The Air We Breathe

by Andrea Barrett

  24

  IF WE FELT ashamed of ourselves—Otto, Abe, and Arkady especially; if we worried about the ways we’d failed Leo, we were comforted by the way, almost immediately, the tension here eased. Still the Four-Minute Man came to lecture us; still Miles came several times each week to consult with Dr. Richards. But our routine settled down after Leo vanished, as if Miles wasn’t interested enough in the rest of us to continue constricting our lives. Curiosity about our own behavior would come to us later; what we had at first was a continued curiosity about the fire and its causes, and also about what had happened to Naomi. Any information, we knew, would come to us from Eudora—but Eudora, after Leo left, didn’t spend much time with us. She worked extra shifts, still; she performed her duties carefully and was always pleasant when cleaning our rooms. But she left as soon as her tasks were done, and although she never said anything about Leo’s sudden departure, we knew she judged us.

  To Irene, her only real companion after Leo left, she admitted how angry she was with us (we expected that) and also, more surprisingly, how angry she was that Leo had bolted without talking to her. That he’d finally state his feelings not in person but in a note: how was she supposed to respond to that? Something delicate and interesting had arisen between them in the X-ray room, which was one of the reasons she’d agreed to meet him at movie night—and which, after all that had happened, still hung unresolved. A blunt line, at the end of a note, only served to hide everything worth talking about. And she was further distracted by his first paragraph, which explained how, after all this time, he’d finally received Naomi’s letter.

  That letter itself she read with a terrible pang. Naomi’s feelings had developed in front of her as steadily and clearly as a photographic plate, but she’d acted as if, because Leo didn’t share them, they meant nothing. When she’d suggested that Naomi should let Leo know how she felt, she’d imagined a few words, perhaps a warm glance at the end of a Wednesday session—never a letter like that. But she also hadn’t imagined that Naomi would sneak into the movies on a night when she was driving Miles. All their walks and talks and bicycle rides, the confidences they’d exchanged, the times they’d skated on the frozen lake with their arms linked and the moon rising over the mountains, counted for nothing against the moment when Naomi had caught the look she and Leo exchanged. Naomi had left without a word, without even a hint. Now the letter made Eudora suspect she’d never hear from Naomi again.

  When she did get news of Naomi, it came indirectly, in late September. In Irene’s tidy room, which Eudora visited each week and which was slowly filling with the books Dr. Petrie begged from friends to replace the collection destroyed in the basement, she flipped through a radiography manual. She glanced at a formula for mixing a developing solution—already, this was out of date—and then she told Irene that her brother Ernest had seen Naomi in New York.

  Irene reached for her pad and pencil. Still, then, she hadn’t regained her voice. I didn’t know they were even friends, she wrote.

  “I didn’t either, really,” Eudora said. “She used to see him at our house, but I never thought of them as close. Ernest wrote that she’d gotten in some trouble during her first few weeks in New York—I guess that’s where she went from here—and then she looked him up.”

  She’s all right, then?

  “So Ernest says.”

  You must be relieved.

  “Ernest didn’t know how she got to the city, or what she did when she first arrived. But he said she showed up at his room one night—he has a tiny place in an attic, near Central Park—and stayed for a couple of months. Then one day she told him she’d found work in Brooklyn, and the next day she left.”

  Irene, who still hadn’t admitted to Eudora, or to the rest of us, all that had happened between her and Naomi, wrote, What kind of work?

  “As a trolley conductor,” Eudora answered, wondering why this would matter. “Maybe being so good with her mother’s car helped.” While Irene drew a jagged border in the margin of her writing pad, she added, “But the important thing is that she’s in one piece.”

  Eudora had found a fresh glove for Irene after the fire, changed the cotton inside the fingers, later wrapped the ugly wound on her neck with a bright printed scarf. In all ways she’d been an excellent assistant and it would have been nice to spare her feelings. Still, Irene had to ask, Do you know why Naomi left?

  “I’m not sure,” Eudora said.

  Irene waited, her pencil motionless.

