The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

by Andrew Sean Greer

  I stood up, dizzy, and went to find Ruth. I told her, and she took my hands and asked me hard questions. Then she gave me an address on the Lower East Side. “I know women who have saved their marriages there,” she told me. It was dark, but hours before Nathan would be home. I dressed myself in a long cloak and went out into the rainy night.

  It was a nightmare scene: skeletal horses sat with feed bags over their noses, patted by skeletal owners who watched me stepping over cobblestones in my silk skirts. I wore a veil, to keep my anonymity, but still, a woman unchaperoned must have been a strange sight at that time of night. Perhaps they took me for a streetwalker. I came to the door and saw just a stained-glass oval and a knocker shaped like a lily. From within, I could hear a woman talking. At first I thought it was someone on the telephone, but then I heard a slight whimpering. A light beside me came on; the window was heavily shaded. From there, I heard the sound of retching. The woman’s voice grew stern. Suddenly there was a boy beside me: “Lady, got a penny? Got a penny?” He said it mechanically, as if a penny would set him in motion for my entertainment. Grubby and torn, grimacing with need. He knew so much more than I did about what happened behind that door. “Here, go away, go away,” I said, handing him whatever change I found in my little purse. I felt a light rain beginning, and thought how it would never clean this place. A ragged little hansom was coming by, and without thinking I hailed it and climbed inside. I told the driver Patchin Place, and realized I was shouting. Off we went as the rain grew gray and luxurious. I did not go to that place again.

  I did not tell Nathan.

  DECEMBER 26, 1918

  I RETURNED TO 1918 AND, AS MILLIE AND I CLEANED THE house, I knew I had to decide what to do. For one version of me, after the lightning had stopped, would end up here, with a child. One of us would have to explain it to her husband. When I sent Millie out shopping, I stood before the mirror and felt my belly and my breasts. I was not showing yet; I had time. There were ways to make things all right. It was only the difference of a month, these things were hard to tell. Leo was dead; there was no point in Nathan knowing anything about him. I had not considered, however, that this Village was a smaller town than the one I had come from. And, in small towns, there are no secrets.

  When Nathan came home from the clinic, I heard the sound of two men in the hall instead of one. Jangling keys, unsteady footsteps, low laughter; I surmised he had brought a tipsy buddy home.

  “Greta!” came my husband’s drunken voice. To see him try his crooked smile, to see him anything other than shaking with grief and memory, what a joy it was. Even with the whiskey so strong on his breath. Beside him, a little walrus of a man in a beaver-fur hat. He kissed my hand. “Greta, you remember Dr. Ingall.” I said of course I did, and retired to the kitchen where my chicken à la king was waiting.

  I could see it was a comfort to Nathan to be in the company of men once more and not just me and Millie and Ruth, chattering away while his skull ached with metal shards and memories. We talked about Nathan’s plans, and my brother’s wedding coming up in two weeks. Perhaps it was the drink, or my feminine presence, that made Dr. Ingall so at home that, without meaning to, he set off a little dynamite in our dining room.

  He was thanking Nathan for his service, admiring him, explaining how his own bad leg had kept him from helping the men overseas. It was then he mentioned a notion I had read about in the paper: that our soldiers were, in fact, returning to their daily life, better than before. That was the phrase everybody used: “better than before.” Dr. Ingall’s lips were glistening with butter when he dropped his theory into our conversation as one does when speaking of a political opinion you assume everybody shares, simply because your world is as small, for instance, as the West Village.

  “I think I don’t understand how my men are better than before,” Nathan said in a friendly way. His hand was always at his chin, touching his new beard.

  “Oh, I’m sure you would know, Nathan,” the man said, bowing his head. “But surely they have seen bravery that we could never experience. Wounded comrades who insisted their friends get help before accepting treatment. Selflessness and sacrifice. Things they never would have known. The best of the human spirit.”

  “I suppose that’s true.”

  “And,” the man said, emboldened by Nathan’s words and by drink, “I’ve heard there’s nothing brash or boastful about a man who’s actually been on the front lines. That they’re gentle and humble and kind. Not what we think of as a soldier, but what we want in a man.”

