The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells (11 page)

Or, rather, firehouse. Apparently the old firehouse had been converted into a theater, and a little turnstile had been installed within the great red engine door. A man in a suit sat on a pickle barrel inside, collecting dimes. He bit each one in his back teeth before dropping it in the barrel; the process was interminable. The smell of pickles clung to us even when we sought out a seat near the front. “You want Leo to see you’re here,” Ruth whispered. She had told me we were going to see
The House of Mirth
. I had read the book in college, but could remember barely anything except a vision of Lily Bart’s exceptionally white skin, made whiter still by the overdose she took. I wondered what role Leo would take, and recalled a rather handsome platonic friend as well as a ne’er-do-well married man. I could not picture him in any role. But I could not picture him in my life, in any role, either.

It was at that moment I remembered the letters. Among the beaded fringes of my purse I found the snap, and tore open the first letter with a military stamp. What a strange sensation, in that other world, to see that old familiar handwriting I used to see every day on grocery lists, and bills to mail, and the little love notes I once found in books I was reading:

October 20, 1918

Dearest Greta
,

It has been a hard month here in - - - - - but I fear the hardest is yet to come. People talk of peace, but where I am there seems no end to young boys brought in wounded, suffering, crying for their mothers. But we have suffered nothing compared to the locals. A small trip and one only enters towns of widows, all in black and clawing at you for a piece of bread or comfort. Whole trenches fill with flu victims. We cannot treat them or cure them. God knows what would happen if our staff got sick! It is a small bit of hope that some boys survive, and are well in days, though only to head into battle the next
.

But I don’t want to depress you with these thoughts. Peace will come, perhaps soon, if the Huns are routed as the generals say they will be. Your letters have been a great comfort to me. My mind is only on you, and on the child we will have on my return, God willing! The war will end. I will return. The smoke will clear, and we will see each other as we once did when we were young. And I will be home
.

With love forever
,

Nathan

The old history lessons of public school made their way out of the rubbish heap of youth. Armistice. Today was the eighth of November. The Germans would be routed; the kaiser would soon abandon his post and flee the country; the war was nearly over, and yet it astounded me, looking around, that none of them knew! Surely the papers were full of negotiations and concessions; surely the war had ended weeks before and the famous November eleventh date—the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month!—was merely a formality. But no; overhearing conversations and remembering Liberty Bonds posters in windows, I realized that being this close to peace, to the end of all that horror, was not like being close to the end of a novel; you could not weigh the final pages in your hand. They did not know. They lived in fear, not knowing that the last days were upon them. And 1918 Greta, receiving letters such as this from her husband, did not know. That very soon the war would end.

I was making my way through these thoughts, barely paying attention as I opened the second letter and read it through.

“Ruth,” I whispered loudly, but did not manage to extract her from her conversation. “Ruth!”

“Darling, yes.”

“How long have I known Leo?”

“I think a month or so. I started getting flowers sent to me around then. I knew they were meant for you.” She added that he had been seen in Patchin Place, staring up at my window. “I’m afraid to tell you,” Ruth said quietly as a gong was struck somewhere backstage. “That the boy’s rather attached.”

“Is he my . . . ?”

“Your sweetheart, is what I would say,” she said. “Your admirer. Nothing serious has happened yet.”

I showed her the letter. The message was brief, and I managed to see the thrill in her eyes before the lights dropped and audience noise fell to a hush. She put her hand on mine and squeezed. Things had suddenly become more complicated than expected. First a loving husband with allusions to sorrow. And now this.
Greta
, it had begun.

I will never forget the night you said you loved me . . .

The theater now was dark as a forest. A piano began to play an antique waltz. In the twilight we could see the curtain opening on something square and white, and then, a moment later, the bedsheet glowed with the miraculous words
The House of Mirth
. It turned out I had completely misunderstood the performance we were seeing, and Leo’s role. It was not a play at all. It was a moving-picture show.

