Andrea Barrett - The Air We Breathe

We’d enjoyed those last two, especially Pearl’s lively account of her brief acting career, but how anecdotal and personal did we want these afternoons to become? Did we want to discuss how we treated our children’s winter colds, how one of us made a tender brisket and how another turned rags into braided rugs? These matters too were important, some of us argued. And interesting. Yet they also made us miss even more the lives we’d left behind. Better, safer, to steer our talks back toward the territory Miles had first established: science, art, ideas. Celia, who was a good deal older than the rest of us and had lived in Russia until she was twenty-three, offered to discuss the work of Anton Chekhov.

“A Russian writer,” she said, one January Wednesday. Still she spoke English with a heavy accent. “Very famous there although not yet here.”

Because she’d developed symptoms in her knees and hips, she preferred to speak sitting down, moving only her hands. Against her heavy green jacket, they seemed unusually white. Like us, she said, Chekhov had suffered from tuberculosis, dying of it in his early forties but before then writing strange and wonderful plays, which at first hardly anyone understood. Stuck in sanatoria far from the city, he knew, she said, what our lives were like. “His stories are as beautiful as his plays — I like best a volume called Khmurye liudi . In English Gloomy People, ” she said with a smile. “Or Gloomy Folk, like us.”

When she tried to summarize for us some of the stories she’d treasured, she grew frustrated and said that with all writers, but especially Chekhov, summary ruined everything: beauty lay in the story itself, the particular arrangement of sentences. But she promised that if any of us were interested, she’d try translating a story or two — and in fact Leo, whose own Russian was very rusty, and several of the rest of us took her up on this and later enjoyed the results.

Still, despite those diverting sessions, we missed Ephraim more than we might have expected. His steadiness and his easy sense of humor, which had often lightened our moods, disappeared just when they were most needed. Week after week, the news from the outside world was bad, and we found ourselves talking constantly about the war. In New Jersey an enormous shell-assembly plant blew up, half a million shells exploding while people all over the area trembled at the noise. After we heard that, Lydia, with her great gift for practical invention, brought to her session a working model of a sprayer she’d originally designed to mist fruit trees. If the country went to war, she said, she’d submit the model and her patent application to the War Department, along with notes on how to adapt it to spread an ignitable fog of gasoline.

We tried to imagine such a device and shuddered when we did. Our concentration wavered; how could we appreciate Nan’s discussion about the suffrage movement when just before that the German government announced that their submarines would now attack all ships, including American ships, entering the blockade zone surrounding Great Britain, and when the president severed relations with Germany in response? Passenger ships were being torpedoed, people were drowning: it was as if the German government wanted the United States to enter the war, and that, we thought, made no sense at all. In the library we passed sections of our newspapers back and forth and sometimes smuggled them into our rooms.

A week after Valentine’s Day, Kathleen, who’d been a music teacher at a progressive elementary school in Utica, wheeled into the solarium an upright piano, which the women among us knew as well as we knew our own cure chairs; it came from our sitting room. We’d spent hours playing it, cursing the sour notes, singing in groups around it, but for the men it was a surprise. Thumping, pounding, singing loudly over her own playing and shouting directions as she played— Here you must imagine woodwinds, daaaah, da-da-da-da da-daaah, calling and answering like birds…Now the strings! All at once, DUM, dum-dum-dum-dum; DUM —Kathleen squeezed through that worn old instrument a reduction of Stravinsky’s shocking ballet, Le Sacre du printemps . The orchestral version, she assured us, was just as chaotic and fragmented as what she rendered for us. More so really — a new kind of music, which she was just beginning to learn for herself from a recording.

We remember that session with particular clearness, and not only because of what Kathleen’s playing would later signify. The men were dazzled by her knowledge and skill, while the women, who’d earlier heard her distill Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky, were fascinated by the music itself, and by our growing realization that life in the men’s and women’s annexes had been more different than we’d thought.

We questioned each other, and her, intently. We had a wonderful talk. Gleaming beneath it was an intuition that time would later confirm: Kathleen’s session was one of the few when we were nearly whole. Except for Ephraim, all the members of our little group were present that day: Leo, Dr. Petrie, Irene, and Eudora; Celia, in the first stages of translating her Chekhov stories, and Polly, getting ready to talk the following week about poetry; also Sophie, Pearl, and Lydia, who’d already surprised us with their talks. Ian was there, with new advertisements his brother had sent from the Erector plant; Arkady and Abe, now arguing over every page of something Celia had given them to read about a penal colony on Sakhalin Island; Pietr, who’d been in bed for six weeks, talking to David, who was doing so well he dreamed of being discharged; Olga and Nan, who despite having quarreled had each refused to miss a session and so sat on opposite sides of our circle. Jaroslav, who played the violin, was discussing the possibility of duets with Kathleen. Bea was showing off the embroidered slippers she’d been given for her thirty-first birthday to Sean, who was wishing he’d given them to her. Zalmen, Frank, Otto, and Seth, united by their joint plan to settle in Utica and start a tool-and-die shop once they were cured, leaned toward each other while Albert, always dreamy, wondered under the influence of the music how his mother and father had met. We were all there, with our hopes and plans, our clashing and mingling purposes, our delight in what Kathleen had done and — Naomi was sitting near Eudora but Miles was off to one side, alone; how did none of us see it? — our shared neglect of Miles.

WHEN MILES SKIPPED the next session, on the last day of February, we hardly noticed at first. That day Polly told us about Carl Sandburg, a performance as surprising in its own way as Kathleen’s. Only Polly’s two closest friends, Olga and Nan (they’d made up by then), had known before that Polly wrote poems herself, or that she followed new poetry as avidly as our library and her own very limited budget permitted. From Sandburg’s book Chicago Poems, she read pieces nothing like those we’d learned in school. No fancy language, no kings and floating princesses or holy grails. These were about the copper wire strung between the telephone poles and carrying our voices. About hoboes and soldiers and factory workers, ships that heaved like mastodons, the windows shining in railroad cars, the mist and the fog and prairie cornfields and, yes, the war — but not what the men who sat safely in warm rooms imagined it to be. These poems described the war as it looked to men fighting it, and we had never heard anything like them. We listened — Polly read well — and then pulled our chairs into a tighter circle to look at some passages more closely. Only as we bent our heads together did we realize that Miles was absent and with him, of course, Naomi.