In preparation for their outing, she had one of the new kitchen helpers—since May there’d been five—bring him a pot of tea. From the first sip, he could tell it had been made from water that wasn’t quite boiling. The girl who brought it had a long braid of brown hair that swung sullenly against her back and an expression that seemed to dare him to complain. The one before her had had grubby hands, another had flirted outrageously with several boarders, although not with him; they came, stayed for a couple of weeks, bungled their tasks, and then left. Around him were other signs that Naomi might have had more to do with the household’s smooth functioning than he’d suspected. A stain on the carpet, an unrepaired tear in the dining room curtain. Also a disconcerting influx of mail: letters from booksellers, complaining that payments he knew he’d left to be mailed had never arrived; from clothing stores in Philadelphia wondering why they hadn’t received his usual order for shirts and vests. In Naomi’s continued absence, nothing seemed to work. He tried not to think about her, and thought about her all the time.
To the list of things for which he blamed Leo, he added this: Leo had driven Naomi away. He blamed Eudora for failing to stop her, Mrs. Martin for overburdening her here at the house, Irene for whatever clumsiness she’d committed the night of the fire, when Naomi came looking for consolation. Dr. Richards had shown him Irene’s letter, from which he remembered this: She was upset about something when she came to see me, and still upset when she ran out. The line made him want to weep. How was it that Irene, old enough to be Naomi’s mother, supposedly so resourceful and sympathetic, had failed to comfort her?
How had he? Sometimes, as when he looked up now to see Tyler in the doorway, so eager to drive him that he was bouncing gently on his built-up shoe, he also blamed himself. Long before Naomi left he could, he saw, have freed her and hired his own permanent car and driver. Except that he had wanted her next to him. Except that he had wanted to be able to study her features in a place where, with her eyes fixed on the road before her, she wouldn’t be able to turn away. Except that, worst of all, he had enjoyed making her do what he wanted. During their last weeks together, when he’d ordered her to take him somewhere and she’d curled her lip and looked down at her shoes for a second before looking back up and saying, “Of course”—that feeling moving through his veins had been pleasure.
He set down the unsatisfactory cup of tea and rose just as Mrs. Martin entered the parlor. “Ready?” he asked her.
“Ready,” she said, patting her bag. “I have my notes, I know what I want to say—really this is so kind of you.”
Miles nodded to Tyler, who clopped ahead to the limousine. Mrs. Martin, who hadn’t ridden in it before, settled into the back seat as if she belonged there, running her hand slowly over the smooth leather upholstery. All week long she’d been talking about this meeting, which she’d organized herself. Gathering together other directors of cure cottages, along with the women who worked in the hotel kitchens and the hospital dining rooms, she planned a brisk half-hour speech, complete with diagrams, of how they might most effectively conserve food and cooking fuel. Before she started, though, Miles was to give a brief talk on the sacrifices being made by the drafted soldiers, and how every scrap saved here would directly help our men.
As they drove the short distance to the hotel, she prattled, Tyler responded attentively, and Miles, listening to their eagerness and goodwill, their obvious delight in finding a purpose, felt his own spirits plummet. How worthy both of them were, and how tiresome! Mrs. Martin with her meticulous lists and the mat of carefully plaited hair clamped to the back of her head like a trivet; Tyler with his sweaty hands and his way of brushing off the seat with a handkerchief before Miles sat down. They agreed with him on every point and anticipated most of his requests. He didn’t care for either of them.
Except for the days he’d shared with Edward and Lawrence in Doylestown and their blissful summer digging fossils in Canada, he sometimes felt that he’d spent most of his life with people he didn’t really like. The ones who drew him magnetically always moved just beyond his reach, living lives that seemed much more interesting and joyful than his own. They danced past, talked gaily together, burst into laughter, and then disappeared. Meanwhile he dutifully worked with the earnest ones. This, perhaps, he’d shared with Dr. Petrie; which made the betrayal worse.
