The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells Read online

  WHAT WAS MOST wonderful about my journeys, I now believe, was that I alone could appreciate the beauty of those worlds. None of the ordinary people in 1918 found flickering gaslight quaint or beautiful, or saw the old Dutch market houses as anything but eyesores; to them, the world was both falling apart and coming together all too much. In 1941, as well, for those people it was all too modern and too old. The old billboards and funny metal sounds of life, the way that women flounced their skirts, and how men were always removing and replacing their hats, things that are gone forever; it was nothing to them. I was that visitor who comes to a country and finds it charming and ridiculous all at once. Why would anyone wear those hats? Those skirts? And why have we lost the simple decency of saying hello to strangers on the street? But to those who lived in those times, of course, none of it seemed strange. It was ordinary life, with all its troubles, and only when they were jolted off the rails for an instant did they see how odd, how beautiful, everything around them was. Jolted by love or death. They would never consider that it might disappear, or that they might one day miss the quiet Fifth Avenue snowfall that slowed their Model T, or the awful smell of oyster shells and horse manure, or the green el trains that blocked their window view. I was the only one who knew what would be lost.

  “YOUR BROTHER IS on the phone at the moment, but Mrs. Wells is in the parlor with Baby.”

  I never thought I would hear that sentence in my life. But I had ceased wondering at the impossible; I suppose your eyes adjust in a looking-glass world.

  “Thank you,” I said to the maid, a short blond girl with a bent nose and a Coke bottle in her hand, filled with water, that I mused must be for ironing. “Show me in.” And she did, bottle sloshing, leading me through what appeared to be my brother’s home, though without his stark sense of style. Here it was striped wallpaper and old tatted upholstery. Of course it was decorated by a woman, this wife who waited for me in some pink parlor with “Baby.”

  To my surprise, I stayed in that 1941 world for nearly a week; I had to wait for Dr. Cerletti in order to travel, which meant I awoke in a new world only every Thursday and Friday. As I would later discover, this gave me just a day in some worlds, an entire week in others: a day in 1918, this week in 1941, followed by a day in 1985, a week in 1918, and so on. All of my travels would follow this pattern—or nearly all.

  And so here I was, at my brother’s house. Mrs. Green had given me the address without any questions and took little Felix into her care. Out the door, of course, into a world I had learned to navigate. Soldiers and sailors and children with pennywhistles silenced by mothers wielding anvil-size handbags. The subway was a bit of a puzzle, as I had nearly forgotten the difference among the IRT, IND, and BMT lines, and how one bought a ticket, but I was no more mystified than the excitable French couple fumbling with coins that, with their Indian heads and Mercurys, were as exotic to me as to them. On the dark green–painted train I sat beside a tired shopgirl, her best peacock dress faded from too much washing and pressing, her feather boa limp as an eel, removing her shoes in the car with an audible sigh. And navy men everywhere, red faced, eager eyed, and watchful, rolling with the turns of the car as with the roll of their ships, resting powerful farm-boy hands on their clean white pants. When the pretty shopgirl looked their way, they seemed as scared as of a bank robber.

  Felix’s house was in the East Eighties, in what they called Yorkville. I was surprised to learn it was a German neighborhood, and the street provided evidence: German bakeries and cafeterias, coffeehouses and men’s societies. We were Germans, of course, brought over by our father as children. Later, I would learn our nationality excused Felix from service, in both worlds, but not from complications in a nation at war with our country of birth. On a stoop two boys stood talking, one still straddling his bicycle (his pants leg bound by a gleaming bicycle clip), yelling, “Tote mich!” until the other pulled out a very realistic gun and said, “Bang!”—a little cork popped out of its mouth, then dangled from its invisible string as they both cracked up. Only in one bakery window did I see a notice about a meeting; my German was rusty, but still it was impossible to escape its message. At the top, printed in black, was a swastika. And next door was my brother’s house.

