The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells Read online

  OCTOBER 31, 1918

  LATE AFTERNOON; I MUST HAVE SLEPT THROUGH AN ENTIRE day. A slow, soft awakening, like pulling one’s way out of a web—the distant sound of ringing bells. I could feel the sunlight playing on my lids, the shadows of the trees outside, and for a moment I felt as I did as a girl, at a friend’s country house, when Felix and I would swim in the river and feign sleep on the shore so our father would have to carry us one by one to the car, whispering to our mother, “Isn’t it wonderful to be a child?” I took a few long breaths, thinking of summer and of Felix, before I had the strength to open my eyes.

  I lay there for a long time trying to make sense of what I saw. Sunlight and shadow. Striped satin and lace. A piece of fabric hanging over me, dappled by the sun and leaves, billowing slightly from the open window. The sound of a steam whistle, and the clatter of hooves. Striped satin and lace; it was quite beautiful, moving in slow waves above me, just as my mind had been moving in waves as I awoke: a canopy bed. My eyes moved down to take in the rest of the room, which was lit with the same watery refracted light. My breath began to quicken. Because the bed I had fallen asleep in had no posters, no fabric. And the room I saw before me was not my room.

  Here it was, what Dr. Cerletti had warned me about: the “disorientation.”

  For I knew that it was my room; the shape and size of it were the same, the placement of the window and the door. But instead of my white walls, I saw pale lilac wallpaper patterned in ball and thistle. Gold-framed paintings placed along it, and sooty gaslight back plates. A little table with a Japanese tableau of porcelain chopsticks and a painted fan. Long green heavy drapes hung beside the window, pleated and tasseled, and before me a great oval looking glass was set in a tilting frame, reflecting the striped fabric of the bed. Curious, fascinated by the effects of Cerletti’s procedure, almost sure of what I would find, I pulled myself up before the mirror and watched as, inch by inch, my own shape came into view. . . .

  What else can we call it but beautiful when we are someone new? I marveled at the long red hair falling in waves over the delicate yellow nightgown I had never owned before, trimmed with little useless ribbons. I touched my face and wondered: What trick was this? How could this be me?

  I laughed a little, letting my fingers run through my long hair. Dr. Cerletti had said this phase would pass, and I decided to enjoy it while it lasted. Soon enough, I would be shorn-haired little Greta Wells, in slacks and a jacket, wandering from room to room. Until then: I would be this beautiful creature my doctor had made.

  A knock on my bedroom door. “Greta?”

  A relief. At least something familiar here. It was Ruth’s voice.

  I blinked at the woman in the mirror before I climbed out of bed and saw how the yellow nightdress fell to my feet. What an elaborate hallucination this was.

  “You’ve slept the day away,” Ruth said as she opened the door and entered. “You foolish girl.”

  I laughed again; my “disorientation” seemed to include Ruth as well: She wore an outrageous black cloak, breastbone beads, a tight turban with a great black trembling feather. I sighed when I remembered it was Halloween. Surely she was in costume. Surely I was as well; the procedure had merely erased some long part of the day. As for the room, the steam whistle, the horse—well, it would all soon fall into place.

  “We have to get more hooch before the party starts, which is very soon,” she was saying. “Get yourself together and come along.”

  I said nothing. A little voice in my mind was saying, Pay attention, you’re not yourself, but I waved it away. I smiled at the little white curls that poked out from her odd turban.

  “We have to get back before him, he’s lost his key,” she said, then looked me up and down. “You’re not even dressed. Let’s get you into your costume.” Ruth walked herself around my bedroom, chattering the whole time, poking through my scattered things, until she came upon a mirrored gilt armoire—sized, perhaps, for hiding illicit lovers—and flung it open with a bleat of delight. “Aha!” I was handed a white blouse and dirndl and slowly put them on. I sat very still as Ruth quickly did my hair. A letter lay on the dresser, unopened, and something bade me to pick it up and put it in my pocket. Pay attention.

  “There you are. My little Gretel!”

