Dr. Petrie said. “It’s essential that you rest for some months. You put your own life at risk by leaving here. Not to mention your family.”

  “I’ll sleep on my cousin’s porch,” Ephraim said. “I’ll take my meals separately. You’ve taught us plenty about how to quarantine ourselves.”

  “That wasn’t so you could kill yourself,” Dr. Petrie said. “I could force you to stay, there are papers…”

  Ephraim, who towered over Dr. Petrie, shook his head. “You wouldn’t.”

  “I might, to keep you alive.”

  We don’t know if it would have come to that; Ephraim arranged things otherwise. That night, after supper, he lay silently next to Leo on the porch until finally he slapped the arm of his cure chair and rose. “I can’t stay,” he said. “You have to help me.”

  “Whatever you want,” Leo said. Lying so close to Ephraim’s chair, he’d felt the tension building in his friend. Rosa, Gemma, Rosa, Gemma. If he himself had someone he loved, a family and a home of his own, he too would go.

  He followed Ephraim to the front of their room and held open the carpetbag that Ephraim took from his metal locker. Ephraim stuffed into it two shirts, a pair of pants, three books; because it was very cold that night—the rest of us, still on the porches, were complaining to each other—he was wearing almost everything else he owned.

  “People on the outside are going to notice those,” Leo said, pointing at the pajama bottoms hanging below the hems of Ephraim’s thick wool pants.

  Ephraim stripped, handed the bottoms to Leo, and put the pants back on. Leo added the pajamas to the carpetbag along with a knitted scarf of his own and then stood looking at his friend.

  “You’ll leave tonight?”

  “It’s the best thing,” Ephraim replied. “I’ll get a ride into the village with someone I know, then take the first train out from there. If I try to leave from here tomorrow, Dr. Petrie is going to stop me. It’s not his fault, he has to do it. But it’s not my fault I have to go.”

  “It’s not,” Leo agreed. “But I worry about you. I have three dollars—would you take that?”

  “Thank you,” Ephraim said. “You know I’d do the same for you. There’s one other thing, though.”

  “Should I make up a story about where you’ve gone?”

  “They’ll know,” Ephraim said. “But I don’t think they’ll bother to look for me once I’m safely off their hands. They just don’t want to be responsible for letting me leave.”

  He reached into the locker again, pulling from behind some books the small metal box Leo had last seen when the young man had visited from Ovid. “Felix said a friend of his would come for this before summer. Could you keep it until he gets here?”

  “Whatever you want. You don’t want to bring it home?”

  “Better it should stay here,” Ephraim said. “This way I know that it will get to the right person.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Leo said, embracing his friend at the door. “You have no idea how much I’m going to miss you.”

  “I have an exact idea,” Ephraim said, smiling wryly. “I wish I could say I’ll be back soon, but if all goes well I won’t.”

  “She’ll get better,” Leo said, quickly stuffing the metal box into his own locker. In Odessa, in the months before he’d left, he’d known wild-eyed men with boxes hidden under their beds, boxes holding pistols, ammunition, knives, foreign currency, fevered tracts; he’d left in part to escape their frenzy and he resented Ephraim’s friend for bringing that shadow here. Still, of course, he would do what Ephraim asked. “You’ll get better, too,” he predicted. “I’ll come and see you in Ovid as soon as I’m discharged.”

  Ephraim waved, scouted the corridor to make sure it was empty, and then without a word to the rest of us—not those who’d known him since the beginning, not those who, until Leo’s arrival, had thought of ourselves as his closest friends—he tiptoed along the corridor, down the stairs, and out the kitchen door.

  AFTER EPHRAIM LEFT, the women among us began to play a larger role at the Wednesday sessions. All the first speakers had been men; to make up for that imbalance, a string of women—all of whom had been here longer than Leo, which meant deferring Leo’s talk yet again—now spoke as we began our new year. Sophie started, describing the settlement house she’d worked at before she became sick, and how she’d taught English and history to people like us at night. Pearl, who until her money ran out had been in a cure cottage not as fancy as Mrs. Martin’s house but still nice enough, and who’d had stretches when she was nearly well, then spoke about her weeks working as an extra on a movie shot here in the village, where the frozen rivers and the gray cloudy sky had stood in for the Klondike. After that, we had some discussions in the halls and over dinner about the direction of our talks.

  We’d enjoyed those last two, especially Pearl’s lively account of her brief acting career, but how anecdotal and personal did we want these afternoons to become? Did we want to discuss how we treated our children’s winter colds, how one of us made a tender brisket and how another turned rags into braided rugs? These matters too were important, some of us argued. And interesting. Yet they also made us miss even more the lives we’d left behind. Better, safer, to steer our talks back toward the territory Miles had first established: science, art, ideas. Celia, who was a good deal older than the rest of us and had lived in Russia until she was twenty-three, offered to discuss the work of Anton Chekhov.

  “A Russian writer,” she said, one January Wednesday. Still she spoke English with a heavy accent. “Very famous there although not yet here.”