  Nathan’s own spirit seemed to mirror this. He said, “Yes, that’s so.”

  “So they will return to their lives, and leave the war behind. It will have touched them but not changed them.”

  “You are so right. But I wonder about Henry Bitter.”

  “Who’s that? Don’t know the name.”

  “No, no,” Nathan said, putting down his fork and looking away from us and out the window, where city lights shone. “When we debarked at Grand Central Station, they took us to a midtown hotel and we were showered, and deloused with kerosene, and our throat cultures taken for diphtheria. They gave us socks, pajamas, slippers, and a handkerchief. There was a boy next to me who couldn’t hold his handkerchief, so I put it in his pajama pocket. He had a wide smile. He was from Dubuque, Iowa. Both his hands had been blown off by a grenade, and he was blind. That didn’t worry him. He was worried about how to break the news to his family; he hoped they wouldn’t learn through the newspaper. So I got the Red Cross girl to take a message that he dictated and I wrote it down. I remember it perfectly.” Then his eyes were on us again. “Would you like to hear it?”

  There was no possible answer to that.

  “It said, ‘Arrived safely in New York. Feeling fine. Met with accident in Divisional School November sixteenth. Both hands amputated. Eyes affected. Undergoing treatment. Tell Donna I’ll understand if she won’t have me. Tell me how all you are doing. Henry.’”

  “Ah,” said the doctor friend.

  “‘Feeling fine.’ ‘Eyes affected,’” Nathan repeated firmly. “‘Tell me how all you are doing. Henry.’”

  “That’s a sad lot. And a gentle thought for others.”

  “It is.”

  “And so?”

  I looked at my husband, that stranger, full of the strength and fury I remembered so well from our early days, when he would pound a table with philosophy and politics, whose studies got him out of Vietnam. I looked at this man, who did not escape war, saying: “And so tell me, how exactly is Henry Bitter from Dubuque, Iowa, better than before?”

  AFTER DR. INGALL left, we moved to the living room as Millie did the dishes. We could hear a little Irish tune coming from the doorway, and the fumble of china and glass in the sink. We drank soda water from a chain-mail siphon; it would never have occurred to him to share his whiskey with me. Nathan took the siphon again to force the water into his glass and, without turning, he said to me, “I heard you had a friend who died.”

  The song went on from the other room and there was something in its lyrics about a lass and a lad.

  “Who do you mean?”

  “An actor friend.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It was very sad.”

  A hive of bees loose in my brain. How did he find out? Millie, surely. A maid can be paid for anything. How much did he know, how much did the other Greta let Millie see? I thought of a night of booze and celebration, Ruth at my door, a parrot on her shoulder. I sighed and looked up at Nathan. He held out the siphon for me. I’m sure he could not control the violence of it shooting loudly into my glass; it was the nature of it, but a little terror went through me.

  Nathan’s whiskered face was as calm as when he talked about his patients. “Were you there when he died?”

  I found myself adjusting my skirts, just to make a little noise. “No, you know it all happens so fast. I heard about it days later.”

  Nathan sat back in his chair and sipped his drink. He watched m
e without any emotion in his eyes.

  I went on: “It’s nothing compared to what you’ve been through.”

  “Yes,” he said, with the glass in his hand.

  And I will never forget what I saw there in his face, just before he stood up to get ready for bed. Something I did not recognize. Was it something that war had hammered into him, and loss, and the heat and pressure of this time we lived in? Or was this the difference among my Nathans? Before he left the room, something bright shone in his eye. I thought at first it was the aftershock of war, but now I know it was not. It was an aspect only solitude and hunger and pride can force out of men, even the best of men, as Nathan was, in his way. It had always been dormant in the Nathan I’d known, a smaller part of him. But here: bright in his eye like the gleam of a gold tooth. It was pure pain.

