Andrea Barrett - The Air We Breathe

But not of Leo, she wrote. Surely not of him. I should have told them why he was studying, this is partly my fault —

“Not at all!” Dr. Petrie protested. “We were trying to help.”

Still, she wrote. I don’t understand how he got that box.

“I don’t either,” Dr. Petrie said. “I was hoping you might.”

But let’s be logical, she wrote. I had a good reason for giving him those books. So let’s assume someone else gave him the box for a similarly good reason. Also that he has a good reason not to tell us what that is.

“Rather a leap,” Dr. Petrie said. “Very generous; probably correct. But not convincing.”

There are also other factors, she wrote, tearing off that sheet and turning it over.

For another half hour they continued their conversation, Dr. Petrie rising once to close the window. Although the afternoon had been hot, the night was beautifully cool and the room had slowly chilled. This was the weather that convinced people to cure in the Adirondacks: this antiseptic pine-scented breeze, these stars brilliant in a dense black sky, owls and nighthawks speaking in the dark. The noise Dr. Petrie heard was unfamiliar, though, a gentle, low-pitched wave of sound that rose and fell, rose and fell, wordless but still signaling emotion. It took him a few minutes to realize that he was hearing our porches humming, fifty feet away.

IRENE HEARD THAT noise as well, and the sound stayed with her through the next day, as she wrote to Dr. Richards in defense of Leo.

I first got to know Leo Marburg through the Wednesday meetings organized by Miles Fairchild, she wrote. Since then, I have helped him with his studies in chemistry — he was trained as a chemist, as was I. He’s an intelligent and honorable man, eager to learn and to further his education, and I gave him those two books, which he wanted purely for his intellectual pursuits. They were mine before they were his; there is nothing the least bit dangerous in them, in the right hands.

She paused for a moment, remembering the look on Leo’s face when she’d given him the green volumes. The swiftness with which he’d learned, the intensity with which he’d worked; she’d been hoping to offer him an apprenticeship that might someday, after his discharge, lead to a job as satisfying as her own. If she hadn’t immigrated here with money in her pocket, a married sister to greet her, and a brother-in-law willing to help fund her studies, she might easily have ended up no better off than Leo was. Firmly, she continued:

I don’t know how Leo came by that box and its contents, but I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation; he’s a person of sterling character and I would vouch for him in any situation. In any event, there’s no link between those objects and the fire, which I know for a fact that he couldn’t have started. I was in the X-ray facility that evening; at no point was there any sign of him. The one person who visited me was Miles Fairchild’s young driver, Naomi Martin.

We had a discussion. She was upset about something when she came to see me, and still upset when she ran out. Because I was worried about her, I went after her, but before I could catch her, she pushed through the service door and ran away. On my way back to the X-ray facility I smelled something odd, which when I think about it now makes me wonder if we didn’t have a short in the transformer, or a failure in the main electric line. When I opened the door the room was already filling up with smoke and so I brought my smock up over my face and rushed into the back.

With one hand, she realized, she was clutching at her throat, her body returning before she could stop it to the fire itself. What that had felt like, which she could never write down. She dreamed, still, of expressing some confused version of this out loud, an easier task than shaping a single version on the page. She would have preferred to write nothing, waiting until her voice returned — but Dr. Petrie had said that Leo’s situation was urgent, and it was possible that she wouldn’t speak again. She couldn’t remember breathing through the bit of tubing Dr. Petrie had pushed into the slit in her throat, but when she closed her eyes, she could still see the scalpel glitter in the moonlight. She turned to the letter again.

I couldn’t find where the fire was coming from and couldn’t put it out, although I did save some of our films. At no point was Leo or anyone other than Naomi in the room with me.

She folded the pages, wondering at the same time how Leo was. If she could have seen him alone in the empty ward, hearing the troubled hum from the porches as we turned against him, our ill will emanating through the corridor where not one friendly set of footsteps echoed; if she could have known how alone he felt, she would have risen despite her own exhaustion and gone to stand silently next to him.

MILES VISITED THE sanatorium several times during the first two weeks after Leo’s relapse, but Dr. Petrie refused to let him see Leo; an emotional upset might, he claimed, make his condition worse, and Leo had to be spared any stress. The hay was mowed in the fields while Miles came and went and came again; the hay was dried in rows and then it was baled. The creeks dried up and the locusts buzzed as day after day the sky shone imperturbably blue. In the garden the pansies wilted and we did too, in our overcrowded rooms. The rough new kitchen wasn’t ventilated well, and so our densely packed dining room smelled of cooking and, on the hottest days, of us; Miles avoided that place. But everywhere else at Tamarack State continued to seem like his fair territory. Our improvised mailroom, where he looked at what came in and went out; our pitiful library, reconstituted in a former bedroom in the women’s annex and reduced from its already shameful state when, after Miles’s inspection, his agents removed any books by Germans, or in German, or about Germany or the Austro-Hungarian empire. We don’t know if he bullied Dr. Richards into this or if Dr. Richards freely agreed, nor do we know how he arranged to have our shipments of newspapers from New York City stopped. We do know that he considered a plan to enlist the national headquarters of the American Protective League, perhaps aided by the Department of Labor, in the deportation of Leo Marburg — a plan he might have followed through on had it not been for Irene’s letter and Dr. Petrie’s maneuvers.

To Dr. Petrie’s surprise and then dismay, Dr. Richards hadn’t been convinced by Irene’s letter. What seemed so obvious to him, the argument that, as he gently reminded Dr. Richards, not only supported what he himself had said about the presence of the chemistry books in Leo’s room, but also made it almost impossible that Leo could have had anything to do with the fire, was for Dr. Richards apparently only one facet of something more complex.

“If you trust Irene,” Dr. Petrie had pointed out, “then you have to believe what she wrote. Which means Leo didn’t do anything. He couldn’t have.”

“I know that seems true,” Dr. Richards said, obviously troubled, “and I know I was the one who pushed to hire Irene; I’ve always trusted her. But Miles has raised other points.”

Whatever those were, they were enough, Dr. Petrie saw, to pressure Dr. Richards into continuing to let Miles interfere in our daily business, and to make Dr. Richards so nervous that he asked Dr. Petrie not to tell us about Irene’s letter. Because Dr. Petrie honored that request, and perhaps because Irene was confined to her room in the staff cottage and still unable to talk, our information-gathering failed this once and her letter didn’t immediately become public knowledge. For a little while longer, then, we were left in our uncertainty. In the new infirmary the nurses checked on Leo every few hours but refused — Dr. Petrie’s orders, they said — to talk to him about Miles’s investigations. Dr. Petrie himself came by twice a day but, wanting Leo to heal as quickly as possible, also said nothing about Miles or the shifting moods inside Tamarack State. Rest, he said, echoing the instructions Leo had received almost a year ago. Think only of resting.