The Air We Breathe

by Andrea Barrett

  He paused while Sophie, who had recently relapsed, coughed, choked, coughed more violently, shook off Bea’s whispered offer of help, wiped her running eyes, and subsided. Then, thoughtfully, he tried to link his subject to what Miles had taught us. “Perhaps,” he said, “the reconstruction of living action from still images isn’t so different from the effort to reconstruct creatures from fossilized bones.”

  “That,” Miles said unsmilingly, “is a preposterous analogy.”

  Arkady and Sean exchanged glances and Lydia frowned as Jaroslav paused, his feelings clearly hurt. He hurried through the rest of his presentation and then left the room, in the company of Pietr and Abe. The rest of us filed out more slowly. Often we left our sessions elated, hovering in the corridor or in front of the windows to talk more about what we’d just learned, but Miles’s comment squelched us. He was grieving, we knew. His words had been instantaneous, unconsidered—but somehow seemed worse because of that, as if all along he’d found our presentations foolish but no longer had the energy to conceal it. Halfway down the hall, in front of a freshly painted exam room, Nan said to David, “He probably didn’t mean to do that.”

  “But it’s who he is,” David replied. “That’s the trouble.”

  Behind them the solarium had emptied out except for Leo, who’d stepped into the alcove to the left of the fireplace, and Miles, who a minute later came to stand beside him. Leo was gazing out the window, and he jumped when Miles said, “Won’t you be late for your supper?”

  “I didn’t know you were still here,” Leo said.

  “I can’t go anywhere until Naomi’s ready. She wanted to talk with Eudora about something, so…” He gestured toward the pair outside, walking in the frozen garden. “I wish she wouldn’t keep me waiting like this.”

  Leo, who’d stayed behind simply to watch Eudora, nodded absently.

  “It doesn’t seem fair,” Miles added, clicking his fingernails against the window as if Naomi might hear him. “Especially not now. Last week I got some letters that Lawrence wrote me and never got the chance to send. One of his friends found them and mailed them on. It’s so—reading words he wrote months ago, hearing his voice in my head when I know he’s gone—I can’t explain what that feels like.”

  “I’m sorry,” Leo said, meaning it despite his absorption in the scene below, and his annoyance at the way Miles had treated Jaroslav.

  “They’re too grim to show anyone,” Miles said. “If people here really knew what was going on there, they would want—”

  “To stay out of it?” Leo said.

  Miles looked at him appraisingly. “To get into it. I’m sure we’ll declare war any day now, but why have we already wasted so much time? We should have committed ourselves much earlier. If we had, maybe Lawrence wouldn’t be dead.”

  Below Leo, a shadow moved across the drift—it had finally snowed—and from above a bird plunged. Back home, he thought, in the marshes and hollows he’d known as a boy, all the men must have gone off to fight, leaving behind only the birds and the fish and the empty forest. Lawrence wouldn’t be dead if he hadn’t volunteered; how would it help to send more men after him?

  “One thing I can’t stop thinking about,” Miles said. “Jaroslav reminded me of it, when he mentioned the fossil bones. Lawrence wrote that some nights, when he was lying awake in the mud, he thought of the river we floated down as a river through time. He said for him, our boat journey might have started in the nineteenth century, in his father’s world, and mine. When it ended it dropped him into another century and another world.”

  They looked out the window again, eyes averted from each other, fixed on the women below. Lawrence, Miles continued, had described all too vividly the trench walls where he was stuck, slick and slippery and caving in daily, dotted with bones and body parts: a nightmare version, he’d written, of the cliffs from which they’d excavated the cleanly layered fossils.

  “It makes me sick,” Miles said, slapping his hand against the windowsill. “Not just his death, but what happened before it, what’s in those letters—I think he wanted to die. What’s wrong with the French and the British, that they can’t organize matters better than this? The inefficiency, the sheer waste of life and idealism—when we get over there, when Americans are in charge, things will be different.”

  “Will they?” Leo said, not thinking how his words might sound.