  In the pink-toned parlor, sitting sideways in a slipper chair, I found a slight brown-haired woman in a frilled milkmaid dress holding a newborn child. The maid said my name, and the young woman looked up very peacefully—and then her face flickered, briefly, with the most astounding expression! I would say it was fear, almost as if she was doing something wrong, and I might punish her, but mixed in there was something complicated, subtle. In an instant it dropped below, and her surface was serene again, her smile very bright as she stood, holding the baby close in its swaddling clothes, and sweetly said, “Greta! Well, now I’m glad I stayed in town.” I walked forward to embrace her and she smelled of lilacs and powder.

  “Oh, the baby’s so beautiful!” I exclaimed (not knowing the sex) and she smiled proudly and tucked the blanket under the creature’s chin. “Can I . . . ?” I said, holding out my hands. I saw her mouth purse in concern, looking down at my cast. I understood: We were not friends.

  “Do you want some tea?” she offered, sitting down again with her baby and smiling at it. “Or something to eat? No, you’re going out to lunch with Felix.”

  “That’s right,” I said carelessly. “He wanted me to meet a friend.”

  “Oh? He didn’t mention it to me. What friend?”

  Her face shifted to me, eyes sparkling, and a voice came from the hall: “Ingrid, you remember I told you my sister and I were lunching . . . Oh hi, Greta!”

  Later, as we made our way to the restaurant in a cab, I told him I had misstepped slightly in my conversation with his wife, and Felix glared at me with his lower lip pressed out. He was thinking something through. “What do you mean?” he asked. “Of course that’s fine, I just forgot to tell her. She knows Alan, he did my will. Don’t make her think my life is so mysterious, bubs.” He laughed, then looked out the window the way you do in cabs, finger to his chin, and I understood how deep he must be in.

  HOW STRANGE. To step into the Oak Room in my velvet dress and feathered explosion of a hat, purse under my arm like a baguette, chandelier glitter on everyone’s shoulders, and see Alan there!

  Sitting at the table, waiter beside him, with his hands forming a tepee, his silver hair cut military-style, a wide-shouldered suit, but the same square, lined face as ever! Same cracked-green-glaze eyes! Big and broad and healthy, as he had been when I’d first met him, years before. I wanted to run up and tell some old Felix joke only we knew and see his midwestern countenance turn red with pleasure. Then he would pat my arm to comfort me. Over the beloved dead.

  But I couldn’t. Because Felix was not dead. He was here beside me, talking to the maître d’. And I couldn’t run up to Alan because he didn’t know me. I was only now—as he stood up and visibly, nervously swallowed—meeting him for the first time.

  “Hello,” I said, smiling and taking his hand, “so you’re my brother’s lover?”

  Of course I said nothing of the sort! Would you have every banker drop his martini in his lap? The whole of Manhattan would short-circuit. Instead, I took his firm hand limply and said, “So you’re my brother’s lawyer?”

  He said he was, and he had heard a great deal about me. He and Felix exchanged glances several times, like actors who have forgotten whose line comes next.

  They fought over who should pull out my chair—the waiter did it, arriving magically at the right moment, then vanishing—and who should order for us all.

  “I will,” I said. “Felix, you’ll have the pork chop and onions. Alan, you look like a man who likes a rare rib eye, with spinach. I’ll have the same. And martinis,” I said to the waiter, handing him the menu. “Gin for the men, vodka for me.” Oliver Twist? asked the waiter. “Olives,” I said, then sat back and smiled at the small bright room.

  Both men stared
at me in astonishment. “Well, a woman has certain talents,” I admitted, arranging my napkin.

  “But how did you know how I liked my steak?”

  “Felix has said so much about you,” I explained, watching Felix and seeing his cheeks redden. “So I feel I know you. You look like a rare-rib-eye man. A man who shaves without a mirror.” A jolt of alarm from Felix; I saw my game had gone too far. Now Alan was looking into his lap.

  “Greta is going to work,” Felix offered, and this time it was my turn to be shocked.

  “Is she?” Alan asked, leaning toward me. “What jobs are they giving women these days?”

  “Oh, let Felix tell you,” I said.

  My brother smiled. “Women are getting all kinds of work. It’s fascinating, really. Greta’s job, you sure you want me to tell?”

