The Air We Breathe

by Andrea Barrett

  “But you have countrymen,” he’d said. “People from your home, who’d be glad to welcome you; a landsmanschaft, surely? I belong to the Young Men of Poniewiez and they’ve helped me with everything. They help my family, and they’re making arrangements to get me into a Jewish sanatorium. Someplace where the doctors speak Yiddish. And where the food is more what I’m used to.”

  When Leo explained, yet again, that he didn’t speak Yiddish and that he was an atheist, Meyer said, “You Russians who aren’t Jews—how do you live?”

  During his third week on the boat, the polio epidemic spread to New Rochelle, carried, or so the newspapers claimed, by four Italian families. On Long Island, Boy Scouts went house to house, searching for children visiting from New York and, with the help of their parents, driving them back beyond the city line—and still, Leo had imagined that he’d be returning to work as soon as his coughing stopped. On the ferryboat, a social worker told him that she could get him a place at the Municipal Sanatorium in the Catskills but Leo said he’d prefer to stay in Williamsburg—learning only then that the Board of Health could send him wherever they chose, that he’d never been free to leave, and that the refinery would never take him back.

  That night, when he returned to his cot in the small apartment, Rachel refused to wash his clothes although this was included in his weekly rent. On Sunday Tobias, speaking from the door of his and Rachel’s room, finally told him that they’d done what they could and that he had to find someplace else to live. By the end of July he’d been out of money, out of work, and about to lose his lodging. Just in time, his placement up here had come through.

  On his last night in Williamsburg, he’d slipped outside after everyone was asleep. Where the streets should have been packed with people trying to catch a breeze, the fire escapes carpeted with children lying on folded blankets, the rooftops covered with older people trying to sleep and younger ones hoping to find some privacy, instead he’d found almost no one. A few young men were drinking; piano music rose from the bars. By the waterfront he saw the flare of matches, three or four people sitting out on the wharves to fish and smoke cigarettes, and although it was nearly two in the morning he’d walked that way, through the gentle breeze, to the water. His last night, as he remembered it, of freedom.

  HE MULLED OVER those experiences during his first, solitary week. Midway through the second week, after his temperature had come back down, he was allowed his first visitor: not Miles, thankfully, but Eudora. From his bed he saw her pause in the doorway, looking up and down the corridor as if to make sure she was unobserved. As she turned her head, a moth detached itself from the lampshade and drifted her way, passing so close to her neck that he could feel the touch on his own skin.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked. “Better?”

  “Better,” he agreed. When she smiled he felt, at first, only the pleasure of seeing her. Then he saw that she held one hand pressed over the side pocket of her blue wrapper, as if she had a pain there. Still working double shifts, six days a week—suppose she was getting sick? He said, “But how are you?”

  She shrugged, looking back toward the door. “Busy,” she said, “but fine. I was very relieved when Dr. Petrie said yesterday that you could have visitors.” With her hand flattened along the top of her thigh, she continued, “It’s not as if this is my first time—I came to see you a lot when you were first sick. Don’t you remember?”

  “Not exactly.” He sat up a little straighter, smoothing the front of the white shift required in the infirmary. Beneath the blanket, his legs were humiliatingly bare. “I couldn’t always tell what I was dreaming and what was real. But I thought I remembered you sitting next to me, wearing a mask.”

  She nodded. “I stopped by most days to see you and Irene. She still can’t talk, but she’s doing much better.”

  “I heard.”

  He waited for a moment, wondering when she’d ask him about what Miles had found, hoping she’d leap into the silence. Instead she looked around again and then drew from her wrapper pocket an oblong tin. “For you,” she said.

  A smaller, more delicate version of the box Miles had taken from his locker—for a second, he wondered if she was mocking him. As he pried at the lid, she said, “I baked them.”

  “Cookies,” he said, wonderingly.

  She made a wry face. “I hope they’re all right; I’m not much of a baker but I wanted to make you something.”