  Because she’d developed symptoms in her knees and hips, she preferred to speak sitting down, moving only her hands. Against her heavy green jacket, they seemed unusually white. Like us, she said, Chekhov had suffered from tuberculosis, dying of it in his early forties but before then writing strange and wonderful plays, which at first hardly anyone understood. Stuck in sanatoria far from the city, he knew, she said, what our lives were like. “His stories are as beautiful as his plays—I like best a volume called Khmurye liudi. In English Gloomy People,” she said with a smile. “Or Gloomy Folk, like us.”

  When she tried to summarize for us some of the stories she’d treasured, she grew frustrated and said that with all writers, but especially Chekhov, summary ruined everything: beauty lay in the story itself, the particular arrangement of sentences. But she promised that if any of us were interested, she’d try translating a story or two—and in fact Leo, whose own Russian was very rusty, and several of the rest of us took her up on this and later enjoyed the results.

  Still, despite those diverting sessions, we missed Ephraim more than we might have expected. His steadiness and his easy sense of humor, which had often lightened our moods, disappeared just when they were most needed. Week after week, the news from the outside world was bad, and we found ourselves talking constantly about the war. In New Jersey an enormous shell-assembly plant blew up, half a million shells exploding while people all over the area trembled at the noise. After we heard that, Lydia, with her great gift for practical invention, brought to her session a working model of a sprayer she’d originally designed to mist fruit trees. If the country went to war, she said, she’d submit the model and her patent application to the War Department, along with notes on how to adapt it to spread an ignitable fog of gasoline.

  We tried to imagine such a device and shuddered when we did. Our concentration wavered; how could we appreciate Nan’s discussion about t
he suffrage movement when just before that the German government announced that their submarines would now attack all ships, including American ships, entering the blockade zone surrounding Great Britain, and when the president severed relations with Germany in response? Passenger ships were being torpedoed, people were drowning: it was as if the German government wanted the United States to enter the war, and that, we thought, made no sense at all. In the library we passed sections of our newspapers back and forth and sometimes smuggled them into our rooms.

  A week after Valentine’s Day, Kathleen, who’d been a music teacher at a progressive elementary school in Utica, wheeled into the solarium an upright piano, which the women among us knew as well as we knew our own cure chairs; it came from our sitting room. We’d spent hours playing it, cursing the sour notes, singing in groups around it, but for the men it was a surprise. Thumping, pounding, singing loudly over her own playing and shouting directions as she played—Here you must imagine woodwinds, daaaah, da-da-da-da da-daaah, calling and answering like birds…Now the strings! All at once, DUM, dum-dum-dum-dum; DUM—Kathleen squeezed through that worn old instrument a reduction of Stravinsky’s shocking ballet, Le Sacre du printemps. The orchestral version, she assured us, was just as chaotic and fragmented as what she rendered for us. More so really—a new kind of music, which she was just beginning to learn for herself from a recording.

  We remember that session with particular clearness, and not only because of what Kathleen’s playing would later signify. The men were dazzled by her knowledge and skill, while the women, who’d earlier heard her distill Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky, were fascinated by the music itself, and by our growing realization that life in the men’s and women’s annexes had been more different than we’d thought.

  We questioned each other, and her, intently. We had a wonderful talk. Gleaming beneath it was an intuition that time would later confirm: Kathleen’s session was one of the few when we were nearly whole. Except for Ephraim, all the members of our little group were present that day: Leo, Dr. Petrie, Irene, and Eudora; Celia, in the first stages of translating her Chekhov stories, and Polly, getting ready to talk the following week about poetry; also Sophie, Pearl, and Lydia, who’d already surprised us with their talks. Ian was there, with new advertisements his brother had sent from the Erector plant; Arkady and Abe, now arguing over every page of something Celia had given them to read about a penal colony on Sakhalin Island; Pietr, who’d been in bed for six weeks, talking to David, who was doing so well he dreamed of being discharged; Olga and Nan, who despite having quarreled had each refused to miss a session and so sat on opposite sides of our circle. Jaroslav, who played the violin, was discussing the possibility of duets with Kathleen. Bea was showing off the embroidered slippers she’d been given for her thirty-first birthday to Sean, who was wishing he’d given them to her. Zalmen, Frank, Otto, and Seth, united by their joint plan to settle in Utica and start a tool-and-die shop once they were cured, leaned toward each other while Albert, always dreamy, wondered under the influence of the music how his mother and father had met. We were all there, with our hopes and plans, our clashing and mingling purposes, our delight in what Kathleen had done and—Naomi was sitting near Eudora but Miles was off to one side, alone; how did none of us see it?—our shared neglect of Miles.

  WHEN MILES SKIPPED the next session, on the last day of February, we hardly noticed at first. That day Polly told us about Carl Sandburg, a performance as surprising in its own way as Kathleen’s. Only Polly’s two closest friends, Olga and Nan (they’d made up by then), had known before that Polly wrote poems herself, or that she followed new poetry as avidly as our library and her own very limited budget permitted. From Sandburg’s book Chicago Poems, she read pieces nothing like those we’d learned in school. No fancy language, no kings and floating princesses or holy grails. These were about the copper wire strung between the telephone poles and carrying our voices. About hoboes and soldiers and factory workers, ships that heaved like mastodons, the windows shining in railroad cars, the mist and the fog and prairie cornfields and, yes, the war—but not what the men who sat safely in warm rooms imagined it to be. These poems described the war as it looked to men fighting it, and we had never heard anything like them. We listened—Polly read well—and then pulled our chairs into a tighter circle to look at some passages more closely. Only as we bent our heads together did we realize that Miles was absent and with him, of course, Naomi.

