The Air We Breathe

by Andrea Barrett

  The Baums, he said—Sidonie and Martin—had in the nineties immigrated to Tamarack Lake from Germany and had long been solid citizens. Children took piano lessons from Mrs. Baum, who taught in the music studio attached to the back of their house. “You, Charles,” he said to a man on his left, “—didn’t you study with her?”

  “Four years,” Charles said. The man next to him chimed in, “I took for six.”

  Miles nodded. “It seems like half the village has taken lessons from her at one time or another. She has quite a number of students now from the high school. Including many boys.”

  Much as he’d stood before us during our early Wednesday gatherings, he faced the men in chairs and went on to describe Mr. Baum, whose fabric and notions store was familiar to everyone but who was also known as the director of the local choral society, the Mountain-aires. For years, anyone who could carry a tune had crowded into the church hall and sung what Mr. Baum directed. Some years, when they had a good soprano, the Mountain-aires had done very well, other years less so, but no one had found them controversial until, two weeks ago, at a rehearsal for the summer concert, several members had suggested politely that the Bach and Brahms selections be removed and replaced by English works.

  “And this,” Miles continued, “is where the problem arose. My agent reported to me that Mr. Baum called the member who’d suggested this an unpleasant name, in German. And then said that German music represented German culture, which in turn represented the highest level of human achievement. And that anyone who would turn their back on that culture because of a war, a war in which we had no business interfering, understood nothing.”

  A hand rose in the back; Miles called on its owner. “He said ‘a war in which we had no business interfering’? Those words exactly?”

  “So my agent reports,” Miles answered. The fabric in Naomi’s new dress, he thought, had probably come from Mr. Baum’s shop.

  Charles added, “My sister talked to Mr. Baum the next day. He said he loved America, which was like his wife. But that Germany was like his mother—and how could he fight his own mother?”

  “Recommendations?” someone asked.

  For half an hour they discussed the Baums, who, they all agreed, had an unusual degree of access to young people in general, young men subject to the upcoming draft in particular. Against the arguments that they’d been known for decades as good neighbors and good teachers, the men weighed Mr. Baum’s outburst, the couple’s background, and their potential for spreading harmful attitudes. Both should be watched, the group decided. And if necessary disciplined.

  An agent from a village north of Tamarack Lake then proposed that they adopt a unified warning system using color-coded cards. “Something like these,” he suggested, passing around samples.

  The air was stuffy inside the hall, and the light so dim that, when the cards reached Miles, he had to move closer to the shaded bulb hanging over the table. The buff card read:

  You have been reported to your local committee of concerned citizens for unpatriotic

  ACTIONS or

  SPEECH(circle one or both).

  Please adjust your attitudes. This is your First Warning.

  (signed)

  Local Patriots

  A blue card offered a Second Warning; a red card announced the visit of a committee member. Miles passed the cards on, listening as his companions discussed details of wording. Should the second-to-last line include the word “please,” or should it be more abrupt? Should the committee identify itself by name? He felt his mind split in two as he listened, like a long sheet of newsprint torn lengthwise. On one side all the words he’d said and heard tonight appeared in columns, bordered by neat ruled lines: motions made and seconded and passed, rules approved, language adopted, money allocated. This was the world he’d known since childhood, orderly and businesslike. Hardworking men, whose chain of command was clear, disposed of tasks in a certain order; this was what meetings were for. The tasks might be trivial, the tasks might be crucial, but the method was the same either way, a calm discussion and assignment of duties, the items ticked off the list. The minutes ticked by, the agenda items came and went. The words continued to accumulate in one half of his mind. In the other was an image of Naomi.

  HE WAITED OUTSIDE, after the meeting ended, as the doctors and lawyers and merchants drove away. The three men in the Cadillac drove away. The mayor of Tamarack Lake, whose little dog had waited patiently on his car seat throughout the meeting—“I renamed him,” the mayor said, cradling the brown creature. “He’s Fred, now. And he’s not a dachshund, he’s a liberty pup”—offered Miles a ride, but Miles assured him his own driver was coming and so the mayor drove away. A local man shut off the lights, locked the door, and talked for twenty minutes to one of the undertakers from Tamarack Lake. When the undertaker was ready to go, Miles finally accepted a ride with him.

