The Air We Breathe (22 page)

The officials who arrived to advise Dr. Richards pointed at the undamaged wings of the men's and women's annexes, separated from the ruined central building by the covered walkways. Combine the patients in a single wing, they said. Men on the top floor of the former men's annex, women on the ground floor, the middle floor split half-and-half. Four of us rather than two in each room; on the porches the dividing panels removed and the chairs crowded into long rows. All the functions of the central building could then be transferred into the former women's annex.

Doctors and nurses crowded in to help from other sanatoria in the village; housewives ferried in meals; grocers and druggists brought bread and bandages and medicines while our own maids and orderlies, Eudora included, worked double shifts moving us into our new quarters, making up beds, and carrying meals. A new infirmary was improvised on the second floor of the women's annex, a dining room wedged into what had been the women's lounge, offices and laboratories scattered here and there. Floors were reinforced to support the heavy stoves, new plumbing was installed and equipment moved for a new kitchen. Until that work was finished, our meals were cooked on the back lawn, in a sort of field kitchen.

We were lucky this had happened at the beginning of the summer. Tents, wooden platforms, canvas awnings; military cookers on wheels donated by the army training camp at Plattsburg; wood and coal stoves carted over from merchants in the village; finally we were grateful for Miles's managerial skills. Scrubbing and soaking restored the utensils and the big pots and pans, but our old familiar tables and chairs, which were made of wood, seemed to have sucked the fumes into their pores and couldn't be used without being sanded and repainted. Until then we ate our meals from trays in bed or on our cure chairs. Before, this wouldn't have been much of a hardship, but it made those early days, when many of us were still sick and all of us were getting used to our new, forced intimacy, more difficult. Rooms and porches that had been snug for two were crammed with four; we quarreled—we still quarrel—over lockers and sinks and toilets and our positions on the porches.

Both Dr. Richards and Dr. Petrie, healthy to begin with, recovered more quickly than the rest of us; on Dr. Richards' orders, Dr. Petrie began assembling notes and writing a preliminary report on the fire as soon as he was out of bed. Who was injured and how badly. Who had died so far: Morris, after his botched jump, and Edith and Denis, who'd been trapped in their beds. Who might yet die: Kathleen, who'd been exposed the longest; Janet, who'd been in the back row and who had only one functioning lung; Leo, who'd received a very large dose when he'd tried to help Kathleen. Naomi didn't appear on any of his lists; Eudora had seen what looked like Mrs. Martin's Model T spiraling down the hill long before the fire trucks arrived. He was far more worried about Irene, who was struggling to breathe and whose throat was still so swollen that she couldn't talk.

Piecing together where the fire had started and what had burned, he determined the nature of the brownish yellow clouds that had made us so sick. He wrote:

As he wrote, stopping occasionally to rub a cramp from his hand, he was thinking about Edith and Denis and Morris, and about all his other failures. He might have recognized the first whiff of the fumes and rushed us out before anything worse could happen; if he were taller and stronger he might have pushed and carried from the hall more people than he had; if he hadn't succumbed to the fumes himself he might have taken better care of the sick in the first crucial days instead of lying in bed, wheezing and vomiting. And how had he failed to pry Irene away from her work that night? They often urged each other to take a break, and it had been his job to convince her. If he had, she might be back at her desk already, like him. Instead—she too might die, he thought. His pen paused at another repetition of the word “pulmonary”—suddenly the spelling looked very odd—and then stopped altogether. For the first time since his return from France, his job seemed like too much.

He stood, stretching his aching arm over his head and flexing his fingers until the soreness eased. How had the fire started? He could imagine Irene bent over her apparatus, so caught up in her work that she failed to notice the first signs until she was enveloped. Either she'd rushed from the room too late, her arms heaped with films, or, an even more upsetting thought, she'd fled promptly but then steeled herself to return and rescue what films she could. She'd been found on the back stairs leading to the service door, clutching to her chest an enormous stack of images of our lungs. The first investigators, masked and goggled, had followed a shining trail of radiographs from the spot where she'd collapsed all the way back to her desk.

Dr. Petrie shared his report with the fire department and the police, the commission from Albany and the other one from New York. More informally, he told us, so that we began to get a sense of what had happened. His partial information was better than what we got from the newspapers, which tried to link our fire to others of the recent past: at the Williamsburg tenements, the insurance building, the shirtwaist factory. Interspersed with their speculations were shots of our own faces, swollen and covered with soot, which eager local photographers had taken as we lay out on the lawns.