  We learned why the following week, when they returned. As David, who’d arrived at Tamarack State six months before Leo and had once worked in Mexico, explained the implications of the newly published document the newspapers called “the Zimmerman telegram,” Miles listened impassively. David read out loud the German telegram as it had been translated and printed in the papers, six weeks after it was sent:

  Berlin, January 19, 1917. On the first of February we intend to begin submarine warfare unrestricted. In spite of this, it is our intention to endeavor to keep neutral the United States of America. If this attempt is not successful, we propose an alliance on the following basis with Mexico: That we shall make war together and together make peace. We shall give general financial support, and it is understood that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona…

  It hadn’t been even a year, David reminded us, since Pershing took American troops into Mexico in pursuit of the revolutionary general Pancho Villa; hardly a month since those troops had withdrawn; the Mexicans were eager to pay the Americans back. On a map David showed us how easily that territory might be reclaimed. We thought of Canada, just a few miles away, and how we’d feel if the Germans had proposed an alliance with them. The war, we understood then, was here.

  Some of us drifted away when David finished speaking, while others continued talking in twos and threes. Only the handful of us clustered around Dr. Petrie noticed how, as Miles made his way toward us, he stepped as if the bones in his feet had been shattered. Six inches, six inches, six. Finally he reached our group and stopped.

  “I have to tell you,” he began, his eyes fixed on Dr. Petrie’s chest. The pause that followed was long enough to silence the rest of us and make us turn toward him.

  “To tell you,” he tried again.

  Dr. Petrie reached for his hand. “You don’t feel well,” he said. “Please, sit down.”

  Miles backed a few inches away. “My friend was killed,” he said quietly. “My friend in France. I wanted you to know.”

  “Not Lawrence!” Dr. Petrie said.

  Miles nodded. “Gassed,” he whispered.

  Seth began to cough as the rest of us wondered whether to draw closer to Miles or to leave him and Dr. Petrie alone. We kept our places. Still looking at Dr. Petrie’s chest, Miles said that since hearing the news he hadn’t left his room, until today.

  “I’m sorry,” Dr. Petrie said, gently touching one hand to Miles’s jacket. Behind him the rest of us mumbled our regrets; this was the first personal thing Miles had ever told any of us other than Dr. Petrie, and we didn’t know how to respond. “I’m glad you were able to come here.”

  “It’s what got me out of bed. I missed you. I missed this.”

  Embarrassed, but also touched, we continued to stand there clumsily. After a minute, Miles took some folded papers from his jacket pocket and handed them to Leo, who was standing closest to Dr. Petrie. “Lawrence wrote this not long before he died,” Miles said of the first sheet, gesturing to Leo to pass it around. “You can see…”

  Not what he saw, probably: but as each of us in turn read the scrawled words we grasped that the letter was terrible. Reluctantly we took the second sheet, this one the letter from Lawrence’s father announcing his son’s death. Together they were so sad that we didn’t know where to look or what to say. Pietr rubbed his eyebrows, Arkady mumbled a word. Seth, still coughing into a paper handkerchief, stepped away. Leo put the sheets in Dr. Petrie’s hand, as if he couldn’t bear to give them back to Miles himself. Dr.
Petrie kept up a steady murmur of consolation but the rest of us were useless. We could not, after all, touch a man like him, and we had no idea how or if he prayed.

  TO OUR SURPRISE, Miles returned the following Wednesday and sat mutely, very close to Naomi although not touching her, during Jaroslav’s explanation of cinematography cameras. Until a few years ago Jaroslav had worked at a studio in New Jersey, repairing and maintaining their equipment, and although he didn’t have a camera he was able, with a few sketches and some strips of paper cut to the width of film stock, to show us how the film spooled on rollers between the two magazines tucked inside each camera box. He diagrammed the sprockets and the corresponding perforations in the film, and also the clever mechanism that moved the film in synchrony with the opening of the lens shutter, exposing it at the rate of sixteen frames per second. Our eyes, he said, when confronted with images shot and projected at that speed, magically converted stillness into motion.

  We listened eagerly, some of us taking notes; we loved our movie nights, which never came often enough, and it was a pleasure to know more about what we saw. Polly and Bea noticed, despite their absorption, the way Naomi kept shifting away from Miles’s legs, which occasionally tilted in her direction. Zalmen and Abe saw, instead, the way that Miles, despite his recent loss, tried to concentrate on Jaroslav’s explanations.

  “In its essence,” Jaroslav continued, “cinematography freezes light, storing it like ice in an icebox. During projection, the light is released again in measured quantities, animating what would otherwise seem dead.”