“Shall I wait?” Tyler said as he parked in front of the hotel. The moon was full, illuminating the leaves swaying on the basswoods, the soft shadows of the shrubs and the darker ones of the buildings on the street. Lights were on here and there, linked by scallops of bunting strung across the façades, and porches glowed on the cure cottages marching up the hill. In some he could see figures lying on their chairs, where he’d once been. Where he should be.
“Come in and listen,” Mrs. Martin urged Tyler. “I promise it will be interesting.”
He could engage a private detective, Miles reflected as he helped Mrs. Martin from the limousine. Not for any further investigation of Leo—Dr. Petrie had closed that route—but as a way of trying to find Naomi. Several detectives, even, in different cities; one young woman with modest resources couldn’t be that difficult to find. But even if he found her—what then? She didn’t care for him, she never had. Let her mother find her, let her mother sort out what had happened. Already, he knew, Mrs. Martin had circulated inquiries through the web of her professional acquaintances, cure cottages here connected to boardinghouses in the Catskills, home economics instructors on Long Island in touch with hospital administrators in Vermont and far beyond.
He straightened his narrow shoulders. His job tonight was to inspire the audience so that they would all adopt, enthusiastically, Mrs. Martin’s recommendations. More tasks loomed tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. Work in the village, work for the league, work related to Tamarack State; fortunate that he knew how to husband his energies. At home in Doylestown—home, he thought, seeing the pale, well-ordered rooms of his house, the ranks of machinery in his plant, each piece tended by his well-trained employees—other work awaited him, which only he could do. Would do, as soon as he was cured. Everyone, he thought, must do his duty.
IT WAS ON a Wednesday that Dr. Petrie met with Miles; Leo returned to his room on Friday, the same day Miles told Dr. Richards he’d completed his investigation. On Saturday Miles went to the meeting with Mrs. Martin, after which nothing changed. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday passed, during which the news of Miles’s retreat spread throughout Tamarack State. We might have welcomed Leo back then: but still nothing changed. He confided in no one; he told none of us the story he’d told Eudora about Ephraim’s visitor and the box he’d left behind. Twice he walked to the clearing by himself, looking over the new stones that marked where Morris and Edith and Denis lay, and this seemed to us to signal something suspicious. By then, perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered what he’d done. We no longer trusted him.
None of us slept during our afternoon rest hours that next Wednesday, the balconies so hot beneath the canvas awnings that we could feel ourselves shriveling, and when four o’clock arrived we leapt from our cure chairs and headed toward the pavilion. Even here there was only the smallest breeze, but this, combined with the shade of the pavilion roof, the smell of the cedar shakes, and the sight of the creek emptying sluggishly into the weedy mouth of the nearest pond, was still a relief. No one was feeling well. Six patients were in the infirmary Leo had so recently left; there’d been three dramatic hemorrhages in the last four days and no one had any appetite. Twice the afternoon milk had curdled. Our hearts seemed curdled as well. We sat on the pavilion benches or the balcony rails, fanning ourselves with copies of The Kill-Gloom Gazette while Leo paced slowly back and forth between the willow tree at the top of the pond and the three larches clustered at the first bend in the creek.
He looked, Polly remarked, as if he were attached to a pendulum. Back and forth, back and forth, thinking intently while we drooped in the shade. How long would he do this? Ian wondered
. And what was he thinking about?
Us, we knew. We’d been behaving badly. Overhead a swarm of sparrows pulled tightly together only to scatter, as if even they were too warm to be near each other.