  “She saw Leo and me together, at the movies,” Eudora admitted. When Irene nodded, Eudora continued, “She was upset. We were all upset. But it’s worse than I knew. She…” Eudora paused and looked out the window—it was lovely outside, the leaves just beginning to turn color on the trees near the pond and the swallows eagerly darting—before taking two folded sheets of paper from her pocket. “I’ve been wanting to show you these.”

  Irene read Naomi’s letter, and then Leo’s. Then Naomi’s again. She wrote, What did she have that belonged to Leo? Leo’s name she underlined twice.

  “She had a bag with her that night. I saw some drawings in it. Drawings of him.”

  Irene nodded. She showed them to me as well.

  “Did she?” Eudora asked. For a minute they looked at each other. “She might have meant those.”

  She might, Irene wrote. She turned her gaze to the swallows while she decided what she’d keep to herself. Then she added, What will you do now?

  WE WEREN’T SURPRISED to hear that Eudora had decided to leave us; with the X-ray laboratory destroyed and Irene unable to work, she didn’t have much reason to stay. Irene and Dr. Petrie helped her apply to a nurses’ training school in Jamestown, where she might get certified quickly as an aide. She planned to head overseas when she was done, with whatever organization would take her. Once she was in France she could find a place helping with a mobile X-ray unit or assisting a radiographer in a field station. At worst, she could work in a base hospital. Three months, she told Leo, when she’d forgiven him enough to write. I’ll let you know where I’m posted as soon as I hear.

  From Miles, who caught her one afternoon on the lawn near the men’s annex, she hid both her own plans and Leo’s whereabouts. Nor did she tell him what she’d learned from her brother about Naomi. Behind his good manners was not, she thought, the meek creature Naomi had thought she could manipulate so casually. She avoided Miles when she could, now, and concealed anything important when she couldn’t.

  “I suppose Leo’s gone to be with Naomi,” Miles said bitterly. The wind, blowing from the west, carried with it the smell of a thousand miles of pine. “They’re probably in the same place. What have you heard?”

  “Not a thing.” She turned and headed toward the annex.

  From right behind her, crowding her heels, he said, “Why do I ask you anything? You thought he was in love with you.”

  “I’ve been wrong about quite a few things,” she replied. Including, she thought, her own feelings for Leo. Packing up her few belongings, explaining to her distraught parents why she had to do this, her anger at Leo had faded. She liked Leo enormously, she realized. She longed to touch him, take care of him, sleep next to him—was that love? She couldn’t imagine joining him now, when she’d still accomplished nothing and been nowhere, but she could imagine returning to him.

  WINTER SET IN not long after Eudora left, the coldest winter anyone could remember. The lakes surrounding us froze quickly, their surfaces so glossy that from our porches we could see them gleaming like mirrors between the hills and hear the runners’ whisk as the iceboats flew from shore to shore. In New York, the Hudson River locked up partway into the bay, allowing astonished men to walk from Staten Island to New Jersey but stopping all traffic between there and Albany. Families froze to death in tenements as wood and coal grew scarce. Men who’d been drafted in July and shipped to army camps thrown up from wood and canvas shivered next to each other on cots without blankets, trained without woolen socks o
r overcoats; whole regiments came down with pneumonia. There were investigations, hearings, newspaper articles condemning the ill treatment of our new soldiers. Once the revolutionary government in Russia signed an armistice with Germany, the war news became even worse, and that, in a way, was a blessing for us: suddenly no one had time for us anymore, and we were left alone.

  In January one blizzard after another marched over us and then on to the East Coast cities. The wind blew, the snow fell. The snow fell and fell and fell and no one could get anywhere, but we didn’t care: we had nowhere to go. There were Bolsheviks in the Bronx, we heard; no longer admirable fighters for freedom and peace but traitors. We ignored the cold, we ignored the news. (Although we paused at that word “traitors”: was that what we were?) Clinging to what was left of our weekly gatherings, beginning at the same time to realize what we’d done, we went to work. No single person, we thought, had done anything so terrible. Yet together, without noticing exactly what was happening, we’d contributed to destroying our own world. We wanted to understand how we’d done that, or how we’d failed to prevent it.