  DECEMBER 27, 1941

  I AWOKE TO THE CHIMING SOUNDS OF 1941 QUITE SHAKEN BY the events of the previous evening, and talking with Mrs. Green about my husband’s upcoming visit, I tried to separate the man who showed his pain from the man returning home. They were different men, in different worlds. And yet, somehow, just as a new lover can unwittingly summon up the hurt done by another—with careless words or gestures—I blamed each Nathan for the crimes the others committed. I had always said my Nathan was kind but could be cold when angered. It had not occurred to me that worlds could separate him: into a kind Nathan, in 1941, whose passionate mistakes could not disguise his love for me, and a cold Nathan, in 1918, whose own affair was a mirror to his jealous rage. Each had harmed me in degrees; each loved and quarreled with me in different portions, and yet, in my mind, they were all one man. They were still the Nathan I loved.

  Of course, by that logic, I should be all one woman. The one who had forgotten him in my brother’s dying; the one who was all mother and no wife; the one who carried another man’s child. I had committed only one of these crimes. And yet, by this thinking, I should have been tried for them all—like conspirators who all hang together.

  Nathan was still processing soldiers at Fort Dix, and they were letting him come home for one night to say good-bye before leaving for Europe. His visit was still a week away, and Fee and his uncle X were readying the house for his arrival—for Felix had indeed moved in with us, onto a little couch Mrs. Green had carried into Fee’s room. The visit happened to coincide with my and Felix’s birthday and so it took on the aspect less of the homecoming of a weary army doctor than of a springtime party. The kitchen smelled of failed attempts at cakes and cookies until Mrs. Green, monitor of our ration book, put a stop to it and announced that she would make the celebratory food. After that, the Felixes were left only to decorate themselves, and secretly plotted in their room with Mrs. Green’s sewing machine humming, the door posted NO TRESPASING! FELIXES ONLY! (BY ORDER HOME DEFENSE). I stayed away except to correct the spelling with a curve of lipstick, and in there I could hear them giggling away.

  I checked my appointment book and saw a note at six fifteen: Every day at six fifteen, the 33rd Street bridge. What could it possibly mean?

  Alan’s absence from our merry midwinter scene alarmed me, as if his death in 1986 had somehow carried through to the other worlds. It turned out, as Felix whispered hurriedly before dinner, that Alan was on the West Coast for business, and would be all week. Not back in time for the wedding? I thought, and then of course remembered that there was no wedding, not here, not for my twin brother perched on a ladder to tack the letters H-O-M-E to the ceiling. Instead, his wife was filing for divorce, and taking the newborn son with her to D.C. for good. “Good,” I had said, then immediately saw my brother’s fallen face. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said, touching his arm. “I’m so sorry, your son.” He smiled ruefully. “You’ll see him again,” I said, and by saying it I felt I had cursed it never to happen. In those times, we both knew, sons went to the mothers. And were rarely seen again.

  But it was Alan I mourned for.

  What is it, the missing of people? It kills, and kills, and kills us. We think back on a weekend at the beach, and cooking lobsters and splitting their shells, and making margaritas with lemons instead of limes and the car breaking down, walking all the way back down the sandy road to find a house with a phone, laughing and laughing in the drunken heat of the afternoon—a wonderful time, one of the best times!—and think, “Where are they all now, all my young friends?” Dead, of course; and the memory changes. It deepens and alters and grows happier and sadder all at once, but why should it? We were happy then, they were happy; shouldn’t the moment be set? Yet it is not; every moment is changeable. How strange, for the present to change the past! In just this way, I lived in these worlds knowing something like the future: a sense of how things could be. Isn’t this the time traveler’s curse? I did not see what was to come, but I saw the possibilities. And the pain of seeing life and happiness in people I knew to be dead in other times, it was like that sad sense of the past, when the glass warps how we perceive things. I could not ever be there with them, truly. Because I was both seeing them, and remembering them. Alan with his lawyer’s voice; Alan telling his donkey story. Alan in his business suit beside three phones; Alan in his swimsuit, carrying a screaming Felix into the sea; Alan in an urn. The possibilities. Is there any greater pain to know what could be, and yet be powerless to make it be?

  Every day at six fifteen, the 33rd Street bridge. I slipped away from home. I had to follow it, had to know.