  Both furious and frightened, he greeted Mrs. Martin harshly when he got back to the boardinghouse. “Where is she?” he said. “I know it’s late, but I want to talk to her.”

  “She’s not here,” Mrs. Martin said—looking, Miles thought, not half so concerned as he was himself. “She didn’t pick you up?”

  “Obviously not,” Miles said. “If it hadn’t been for Monty I couldn’t have gotten home.”

  “Maybe she’s doing something with Eudora, and lost track of time?”

  As she said that, the powdered planes of her face shifted briefly and Miles saw something that might have been worry, or fear. Then it was gone, and she was once more wearing her pleasant, meaningless smile. At the Wednesday gatherings, he remembered, he’d often caught Naomi and Eudora whispering together. Slightly comforted, he said, “I want to speak to both of you, together, first thing in the morning.”

  Coming into town from the west, he’d missed the fire trucks going to Tamarack State, which had headed up the hill while he was at the meeting. All night long he tried to sleep, leaping to the window at each slight noise, hoping to hear the grate clack as the car pulled into the carriage house. Before breakfast, he paced his porch, peering at the windows and screens of the houses nearby as if Naomi might be hiding behind one.

  He entered the dining room to a flurry of excited gossip about the fire. As the facts surfaced—there weren’t many, yet, but it was clear that the damage was serious—his mind once more seemed to tear into two strips. This time he forced himself to ignore the one belonging to Naomi. His league work during the past weeks had put him in contact with every important person in the county; back at home he’d not only run his plant but had been on the boards of four different charitable organizations; who was better equipped to organize help for Tamarack State?

  By ten o’clock he was already at work. His lack of a driver turned out not to be a problem; one call to the chief who’d recruited him produced, half an hour later, a weedy boy with a red cowlick, a shriveled left leg, and, on his left foot, a black shoe with a thickly built-up sole. He could never serve in the military, Miles saw at a glance. And was correspondingly eager to do what he could to help at home.

  “Tyler,” the boy said, introducing himself. “At your service.” The Willys-Knight limousine he’d driven over was, he proudly claimed, on loan to Miles “for the duration” from the owner of the dealership. Throughout the day, as Miles moved through his long round of visits, Tyler was so useful that Miles once or twice wondered, guiltily, why he hadn’t asked his chief for a car and driver from the start. The answer was too painful to consider. Hourly he checked in with Mrs. Martin, hoping for news of Naomi. Had she been in an accident? Simply gone to visit a friend? Late that night, when he finally returned to the boardinghouse after missing all three of his rest periods and several meals, Mrs. Martin set before him a warm plate, which she’d saved from dinner. “You won’t last long if you don’t take care of yourself,” she said.

  “Any word?” He tried not to wolf the scalloped potatoes.

  “Not yet,” she said, her voice as flat as Naomi�
��s had been the previous night. “I think she’s run away.”

  “Why would you think that?” Even as he spoke, he remembered Naomi’s words—What would you do if I just stopped doing this?—and saw again her red dress with the crisp white collar, which now seemed too nice for an evening’s duty driving. The baked ham he’d been enjoying suddenly seemed both dry and salty.

  Looking down at a dish on which birds carrying bows of ribbon chased each other around the embossed rim, Mrs. Martin explained, never meeting his eyes, that some money, which at first she thought she’d lost, was missing from her purse.

