The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells Read online

  DECEMBER 13, 1918

  THE NEXT MORNING, DESPITE THE COLD, RUTH AND I MADE our way to Washington Square, where some horses were out for exercise, shining like leather, and everything was draped in Christmas pine boughs that reminded one that this once had been the countryside of New Amsterdam. A band in uniforms was setting itself up far away, perhaps the Salvation Army, and a woman in a bright green shawl stood watching them, but all I could make out was an enormous drum strapped to a small young man.

  I wore a hooded velvet cloak, and Ruth marched along beside me in her black Turkish lambswool coat and hat, playing with the tassels on the belt. “Do you think we should change our names? Anything German is going to leave a bad taste for a little while.”

  “Why won’t Felix see me? I try to call and there’s no answer.”

  “Maybe he needs some peace and quiet,” she said. “Not that ‘Wells’ sounds German. But I’m thinking maybe I’ll get rid of ‘Ruth.’ Would you mind calling me Aunt Lily?”

  I saw a newspaper, taped to a wall. My eye was drawn to the obituaries; the flu epidemic was worsening. GOODWIN, HARRY, 33, suddenly, Wednesday night. KINGSTON, BYRON, 26, suddenly, at his home. I could not bear to read more; it could have been any morning of dread from 1985. Drum, drum, drum.

  “I’m just trying to help him. He got arrested again. In nineteen forty-one.”

  She seemed concerned. “Felix? What for?”

  I didn’t know quite how to put it. So I simply said, “There’s another war, Ruth.”

  She stared at me and that crease appeared between her brows. “Another war,” she repeated. Then she blinked and I saw her mind shaking it off. She did not like to think of terrible things she could not control. “Remember to call me Lily,” she said. “I was thinking maybe you could be Marguerite. And Felix could be George.”

  “Has Leo returned?”

  “She won’t answer his letters,” she said. “I don’t know what to do with her. She’s so sad. I really wish you were here more often, you’d handle it better.”

  “But what about when Nathan comes back?” She shrugged. I wanted to tell her how eager I was to see this third Nathan. Somehow, I imagined a version of my man hardened, perfected by war. But it seemed the wrong time to mention such a thing, with my other self so lonely for her lover.

  We neared the arch. Here was something only Ruth and I knew. That there was a door in the marble. That a boy might take me inside. That anything, even a cold city, might have a hidden heart. I’m sorry about Leo, I wanted to tell the 1918 Greta, as I looked up at the arch. I’m sorry I started it, just to have it hurt you. But perhaps there is still a way. Perhaps it was another of love’s false endings; she could reach her hand out and he would come, just like before. Maybe take one of those ads in the paper, in the personals, that I had read: “HOL. Why were you not over Sunday? ’Twas a lonesome day! PEARL.” After all, the heart can hear only one sound . . .

  I changed the topic again: “I keep trying to confront Felix, but he won’t listen.” I heard a little sigh from Ruth and turned to face her. “You know about him, don’t you?”

  Our eyes met for a tough moment, and I was treated to that intelligent gaze I recalled from being a child, when I would ask her to take me to the theater and she would examine me, carefully, presumably to gauge if I was ready. “He has a hard fate, dear. I don’t know how you can help a man like him.”

  “Ruth, I knew him so well.”

  “It’s Aunt Lily.”

  “He wasn’t like this, he didn’t try to hide it and marry a woman.”

  She retied the tassels at her belt. “Some of these men,” she said, “they can live as they like down here. Downtown. If they have money, and courage. They can go to balls in Harlem and find little hidden saloons and things. You’ve met them at my parties, you know I take care of them. I protect them. They’re brave people. But your brother won’t settle for what those men have. He wants . . .”

  “He wants a lover. He had one, in my time. His name was Alan.”

  “Alan.”

  So I had said it, and she had said it, and we understood each other at last. The drum came from the park in solemn ceremony. “You could follow him one night,” she said plainly. “Then, when you talk with him, he won’t be able to deny it. If that’s really what you want.”

