The Air We Breathe (9 page)

NOT UNTIL AFTER
supper the following day did Naomi escape from her mother's house. Exasperating to be trapped for so long; more exasperating to learn only at lunch that Eudora had come by to see her yesterday. Why, Naomi thought furiously, did her mother think it was reasonable to withhold a message overnight? Through a cold mist she walked down the hill and through the village, moving between the streetlamps' cones of light and the dark wedges by which they were separated. At the far end she turned up the flagstone walk leading to Eudora's parents' house.

“Come join us,” Mrs. MacEachern said, opening the door and welcoming her in. “We're just finishing supper—I know Eudora will be glad to see you.”

Naomi moved through the cluttered hall and into the crowded, pleasantly untidy dining room, so different from her mother's crisp arrangements. A piece of oilcloth over the table, in place of starched white linen; gingham napkins and a pair of shaded lamps; mismatched silverware and big crockery bowls. She sat in the chair Eugene pulled out for her, accepted the plate Mrs. MacEachern passed her way, and, although she'd already eaten one meal, savored the turkey hash and sautéed greens and cornbread with fresh butter. Eudora's mother was every bit as good a cook as her own, with less fuss and, as far as she knew, no recipe books at all.

Around the table were Eudora and her parents, Eugene and two of his friends from the garage, Sally and her children but not her husband, who'd gone out to visit someone else, and Ernest, whom Naomi almost never saw. When she and Eudora were still girls, he'd bolted from the workshop out back and, without discussing his plans with anyone, gone to New York City. Six months later, back for a visit, he announced that he'd found a place as an apprentice in the taxidermy studio at the Museum of Natural History and had no intention of returning home to live. Since then he'd done well enough that he now had several people working for him.

If she had an older brother, she thought—older, not younger; she never thought of Thomas—whom she could ask for help and who could show her the world, everything would be different. Leaning over, she asked Ernest what he was working on now.

“An elephant,” he said, and laughing as her eyes widened. “For a diorama, a complete African scene to go in one of the first-floor halls—it's great fun, really. Fascinating.”

She listened as he described the huge, heavy pieces of hide, barktanned for half a year before being hoisted, dripping wet, over a form coated with wet clay that would capture the shape of all the wrinkles. Seven years ago, when he'd left, he'd been a quiet, clumsy, somewhat lumpish boy whom everyone ignored. Now, as he leaned back in his chair, his legs spread and his arms relaxed, he exuded an easy confidence that made her wish she knew him better.

Before she could ask him anything else, though, Sally and her children rose and said it was time for them to go. In the confusion of farewells, Eudora made an excuse to her parents and handed Naomi her coat. Suddenly they too were outside, and alone.

“See why I came over to your house yesterday?” Eudora said as they headed for the lake. Her hair turned gold each time she entered the cone of a streetlight. “Our house, at the holidays…”

“My mother didn't even tell me you'd come by until lunchtime today,” Naomi said. “I wish I'd heard you knock.”

“She didn't tell you until
today
?”

The mist lightened as they reached the lake and a few stars appeared through the clouds, followed by the nearly full moon. Talking as swiftly as they walked, they caught each other up on the day's events until, at the cove opposite the Northview Inn, Naomi paused and reached into her pocket.

“My mother's contribution to the household this morning,” she said. “I had to take it down before Darlene and Daisy could see it.”

Eudora tilted the heavy piece of paper, trying to catch the moonlight. “I can't read it,” she said. “The usual?”

“Close enough,” Naomi said, taking it back. Largely from memory, she recited what she'd found posted above the sink:

“Your mother,” Eudora said, less amused than Naomi had expected. “Yesterday…”

She paused, looking uncomfortable. Then she continued, “She said the oddest thing to me before I left. She asked me to stop riding home with you on Wednesday evenings—because of Miles, she said. Because she wants you and Miles to have time alone together. She seems to think he's interested in you.”

Naomi groaned. “Miles,” she said. “If she had just let me get a
real
job I never would have asked him for work.”

“Your mother's not the one who's been flirting with him,” Eudora pointed out.

“I haven't been
flirting,
” Naomi said. “Not really.”

Eudora scuffed her feet through the damp leaves as if they deserved her full attention. In the silence Naomi almost believed her own words. The idea that her mother, characteristically alert to anything that might advance their lives, was pushing her and Miles together made her wince. “Whatever he's thinking,” she said, “I'm certainly not interested in him.”

