The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells Read online

  I wondered what on earth she made of this madwoman walking the halls.

  They were there waiting for me, and their conversation broke off immediately as I entered the room with as much dignity as I could muster. Bald Dr. Cerletti smiled professionally as he nodded; he was in a navy suit and silver glasses, his demeanor somehow diminished from his contemporary self. “Mrs. Michelson, here you are.” He did not wear a doctor’s white coat, nor did the nurse (the same girl, her hair a different blond from a different bottle) wear a uniform. They were in civilian dress; I later found this was a courtesy to my husband, as was this house visit for a procedure typically done in the hospital. I looked around and saw the sunlamp had been rolled across the room and was beside my bed, which had been unmade to just a sheet. The machine was plugged into the wall.

  “Would you lie down, please, Mrs. Michelson?”

  A commotion started on the street—a soldier’s fight, it sounded like—so the nurse closed the window and drew the curtains, dimming the room except for a bright vertical bar of gold that shone between the drapes and cast its duplicate on the wall across from me. I removed my shoes and dress, placing the hat on the vanity where the birds seemed to watch me from its brim. In my slip, I lay down on the sheet and took a deep breath.

  “We’re trying a little more today. You shouldn’t notice any difference. Now lie back and relax. Same as always.” The nurse rubbed gel on my skin, just on the right side. The doctor took two metal disks and put them against my temple.

  “Wait. I’m not ready.”

  “Relax. It will be over in a moment, you’ll feel so much better. No more daydreams.”

  “Wait.”

  But he did not wait. The nurse sat beside me on the bed and there was something gentler about her in this form, more pitying and kind, a sad daughter at a deathbed, as she placed the cotton wand in my mouth and held my free hand tightly. She squeezed twice, as if to comfort me, but I realized it was a signal to the doctor, for on the second I felt the charge going through me—briefer than in the other worlds, but moving like a wave within my mind. I moaned audibly and hoped my son never heard these cries, these unmotherly sounds coming from the bedroom; what did Mrs. Green say they were? Was this the ghost she spoke of? Would he remember them, or just the story she made up about them? I felt my face tighten into an animal’s snarl and I was shifting. Something like a wire moved through my veins until I was all metal, bending for them, and then the blue fantastic vision filled the room, a web of light, and I wept to see my thoughts blow off, in groups, like dandelion seeds. I watched them float off and away. There was my son. And my husband. And, of all surprising things, there was the young man Leo. Off and away. What was so wrong with daydreams?

  NOVEMBER 7, 1985

  THE LIGHT FALLING THROUGH THE METAL BLINDS, STRIPING my body in the bed, should have told me everything. And yet I woke with delight at the thought of what new miracles Dr. Cerletti had given me, even found myself calling out Nathan’s name. But no one appeared. The wind blew through the open sash and rattled the blinds, and the sound was too familiar. Throwing away the gauze of dreams, I saw the three abstract photos in their frames, and the chair piled with clothes, and recognized my old life waiting for me, schoolmarm-tsking me for ever thinking life could be perfected. That life could be anywhere but here and now.

  “My theory,” said my aunt Ruth, pouring me champagne in a teacup and gesturing wildly with her free hand, “is that you are experiencing the Buddhist transmigration of souls!” I had of course told her everything. I had no other ally to confide in, after all.

  That afternoon in 1985, she was dressed in her black-and-white kimono. Her white hair was messily uncombed and she stood perfectly still while some hidden radio was braying through the wall, causing the glasses in the highboy to clink ominously on each downbeat. I can’t get no, it said in a muffled voice. Satisfaction.

  “Transmigration of souls?” I asked.

  She gestured wildly in the air. “Well, the Buddhists believe in thousands of worlds outside our own, with their own boddhisattvas, arranged like the petals of a lotus.”

  “Ruth, do you ever drink tea in your teacups?”

  “And physicists have the same theory,” she told me. “Mathematically their formulas make more sense if, instead of an atom going left or right, it goes both ways. It forms two worlds, a left world and a right world. And that these other worlds are being formed constantly. Like the petals of a lotus!”

