The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

by Andrew Sean Greer

  JANUARY 16, 1919

  WHAT A BEAUTIFUL DAY FOR A WEDDING. MORNING HAD awakened like a girl in a tantrum who will wear nothing but her party dress, and an unseasonal warmth spread over things, leaving darkened stains where ice had coated the sidewalks, baffling old ladies who handed their minks to their maids. Gray-coated crowds filed into the Metropolitan Temple, and one could enjoy the variety of ladies’ hats and men’s top hats, one of which belonged to the famed senator about to lose his daughter. And one young woman, all in lilac silk, standing on the steps, arms crossed, staring up at the church.

  For it stunned me, standing there, in the church, beside the groom’s door, that no one had stepped forward to stop this wedding. Neither of my other selves, not the free-love Greta nor the mothering one, had said a word. Two-thirds of me had chosen silence. Even Ruth had done nothing. It was a new kind of madness to think that I alone knew how unhappy this new bride would be, the stifling pact that would be made within that church, all with the sun cruelly shining. It had happened before; my brother had married this same woman, and had a child with her, and had he not been German it would all have been handled as it had been before: with money, connections, and a father-in-law’s stern words behind closed doors. Yet somehow this was what everybody wanted. Families, Ingrid, even Felix himself. Was I the only one who wanted something else?

  And I pictured him: Just behind this door, my brother in his fastidious suit, staring at the mirror. Taking a jolt of whiskey, adjusting his boutonniere, and grinning at his bachelor self, about to vanish at a word from the magician at the altar.

  Do we have the right to ruin others’ lives? It seems so easy to believe that if we swooped in like an angel, we would not hesitate to change things: tell the secrets, right the wrongs, and bring lovers together. But I could not promise happiness to Felix. I could not say, Oh, give up your life, there are men waiting everywhere to love you! You won’t be blackmailed or robbed or killed for what you are! Even his faithful Alan could not bear the burden, here. At least, in a wife, he would have a companion. A son, as before. Someone on whom he could project his hopes, so that one day there would be a version of him whose life went right. For, as I stood before that white-painted door and thought of ruining everything, I knew that not all lives are equal, that the time we live in affects the person we are, more than I had ever thought. Some have a harder chance. Some get no chance at all. With great sadness, I saw so many people born in the wrong time to be happy.

  The ushers were pushing people to their seats, and already one was walking down the hall to summon the groom. A young man in a curled mustache and dove gray suit, he smiled at me and tipped his hat. He said something else to me, but I was already back outside the church, hearing the organ sounds bleating from within, watching the unusual weather awakening the city as if from a deep sleep. Grimly I crumpled the program in my fist. I was feeling ill, anyway. So I was already outside the church and on the street when the gunshot rang out.

  IT WAS ONLY when I ran home that my heart stopped beating out of my chest. For there he was, sitting on the floor and staring at the fire. My brother. Again: alive.

  “I got the gun from a soldier,” he told me.

  The ushers had burst through the door to find the groom’s quarters empty: just a mirror shattered by a bullet, and a window thrown wide open to the day. In the mud below: the distinct boot prints of a man who had made his choice.

  I looked cautiously around the room, searching for the weapon. He looked so thin, and with his gaunt pink face, his mustache, his unruly hair, at last I saw my dead beloved brother before me. He said, “I had it sitting on the little dressing table. And I thought, it would be so easy.” He spoke in the low drone of a teacher taking roll, his eyes fixed wide on the flames. He did not seem to be aware of me at all, he was so numbed by what had happened. “It would be so easy.”

  “Thank God you’re here,” I said quietly, my eyes looking everywhere around the room. Light fell in a long perfect diamond across my brother’s body, like a coverlet, patterned with the shadows of branches. “Felix, where did you put that gun?”

  “I wasn’t afraid,” he said. A lock of his red hair had fallen and caught in his eyebrow, but he did not shake his head to release it. “I liked the idea of everyone hearing the gunshot. I especially liked the idea of the senator hearing it. Isn’t that crazy?”