  UP ON OUR own hill, it didn’t seem possible that we’d survive. The administration building was ruined, not destroyed exactly—it stands where it always stood—but blackened with soot and so saturated with toxic fumes that no one could enter without a mask. Lost with it were our X-ray facility, our kitchen, dining hall, and reception room, our library, the infirmary, the clinical laboratories, most of the staff offices, and the solarium where our little group had met on Wednesdays. Before the night of the fire, we’d already lost to the suddenly ravenous military a number of young doctors and orderlies and maintenance staff. Now there were fewer people to take care of us just when we needed more, and no place else to send us; every place was like Tamarack State, suddenly overcrowded and understaffed. And everyone was short of money, too; funds that might have been used for rebuilding went, instead, to construct hospitals for the war wounded who would soon enough return from overseas. We were on our own.

  The officials who arrived to advise Dr. Richards pointed at the undamaged wings of the men’s and women’s annexes, separated from the ruined central building by the covered walkways. Combine the patients in a single wing, they said. Men on the top floor of the former men’s annex, women on the ground floor, the middle floor split half-and-half. Four of us rather than two in each room; on the porches the dividing panels removed and the chairs crowded into long rows. All the functions of the central building could then be transferred into the former women’s annex.

  Doctors and nurses crowded in to help from other sanatoria in the village; housewives ferried in meals; grocers and druggists brought bread and bandages and medicines while our own maids and orderlies, Eudora included, worked double shifts moving us into our new quarters, making up beds, and carrying meals. A new infirmary was improvised on the second floor of the women’s annex, a dining room wedged into what had been the women’s lounge, offices and laboratories scattered here and there. Floors were reinforced to support the heavy stoves, new plumbing was installed and equipment moved for a new kitchen. Until that work was finished, our meals were cooked on the back lawn, in a sort of field kitchen.

  We were lucky this had happened at the beginning of the summer. Tents, wooden platforms, canvas awnings; military cookers on wheels donated by the army training camp at Plattsburg; wood and coal stoves carted over from merchants in the village; finally we were grateful for Miles’s managerial skills. Scrubbing and soaking restored the utensils and the big pots and pans, but our old familiar tables and chairs, which were made of wood, seemed to have sucked the fumes into their pores and couldn’t be used without being sanded and repainted. Until then we ate our meals from trays in bed or on our cure chairs. Before, this wouldn’t have been much of a hardship, but it made those early days, when many of us were still sick and all of us were getting used to our new, forced intimacy, more difficult. Rooms and porches that had been snug for two were crammed with four; we quarreled—we still quarrel—over lockers and sinks and toilets and our positions on the porches.

  Both Dr. Richards and Dr. Petrie, healthy to begin with, recovered more quickly than the rest of us; on Dr. Richards’ orders, Dr. Petrie began assembling notes and writing a preliminary report on the fire as soon as he was out of bed. Who was injured and how badly. Who had died so far: Morris, after his botched jump, and Edith and Denis, who’d been trapped in their beds. Who might yet die: Kathleen, who’d been exposed the longest; Janet, who’d been in the back row and who had only one functioning lung; Leo, who’d received a very large dose when he’d tried to help Kathleen. Naomi didn’t appear on any of his lists; Eudora had seen what looked like Mrs. Martin’s Model T spiraling down the hill long before the fire trucks arrived. He was far more worried about Irene, who was struggling to breathe and whose throat was still so swollen that she couldn’t talk.

  Piecing together where the fire had started and what had burned, he determined the nature of the brownish yellow clouds that had made us so sick. He wrote:

  A fire of undetermined origin began in the X-ray facility at approximately 9 p.m. Concrete walls and floors retarded the spread of the flames and only moderate damage might have been done had not the fire heated the metal shelves along the walls of the facility, in which were stored several thousand radiographs. While the shelves did not catch fire they conducted heat, causing the sheets of film to melt and smolder.

  The film stock, made of highly flammable nitrocellulose, gives off carbon monoxide and nitrous fumes as it decomposes. Ductwork extending from the basement area to the dining hall directly above it spread the toxic gases rapidly.