  “Of course they will,” Miles said. “If you saw the way my cement plant runs, or the way Edward’s factories are organized—we’d never let men rot like this. Not just physically but morally, spiritually. Lawrence and his friends were trapped.”

  Leo tried to envision Miles’s cement plant in Doylestown. Different from the sugar refinery, not chaotic and filthy but well run and organized, workers calmly tending their machines before stopping for useful after-hours classes, encouraged by small rewards to produce more and still more—was that what Miles meant? Those same men, overseas, would climb docilely out of the trenches and march toward the bullets.

  He glanced down and saw that Eudora was leaving the garden; the sky had darkened further and he’d missed his chance to speak with her again. “I wish I could help,” he said to Miles. “Truly.”

  Miles drew himself up a bit straighter. “It was kind of you simply to listen. I expect you have to go—”

  “—to supper,” Leo said. “But I’ll see you next week.”

  LEO TOLD NO ONE about this conversation; only later would the rest of us hear a version of what, at the time, seemed private. His imagination was dark with those images of Lawrence, and he felt more sympathy for Miles than he would have thought possible. He was startled—all of us were—to hear later that, while we were sitting down to supper, Miles had stopped by Dr. Petrie’s office. There he spoke not about Lawrence and the letters, but about Naomi.

  “Maybe you could talk to her for me?” he asked. “Convince her to give me a chance…”

  “Convince her, more likely, to avoid you completely,” Dr. Petrie said impatiently. Hadn’t they already talked about this? “I know this is a terrible time for you, it’s natural to look for comfort anywhere you can find it—but infatuations are as common up here as colds. You need to find some way to control this. I would never have expected you to take these feelings so seriously.”

  “I gave her the book Edward gave me,” Miles said miserably. “That was terrible of me, but I thought she’d like it because it’s old, and a curiosity. But she didn’t, and—”

  “Look outward,” Dr. Petrie said. Even to himself he sounded harsh, but nothing was more important than preserving Miles’s health. “Stop focusing so much on yourself. Naomi can’t console you for losing Lawrence. There isn’t a person up here who hasn’t lost a friend or a family member. Do you think you’re alone?”

  Miles slumped once more in the gray chair. “You think I am self-indulgent,” he said. “You think I’m ridiculous.”

  “Not at all,” Dr. Petrie said wearily. “I’m only trying to help. Of course you’re grieving, you’ve had a terrible blow. No wonder you feel confused. But sometimes the best cure is to think about other people, involve yourself in their lives. The way you helped Lawrence when he was a boy.”

  “If you had lost someone,” Miles said, “I would be more sympathetic. Or if you were in love.”

  Later he sent Dr. Petrie this:

  I do thank you for your conversation and advice. I take it seriously. I know I should have written, should now be writing, further letters of consolation and condolence to Edward. I know I should tell him about the awful letters that Lawrence wrote to me and maybe I should send them on: but I can’t, they’re all I have left of him. Nor can I let go of my hopes for Naomi. What else am I to look forward to?

  I am taking one bit of your advice at least. Lawrence is gone, I can’t help him; perhaps I can help someone else. It has struck me that Leo Marburg seems more than a little lost since his roommate has left us. I have formulated a plan that may assist him, which I hope
to discuss with him, and then you, sometime soon. In the meantime I promise not to trouble you with personal matters again

  12

  ON THE MONDAY following Jaroslav’s talk, Leo fell asleep on the porch during afternoon rest hours and woke to the hollow chock, chock, chock of someone splitting wood near the barns, a sound that in the last moments of his dream made him see an ax in his cousin’s stout arms and his mother, framed between two giant beech trees, smiling off to one side. Rising groggily, already late, he pushed open the door of his room and, turning toward the library, nearly crashed into Miles.

  “Sorry,” said Miles, who still had his overcoat on, buttoned up to the neck. “I know I’m not supposed to be here.”

  “That’s true,” Leo agreed. “We’re not allowed to have visitors in our rooms.”

  “I’m not exactly a visitor,” said Miles.

  Leo drew a breath, remembering all that Miles had lost. “Who are you looking for?”

