The Air We Breathe by Andrea Barrett

kind of nephew. I’m always eager to learn what I can about conditions there. If you’d share your experiences, I’m sure the others would also like to be instructed.”
    Dr. Petrie said he’d think about it and moved away. Leo, who’d been eavesdropping, turned to Ephraim and said, “I hope he keeps coming. Our little learning circle expands…”
    â€œDid you think it went all right today?”
    â€œIt went fine,” Leo said, patting his friend’s arm. “We all enjoyed it.”
    And in fact we had. We had a sense, then, of what our circle might be. What we might be. Suppose Bea talked about her union work and Kathleen about teaching music, Albert about the intricacies of forming incandescent lightbulbs and Pietr about his method for blanching celery? How much we might all learn! It was embarrassing that we’d needed Miles to get us started, but still here we were, and we were headed—well, someplace, though no one knew where. But after Ephraim spoke, we all felt pleased with the way we’d decided to spend our Wednesday afternoons.

6
    Y EARS AGO, A man came to Tamarack Lake from New York in the hopes of improving his health, married the undertaker’s daughter, worked in a bank, and then built the village’s telephone exchange. Resigning his position when he had a relapse, he began in 1912 to write a history of his adopted home. From deeds, contracts, old letters, newspapers, the reminiscences of guides and visitors, he reconstructed who started the bank, built the churches, organized the schools and the hospital. He wrote about when the last guest came to the Northview Inn, when the boathouse fell into the lake, what happened to Dr. Kopeckny and the first sanatoria. Who donated money to those institutions, and which doctors worked where. Comfortable in his retirement—he sold the exchange at a fine profit—and cared for by his wife, he worked at his project for years but never mentioned us.
    Sometimes we thumb through those pages, looking for traces of our lives and places where our histories overlap. Fires, accidents, holidays; holidays always bring complications, both down in the village and up here. Someone ends up in the infirmary, after having grown too melancholy to eat; someone wanders into the pond and nearly drowns; friends quarrel savagely. That Thanksgiving, which wasn’t any different, also had the disadvantage of interrupting our Wednesday sessions just as we were getting used to taking charge of the talks for ourselves.
    It didn’t help that the sanatorium staff, resentful at having to work that day, made it clear that they felt burdened. In the village, those caring for patients also felt that they were having the opposite of a holiday. More cooking, more shopping, more cleaning at the cure cottages and boardinghouses and hotels. The butcher worked overtime, extra porters unloaded extra trains, drivers took extra shifts. At Mrs. Martin’s house, Miles would spend the afternoon eating turkey with chestnut stuffing and giblet sauce, sweetbreads, tongue in aspic, duchess potatoes, and Mrs. Martin’s Nesselrode pudding served with boiled custard, quite unaware that in the kitchen, Daisy and Darlene were telling Naomi they were ready to quit. At the same time Eudora, across the village, would be wishing that she had someone to grumble to. She’d been looking forward to her days off. Irene had loaned her two textbooks, which she’d hoped to spend some quiet hours reading. Instead, as had been the case since she was old enough to wield a knife, and especially since her older sisters had married, her mother called on her to help with their elaborate meal.
    Not simply a turkey but also a ham, cornbread stuffing with oysters and mushrooms, clear soup with homemade dumplings, roasted squash glazed with maple syrup, potatoes mashed and scalloped and baked, heaping dishes of corn and carrots, tiny onions creamed and dusted