  I stood at the mirror looking at the fairy-tale girl before me. A dirndl, hair in two long braids, done up in green ribbon. You’re not yourself.

  “And look at me, darling,” she said, fiddling with a device attached to her belt so that her costume revealed itself: all along her skirt, candy canes lit up in bold electric light. “I’m your witch! Now let’s go fatten you up! Ready?”

  I knew that a step outside would take me further still. So, like Alice before the looking glass, I took one more look at my reflection before I said:

  “I’m ready.”

  FOR ALL OF my life, beside the tower of the Jefferson Market, down at the end of Patchin Place where Felix and I used to swing on the iron gates, there had been nothing but an empty fenced garden. And now, in its place, there had suddenly sprung up a huge brick building, lit by the setting sun. From one barred window, I saw what I thought was a twisted sheet, but soon realized was a woman’s arm, as white as a feather; it did not stir the whole time I watched. I was mesmerized, smiling at the dream I was in.

  “What is it, darling?”

  I laughed and pointed. “Look!” I said. “What is that?”

  She squeezed my hand. “The prison. Now come along.”

  “A prison? You see it, too?” I asked, but she could not hear me in the noise of the crowd making its Halloween way along Tenth Street. Something was coming together in me. The change in my city, the change in my room. My long hair, my long nightdress. “Ruth, I thought you weren’t throwing a party.”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked me, pulling me along. “I always throw one.”

  “But you said—”

  “He’d kill me if I didn’t! Be careful, dear, you seem unstable.”

  “I’m not myself,” I said, smiling, and she seemed to accept that.

  We stepped out the gates of Patchin Place, and, very calmly, I pulled out the envelope from my pocket. “Greta Michelson,” it read. “Patchin Place.” My last name had never been Michelson. But it was the postmark that made me stand still in the moving crowd.

  I began to laugh. It overcame me, what had happened. You make a wish. The postmark explained it all.

  THEY SAY THERE are many worlds. All around our own, packed tight as the cells of your heart. Each with its own logic, its own physics, moons, and stars. We cannot go there—we would not survive in most. But there are some, as I have seen, almost exactly like our own—like the fairy worlds my aunt used to tease us with. You make a wish, and another world is formed in which that wish comes true, though you may never see it. And in those other worlds, the places you love are there, the people you love are there. Perhaps in one of them, all rights are wronged and life is as you wish it. So what if you found the door? And what if you had the key? Because everyone knows this:

  That the impossible happens once to each of us.

  ANOTHER WORLD.

  With fascination, I looked around this version of my life in 1918. Nothing was different from my 1985 Patchin Place except the prison beside the tower. The Northern Dispensary, visible down Waverly, was the same as ever (a slice of brick cake), though at Seventh Avenue rubble was piled everywhere, with some recent, violent construction, and women in high-buttoned shoes and costumed like gypsies or pirate queens made their delicate way. Many were wearing gauze masks to cover the lower halves of their faces, tied behind their heads. Below: scattered ancient cobblestones. Above: silver fishhook moon. Between: a bustling crowd of strangers calling to one another from windows, carriages, balconies, and doorways. Just one small thing had changed, such a small thing really.

  What difference could it make, the era in which we are born?

  “It’s beautiful,” was all I said, almo
st to myself.

  Two people began to sing along with a phonograph, a man’s voice and a woman’s. Ruth said, “We have to get going. He hates to wait. And take that ring off, don’t be so ridiculous.”

  I removed my ring to look at the engraving inside: NATHAN AND GRETA, 1909. In this world, he had married me.

  Ruth’s hands emerged magically from her long sleeves and fluttered frustratedly in the air, then one snatched the ring from me.

  “It’s Halloween, and you’re young! And he’s far away at war, up to his own pleasures, bless him. Leo will be looking for you at the party.” Then she leaned in close and I could smell violets and cigars and the sweet cinnamony oil she must have used to dress her hair. “Free love, darling,” she said, patting my cheek.

  So, in this world, Nathan was at war.

  “Watch out, ma’am!” Heedless of the world around me, I had bumped into someone.

