JANUARY 9, 1942
I CAN SO EASILY IMAGINE THAT SCENE IN 1919: MY HUSBAND standing with his suitcase in the hall, staring at me across the long distance that separated us. I see myself at the bedroom door, all in hyacinth silk. The war scar white in his beard the only change in the face I knew so well, a face that in another scene of leaving had looked at me from a car window. In another world, it all might have gone differently. Pocket watch in his pocket, a crease of pain in the corner of each eye. Once again, the flash of light on his glasses might be the last I ever saw of him.
In another world, he would have tried to say the right thing. Even with love lying dead on the operating table, yet still the right thing might bring it back to life. But who has ever found the right thing to say? Who, in the history of love, has ever found it, and said it perfectly to the woman standing there? In another world, he might have come close. But my Nathan, in 1919, was too battle worn and proud to say he was sorry again. I imagine all he said was, “Good-bye.”
For I was not there, and can only imagine it. It was the midcentury Greta he said it to, who might have begged him to stay had she not loved a better version of that man. And I was in her life, the one who stood outside the door in 1942 at Patchin Place, with my son, weathering the cold in our hats and mittens, watching the iron gate for half an hour before—at last!—a shape in an army coat and duffel came and undid the latch and stepped into our little cobbled road and I let my son free to run to him. I watched the clean-shaven man drop the duffel and pick up the boy, shouting ridiculous nonsense before he turned to grin at me. You, Nathan, all over again. My husband home from war.
THERE ALMOST HAS to be a heaven, so there can be a place where all things meet. Where time folds in, a lifted tablecloth after the meal, and gathers all the scattered crumbs of life. A son and a brother, a husband, all sitting by the coal fire while from another room comes the scent of Mrs. Green making split-pea soup, a smell so rich it is almost as if we are eating it. Nathan costumed in drab, creased and pinned and necktied with his glasses sitting a handbreadth above his smile. The sagging sign above him done in silver, WELCOME HOME DADDY, and his son misbehaving wildly, almost delirious with joy, his collar now firmly in his father’s grip, a wife amazed to see him alive again, no hatred anywhere, nothing but the grand relief of being home and shouldn’t there be a dog here with its head on his polished shoe? Shouldn’t there be a grandmother knitting scarves from reused yarn? Shouldn’t there be a white-frosted cake—oh there it is! HAPPY BIRTHDAY, TWINS.
“Looks like it’s England for me, though that could change any minute,” Nathan was saying, one cheek glowing red from the warmth of the fireplace, the creases white around his eye. “Guess I’ll have to learn the language.” With a wink.
What a different man from the one I had left in 1919. He stroked his son’s fine hair and smiled and told us stories of bad food and bad behavior, the underfed Okie boys who showed up more Adam’s apple than soldier, and the funny old lady who sang to them from her fire escape as the soldiers stepped out of Grand Central. “Over There” was what she sang. As he talked, and petted Fee, he looked across the room and smiled at me and, as the poet said, that smile would make a stone love.
Felix, beside me, leaned over and whispered: “Happy birthday, Sis, I have something to show you.” He bent his head to the right. There, in those red hairs, only an expert could have picked out the weeds of white. He turned back and his mouth gaped in alarm. “Old! We’re getting old!” I told him that was nothing; my hairdresser had been plucking mine out for years, and I kept the smile on my face as it occurred to me that this Felix was changing, aging as I watched. The brother I remembered had never seen a wrinkle, never known a gray hair. This Felix, along with me, would have to grow old. How I wished I could stay to see it. For there were only four procedures left.
DOWNSTAIRS, THE NEXT day, making the beds after Cerletti had given me my procedure, I felt as if I was closing up a house for the summer, closing up a life. Everything was cycling one last time, three more shocks after this, which meant I would return to this world one more time before taking my final dose. I knew that each object I touched might be the last I would ever see of it. The people as well. But how do you say good-bye to someone who does not know it is good-bye, will never know? To stand with Mrs. Green and fold a quilt with her, approaching close enough to her at last to smell the nutmeg and cigarette in her hair, how could I tell her: You were my only friend in this age? To wonder, if I looked for her in my modern time, would I find her anywhere at all? Would she be back in Sweden, or France? Would she even be alive?