  “I don’t know anything about it. I only know what I saw.”

  “Well, I know about it,” she said, raising an eyebrow. “Married to Nathan. And Felix, alive!” I watched as she removed the cover from the parakeet’s cage and it hopped along on its twig toward her. “So many worlds.”

  “Ruth, maybe I should talk to Dr. Cerletti.”

  I can’t get no, said the wall. Satisfaction.

  She put a little seed into the bird’s tray, all the while talking: “Well, of course, baby, if you want. But you know what he’ll say. That it’s all in your head.” She walked over and pounded on the wall.

  “I suppose.”

  Ruth sat back down on the sofa, scratching behind her ear and looking out at the last autumn colors of the garden; clouds must have been passing over the sun, because the yellow gingko leaves slowly pulsed with brightness, as if someone were working a switch. She absently removed a thread from a cushion. “It’s easy to say something is all in your head. It’s like saying a sunset is all in your eyes,” she said, gesturing, pursing her mouth in small furies. “It’s stupid, it’s nonsense. It has no brain for beauty.”

  “But he might keep me from this paranoia—”

  “Well, you knew what he would say. And you knew what I would say.” I can’t get no. She stood up and pounded on the wall. “It’s just interesting that you came to me. Imagine what Felix would say.”

  “I have my procedure again today. I’ll be back in nineteen eighteen for a week. I can ask him then.”

  She smiled.

  “Ruth,” I said quietly. “I’m so lonely here.” She put her hand on mine. The music stopped at last, and in the silence we could hear Felix’s parakeet singing longingly from its cage.

  NOVEMBER 8, 1918

  I AWOKE THE NEXT MORNING TO THE WHINNYING OF A HORSE, the echoing chimes in my brain, and knew at once where I was.

  “Madam?” I heard outside the door. “Do you want coffee?”

  For it was as I had hoped: My trips made a logical pattern. From 1918, to 1941, to my world, and back again. Like scales on a piano. You asked to be back, I thought to myself. And here you are.

  “Yes, Millie,” I found myself saying as I looked out the window on the chill November of 1918. “I’m going down to see my aunt.”

  THAT MORNING IN 1918, I was treated to a strange mirror of the conversation I had had with another Ruth, in another world.

  “Perfect them?” Ruth was saying to me as she poured champagne into a teacup. “What do you mean perfect them?”

  Apparently, the 1918 Greta had confided her own travels to other worlds, and Ruth had greeted me with the twinkling eye of someone who knows all your secrets. And indeed she did. I sat on her daybed, with pillows behind my back and chrysanthemums bristling from a green vase beside me. The silver trelliswork of the wallpaper—so garish, so like my aunt—reminded me strangely of the light effects I had witnessed as I slept, when the world disappeared from my skin and an electric lattice, like the accordion gate of an old-time elevator, unfolded behind my lids while presumably some unseen porter worked the lever—and down I would go. First floor: flu. Second floor: war. And there Ruth sat, directly opposite, in a pink kimono and small wire-rimmed glasses that magnified her eyes into objects of wonder. Champagne in teacups, white hair, kimono.

  “You did this before,” I told her. “Yesterday, you gave me champagne in a teacup. In your kimono.”

  “It’s my last champagne,” was all she said. “I missed you this week. Another Greta was here, not
as charming.”

  I laughed at the idea. “Really? How funny to think of that, but of course another would be here. Is she sad, too?”

  “Not as charming,” she repeated. “She thought I was a hallucination.”

  “At least she told you everything.”

  A flash of anger in her face. “No one likes to be called a hallucination. Then my own came back, to this world. She’s the one who told me. You want to perfect them, you were saying. That’s what she said, too.”

  Her cat materialized on my arm and began its tightrope walk, vibrating deliriously through the pads of its feet, mesmerist eyes affixed. I wondered about the other Gretas, how they would differ from me. Was it possible? “I just thought maybe that’s the purpose. Three women who wanted to escape their lives, and so we did. We just happen to all be the same woman. So maybe I can perfect their lives. And maybe, while I’m missing, they can perfect mine.”