  I heard barking, and then I saw that there in the park, walking two great Irish wolfhounds, was Leo’s friend Rufus, whose long underwear I knew so intimately hanging on the line, in the bedroom Leo and I had borrowed. He wore a ragged raccoon coat and a determined expression. The dogs bore him along like horses with a sleigh and he looked less surprised to see me than he was to be drawn by his two charges.

  “Rufus!” I said loudly. “It’s Greta, Leo’s friend. We met on Armistice night.”

  “Yes!” he shouted with a painful smile. Perhaps he did not remember; we had all had a great deal to drink. But then he said my name: “Mrs. Michelson. I remember.”

  “Rufus, this is my aunt Miss Ruth Wells.” She tsked me at forgetting her new name, but I ignored her. “Are these your dogs? They’re handsome.”

  “A rich lady pays me to parade them.” He nodded at my aunt.

  “You could probably ride them,” I said.

  He didn’t laugh. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

  Ruth said, “I’ve seen you at the Hatter. You play the trumpet, I think.”

  I pushed the velvet hood back from my face and felt the chill. I tried my calmest smile. “Have you seen Leo? I haven’t heard from him in a while. I hope he’s found work; now that the war is over the theaters are reopened. He’s such a talented actor.”

  A look as frozen as the arch above us. The dogs sniffed us up and down.

  “I’m . . . I’m sorry,” the young man stammered. “You hadn’t seen him?”

  So he knew. Well, of course Leo would have told him, as young men always get drunk and tell each other tales of women. I looked up at the flat gray sky. ’Twas a lonesome day.

  I told him I had been away.

  “I’m sorry,” he repeated in a quiet voice.

  I tried to cover as best I could. I shrugged and laughed, petting the dogs. “Well, I’ve been away. Perhaps you could do me a favor and take him a message?”

  “No,” he said, so frozen. All he could say was he was sorry, so sorry. And then he told me.

  Across the park, the band began to play a song that was all drum, drum, drum.

  WHEN I GOT home that afternoon, I found Millie smiling brightly in the hallway like a gaslight at full blast. “Two letters came for you while you were out,” she told me, blushing at some private secret. I took off my coat like an automaton, and held it out, spangled with damp, to encumber her little arms, and set my hat on a peg. Struggling, she pulled the letters out of her apron. Looking at me from under her brows, she said she thought perhaps one was from my aunt’s young actor friend.

  “It’s not,” I said dully, making my way to my bedroom.

  But, she said, pardon, she had noticed the return address, and thought—

  “It’s not,” I repeated firmly. “He caught influenza. He died two days ago.”

  AT SIX O’CLOCK in the morning, my husband went to war.

  Or so I was later told. I was of course far away, in the 1918 world, going through the empty rooms and setting each one right. With Millie, I brushed and cleaned each object in the house, scrubbing every mark that I had made on this world. I had Millie down on her knees cleaning the wine stains from the carpet. We used vinegar and water on the windows, so that even in the winter light they shone. It was all I could think to do. For one thing could never happen: I could never meet my other self and give the bad news to her gently. Tell her that her lover was dead. I could only make her world as one makes the bed of the aggrieved.

  Days before, when Rufus told me—“He seemed better Tuesday, but then the fever . . .”—Ruth supported me as I stood in the cold and stared at that young man and his awful news: “It was Wednesda
y night he left us.” The frozen sky with its scratches for clouds and the barren trees of the park, and the drum sounding inside me. No no, my mind kept insisting, he can’t be dead. It’s impossible, impossible. I was just about to write him! As if others’ lives lasted only until we were out of their stories. I turned to Ruth, whose face wrinkled in sorrow. “There, there, darling,” she said. “It’s terrible, just terrible. He was so young and sweet.” And I saw my old aunt’s eyes begin to tear up, she who had known so much of death. The dogs shuffled on the frozen ground, and the band across the park began to play.