  “Felix, where’s the gun?”

  “I’m not myself these days. Isn’t that what you told me once?” He took a deep breath. “It’s in the church. I left it there.”

  I sighed with some relief. I looked around for water; I could feel a headache, and a flash of vertigo overcame me, forcing me to sit in a chair. I was not feeling well at all. The sound of a police van clanged along West Tenth, and with it the noise of young boys running after it.

  “I met him in September. And he left me in December,” he said plainly to the fire. “It wasn’t very much time.”

  I watched him lying there so bleached of emotion. Something had shaken it loose inside him, the thing he feared, and now I saw how still he lay so that it would not rattle and wake him again. I suppose it was holding that gun in his hand. Standing in his wedding suit before the long mirror and watching himself aim it at his head, as if it were the hand of another person. Fascinated by the image. And then something—who knows what?—moving that arm to aim the gun directly at the man before him. The suited, brushed, and polished man he had made himself become. Reflecting the world as neatly as that mirror. What does it take to pull a trigger like that? What does it take to open fire on that man, the one who they would have us be?

  “It wasn’t much time,” he continued. “But it was enough to wreck everything.” Then he put a hand to his forehead. “Oh my God, I just walked out of my wedding . . .”

  “I’m here now,” I said, walking quickly over to him and touching his arm. The dizziness came back. “I’m here.”

  At last he looked over at me. “I think I’ve gone crazy, Greta. You have, too. Look at what I just did. Look at what I almost did. I don’t know what . . .” He could not finish the sentence. He froze there in the coal-heated air, shivering, staring and staring at the fireplace as he began to breathe heavily. I saw it came to him in waves, the real vision of what he was. And that it frightened, disgusted him.

  A cloud went over the sun, and the light vanished from his body, and I thought of how this was the last time I would visit this world, this Felix: I had seen Dr. Cerletti already that day. Tomorrow, I would shoot forward. Then one last spark before the end. I always assumed it would take me home. How could I not sense something else at work?

  “What do you need to hear, Felix?”

  “That it’s going to be all right,” he said, trying to breathe easily.

  “Felix,” I said, sitting down beside him now and putting my hand on his knee. “It is going to be all right.”

  “Is it?”

  Back it came: the diamond of light, falling over us both, keeping us warm for now. This was the last time, I thought, that I would see this Felix. I thought of all those mourners dressed in their Felix drag, the swimsuit, the cowboy, the torn plaid shirt. The blond wig, the stuffed bear, the birdcage. I thought of pressing that spoon between his lips. “You’re alive. It’s going to be all right. Life’s better than you think it is.”

  THAT NIGHT IN 1919, I put Felix to sleep in my bed beside me, and lay there for a long time listening to my brother’s breathing. How I would miss that sound. And so I stayed awake as long as I could, seeing his fox face pale in the dim room, breathing fitfully on his pillow. I was so tired, so hot and weary. I assumed it was the struggle of the day. Images began to swim before my eyes, more than blue sparks and stars. A tightness in my throat like drowning. Was it just the sadness of leaving him? And my unborn child? I tried to calm myself, focus on the lights behind my eyes. I do not know how long it was before I fell asleep.

  And for the second time in my travels, something went wrong.

  J
ANUARY 17, 1986

  HAD I ALREADY BEEN AWAKE FOR SOME TIME? I SEEMED to be in the middle of a conversation in a blurred setting, and began breathing heavily because I felt my body collapse under a wave of pain. A cold cloth on my forehead as I tried to catch my breath. Drowned, nearly drowned. And now who knows where?

  “. . . Don’t tell anyone,” I found myself saying. “Don’t let them know.”

  “Know what, dear?” It was Ruth, it had to be Ruth.

  Heart like a stone outside my chest, weighing me down. Had I read that somewhere? Or was it happening?

