The Air We Breathe

by Andrea Barrett

  “Start over,” Eudora said. Why did she find this so hard to remember? Otherwise she was very good with machinery.

  “Look,” Naomi said, tapping the levers on the steering wheel as they came to a rise. “If you’re in high gear when you get to a hill, push the spark lever back till it’s at the second or third notch, and open the gas to seven or eight notches. As soon as you hear the engine start to labor, use the clutch to put it in low gear and then move the levers like this. It’s simple.”

  “I’ll remember this time,” Eudora said, even as she felt the details slipping away. In the headlights, which brightened as they picked up speed, soft fat clumps of snow began to rush at the windshield. She turned her head toward the back and said to Miles, “I missed the end of your story. Would you mind telling me more about that dinosaur?”

  Eagerly he leaned forward and, as Naomi shifted gears and told Eudora to listen as the sound of the engine changed, repeated what he’d told us. Naomi steered along the edge of the lake, where some geese who should have headed south earlier were huddled by the benches in the park, and then drove into the village, past the lights and the people walking through the wet flakes. Miles completed his story and then said, shyly, that he thought the afternoon had gone well.

  Eudora agreed. They passed two doctors who worked at the private sanatorium up by the tobogganing hill; three boarders from Mrs. Martin’s house, standing in front of the theater; the mayor, walking his dachshund; one of the druggists talking with the director of the second-best funeral parlor. The dachshund, Eudora saw in the light pouring out from the theater, trotted along on his dwarfed legs as if he were exactly as important as the mayor.

  They passed the village train station, so much more welcoming than the siding at Tamarack State, and then pulled up at Eudora’s house. Inside, she knew, her parents would be sitting at the table, waiting dinner for her, listening to the empty rooms. If she was lucky, Eugene might have come over from the garage, in search of a home-cooked meal. If not, she’d be on her own, caught in her parents’ silence. What did they do all day, now that she was working at the sanatorium and everyone else was gone?

  “That was a treat,” she said to Naomi, opening the car door. “Thank you.”

  As she was about to walk back and untie her bicycle, Miles cleared his throat and said through the open door, “I wonder if you—I mean this for both of you—I know you’re both busy but you did seem interested in what we were talking about…Would you like to join in our sessions? Officially, I mean, not just listening on the side like you’ve been doing.”

  Naomi hesitated just as Eudora said, “I’d be delighted.”

  MILES WAS DELIGHTED that they’d said yes. Later that week, tucked into his bed at Mrs. Martin’s house, he wrote to Edward Hazelius:

  I hope this finds you well. I am doing well myself, very comfortable in my fine room. Just now I am in my excellent bed, the windows open and the alpaca shawl you so thoughtfully sent on my shoulders. The electric lamp shines down on my tray, which neatly holds my pen and papers; the covers are snugged over my legs; what more could I want?

  Well, my health, of course. And to be back in my own house and, if not back at work, at least planning travels with you and Lawrence. Our last trip has been very present to me these weeks, as I go through my journals from that summer and talk to strangers about our work. The experiment I described to you continues—our group had its third meeting this week—and although I meant to speak only at the first meeting, and only as an example to the others, I’ve found myself surprisingly caught up in the pleasure of sharing what I know. Also I’ve been stimulated by the realization of how very little the Tamarack State inmates know about the world around them. In education (or lack thereof), background, and training they are not dissimilar to the hands at your plant or mine.

  Because of this I’m often forced to backtrack, defining terms as I describe aspects of where we went or what we found; even the simplest principles of sedimentary deposition are beyond them. But this week I made real progress, I think. There is one inmate who seems particularly alert and whose face I use as a sort of living barometer; when I have his attention, I know I’m speaking well. This week he asked me about Kovalevsky! That a man in his position should know that name…

  Sorry—that blot marks the entrance of my very vigorous landlady, Mrs. Martin, come round with our evening glasses of hot milk and some fresh gingerbread. A crisply starched apron; her hair perfectly coiffed and a smile on her face—you could not find a better housekeeper, and there are reasons this is the most expensive cure cottage in the village. As always we get what we pay for. Her daughter, who helps her out, has offered to drive me weekly to the sanatorium.