  I shrugged. “You’re so much more charming with words.”

  “She’s photographing great buildings, inside and out. In case we go to war, and the Germans bomb New York. So we can rebuild them just the way they were, isn’t that interesting?”

  Alan raised his eyebrows. “You’re like an African griot. You’re preserving our civilization for us.”

  “Hardly,” Felix said. “All photographers think about is light and shadow. They don’t give a damn what the subject is.”

  I grinned. “Sad to say, he’s right. Oh, martinis!”

  My twin brother tapped his hand on the table in time with the piano and looked around the room as if not interested in me or in his wife or anything but some appointment he was missing. It was so odd. It was infuriating, and so like my brother, but not in any of the ways I’d hoped. I had longed for this Felix to be the one, to be more like my brother than the 1918 version (all slogans and Diamond Jim smiles), and yet of course we forget that when the dead come back to life, they come back with all the things we didn’t miss. The bad cooking and the late arrival and the habit of hanging up the phone without saying, “I love you.” They aren’t fixed; they’re just back. And here he was, adolescently pursing his lips as if bored out of his mind. I could have hit him with a dinner roll. Bored? Here we were! The three of us, alive, together! So what if I was the only one who knew the lines, who knew how things should go? At least sit here and stop fidgeting, Felix, I wanted to say.

  But then I saw that Alan was the same. To the unaccustomed eye, they looked like two men bored to death by a chattering woman. Nodding their copper and silver heads, playing with the mixed nuts on the table, gulping down their drinks like medicine (the olives submerging with terror). But I knew. That they were not bored; they were robbers who have hidden their cache somewhere in the room and were giving it all away, not by staring at the spot, but by staring at everything else, eyes roaming the ceiling, the floor, the tabletop. They were giving it all away. Any detective would have found the hiding place instantly, lifted up the floorboard, pulled out the diamonds and said, Here! You fools! I could see it in these nervous men, tapping and fiddling with rings and topics of conversation and forks and knives. Not even brushing against each other. I had gotten it all wrong. If you had silenced the clatter of dishes and silver, the noise and hubbub of a crowd two drinks into lunch, the sounds of the street and the kitchen, you would have heard the water ice clinking on the table from how their hearts pounded away. How simple: They were two men in love.

  “Where is the food?” Felix asked, looking into his drink and finding nothing left. “I’m starved, aren’t you?” He looked up with a halfhearted smile, his cheeks flushed with color.

  Men in love. I wanted to reach across the table and thrust their hands together. But of course I could not do it; I could not even let on that I knew.

  “Oh, they want us to get good and drunk,” I said.

  “Then I’m ready!” Alan said gamely.

  So it had already begun. I was prepared to meet the man, a lover of a later time, who, like tropical plants that never bloom out of their climate, would be no more than a platonic friend my brother yearned for. But here, it was so obvious! They needed no prompting. For they were already lovers.

  “Alan, tell me again how you two met.”

  He looked at me very professionally. “Well, let me remember, it was at a party, right?”

  “I think it was one of Ingrid’s playwrights,” my brother broke in, leaning back in his chair and glancing out the window. “He had an opening, of course we missed the show, I think it was all Irish ghosts and family drama, but the party was in a rich lady’s place up on Park Avenue. The elevator man wouldn’t let you in unless you could name the hostess and the playwright, thank God Ingrid was there, I didn’t know either!”

  “It was Amanda Gilbert, I handled her divorce,” Alan informed us. “Baffling crowd. There was no one to talk to but your brother.”

  “Either longhairs, lesbians, or bagatelle matrons.”

  How did it work? Did they each take long lunches and meet in a hotel known for such things? Did they go on working weekends to the country, have late-night drinks with clients? What were the lies they told their wives or girlfriends or secretaries? What were the lies they told themselves?

  “Oh, now I remember!” Alan said, laughing inwardly. “One old lady in feathers yelled at a waiter for bringing her lime instead of lemon, and I saw this young man turn to her and say . . . Oh, what was it?”

  Felix pretended he didn’t know and picked at a Brazil nut.