  Even as our time on the crowded porches grew more bitter, our hands stiffer, our faces more frozen, we continued to sift and sort our recollections. We’ve made more progress than we might have thought. By February, we’d looked at the various letters and at Dr. Petrie’s reports, and also at the drawings Eudora left with us, which deepened our sense of Naomi’s desperate attachment to Leo. We looked at the green volumes Irene tried to give to Leo, which Dr. Petrie retrieved and which taught us something about scientific proof. The last piece of the puzzle came from Irene herself, though, when she regained a whisper of her voice.

  She’s completely one of us now that she can’t work, a patient again as she was in her youth. She was, as she’s admitted, unwilling at first to rejoin us, disappointed by our cowardice, our pettiness, the misplaced sense of clannishness that drove us to cling together and push Leo away. But eventually, she also began to remember some of what she’d seen in us during our Wednesday sessions. Our hopefulness, our eagerness to learn. Our belief that, sick and inadequate as we were, we might help each other. One night, finally—we had gathered in the kitchen, completely against the rules—she told us what she’d omitted from her letter to Dr. Richards and also withheld from Eudora.

  On the Friday evening of the fire, she’d been sorting radiographs, looking for images that Dr. Petrie might find useful. Later she meant to go upstairs to the movies, but she was behind in her filing and the work went slowly. Images of the dead she laid to her right, images of the living to her left. Through the door, which she’d left open to air out the musty room, she heard footsteps pounding down the stairs and rushing past before stopping, walking back, and tentatively entering the lab.

  She rose from her desk in the back, which was behind a dividing wall lined with shelves, and walked into the area nearest the corridor. In the pale light of her desk lamp, she could see a young woman huddled on the couch. Her head was in her arms and she was weeping.

  “Are you all right?” Irene asked gently. The woman raised her head and Irene recognized Miles’s driver. Despite the Wednesday afternoon sessions they’d shared, Irene didn’t feel she knew her well. Naomi sulked, and had a biting tongue; sometimes she drew Eudora away from her work; otherwise Irene couldn’t figure her out. Still, she couldn’t work with Naomi sitting alone in the gloom. Lowering herself into a chair, she asked why Naomi was so upset.

  “Because,” Naomi said, flinging her hands dramatically.

  She leapt from the couch and began circling the room, touching the walls, trailing her fingers against the edges of the gray paper envelopes holding each patient’s films. We were all there, arranged alphabetically, our folders thicker or thinner depending on when we’d been admitted and what crises we’d had: lungs before, during, after, lungs scarred or healed or dense with fluid and deposits. Naomi circled counterclockwise, her right arm outstretched, fingers clicking over the edges of the folders and making a sound like a stick rubbing down a washboard, which at first Irene could only envy: it had been years since she could imagine doing something so harsh to her own scabby, truncated hands.

  “What can I do?” Irene asked. In the kitchen where we listened to this, the radiators popped and hissed and we drew closer together, as if the anxiety Irene had felt, listening to Naomi, had made its way across the months to us.

  A cloth bag hung from Naomi’s left shoulder, Irene said. The bag—some of us remembered seeing it—swayed back and forth as she moved. Her head was down, her arm was out, her dress was red and had a crisp white collar. Her fingers clicked against the films as she began to speak. Disjointed phrases, disjointed feelings. Her yearning for Leo and the signs he’d sent her, so surreptitiously, all through the winter and spring. His secret intention to meet her and watch the movies together, and the letter she’d sent him, which he pretended not to have seen. Eudora had tricked her, lied to her…

  “Eudora would never do anything to hurt you,” Irene said. “If she deceived you at all, it would only have been to keep you from being hurt.”

  “You would take her side,” Naomi said. “You’ve done everything you could to come between us, you took her. You took my friend.”

  “That’s not true,” said Irene. Click click click click click, went the nails against the folders.

  “Leo loves me,” Naomi said, “the way I love him. I see the way he watches me, I know. I made the mistake of telling Eudora and now she’s trying to take him for herself, just the way you took her. The way you two take everything.”