  “You,” Miles said, “actually. I want to talk to you about something.” As Leo struggled not to look at the clock on the wall—so little time to work before supper, and so much he wanted to do—Miles added, “I think you should consider coming to stay at Mrs. Martin’s house.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “At my expense,” Miles continued. “A room just opened up on the first floor. It’s not the nicest one; it’s in the front, and modestly sized. But it’s clean, and private, and very much nicer than here. Plus Mrs. Martin keeps a marvelous table.”

  Leo shivered, too cold in the windy corridor to think of the right thing to say. As if he’d leave when Ephraim might still come back and when, two floors below him, Irene and Eudora were working with equipment that might someday be available to him. In the weeks since his visit to the basement, he’d been slowly, painfully, trying to recover what he’d once known. Thus matter does not disappear and is not created, but only undergoes various physical and chemical transformations—that is to say, changes its locality and form. Matter remains on the earth in the same quantity as before; in a word it is, so far as we are concerned, everlasting. Somehow that sounded more surprising in English than he remembered it being in Russian. All of it surprised him, really; digging down through the rubble that, during his six years in New York, had buried his mind, he’d felt like a worker excavating a subway tunnel. He’d set himself the task of relearning all of Mendeleeff’s book, not because Irene expected it—he knew she didn’t—or because he needed more than a scrap of that knowledge to help her out in the laboratory, but because he was looking forward, still, to speaking at one of our Wednesday gatherings and he wanted to draw not on his scattered, broken American self but on who he really was.

  “I can’t,” he finally said, drawing his hands up into his sleeves. “Those places are very expensive, not to mention all the doctors’ bills I’d have. I could never pay you back.”

  “It’s not a loan,” Miles said. He’d lost weight in the last few weeks and his shirt, which normally fit so tidily, gaped at the neck. “It’s a gift. Room, board, medical care—it’s what I’d give Lawrence, if he needed it. Since I can’t help him any longer, I’d like to be of some service to you. When we’re both better, I thought I could offer you work as a chemist at my plant. The work you were trained for.”

  Leaning forward, his lips trembling, he rested one hand on the doorframe—too upset, Leo assumed, by the very thought of Lawrence to remember the rule against touching the woodwork. “Cement can be interesting,” Miles added. “The nature and proportion of the lime, the temperature and time in the kiln and the grinding of the clinker, the exact blending of the different constituents, the lime with the silica and the alumina—everything depends on the skill and accuracy of the chemist. I need good help.”

  “That’s kind of you,” Leo said, “truly, but…” Once more he caught himself, continuing as patiently as he could. “Unfortunately,” he said, “my training’s in quite a different area. Fermentation chemistry, mostly. Organic chemistry.”

  The chemistry, his teacher had explained years ago, of carbon and its compounds—vegetable matter, animal matter, wax and oil and tar and wood, wine and vinegar and starch. Everything alive, which had nothing to do with gray cement. Each day he’d been working through a few of Mendeleeff’s pages. Carbonic anhydride, formed during alcoholic fermentation and found in nature near extinct volcanoes and in caves and mountain fissures, had been this morning’s lesson. Insects flew into those hollows and died, Mendeleeff wrote in one of his footnotes. Also the birds chasing the insects, and the animals pursuing the birds. A man mining or digging a well in such an area may be suffocated. In a sunny classroom, Leo remembered, he’d once placed a mouse in a bell jar and measured the amount of carbon it expelled before it died.

  “Don’t you want to think about my offer?” Miles said.

  “I wouldn’t be any use to you,” said Leo. “Anyway I wouldn’t leave my friends here.” He gestured toward Miles’s hand, still grasping the doorframe. “You should wash before you go.”

  Miles lifted his fingers from the wood. “I’m trying to help you,” he said stiffly. “Mrs. Martin’s house has amenities that this place can’t provide. I thought the arrangement might be good for both of us, but I see I was wrong.”

  He turned and hurried away, the hand that had been touching the wood now held, Leo noted, some inches from his body, just as if he were someone healthy enough to worry about getting sick.

