The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells (26 page)

I
FOUND HIS
glossy top hat decorating a fireplug, and my brother leaning against a house. He had not gotten very far, and had predictably headed west, as he did on his brooding walks around the Village in my 1985 world. He had a long cigarette going, arms crossed, fur collar bristling with streetlight, and he stared at the fireplug as he had at the dressmaker’s dummy, this time with an expression of vindictive rage. The night sky over Washington Square was aglow with a street fire, and shouts could be heard.

“I was at Bloomingdale’s the other day,” I said loudly, and his head jerked with surprise. I walked forward, hands in the pockets of my coat, warm in the chill night air. “I was there, in the men’s department.”

He said nothing to me. A couple walked by, the woman almost completely shrouded by a hood, the man staggering drunkenly. Felix just smoked as they passed us. Both of us knew the next few minutes would unravel everything our lives had been.

I asked, “Is that where you met Alan?”

A puff from the cigarette; nothing else, no glance at anything but the fireplug, the hat. My brother leaning against a building, staring at the New York night. The smoke trailing from his mouth.

“When did he leave you?” I asked him. For now it was all so apparent, with Felix taking a deep, angry breath and staring out at a shining black horse carrying a policeman on his way. Then, saying nothing, he looked at me.

I can picture them in Bloomingdale’s, staring across the gloves at each other. A meeting in a bar, a hotel room carefully arranged. But different, this time. Strong and wary Alan, in his beard and pince-nez, worrying and worrying in that room, drawing every shade, hushing his young lover. Telling him it cannot go on. Felix different as well, framed in an oval mirror: terrified, fascinated, in love. And then meeting him again: more darkened rooms, and promises, and did Alan weep? Not unhappy? Secret visits to Alan’s Long Island house. Easy days, no chance of being caught. Reckless midnights on the beach—silver-haired Alan carrying my long-limbed brother into the ocean. And I can picture another scene out in that house, shuttered against a December storm, when Felix arrived by mistake one weekend when the family was there, and the maid let him in, and they all had to endure a long supper of pressed duck before Alan took him aside and whispered this was danger, this was folly, this could not go on. Closing his eyes so he would not look at the man he loved. He was so sorry. It was best forgotten. A dark driveway, and a silhouette of Alan in his study, head in his hands. Felix in a carriage that took him the cold four hours back into Manhattan, and time to think over all the ways in which he might kill himself.

I saw that when he looked at me at last. In his eye: a gun, a rope, a bottle of poison.

“You don’t have to marry,” I said loudly.

“She’s the best thing I have,” he told me, standing very tall and his bright hair on fire in the streetlight. “I’m sorry. I know you can’t understand the things you’ve seen.”

“I understand you completely,” I said. “This is the brother I know.”

“I want you to forget all this.”

I repeated something he told me: “If only we just loved who we’re supposed to love.”

The glow on the clouds grew brighter in the distance. Fire trucks were making their way down the avenue, and from the south one could hear shouts and the rusty working of a water pump. A rush of action, and then we were left alone again on the street.

“The tourists are ruining everything,” he said, dropping the cigarette and smiling grimly. “We’ve made a mistake, you and I. Ruth was wrong about everything.”

I wrapped my coat around me; it was too cold for this. “I love you, Felix.”

“That party. All her parties,” he said, staring at the top hat. “All her talk about life. Living each day.” Shouts and cries from far away, shadows on the low clouds.

I walked toward him in the freezing air. “You told me you understood. About loving someone married.”

“Living each day. It only works if there’s no tomorrow,” he said to the hat. He spread his arms wide. “Well, it’s tomorrow.”

A New York wind blew down the corridor of the street and the hat toppled from the fireplug. Felix stepped forward to retrieve it.

“We have both made mistakes,” he said. “I need to fix mine.”

“Was mine a mistake?”

He picked up the hat and brushed it off, staring at it as if some answer were contained there.

“What does your husband know? What will he do?” he said, speaking with pity now. “It’s tomorrow, Greta.”

A cheer from an invisible crowd, a dimming of the fire glow. Another police horse came clopping by, black and polished.

He put the hat on his head and stood up tall. “I can save myself, Greta. I can marry and be happy.”

“I’ve seen enough to know that isn’t true.”

In the sky, the fire was dying, flame by flame. My brother’s face was full of heartache. “Greta, Greta, it’s a lie,” he said wearily. “You can’t just
love
people. You can’t just wander out there and
love anyone
.”

“Yes, you can!” I said rashly. “That’s exactly what you do!”

At that he stared at me with the purest sorrow, then turned and ran away down toward the fire, leaving me alone in Greenwich Village on a winter’s night.

W
HEN
I
RETURNED
home, I opened the door to the overwhelming scent of camphor. It was only after a moment that I could make out the silhouette of a top-hatted man against the gaslight in the hallway. Like a chess piece, like a king. We stood there for a moment and I heard the faint tinkling of my beaded dress, but I did not think much of the silence; my head was full of my conversation with Felix, and the growing life I carried within me. “Greta,” I heard, and there came the light of a match into a pipe bowl. “Nathan?” I said, for it was his face, though somehow behind the face it was not him. “Nathan, I thought you were working late at the clinic.”

