The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

by Andrew Sean Greer

  First, nobody really knew what to do. Most people kept going about their daily lives. One man, wearing a black triangular armband, stepped into the street and yelled, “I am your civilian air warden! Enter the nearest building and lie down!” at which people merely stared at his preposterous command and kept walking. A policeman managed to stop traffic, but could not convince the passengers of a bus that they all had to disembark immediately. Not a single passenger would leave his seat. Brandishing his gun, he yelled, “But I’m the police! I’m the police!” and finally walked away in despair, asking nobody in particular: “What am I supposed to do? Shoot the poor louses?” But by then we had already rushed into a store with a crowd of other ladies, burdened by shopping, and I held Fee against my coat like any animal mother with her young. I put my hand to his face and from his wet cheeks I knew that he was crying.

  After a few minutes, the terrible noise stopped and I could hear my son’s loud sobbing. “Oh, baby,” I heard myself saying, stroking his head, “hush now, hush now.” I looked across the room and found some solace in another mother, consoling her own frightened son—no, it was a mirror, and just my unfamiliar self with Fee. We exchanged shocked stares with the tailor, and then, to add to the comedy, a young man emerged from the curtain wearing nothing but garters and boxers, saying, “Hey, are we supposed to lie down or something?”

  “No,” said Mrs. Green. “We are simply meant to wait indoors until the all clear.”

  He grinned. “Well, thanks, ma’am. So . . . can I go back in there?”

  I heard her take a deep breath and then, to my surprise, she said, “No, not until the all clear.”

  “All right then,” he said, smiling shyly, “if you ladies don’t mind.” He took a homburg from a shelf and placed it on his head, then crossed his arms and waited with the rest of us, nodding at each lady in turn. No one told him he was allowed to get dressed, especially not the stunned shopkeeper, who sat winding his watch. So we stood, we housewives with our bags of blackout cloth, and simply admired his form. Mrs. Green would not meet my eye. I wish she would have; I was so delighted to discover she had a sense of humor.

  And then it came: three short bursts, repeated over and over. The young man tipped his hat to us, and the ladies all gathered their things, and I gathered Fee. There was a general bustle among the ladies that prevented us from leaving, as everyone expanded to grab bags and loosened shoes and gloves and coats scattered, somehow, everywhere, like autumn trees that have changed their minds, sticking every leaf back where it came from. I lingered a little, looking at Christmas tiepins for Nathan, knowing it was silly; he would be in uniform for years. What he needed was something to take blood out of khaki. And something to keep the horror out. “I need a bouquet,” Felix used to say to florists, “that says, ‘I will keep the sadness out.’ Can you do that?” And sometimes they could.

  “HERE WE ARE,” Mrs. Green said when we were home, hoisting her pile of fabric. “Wipe your feet, Fee.” Outside in Patchin Place, someone had not tied the cord properly to a flagpole, and it whipped in the wind, and even from our hallway we could hear its metal buckle dinging against the pole.

  I heard my son shout, “Uncle X!” and rounded the corner, pulling off my coat, to see my brother sitting in the parlor with his lawyer: Alan Tandy, Esq., in a striped blue tie and a face flushed red by the fire. And my brother, in just a shirt and slacks, a cotton jacket. Probably the clothes he was picked up in. Turning to see me.

  “Felix!” I said, running to him, my hat falling to the floor. “You’re free!”

  He smiled at my embrace, but there was a change in him. Dark commas beneath his eyes. Thin and scared and quiet. I could not bear it. It is the case with twins; it feels unnatural for the image in the mirror to change without you.

  “Greta,” he said. His eyes as dull as his cuff links.

  “Merry Christmas, Greta,” Alan said, smiling.

  “Thank God you’re out. Are you all right?” I turned to my son, who clung to his uncle. “Fee, go to your room for your nap. The adults are going to talk. Mrs. Green, would you . . . ?” She smiled, looking over the cast of characters, and shuffled my complaining son out of the room. Felix produced a cup for me. Alan rose to greet me properly, scratchy in his tweed suit. There were formal embraces and words. I wondered what to say, what to do, with these men, nervously holding their steaming cups, these men and their lives. I had a notion we should all just make a run for it.