The investigators, after sorting through the evidence and taking statements from everyone able to speak, found nothing scandalous to feed those papers, though. No defects in the heating or the electrical systems, no mismanagement, nothing scanted in the building's design or maintenance, no evidence of shortcuts during construction, no sign of arson. An accident, the investigators said. A spark, perhaps, or a shorted wire from a piece of apparatus in the X-ray facility. The cause of the “smoke-related incident”—that was how they referred to it—remained mysterious, but the destruction would have been far worse and the fire spread more rapidly if the building hadn't been so well-designed and well-built. They particularly admired the central stairwell, recommending only that exterior fire stairs be added to the top floor of each dormitory wing.

DURING THE DAYS
immediately after the fire, Eudora hardly left Tamarack State except to snatch a meal and a few hours of dreamless sleep. She knew, as the rest of us didn't, then, how upset Naomi had been to find her with Leo, and she blamed herself for Naomi's disappearance. Briefly she wondered if Miles might have helped her leave town, but when she saw him at Tamarack State, directing a line of volunteers carrying groceries, she didn't dare ask him. Mrs. Martin was useless; Eudora had glimpsed her at the pharmacist's, telling whoever would listen that her daughter had run away for no reason, taking the car that even now wasn't fully paid off and leaving her shorthanded. Perhaps, Eudora thought, Naomi had left some clue in her room.

She sacrificed her first morning off since the fire, bicycled over to Mrs. Martin's house, and went in through the service door. A young woman stringing beans greeted her as she walked past white walls fringed with Mrs. Martin's notes. New ones, about conserving food for the war: reminders about observing wheatless Mondays and Wednesdays and meatless Tuesdays, about using less sugar, eating more fish, saving cooking fats for soap and fruit pits for carbon that would go into gas masks to save soldiers' lives.
Eat Potatoes!
one card read.
Eat Oatmeal!
read another.

“What's all this?” Eudora asked the girl, whom she hadn't seen before.

“Mrs. Martin signed the food pledge,” the girl said, pointing with her knife toward a larger placard hanging from a pin.

Eudora paused and said, “Sooner or later, I suppose everyone will have to sign.”

“No doubt,” said the girl. “But they won't all be so smug, will they? Or volunteer to head up the local women's drive to save food. All the time bragging that she keeps the best table in the village, and making everyone who works here suffer for it.”

She chopped a pile of beans in half and added, in a high, mocking voice, “‘There is no reason why we can't serve nutritious, delicious meals while still conserving to the utmost. We must be endlessly
creative
…' She's ten times worse now that she's got Mr. Fairchild egging her on. He overheard me complaining about trying to cook with so little butter and he accused me of being disloyal.”

Taken aback by the girl's vehemence, Eudora pushed through the swinging door to the dining room and nearly bumped into Mrs. Martin, standing just a few feet away. She'd had her hair done recently, Eudora saw, a new style involving a complicated mat of gray braids clamped to the back of her head. Her apron, ruffled along the bodice, looked new as well, or at least freshly starched.

“How nice to see you,” Mrs. Martin said, crossing her arms at her waist. “But why did you come to the kitchen door?”

“I didn't want to bother you,” Eudora murmured, trying to look trustworthy.

Mrs. Martin proceeded to talk about the weather, the tragedy at Tamarack State, the difficulty of running a boardinghouse with the new wartime restrictions and how she'd nonetheless triumphantly adapted to them; about everything except Naomi. As if, by refusing to mention her daughter, she erased any grounds for worry. Five or six years ago, when Naomi had had a terrible case of bronchitis and a cough suggesting that she might have something worse, Eudora had seen Mrs. Martin wall off her fears in just this way, betrayed only by her rigid hands. As she rattled on now, the skin on her knuckles whitened.

“Was there something you wanted?” she finally asked.

“Just—to see how you were,” Eudora answered, knowing she'd lost any hope of ducking into Naomi's room. “And to find out if there'd been any news.”

“Nothing,” Mrs. Martin said. “Too much trouble for her, I am sure. But as long as you're here, I know Mr. Fairchild wants to speak with you.”

Before Eudora could protest Mrs. Martin had vanished up the stairs. A minute later Miles came down alone, his stiff collar buttoned and cinched by his tie.