Small footlights came up left and right, revealing two young people on stools: a kohl-eyed girl in even more old-fashioned dress than the crowd, and Leo, wearing a tight wool suit, bowler, and eye shadow. Both held megaphones, and Leo immediately lifted his and read the title aloud, along with the names of the performers, one of whom was a female Barrymore I had not heard of. Then the scene opened on a silent picture of a beautiful woman walking down a New York City street of brownstones, smiling at a sunny day. The girl in the bustle dress read the words that appeared on the screen: “Lily Bart had missed the three fifteen to Rhinebeck.” They were to read the title cards of this movie, while the piano changed tunes according to the action; the girl read the female parts, and Leo the male ones. At first I assumed it was a theatricalization of the moving picture, but after a long time I understood the real reason, and then I was ashamed. It was not for any theatrical purpose. It was because most of the audience could not read.

A man appeared on the screen, a wry man in an ascot, and Leo read the card: “Oh, I’m not dangerous.” A few in the audience laughed. But I sat and looked at my young man with the painted mustache.

So funny to sit and see a stranger and be told: “That’s your lover.” The one in the chair? No, on the stool, in the hat. Aha, thank you, Doctor. It seemed curious that another me loved that young man, staring boldly at me in the alley; in my aunt’s hall; five-foot-something of headstrong youth.

I would do anything for you
, the letter went on to say.
So be kind to me
.

It took me a moment to realize that he saw me. Of course; unlike the theater, here the audience was lit by the glow of the film; he could see us almost as well as we could see him. Who knows how long I had been staring at him? Or he at me? But the moment caught us both out of character. Eyes locked in the white light of the projector, hiding nothing. So tell me: Who were we then?

“W
ELL, WASN
’
T THAT
fun!” Ruth said, rushing forward as Leo came out of the stage door. “They should do that with all books! Have you standing over my shoulder reading all the men’s parts would be so much more fun, don’t you think?”

“As long as you pick a short book,” Leo replied, and as she cast me a look that said:
I envy your youth, if I had your luck and your figure, I wouldn’t hesitate for an instant, life is too short
, and he chuckled knowingly and shot me a look that said:
See how well I fit into your life, see how nice I would be to have around, try me for a while
. They chattered and flirted, and were all want, want, want. And all for a girl who wasn’t me.

It was agreed that Leo should accompany us home, and on the way we discussed the book and the movie, which Ruth seemed to know by heart. I watched the pushcarts and barrels of pickles and schmaltz herring and men standing around. I felt people’s eyes on me, now in the darkness more than before. I wondered where my brother could be. Sitting with his fiancée? Waiting for me somewhere? At least I knew he was out of jail.

“Excuse me,” I heard Leo say, interrupting my aunt’s flow of words. “I wanted to show you both something I thought you’d like.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

“It’s a secret,” he said, raising a roguish eyebrow. “My friend’s a gardener here.”

I was going to ask “Where?” because I had lost my way (the streets seemed to have changed—or rather, not yet have changed) but realized we were standing just at the edge of Washington Square Park. My heart could have leaped like a fish from a bowl: I saw it as it used to be. No bright glare of lamps on the fountain; no gathered crowds of roller skaters, visiting youths, old hippies spending a chilly night. Only the old elms from which supposedly they used to hang criminals for public viewing. A startling thought: Someone alive remembered those days. And there was the arch, shockingly white, of course, cleaner by sixty-seven years, yet still the same pale open mouth on Fifth Avenue, and it took me a moment to realize it was missing one of its George Washington statues. I supposed some sculptor was still chiseling away at a deadline.

Leo looked under a nearby white stone for a while. “Found it!” he said, smiling, and boldly took my hand, leading me to the east side of the arch. Ruth followed, lifting her skirts in the wet grass. I had never noticed before the little door cut into the stone there, or the tiny keyhole; it had never occurred to me the arch could be anything but solid marble. Leo slid the key in the lock and, with a satisfying creak, the door slid open to darkness. All we could see were the first steps of some stairs. A smile from Leo, full of daring:

“Nobody comes up here. Nobody even knows it exists.”