  Within the respiratory tract, moisture converts nitrous fumes to nitric acid, with subsequent damage to the trachea, bronchi, and lungs. Alveolar rupture, pulmonary congestion, and pulmonary edema may result. The effects are not dissimilar to those I observed in France among soldiers exposed to poison gas. Worst affected are the radiographer, who apparently tried to rescue some of the films (she remains unable to speak, so we have no clear account of why she was in the vicinity), and those who were closest to the ductwork from which the gases poured into the dining hall.

  As he wrote, stopping occasionally to rub a cramp from his hand, he was thinking about Edith and Denis and Morris, and about all his other failures. He might have recognized the first whiff of the fumes and rushed us out before anything worse could happen; if he were taller and stronger he might have pushed and carried from the hall more people than he had; if he hadn’t succumbed to the fumes himself he might have taken better care of the sick in the first crucial days instead of lying in bed, wheezing and vomiting. And how had he failed to pry Irene away from her work that night? They often urged each other to take a break, and it had been his job to convince her. If he had, she might be back at her desk already, like him. Instead—she too might die, he thought. His pen paused at another repetition of the word “pulmonary”—suddenly the spelling looked very odd—and then stopped altogether. For the first time since his return from France, his job seemed like too much.

  He stood, stretching his aching arm over his head and flexing his fingers until the soreness eased. How had the fire started? He could imagine Irene bent over her apparatus, so caught up in her work that she failed to notice the first signs until she was enveloped. Either she’d rushed from the room too late, her arms heaped with films, or, an even more upsetting thought, she’d fled promptly but then steeled herself to return and rescue what films she could. She’d been found on the back stairs leading to the service door, clutching to her chest an enormous stack of images of our lungs. The first investigators, masked and goggled, had followed a shining trail of radiographs from the spot where she’d collapsed all the way back to her desk.

  Dr. Petrie shared his report with the fire department and the police, the commission from Albany and the other one from New York. More informally, he told us, so that we began to get a sense of what had happened. His partial information was better than what we got from the newspapers, which tried to link our fire to others of the recent past: at the Williamsburg tenements, the insurance building, the shirtwaist factory. Interspersed with their speculations were shots of our own faces, swollen and covered with soot, which eager local photographers had taken as we lay out on the lawns.

  The investigators, after sorting through the evidence and taking statements from everyone able to speak, found nothing scandalous to feed those papers, though. No defects in the heating or the
electrical systems, no mismanagement, nothing scanted in the building’s design or maintenance, no evidence of shortcuts during construction, no sign of arson. An accident, the investigators said. A spark, perhaps, or a shorted wire from a piece of apparatus in the X-ray facility. The cause of the “smoke-related incident”—that was how they referred to it—remained mysterious, but the destruction would have been far worse and the fire spread more rapidly if the building hadn’t been so well-designed and well-built. They particularly admired the central stairwell, recommending only that exterior fire stairs be added to the top floor of each dormitory wing.

  DURING THE DAYS immediately after the fire, Eudora hardly left Tamarack State except to snatch a meal and a few hours of dreamless sleep. She knew, as the rest of us didn’t, then, how upset Naomi had been to find her with Leo, and she blamed herself for Naomi’s disappearance. Briefly she wondered if Miles might have helped her leave town, but when she saw him at Tamarack State, directing a line of volunteers carrying groceries, she didn’t dare ask him. Mrs. Martin was useless; Eudora had glimpsed her at the pharmacist’s, telling whoever would listen that her daughter had run away for no reason, taking the car that even now wasn’t fully paid off and leaving her shorthanded. Perhaps, Eudora thought, Naomi had left some clue in her room.

  She sacrificed her first morning off since the fire, bicycled over to Mrs. Martin’s house, and went in through the service door. A young woman stringing beans greeted her as she walked past white walls fringed with Mrs. Martin’s notes. New ones, about conserving food for the war: reminders about observing wheatless Mondays and Wednesdays and meatless Tuesdays, about using less sugar, eating more fish, saving cooking fats for soap and fruit pits for carbon that would go into gas masks to save soldiers’ lives. Eat Potatoes! one card read. Eat Oatmeal! read another.