  Irene drew a breath. How terrible, she thought, not to be able to see what was real. Gently—she wondered if she’d ever misread a person so badly—she said, “Leo has been mooning over Eudora for months now. He was watching her, not you. He’s told Eudora how he feels. And I think she’s beginning to have feelings for him as well. I don’t approve, I think she should keep her mind on her work, but—”

  Naomi glared at her and then set her bag firmly on the floor. “Why are women like you so stupid?” she said. “You, my mother—both of you too old and dried-up to understand how anyone feels.”

  Reaching down, she pulled a handful of papers from her bag and waved them at Irene. Chins, ears, noses, eyes; at first Irene wasn’t sure what she was looking at. Eventually, she made out Leo’s face.

  “This is what’s real,” Naomi said scornfully. “The way I feel about Leo. Not that you’d know what it’s like to look at someone’s mouth and feel it on you, or to know how his hands would touch you…”

  For a second, Irene wanted to slap her. Of course she knew: when she and her husband were first married, the sound of his footsteps coming toward her in the dark could make her heart race like a greyhound’s. He used to tease her by holding his right hand over her breast, so close he was nearly touching it, hovering until she lifted her body to meet him. And then years later, after he’d died and she’d moved to Colorado and thought she was past all of that, she’d been startled by the fierce charge that leapt between her and her brother-in-law when they were first experimenting with the Roentgen rays. She’d taken the job Dr. Richards offered as a way of saving her sister; she was here because of just those feelings. How upsetting that, to someone Naomi’s age, she looked as if she’d always been old.

  She calmed herself and raised her good hand to Naomi’s shoulder. “I do understand,” she said: sympathetically, she hoped. “I’m fond of Leo myself and I can see why you’d be drawn to him. His intelligence, and his desire to learn; it’s touching. He told me once that in Odessa he earned money for his laboratory fees by cleaning out latrines. You work hard yourself, I know. You must feel like that’s a bond between you.”

  Naomi shoved the drawings back into her bag. “When,” she said—her hands were trembling—“when did he live in Odessa?”

  “Before he moved here,” Irene said. “After his mother died and he left Grodno.” All those drawings, and yet Naomi seemed to know nothi
ng essential about him; not even, perhaps, that he’d meant to be a chemist. “He told Eudora that during the first winter after he ran away from home, he slept on the floor in someone’s pantry.”

  In response, Naomi burst into tears, heaved the bag at Irene, and ran from the room. Papers, and something that looked like part of a garment, fluttered past Irene’s shoulder. She had an instant to be grateful that the bag had missed her; there was something heavy inside, a book perhaps, which made a thudding sound as the bag hit the floor below the shelves.

  We think the thudding sound was made by the antique fossil book given by Edward Hazelius as a Christmas present to Miles, which Miles then gave to Naomi and which Naomi must have wanted to give Leo. The stolen shirt lay on top of the book, along with the heap of drawings. Below it, we think, lay the third pencil. In the letters Eudora had started writing once she was over in France and working in the hospital, she’d tried to explain to Irene, and to herself, the evolution of her feelings for Leo. Without understanding the implications, she described the afternoon she’d found Naomi rummaging through Leo’s locker. I was ready to hit her, when I saw her there. I should have known then how I felt about Leo.

  I should have known, Irene would tell us later, as we leaned against the kitchen counters and nibbled the sunflower seeds she’d brought. But on that May night all she knew was that Naomi was crying. She followed Naomi into the corridor, leaving the bag where it fell. Behind her, we hypothesize, the pencil crushed between the book and the floor let out a little spurt of exceptionally hot flame.

  WE HAVE THE letter from Eudora’s brother; based on that we imagine Naomi’s life in New York. Probably, we think, she is fine. Upset, perhaps; grieving over the loss of Leo—but for all that basically fine. Unaware of what she has done, what she has caused. If she saw a report about the fire in the newspapers, did she figure out her own role? We think not; she paid no attention to anything but her own feelings, and it wouldn’t have occurred to her that her actions might affect other people. We imagine her dressed in a streetcar conductor’s uniform, collecting fares and smiling at passengers as the car traverses a stretch of Brooklyn, perhaps flirting with a young man who looks like Leo. A girl, still; not quite twenty years old. In time someone else will catch her eye. Who knows what will happen then? She doesn’t know that Leo was forced to leave, that Irene will always whisper, or that the clearing has expanded by three stones.