“He's not so bad,” Eudora said. “At least he's trying to do
something
.”

Naomi made a face and changed the subject, baffled that Eudora hadn't grasped her dismay. Not a single person understood—she didn't understand herself—how she could want and want and want. She wanted not to keep living in Tamarack Lake, under her mother's thumb. Not to end up with some local boy, because no one else was around. And not to choose someone like Miles, just because she could make him tremble by flashing her stockings when she crossed her legs. Both she and Eudora had let the boys they'd known in school take them out to moving-picture shows, skating parties, hayrides. Some they'd kissed, but Eudora never liked to talk about that, and when Naomi tried to tell her about the time she and Liam O'Connor had done a little more than that in the woods last summer, Eudora wouldn't listen.

But that had just been Liam, sweet and as dumb as a big yellow dog; Naomi had wanted to see what he'd do. Liam, the Dalton brothers, Mrs. Flaherty's husband, Miles: what a waste, Naomi thought. What she really wanted was to know what being with someone
felt
like. What it was like to be in love, and with someone who didn't act like a dog at the end of her leash.

Into her head flashed a picture of Leo Marburg, so intriguingly different from her despite his similar hair and eyes. His life before Tamarack State was a blank; no one visited him and he never mentioned brothers or sisters or parents or a girlfriend. Did he have a family? He had to be poor, or he wouldn't be here. And smart—beyond the questions he asked Miles, he seemed to read a great deal and Eudora had shown her the toy he'd made from the Erector set. He'd been in this country for six years; he came from someplace overseas. When she was close to him she felt the way she used to feel in Chester, early in the morning, when she couldn't imagine what the day would bring but was thrilled to get up and meet it.

He was lonely, she thought, and he had no idea how attractive he was. He seemed mystified by the way people moved toward him, often resting their hands on his arms as they talked. Sometimes she'd caught him looking her way, seeming to study her as she studied him, and she'd imagined rising, while whoever was speaking droned on, and slipping out into the garden as he followed her. There was a nook outside the solarium door, near the chimney and across from that fountain, and he pressed her into it, not clumsily like Liam but tenderly, moving his hands along her back as if he was investigating…

“…and Eugene said he'd ask you,” Eudora said. “What do you think?”

Naomi stopped. “About what?” She'd missed half a conversation, and the huge boulder, perched as casually as if a giant had dropped a pebble on the thumb of land protruding into the lake, loomed before her as if some other set of feet had carried her there.

“I've been talking for five minutes—what were you thinking about?”

“Just…” Naomi gestured toward the lake, the stars dimly reflected in the water but the distant shore invisible and the mountains lost as well. “Don't you get tired of this?”

“Of what?”

“I don't know. Work. Our families, everything. How empty it is here.”

“It's home,” Eudora said.

“Not for me,” Naomi said. “Not really.” She struggled to explain herself more clearly. “When I was tiny and we lived in Chester,” she began, “I used to wake up in my room almost wild with excitement, so anxious to run out into the garden, down to the river, everywhere, so thrilled to talk to the fishermen or the neighbors. If I found a flower that had fallen from one of the tulip trees, that was enough to make the whole day. A pinecone. The sight of the neighbor's gray horse. Why is it different now?”

“Is it different?” Eudora asked.

“Mostly—you don't feel that? I can see the world around me, I can draw everything in it. But now I'm
outside
it, on the edge somehow. It's like being trapped on the wrong side of a window. If I could scratch through it, maybe I'd know what everyone else wants and feels.”

“You
know
what I feel,” Eudora said, stopping to look directly at Naomi, her expression wounded. “I tell you everything.”

Naomi shook her head. “You don't,” she said. “No one really does, do they? That's what I mean. You tell me lots of things but not what's most important to you, what's hidden inside. Everyone else I know does the same thing. We're all like that and some days I can't stand it, I just can't
stand
it.”

Her eyes were wet, her voice was loud, she was flinging her arms about and Eudora was looking at her as though she'd hit a dog with the Model T—why was she saying this, why would she even
want
what she'd just said? Suppose Eudora knew what she really thought about Miles, about Leo, about Ernest or the men she passed on the street. Suppose Eudora, so helpful to the patients at Tamarack State, knew what she did to some of her mother's boarders? The young women, especially—how she turned her back when they wanted to confide something sad, how she dawdled over their fretful requests. It was unbearable the way that, despite all their money, they acted like their lives were over and they had nothing to look forward to. Unbearable that they confused her with the hired help and spoke to her in the same tone.