  Ruth picked up the cat and carried the suddenly powerless creature to a pink armchair in the corner, all the while talking. “What would you have them change?”

  “Maybe they see things I don’t. Maybe they can fix me.”

  “And what would you change about the other Gretas?”

  “What happened to Felix? Is he in jail?”

  “No, no,” she said. “The police were just harassing him. It’s not a popular thing to be German, you know. Or to be a young man not fighting in the war.”

  “I don’t think he’s happy here,” I told her. “He’s not like the brother I knew.”

  “So you want to change other people, too.”

  “Well,” I said with confidence, “I know how they could be if things were different. If they were born in a different time.” I watched the cat as it considered its armchair, and then, with one claw and after some thought, as it absently removed a thread from a cushion.

  Ruth stood up very straight. “I hope you’re not trying to perfect me!”

  The image came to me of her grave in 1941.

  “No, no, Ruth, I couldn’t change you if I tried. Now will you tell me,” I said, “what brought on my procedures here. What happened?”

  Sudden sunlight drew a bright box on the counterpane, containing the cat, who stretched in an ecstasy of fur. Ruth thought a moment, then said, “It was a very hard time. But you got through it.” Then she looked up at me. “Nathan became very close to another woman. It was a small thing. It was months ago.”

  Brick building, zigzag smile, two silhouettes.

  There came the shrill sound of a mechanical bell. She tapped my knee and said, “He’s here!”

  The creak of Ruth’s old door called out (did she never oil her hinges, not in any time?) and I heard a male voice talking from the hall. Then the sound of footsteps. I stood up from the daybed, touched my hair (it was in some huge brioche formation), and shared a glance with Ruth, whose eyes and hands sparkled back at me with all their gems. “Maybe it makes things clearer for you,” she said. She tightened the turban around her head, shooing away the cat, who glared at the flowers with a look of mischief. Laughter from the hall.

  “Felix!” I shouted.

  He smiled in confusion. For it was not Felix there.

  THE PERPLEXED YOUNG man stood there with a bouquet of roses in one hand and a hat in the other.

  “Leo!” Ruth exclaimed, and to my surprise she walked forward to kiss him! “Oh, you’re as adorable as ever! Isn’t he, Greta?” A magnificent wink, and I recognized him: the young man from the street on Halloween. He raised an eyebrow and smiled slyly at me, raising a dimple on one side of his wide, handsome face, the cheeks shining from a fresh shave, though he looked as if he could not keep a shave for long; his chin was already blue with a new beard. “But we need to get you a new suit and a better barber. Look, I’m treating you like a nephew. I’ve got a package I can’t get down from the study and you promised to help! Just in the study, you’ll see its brown paper.”

  Two Felixes, two Ruths, a new Nathan, and now this Leo person. I was someone switching television channels, trying to keep all the characters straight.

  “Happy to do it,” he said. He had a surprisingly low voice for a young man. “But only for a moment. I just wanted to leave the tickets, I have to be at the theater. Here they are. Oh, and these are for you.” He did a little juggling act with his hat, the flowers, and his pockets to produce an envelope. He nearly handed the hat to Ruth, but she took the other two very smoothly.

  “You darling boy. The study, brown paper.” Leo nodded and looked at me.

  Shorter than I remembered, but upright and confident in his worn blue serge suit. His large brown eyes, long lashed, bright with intelligence, took in everything about me, everything about the room. His thick brown hair seemed ready to spring from its pomade back to the wild state it must see every morning. I would later learn he was an intense young man, more likely to wander Washington Square, retracing scenes from Wharton and James, than to sit smoking cannabis in the Mad Hatter and talking nonsense. This perhaps was why he was drawn to an older woman. Another smile. “I’ll be right back.” As he left, I noticed a slight limp: I would learn it was from a childhood accident, and sometimes, when he misstepped, he would laughingly turn it into a kind of dance. This was what had kept him from the war.

