Then as now we live without locks; when no one answered she slipped inside, hoping that Leo would be alone and eager to see her and perhaps also, at the same time, hoping that he’d be absent and she’d be able to root among his belongings without distraction. He wasn’t there. She shut the door behind her and sped through the room to the porch, where she examined the blankets piled on Leo’s cure chair, concealing the layers of newspaper; the soapstone pig, presently cold; the two volumes of Mendeleeff’s book balanced on the little table between the chairs; the second chair, oddly bleak, which had been Ephraim’s. Tentatively she stretched out on it and convinced herself she was seeing what Leo saw. Hill, hill, hill, hill, trees and trees and trees. Only the clouds marching from west to east were pleasant to look at. Dark birds rose from the trees, circled around, and settled again; what were they? She imagined Leo, lying a yard away, reaching out a hand to say he loved her.
“Leo?” Abe called.
His chair was a few yards farther down the porch, beyond one of the thin partitions that still, then, marked off territories specific to each room. Silently Naomi retreated inside and inspected Leo’s bed, not just the sheets but the blankets, the pillowcases, the movable tray table that slipped over his legs so that he might eat or write with ease. She investigated the nightstand, the lamp, and the stubby pencils jumbled, inside the nightstand drawer, with white quartz pebbles and pinecones. She inspected the slippers beneath the bed and then, moving toward the front of the room, the little cubicle containing the washbasin, the toilet, and the two metal lockers. His clothes were here and the rest of his belongings. Wool pants hung from a hook; she slid her face along the fabric and then sniffed a sweater she’d seen him wear. More clothes, as well as a laundry bag to investigate. She had a few minutes to herself.
And then Eudora walked by the door to Leo’s room, as she did most afternoons. Seeing it closed—we were required to keep our doors at least halfway open during our free time, so the nurses and orderlies could spy on us—she knocked twice and, worried at getting no answer, opened it. What she found was not Leo slumped over the sink or hemorrhaging in bed but Naomi, perched on a chair with some clothes at her feet, her hands filled with papers, a metal box on her lap.
“What are you doing?” Eudora said. Swiftly, before anyone else could come by, she closed the door behind her. When she turned back she saw Naomi’s hand emerging from her waistband. “What do you have?”
“Nothing,” Naomi stammered. “I was just—I saw his door was open and I wanted to come in for a minute and see his things. The locker was already open, sort of…”
“You know it wasn’t,” Eudora said, walking over to the chair, as close to slapping her friend as she’d ever been.
“Well, it wasn’t locked, anyway,” Naomi said, for the first time seeming embarrassed. “Then I saw this box under a sweater and I took it out. I know I shouldn’t have, but once I looked inside, I couldn’t put it down.”
What was it, Eudora wondered, that so drew Naomi toward Leo? As she reached over for her friend’s hand, she remembered an October afternoon, not long after Leo had first joined Ephraim in this room. All day rain had been falling and at four o’clock, when the shift changed, the sky had been nearly dark. Along with a few nurses and kitchen helpers and other ward maids she’d stood near the main entrance for half an hour, waiting for a break in the weather and gossiping about the doctors and patients. Leo’s name kept coming up. The way he looked: not that he was so handsome, a dishwasher said—not at all, a nurse’s aide agreed, he was too bony, and his hands were so large they were frightening—but more that even when he was with a group at the dinner table, he seemed alone. As if, another aide said, he needed not so much company as a companion.
Clarice, who had served Leo his dinner the first night he joined us, and who’d been married twice and widowed once, smiled slyly and said that if he was healthier, and she was younger, she’d be tempted to take advantage of him. His eyes were part of it, someone else claimed, while the rain dripped steadily from the breezeway. But not just his eyes. Eudora, listening alertly, had tried to fit this with what she’d noticed as she tidied his room each day. She hadn’t seen that in Leo, herself; both Leo and Ephraim interested her but they were always talking when she came by and she hadn’t wanted to interrupt them. Only after Ephraim left had she seen how solitary Leo seemed, and how Naomi’s whole body tensed in his presence. Just now she was so rigid that her hand, when Eudora touched it, felt like wood.