  That evening, alone in his room with a newspaper propped against his knees—the czar had abdicated, the czar had abdicated: no matter how many times he read the headline and the columns that followed, he couldn’t believe it—Leo reviewed Miles’s offer only to dismiss it again. Why would Miles think he’d accept that kind of charity? In Russia, he read, everything was on the verge of changing, the rational and harmonious order so many had proposed for so long about to sweep away the corrupt, the foolish, and the antiquated; every day brought a new astonishment. The people rose up, the czar fell down, a provisional government appeared by what seemed like consensus: how could this be? If only he could talk with Ephraim. Since his friend’s departure he’d been trying to imagine the community in Ovid and what might be going on there. What might go on here, if we were left to our own devices. In Russia everything seemed possible but here—here, we seemed blocked at every turn, the conversations of our Wednesday afternoons the one place we were free.

  NOW, WHEN THE February Revolution seems like a child’s dream and we’ve seen the consequences of the Bolsheviks’ October triumph, when we read daily the terrible news of Russia’s civil war and dread what comes next, the optimism of those weeks seems laughable. But it didn’t feel that way, then. It felt, Leo thought—many of us thought—as if we were walking into a new world. During the last two weeks of March we had two more excellent gatherings, Pietr talking about the constellations visible from our porches, and then Zalmen and Seth, together describing the design and manufacture of machine tools; these raised everyone’s spirits and even Miles, so quiet since Lawrence’s death, asked questions at both sessions. Those were the same weeks during which Leo, working steadily, regained his old familiarity with Mendeleeff’s work and borrowed other books from Dr. Petrie and Irene, which delighted both of them. Meanwhile Eudora, who cheered Leo on whenever she saw him, nearly finished tuning up the old X-ray apparatus.

  Three or four nights a week, sometimes with Irene and sometimes alone, she’d been working in the basement. Finally she understood what Naomi had meant about her hand seeming to draw without conscious instruction; her own hands seemed to understand the tubes and wires without interference from her brain. She couldn’t explain to Irene why she did what she did; she couldn’t have written down what she was doing or justified her actions according to any rules. Yet as she stared at the apparatus, her hands knew that this part should be moved here and that part there, this connection resoldered. It looked better that way; it made more sense. When the images improved, even she was surprise
d. It wasn’t so different, really, from the implements and appliances in her parents’ house, which she’d always been the one to repair. She’d sharpened her father’s skinning knives, fixed the telephone when it broke, repaired not only her own bicycle but everyone else’s too. Only Naomi’s Model T had eluded her—and that, she thought, watching the dead animals yield their secrets under her hands, might after all have been because she’d known it was something Naomi wanted to keep as her own.

  Naomi, during those March weeks, found herself watching Leo even more closely. With Ephraim gone, his face radiated a kind of loneliness that she herself had known as a child and, now that Eudora never had time for her, was painfully feeling again. No wonder, if Leo felt so abandoned, that he’d be driven to spending most of his free time in the library with the books Irene had given him. Old things, useless things. Anything to fill his empty hours. She’d examined Irene’s frizzy hair and worn face, her shapeless dress and absurd purple glove, and reassured herself that however much Leo liked her books, he could not like her. If Irene meant to Leo what Miles meant to her, she had nothing to worry about. How tiresome Miles was when he caught her alone! He pulled his chair close and couldn’t stop talking: had she enjoyed the book he’d given her, did she like old things?

  Like me, he meant. What did she care about his interests? The book had left thick brown smudges on her hands and clothes and she couldn’t stand to touch it. If Miles would just give his books to Irene, they could talk with each other and leave her and Leo alone. She had her own plans, the thought of which made her able to smile blandly at Miles no matter what he said.

  ON APRIL 3, the day after President Wilson went to Congress and asked for a declaration of war, Naomi drove up the hill to Tamarack State, parked near the power plant, and entered the men’s annex through the service door. Although it was spring by the calendar, the ground was still frozen, the woods thick with snow, and Leo was in the library, as he was during every free hour. The door to his room was partway open and Naomi knocked on it twice.