  I see, speaking of getting sidetracked, that I have once more succumbed. This happens to me so commonly now that I wonder if my daily fevers have not impaired my mental functions. Though more likely it is the result of spending so much time in bed, so lazily: I hate this. The inmates at Tamarack State must hate it as well but their opportunities for self-improvement, unlike mine, are minimal. Their so-called library is shocking, ill-sorted shelves of castoffs donated by the villagers: old encyclopedias, new inspirational tracts, dime-store romances, gardening manuals, anthologies of sentimental verse, memoirs of unknown military figures, outdated almanacs. I could weep when I think of the orderly reading rooms we established in our plants. If our public library can deliver good and useful books on a weekly basis and encourage a program of systematic reading among the workers, why can’t that be done here? And if, in our well-run cafeterias, up-to-date magazines are available for the workers’ perusal, why must these inmates rely on tattered copies of Yiddish-and Russian-and German-language newspapers brought up weeks or months later by visitors from New York? Why isn’t there a daily English class? (The speech of many is far from perfect.) Or any of the other amenities we introduced in our plants?

  What I am trying to do is modest but I know it’s right—if they return to society better fitted to be happy and productive workers, the sort we would be pleased to hire, I will feel most satisfied. I am with Taylor in his philosophy of management: “Men, not materials, are the finished product of a factory.”

  And not only men: women as well. I did something bold this week, Edward. Attendance at the second and third sessions dropped a bit, and so I asked the housekeeper’s daughter, the one who’s been driving me, to join our group formally. Also I asked a friend of hers, a ward maid who’d come by to see her and stayed to listen. Both have agreed, which pleases me. I think I’ll issue a general invitation to the women’s annex, to make the group truly coeducational. The men and women are kept largely separate, meeting only for meals, prayers, or the occasional moving-picture show. They should welcome this chance for further interaction.

  In your last, you said nothing of Lawrence—I worry about him all the time. I haven’t had a letter from him in a month, have you? Often at night I have trouble sleeping (so would you, if you spent half of each day lying about) and then I see our trip again in my memory. I remember the way we grew so thirsty, after working in the rocks all day, that when we got back to the boat in the evening we dropped our heads to the river and drank like horses: you and me and Lawrence side by side. I remember the little boy who told us the Sioux legend about the giant monsters who’d once roamed the land, and how the Great Spirit struck them down with lightning bolts. Their explanation for dinosaur fossils, both of us realized at once. When the little boy said that the bones still lay on the ground where they fell, as no Sioux would touch them for fear they might be similarly destroyed, Laurence said: “ I will touch them!” Brave boy. Where did all of that go?

  There is little news; my health is much as it has been, neither worse nor, unfortunately, any better. Write when you can, your letters cheer me greatly.

  4

  EACH WEDNESDAY MILES continued to make the drive between the village and Tamarack State, puzzled that he hadn’t drawn more of us in but sure that he’d succeed in time
and comforted by the presence of Naomi at his side. The two women he’d courted seriously in the past had been ample and tall, while Naomi was as small as a child: the top of her head barely reached his nose and her figure was very slight. Sitting close to her in the car, though, always aware that she’d approached him, he saw that he’d missed the beauty of her eyes, her fine skin, and her wide, mobile mouth. Nor had he noticed, before, how sharply she observed those around her. On their rides, as she navigated the bumps and turns or steered around a frightened rabbit, she had something to say about all the other boarders at her mother’s house. This one looked worried, those two had quarreled, that one’s cough had changed. What, he wondered, did she say about him? Imagining her talking to Eudora, he began on Wednesdays to dress more carefully, tending to his fingernails and smoothing lotion on his hands.