“Let go of that,” Eudora said, tugging at the open box. Reluctantly, Naomi held it out.
On top of some newspaper articles lay a pencil. Next to it was what looked like its mate, reduced to parts: two slim wooden halves, one with a centered groove running down its entire length, the other with an identical groove that cradled a very slender tube, nipped at the middle like a waist.
Eudora leaned over and pointed at the tube. “Shouldn’t the lead go there?” she asked. She picked up the intact pencil and examined the tip, which didn’t look right and felt glassier than a normal pencil’s tip.
Naomi held out a piece of paper. “This was in there too,” she said. “Something Leo drew, I think. Isn’t that his handwriting?”
A diagram, Eudora saw, in which the wooden halves of the dissected pencil had been drawn side by side, accompanied by Leo’s comments. Pencil soaked in water until the halves came apart. That’s how the lead was removed and the tube inserted. When the two halves are glued back together the pencil appears nearly normal.
He’d labeled the bottom of his drawing of the slim glass tube, Chlorate of potash mixed with sugar; the top, Sulfuric acid. A paragraph connected by an arrow to the pencil’s tip noted: Capillary action forces acid down into the mixture when the tip is broken and air is admitted. A very hot flame appears instantly.
He really was a chemist, Eudora thought. But how had he come by this?
“I wonder if it works,” Naomi said. She reached over and scratched the tip of the intact pencil with her thumbnail. “I can’t believe this would catch fire if I just snapped off a little piece…”
Eudora snatched the box away. “Whatever this is, it’s Leo’s. You shouldn’t even be here.”
As Naomi rolled her eyes, Eudora took the diagram from her, asked if it had been folded, and when Naomi said no, slipped it back in the box. “Was it under the pencils?”
“On top,” Naomi said. “Like that.” Even now, she didn’t apologize.
“What else did you disturb?”
Naomi held her hands up, palm out, in front of her chest. “I just looked at that one thing.”
Eudora frowned and returned the box to the back of the locker. Then she closed the door and stood aside as Naomi moved the chair back next to the sink. “Maybe you should tell him how you feel. Either he’s interested, or he isn’t. Why should you live in this kind of uncertainty?”
“That’s not the point,” Naomi said angrily. “He has to tell me first, for it to count. He can’t just want me because I want him. He has to feel like that by himself. To want me worse than anything.”
Eudora let that pass, suggesting instead, “What if you did something to help him, which would also help him to notice you? You could bring him some books, maybe, from the town library…”
“I’m not interested in what he’s reading,” Naomi said. “Why would you think—”
“—think what?” Leo said, walking in just then.
The fingers on his right hand were stained with ink and his wool pants badly needed mending. His hair was shaggy, like everyone’s; our barber hadn’t visited yet that month. Naomi took a step toward him, but before she could say anything, Eudora seized her arm.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, gripping Naomi just above the elbow. “We were walking down the hall together and then Naomi suddenly got dizzy”—Me! Naomi thought, pulling her arm free—“and she stumbled.”
Twining her hands in her ugly blue apron, Eudora continued to spin her lies. Because she knew how
much of his free time Leo spent in the library now, she’d guessed that his room might be empty and had led Naomi inside for a minute’s privacy: “So she wouldn’t faint. So we wouldn’t upset the patients.”
How ridiculous, Naomi thought. If she hadn’t fainted when her brother died, when her mother took her from Chester or when she first saw a dead body, why would she start now? But Leo must have sensed that, simply from looking at her. She could feel that she was the opposite of pale, her face hot both from the thrill of being in the room with him and from knowing she had a scrap of him tucked between her waistband and her skin.
“You’re welcome to use anything you need,” he said gently. “Maybe Naomi should lie down on the bed?”
He was looking at Eudora as he said this, but Naomi could feel how much he actually wanted to be looking at her, how conscious he was of her, so nearby. How much he wanted for her to lie down, for Eudora to vanish, for the door to close behind her.
“Really, I’m so sorry,” Eudora said again. She looked at him as if trying to distract attention from what Naomi had done, while he looked at Eudora as if, Naomi thought, by not looking directly at her he could deny the attraction between them. She stood there, mutely watching, until Eudora seized her elbow again and hustled her away.
