The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells (8 page)

Where was my ally in this particular dream? Where was Ruth? “Felix, I need your help.”

“What did they do to you?”

“What happened? There was an accident.”

“We don’t have to—”

“Jesus, just tell me, they won’t tell me.”

He looked at me with the intense pain of someone watching something burn to the ground. I suppose it was watching his sister, who had always been stable, normal, ordinary, and good, fall apart in front of him.

“There was a car accident, you and Ruth. It wasn’t your fault. You were badly hurt and shaken . . .”

“Where is Ruth?” I asked him.

We sat there on the bench, each regarding the other with such pity and envy, the way that siblings do. “Greta,” he began.

“She died, didn’t she? In the accident,” I said. “She’s dead.”

He nodded slowly. Golden leaves turned in the wind around us.

“Oh, Ruth,” I said, letting my head fall into my hands. I felt the tears starting and I let myself sob a few times; I felt my brother’s hand on my back. That was when I felt it again: the sensation that I was not merely visiting these worlds. For I felt her death keenly, though I could picture her in turban and beads, alive in other worlds. I wept and wept into my white gloves. I was not borrowing these other Gretas; I was becoming them.

“I’m so sorry, Greta. I thought you remembered.”

“No, no,” I said. “Oh God. And I need her here so much. Poor Ruth. What am I going to tell—” But here I stopped myself.

“That’s why Nathan found a doctor. You fell apart, Greta.” He leaned over and put his hand on my knee. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

I sniffed and wiped away my tears, then drew myself up tall. “I have to tell you,” I said. “I’m not myself.”

He winced in pain once again. I felt my hand begin to shake with some surge of emotion; I dropped my cigarette. I was not used to it. Surely in this life, like the last, I was always playing the sober sister. And now—to be the one to break down. It was unbearable. I was reminded of a scene I had once passed on the highway, of a small sports car with a chain attached, slowly and carefully pulling an old truck out of a ditch.

The thing that everybody knows. For Felix, it was of course that his sister had lost her mind.

“There are things,” I said, “that you might be shocked if I told you. That you wouldn’t understand. I’ve seen things . . . I’ve gone places that—”

“It’s okay, it’s okay.”

He took my hand and we were both so cold.

“Felix,” I said. “I’m not who you think I am.”

He looked at me for a long time, taking in the words that I had said. The light changed all around us, glowing on each person in the park, my son, the woman, as if lighting a cast of characters. Then at last he spoke: “Me neither, baby.”

And in those words I heard my dead brother at last.

Then Felix stood up, shaking off the moment. “I have to go,” he said, gathering his coat, then turning. “I want you to meet someone. I want you to come over for lunch next week, Ingrid will be off at her parents’. I have to go.” He looked up with a halfhearted smile, his cheeks flushed with color. “Bubs, I would understand anything you told me,” he said. “Anything.” Then he slipped on the coat, turned back. “Plant you now,” he said, winking. “Dig you later.”

What is it to lose a twin? My brother was not just the boy I grew up with; he was my entire youth. I have no memory without him. From the get-go we were allies in the world, with our own language (a combination of family German and babysitter’s Spanish), our own monsters and deities and doors to other worlds. I understood everything he did, and why. I knew his body and his bravery and his foolishness. Older and older, and nothing was different, no parting, no change. When he said he liked boys, it made so much more sense—after all,
I
liked boys. So should Felix. We liked everything together. Spaghetti and bratwurst and ketchup. That we could now talk about boys was an enormous relief. And to lose him.

I watched my brother as he walked away through the park, tipping his hat to an old woman in a bright green shawl. Lost to me, again, lost in a brand-new way. But I remembered his words. And, as in a drop of water, within that “anything” a world revolved.

T
HAT NIGHT,
I assumed that I was saying good-bye to that second world, and treated myself to the possibility that I would awaken in yet a third! And so I held each moment with tenderness. My son kissing me a sloppy good night. Mrs. Green packing yarn into a purse. Nathan brushing his teeth. Strange to see people going about the daily motions of life, when you are the only one who knows it is good-bye.

