The Air We Breathe Read Online Free Page A

most reputable cottages. Each was managed by an ambitious woman who, like Naomi’s mother, didn’t have the funds to buy a place of her own.
    Last year Eudora’s aunt had coerced all five managers into buying identical Model Ts, the loans to be paid off in monthly installments added to the house rent. The car, meant to please prospective boarders who might be swayed at the thought of a doctor fetched more swiftly, had unexpectedly offered Naomi a scrap of freedom when her mother refused to learn to drive it. Yearningly the boarders, their own cars left at home, stroked the black fenders, but they weren’t allowed the exercise of turning the steering wheel and it sat until Naomi saw her opportunity. Within the month she’d appeared at the Tamarack Garage and persuaded Eugene to give her driving lessons. Soon she was picking up groceries and dropping off laundry, fetching packages from the station and sometimes driving a boarder to church or to visit a friend: all with her mother’s grudging approval. If she occasionally took a few minutes for herself during one of those errands, that was no one’s business but hers.
    She smoothed her hair and turned toward Miles. “You’d be doing me a favor,” she said. “For me to have some time in your company, away from my work here…”
    â€œYou do work very hard,” he observed. “I see you working all the time.”
    She shrugged, smiling, as if she were the sort of person who would never complain. A few more minutes of conversation, an easy negotiation about her wages, and they were agreed. With a smile she left his room, slipped out the front door without her mother noticing, and walked down to the garage to tell Eugene what she’d just done. A small job now might lead to something larger later; who knew what would happen once Miles was cured and back home running his business? She imagined herself in a city, typing in a handsome office; perhaps she could follow Miles back to Pennsylvania. Any road out of the mountains seemed appealing.

    AT OUR END of the road, on the bulletin board in the dining hall, Miles had several weeks earlier persuaded Dr. Richards, our director, to pin this notice:
    GROUP FORMING NOW
    For the purposes of educational discussion and study. Male patients competent in written and spoken English are welcome to join in this exchange of work experience and other knowledge. Meetings to be held Wednesday afternoons, from 4 to 6 P.M ., in the central solarium. I will give the opening talk or two. Please join us in this educational experiment.— Miles Fairchild
    â€œMiles Fairchild,” one of us had said then. “Who’s that?”
    â€œWho’s the us ?” asked someone else.
    No one knew, although we saw that he’d done his research; the time he proposed fit into the only possible spot in our routine. Every day, then as now, we woke to a bell at six-thirty. After that, it was wash, dress, and breakfast at eight; doctors’ rounds and procedures until ten; rest cure until lunch at twelve; back to the porches after lunch to rest until four. We ate dinner at six and then cured again from seven to nine, with lights-out at nine-thirty. Our only free time, very precious, was that slot between four and six: which twenty-two of us offered up on the Wednesday following Leo’s release from the infirmary.
    The sun was shining that afternoon, but the air streaming through the open windows already had a bite to it and we entered the solarium to find a slight man, with the same concave chest that many of us had and one shoulder drooping slightly lower than the other, standing in front of the fireplace with his jacket buttoned against the cold. A decade or so older than most of us, he wore a gray wool suit that looked new and expensive despite its old-fashioned cut. While we filed in he turned his head away from us, studying the framed documents above the mantel. Perched on the window