Andrea Barrett - The Air We Breathe

What she knows is that she escaped. Leo escaped as well, which seems lucky given the climate these days. When he left, he couldn’t imagine how he’d make his next life. He went to Ephraim, whom he trusted, but soon he found that Ovid didn’t suit him. Too much family, he wrote Dr. Petrie, all those cousins speaking Yiddish: exactly what he didn’t want. One of Ephraim’s friends found him work not far away, at a winery in Hammondsport. A pretty village, beautiful hills, he wrote to Irene. (He writes to Irene and to Dr. Petrie; not, so far, to the rest of us.) A chance to work once more with grapes and the chemistry of fermentation, as I did long ago in Russia. I have my own laboratory.

He felt safe sending letters through the mail, knowing that Miles, to everyone’s great relief, wasn’t here to intercept them. In January, against the advice of his doctor, Miles left Tamarack Lake. No one, he supposedly said, could produce cement like he could, and so he went back to run his plant: his contribution to the war. When he left, it was like a patch of bad weather blowing out. The tops of the trees reappeared, and the tops of the mountains. The stars above the mountains, and the moon. We could see each other. We could see where we lived, what we had done, and what we still had left.

How innocent we seem to ourselves, now, when we look back at our first Wednesday afternoons! Gathering to learn about fossils, poison gas, the communal settlement at Ovid, about Stravinsky and Chekhov, trade unions and moving pictures and the relative nature of time, when we could have learned what we needed about the world and the war simply by observing our own actions and desires. We lived as if we were already dead, as if we’d died when we were diagnosed and nothing we did after that mattered. We lived as if nothing was important.

Despite the cold — it is ten below zero on this February day — we’ve walked through the snow to the garden behind our old solarium, the place where we were first joined. Around the fountain, shut off for the winter, we draw together as Abe begins to read the pages we have made. Once we built ships and towers from the pieces of an Erector set. Now we build hypotheses. About what Naomi did, and how Miles felt, and who said what to whom. About how the pencil that disappeared from Leo’s locker ended up being used, almost accidentally — more and more, we think it started the fire — in Irene’s laboratory. And about how all of us are to blame.

Abe reads, then Pietr reads, then Sophie, and then the rest; the sparrows perched on Hygeia’s shoulders rise; words mingle in the air. If the voice we’ve made to represent all of us seems to speak from above, or from the grave, and pretends to know what we can’t, exactly, know — what Miles was thinking, what Naomi meant — that’s our way of doing penance. Singly, we failed to shelter Leo. Singly, then, we’ve forbidden ourselves to speak. This is what happened, we say together. This — this! — is what we did.

I’m grateful to the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library, for a fellowship that made possible much of the research for this novel, and to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, for a fellowship that enabled me to write it. Numerous libraries large and small were helpful, but I’m especially grateful to the Saranac Lake Free Library. Rich Remsberg uncovered marvelous photographs that inspired me and provided crucial details. Ellen Bryant Voigt’s wise counsel led me to the title. Jim Shepard and Karen Shepard offered sympathetic, truly helpful readings of the final draft, while Margot Livesey’s brilliant comments on many drafts along the way improved the book immensely; the failures are mine alone.

Although this novel is set in and around an Adirondack village that resembles Saranac Lake, New York, the village of Tamarack Lake and all its inhabitants are invented, as is the institution of Tamarack State. Mendeleeff’s book is real, though; Leo and I used the same edition.