  He nibbled the edge of a tawny disk: gritty, buttery, not too sweet, scented with vanilla. Something like shortbread but not as rich. In another life, in another century, his mother had made a treat with ground almonds that had tasted faintly like this and had a similar sandy texture. His mouth watered, and then his eyes.

  “Then you don’t believe what Miles has been saying about me?” he asked. After all, his relapse had been worth something. The moth flapped slowly back into the room, found a column of sunlight, and began spiraling up toward the ceiling, spacing its turns as closely as if it were moving through the coils of a still.

  Eudora looked down at the tin. “No,” she said, more slowly than he would have wished. From that he knew he’d been right to fear the hum from our porches.

  “The box belongs to a friend of Ephraim’s,” he said, sketching the story of Felix’s visit—but not, we have to note, telling her that the box had once held three pencils rather than two. On the other hand, she’d never admitted to him that she’d seen the box at all—and she didn’t admit that now. All she said, when he was finished, was, “I knew there was an explanation. Can I tell the others?”

  He shook his head. “It’s too risky, the way Miles is acting. He has contacts all over the state. Maybe all over the country—I don’t want anything to happen to Ephraim or his family. And you know what it’s like here: tell one person, and everyone else knows in an hour. People here know me well enough; they ought to just trust me. You did.”

  “But I’m not a patient here,” she said, startling him.

  MILES COULDN’T PROVE anything, especially since he couldn’t question Leo further. But at both Tamarack State and throughout the village he voiced his suspicions. He told anyone who’d listen about Leo’s refusal of a room at Mrs. Martin’s house—some of us were indeed baffled by that, and others annoyed; no one offered us such things—and he harped on the box and its contents.

  Finally, after Dr. Petrie found Miles discussing Leo with the milk delivery man, he asked Miles for a private meeting, much as Miles had once asked him. First Miles said he was too busy; then, relenting a bit, said he might be able to spare a few minutes but that he couldn’t come to his office. “In the village, then,” Dr. Petrie said. “Tomorrow, or the next day?”

  “Tomorrow,” Miles said. “At Mrs. Martin’s house.”

  “Not there,” Dr. Petrie said. They compromised on the picnic area at the lake’s east end, not exactly convenient but easy enough for both to reach.

  It was raining that Wednesday, without a breath of breeze and still very warm; Dr. Petrie, arriving first, chose a bench and covered his end with half the piece of oilcloth he’d carried down the hill. Then he sat beneath the shelter of his old umbrella, carefully keeping the rest of the cloth dry. When Miles arrived, five minutes late, he unrolled the rest of the cloth and watched, bemused, as Miles perched at the farthest end of the bench and hid under his own umbrella. Briefly the ribs of the two umbrellas clashed, so that Dr. Petrie was forced another inch away.

  “What is it you want?” asked Miles, looking straight ahead. “I have another meeting in less than an hour.”

  “I want you to stop bothering Leo Marburg,” Dr. Petrie said. Out on the lake young gulls, speckled like eggs, were floating in groups of three and four, apparently more interesting to Miles than anything he himself said. “I’m asking you as one professional man to another,” he went on, trying to keep his tone calm, “to do what you know is right. You’ve seen Irene’s letter. Both Dr. Richards and I have explained the situation to you, as we
understand it. Your accusations are based on nothing but your own anger.”

  Beneath the umbrella’s scalloped edge, he could see only part of Miles’s profile: earlobe, nostril, mouth and chin, the lips drawn tight. Still, in the most annoying way, he kept staring at the seagulls.

  “Miles?” Dr. Petrie said.

  “You might,” Miles said distantly, “want to be a little more careful about how you talk to me.”

  Dr. Petrie lowered and furled his umbrella so that the rain, falling more gently now, might cool his head. For this he needed calmness, clarity. He took two slow breaths, gripped his umbrella in both hands, and said, “You refer, I know, to your powerful friends, and to your committee. Then let me refer to them as well. What would they think if they knew you’d hired Naomi Martin as a driver only because of your infatuation? And that you kept her on—that you let her drive you to the most sensitive meetings, where she could see exactly who was present and even overhear certain things—long past the point when you knew she was untrustworthy?”