“Mrs. Green,” I said, turning to her as she picked up a pair of Fee’s knickers to mend, “what is your given name?”
She did not look up, but kept sewing her maidenly stitches, so small and perfect even without the use of the machine, which was being repaired. “Karin,” she replied.
“And what happened to your husband?”
The room waited for four, five, six stitches before she said, “I never had a husband, madam.” She looked up at me but nothing was furrowed or marked on her face at all. She simply added: “I found it easier to say so, long ago.”
I went through all the possible stories in my mind, as one does at moments like this, when a human being one has known breaks the bonds of expectation, expands almost infinitely beyond them, then contracts again into the small woman in the parlor, making stitches with a thread not quite the right color. We are so much more than we assume.
“I will still call you Mrs. Green, if you don’t mind.”
“As you wish, madam,” she said, nodding and going back to the knickers, adding only, and this time more quietly: “Yes. Thank you.” Then: “Your brother took Felix out to the toy store and your husband had to stop by the clinic. It might be a good time to take a lie-down.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you,” and I said it the second time as one double-ties a knot, to ensure that it will stay.
THAT NIGHT, HIS last before he left for England, Nathan removed my cast. “You’re married to a doctor, after all,” he said. “And it’s time to come off.”
Sitting beside me, he began at my elbow: I felt the cold metal of the shears against my skin. The rasp of his gentle cutting was the only sound in the room. Only once did the shears grab at my skin, causing me to gasp, and he stopped, took my hand, and paused for a moment.
As I sat and watched him, and felt him with those shears so close to my tender skin, I wanted to ask, How often do you think of her? With his gaze so intent on his work, wiping bits of plaster from his cheek where they had stuck. How often do you mistake someone on the street for her, and your heart starts pounding? The silver circles the light made in his military hair. But must we always ask those things? Does it always bring us closer? Or was this itself the closeness: the prick of the shears, the careful adjustment, the tear of the plaster, the trust and concentration? There, haloed in the light, biting his lip and changing his position so as not to hurt me if he could avoid it. My blood beating so close to the sharp metal. Was this the marriage? To hold still, to do our best.
Only when he reached my thumb, and with a great crack was able to tear the whole thing loose, did he place my naked arm on a fresh towel and begin to clean it with a sponge. I flexed my fingers, amazed. As if it were not my arm at all. I looked up at my husband, who sat flushed and beaming at his work. “There,” he said. “As good as new.”
And on the walk we took, later, around the old neighborhood, something came into my head and I took his hand in my now unbroken one, thrilling at the freedom and lightness of my new arm. “Wait,” I said. “Come here. I want to see something.”
“Well, what’s this?” he said, looking amused.
“I just want to see.” I pulled him along with me toward the arch, now with its statues complete. There was a couple beneath it saying a prolonged good-bye. I walked to the side and saw, there, just what I had hoped for. The same white stone. “I wonder . . . ,”
I said, and picked it up. And it was there.
I turned to him, laughing, the key in my hand.
Only in brief flashes does it come to us that we may never see someone again. It is an absurd thought; a car crash or heart attack or rare disease may take anyone, and the last may be that matinee you sneaked to together, or the tipsy lunch, or the silly phone argument that one more meeting would dilute; equally, the melodramatic moments in hospitals and airports and apartment doorways are no assurance of an ending. They are just the preparation for one. And it is doubly true with lovers, for with them it is not just the person who might vanish, but the beating heart itself. With people, the end is rarely in our minds; it takes a man with a scythe to remind us. With lovers, though, the end is always there. It is a death as certain as the real death, and those of us in love, as at the bedside, begin to prepare ourselves. We might say it isn’t working, or I can’t give you what you need, and yet a day later there he is in your arms, and who can help it? There is the good-bye, and the good-bye, and the good-bye, and which will stick? Who can ever say, this is the last? Only one is true, but all of them feel true, and the tears we shed are equal every time.
