The Air We Breathe by Andrea Barrett Page A

housekeeper, and there are reasons this is the most expensive cure cottage in the village. As always we get what we pay for. Her daughter, who helps her out, has offered to drive me weekly to the sanatorium.
    I see, speaking of getting sidetracked, that I have once more succumbed. This happens to me so commonly now that I wonder if my daily fevers have not impaired my mental functions. Though more likely it is the result of spending so much time in bed, so lazily: I hate this. The inmates at Tamarack State must hate it as well but their opportunities for self-improvement, unlike mine, are minimal. Their so-called library is shocking, ill-sorted shelves of castoffs donated by the villagers: old encyclopedias, new inspirational tracts, dime-store romances, gardening manuals, anthologies of sentimental verse, memoirs of unknown military figures, outdated almanacs. I could weep when I think of the orderly reading rooms we established in our plants. If our public library can deliver good and useful books on a weekly basis and encourage a program of systematic reading among the workers, why can’t that be done here? And if, in our well-run cafeterias, up-to-date magazines are available for the workers’ perusal, why must these inmates rely on tattered copies of Yiddish-and Russian-and German-language newspapers brought up weeks or months later by visitors from New York? Why isn’t there a daily English class? (The speech of many is far from perfect.) Or any of the other amenities we introduced in our plants?
    What I am trying to do is modest but I know it’s right—if they return to society better fitted to be happy and productive workers, the sort we would be pleased to hire, I will feel most satisfied. I am with Taylor in his philosophy of management: “Men, not materials, are the finished product of a factory.”
    And not only men: women as well. I did something bold this week, Edward. Attendance at the second and third sessions dropped a bit, and so I asked the housekeeper’s daughter, the one who’s been driving me, to join our group formally. Also I asked a friend of hers, a ward maid who’d come by to see her and stayed to listen. Both have agreed, which pleases me. I think I’ll issue a general invitation to the women’s annex, to make the group truly coeducational. The men and women are kept largely separate, meeting only for meals, prayers, or the occasional moving-picture show. They should welcome this chance for further interaction.
    In your last, you said nothing of Lawrence—I worry about him all the time. I haven’t had a letter from him in a month, have you? Often at night I have trouble sleeping (so would you, if you spent half of each day lying about) and then I see our trip again in my memory. I remember the way we grew so thirsty, after working in the rocks all day, that when we got back to the boat in the evening we dropped our heads to the river and drank like horses: you and me and Lawrence side by side. I remember the little boy who told us the Sioux legend about the giant monsters who’d once roamed the land, and how the Great Spirit struck them down with lightning bolts. Their explanation for dinosaur fossils, both of us realized at once. When the little boy said that the bones still lay on the ground where they fell, as no Sioux would touch them for fear they might be similarly destroyed, Laurence said: “ I will touch them!” Brave boy. Where did all of that go?
    There is little news; my health is much as it has been, neither worse nor, unfortunately, any better. Write when you can, your letters cheer me greatly.

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    E ACH W EDNESDAY M ILES continued to make the drive between the village and Tamarack State, puzzled that he hadn’t drawn more of us in but sure that he’d succeed in time and comforted by the presence of Naomi at his side. The two women he’d courted seriously in the past had been ample and tall, while Naomi was