He felt, he was thinking as a larch cone crunched beneath his feet, like a stranger. A stranger to us. In the dining room he felt more alone than he had a year ago, when, during a similar heat wave, Ephraim had first wheeled him through the door of the old hall. Then we had welcomed him; now we were polite. Always, but only, polite. We never accused him of anything. Yet if he walked up to Pietr and Zalmen and Lydia and Bea and tried to join their conversation, he felt his words slide into nothingness as he spoke. If he suggested to Abe and Ian that they read a book together and discuss it, they smiled, spoke vaguely of being busy, and moved away. David and Pearl and Celia had separately offered excuses when he’d proposed walks to them; even Kathleen turned from him, although she blushed as she did. We’d all evaded him, our eyelids lowered and our real thoughts shrouded. None of us offered more than courtesy demanded and no one would say—we could not, exactly, have said—what he’d done wrong. We thought of the library books Miles’s agents had earlier carried away in boxes, and of the orders to darn worn sheets instead of replacing them, change the linens less often, reuse rags that should have been burned. It’s our duty to economize, Dr. Richards had told both the staff and us: but we sensed Miles behind the new directives. Miles, reaching for Leo, punishing us.
As Leo paced, a young fox popped up from the grass, snapping at a butterfly that lifted effortlessly just out of reach. He stopped, watched, and then watched us watching the fox, while ignoring him. If he’d known for sure how Eudora felt, perhaps he wouldn’t have panicked, but he’d seen little of her since leaving the infirmary. He couldn’t read her intentions any more clearly than he could read ours, and he wondered, now, if she’d really heard what he was saying when he’d asked her to the movies. He wasn’t sure anymore why she’d come that night, or what might have happened between them without the fire. Apparently they were going to have to start all over again.
A handful of sparrows, one missing a foot, landed on the dusty path, and he glanced over at us again. Clumsily, obdurately, we looked away while Otto, feeling guilty because of Naomi’s letter, turned his back completely. For more than a month that letter, stalled at first by her careless address and then by the chaos after the fire, had lain in the village post office with the other mail meant for here. Once the sacks were finally delivered and all the mail was sorted through, Otto had seen the envelope addressed to Leo and, well-intentioned then, had taken it back to their shared room, to deliver when Leo returned. After the humming started, though, he’d hidden it on purpose. “Not my fault,” he’d said blandly, when he finally decided to deliver it: already that line embarrassed him. “I stuck it in a book and then forgot about it.” And so it was only on the night before we gathered at the pavilion that Leo had read:
May 9, 1917
Leo—
I don’t know why I’ve been so stupid. You were doing everything possible to let me know and still I missed all the signs. In your room that afternoon, you signaled me again—I saw the way you avoided my face so carefully. The way you closed the door behind us, your right hand wrapped around the edge, showing me your fingers until the last minute. Your shirt collar opened so I could see the pulse at the base of your throat—
I used to think I knew what longing was but I was wrong. You’re with me everywhere, all the time. The birds are you, the foxes are you, the plants pushing up beneath the trees and the trees themselves, trunks and branches, from the smallest needle to the roots spreading through the ground. The curtains in my mother’s house and the silverware in the drawers. Everything. What we feel for each other, the way we’re intertwined—I can feel everything you mean to say to me, you don’t need to say a word. It means nothing that you are sick. Nothing. You’ll be well as soon as we’re together, away from here; I’m healthy enough for both of us and my strength will flow into you.
Meet me this Friday at the movies. Sit near the back and wait for me, I have to take Miles someplace but then I’ll come to you. I have something to give you, something of yours, which I’ve been holding on to for too long; that was my mistake, but I know you’ll forgive me and then we can make a plan. I have the car, I know a place where we can stay. I have money enough for our journey. All we need to do is pick the day and we can leave our old lives behind.
Love, Naomi
He remembered Eudora’s trusting glance the afternoon she’d been in his room, and the way she’d looked toward him for help. He’d hardly noticed Naomi and yet she’d apparently studied his every move. The idea of her drawing his face again and again, and then writing that letter and sitting beside him, made his skin crawl as if insects were marching up and down in rows. He gazed longingly across the meadow at the staff cottages. Irene, who lived in one of them, might have helped him sort through his confusion. But she’d already done so much by writing to Dr. Richards on his behalf that he felt ashamed to trouble her again.