  Is it better to hear of death or witness it? For I had suffered both and could not tell you. To have a person vanish in your arms is too real for life, a blow to the bones, but to hear of it is to be utterly blind: reaching, stumbling about, hoping to touch the truth. Impossible, unbearable, what life has planned for each of us.

  Millie had been right; the letters were from Leo. He must have sent them before his illness, or on the brink of it, lying in his flat with Rufus sitting nearby with cold compresses, the lamp sputtering above them. The first was a cold lover’s letter saying he was soon to change addresses and that if she had anything of his she could send it to . . . and so on. “I am excited about a new play a friend has written” was how it ended. The second, which he must have written moments after the first had been sent, began with just these words: “Is it too late? Write me and I will come at once. Tell me it is not too late.”

  Dressed as a Union soldier, grinning up at me, hair shining in bolts of brilliantine, flowers in his hand.

  I went and saw his grave, out in Brooklyn where the dead of New York have been kept for a long time. An enormous field of stones, attended by a number of stout men with caps pulled down against the cold, only their beards showing. Irish accents, giving me directions. A rake leaning against a nearby tomb, snow scattered like ashes, and there: LEO BARROW. BORN 1893. It seemed inconceivable that someone so young could have been born so long ago. DIED 1918. BELOVED SON.

  Tell me it is not too late. Nobody could have known it was.

  Could I have loved him? Ruth asked me. Snow had gathered in the newly cut letters. I set down my flowers among those frostbitten there. I thought of those sharp eyes beneath his mobile eyebrows, his wide lips in a tense, ironic smile. And at last came to the image I had pushed away all this time: Of him in my arms, in bed, on our one night together. The clothes hanging from their lines above us, glowing. Long lashes closed, hair swept wildly above him, the light catching the down of his ear. Watching as he began to breathe more slowly, slumbering as sunrise came. I lay there and could not tell which was more golden: the sky outside the window, or his flushed, sleeping face.

  You didn’t love him, I told myself at the cemetery, as one berates a careless child whom only luck has saved from danger. I turned and walked down the long snow-dusted slope toward the river. But she did.

  Should I stay here? Should I leave the jar untouched, and like my other self, lock the door to this world until I had things right? Until I made a place for her grief? But I could not do it. It was not my world, and there was so much to be done in the others.

  And so I cleaned. I wanted it to be ready for her, the other Greta, when she returned, and found her life fallen to dust. But I was also preparing it for another.

  Over halfway through. Fourteen procedures. Eleven to go.

  It was already dark, very late and unexpected, when the doorbell rang and I found him standing there. I don’t know what your other Nathans are like. Narrow face, a scar on the chin. He was clean and shaven; they had taken them all from Grand Central Station and put them up at fine hotels, where their clothes were cleaned and mended, their bodies washed and deloused. But remember, you haven’t met this one. I pushed the letters into the pocket of my dress and smiled. His shoulders were darkened with rain. He had no umbrella, of course, and did not care.

  “Nathan,” I said. He put his hand to my face.

  Six o’clock in the evening: my husband back from war.

  Part Three

  DECEMBER

  TO

  END

  DECEMBER 15, 1918

  NAME THE WOMAN IN HISTORY WHO LOVED A MAN THREE times?

  “Where is my girl?” this Nathan said to me those first few mornings of 1918. I would walk in with coffee and oatmeal, he would put on his glasses, and an attempt at a smile would creep over that long narrow face, marked now with a scar. Everything was reversed from 1941, when I was the invalid being brought coffee by this man. Now it was my turn to play nursemaid. So much was gone of the man I had said good-bye to in another world, but so much had returned of my old Nathan. The red-brown beard he was growing, streaked with gray; that Nordic face, lined with worry at the eyes; the heart shape of his hairline. The surprise in ordinary things: “Make me a steak tonight, Greta, I haven’t had a steak since last Christmas,” he might say, and I would tell him to make a list of what he missed the most. He dutifully did so, and showed me. At the top of it: my wife. He could be distant and pensive like my first Nathan. He could be careful and attentive like my second. Like both, he checked his breast pocket for his wallet almost twenty times a day! But he was not the first or second. I don’t know what your other Nathans are like. It was dangerous to see him that way.