Without any greeting, he asked the same question she wanted to ask him. “Have you heard from her?”

In this house, Eudora thought, “her” always meant Naomi. “No,” she said. “Have you?”

His face crumpled, and then his body, depositing him on the broad bottom step. “I thought she told you everything,” he said.

“If she had,” Eudora replied, “I might know where she was.” The top of his head, now at the level of her knees, had a bald spot she hadn't noticed. She tried to step back but his hand clutched her right shin through a handful of her skirt.

“She didn't mention leaving?”

“No,” Eudora said. She held her breath, waiting for the obvious question: when had she last seen Naomi?

Instead he said, in an anguished tone, “There's money missing from my room. From her mother's purse as well. It disappeared the day she did. How could she not know that if she asked, I'd give her anything?”

He was so upset that Eudora didn't dare hint at Naomi's real feelings, or at her own. At movie night, the pang she'd felt when she'd returned to find Naomi sitting at Leo's side had shocked her.

“Really,” she said to the top of Miles's head, “I have to go.”

She left him on that bottom step, knowing as she fled the house that she wouldn't feel so guilty if Naomi's suspicions hadn't been true. In the weeks since the fire, she'd felt more and more strongly drawn to Leo each time she crept into the rough new infirmary and listened to him struggling to breathe.

I
N OUR NEW
infirmary, which was wedged into the second floor of the former women's annex, Leo lay on a white bed resembling those in which Edith and Denis had been trapped during the fire. He didn't know that they were dead, nor did he know about Morris's fatal jump or how badly Irene had been injured. Although many of us had recovered from our exposure to the fumes, he'd developed pneumonia in both lungs, with a fever so high he felt like flames were licking at his sheets. Often he was unconscious when Eudora visited him, and even when he was awake he didn't always recognize her behind the mask Dr. Petrie made her wear. Watching the muscles at the base of his neck tighten and hollow as he struggled for breath, sometimes she couldn't recognize him either. For the ten minutes Dr. Petrie allowed, she sat next to him silently, now and then stroking the smooth web of skin between his index finger and his thumb.

Afterwards, she took off her mask and crossed the hall to the women's section where Kathleen, Janet, and Irene were laid out in identical beds. Kathleen and Janet remained very weak while Irene, whose face was heavily bandaged, still couldn't talk. The fumes pouring through the basement had swollen her windpipe shut and she'd already stopped breathing by the time the firemen brought her up the basement stairs. Dr. Petrie had saved her life—a few of us had seen his arm swoop down, the scalpel glittering in the moonlight before it pierced her neck—but in the process damaged her larynx. No one knew how long she'd lain there before the firemen fetched her, and Eudora worried that her brain might be damaged as well. She might speak again, or she might not; might work again, or not. All Eudora could do was visit each day, deliver the news and gossip in a cheerful tone, and then—she knew that Irene didn't want anyone else to touch her hand—change the cotton inside her violet glove. The glove itself was clean and fresh, replaced from the box in Irene's room.

When she finished her visits, she went back to work with a sense of relief. For fifteen hours a day she worked without a pause, falling asleep at home as soon as she reached her bed. In between those states, the bicycle ride that should have relaxed her became a kind of torture. Pedaling up the hill at dawn, or flying down in the last bit of twilight, she couldn't help thinking selfishly of all she'd lost. Who, if not Irene, would sympathize with her complicated feelings for Leo? Who but Leo could understand her uneasiness over not telling Miles that she'd seen Naomi the night of the fire? Who but Naomi could understand how lonely she felt with all of them absent—but her loneliness wasn't all of it. She'd lied, she'd betrayed her friend, she'd made a mess of everything, and still she was selfish enough to grieve over what she'd lost in the basement.

Both the new X-ray apparatus and the old one she'd restored had been destroyed. The gas tubes, the darkroom, the lead-shielded stand were gone; also the notebooks in which she'd kept the record of her experiments, the films she'd taken of Irene's chest and of Leo's, and her father's old specimens. Gone too were the images from her first clumsy experiments with bits of leather and wood, buttons of bone and vulcanite and glass. The data she'd collected, at first only out of a sense of duty, had revealed a great delight: simple rules were useless. The best images required a subtler tinkering, which she realized, now that she was separated from any hope of doing more, she had loved.