Eudora didn't know that she sometimes stole from them. Little things, something small and part of a set, so that for months they'd go on searching for a cuff link, an earring, a lone calfskin glove. A single turquoise stocking, which wouldn't be missed for weeks. Or letters, which she took just often enough to baffle them. The boarders left their mail in the basket on the sideboard, trusting her to deliver it to the post office. Once in a while she took a letter for herself, which was how she kept track of what they thought. Or she'd slip an incoming letter from the pile she brought home and then listen, her face blank, while they fretted about how their families never wrote.

Eudora reached for her hand, her face concerned. “What is it?” she said. “What am I missing?”

They'd reached the boulder and were heading back now, to the village and their families and their jobs and their lives that would never, Naomi thought, ever change except to grow still more confining. She drew the cool air into her lungs and tried to focus on the bare trees lining the path, so common that they'd given the village its name. Each limb lined with twigs, each twig dotted with tiny stubs from which the smallest, softest, pale green needles would sprout in the spring, darkening throughout the summer and then lightening again once the weather changed until they'd turn a beautiful yellow and, before Thanksgiving, shower to the ground. On the ground they looked like a golden veil. A hundred times she'd drawn tamaracks, which were pleasing in every season. Not once had she told Eudora or anyone else how she loved them.

“What is it?” Eudora repeated.

“Nothing,” Naomi replied.
Everything,
she thought.

D
URING THAT LONG
Thanksgiving weekend, the rearrangement of our chairs, which Ephraim had undertaken so casually during his talk, seemed to shake something loose in us. As we considered Miles's assumption that each of us might know something interesting, we also began to imagine what we might polish up to share on a Wednesday afternoon. Old hobbies, new curiosities, hard-won skills. Books we'd loved in our earlier lives. Some found a new appetite for reading or conversation, some started journals, some began to think about their futures as well as their pasts: you might call this hope; it is always disturbing. Briefly the air around our porches seemed to flicker, as if the railings were electrified. On the ship from Hamburg to New York, Leo remembered, the sky had also felt like that.

His old friend Vincenzo, who worked in the char house at the sugar refinery, where Leo had started, sent him a letter that week. Three workers with Hungarian names had been dismissed after a warehouse fire, Vincenzo wrote angrily. On no more evidence than their friendship with a former crew member from one of the German merchant ships being held in the harbor. Dark thumbprints edged the sheet of paper, which was filled with large black words slanting toward the lower right corner.
That's how it is now—you're better off out of it
.
Anyone born overseas falls under suspicion whenever anything happens
.
Sometimes I wish I was up there with you. Do they feed you well?

Leo touched the grubby sheet thoughtfully, a reminder of the days he'd spent packing bone black into the enormous filters used to purify the sugar solution. He and Vincenzo had worked side by side, so filthy they could be distinguished only by their teeth and eyes. Without Vincenzo to guide him—without Vincenzo, who'd shared his lunches of bread and cheese, shown him the cheapest place to have shoes resoled, taught him the best times at the public baths, and introduced him to the head chemist—he wouldn't have survived.

He'd taken the job when he was starving, after weeks of searching for a position in a hospital or a university, anyplace with a laboratory. In Russian, or German, or sometimes in Yiddish, depending on the look of his prospective employer—he'd known only a little English when he'd landed—he explained the particulars of his education and his training. After a while he learned not to be surprised that no one understood. Not to be surprised that they thought he was stupid. By the time he got to the refinery, he'd learned to be grateful for anyone who'd offer a hand. New York was nothing like what he'd imagined but, crowded into the shared room at Tobias and Rachel's flat, swilling the same cheap food and beer as his companions while working the same hard jobs, for long stretches he'd convinced himself that he was getting somewhere. He lived like the Irishmen and Sicilians and Ruthenians and Poles he met, the Finns and Jews and Germans, absorbed into the crowd—until, in the middle of a sentence or a task, he'd start thinking about something he'd read or studied, some experiment that had once captivated him completely. Then he'd stop listening to whoever was around him and withdraw his attention, feeling for those minutes utterly alone. Once more he was a boy, stirring sugar and potassium chlorate in a white porcelain bowl and trickling sulfuric acid over the mixture, stepping back as the smoke spewed and a cone of carbon rose in the dish.