THEY HAD A few sharp words in the parking lot—Celia saw them, from her porch, also Sadie and Pearl and Bea—and then Naomi drove home alone, leaving Eudora behind to whatever she did in that basement with Irene. Eudora’s annoyance was nothing, Naomi thought, a misunderstanding she could explain away later. What she wanted to think about was that brief encounter with Leo. She was so excited she stalled the car twice and bumped the fender entering the carriage house. Inside, serving dinner, her mouth responding to her mother’s orders and the boarders’ comments, her eyes avoiding Miles’s face, she mulled over all she’d learned. She’d seen a new part of Leo, and she was sure—his eyes were the same transparent blue as her own—that for the first time, he’d really seen her. As if that weren’t a big enough gift, she also had what she’d stolen.
She’d meant to take a scarf, or a pillowcase—something that, if he were to miss it, he could imagine had been lost in the wash. She would have, if Eudora hadn’t barged in and she hadn’t had to act so swiftly. On the drive home, she’d been disappointed to end up with something so impersonal, but in the dining room she reconsidered. She served the hazelnut torte, poured coffee, cleared the dishes. By the time she got up to her room and could examine her treasure, it seemed like the one perfect thing. When she rolled it in her hand she told herself: It’s not a pencil. Then she stood it alongside the others in the cup, the point hidden and the long seam almost invisible—and it was a pencil, no different from any other. She could leave it anywhere without a person noticing; carry it in her pencil case or in a pocket. Holding it made her feel like she could see inside Leo’s brain.
LEO, WHO DIDN’T know the pencil was missing, went to supper and, as he had done with Miles, told no one about the visit. Not, the rest of us think, because he wanted to hide it, or because he feared what some of us might say (and it’s true that any of us could have pointed out Naomi’s growing interest in him), but simply because he didn’t think it was important. Eudora he’d been thrilled to see, Naomi he’d hardly noticed; he’d taken Eudora’s story at face value and forgotten it the minute she left. The box tucked in the back of his locker hadn’t crossed his mind. Weeks ago, right after Ephraim’s departure, he’d methodically examined everything in it, dissected the pencil, diagrammed its workings, and then, reassured that he knew all he could about it, put it back and moved on to more interesting matters. When he thought about pencils, he thought about a page he’d found in his Mendeleeff: If sugar be placed in a charcoal crucible and a powerful galvanic current passed through it, it is baked into a mass similar to graphite. If the sugar refinery in Williamsburg was hit by lightning, would it fuse into a shiny black mass? He’d turned to the footnote below, which concerned the best sources of graphite for pencils: In Russia the so-called Aliberoffsky graphite is particularly renowned; it is found in the Altai Mountains near the Chinese frontier…
Why should those sentences, about a part of Russia he’d never seen and a substance interesting only for its unusual molecular structure, have caused such a massive fit of homesickness in him? Yet they had, they’d made him see not only the places where he’d lived as a boy but all of Russia spread out in his mind’s eye, taiga and tundra and Lake Baikal, St. Petersburg and Moscow, spots as distant from his childhood homes as he was now from California. Just that afternoon, in the library, he’d found an out-of-date atlas and spent his free hour hunched over maps showing the advance and retreat of Napoleon’s army, the location of salt mines, the average number of bushels of buckwheat a field might yield. He’d taken notes, without knowing why. When he’d stopped by his room to find Eudora and Naomi confused and guilty-looking inside, his imagination had been a jumble of maps and politics and molecular structures, against which the women had seemed, for a second, as insubstantial as ghosts.
Then Eudora had solidified enough for him to realize that he’d caught her and Naomi in an awkward moment, some female difficulty perhaps, into which it was best not to pry. A waste, he thought; there was no way, given the situation, for him to ease Naomi gently from his room so that he could talk to Eudora alone, although he badly wanted her advice. The atlas, with its hints of home, had made him think about his mother and the dim hours between four and six when she used to go over his lessons with him. She sat on the green sofa with her skirts spread out, one of his books in her hands, and he stood before her. The sun slanted over her left shoulder and onto the pages and her knees. He recited a stanza of a poem or a bit of elementary German, whatever he’d studied for the day, and she read along in the book, checking his recitation. When he was done she smiled, clapped her hands softly together, and held out her arms to him.