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  It was a young man dressed for Halloween as a genie. He smiled and touched my shoulder before moving on. His touch made me gasp. I tried to catch my breath as he made his way into the crowd.

  Ruth took my hand. “Come now, darling.”

  But I could not move, watching him walking away from me, chatting with his companion and laughing, disappearing into the crowd.

  I felt her tight grip on me. Her concerned whisper: “Greta? Are you all right?”

  “I know that man,” I said, pointing where he had been, a shimmer in the moonlight. I felt tears well in my eyes. “They’re alive,” was all I could say. “They didn’t die.”

  “Darling—”

  “That man,” I said, gesturing to the genie disappearing into the crowd. “His name was Howard.”

  How could I explain it? That the year before, I had seen him every day selling me half-price baguettes at the bakery. Same short blond hair, same pale beard, same ivory smile. Just as he used to look standing behind the counter, months before. And waving at me late at night on the street, in tight jeans and with his buddies. And on the photograph taped to his coffin.

  Laughing again, turning, looking around at me: familiar young men appearing in this unfamiliar world. Men who had died months or years before from the plague miraculously revived! There, in an army uniform, was the boy who made jewelry from papier-mâché beads; he died in the spring. And that one soldier, the stark blond Swede jumping from the streetcar, once sold magazines; he’d died two years before, one of the first: the cave’s canary. Who knows how many more were off to war? Alive, each one, alive and more than alive—shouting, laughing, running down the street!

  Of course: 1918, a world set long before the plague. A world in which they had not died.

  TWILIGHT HAD DESCENDED when we returned, carrying growlers of beer, to Ruth’s apartment—decorated, in this world, as a fairy-tale land. The ceiling was pasted with silver stars, and a cardboard gingerbread house stood at the entrance to the dining room, dotted with peppermint candies, some of which had already fallen to the floor. On the wall was a paper castle, and from it fell a waterfall of Rapunzel hair.

  I had been lost in thought amid the crowds of revelers. “Ruth,” I said. “I’m going to tell you something impossible.”

  “Not now, darling,” she said, leading me back outside. Yellow leaves blew in a spiral behind her. “Later, when we’re drunk.”

  “I’m not who you think I am. You told me once—”

  “Who is? I’m going to make the punch,” she said, squeezing my hand. “It has to be strong, to beat the flu. And last us through these insane times. You stay here, I’m sure we’ve kept him waiting.”

  She disappeared into the house, the bright electric lights of her dress burning into my eyes.

  Another world. My life if I had been born in another time. Ruth was the same, but what else would have changed? I looked down at my hand, empty now but still bearing the pink pinch of my wedding ring. Married. I should have guessed Nathan might be at war. Of course I would not find him here, waiting for me in this world.

  I looked around and saw, all along the path of Patchin Place, leading right up to my aunt’s door, a peculiar thing: a trail of bread crumbs scattered on the stones. I felt the strange magic contraction of the worlds. I stared at those bread crumbs a long time before I began to follow them, one every few feet, back down Patchin Place toward the gate. It never occurred to me to look up, to see who might have left them, not until I reached out my hand to touch one, to be sure it was real, and a voice yanked me back: “Gretel!” I looked up and felt a black bolt in my brain.

  For there at the gates stood a fairy-tale man, removing his feathered cap. “I’ve been pacing the block. You took so long!” he shouted. There is the thing you hope for, and then, beyond it . . .

  As fox faced as ever, smiling, with skin and muscle and blood and all the spinning, churning apparatus of life: “Why did you take so long?”

  I can barely write the words. It was my brother, Felix.

  “YOU CAN’T BE here,” I said. “You can’t.”

  He asked me, laughing, why not?

  I stared at him a long time before I answered, “Because you’re dead.”

  “SORRY TO DISAPPOINT you, bubs. I’m still kicking.” A well-remembered laugh. Red hair cut close on the sides, those few freckles still haunting his skin, pale eyes flashing. “No,” I said, bracing myself against the wall. “I was there, I watched you, I held your hand.”