Someone would bark at him, disgruntled to find him daydreaming, and then the boy who'd done that experiment disappeared. In place of his clean hands, his ambitions, and the alert, chattering, clever friends who'd studied physiology or the nature of the chemical bond, he had comrades who joined the preparedness parades in the streets. Along with them came employers who contributed to the cost of the gigantic electrified sign—
ABSOLUTE AND UNQUALIFIED LOYALTY TO OUR COUNTRY
—hanging over Fifth Avenue, and strangers who narrowed their eyes at the sound of his name. In Brooklyn, Vincenzo reminded him, people were changing their names. The explosion of Black Tom Island, which had occurred while he was in the infirmary and had been blamed on German spies and the German-Americans who sheltered them, had made the situation even worse.

Yet still, Leo thought, he wouldn't have left the city on his own. How had Ephraim's Rosa and her brothers found the courage? For them, as for him, New York had been home since getting off the boat. Only after the city ejected him had he understood that he hadn't really
believed
in the rest of this enormous country. West of the Adirondacks, Ephraim claimed, New York State continued for hundreds of miles, green rolling land, rivers and valleys, town after town, and beyond the border Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nebraska…who could imagine Nebraska?

Leo read the letter again and then, reluctantly, went to bed, where he slept poorly. A few days later, he received a second, even more unexpected, letter. Opening his copy of our sanatorium newsletter,
The Kill-Gloom Gazette,
he watched, bemused, as a small white envelope with no address and no stamp slid from the stenciled pages and landed in his lap. Inside was a note in blue ink:

No signature; no salutation. Perhaps it had been meant for someone else? After trying to ignore it for a day, he showed the contents first to Ephraim and then to the rest of the dinner table. One of the patients who helped produce the weekly paper must be responsible, someone said.

“A female patient, I hope,” Ephraim said, which caused a few smiles. Ian suggested the fat woman who collated the visitors' list, while Frank said it might be the girl who'd written the poem about the dying chrysanthemums. Or perhaps the sad woman—Abigail? Adelaide?—in her early thirties who delivered the newsletters without meeting anyone's eye.

Leo put the note aside but still couldn't make himself throw it out. Something about it stirred him, not the content but the cryptic delivery, which lured him into spending more time in our excuse for a library. The women had separate borrowing hours, so it wasn't as if he'd meet anyone there. Still, he sat where he was visible from the hall, reading old copies of
Scientific American
magazine while wondering if the note writer, passing by, might see him and make a sign. Who would be drawn to him? His pale face, thin legs, shrunken shoulders; the weight and strength he'd lost: he'd been proud of his body when he was younger, but now he was sure that if someone were ever interested in him again, it wouldn't be because of the way he looked. Still, his last romance—they'd all been brief—had ended more than a year ago, and since then there'd been only work and sickness. It was just possible, he thought, that the person who wrote him was someone he might like. He sat in the library, reading an article about the geometry of snowflakes and inspecting the photomicrographs, while waiting for the note writer to show herself. Because of this, he missed the visit of Ephraim's friend.

VISITING HOURS:
late afternoon, twice each month, the same slot of time during which we met for our sessions but fortunately not the same day. The first Tuesday in December brought a scant crowd, which we'd expected; many would wait for the third Tuesday, when we'd be closer to Christmas. Benny's sister came, bringing a potted plant. Ian's mother came up from Albany. Polly was visited by her former fiancé, who'd broken off their engagement when she became ill but now, having heard from a mutual friend that she was cousining with a welder from Yonkers, was interested again. Two young men from the private sanatorium across the village called on Lydia—she'd sneaked over there one night for an illicit dance—and Otto's nephew arrived with a box of homemade gifts from his family in Utica.

Ephraim, unusually, had a visitor that afternoon as well. At his insistence Rosa seldom came to see him; their daughters home in Ovid needed her, as did her parents, and he counted on her to keep the family going until he was cured. His own parents had once traveled up from New York, and a few young men from Ovid, who had other business nearby, had also kindly come by at different times, but Felix hadn't been among them and so Ephraim was surprised to see him now.

