The Air We Breathe Read Online Free Page B

seat nearest him was a slim girl—sixteen, we guessed; really she was eighteen—with flossy dark hair, an olive complexion, and deeply set blue eyes. She examined us as we settled hesitantly into the rows of chairs.
    â€œGood afternoon,” the man said, turning back to scan our faces. “My name is Miles Fairchild, and this”—he gestured at the girl—“is my driver, Naomi Martin. Thank you for letting us join you today.”
    Pacing confidently back and forth, with the sun glinting off his face, he said he wanted to start by giving us a little background about himself. He was thirty-seven years old and had been sick on and off for some time. A little more than a year ago, both his regular doctor and a consultant in Philadelphia had advised him to seek a cure in the Adirondacks. Since then he’d lived at Mrs. Martin’s boarding cottage in the village, which he was sure we knew.
    A small slip, but we noticed it; we seldom went to the village, although it was so near. Who had money to shop? That Miles didn’t grasp this suggested how little he knew about our lives.
    â€œRecently my health has improved,” he continued, “which has made it possible for me to think how I might be of use to others. Being sick is lonely, in addition to everything else. Boring, too. All of us need conversation, and instruction—which is what I hope to offer. It’s my idea that we’ll teach each other, thereby widening our horizons.”
    As he spoke he moved from the window—nearly brushing, several of us noted, the skirt of his dark-haired driver, who nonetheless looked away from him—and then to the fireplace; to the window and back again, as regularly as a shuttle. We might, he continued, while we pondered his use of the word “thereby,” be in a public institution while he was in a private cure cottage; our means might be strained as his were not; perhaps we hadn’t attended school for long: none of this mattered. We all knew things of value, which we might share. At his home outside Doylestown, Pennsylvania, he, for instance, now managed the cement plant he’d inherited from his father.
    For a moment, while he described his smoothly running plant, we thought we knew where he was going. His quarry, with its abundant limestone and shale; his grinding mill and his talented chemists and engineers; his vertical kilns, so technologically advanced. His special formulation for use in cement guns.
    â€œI was one of the first to see the potential of Akeley’s invention,” he explained. “After the Cement Show of 1910, when the perfected cement gun was exhibited, others hopped on the bandwagon—but my engineers had already begun to modify the device, and we’ve since developed varieties of gunite that exploit the qualities of our cement and also make the best possible use of the double-chambered gun. Our materials have been used in the construction of dams and water tunnels, to resurface worn buildings and coat the steel columns for new…”
    We listened with interest while he spoke in this vein. But after a while—oddly, we thought; what kind of speaker turns away just as he’s captured his audience?—he paused, drew a deep breath, and said, “But that’s only my work, and that’s enough about that. Since I was a boy, all my free time has been spent collecting and preserving the fossils of extinct vertebrates, and that’s really what I want to tell you about.”
    Suddenly he was describing weekend trips to New Jersey or western Pennsylvania, longer trips to Kansas, winter nights spent sorting and cataloging his finds. Not just a hobby but his passion, his chief recreation, he said, and he was sure…
    When he paused again, it wasn’t to ask if any of us had ever worked in a cement plant, as several had, nor to see what we, who’d had only Sundays off before arriving here, thought of having a