The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells (30 page)

W
ASHED 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.

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.

A
ND 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.

I
N 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.

T
ELL ME WHO AWOKE THAT MORNING?
W
HO 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 this 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.

A
FTER
R
UTH 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.

“Of course.” He sat back down, the book on his lap.

“It’s going to be okay,” I said. He nodded his head gravely and looked out the window. I watched his throat tense as he swallowed some memory he did not want to share.

“Greta, I’m leaving.”

I reached out a hand across the quilt. “No, stay just a minute.”

He looked down at the book in his lap. “I mean I’m leaving New York,” he said, and faced me resolutely. “I’m going to some small town where no one knows me, where Ingrid’s father can’t ruin me. I’m thinking of Canada.”

“No one thinks of Canada.”

A glance out the window, where the alley cat was making its way across the roofs. “Maybe I’ll change my name.” He laughed. “I’ll be Mr. Alan Tandy, as a kind of revenge. Someplace I can start all over.”

I looked at him in profile, the strong nose and slightly weak chin, the same mustache as the brother I’d lost, the same gray hairs as his 1940s self. A version of my own face. “Quit,” I said to him loudly. “Give up. Start over. I see. I just have one question.”