The Air We Breathe

by Andrea Barrett

  At least, Dr. Petrie thought as he left, Leo had friends: by that he meant us. Back in his own office, he pushed aside a pile of papers and then, exasperated by the chaos on his desk—how could he work, how could he think, with these tongues of paper lapping from stack to stack, stray sheets wandering from one report into another?—he swept the whole array into a single mass and heaped it on the floor. One project on his desk at a time, which he could then work on unimpeded. For the moment he wanted only to think about Leo and Miles. If Miles really wanted to push matters, he’d be supported by the rest of his league and maybe even by Dr. Richards. On the other hand, Leo would be supported by all of us. So many companions, willing to testify about Leo’s good character, must be worth something. Calmed slightly by that realization, he began pulling sheets from the pile.

  OVER THE NEXT few days, what Dr. Petrie sensed as he made his rounds among us shocked him as much as if we’d all sprouted tails. We were so cold-blooded we shocked ourselves. From the moment Miles’s agents searched Leo’s room, something swept through the sanatorium that we’re still ashamed to admit, and that we still don’t completely understand. On the night of the search, it spread from the cluster of Abe, Arkady, and Otto through the second-floor porch in both directions. The chemist, we muttered among ourselves: as if we didn’t know Leo, as if we didn’t know better. Of course. Who else? From that row of densely packed chairs, the judgment we were so quick to pass seeped up to the women on the third-floor porch, down to the men on the first-floor porch, voices rising as the conversation took hold. Leo had shown no one the little tin box; why was that? We hadn’t seen the diagram, and we knew nothing then about Ephraim’s visitor; why had Leo been so secretive? And what had he said to Naomi that had so upset her on the night of the fire?

  He kept secrets, we felt. He always had—and now, as news spread of Leo’s well-timed coughing fit and his failure to answer Miles’s questions, we discovered that we’d all resented that. Who’d given him the right to keep himself to himself? By the end of the second day, our suspicions had painted a portrait of Leo about as close to his true self as Eudora’s X-ray portrait was to his living, breathing lungs. Dr. Petrie and Eudora both found, over those two days, that each time they moved toward a group of us we’d break up and slip away, no one saying anything, everyone avoiding any mention of Leo. Dr. Petrie, so sure he understood us that he often assumed he was one of us, could not believe what he was seeing. When it registered, he went to Irene.

  During Irene’s stay in the new infirmary, he’d visited her daily, reading aloud to her or simply chatting into the silence. Leo, so glad for Dr. Petrie’s visits, didn’t know that she was the one who’d really drawn Dr. Petrie there; he’d stopped by to see Leo only after seeing her. He brought her tidbits from the newspapers and news about the latest conception of atoms and their structure. Astonishing, he said, the reverse of common sense. Instead of seeing the atom as a solar system, electrons whirling like planets around a dense nucleus, now we were to imagine that each atom possessed a certain number of possible shells which the electrons might inhabit.

  Irene, her throat bandaged, her face scarred, had listened intently, comforted as no one else would be by his blundering explanation of atomic structure. Her mind, he’d seen then to his huge relief, was as keen as ever. Now, as he knocked at the door of her room in the women’s staff cottage, he felt sure that she’d be able to make some sense of Miles’s accusations, Leo’s reticence—he felt sure Leo had willed his collapse, as a way of gaining time—and our disturbing behavior.

  Her room, which had only one window, still seemed cheerful and bright and Dr. Petrie sank with relief into her blue upholstered chair. Resting his feet on the ottoman, he explained the events of the last three days as Irene, still unable to speak, listened closely, nodding now and then. She’d already heard about the search.

  “The worst of it,” Dr. Petrie said, “is what’s driving Miles to pursue this. He told both Dr. Richards and his own agents that Leo’s background makes him particularly suspicious. Russian, Jewish, German—there’s not a part of him Miles trusts. But we both know the real reason. Apparently someone hinted at Naomi Martin’s feelings for Leo, and once that happened…”

  Irene, her mouth compressed, reached for her pad of paper. Why are the patients acting like such sheep? she wrote. Us, she meant.