  “Thank you for visiting me, it was the only fun I had,” Felix said. Ding, ding went the flagpole.

  “I never asked if they were feeding you,” I said.

  He took a drag from a cigarette and rubbed his eyes with his other hand. “I suppose it’s unpatriotic to say that if it’s going to be bread and water, German bread would be preferable. They thought I was a spy.”

  “You look terrible.”

  He managed a smile with his eyes closed. “Thanks, Greta. It wasn’t torture. It was me and Italians and lots of krauts. Now they, they were spies. But Alan got me out.”

  “We had a bit of luck,” Alan was saying. “And I’ve managed to get his record erased. I knew the police. I knew the judge.”

  “Thank you,” I said gravely. The loud voice of the wind was battling with the windows.

  Alan took a deep breath. He smoothed his short gray hair and said, “But we can’t erase his name in the paper.”

  A look of fear from Felix again.

  “You mean where you were found,” I said.

  Ding, ding went the flagpole in the silence. The windowpanes shook violently. Not one of us moved from our places, looking, searching each other.

  Alan broke the quiet: “We’ll think of something. Greta and I, we’ll take care of you.” He looked directly at Felix and I saw him put his other hand around his cup. Perhaps to stop himself from touching my brother, to comfort him. Surely he had done that already, on the way home from the prison. Gripping his hand under a coat where the driver could not see.

  I heard Mrs. Green discreetly coughing in the hallway to let us know she had reentered. Their gaze flew apart, and very soon Alan was saying his good-byes, back to the cordial businessman I knew. I tried to picture what he might be like in 1919, in his waistcoat and tails and pocket watch. The door clicked closed.

  “Ingrid is staying in Washington,” Felix told me, looking at the door. “With her father. It looks bad, that I was on a list. And what was in the paper.”

  “She took your son.”

  “I’ve lost my job,” he said, looking back at me with shadowed eyes.

  “Felix!”

  He puffed nervously on his cigarette. “They gave no reason. They don’t need to. No one will have me now.”

  “Felix,” I said, startling him by violently grabbing the arms of his chair. It was not an easy thing to do in that stiff dress. “Felix, you can’t live alone.”

  He leaned against his free hand, and blew his smoke into the air. “Greta. Alan was in the bar with me. He knows the police, but he couldn’t help me.”

  “Move in with me and Fee,” I said. “He needs a man around.”

  “I’m not a man!” he said, shouting now. “Didn’t you read the paper? I’m a sex criminal.”

  “It’s going to be all right.”

  “When is it going to be all right?” I said nothing as I stepped away from him. “I’m sorry, you shouldn’t have to see this. Or hear any of this. It must disgust you.”

  “I’m not who you think I am,” I told him.

  He looked up and I saw there a little spark of hope.

  “I told you before.”

  He swallowed and winced visibly at some thought I could not imagine. In a quieter voice, he asked, “When is it going to be all right? For someone like me?”

  Bright reflected sun came in the room, afternoon sun, hitting the chandelier and sending prismatic lights briefly around the room, across my brother’s face and body. I realized I had not yet seen a time. But you can’t tell a person
something like that. You can’t tell a person that you have seen many possible worlds, where people thrive or fail, but there is no world for him. In a moment, the beautiful effect was gone. At the front door, I heard Dr. Cerletti’s voice. Time for my procedure.

  “Move in with us,” was all I could say before Mrs. Green let the good doctor in.

  DECEMBER 24, 1985

  IT WAS CHRISTMAS EVE, AND I FOUND MYSELF ON THE ROOF with Ruth, wrapped in her old furs, passing a joint back and forth. Say what you will about the eighties, at least the pot was easier to come by. We were both in black, our faces red from weeping; we had just come from a funeral.

  “I can’t bear it,” Ruth said to the 1985 sky. “I think from now on I’m going only to wakes.”

  It was Alan who had died.