  Ruth pivoted on one shoe and turned to me.

  “I saw him outside my window that first night,” I said.

  “She met him a while back. At a play in the alley,” she said. “You understand, don’t you? Because of Nathan, what he did. She is so lonely.”

  “I understand. But I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” I said. “How old is he, anyway?”

  “I think she said twenty-five.”

  “Twenty-five?”

  She held a finger to her lips to quiet me. “Just tell Leo you can’t wait to see the show tonight. Oh, there are two letters for you.”

  “The show?”

  “His show, darling. We’re going to the theater.” She threw off her kimono and I saw that, underneath, she wore an elaborately pin-tucked dress in black silk, a black rose blooming from her breast. “I’m your elderly chaperone.”

  THE PLAYHOUSE WAS, to my surprise, not in the Village at all but in an almost unrecognizable Lower East Side, on Grand Street. There, between the pickles and the pushcarts, I found myself hobbling down a street that seemed paved with tar-stained wooden blocks, and everywhere impoverished Jewish women stared at me with babies in their arms. Peddlers on all sides sold bananas, buttons, blankets, anything the heart could dread or imagine. Two young women stood in front of one cart, trying out eyeglasses by reading a newspaper the peddler had nailed to a post. “Cloth for cash,” another old man said to us, his eyes red as embers, “cash for cloth,” as if he didn’t believe it himself. Almost immediately we were in the theater.

  Or, rather, firehouse. Apparently the old firehouse had been converted into a theater, and a little turnstile had been installed within the great red engine door. A man in a suit sat on a pickle barrel inside, collecting dimes. He bit each one in his back teeth before dropping it in the barrel; the process was interminable. The smell of pickles clung to us even when we sought out a seat near the front. “You want Leo to see you’re here,” Ruth whispered. She had told me we were going to see The House of Mirth. I had read the book in college, but could remember barely anything except a vision of Lily Bart’s exceptionally white skin, made whiter still by the overdose she took. I wondered what role Leo would take, and recalled a rather handsome platonic friend as well as a ne’er-do-well married man. I could not picture him in any role. But I could not picture him in my life, in any role, either.

  It was at that moment I remembered the letters. Among the beaded fringes of my purse I found the snap, and tore open the first letter with a military stamp. What a strange sensation, in that other world, to see that old familiar handwriting I used to see every day on grocery lists, and bills to mail, and the little love notes I once found in books I was reading:
r />   October 20, 1918

  Dearest Greta,

  It has been a hard month here in - - - - - but I fear the hardest is yet to come. People talk of peace, but where I am there seems no end to young boys brought in wounded, suffering, crying for their mothers. But we have suffered nothing compared to the locals. A small trip and one only enters towns of widows, all in black and clawing at you for a piece of bread or comfort. Whole trenches fill with flu victims. We cannot treat them or cure them. God knows what would happen if our staff got sick! It is a small bit of hope that some boys survive, and are well in days, though only to head into battle the next.

  But I don’t want to depress you with these thoughts. Peace will come, perhaps soon, if the Huns are routed as the generals say they will be. Your letters have been a great comfort to me. My mind is only on you, and on the child we will have on my return, God willing! The war will end. I will return. The smoke will clear, and we will see each other as we once did when we were young. And I will be home.

  With love forever,

  Nathan

  The old history lessons of public school made their way out of the rubbish heap of youth. Armistice. Today was the eighth of November. The Germans would be routed; the kaiser would soon abandon his post and flee the country; the war was nearly over, and yet it astounded me, looking around, that none of them knew! Surely the papers were full of negotiations and concessions; surely the war had ended weeks before and the famous November eleventh date—the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month!—was merely a formality. But no; overhearing conversations and remembering Liberty Bonds posters in windows, I realized that being this close to peace, to the end of all that horror, was not like being close to the end of a novel; you could not weigh the final pages in your hand. They did not know. They lived in fear, not knowing that the last days were upon them. And 1918 Greta, receiving letters such as this from her husband, did not know. That very soon the war would end.