The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells (4 page)

“Well,” he said.

“I wish it not to have happened. I’ve lost my mind, Alan. They’re giving me ECT.”

He took my hand and squeezed it.

“I had the first procedure today. It’s making me hallucinate.”

He grimaced. “My drugs do that. It fades. It comes again. I’m so sorry.”

“Let this guy take care of you, Alan.”

He took my gaze very seriously, narrowing his eyes, causing those lines around them to deepen, then after a moment he shook his head and let go of my hand. “I’m too old and sick for all that.” He sipped his coffee and shrugged; his hair was haloed in silver. “This young man, he thinks it would be romantic to be there at the end. To be the widow at the funeral. I told him I’ve been that widow. It doesn’t feel like anything at all.”

“You’re not going to die, Alan.”

It is a foolish thing to say to anyone, but it was especially foolish at that moment. He raised his eyes from his coffee cup and they were the same cracked green glaze, shining with pain and amusement at me; the dying have a way of looking at the rest of us in this strange way, as if we were the ones merely mortal. From far off, a siren wailed and wailed. A sigh beside us; the house of cards had fallen and lay everywhere.

“Of course not,” he said with a chuckle. “None of us are.”

I
STAYED UP
very late that night, looking through contact sheets of photographs, trying not to think of Alan or especially of Felix. Perhaps I was afraid of my dreams, that my brother would arrive in them again. It was not until four or so in the morning that I found myself in bed, staring at the bland white walls, the photographic prints, the red blinds pulled up to show a midnight Greenwich Village and that constant view: the houses of Patchin Place, the Jefferson Market tower, the garden beside it. The yellow heads of gingko trees decorating everything in between.
I wish it not to have happened
. I recall closing my eyes and seeing one bright blue star floating there in the darkness, pulsing with light.
Any time but this one
. How it split in two, and those split, and so on and so on, the throbbing blue stars dividing until they formed a circular cluster of light, and there was a kind of thunder as I fell into it—and that is the last thing I remember.

L
ATE AFTERNOON
;
I MUST HAVE SLEPT THROUGH AN ENTIRE
day. A slow, soft awakening, like pulling one’s way out of a web—the distant sound of ringing bells. I could feel the sunlight playing on my lids, the shadows of the trees outside, and for a moment I felt as I did as a girl, at a friend’s country house, when Felix and I would swim in the river and feign sleep on the shore so our father would have to carry us one by one to the car, whispering to our mother, “Isn’t it wonderful to be a child?” I took a few long breaths, thinking of summer and of Felix, before I had the strength to open my eyes.

I lay there for a long time trying to make sense of what I saw. Sunlight and shadow. Striped satin and lace. A piece of fabric hanging over me, dappled by the sun and leaves, billowing slightly from the open window. The sound of a steam whistle, and the clatter of hooves. Striped satin and lace; it was quite beautiful, moving in slow waves above me, just as my mind had been moving in waves as I awoke: a canopy bed. My eyes moved down to take in the rest of the room, which was lit with the same watery refracted light. My breath began to quicken. Because the bed I had fallen asleep in had no posters, no fabric. And the room I saw before me was not my room.

Here it was, what Dr. Cerletti had warned me about: the “disorientation.”

For I knew that it was my room; the shape and size of it were the same, the placement of the window and the door. But instead of my white walls, I saw pale lilac wallpaper patterned in ball and thistle. Gold-framed paintings placed along it, and sooty gaslight back plates. A little table with a Japanese tableau of porcelain chopsticks and a painted fan. Long green heavy drapes hung beside the window, pleated and tasseled, and before me a great oval looking glass was set in a tilting frame, reflecting the striped fabric of the bed. Curious, fascinated by the effects of Cerletti’s procedure, almost sure of what I would find, I pulled myself up before the mirror and watched as, inch by inch, my own shape came into view. . . .

What else can we call it but beautiful when we are someone new? I marveled at the long red hair falling in waves over the delicate yellow nightgown I had never owned before, trimmed with little useless ribbons. I touched my face and wondered: What trick was this? How could this be me?

I laughed a little, letting my fingers run through my long hair. Dr. Cerletti had said this phase would pass, and I decided to enjoy it while it lasted. Soon enough, I would be shorn-haired little Greta Wells, in slacks and a jacket, wandering from room to room. Until then: I would be this beautiful creature my doctor had made.

A knock on my bedroom door. “Greta?”

A relief. At least something familiar here. It was Ruth’s voice.

I blinked at the woman in the mirror before I climbed out of bed and saw how the yellow nightdress fell to my feet. What an elaborate hallucination this was.

“You’ve slept the day away,” Ruth said as she opened the door and entered. “You foolish girl.”

I laughed again; my “disorientation” seemed to include Ruth as well: She wore an outrageous black cloak, breastbone beads, a tight turban with a great black trembling feather. I sighed when I remembered it was Halloween. Surely she was in costume. Surely I was as well; the procedure had merely erased some long part of the day. As for the room, the steam whistle, the horse—well, it would all soon fall into place.

