The Air We Breathe (7 page)

“Could I do that?” Eudora asked.

“Anyone could,” Irene repeated.

S
OMETIMES WE SPLIT
into factions, half of us disagreeing with the other half over how to relate these events: should this come first or that, should this be emphasized more, or less?

Show them,
one side insists.
Morris, Edith, Denis. Before they're gone.

We can't,
the rest of us argue.

Why not? It would mean more, if they stood out
.

Less.
It would mean less.

Eventually we reach some agreement and move on. We can't show everyone, and some—Irene was long overdue—have to show up before others. Days and nights that aren't interesting, we skip. We do our best.

Skip our fifth session then, which was only Miles saying more of the same. And although we love our movies—we don't have much to look at here, beyond our own rooms, our slivers of porch, the walkways connecting the buildings, and the view which, although beautiful, is hemmed tightly by mountains and trees—skip November's movie night, during which there were no raging quarrels and no new romances. Skip that weekend, too, which, without the gossip that usually followed a movie night, was unusually dull. By Monday we were already back to our routine, lying cold and damp on the porches. Reading, most of us: plodding through whatever we'd found, longing for something better. Ephraim looked up from the pages of the novel he'd been struggling with for a week and said out loud what he'd meant only to think: “Why would someone
write
this?” Beyond the railing, branches drooped.

Leo looked up. “Bad?”

“Worse than bad,” Ephraim said. “But I'm at fault here too—why am I reading it?”

“Why have we been playing with an Erector set?” Leo said, making a face. “Grown men—I get so bored that parts of me aren't even awake enough, anymore, to know what the other parts are doing.”

“I built that little model of a skyscraper,” Ephraim admitted.

“
You
made that?”

Ephraim nodded, wadding up a piece of paper and tossing it into the basket between their chairs. “When I was first in New York,” he said, “I was determined to work in one of those buildings someday, high up in a room with big windows, looking out on the city—”

“What did you think you'd be doing in there?”

Ephraim laughed. “That was the trouble—I didn't even know enough to imagine the work.”

Leo waited for more—he was always interested in Ephraim's stories—but instead Ephraim blinked, bent his head, and returned to the novel he'd just denounced. A line from a long-ago physics class appeared inside Leo's head:
A body in motion tends to stay in motion; a body at rest tends to stay at rest.

With that, his own head bent as well. Secretly pleased that he'd uncovered something better from the latest box of book donations, secretly ashamed that, having found something delightful, he hadn't yet shared it with his friend, he returned to H. G. Wells's
The World Set Free
. The first few pages had been dull but soon the pace had picked up, and now he was caught up in a futuristic world—1940, 1950, was it possible he'd live that long?—in which a new energy derived from atoms liberated people from all toil and, after one last terrible war, rendered war pointless.

He turned the pages, following the skilled bomb-thrower who, grasping the pitcher-like handles of a spherical atomic bomb, bent his head to the cold metal surface and bit off a little celluloid tab. Air rushed in, the reaction began; the thrower crouched in the flying machine and hurled the bomb down onto the target. The ground welled up in a great volcano that would seethe and seethe—forever?

That page he read again.
Those used by the Allies were lumps of pure Carolinum, painted on the outside with unoxidised cydonator inducive enclosed hermetically in a case of membranium:
what kind of chemistry was that? Yet so many astonishing things had been discovered in the few years he'd been away from his studies that even this might be true. Herschel, one of his companions at the polytechnic in Odessa, would know; he'd gone to England instead of America and found work as a chemist at a dye works in Manchester, from which he used to send enthusiastic letters. Once he'd described a meeting at the local literary and philosophical society, to which he'd gone expecting the usual reports on bird migration or new mining techniques. Instead a physicist named Ernest Rutherford had discussed the inner structure of the atom, which he'd proved was not a solid ball at all but a tiny nucleus tucked inside a whirling cloud of negative charge. It was so exciting, Herschel wrote, that he'd wept—which Leo, reading the page on the stone jetty at the sugar refinery, his hands black with carbonized bone from the char house, had wanted to do himself. That nucleus, it seemed, played a role in Wells's new world. Absorbed, he continued to read, while Ephraim moved his eyes back and forth across the lumpy print, dreaming of Rosa and his girls.