In the west clouds were gathering, weather moving in from Canada. We turned our faces to the breeze and saw Leo, perhaps unconsciously, turn his head as well. He stopped in the middle of his circuit, halfway between the clump of larches—larch, we’d learned years ago, was another name for tamarack—and the willow. Miles, he was thinking, didn’t really believe that he was innocent; he was pushing the rest of us as a way of getting at him. In fact as that breeze touched our faces we were discussing another of Miles’s intrusions: the arrival, that Monday night, of our own personal Four-Minute Man. Everywhere else in the country, Miles claimed, these volunteers were giving pep talks in theaters and churches, inspiring audiences to buy Liberty Bonds, plant victory gardens, conserve food, work longer hours, economize on coal. Surely we needed this more than most; why not set aside a dinnertime slot once a week, and let a series of these punchy speakers inspire us while we ate? Dr. Richards had agreed, perhaps to placate him, and so along with our baked macaroni and cheese we’d been served with a barrel-chested man, standing on a chair and chattering at auction speed for the time it would have taken to change reels, if we’d been watching a film.
His topic had been the importance of following the rules of our sanatorium even more rigorously than usual: the harder we worked, the faster we’d heal. One of the most encouraging features of the war against tuberculosis is that it requires few new weapons or strange and complicated ammunition for the rank and file of the army, he said. Did we look like an army? Our weapons are food, fresh air, and sleep. If you do what you are told, and do it well, you will cut days from your cures. And each day cut saves vital funds for our effort overseas.
We could feel the knife. The harder Miles pushed, the further we pulled away from Leo—who from his place between the willow and the larches saw that he might have to leave. There was nothing here, there had never been anything here but our community, which the fire had destroyed. He hated the room he’d once shared with Ephraim; he hated his slot on the porch. He hated the chaotic new dining room where, although his tray clattered against our trays and his elbows banged ours at the crowded table, we talked across and around him. He had no friend and yet he was never alone. If he’d been alone, away from the whispers and night noises of Otto, Arkady, and Abe, he might have been able to sleep, which might have allowed him to think. He’d barely slept since moving back among us and now the whole place seemed to him diseased.
The warning bell for supper rang, six strokes thudding through the air. We turned at once, we turned as a group, and Leo saw how we’d file inside together, find our places together, whisper about him together in the few minutes it would take him to follow. When he walked through the dining room door alone we’d turn together to look at him, or together ignore him: unbearable, either way. He had to leave. He wouldn’t go back to the city, though; he’d never go to a city again. He wanted a place where no one resembled him, where no one spoke Russian or G
erman, no one remembered crossing the ocean or slept six and eight to a room and pretended that was a reasonable way to live. He wanted fresh air, animals, open land; people one or two at a time but never in groups: Ephraim’s place in Ovid, near the Finger Lakes. Ephraim, his friend.
At the door to the dining room the roar of all of us talking at once rose like a concrete wall. He told the nurse on duty that he was feeling poorly and then turned and went to his room and fetched his bag. He wrote a quick note to Dr. Petrie, thanking him for his help. He wrote another to Irene, thanking her for the gift of the books and for her confidence in him; also for her letter, which he hadn’t seen. Then he wrote Eudora’s name on a third envelope, put Naomi’s letter inside it, and added a note of his own. I am leaving, he wrote. I am starting over; I don’t want to say where but I’m sure you know. My health is very much on the mend and that last incident meant nothing. I wish you would join me when you feel ready. I love you. Leo Marburg.
HE LEFT US with hardly more than what he’d brought to Tamarack State. That night, carrying one small bag with a change of clothes and the little box Eudora had given him, he caught a ride down the hill with Roger, our night watchman, who’d been called up and knew he’d be leaving soon. Sympathetic to anyone wanting to get away, Roger dropped Leo off at the lake. There Leo spent an hour on the bench where Miles and Dr. Petrie had talked. When dawn came he walked to the village station, which he hadn’t seen before. Red brick, a square tower capped with a skylight, a stone arch over the door rimmed with green tiles. In the stone were chiseled the words that would have greeted him had he arrived by choice, with money in his pocket, headed for a place like Mrs. Martin’s house: Welcome, Health-seekers! He took the first train headed south.
The Air We Breathe Page 27