“We have to get more hooch before the party starts, which is very soon,” she was saying. “Get yourself together and come along.”

I said nothing. A little voice in my mind was saying,
Pay attention, you’re not yourself
, but I waved it away. I smiled at the little white curls that poked out from her odd turban.

“We have to get back before him, he’s lost his key,” she said, then looked me up and down. “You’re not even dressed. Let’s get you into your costume.” Ruth walked herself around my bedroom, chattering the whole time, poking through my scattered things, until she came upon a mirrored gilt armoire—sized, perhaps, for hiding illicit lovers—and flung it open with a bleat of delight. “Aha!” I was handed a white blouse and dirndl and slowly put them on. I sat very still as Ruth quickly did my hair. A letter lay on the dresser, unopened, and something bade me to pick it up and put it in my pocket.
Pay attention
.

“There you are. My little Gretel!”

I stood at the mirror looking at the fairy-tale girl before me. A dirndl, hair in two long braids, done up in green ribbon.
You’re not yourself
.

“And look at me, darling,” she said, fiddling with a device attached to her belt so that her costume revealed itself: all along her skirt, candy canes lit up in bold electric light. “I’m your witch! Now let’s go fatten you up! Ready?”

I knew that a step outside would take me further still. So, like Alice before the looking glass, I took one more look at my reflection before I said:

“I’m ready.”

F
OR ALL OF
my life, beside the tower of the Jefferson Market, down at the end of Patchin Place where Felix and I used to swing on the iron gates, there had been nothing but an empty fenced garden. And now, in its place, there had suddenly sprung up a huge brick building, lit by the setting sun. From one barred window, I saw what I thought was a twisted sheet, but soon realized was a woman’s arm, as white as a feather; it did not stir the whole time I watched. I was mesmerized, smiling at the dream I was in.

“What is it, darling?”

I laughed and pointed. “Look!” I said. “What is that?”

She squeezed my hand. “The prison. Now come along.”

“A prison? You see it, too?” I asked, but she could not hear me in the noise of the crowd making its Halloween way along Tenth Street. Something was coming together in me. The change in my city, the change in my room. My long hair, my long nightdress. “Ruth, I thought you weren’t throwing a party.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked me, pulling me along. “I always throw one.”

“But you said—”

“He’d kill me if I didn’t! Be careful, dear, you seem unstable.”

“I’m not myself,” I said, smiling, and she seemed to accept that.

We stepped out the gates of Patchin Place, and, very calmly, I pulled out the envelope from my pocket. “Greta Michelson,” it read. “Patchin Place.” My last name had never been Michelson. But it was the postmark that made me stand still in the moving crowd.

I began to laugh. It overcame me, what had happened.
You make a wish
. The postmark explained it all.

T
HEY SAY THERE
are many worlds. All around our own, packed tight as the cells of your heart. Each with its own logic, its own physics, moons, and stars. We cannot go there—we would not survive in most. But there are some, as I have seen, almost exactly like our own—like the fairy worlds my aunt used to tease us with.
You make a wish, and another world is formed in which that wish comes true, though you may never see it
. And in those other worlds, the places you love are there, the people you love are there. Perhaps in one of them, all rights are wronged and life is as you wish it. So what if you found the door? And what if you had the key? Because everyone knows this:

That the impossible happens once to each of us.

A
NOTHER WORLD.

With fascination, I looked around this version of my life in 1918. Nothing was different from my 1985 Patchin Place except the prison beside the tower. The Northern Dispensary, visible down Waverly, was the same as ever (a slice of brick cake), though at Seventh Avenue rubble was piled everywhere, with some recent, violent construction, and women in high-buttoned shoes and costumed like gypsies or pirate queens made their delicate way. Many were wearing gauze masks to cover the lower halves of their faces, tied behind their heads. Below: scattered ancient cobblestones. Above: silver fishhook moon. Between: a bustling crowd of strangers calling to one another from windows, carriages, balconies, and doorways. Just one small thing had changed, such a small thing really.

What difference could it make, the era in which we are born?

“It’s beautiful,” was all I said, almost to myself.

Two people began to sing along with a phonograph, a man’s voice and a woman’s. Ruth said, “We have to get going. He hates to wait. And take that ring off, don’t be so ridiculous.”

I removed my ring to look at the engraving inside:
NATHAN AND GRETA, 1909
. In this world, he had married me.

Ruth’s hands emerged magically from her long sleeves and fluttered frustratedly in the air, then one snatched the ring from me.

“It’s Halloween, and you’re young! And he’s far away at war, up to his own pleasures, bless him. Leo will be looking for you at the party.” Then she leaned in close and I could smell violets and cigars and the sweet cinnamony oil she must have used to dress her hair. “Free love, darling,” she said, patting my cheek.