  I got out at Times Square and was thrown into a mass of sailors in their winter coats and whites, faces burned red from the Atlantic sun, walking tipsily either from a day of drinking or from so many months at sea. They shouted at every passing girl, and a few gave me long leering looks. I pulled my seal jacket around me and flashed my ring; it did no good; I suppose they had heard about married ladies. I suppose that they were right. I headed west and knew it was a poor decision as soon as I passed Eighth; I didn’t know what it was like in 1941, but in my time it was Hell’s Kitchen, built along the train tracks and full of derelicts, addicts, and whores. The streets smelled, unmistakably, of bread and sugar and ginger: a nearby cookie factory. I felt conspicuous in my jacket, my jewelry, my doctor’s wife’s hairdo and dress and shoes. In my old life, I would have taken a New York stride and held my head high. In 1919, I would have been hauled off the street. Here, I did not know what would become of me. But I hurried to the Thirties, to where a small iron bridge rose over the train tracks, then back to the avenues. I climbed the stairs to the top.

  And here I stood, waiting. It was nearly six fifteen. I looked across the bridge—how did I not expect the obvious?

  At first just the silhouette of cap and scarf against the lights, among the few others crossing the bridge or loitering there. But I knew instantly who it was. Head high and confident, arms wrapped around himself against the cold. Another world, another Leo. My child’s father, returned from the dead.

  THERE LEO STOOD, in a gabardine jacket and bright red scarf, the same shaved and polished face, smiling as widely as ever. As if simply existing was no great miracle. My heels made a clanging noise as I made my way to the middle of the bridge, hung with railroad lanterns that glowed in the wet air. Servicemen were gathered at the curved railing, a few wandering navy boys, and Leo. I stopped at a distance, watching his head move back and forth as he took in the scene around him. A hand went to his hair to smooth it down; I knew no gesture could ever tame it. I had gone and seen his fresh grave carved with the twenty-five years of his life. And yet, there he stood.

  The soldiers were gathered nearby, making a great deal of noise, so he left his post and began to walk toward me; my pulse quickened immediately. He was still in shadow and then passed into the light and I saw the face I had last known in a coldwater flat, hung with clothes glowing like lanterns. Wide handsome face, his chin already blue with a new beard, large brown eyes, long lashes gold in the bridge lights. He walked on, and I saw in this world that he had no limp to hide, no dance when his lame leg tripped him.r />
  He thrust his hands in his pockets and grinned, looking around him, and then he looked right at me.

  He nodded, and walked on by.

  Just that look: appraising, with the flutter of a smile, the way young men look at dozens of women every day. Just that look and nothing else. I watched him as he went by. So we were strangers in this world.

  He took his place against the railing again, looking south as the soldiers bickered grandly from the other end of the bridge. Waiting for something, but not waiting for me. The boy who surely grew up here and not up north, a poor boy from Hell’s Kitchen. The Greta of 1918 must have learned his rituals, and knew he came here every night at six fifteen, as the others had, to witness something that had nothing to do with Mrs. Nathan Michelson.

  I felt how much she missed him.

  I READ IN her diary how their time in the cabin ended:

  Greta and Leo had gone on a walk in the woods he knew so well, where he stopped and showed her where, hidden in the trees, a few boards were nailed to the trunk of an old bare oak—nothing more—the last remains of a hideout from his youth. He stood for a long time in memory before the scene. It was colder without the falling snow, and her fur did not warm her enough, but she bore it. It was, after all, the last day, and she would not turn back, knowing it would be their final walk together in that place. She thought Leo was lost in childhood; instead, she realized he must have been building up the will to ask her.

  “Should I fight for you?”

  She did not think about it more than an instant. Shivering in her fur, feeling the cold like an ice coat beneath her own coat, working its way up against her skin. She found herself saying, “No. Don’t fight for me.”

  But who on earth would say no? Who on earth would not long to be fought for? Is this not the very heart of human existence, to be worth fighting for, worth losing everything for? That was surely what Leo proposed. But no, she said. No, don’t fight for me. She horrified herself by saying it so plainly. But it was what she had to say, to save him from a deeper heartbreak. Now it was done. Now she would bear the pain for both of them, probably for always, and he would go and have a life without her.