  “I forget. I forget. What am I doing here?” The cloth was removed and I could see, at last, my red-black-white room toppling sideways in my seasick brain. Ruth was leaning over me with a grim expression and, beside her, Felix’s canary cage, covered by a towel. Perhaps she had brought him here to keep me company. I put a hand to my face and it was burning; I could feel the creases left by the sweated pillow. It was 1986, not 1942. A brief moment of clarity: “I’m not supposed to be here . . .”

  “You’ve come down with something. Doctor says it’s the flu,” she said. “It’s time to take your aspirin again.” Two white pills and a glass of water held before me; they seemed as impossible to swallow as a glass of vodka. Nausea billowed inside me and as I leaned over the bed I saw there was already a bucket there, prepared for me.

  “I’m not supposed to be here . . .”

  “Oh, Greta, oh, poor baby, poor baby. It’ll be over soon. Five days, the doctor said.” She wiped my face and I sobbed for a moment, overcome with the shock of a body gone bad, in which no good place could be found to rest. Everywhere—my head, my muscles, my blood—had turned against me. Someone had missed a procedure. Just like before, someone had missed and so two of us traveled, and mixed up our places in these worlds. But there was no time left.

  “Ruth, something’s gone wrong. I should be in nineteen forty-two . . .”

  “Just rest.”

  “Something’s gone wrong . . .” The cloth covered my eyes again, and pinpricks of stars appeared in my bruised brain.

  JANUARY 18, 1919

  WASHED ASHORE AND MOANING, A BELL CONSTANTLY tolling of pain, I found myself alone and in near darkness; a green flame seemed to glimmer from the door, then was eclipsed by someone passing. I could hear whispers and the rasp of a match so loud I felt it scratch along my skull. I moaned again; the pain was not gone, and I widened my eyes in amazement that it could persevere. I could feel my illness pulling me back again, arms of thick watery darkness, and before I went under this time I saw, at the door, a man standing there in a gauze mask. “Get back,” I heard in a whisper, “she’s in quarantine, I’ve given her medicine, let her rest.” My husband’s voice. The man remained a moment, and movement in the hallway sent a gaslight glow across his face. Above the mask, I saw in my brother’s eyes the same fatal concern I had once seen in Alan’s. Felix, I wanted to say. Don’t let me die here. You will be all alone, and they won’t treat you well. The flu, we had the flu. All of us.

  “Can she hear us?” “No, she’s too far gone, we can only wait.” “And the baby?”

  Then they closed the door on my room. And again I traveled.

  JANUARY 19, 1942

  A VAGUE MEMORY OF AWAKENING, THAT THIRD DAY OF MY sickness. I watched the darkness melt away and where the desk had sat, a three-mirrored vanity appeared, blooming with reflected light, and I saw in its mirrors even before he appeared: my brother, Felix, in yet another form.

  He was in the middle of speaking: “. . . to Los Angeles, there’s a chance there, you look bad again, Greta, I’ll call . . .”

  And he melted like a pat of butter in a hot pan, before the blackness of my fever.

  JANUARY 20, 1986

  AND AGAIN, IN THAT WHITE ROOM OF MY OWN WORLD, where a vase of white roses shivered in the light. I heard Ruth’s voice in my fever, talking to somebody. The photographs moved and watched where I was pinned to my bed. The roses said to me: “I will keep the sadness out.” Ink drowned the scene, fringed with hot, throbbing pain.

  I WAS DYING. I felt it, and knew it. Nathan thought he had killed her, his wife, but his knife slipped and got me instead, and I remember thinking that it was right that I should die. The others had husbands and children. Who did I have? If someone had to die, let it be me.

  IN THOSE AWFUL days, as I went from one world to the next, my belly waxed and waned like the moon, filling with my unborn child, and from the door or chair or bedside Nathans came and went, in glasses and hats and beards, and strangers, and Ruths, always the same, but mostly I remember the paper-doll chain of Felixes smiling down at me.