  One afternoon, aware of her perched on the window seat as he listed geological periods, Permian, Devonian, Carboniferous, he stopped mid-sentence and started talking, instead, about how each of us possessed at least one gift. No matter how poorly we’d been educated, no matter how deprived our lives, we each had something worthy of sharing. “That’s why I started these sessions,” he said, walking toward the window. “I believe that absolutely. Look—”

  Swiftly he bent down, tugged away from Naomi the tablet of drawing paper she always had with her, and on which we’d seen her sketch our surroundings and sometimes our faces, and held it up. Leo and Ephraim side by side, an excellent likeness of both.

  “A perfect example,” Miles said. “Naomi’s gift, one of Naomi’s gifts, is the way she can draw anything.”

  She frowned and took the tablet back, flipping the pages to a drawing of roosting crows and wondering what else he thought he knew about her. He was studying her, she thought. As if she were a rock formation hiding a big skull. All month she’d felt his gaze following her as she dropped off laundry or picked up his library list, and often, now, despite the months when she’d been invisible to him, he looked at her intently and wanted to talk. His glances had prickled her skin as she sketched and she was almost sure he’d been eavesdropping on her and Eudora earlier, in the hall. She should have asked him for work simply, bluntly, instead of trying to charm him—why had she done that? On their last few drives she’d spoken little and answered his questions tersely, trying to act more like an employee than a companion, but he’d sensed nothing. Oblivious, like all the antiques: her mother, Eudora’s parents, Mr. Baum who sold her fabric and buttons, the fat geese who ran the village with their swollen middles and scrawny necks. All of them sure they knew how the world worked, unaware that their advice was useless and that they had nothing to say to her. What did they know about what she felt, what she needed, how the world was shimmering beyond these mountains, waiting for her to grasp it? They’d forgotten everything important about being alive.

  “And so,” Miles was saying, having swerved back to his original subject, “when you consider the comparative paucity of the fossil record…”

  Arrayed before him, we looked up obediently: more geese, Naomi thought. But we weren’t as stupid as she believed. We were people trying to learn something in a situation that offered little else, and at a time when we needed the distraction. That November, while Naomi was already trying to undo what she’d set in motion, also brought President Wilson’s reelection. Despite his campaign promises, no one really believed he’d be able to keep us out of the war much longer. November was the news from France, the battles at Verdun and the Somme just grinding to their end. It was rain and a new cook in the kitchen and two orderlies leaving; it was Morris and Pinkie back in the infirmary and Sam—age twenty-six, beloved first of Pearl and then of Celia—dead. November was the sky dropping down over our mountains like the lid of a cooking pot, until even the description of a three-horned herbivore was more pleasant than our own thoughts.

  A shifting group of us kept showing up for the sessions with Miles, but each week we managed to stretch the length of our refreshment break a little further, taking pleasure in talking, then, about whatever we wanted. One afternoon Ian, who roomed a few doors down from Leo and Ephraim, looked around at those of us holding cups of hot chocolate and slices of bread and butter topped with jam, and started talking about his brother, who had a wonderful job making children’s toys. For three years, he explained, his brother had worked at the plant that produced Erector sets, stamping steel into miniature girders, each tiny element precisely made and glowing with its nickel coating, the girders fitting so neatly together that a boy might construct a miniature bridge or a battleship. Instead of working as a collier, as he’d have been doing if he’d stayed in Wales, he was aboveground, not black with coal dust, enjoying the routine of a well-run factory.

  “I run an excellent factory myself,” Miles said, leaning into our circle. “At my plant…”

  Ian smiled, nodded, and then, as if Miles hadn’t spoken, continued. “I was hoping to work there myself, before I got sick,” he said. “My brother was sure he could get me a job.”

  “You’d be right to leap at that,” Leo said.

  The rest of us nodded, having many times admired through shop windows the gleaming parts bedded in sturdy wooden boxes. Those boxes, Ian continued, were exactly what he’d hoped to make; in Flushing he’d worked as a cabinetmaker and he had just the skills required. Several of us, longing to purchase the least expensive sets for our sons, wondered if Ian could get a discount and moved closer as Ian asked Naomi if he might have a few sheets of paper. He drew girders and angles and connecting strips, wheels and tiny motors, along with sketches of some of the models that boys from across the country submitted for the yearly contests. A windmill, a dredge that actually dug. A streetcar with wheels that moved.