WHEN MILES ANNOUNCED,
at the end of our sixth session, that he was finished speaking and that it was time for the rest of us to take over, we talked for a while about who should address the group next, and in what order. Several of us wanted Leo to talk—we all longed to know more about him—but a majority felt that those who'd been confined to Tamarack State the longest should get to talk first. Finally we voted that Ephraim should begin, followed by those who'd been here more than a year. Later there'd be time for Leo and any other new residents who joined us. And so, on an afternoon when it was snowing heavily, white flakes blowing in sheets across the field, Ephraim left the boring novel on his porch and came down to tell us a story.

Sixteen of us were in the solarium that day, including the five women who'd responded to the invitation Eudora had hung in the women's annex. Dr. Petrie, who'd dropped by out of curiosity after hearing some of us discuss the sessions, was also there; he meant to stay only a few minutes but he settled into a chair and listened intently, occasionally pushing a hand through his wiry hair. Most of us knew that Ephraim had been an apple farmer, but not how he'd become one. And although he'd spoken often of his daughters and his wife, he'd said little, until that afternoon, about his past or his daily life on the farm near Ovid.

“I lived in Minsk when I was very young,” he began, “but almost all I remember from there is the smell of the air. And our crossing.”

His Yiddish he claimed he'd learned not in Minsk but on the Lower East Side, where from the age of eleven he'd lived surrounded by people from the place his family had left behind. Like most of us, he had worked too hard, been paid too little, eaten poorly, spent hours arguing about politics but never seen anything change. After following his father and his brothers into a sock-knitting factory, he'd taken evening classes that got him nowhere; gone to the Yiddish theaters and seen plays that made him homesick but also infuriated him with their sentimentality; dreamed about escaping from his cramped flat, his cramped life—and never, until he met Rosa and her family, thought to leave the city.

We'd lived some version of that life, if not in New York then in Utica or Binghamton, Syracuse or Rochester, and we nodded; we knew how that went. While we thought about our old lives, Eudora, whose bedroom shelf was now adorned with the gleaming model Leo had given her, thought about why he'd made it. She was trying to imagine what she'd be like if, in one country, she'd been highly educated, fluent in several languages, knowledgeable about music and theater and chemistry, while in another, across the ocean, she'd been turned into someone barely fit to blast rock for a subway tunnel. Compared to Leo or Ephraim, she thought, she might have lived inside a shell. Her mother and her aunt had left England as tiny girls in the care of their parents, wanderers themselves; the gray-haired man with the deeply lined face who occasionally showed up at the house for a week, talking about a year spent in Siberia or six months in Tibet, and then looked at her mother and Aunt Elizabeth as if they were unusual rhododendrons—that was her grandfather, Max Vigne. Sometimes her grandmother Clara arrived with him, and sometimes not, but no one ever said why. On her father's side of the family were stories about his mother, Nora MacEachern, who'd traveled from Ireland to Canada to Tamarack Lake, where she nursed consumptives and later trained Aunt Elizabeth to do the same. Nora's brother, Ned, was born in Ireland too and before he built the Northview Inn had once traveled, as a cook on a ship, up near the North Pole.

But all that had happened so long ago. By the time she was born her relatives seemed to have lived in Tamarack Lake forever, their names—Kynd, Vigne, MacEachern—as much a part of the scenery as those who'd been here for generations. Walking through the shops downtown, she'd see an advertisement for one of Aunt Elizabeth's cure cottages, a sample of her father's work, or one of the placards, dusty now, which Ned had proudly hung when his nephew joined the business:
Ned Kynd and Michael MacEachern, Taxidermy. Art and Craft.
Everyone rooted in this small place from which she, despite her ambitious relatives, had traveled no farther than she could reach on her bicycle.