That night, for instance, as I watched Nathan undress. Undoing the buttons of his trousers—an old-fashioned gesture—and hanging them on a wooden valet as he stood in his high-waisted underwear. Sitting there, nearly naked now, unaware that he should not be doing this, should not be with me, and yet I could do nothing to stop it that would not seem insane. I could not say, “Stop, this is wrong, in my world you don’t love me.” I could not say, “Please don’t torture me.” So I sat there as he removed his undershirt, his undershorts, and stood nude until a pair of striped pants covered him and he slipped into bed beside me, yawning as if nothing had happened at all. A good-night kiss, a “Good-night, love.” And as I closed my eyes, I felt as guilty as a Peeping Tom.

And yet, I awoke the next day to that same narrow face—“Good morning, love”—and saw the same billboard out the window. No shift, no travel. Of course it was the procedures that sent me traveling at night, and I had to wait a week until the next one, but at the time I considered I might be trapped there forever. Waking each morning to have a little boy peeking in at the door, running to me. Sleeping each night with Nathan beside me. And would it be so bad?

W
HAT WAS MOST
wonderful about my journeys, I now believe, was that I alone could appreciate the beauty of those worlds. None of the ordinary people in 1918 found flickering gaslight quaint or beautiful, or saw the old Dutch market houses as anything but eyesores; to them, the world was both falling apart and coming together all too much. In 1941, as well, for those people it was all too modern and too old. The old billboards and funny metal sounds of life, the way that women flounced their skirts, and how men were always removing and replacing their hats, things that are gone forever; it was nothing to them. I was that visitor who comes to a country and finds it charming and ridiculous all at once. Why would anyone wear those hats? Those skirts? And why have we lost the simple decency of saying hello to strangers on the street? But to those who lived in those times, of course, none of it seemed strange. It was ordinary life, with all its troubles, and only when they were jolted off the rails for an instant did they see how odd, how beautiful, everything around them was. Jolted by love or death. They would never consider that it might disappear, or that they might one day miss the quiet Fifth Avenue snowfall that slowed their Model T, or the awful smell of oyster shells and horse manure, or the green el trains that blocked their window view. I was the only one who knew what would be lost.

“Y
OUR BROTHER IS
on the phone at the moment, but Mrs. Wells is in the parlor with Baby.”

I never thought I would hear that sentence in my life. But I had ceased wondering at the impossible; I suppose your eyes adjust in a looking-glass world.

“Thank you,” I said to the maid, a short blond girl with a bent nose and a Coke bottle in her hand, filled with water, that I mused must be for ironing. “Show me in.” And she did, bottle sloshing, leading me through what appeared to be my brother’s home, though without his stark sense of style. Here it was striped wallpaper and old tatted upholstery. Of course it was decorated by a woman, this wife who waited for me in some pink parlor with “Baby.”

To my surprise, I stayed in that 1941 world for nearly a week; I had to wait for Dr. Cerletti in order to travel, which meant I awoke in a new world only every Thursday and Friday. As I would later discover, this gave me just a day in some worlds, an entire week in others: a day in 1918, this week in 1941, followed by a day in 1985, a week in 1918, and so on. All of my travels would follow this pattern—or nearly all.

And so here I was, at my brother’s house. Mrs. Green had given me the address without any questions and took little Felix into her care. Out the door, of course, into a world I had learned to navigate. Soldiers and sailors and children with pennywhistles silenced by mothers wielding anvil-size handbags. The subway was a bit of a puzzle, as I had nearly forgotten the difference among the IRT, IND, and BMT lines, and how one bought a ticket, but I was no more mystified than the excitable French couple fumbling with coins that, with their Indian heads and Mercurys, were as exotic to me as to them. On the dark green–painted train I sat beside a tired shopgirl, her best peacock dress faded from too much washing and pressing, her feather boa limp as an eel, removing her shoes in the car with an audible sigh. And navy men everywhere, red faced, eager eyed, and watchful, rolling with the turns of the car as with the roll of their ships, resting powerful farm-boy hands on their clean white pants. When the pretty shopgirl looked their way, they seemed as scared as of a bank robber.