  For several more minutes we chattered, ignoring Miles’s attempts to interrupt us. At supper we wondered if our discussion had irritated him, but to our surprise an elaborate Erector set turned up in our library that weekend. The three of us who unpacked it and spread out the pieces were impressed to see an electric motor and extra gears.

  “If we’d talked about books,” Frank said, “would he have sent up a crate of those?”

  “Records?” asked Pietr, who loved opera.

  “He wants something,” Abe said flatly. “He must. But what?”

  “Why does he have to want something?” Pietr said, setting the lid of the box aside. “It’s a toy, and that’s all it is. But still—we’ve got enough parts to build almost anything.”

  Together he and Frank and Abe made a simple building with a smoke-stack, rather like our power plant, which they left on the library table next to the open box. Soon after that the building disappeared, replaced by an arched bridge. Then a skyscraper rose and melted away, replaced first by a railroad car and then by an ambitious but inaccurate attempt at a battleship. Eudora stopped by the library after work one day and found Leo standing over that ship, which was now missing part of its deck. In his right hand he held a shiny hexagonal ring the size of a dinner plate.

  “What did you make?” she asked.

  “Model of a benzene molecule.” He hung the hexagon over her extended wrist. “Did you take chemistry in school?”

  “Two years,” she said. “Not as much as I would have liked, but that’s all girls can take here. I remember benzene, though—six carbon atoms?”

  “Kekulé’s structure,” he said. He’d built it almost unconsciously, his hands fitting the girders together into what for him was a common shape.

  “Peculiar name,” Eudora said, turning the angular ring on her arm.

  Leo pushed what was left of the ship across the table, remembering the scarred oak tables that had filled his old schoolroom, the smooth-bellied glass vessels and the sinuous tubing pulled fine as thread, the purring, nearly invisible flame of the Bunsen burner. Head-clearing tang of acetic acid, eggy stink of sulfur; he couldn’t think without pain of his dabbles into aromatic substitutions, pleasurably simple and yet so complex. During the few ye
ars of his studies in Odessa, the chemicals spritzing up from the bench had burned holes in his shirts. How hard he’d tried, during his first years in New York, to find work that made some use of his training! And how completely he had failed. One menial job after another, only the sugar refinery offering even a hint of possibility. Up here, where Miles’s descriptions of his cement gun and his fossil dinosaurs could seem equally interesting, or equally pointless, now that he knew he’d never be a chemist or find work he loved, he was doing his best to appreciate whatever came his way. Apparently his hands hadn’t resigned themselves, though.

  “Where did you learn that?” Eudora said.

  “In school,” he answered, wondering how long he’d been silent. “A while ago.” Briefly, and with more cheerfulness than he felt, he described his training in Odessa and his struggle, after emigrating, to find work.

  “You ought to talk to Irene Piasecka,” she said. “The woman who runs the X-ray laboratory.”

  “A woman took a radiograph of my chest,” he said. “Was that her?”

  Eudora nodded. “She wasn’t raised around here either.”

  The gleaming metal shape he’d made, which she now held in front of her like a dish, was perfectly useless but had at least drawn her attention. “Keep that, if you’d like,” he said.

  IN THE BASEMENT, two floors beneath them, lay Irene’s domain: a long, dim, cool room, windowless and below the ground, smelling of ozone and the flagstone floor, the chemicals used in the darkroom and tarnishing silver. Dr. Petrie used to sit for hours at the end farthest from the X-ray apparatus, gazing at Irene’s face across the low table and, in the light of a single lamp, talking about his patients—us—and about the young men he’d once loved, both of whom had died. Ephraim, Leo, Pietr, Zalmen, Polly, Nan, Lydia, Abe—all of us had stood perfectly still, comforted by Irene’s voice, while she peered inside our chests. Sadie had talked obsessively to Irene about the dogs she bred, which she’d had to leave behind; Ladislav had talked about his childhood haunts, some of which Irene had also known; we liked the X-ray room, we felt at home. No point in describing how it is now.