New York was his home, Ephraim continued while Eudora mused, and he'd been too ignorant to imagine a different kind of life. His whole self had been formed there, among the pushcarts and tenements and tiny stores that many of us knew well. He'd only managed to leave because of Rosa. “We met in a café,” he said, his whole face lighting up.

A sigh passed through the room as we remembered cafés, sitting in freely chosen places with our chosen friends and lovers. Or perhaps the sigh came from the obvious feeling with which Ephraim had spoken Rosa's name. Of the husbands and wives and lovers we'd left at home, some waited patiently but others had abandoned us; is it surprising we turned to each other? Some of the women now among us had joined the sessions not for the talks but because this was a place where we could mingle. More men had returned in their wake and among our group were now several couples—cousins, as we call them here; Polly and Frank, Nan and David—delighted to have a new meeting place.

Ephraim, who'd never chosen a cousin, went on to describe Rosa's brothers and their friends, socialists who, in the old country, had marched in protests, distributed leaflets in factories, seen comrades exiled to Siberia—a place so enormous, they claimed, that this whole country could fit inside it with room left over. In Siberia, Leo remembered, the chemist Dmitri Mendeleeff had been born and raised and taught by his mother, who ran a glass factory and later managed to get her son across the thousands of miles to Moscow so he could go to school. Later, long before Leo was born, Mendeleeff had taught science for a few years at a school in Odessa.

“Rosa's brothers told me that the climate of Siberia is horrible,” Ephraim continued, “but at least a man has room to breathe there. I don't know if that's true, but they convinced me that what we all needed was
space
.”

Why, he'd finally asked himself, had his parents settled in exactly the same place as everyone else who'd left the Pale? We knew the answer: family, familiar foods, the streets filled with languages we understood. Rosa's brothers, Ephraim learned when he asked her to marry him, had answered the advertisements of a Jewish relief society that helped resettle families on farmlands far from the city. Free land, the brothers said. Land we will work together, crops we will sell in common. Fresh air, open space, no landlords or bosses; Siberia with a better climate. Ephraim had joined the group made up of Rosa's extended family, three other families, and a few young men, and with them headed across the state, to the land near the Finger Lakes the society had set aside.

“I was twenty-one when we moved,” he said. “In the city, when someone said ‘farm' to me, all I could imagine was the countryside around Minsk, which was filthy. But Ovid was beautiful. So beautiful—I felt like a fool when I saw it. I hadn't known before there were places like that.”

Outside the sky had darkened while he spoke and we saw coming up the hill the headlamps of the night attendants, shining in the distance and then, as they reached the big curve in our road, winking out of sight. Leo, who'd chosen a seat at the end of the second row so that without being noticed he could watch Eudora at the opposite end of the front row, barely noticed the spectacle. The room smelled of scalded milk, warm chocolate, the felt in our slippers, and the disinfectant used on the floors, a trace of which clung to Eudora's hands. The down on her cheek was visible as she turned to Naomi, who was whispering in her ear.

He'd managed, in the library, ten minutes of sensible conversation with her, after that first awkward discussion of his benzene skeleton. Enough to learn a few scant facts: she lived in the village, her aunt ran a cure cottage, she was the youngest of five. School—she'd liked school, and missed it. Didn't he? Answering her, he'd responded to what he felt beneath the ordinary words: long, calm waves, which to him seemed to carry her real nature like music through the air.

He might, he imagined, tell her about his mother. About the forest he still dreamed of, or about the school where, briefly, he'd thrilled at the sight of Mendeleeff's periodic table and the possibility of unknown elements that might fill the gaps in the array. Three had been found with exactly the atomic weights and properties predicted: germanium, scandium, gallium. Eudora bent her head, the clean line of her nose tilted toward Naomi's tablet of paper, and reached for Naomi's pencil. They were writing notes, Leo saw, half charmed and half annoyed.