  One new thing: He did not smile. He could not; there was a piece of shrapnel in his jaw.

  “We have our life back,” he told me one morning as he stood in hat and coat in the doorway. The fuzz of the beard he was growing. He had dressed, this morning, ready to return to the clinic.

  “We do,” I said, not knowing, of course, what that life had been.

  He frowned. “I didn’t know if you’d even be here when I got back.”

  I cocked my head as I picked up my coffee cup. “Of course I am.”

  He lowered his gaze. “I didn’t know if I’d be back.”

  I smiled dolefully.

  “Sorry to be so dour,” he said, shrugging and then coming to kiss me. Dour. He said it the wrong way, the way my old Nathan had corrected long ago. Like a cat come home from the rain.

  He brought home flowers from street vendors, and soberly presented them to me. What trick of life was this? There was no “I leave it to you.” It was left to us, a married couple, to make the best of a world destroyed.

  I wondered, but never asked, about the woman here, the details of their thwarted affair. Was she the same one as in the other worlds? And what had stopped him, in this one?

  “I missed New York,” he would say at night, so tired from his day; he had resumed his work at the clinic. “God, I missed it.”

  “Has it changed?”

  “Yes, of course. But not the things I missed. The subway and the smell or the luncheon special at Hoover’s.” He closed his eyes to think of it. “And Ruth.”

  “Don’t tell me you missed Ruth!”

  He shrugged. “Yes, I even missed your crazy aunt Ruth.”

  And there was pain: When he sat to eat his dinner, he would wince. It was one of the things we never spoke of.

  “It is bad today?” I would ask. He would close his eyes and say nothing. I would wait a long time in silence.

  “I think I need to sleep,” he would say, and I would nod. Something stern in his voice that I did not recognize.

  “I need to sleep.” It was the first thing he said when he walked in that door in 1918, returned from war, and what he said most evenings after dinner; the strong, scarred face would crinkle, his mouth would tighten, and I would see his mind retreat into itself like a snail into its shell. “I need to sleep,” he would state, and I would know then that I was not his companion but his wife, his nurse, and would lead him to the bedroom where he let me undress him while he stared at the photographs on the wall.

  “I love you, Greta,” he would whisper in his half sleep. “I love you so much, Greta.” He repeated it so distinctly that I felt it was what he said every night in his foxhole, to calm himself before the booming curtain of sl
eep covered the world where his nightmares began.

  He needed to sleep. And yet—it was a war within him. He murmured things in sleep that I could not recognize; perhaps it was not English. The least sound from the street would send him shouting. Sometimes I woke to find him staring at me, but not in the tender way of a lover in the morning. No, it was the way you would stare at a ghost.

  I think his nights were more like mine than I imagined. He, too, traveled to another world. He, too, awakened elsewhere, perhaps with another woman at his side. Or else in a hospital cot, grabbing a few moments before he was called to surgery again. Or else in a trench, half of his body in rainwater, watching the fireworks of war. You could say that his was different; his was all in his mind. But what does that even mean? What in the world is not “all in your mind”?

  And one night: I undressed for my new Nathan in our canopied bed, and as he buttoned up his pajamas, winked at me in my envelope chemise, there was a honeymoon feeling about it. Of course there was; so worn from war, he had not yet made love to me. I was shy as a bride, lying on the bed. I was lonely, and needed to be touched. A replacement for the soldier who had left, a version of him who longed to do nothing but be home with me and watch my awkward knitting. He took my hand a bit more passionately than my old Nathan, and touched me a bit more roughly, something fiery in his eye. Different. For just as my forties Nathan had differed from his eighties self, here again I was faced with someone who looked and smelled and smiled and kissed like my old love. But who was not really him. A new start. The man I knew best in the world—I took him in my arms for the first time.