LEO, DELIRIOUS WITH
fever, confused the X-ray laboratory with his old classroom, his old life and his new; well into June, nothing made sense to him. He missed the rearrangement of his room—Otto tucked into Ephraim's old spot, next to Leo's empty bed; Arkady and Abe wedged in as well—and he missed the arguments the rest of us had as we were shifted similarly. When his fever spiked he relived the fire, batting the gas from his face while he tried frantically to parse the rules of this combustion. When his fever dipped, he wandered through his past.

While he floated outside Grodno, watching a sleigh move down one hill and up another, rain washed the residue of the fumes from the walls of our ruined central building, turning it into acid that singed the surrounding lawn. Leo saw, not that burned brown oval, but the dark and beautiful forest where he'd spent summers with his mother's relatives; he was with his mother, crossing a field of sugar beets as they walked home from the creek. In an office he stood, his head no higher than the desks, listening with wonder as his father spoke Russian to the tax collector, Polish to a foreman, German to a friend. Then he was older, thirteen or fourteen, wandering the streets like a wolf and later trying to please the Odessa merchant who'd rescued him and paid his fees at the polytechnic institute. In the closet off the pantry where the merchant had let him sleep, two mice visited him each night and ate sunflower seeds from his hand. At the institute, an Armenian friend gave him a soft felt hat while another diagrammed the reaction of sodium chloride and sulfuric acid to yield hydrochloric acid, which could in turn yield chlorine gas. In New York, not long after he arrived, he fell in love with the fourth of his landlord's six daughters, whose father promptly married her to a Jew from their old village. After her there'd been other girls but no one, until Eudora, who had the power to change his life.

Days passed in a dream for him, while those of us who'd recovered watched the burned grass melt into the dirt and the building walls, once a soft brick red, streak and darken. Blackflies plagued us on the porches as we continued to trade hypotheses about the fire and then to share them with the men from Albany and New York who came to question us. They treated us like immigrants just off the boat. Miles we saw hardly at all, glimpsing him only as he flicked past to talk to some of the staff or—this was new—to Dr. Richards. Rumors zigzagged down the porches. We thought we'd known him, his tidy suits and excellent shoes, his boring talks; at the Wednesday session now marked forever as our last, his comments about sabotage and spies had sounded like someone else speaking and we'd assumed the Miles we knew would soon return. If we'd had more evidence, we might have guessed how much he worried about Naomi, or how, thinking she'd left the village directly after their quarrel, he blamed himself. But Miles never gathered us together, as he would have in the old days; he never spoke to us as a group, and he never asked what we thought about Naomi's disappearance. We didn't learn how deeply he'd changed until he appeared unexpectedly in Dr. Petrie's new office.

They hadn't spoken easily together since Dr. Petrie had declined to join his league, and Dr. Petrie was surprised to see him. More surprised when Miles dropped into the wooden chair substituting for the one in which, before the fire, he'd sat while pouring out his passion for Naomi. His hair was too long, his nails were chipped, his shoes lacked their usual polish; in the aftermath of the fire, even he was still disheveled. What had brought him back? Perhaps, Dr. Petrie thought, simply the fact that he'd been Miles's earliest confidant.

Without introduction, Miles said, “I got your report.”

“I'm sorry?” Dr. Petrie said. He looked around at the papers littering his desk. “If I was supposed to send you something—”

“Your report on the fire,” Miles said. “Dr. Richards sent it to me. As you might have expected.”

“Ah,” Dr. Petrie said, struggling to control his voice. Of course Miles had asked Dr. Richards to join his league; of course Dr. Richards had accepted. Of course nothing he submitted to Dr. Richards was confidential anymore. How had he mistaken Miles for someone ineffectual?

“I would have come to talk to you sooner,” Miles said, “but I had to put aside everything for Registration Day.”

“You were involved with that?”

“In the background,” said Miles. He'd organized all the volunteers and donations necessary to restore something like order to Tamarack State, while at the same time keeping an eye on every aspect of the draft registration, but in both cases he'd acted somewhere between anonymously and secretly. Now his reward was Dr. Petrie's surprised, suspicious glance. Either one of those tasks would have been plenty for a healthy young man. But for him, middle-aged and sick, worried about a girl who'd run away and who might be hurt, or worse—only by the most rigid discipline could he hold himself together. He straightened his back. He smoothed down a wisp of hair. He pressed his eyeteeth against his bottom teeth, a trick he'd learned to keep his face from trembling. He added, coolly, “In case men had questions, or had some thought of failing to register, or were in danger of being swayed by someone with Socialist or anticonscription tendencies.”