Nearly a decade younger than Ephraim, Felix was the younger brother of Rosa's brother-in-law: high-spirited, hot-tempered, impatient with apple-picking and pruning. The Work Committee had moved him to the cannery but he hadn't liked that either, although he'd shown a great aptitude for fixing the machines. Finally one of the foremen, tired of disciplining him but wanting to make the most of his talents, had sent him off to Syracuse, where the brothers who'd established the cannery also owned a foundry. Just before Felix arrived there, the works had been converted into a shell assembly plant. He'd been assigned to the cleaning shed, where along with sixty other men he brushed off shell casings and cleaned out the protective grease with rags dipped in gasoline.

Ephraim had never known him well, but it was pleasant to sit with Felix on one of the benches in the garden outside the solarium. With his back sheltered by the high wall and the sun beating down, he was warm enough to open his jacket while Felix tossed crumbs to the sparrows clustered around the fountain. Most of his earnings, Felix was explaining, he sent back to Ovid—
home,
Ephraim thought, imagining the soft brown mole on Rosa's thigh—and soon he'd be eligible to move into the foundry itself, where he might gain some useful training.

He crumbled another stale biscuit and dotted a trail from the ground across the tip of one work boot and back to the ground again. “Will the birds follow that?” he asked.

“Watch,” Ephraim said. “They're as tame as we are; they know we can't do anything to them. Sometimes they take food right out of our hands.”

As a sparrow charged his boot and snatched the crumbs, Felix continued describing his plans—exactly, Ephraim thought, as if planning ever did anyone any good. Until recently, Felix said, his job had been fine, but the plant had contracts from Russia and England for millions of shells and the owners were pushing the workers to their limits. A fence had gone up around the plant; some union organizers had been arrested. Now guards searched them all for what they called “incendiary literature” before they went in, and also for actual matches: Felix's shed, packed with workbenches on which the men kept pans full of gasoline and mounds of soaked rags, was uncomfortably near buildings filled with detonators, shrapnel, and powder. Each week the quotas increased, and also the grumbling, the late night meetings, the complaints filed with the gang foremen.

“I'm worried,” Felix said, tapping his toe until the sparrow darted away. “That something's going to happen.”

“What would happen?” Ephraim asked.

Instead of answering him directly, Felix reached into the canvas sack he'd brought—a clean shirt and food for the train trip, Ephraim had assumed—and drew out a tin box the size of a loaf of bread.

“What's this?”

“My friend Joe had it in his locker, and when he got suspended for gathering some of the workers together and talking about a possible strike, he slipped it to me before the guards came down to search his belongings. He said we'd all be fired if anyone saw it, and asked if I could find a safe place to hide it until some big meeting he's going to this summer. I took it out with my dirty overalls that night, but then I couldn't figure out what to do with it. Nothing's private in the place where I stay.”

He opened the box and showed Ephraim the articles clipped from the Socialist papers, the IWW pamphlets, a copy of a Russian-language anarchist monthly, two compact coils of copper wire, a piece of unglazed white ceramic tile about the size of a playing card, and three pencils that did not, upon closer inspection, exactly look like pencils. Ephraim ran his hands over the wire and then turned one of the pencils around. “And this is…?”

“I wasn't sure, at first,” Felix said. “But I read the papers like you do, I see what you see: spies have set fires with things like that. The wire, though, and the tile…maybe it's just stuff Joe confiscated from some of the workers.”

“Why give it to you, then?”

Felix spread both hands in the air. “I don't know. But when I asked him to take the box back, he said he couldn't, and he made me promise to keep it safe until the summer meeting. You know what's going on with unions all over. Things are going to be bad at our plant for a while.”

He looked at Ephraim, and then looked away. “The thing is—I told Joe I'd bring the box up here and leave it with you. You're so far away, no one would look here for something like this. You don't have anything like a labor movement, no strikes or demonstrations. Just sick people, and a lot of woods.”

He flushed as Ephraim frowned at him. “I know I should have asked you first.”

“I don't see why you'd pull me into this,” Ephraim said. Framed by the garden walls, the woods meant to insulate him from both germs and worry slipped slightly out of focus, signaling more snow.

“Because,” Felix said, looking over Ephraim's shoulder, “I'm a little bit more involved with the union organizers than I should be. And who else could I ask? You're family.”

It was obviously wrong, Ephraim thought, and clearly risky to keep the box. Yet it was equally impossible to refuse Felix's request. He
was
family, as well as a member of the Ovid community, and Felix wouldn't ask this of him unless it was important. At the same time he wouldn't want to be beholden. Casually, as if nothing had just happened, Ephraim turned away from the trees and said, “You'll come back for it?”