  “They’re frightened,” Dr. Petrie said with a shrug.

  But not of Leo, she wrote. Surely not of him. I should have told them why he was studying, this is partly my fault—

  “Not at all!” Dr. Petrie protested. “We were trying to help.”

  Still, she wrote. I don’t understand how he got that box.

  “I don’t either,” Dr. Petrie said. “I was hoping you might.”

  But let’s be logical, she wrote. I had a good reason for giving him those books. So let’s assume someone else gave him the box for a similarly good reason. Also that he has a good reason not to tell us what that is.

  “Rather a leap,” Dr. Petrie said. “Very generous; probably correct. But not convincing.”

  There are also other factors, she wrote, tearing off that sheet and turning it over.

  For another half hour they continued their conversation, Dr. Petrie rising once to close the window. Although the afternoon had been hot, the night was beautifully cool and the room had slowly chilled. This was the weather that convinced people to cure in the Adirondacks: this antiseptic pine-scented breeze, these stars brilliant in a dense black sky, owls and nighthawks speaking in the dark. The noise Dr. Petrie heard was unfamiliar, though, a gentle, low-pitched wave of sound that rose and fell, rose and fell, wordless but still signaling emotion. It took him a few minutes to realize that he was hearing our porches humming, fifty feet away.

  IRENE HEARD THAT noise as well, and the sound stayed with her through the next day, as she wrote to Dr. Richards in defense of Leo.

  I first got to know Leo Marburg through the Wednesday meetings organized by Miles Fairchild, she wrote. Since then, I have helped him with his studies in chemistry—he was trained as a chemist, as was I. He’s an intelligent and honorable man, eager to learn and to further his education, and I gave him those two books, which he wanted purely for his intellectual pursuits. They were mine before they were his; there is nothing the least bit dangerous in them, in the right hands.

  She paused for a moment, remembering the look on Leo’s face when she’d given him the green volumes. The swiftness with which he’d learned, the intensity with which he’d worked; she’d been hoping to offer him an apprenticeship that might someday, after his discharge, lead to a job as satisfying as her own. If she hadn’t immigrated here with money in her pocket, a married sister to greet her, and a brother-in-law willing to help fund her studies, she might easily have ended up no better off than Leo was. Firmly, she continued:

  I don’t know how Leo came by that box and its contents, but I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation; he’s a person of sterling character and I would vouch for him in any situation. In any event, there’s no link between those objects and the fire, which I know for a fact that he couldn’t have started. I was in the X-ray facility that evening; at no point was there any sign of him. The one person who visited me was Miles Fairchild’s young driver, Naomi Martin.

  We had a discussion. She was upset about something when she came to see me, and still upset when she ran out. Because I was worried about her, I went after her, but before I could catch her, she pushed through the service door and ran away. On my way back to the X-ray facility I smelled something odd, which when I think about it now makes me wonder if we didn’t have a short in the transformer, or a failure in the main electric line. When I opened the door the room was already filling up with smoke and so I brought my smock up over my face and rushed into the back.

  With one hand, she realized, she was clutching at her throat, her body returning before she could stop it to the fire itself. What that had felt like, which she could never
write down. She dreamed, still, of expressing some confused version of this out loud, an easier task than shaping a single version on the page. She would have preferred to write nothing, waiting until her voice returned—but Dr. Petrie had said that Leo’s situation was urgent, and it was possible that she wouldn’t speak again. She couldn’t remember breathing through the bit of tubing Dr. Petrie had pushed into the slit in her throat, but when she closed her eyes, she could still see the scalpel glitter in the moonlight. She turned to the letter again.

  I couldn’t find where the fire was coming from and couldn’t put it out, although I did save some of our films. At no point was Leo or anyone other than Naomi in the room with me.

  She folded the pages, wondering at the same time how Leo was. If she could have seen him alone in the empty ward, hearing the troubled hum from the porches as we turned against him, our ill will emanating through the corridor where not one friendly set of footsteps echoed; if she could have known how alone he felt, she would have risen despite her own exhaustion and gone to stand silently next to him.