  His memorial service was held in the Metropolitan Temple and we listened to men between two gorgeous urns of roses speaking about his life. Gay funerals are always good for flowers. I had stopped going to funerals, and this was the first I had attended since Felix’s, almost a year before. I noticed a change, an awful change: Whereas in early services, the old friends of the dead gathered and spoke of memories, always of the man as young and strong and smiling and virile, these eulogies were now given by young men who had known the dead only briefly, six or seven months. Young men of twenty or twenty-one. There in their new beards, dressed in tight handsome suits, weeping endlessly. One thin boy stood up and sang a spiritual I knew well, “In the Garden,” in a high uneven voice with his eyes on the stained-glass image of an ever-burning lamp. Of course it was because these were the new friends, the only ones left alive: the young. Gathered around the grave of an older man they had so recently befriended. And would even they be taken by the fire? I could not bear it. With Alan’s young lover singing “In the Garden,” just as Alan had sung it for Felix. We quietly walked out of the service. There was nobody to disapprove; nobody knew us there.

  “Do you remember when we first met Alan?” Ruth asked me, pulling her head up high as she took a drag. The sky was hard and luminous as wax. Somewhere in it was the sun, but damned if I could tell you where. “Felix brought him to a brunch at my house. So big and handsome. He was wearing a wedding ring.”

  “That can’t be right,” I said, taking the roach from her. “He’d left his wife a year before.”

  “Maybe it was the line a wedding ring leaves behind.” She sighed. “Is it awful to admit now that I found him terribly sexy? I think I was envious of Felix.”

  “I remember how worried he looked. As if we might hate him, maybe because he was older. And all I was thinking was: ‘Oh thank God, at last.’”

  She put her hand on my arm and looked away. “You’re going to get me crying again.”

  I told her about a moment Felix described to me. They had been together only a few weeks, and were lying in bed one morning. And Alan started crying. And Felix said, What’s going on? What did I do to make you unhappy? And Alan, so careful with words. He just kept crying, turned away and didn’t say anything. That big man crying in bed in the morning. Felix asked him again, Why are you unhappy? And Alan just said, beginning to laugh through his tears, shaking his head: “I’m not unhappy.” The morning light on their shoulders. “I’m not unhappy.” And Felix knew what he meant.

  “He was terribly sexy,” Ruth said, and took a deep, sad breath. I saw she was crying again. “I miss them so much.”

  “I wish you could travel with me. And see them. It doesn’t make today any easier, though.”

  She gripped my arm tighter. “I miss you, too, Greta. It’s not easy for me, you changing all the time. You’re all I’ve got now.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, though I imagined Ruth might secretly enjoy her time with 1918 Greta, a new “project” for her to take on. If things went wrong, and we were trapped in the wrong worlds again, she might not be a bad companion for my aunt. I said, “There are only eight procedures left. Then it’ll be over.”

  “Tell me about Alan,” she said, sniffling. “Make me feel like he’s alive.”

  “Things are bad in nineteen forty-one. Felix just got out of prison, you know, but he lost his wife, his son. His job. I don’t understand it, I try to fix these worlds, and they’re full of traps. But at least he has Alan, in a way.”

  “Is he the same cowboy we knew?”

  I laughed. “Oh, he’s all business. No cowboy shirts! But I’ve seen them together. He’s . . . not unhappy. He’s not unhappy with Felix.”

  “What about that other world?”

  “I haven’t seen Alan there.” I leaned over and handed her the joint. “You know, it’s almost a year since Felix died. I’m having a memorial for him. I want to have it here on the roof.” She took the joint from me with a frown. “I invited Nathan.”

  “You talked to Nathan?”

  “I left a message on his machine,” I said, then added: “He has as much right to be there as anyone.”

  “I understand. You want to see him. Now that she’s seen him, the forties version of you. Don’t worry about her, she’s just trying to understand what went wrong. I don’t think she told him she’s not the woman he left. I don’t think she’d do that.” She pulled her fur closer about her and poked her chin out to take another toke.

  “I don’t know what I’d do if he came. I’d be so anxious. I don’t know what I’d say,” I said, then laughed: “I’m making people come dressed as Felix. That’s what he asked for.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” she pronounced in a long exhale of smoke. I managed to smile at the idea of this woman finding anyone else ridiculous.