  That smile again. “Well, it’s Halloween! The dead walk the earth! Let’s go inside and have Ruth make us a drink.” A shout from inside, and the sound of shattered glass and laughter.

  But as he turned I gripped his arm, tight. His arm, solid and strong and alive. Not gaunt anymore, not thin or weak. He looked at me seriously now. I thought of the last time I had seen him, trying to swallow a spoon of poison, the wirework of tendons shifting in that arm. And here. Alive. How does the heart keep beating?

  “Greta?” he asked, his face focused on mine now. We stood, regarding each other, and I’m sure it was only face-to-face that you could recognize our similarity. The lashless eyes that hid so much, the full red lips that gave away everything, the coloring of skin and hair that were mere variations, as if a passing shadow had briefly fallen over me.

  “Felix, something’s happened,” I said firmly. “I’m not myself.”

  He stood quietly for a moment and I watched his smile tense in the streetlight. I held his hand tightly and would not let my eyes leave him. Tall in his lederhosen, neck bare to the night wind. Here was the old nightmare, arriving on schedule as it had every night, this time brought on not by my sleeping mind but by Dr. Cerletti’s magic wand.

  Some partygoers arrived, looked at us, and smiled; I smoothed my apron over my dirndl. I saw that, together, we were characters wandering far from their storybook.

  “I know you’ve been sad,” Felix was saying to me after they went inside. “I know it’s been hard with Nathan gone. I know that’s why you went to the doctor; I’m sure he didn’t expect these side effects.”

  I looked up and saw the moon had risen between the buildings, but then realized it was dangling from a window, on a fishing line, lit from within by a candle, and I saw in that window a pretty female Harlequin making it swing above the crowd. From behind her a man dressed as a black cat kissed the nape of her neck.

  Felix squeezed my hand. He pulled some of my hair back from my face. “I know you’ve been lonely.”

  “Yes,” I said at last. “I’ve been lonely.”

  “I’m sorry I was away so long. Ingrid’s father wanted me to meet my future family. But now I’m back.” The lights of a passing cab shone across his face. “I’m back for a while.” An arrogant little smile beneath that arrogant little mustache.

  And then I realized that I could say the thing I had been whispering to myself all these months, lying in my bed and staring out the window with lashes sticky from tears. I could say it at last to the person I was always addressing, the person I thought
would never hear it. There before me in his costume. I held him close again and said: “I missed you.”

  He laughed a little, accepting my embrace.

  “I missed you. I missed you,” I repeated.

  “I missed you, too, Gretel.”

  I pulled back and kept his hand in mine. He was smiling. Above us, the moon swung from its line as Columbine began to sing to the crowd below. I asked him who Ingrid was and he squeezed my hand again.

  “Ingrid,” he said distinctly. “You’ve met her. You’ll remember. She’s lovely, a girl in Washington, a senator’s daughter. You’ll remember.” He laughed but I saw his concern working away in there. “I’m marrying her in January.”

  “Marrying her?”

  The careful smile and shake of his head. “Hard to believe anyone would marry me, right? Well, I’m one of the few eligible men in town. There’s some luck in being German.”

  To my relief I found myself laughing. My brother? Hanging from a lamppost in his boyish costume, rolling his eyes and his wrists, winking at me—couldn’t everybody see it? Not girlish, exactly, not the way he had been as an adolescent, trying on my shoes and necklaces; he had trained himself in certain ways, and grown in others, and was man enough. But anyone could tell. Anyone who cared to look, who knew a thing about life. “Felix!” I said. “Felix, you can’t be serious! I may be dreaming, but you can’t be marrying her.”

  He stiffened, lowered his eyebrows, and let go of the lamppost. “Yes, I am. You’ve always said you like her; don’t change your mind now.”

  “Well, I’m sure I do, but what about Alan?”

  “What?”

  “This is my dream. If you marry anyone, it should be Alan.”

  Quickly, without hesitation, “Marry him to whom?”

  It was the swift response of a man who is not really lying, but has constructed a careful world—like an acoustic chamber—that swallows the lie before he even knows he has said it. For the mind knows what the man does not.