“Nobody comes up here,” I said to Nathan as he looked at me in amazement. “Nobody even knows it exists.”
JANUARY 15, 1986
ONLY TWO PROCEDURES LEFT AFTER THIS ONE. HOW DOES it end? I lay on Cerletti’s table, letting the electricity trickle out of me. Tomorrow I would be in 1919, then a week later in 1942, and there would be one last bolt of lightning before I awakened, at last, back home. We would all be home, for good. What would I do in mine, with Felix gone again? How would I talk to Nathan, now that another Greta had put us in touch? Was anything better than it had been before? Well, each world was changed. Each one worth loving. But did we still each love our own?
I smiled at my doctor. Tomorrow, Felix’s wedding. But today: Felix’s memorial.
Ruth had warned me no one would come dressed as Felix, but what an assortment came to my house that day! Felix in the awful plaid shirt Alan threw out long ago. Felix in a swimsuit and tank top and towel. Felix in a Cub Scout uniform. As a cowboy, on our last Halloween. And in the white linen shirt he wore at their “wedding.” And with his arm in a cast that time he fell off his bicycle. There they all were, dressed as Felix, drinking from my plastic cups and looking at the spread of photographs that covered my dining room table.
Even Ruth had been unable to resist, in her way; she wore a long white beaded gown. She explained with irritation: “Oh, I’m sure he wore this at some point. He was always borrowing my clothes.” Then she turned to a black man in tennis whites and asked if the plural was Felixes or Felices? “You know,” she said, “like dominatrices?”
In the mail, among the condolence cards, a simple letter. Why did I recognize the handwriting?
Ms. Wells,
Thank you for your interest in my father’s property in Massachusetts. Feel free to give a call and come up anytime, I’m always around. There is a regular train. I look forward to meeting you.
Leo Barrow
Here, again, in honor of my brother: the dead brought back to life. I stared at the signature and thought, Greta, you devil, what the hell are you up to?
I found a knife and dinged it against an empty glass, and watched the whole crowd turn to look at me. In blond wigs or baseball caps or towels done up as turbans. “Thank you all for coming!” I shouted as the talking faded away. “Thank you! It was a year ago today we lost my brother. He was a ridiculous person. He was the kind of person who insisted on a costume party, no matter the occasion!” A laugh from the crowd. “Thank you for indulging him. He loved life, he hated to leave it. He would tell you, ‘I understood nothing . . .’”
LATER, AS THE wine warmed the crowd, people changed out of costumes and became more comfortable. It was the closest approach of Halley’s comet since its last time around, almost eighty years before, at the time of Mark Twain’s death, and even New Yorkers were curious. We moved some chairs, and brought up blankets from Ruth’s flat, but it was bitterly cold up there and the blankets went only so far. People found their coats and hats and scarves. Despite the cold, or perhaps because of it, there was a jolly camp-out air to things and one man had found my barbecue and a broken wooden crate and created a bonfire in miniature. I was not feeling well; I assumed it was the wine.
And then I heard Ruth whisper in my ear: “Darling, he’s come.” I turned around to the skyline: indigo New York against lavender New Jersey. And a silhouetted man cautiously approaching.
“Hello, Nathan.”
“AND SO,” HE said, after we had embraced and stood a foot apart again with our glasses of punch.
“And so,” I said, smiling.
Taller, somehow, than he had been lying in his sickbed reaching for me. Taller, brighter, stronger; he had not suffered as that other Nathan had suffered; he had not heard stories of death in submarines, or trenches. My Nathan, calm and kind and tough as ever, bearded and bespectacled in a brown jacket and plaid shirt, a scarf printed with frogs that his new wife must have given him. As a costume, he held a little birdcage with a stuffed canary. Felix and his bird. He had the wary expression of a man who has been called to a meeting whose purpose he has not yet been informed of, and I thought that perhaps we might start instantly on the conversation that was loading itself up within our heads, cocking, aiming—when he stood sideways and put the safety back on, so to speak, by remarking very blandly: “I have missed your aunt.” I set myself sideways as well, and the old foolish lover in me knew him well enough to know he meant what he said, and yet could not help imagining that he was really saying he missed me.