  22

  MILES VISITED THE sanatorium several times during the first two weeks after Leo’s relapse, but Dr. Petrie refused to let him see Leo; an emotional upset might, he claimed, make his condition worse, and Leo had to be spared any stress. The hay was mowed in the fields while Miles came and went and came again; the hay was dried in rows and then it was baled. The creeks dried up and the locusts buzzed as day after day the sky shone imperturbably blue. In the garden the pansies wilted and we did too, in our overcrowded rooms. The rough new kitchen wasn’t ventilated well, and so our densely packed dining room smelled of cooking and, on the hottest days, of us; Miles avoided that place. But everywhere else at Tamarack State continued to seem like his fair territory. Our improvised mailroom, where he looked at what came in and went out; our pitiful library, reconstituted in a former bedroom in the women’s annex and reduced from its already shameful state when, after Miles’s inspection, his agents removed any books by Germans, or in German, or about Germany or the Austro-Hungarian empire. We don’t know if he bullied Dr. Richards into this or if Dr. Richards freely agreed, nor do we know how he arranged to have our shipments of newspapers from New York City stopped. We do know that he considered a plan to enlist the national headquarters of the American Protective League, perhaps aided by the Department of Labor, in the deportation of Leo Marburg—a plan he might have followed through on had it not been for Irene’s letter and Dr. Petrie’s maneuvers.

  To Dr. Petrie’s surprise and then dismay, Dr. Richards hadn’t been convinced by Irene’s letter. What seemed so obvious to him, the argument that, as he gently reminded Dr. Richards, not only supported what he himself had said about the presence of the chemistry books in Leo’s room, but also made it almost impossible that Leo could have had anything to do with the fire, was for Dr. Richards apparently only one facet of something more complex.

  “If you trust Irene,” Dr. Petrie had pointed out, “then you have to believe what she wrote. Which means Leo didn’t do anything. He couldn’t have.”

  “I know that seems true,” Dr. Richards said, obviously troubled, “and I know I was the one who pushed to hire Irene; I’ve always trusted her. But Miles has raised other points.”

  Whatever those were, they were enough, Dr. Petrie saw, to pressure Dr. Richards into continuing to let Miles interfere in our daily business, and to make Dr. Richards so nervous that he asked Dr. Petrie not to tell us about Irene’s letter. Because Dr. Petrie honored that request, and perhaps because Irene was confined to her room in the staff cottage and still unable to talk, our information-gathering failed this once and her letter didn’t immediately become public knowledge. For a little while longer, then, we were left in our uncertainty. In the new infirmary the nurses checked on Leo every few hours but refused—Dr. Petrie’s orders, they said—to talk to him about Miles’s investigations. Dr. Petrie himself came by twice a day but, wanting Leo to heal as quickly as possible, also said nothing about Miles or the shifting moods inside Tamarack State. Rest, he said, echoing the instructions Leo had received almost a year ago. Think only of resting.

  Lying there alone, Leo tried to convince himself that the situation with Miles would heal itself quietly, gradually, in the same fashion that his lung was healing. He’d insulted Miles, he saw now. Back in March, when he’d turned down Miles’s generous offer to move him to Mrs. Martin’s house, he should have been more delicate; he might have expected that his refusal would make Miles feel like the outsider he was. Now Miles, obviously angry about more than just the box, was paying him back for his clumsiness. He’d apologize, Leo thought, and explain why he’d wanted to stay here. Although even if that worked, it wouldn’t fix what was going on with us. Until he’d heard that humming from our porches, he’d always assumed that here—up in the mountains, far from the crowds; here, where the air was clear—he was safe from the poison of his last weeks in New York, when everyone had turned from him.