“Really,” Dr. Petrie said, his hand smoothing a piece of paper that already lay perfectly flat. “I hadn't realized that was part of your volunteer work.”

And it was true that most of us had hardly noticed the events of June 5, coming so soon after the fire. We were already wards of the state, sent here by our local Boards of Health, and our backgrounds and identities had been documented to perfection. We couldn't have altered our birth dates or lied about our naturalization status if we'd wanted; anyway our illness exempted us from serving. But in Tamarack Lake the situation had been different. In the high school auditorium, every man in the village between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one had been required to appear and fill out a form. Later, we heard that the high school band had played at intervals all day. That the Boy Scouts formed an escort for the truck that carried the registration forms from the post office to the high school. That the Mountain-aires—now led by Mr. Harries, hastily recruited after Mr. Baum's dismissal—sang at 7
A.M.,
when the polling place opened, and again at 7
P.M.,
when it closed, in between passing out miniature American flags for the young men to wear on their chests.

“We had agents at the main doors, and out back, and at both ends of town,” Miles admitted, wanting someone to know how carefully he'd arranged things. “One man at the train station, in case someone got the idea to leave that way, and one parked on each of the main roads. We could have used you—I still feel uneasy about the population here.”

“There's nothing here for me to help with,” Dr. Petrie said. “The male patients aren't eligible to serve. And I'm sure the men who work here registered. Though what we'll do if the army starts to take them…”

As he spoke, he tried not to scratch at the crusty red bubbles erupting on his left forearm. Not poison ivy, not shingles; some sort of reaction, perhaps, to the fumes: but then why did only he have them? He forced himself to look away from his arm and at Miles, whose face was unpleasantly pale. “Aren't you concerned about your
own
health? You shouldn't be working such hours—you shouldn't be working at all.”

Miles rose and began to pace in front of the desk. “You've been here so long that you don't see, anymore, what's happening out in the world.”

“Yet
I
was the one who went to France, I notice,” Dr. Petrie said. “Not you.”

“Thank you,” Miles said bitterly, “for reminding me of my failures with Lawrence. As if I ever forget.”

Dr. Petrie murmured an apology, considering at the same time the truth of Miles's accusation. Twenty years ago, when he'd arrived with patched socks and single suitcase, his mind whirling with a thousand ideas gained in the clinics of Baltimore, he was sure he could turn Tamarack State into a model institution. Since then he'd worked so hard that he seldom traveled or read anything not directly related to his work. His visit to France had been the one great exception.

“If
I
had gone,” Miles said, “I would have come back with some new ideas. Didn't what you saw make you curious? Didn't it make you wonder about how we'd handle raising an army here? All you seem to think about are the patients right in front of you, but what's going on is so much larger—Socialists are preaching draft resistance. Pro-German elements are spreading rumors everywhere. Young men are going to Mexico and Canada, and lying about their ages, and producing forged birth certificates and claiming to be married when they're not. And that's just the tip of what's happening. I don't have time to worry about myself.”

“I read the same newspapers you do,” Dr. Petrie said. “I'm perfectly well aware of what's going on.”

“You don't see the league reports from the other districts, though. Which you might have, had you joined when I asked you—why don't you want to help?”

“Here's a story I heard,” Dr. Petrie said, abruptly pushing aside a huge stack of files. “I heard that in Boston, a member of the American Protective League brought in a white carrier pigeon that he suspected of being used in German spy work because it had spots inside its wings. Tiny black lines and spots that to him looked like dots and dashes. Since he didn't know how to read Morse code, he called in someone from the Signal Corps, who called someone from military intelligence. Everyone got excited until a boy figured out that the specks were clumps of bird lice.”

“Anyone can suffer from an excess of zeal,” Miles said. As if to tease him, a pigeon flew past the window, wings mottled in shades of gray. “It doesn't mean the other cases aren't important.”

“I'm not criticizing your work,” Dr. Petrie said. “I just don't feel that I can be of much help. I've been as busy as you these past weeks, and anyway it sounds as if you have plenty of men to train and supervise already. Maybe you should be giving
them
your Wednesday afternoons.”