  “You remember!” Alan insisted, appealing to me. “He turned to her and said, ‘Madam, when you were a little girl, is this the woman you dreamed of becoming?’ I knew I had to meet him.”

  And then they looked at each other at last and laughed. Anyone could have told then; they nearly touched each other at the memory, but withdrew their hands to their drinks instead. Surely their eyes had locked at that party and each had seen, in that moment, the “tell” they must have learned over the years, the flash of interest that part of the mind understands completely for one brilliant instant—then silences with a bullet like a witness who will say too much, so that it is forgotten and one can walk over and introduce oneself to the young red-haired man flushed with drink, with no more guile than a lawyer with a possible client, producing clever conversation and a business card. No one watching would have noticed except a wary wife, and I wonder if Ingrid had been across the room, seeing every move as a spy sees a briefcase handed over at a train station. For their eyes must have revealed it all. Never leaving each other’s gaze. It didn’t matter what they said. Surely words are just the background music when passion pounces on a soul.

  “I am so glad to meet you, Alan,” I said. “You seem like best friends already.”

  They didn’t know what to say to that, and luckily at that moment the food arrived. They smiled at their plates as if they read there a great fortune.

  It was only afterward, as Felix and I were waiting for taxis (Alan had already left, down the block), that I got up the nerve to say, “Alan seems wonderful.”

  Felix smiled warmly and said, “I thought you would like him.” The porter opened the taxi door and we stood there for a moment on the brink of speaking. Starlings or somethings were whirling overhead. A screech of tires, and a woman in a bright green shawl jumped back, shouting, causing a scene, but we did not look there. We looked at each other, lips open. How to say it? Phrases were whirling in our minds, like the starlings or swallows or somethings, possible ways to say it. I want you to know was one way to begin. Or: I understand everything. We looked at each other. The woman shouted, the cabbie shouted. “Felix . . .”

  “Later,” he said, and slipped into the cab. Slam, whistle from the doorman, and he was off again down Fifth Avenue. Of all the ridiculous things, tears came to my eyes and I turned away. He was alive here, carelessly, effortlessly alive, with all the petty troubles and worries that the living have. A wife, a child, a lover; such troubles. But there he went, again. And the feeling came, again. He did not know, not him or Nathan or little Fee, that my prolonged stay here had ended; the procedure
was mere hours away. Today: the taxi leaving. Tomorrow: home. It was a little death, each time, I would come to feel. Less like a traveler than a mayfly, living for a day, a week, then gone. Reincarnated as myself, again, struggling at the screen door, again. Two procedures: over. Twenty-three to go.

  I SOON DISCOVERED how the procedure in this world differed from the others. I came home and found my son engaged in some Swedish game of Green’s, in which he was made to hide behind the sofa while she knitted on the couch. I was too much a novice mother to protest, and Green’s raised eyebrow (her knitting, like the weaving of a spider, never ceased) silenced me. Fee’s head popped up—a puppet show—and he rolled his eyes and grinned mechanically before running from his counting place and embracing my knees. “Momma, Mrs. Green told me a story about a ghost, a woman who used to live here, did you know about that? Did you know she darns socks in the hall at night? Can I stay up tonight and watch her, Momma? Can I?” Knit and purl went the old girl’s web, that eyebrow still on high, and who was I to argue? Perhaps the ghost she meant was just a shimmer of myself, slipping between the worlds in sleep.

  “Mommy needs a nap, darling. I’ll be out later to take you to the park.”

  “Not now! I’ve been inside all day!”

  “Just a little while. I need to change.”

  “Madam,” came Mrs. Green’s voice and I turned, my hat dangling from my hand. Her eyes seemed to be encoding something. What could it possibly be? “Perhaps you forgot,” she said gently. “The doctor is in the bedroom. He has been waiting, and the nurse is here as well.”

  “I see.” I stood there for a moment feeling the weight of my hat in my hand, the coarse weave of its cloth, the irritating little feathers that stroked my dress with an audible sound. My gaze went all over the room, like a bird in search of a window. Yet there was nothing to do but go into that bedroom, nothing to say but what I said. “Thank you, Mrs. Green.”