T
HREE GLASSES OF
wine stood, now empty, on the stone ledge of the arch, beside Leo’s hat. He had apparently prepared; the glasses and a bottle of wine had been hidden in the staircase below. The lantern was out—“Too risky,” Leo whispered. “Last year some artists got the key for a party and there was hell to pay”—so for our visit we were treated to darkness, silence, and a view that was not my New York: gasworks billowing gilded steam, the black Hudson littered with a jeweler’s shop of boat lights, the few lamps flickering in servant attics north of us, the vagrant fires glowing south.

Leo stood beside me, and Ruth had stationed herself farther away. I saw her, hands clutched together, looking out on the city, oddly silent.

“Look,” Leo said, and she turned to where he pointed. “There’s the courthouse. And there’s Patchin Place.”

You could more imagine it than see it, but there was in the darkness perhaps the gleam of the gates, just between the courthouse and the prison. The lamplight of our little alley.

We stood looking without saying a word. In the darkness, I could feel the young man’s eyes on me.

Suddenly I heard Ruth’s voice. “I heard a story,” she said. “About a Chinese sorcerer who wanted to live forever. So he cut his own heart out and put it in a box and hid it where no one would ever find it.” I looked over to see the light catching her jewelry. “Now where do you think he hid it?”

From behind me, I heard Leo say, “I don’t know.”

“Take a guess,” she said. “A castle with a dragon? A mountaintop?”

“I’d hide it down a well,” I said.

She laughed. “Yes. Something like that. In a flour sack. The least likely place some young hero would look for it.”

“Very clever,” Leo said, closer to me now.

Ruth’s voice grew quieter. “I wonder where New York has hidden its heart.”

The silence of the park sat in the space she left there.

“I wonder,” Leo said softly.

I looked at him and he smiled broadly. Those eyes watching me so closely. He was indeed handsome.

They talked for a while, the two of them, in hushed tones while I leaned out over the edge to see the city. Its flickering lights. I thought of that other Greta, who endured what I had endured—a straying husband—but who had not lost him. Her Nathan had returned, and stayed, but I understood her need for comfort. For someone, perhaps someone very young, who would remind her she was alive. A young actor, his eyebrow raised, so clearly in love. Why not? She had chosen lightning, after all, like me. Was it so impossible to choose passion as well?

A rustle from Ruth: “I’m cold, I think my moment has come. Take your time, this is going to take a while in these skirts . . .”

She made her way down through the trapdoor with a little laugh, into the small brick chamber below that no one in New York suspected. I looked at the lights one last time before turning to go.

Leo touched my arm and began in an insistent whisper: “Greta—”

“We should help Ruth—”

“I need to ask you,” he said. “Who am I to you? When you think about me.”

The city lights gave a softness to his features. His lips were slightly parted, his eyes worried. I could feel my face and chest getting warmer from his look, his touch. I thought of Nathan in 1941 and said, “Let’s not talk about this now—”

His voice grew quieter, his eyes lowered. “I want to know. What’s the word you use in your mind?”

“Don’t ask me now,” I said, trying not to look at those eyes. I understood her attraction. But what he wanted was not me; it was another version of me. “Later, ask me later.”

“I mean, when you think, Oh, I’m going to meet Leo. He’s my . . . what?”

“Don’t ask me this now, I’m . . .” I fell back on that old phrase: “I’m not myself.”

“Who am I to you, Greta?” he asked.

The darkness had drained all color, so we were in silent-movie tones, his face a mottled moth-wing gray. I could see him breathing as heavily as a machine with a load it was not built to carry; I could tell he had suffered quietly for long enough, had promised himself both that he would be quiet, not spoil the night, and that if he got me alone he would not be quiet, he would risk everything. In all my travels, in my anxieties, I had thought only about the troubles of my life. A brother resurrected, a husband returned, a child born, mystery after mystery darting around corners, things restored and taken away again; the whole horrible beautiful magic act of my life. I had not yet thought of this. That someone else’s life depended on me.

“Leo,” I said. I found myself touching his cheek. He flinched; his whole cheek caught fire.