  Miles’s umbrella dropped another two inches, obscuring everything but his chin. “They’d say nothing. Because that’s not true.”

  “It is true,” Dr. Petrie said. On the lake a group of gulls drifted quietly toward the grass at the foot of the park. “How many times did you insist on telling me exactly how you feel about her? And the patients who attended the Wednesday sessions know how you feel, as well—did you think they didn’t notice? They talk about everything.”

  A faint noise, which might have been a groan, emerged from the umbrella.

  “And now,” Dr. Petrie continued—here he took a huge, intuitive leap at which he would later marvel—“now that we know what she took before she left…”

  The umbrella rose, sending all the gulls into the air as Miles’s head swiveled toward Dr. Petrie. “What do you know about that?”

  Fascinated, Dr. Petrie continued to press at the same spot. “Certain things are missing from the X-ray laboratory. From other places too. I’m sure the members of your organization would find that interesting, given the access Naomi had to your room and your papers.”

  Miles furled his umbrella and stood up. Instantly the rain began to dampen his hair, so that it flattened against his skull. “You would blackmail me?”

  “A request, let’s say. Leave Leo alone. You know he didn’t do anything.”

  “Why go to such extremes to protect him, if he’s not guilty?”

  Dr. Petrie rose, folding the oilcloth twice along its length before rolling it into a tidy cylinder. “Because someone,” he said, “has to put a stop to this.”

  NONE OF US, including Leo, learned of that discussion until much later. In the infirmary Leo had been dreading the arrival of Miles every day since the restriction on visitors was lifted, but no one came except Eudora. That Thursday, Dr. Petrie completed his examination of Leo’s chest, pronounced him much improved, and then said, offhandedly, that he could return to his room tomorrow, and that Miles had finished his investigation and withdrawn his accusations.

  “Has he figured out what started the fire, then?”

  “Not that I know of,” Dr. Petrie said. “I still think Irene’s idea—that a piece of equipment shorted out down there—seems most likely.”

  “I do, too,” Leo said, even as the image of the missing pencil flashed before him. For the first time he began to think seriously about how it might have disappeared, and if it might have been involved in the fire. Even to Dr. Petrie, though, he couldn’t suggest this. Instead, keeping the focus of their conversation on Miles, he said, “Maybe he just needed some time to reconsider.”

  He coughed twice and sipped at the glass of water near his bed, anticipating his release. His own room, at last. His old routines, however those might have been changed by the fire. He hadn’t seen the new dining room, the sealed-off central building, the curving dirt path hastily cut to provide a detour between the single, combined dormitory wing and the wing where he lay now. He imagined our days were essentially the same, except that our quarters were slightly more crowded.

  “Maybe that helped,” Dr. Petrie said, fiddling with his stethoscope. “And also Irene wrote a very kind letter on your behalf.”

  He said nothing about his own intervention, summarizing, instead, what Irene had written. Leo listened, amazed. Once, perhaps, one of his teachers might have done such a thing for him, or the Odessa merchant who’d sent him to school. But no one since. That Irene, still almost a stranger, could be so kind, and that her kindness could defuse Miles’s heated accusations, made him think that perhaps he hadn’t made such a bad decision seven years ago, when he’d crossed the ocean to come here.

  That Friday, when he left the infirmary, his cough was gone, his fever was down, and Miles was nowhere in sight. Making his way through the corridors of the women’s annex and then across the new dirt path—the central building looked terrible, he noted, and the garden was trampled—he felt almost hopeful despite the humming he’d heard from the porches. The covered walkway leading to the men’s annex looked as it always had, and so did the stairs and the second-floor corridor. He stood before the door to his old room, delaying for a moment the pleasure of returning to the place he’d known before the fire, which he’d been used to thinking of as home. The instant he crossed the threshold, he saw that it now belonged to Arkady, Otto, and Abe.

  Politely, as they might have received a guest, they made room for him. His bed was perfectly made; the clothes in his locker neatly arranged. His precious books had vanished from his bedside table, which was clean. Every other surface was covered with his roommates’ belongings, as every molecule of air seemed saturated with their smells and sounds. They were patient with him, courteous, but even on the first night he sensed that they made only small talk in his presence, saving any real conversation for the times when they were alone.