  JANUARY 21, 1919

  TELL ME WHO AWOKE THAT MORNING? WHO FELT THE sickness draining from her, the bells fading at last, the sheets cold with someone else’s sweat and fever, who blinked her eyes and looked around as one does stepping from a long sea voyage onto solid ground, everything still rocking slightly but safe, familiar, home? Who tried to sit up, breathing steadily, and found it hard going but not impossible? With the long gold spear of sun thrown on the floor? A chair beside her, a bookmarked book resting there, a glass of water on the table, white sediment at the bottom, and an unfolded piece of paper beside it? A sudden thought—a hand to her full belly, sensing a life there? What woman was it who cried? Surely not the one who had been there before. Surely not me. For I was dead, I had to be.

  In came Millie in a mask, carrying an empty tray, looking startled, then backing away again and gone. A noise I could not make out and Felix rushing in.

  “You’re awake! You’re better? The fever’s broken, how do you feel?”

  “Alive.”

  He laughed. “Yes, yes, I think so.”

  “And my daughter.” He looked at me in confusion, perhaps thinking it was the fever still. Somehow I knew. “My baby.”

  He put his hand to my belly and smiled, but I already knew my child was all right. I found myself laughing, then wincing in pain.

  “You had us scared,” he said, that red lock falling over his face again. “It was a rough time. All over the city, there were no beds, not even at Nathan’s clinic. We thought it best to keep you here.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “How long was it?”

  He shrugged and watched my face carefully. “Almost a week.”

  “Nathan—”

  “He’s not here, Greta,” he told me. “He wanted to move back in, to care for you. I wouldn’t let him. We argued about it. You told me what happened, and I let him know I knew. And at last he left.”

  “What about the procedure?”

  “Dr. Cerletti would not let us give it to you again. He said we could administer the last one when you felt better.”

  “But it’s wrong, we’re all in the wrong—”

  Then the door opened on my aunt Ruth, all in black with a black turban from which dangled jet beads. “She’s alive! Oh, my dear dear girl, I’ve brought my last champagne.”

  I said, “Why are you in black?”

  “This? Oh, it wasn’t for you. I had lined up a bootlegger and he got himself shot on Delancey Street, and now what am I going to do next year? Oh, you’ve missed a lot, my dear.”

  “I’ve seen a lot.”

  She began to tell me about the wedding aftermath. “This one. He caused an uproar. The senator exploded like a French ’75 when he learned the groom had slipped out the side window!”

  “Ruth—,” I tried to interject, but she was far into her storytelling.

  The wrong worlds. For if I was here, that meant 1919 was in my world, and 1942 was in her own. One had missed her procedure and switched us all around, the wrong way. How had it happened? Had 1919 gotten so sick in her own era that Cerletti would not shock her? One charge left, but then where did that leave us?

  Could I live forever as a wife and mother in 1942? That was not the only question, of course: Could 1942 live in my world, with nobody but Ruth to comfort her? And more: Could 1919 live again in her world, in th
is world where I now lay in bed? My brain began to work: We could ask for another procedure, another shock, a charge, a jar, we could yet fix things . . .

  Ruth was still talking: “We had to hide Felix in my dressing room when they came by, Pinkerton bullies. You can’t drink this, you’re still recovering, we’ll drink it, shall we?” She popped the cork. “It was in the papers. An absolute scandal.” She stood, very regal, and looked down on her nephew, sitting with his hands crossed in his chair. “I was very proud of him.” She turned and shouted for Millie to bring two glasses. No, three, to hell with it, I could drink as much as I pleased. I was alive, after all. “It’s not such a bad world, is it?” she asked of nobody in particular. “Flu and wounded soldiers and Pinkertons and Prohibition, I know, and growing old and losing everything. It’s too easy to get down about it. But look at this . . .” Millie came in with the glasses and Ruth filled them sloppily and went on with her toast while my mind submerged into itself, worrying over how it would end now.

  AFTER RUTH WAS gone, Felix picked up his book, as if he, too, was about to leave. “Stay,” I begged again. I wondered if I could hold him tight and bring him with me when I left. He must have heard it in my voice.