  Much of what happened to him then had stemmed, he thought, from his bad luck in falling ill when another disease was raging through his neighborhood, and when his landlady was already so worried about her children. The streets along which he walked to work had fallen strangely silent soon after the first cases of infantile paralysis were diagnosed. The pool had closed, then the movie house, and then the ball field had emptied; men came and shot the dogs and cats in the alleys, to keep them from spreading the disease. Silenced, the days had felt like nights. In the shops, people turned away from each other, fingering the little bags of camphor and garlic hanging from their necks and embarrassed—had they been embarrassed?—not to be able to help each other for fear of infecting their own children. Everything had seemed infected. Bricks leapt from the roof of a building struck by lightning and hit the children walking below; a hammer glancing off a pipe at the oil plant in Greenpoint set off an explosion; a subway excavation caved in and buried twenty workers. In Williamsburg, mothers carried into the clinics screaming babies who could no longer wave their arms or hold their bottles, while others hid from the nurses who knocked on doors. Rumors spread: that the doctors got a bonus for each child captured and taken to the hospital. That the children got sick from eating ice cream, which chilled their stomachs, and that stores sold them ice cream anyway. That gasoline fumes spread the disease (why were automobiles still allowed on the streets?), or commercial laundries (the germs moved in the sheets). That the mothers of stricken children shook their sleeves over the cans of purified milk at the milk stations, hoping other children might sicken as well.

  He’d found those rumors terrifying. He knew what happened when they spread, and he knew how the solitary were punished. During his last year at the refinery, after he began working as Karl’s assistant, he’d been neither a salaried employee nor quite one of the regular laborers. Upstairs, where the magma spun in the centrifuges and the raw-sugar crystals, separated from the syrup, tumbled into the melter, he was alone when he tested the liquor’s acidity, adding milk of lime until the proteins coagulated and then telling the foreman when to release the fluid into the cloth filters packed with diatomaceous earth. Alone at the other end of the line, he tested the final product; alone on the dock, he sampled the loads of raw sugar. Only by a freakish bit of bad luck had a stranger seen him cough blood onto the crystals, and then he’d had no friend to lie for him.

  The two refinery workers who brought him home and helped him up to the flat told Rachel and Tobias exactly what had happened. Rachel, whose sister had died of tuberculosis, wanted to evict him from the apartment immediately, but Tobias reminded her of how much they needed the rent. After the tuberculosis nurse made her visit, Rachel had added her own refinements to the nurse’s advice. She washed Leo’s plate and utensils separately and stored them in a cardboard box kept out on the fire escape, where she made him eat his meals. Her children ran, holding their breath, when they had to pass his cot to get to their own. The four other boarders, after watching this, hu
ng a spare sheet from the ceiling between his cot and theirs. He’d learned, then, what it really meant to have no family. Not having kin here, and not having roots in a single village or city, had set him apart more than he’d understood. When the nurse found him a spot at the tuberculosis day camp, he’d been glad to go.

  Sometimes he’d glimpsed men on the lower deck of the old ferryboat moored at the recreation pier, but until he was sent there he’d never known what they were doing. The boat had looked like a hulk being stripped for salvage, but instead, he learned, it salvaged consumptives, who took their daily cure behind heavy nets that screened them from passersby. Among the deck chairs he found Meyer, a man he’d once known at the char house and who, having been there for two months already, helped him settle into his new routine.

  He rose when Meyer told him to, so that he could drink glasses of milk or eat boiled eggs, sit down at one o’clock to the enormous dinners somehow produced in the boat’s tiny kitchen, later drink milk again. In the mornings, well-meaning women brought them stacks of newly sewn shirt collars, still inside out; each collar had to be turned, the collar points poked out with a small smooth dowel and the seams aligned to be pressed. They worked for two hours: earning their keep, said the camp director sternly. After dinner they rested until a nurse came by and took temperatures and pulses. Once a week the doctor tapped and listened to their backs and chests, looked down their throats and in their ears.

  And that was it, not bad at all; the routine passed the time. The most difficult part was returning each night to Rachel’s domain and the glare of all those nervous eyes. Meyer, cared for at night by the three cousins, the aunt, and the grandmother with whom he shared an apartment, couldn’t understand why Leo lived like that.