Felix’s house was in the East Eighties, in what they called Yorkville. I was surprised to learn it was a German neighborhood, and the street provided evidence: German bakeries and cafeterias, coffeehouses and men’s societies. We were Germans, of course, brought over by our father as children. Later, I would learn our nationality excused Felix from service, in both worlds, but not from complications in a nation at war with our country of birth. On a stoop two boys stood talking, one still straddling his bicycle (his pants leg bound by a gleaming bicycle clip), yelling, “
Tote mich!
” until the other pulled out a very realistic gun and said, “Bang!”—a little cork popped out of its mouth, then dangled from its invisible string as they both cracked up. Only in one bakery window did I see a notice about a meeting; my German was rusty, but still it was impossible to escape its message. At the top, printed in black, was a swastika. And next door was my brother’s house.

In the pink-toned parlor, sitting sideways in a slipper chair, I found a slight brown-haired woman in a frilled milkmaid dress holding a newborn child. The maid said my name, and the young woman looked up very peacefully—and then her face flickered, briefly, with the most astounding expression! I would say it was fear, almost as if she was doing something wrong, and I might punish her, but mixed in there was something complicated, subtle. In an instant it dropped below, and her surface was serene again, her smile very bright as she stood, holding the baby close in its swaddling clothes, and sweetly said, “Greta! Well, now I’m glad I stayed in town.” I walked forward to embrace her and she smelled of lilacs and powder.

“Oh, the baby’s so beautiful!” I exclaimed (not knowing the sex) and she smiled proudly and tucked the blanket under the creature’s chin. “Can I . . . ?” I said, holding out my hands. I saw her mouth purse in concern, looking down at my cast. I understood: We were not friends.

“Do you want some tea?” she offered, sitting down again with her baby and smiling at it. “Or something to eat? No, you’re going out to lunch with Felix.”

“That’s right,” I said carelessly. “He wanted me to meet a friend.”

“Oh? He didn’t mention it to me. What friend?”

Her face shifted to me, eyes sparkling, and a voice came from the hall: “Ingrid, you remember I told you my sister and I were lunching . . . Oh hi, Greta!”

Later, as we made our way to the restaurant in a cab, I told him I had misstepped slightly in my conversation with his wife, and Felix glared at me with his lower lip pressed out. He was thinking something through. “What do you mean?” he asked. “Of course that’s fine, I just forgot to tell her. She knows Alan, he did my will. Don’t make her think my life is so mysterious, bubs.” He laughed, then looked out the window the way you do in cabs, finger to his chin, and I understood how deep he must be in.

H
OW STRANGE.
To step into the Oak Room in my velvet dress and feathered explosion of a hat, purse under my arm like a baguette, chandelier glitter on everyone’s shoulders, and see Alan there!

Sitting at the table, waiter beside him, with his hands forming a tepee, his silver hair cut military-style, a wide-shouldered suit, but the same square, lined face as ever! Same cracked-green-glaze eyes! Big and broad and healthy, as he had been when I’d first met him, years before. I wanted to run up and tell some old Felix joke only we knew and see his midwestern countenance turn red with pleasure. Then he would pat my arm to comfort me. Over the beloved dead.

But I couldn’t. Because Felix was not dead. He was here beside me, talking to the maître d’. And I couldn’t run up to Alan because he didn’t know me. I was only now—as he stood up and visibly, nervously swallowed—meeting him for the first time.

“Hello,” I said, smiling and taking his hand, “so you’re my brother’s lover?”

Of course I said nothing of the sort! Would you have every banker drop his martini in his lap? The whole of Manhattan would short-circuit. Instead, I took his firm hand limply and said, “So you’re my brother’s lawyer?”

He said he was, and he had heard a great deal about me. He and Felix exchanged glances several times, like actors who have forgotten whose line comes next.

They fought over who should pull out my chair—the waiter did it, arriving magically at the right moment, then vanishing—and who should order for us all.

“I will,” I said. “Felix, you’ll have the pork chop and onions. Alan, you look like a man who likes a rare rib eye, with spinach. I’ll have the same. And martinis,” I said to the waiter, handing him the menu. “Gin for the men, vodka for me.” Oliver Twist? asked the waiter. “Olives,” I said, then sat back and smiled at the small bright room.

Both men stared at me in astonishment. “Well, a woman has certain talents,” I admitted, arranging my napkin.

“But how did you know how I liked my steak?”