  We sat there in silence for a very long time. Everywhere around us, smoke and steam trailed into the air: from cones on the streets, from chimneys, high towers, boats on the rivers. Layers of soot blue and gray. I had something to tell her.

  “She’s looking for Leo, you know,” Ruth began suddenly. “The nineteen eighteen Greta.”

  I nestled in my soft coat. “What do you mean?”

  “She went to the library, to the city directory, to look for a Leo Barrow. I was hopeless, that library is baffling to me. It breaks my heart to see her. I can hear her crying upstairs. I haven’t seen you so sad since Felix died.”

  “Leo was very, very sweet. And witty. So different from Nathan. I can see why she fell in love with him. It makes a difference to be someone’s first love.”

  “I’m curious to meet him. But she couldn’t find him. In any of the boroughs.”

  “He grew up in northern Massachusetts. He could still be there in this world. I wish she could find him, but what would I do with him later? I mean, when all this is over.”

  “It’s funny. You’re all the same, you’re all Greta. You’re all trying to make things better, whatever that means to you. For you, it’s Felix you want to save. For another, it’s Nathan. For this one, it’s Leo she wants to resurrect. I understand. Don’t we all have someone we’d like to save from the wreckage?”

  I looked down on the Village below us, the water towers like minarets rising from the taller buildings. The smoke and steam and lights beginning to come on in the gloom.

  I said, “I remember Alan carrying Felix into the ocean, both of them screaming their heads off.”

  “I remember Felix was so worried about moving in with him,” Ruth said. “Moving out of Patchin Place.”

  “I remember how Alan loved that awful mustache.”

  “I’m old,” she said, in a kind of defeat I did not recognize in her. “I’m supposed to lose my old friends. Why are the young ones dying?”

  Below, the cold city: leafless trees in the parks, and red brake lights all down the black-and-white avenues like a badly colorized movie. Somewhere a radio pounded music for street dancers, that new incomprehensible music of shouted rhymes. It was all drum, drum, drum. I had to tell her.

  “Ruth, I’m in terrible trouble.”

  “You mean with Nathan? I thought you fixed things. He left the girl, you said you thought it w
ould be different this time. I have faith.”

  “Not then. In nineteen eighteen.”

  “Your new Nathan. It’s the young man she loved, isn’t it? There is time to set things right.”

  Layers of soot blue and gray in the sky: a tarnished silver tray.

  “Ruth, I think she’s pregnant.”

  IT WAS DR. Cerletti who gave me the clue, on my last visit, though he did not realize it, preoccupied as he was with the circlet he crowned me with, the jarred lightning he put into my hands, the blue spark from my finger. Usually, he told me, I convulsed in an upright position. This time, however, I fainted. When I came to, I was lying on the bed with my wrist in his hand.

  “How are you feeling? Is something different today?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How are your female issues?” he asked quietly.

  Then it occurred to me. I had missed a month at the beginning of the treatment, but my cycle had seemed to reset itself. It was hard, with everything else, to keep track of when my period was expected in all of these worlds. But every woman knows. Fainting, hunger, my sore breasts. I knew at that moment, lying in my canopy bed with the doctor’s face wrinkled in concern. I knew. I could sense it.

  “Normal,” I said. “Everything is normal.”

  He looked deeply at me for a moment. Then he smiled, uncrowned me, and closed his little wooden box. He told me to rest for a while, and then left me alone in the afternoon light.

  A child. Not just borrowed Fee, racing my shoes around the living room carpet, but a child in my body. I was like Cerletti’s magic jar, sitting in my box of green velvet: latent, quiet, but charged with something that would change my world. And in eight months, there would come the spark.

  For it was not that night with Nathan a week before that started this, but a night a month before in moonlit Massachusetts. What would happen when I gave birth not in nine months but in eight? Or even a few weeks from now, when I would show far earlier than a good wife should? And when the child came out looking very little like a certain Dr. Michelson, and with large brown eyes . . .