“Don’t tell me you missed Ruth!”
He shrugged. “Yes, I even missed your crazy aunt Ruth.”
“She doesn’t miss you,” I said, trying to tease this out. “She says you always broke things.”
“I don’t have anyone in my life as interesting as Ruth anymore,” he said. “I remember that summer she came to Alan’s house and gave us each a bottle of Incest Repellent.” Grinning, hands in his pockets, shaking his head. “Incest Repellent!”
I laughed. “You got used to her.”
So this was why. Here, a moment like this. Laughing and comfortable with each other. The sensation like wandering lost in streets and alleys late at night, down passages that seem farther and farther from your destination, until at last you turn a corner and see the green wooden fence you know so well, and think, with great relief: I’m home!
There he was before me: the real Nathan. Of course no more real than any of the others, no more original, but this transport back to a world I knew could not persuade me of it. Because this was the man I loved. That old gesture, checking his breast pocket for his wallet. This was the man I loved, not any other. Yet even still, something had changed forever. Not that I didn’t love him as always, and still felt the reverberations of our embrace as a gong shivers for an hour after it has made its bellow. But that, after everything I’d seen and done, I knew. That even with the spider of old love remaking its broken web between us, here on the roof. Even with his eyes looking into mine. Even so—that I would never have him back.
“Well, I will be careful with her punch this time. You look well, Greta,” he said. It was the thing a lover says to the woman he left long ago. Meaning: You look like you are no longer in pain. We moved an inch apart.
“I’ve had a wild ride this year,” I told him, laughing.
He smiled, again warily, unsure if the joke was on him. I touched his chest: “No, no,” I said. “No, no, Nathan, not because of you. It’s something . . . I can’t explain it to you. I’ve seen myself from all sides.”
“That’s a rare thing to do.”
“I’ve seen you, too. I understand things, I think.” What I wanted to say was: I understand that it wasn’t that you didn’t want to be with me anymore, but you didn’t want to be yourself anymore, the one you were with me. But all I said was: “Yo
u look well, too.”
And it seemed as if that might be all. We smiled our kind smiles, and he touched my cheek, I’m sure because it felt safe to do so. Now that the danger had passed. There were shouts at the edge of the roof—Aunt Ruth with her hand to the telescope as if to a lorgnette—and we looked. Pinpoint stars and the little brushstroke of the comet hanging there. Come around again.
And suddenly I turned to him and said: “Nathan, there’s nothing to lose, so I’m going to say everything. I never thought before how unlikely it was. With all the possible ways it could have gone. To have what we did, at least. Ten years.”
He had nothing to say to that, perhaps not wanting to stop me, perhaps also not wanting to encourage me. I reached out and put my hand on his shoulder and then, impulsively, I kissed him lightly on the mouth. I felt his tense worried lips, dry from the cold, and smelled, extraordinarily, the pipe-smoke scent I knew from another world, and the soapy odor from another, and beneath it all the unchanging Nathan I had held in every world but this one. I pulled back and squeezed his shoulder.
I smiled and said, “Who else has been so lucky for so long?”
Those separate men, the different men he was, in different worlds. Perhaps it’s because I knew Nathan so well, and knew his moods; of him thinking beside me: so quiet! Of him silencing the alarm so I could sleep another hour: so kind! Of him reading some infuriating news in the paper: so angry! I could roll them all into one ball and put it in my brain as one person. Even before my travels, I had met and lived with these different men: the quiet one, the kind one, the angry one. Just as Nathan had lived with those same men himself. For others are not the only ones forced to face our other selves; above all, we must face them. On my last visit to 1942, Felix showed me a photograph of the two of us. It had been taken the week before. And while I knew it was not me, I could not tell which one it was. Perhaps one day they will invent a camera to capture the fleeting self—not the soul, but the self—and we can truly see which one we were, on any particular day, and mark the shifting lives we lead that we pretend belong to one person alone. Why is it so impossible to believe: that we are as many headed as monsters, as many armed as gods, as many hearted as the angels?
The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells Page 19