So we might applaud, or at least understand him better, once he’d given a Wednesday talk. In the library he’d finally thought of a topic and he’d wanted Eudora’s opinion: what if he talked about synthesis, the glory of chemistry? Surely everyone would be interested in that. All scientists, he imagined saying, analyze complex objects and processes, breaking them into smaller and simpler bits until they can be understood. But chemists also, thrillingly, make things. Even as a boy, with a schoolboy’s tools, he’d made things himself. He could use examples from his Mendeleeff and the books he’d borrowed from Irene and Dr. Petrie to illustrate the process of linking small, simple molecules into larger, more complicated structures, until from what had seemed like thin air something useful arose, essential even, fertilizer or indigo dye.
13
BEFORE LEO HAD time to propose a talk, our Wednesday sessions were swamped by our need to talk about the war, which President Wilson had just brought us into. A munitions plant had blown up in Pennsylvania and Miles, who knew the plant’s owner, was pale with fury; a hundred workers had been killed, he said, and most of the plant destroyed in what was obviously a reaction against the declaration of war, another example of blatant sabotage. None of us can remember now who was meant to speak that Wednesday. Instead, Miles talked about the need for all of us to do our share, despite being unable to fight, and then Sean and Frank started arguing about conscription.
By the time the session ended Leo was ready for supper, tired of our conversation and also of the way, each time he turned his head, he found Naomi staring at him. Afraid to embarrass her further—what had been wrong with her, he wondered, the afternoon she was in his room?—he tried to avoid her, but no matter where he looked, she seemed to be there. As he left the room he passed Eudora, who stopped him with a touch and said, “How are you doing with your chemistry books?”
“Pretty well,” he said. “I’ve been working every day.”
“Me too,” she said with a smile. “You should see what I’ve been doing in the X-ray laboratory.”
“I’d love to, if you have the
time.”
The supper bell rang just as she was saying, “Why don’t you let me show you?” Bodies, our bodies, streamed through the corridor. “It’s too late today, I guess,” she added. “Maybe tomorrow?”
“If you think it would be all right.” He stepped into the stream, narrowly missing Pietr, and as the current caught him said, “Four o’clock?”
The next day they met in the basement. Irene was absent and the laboratory door was closed, but Eudora let herself in with her own key, so at home that Leo couldn’t help but envy her. Moving past Irene’s apparatus, sternly modern and encased in dark metal, she led him down the rear wall of shelves and into a shadowy corner. Outside, the late afternoon sun was still shining, but here it was dark until Eudora turned a switch.
“What do you think?” she said.
The discarded X-ray apparatus looked almost new in the glare, the metal caps gleaming where the electrodes entered the delicate transparent tube. The tube itself, grapefruit-sized, was stained a yellowish brown by the discharge. A long protuberance sprouted like a stalk from one end, with two shorter ones opposite, like roots. The cup-shaped cathode and the slanted disk of the target glittered inside. She’d remounted the whole arrangement on a new stand and placed, between the apparatus and the spot where she stood to control the current, a wooden screen faced with sheet lead. “That screen seems sensible,” he said.
“Irene’s suggestion,” Eudora said. “The shielding on her appliance is built right around the tube, but this is a decent substitute.”
A cable snaked from the apparatus across the floor and toward the Snook transformer. On the wall a wooden rack cradled more handblown gas tubes, each shaped a bit differently but all sprouting cylindrical thumbs. “Also Irene’s,” Eudora said. “Some are ten years old, while others have never been used. They’re obsolete now that she has her new Coolidge tube, but for me—it’s a wonderful way to learn. What she can do with a single tube and a rheostat, I can do a little more clumsily by finding a tube with the right amount of vacuum. The ones with the most vacuum need a higher voltage to activate them, and produce more penetrating rays.”
The Air We Breathe Page 16