  At his first breakfast in the new dining room, he felt the same thing on a larger scale. Not since the night of the fire had he eaten with all of us; we might have applauded when he came in, we might have roared our approval or at least stopped what we were doing to welcome him. Instead, we carried on as if we’d never missed him. He waved across the cramped space at Kathleen, who looked remarkably well; smiled at Vivian, now walking with crutches; wedged himself into one of the tightly spaced chairs. Over our dishes of oatmeal with dried fruit and heavy cream, of eggs scrambled and heaped on toast, we nodded as he passed, said hello when he greeted us, asked politely after his health. But nothing more. No one, not even Kathleen, whose life he’d saved, came over, wrapped an arm around his shoulder, and said, “We know you haven’t done anything.” No one mocked Miles, his agents, or his league, as we would have done—had done—until the moment we’d learned about the box and what was in it.

  It was no surprise that Miles remained suspicious of Leo even after he dropped the investigation. The surprise was that we remained suspicious too. After Dr. Petrie released Leo, he’d finally let some of us know the contents of Irene’s letter; from that we knew that Leo couldn’t have started the fire directly. Still, the letter didn’t make us forget the horrors of that night, or bring Edith and Morris and Denis back from the clearing. The letter didn’t restore our lives as we had known them, which had been far from perfect but which were at least ours. Everything familiar had vanished in the fire, which had laid bare the real nature of our confinement and still seemed related to Leo. In his secrecy, in the way he’d been so absorbed in his studies, in the way he’d stopped confiding in any of us after Ephraim left, we couldn’t help feeling that he was guilty of something.

  Dinner that day was the same, and so was supper. When Leo walked into the library, five or six of us were there; fifteen minutes later he was alone and he knew this was no accident. That night, when he went out to the porch and found his chair squeezed between Arkady’s and Sean’s, the partitions torn down and the line of bodies, stretching in both directions to the ends of the annex, so tightly formed that we looked ready
to leap the railing together at the sound of a whistle, he was startled to hear himself apologize as he wedged himself into position. By nine o’clock he began to hear the humming sound, first from the porch above and the one below, finally spreading to the far ends of his own rank. Once in a while, he caught the sound of his own name.

  23

  AFTER HIS MEETING with Dr. Petrie, Miles had skipped dinner and spent a long night out on his porch, inspecting the wreckage of the plans he’d made a year ago. Bad enough that everything he’d hoped to do at Tamarack State had been destroyed by the fire and by Leo. But that his crucial war work was threatened and his feelings for Naomi cast into doubt made him so angry he thought his heart might burst. This from Dr. Petrie, whom he’d once counted as a friend. A little, little man after all, as small in spirit as he was in stature, who’d used Miles’s feelings against him and twisted what Miles knew was a generous impulse toward a troubled young woman until it seemed like a weakness.

  He couldn’t stop his daily round of meetings—indeed he was busier than ever—but for the rest of the week he avoided anything to do with Leo or Dr. Petrie. When he had to pass the east end of the lake, he turned his face from the benches. At Tamarack State, where he still had duties, he timed his visits for hours when he knew Dr. Petrie was making rounds and we were on our porches. To Dr. Richards, who seemed puzzled but relieved, he explained that Irene’s letter, while not completely satisfactory, had along with a lack of sufficient resources reluctantly convinced him not to pursue his investigation further. The night after he told that lie, he had such savage stomach pains that Mrs. Martin had to call in his private physician.

  He was an invalid, he reminded himself then. Nowhere near as strong as he pretended, and useless to everyone if he didn’t take better care of his health. He had responsibilities to the other members of his committee and he had to balance the work that only he could do with the rest his cure demanded. Mrs. Martin, ever thoughtful, put him on a special diet and guarded his rest hours fiercely, answering the telephone herself and taking messages for him. On Saturday, when he was feeling a little better, he decided in return to help her with one small task.