There was no sound except the crackle of tobacco in his pipe. The camphor odor from his clinic was almost unbearable. I closed the door behind me to keep the alley cat from coming in. I turned and saw that he had not moved in the dim light.

“Nathan?” I repeated.

“Did you know,” he said at last, just a shadow and the glow of embers, “that it got so bad, before the Meuse-Argonne offensive, that half my cases were influenza?” I recognized the break in his voice. Had he been crying?

My eyes searched the darkness. “You’ve had too much to drink.”

“I swore I’d never tell you what I saw,” he said, shifting position. “I wanted to keep you . . . safe. That’s what we fought for.”

“I will never know what you went through.”

“But you need to know, Greta. There was a man from a submarine just come over from the States. He had a minor case, and was ready to fight in two days, but he couldn’t fight. He was already shell shocked, before he ever saw the war. The nurse told me his sub had gotten the flu the day they left Long Island. He woke up the next morning and the man in the hammock beside him was dead.”

“My God,” I said. I stood and watched his broken shadow.

“You know submarines are on orders not to dump garbage? But they had to. There were too many, piled in the dining room. The stench. And this man was taught how to wrap the bodies with iron to weight them down, and kneel on the canvas to get the air out. Then it was someone else’s turn to send them into the sea. Almost everyone who was on burial duty got sick and died.”

“I’m sorry, Nathan.” We can hardly guess the burdens people carry.

“I know what he did. I did it, too. You sit by their bed, and you take down a letter, a last letter. ‘Dear folks. Am down with flu. Feeling better, home soon. Love to everyone.’ They look up at you and ask, ‘Will I die?’ and you say, No, no, hold on tight, you’ll be fine. They smile and fall asleep. Dead by sundown.”

“I’m sorry.” And what I meant was:
I am sorry about how things turned out, here in this world
.

“When the sub arrived in France, they had two hundred bodies in the dining room. They had buried only a hundred. We had twice that piled in our hospital.” I was silent. I watched his profile, bent over with the memory.

“Do you know,” he said softly, “what I do for you?”

“I know, I know,” I said, my hand to the wall. “You don’t need to tell me more.”

“You don’t know,” came his voice from that shadow, as if he had not heard me, and then to my relief he stepped at last into the gaslight, where I saw that below his long, bearded Norwegian face hung his gauze mask: the source of the camphor smell. His face was flushed with sweat. Was he drunk? Ill? Then he took my arm and said, “Come with me.”

I
HAD BEEN
here before. After the tense, quiet ride in the cab, the sound of freezing rain hitting the roof and the sight of people scurrying across the black-enameled streets, after we had burst through the doors into the dark hush of the room. I had been here so many times, so many times. Not this clinic, but one surely just like it smelling of incense to cover sickness. I never wanted to see it again.

I had seen those rows of beds lining a long room, separated by white pleated screens, and beside each patient the small little altars of things that loved ones had brought and which the nurses, quietly visiting the patients in hats and soft-soled shoes, removed and threw into incinerators the next morning. I had seen the men too thin for words, eyes wide open at night, staring at the ceiling with one arm dangling from the sweated sheets. I had seen the holiday cards still on display at the nurses’ station, from patients who were grateful for their recovery. Some of them long dead. I had seen twins, identical beds, identical fevers; the New Hampshire chauffeur, hired by a hospital that would not take a patient, arriving late at night with a skeletal man; the choirs that came with masks and sang outside the windows; the wreath at the station that read
KEVIN WAS THE SWEETEST
. How could he guess that I had been here, in another world?

“It’s gotten worse,” you whispered to me. “They told us it had ended over here, but it’s gotten worse again. Fifty more cases today. In Brooklyn the gravediggers are dying of it.”

I tried to think of what to say. What you wanted me to say. “I’ve seen it. I know all about it. Let’s go.”

“Greta,” you said. “I want you to see with your eyes what I do for you.”

But that wasn’t really why you wanted to bring me, was it? It wasn’t to learn your life. I saw it in your eye.

I loved you, Nathan, once. Twice, even. Isn’t that enough for anyone? I loved how you tapped your foot along with music because you couldn’t help it, and made me get up and dance with you. And the way you laughed till you cried, and the little tears gathered in the corners of your eyes before they fell and glistened in your beard. Your grumpy insomniac stalking of the bedroom. The way you found things on the street and put ads in the
Village Voice:
“Found: a child’s necklace, three pink bears, broken.” No one ever called to claim them. But somehow it set your heart at rest. “Found: pair owl eyeglasses, red, one rhinestone at the corner.” It was not just first love in which nothing is impossible. It was also whatever comes after. Love, I suppose. That must be what we call everything that comes after. I loved you all those years, most of my life, it felt like. I never thought you had it in you. But in a different time: a different man. I never took you for a murderer.

“I’m no fool,” you said quietly. “I’m no fool, Greta.”

“There’s no one,” I said. “He died.”

“No, he didn’t,” you said. “He’s right here.” And I knew you meant the baby.

How did you know? Cerletti, perhaps, or your own doctor’s instincts. Or something I had done, something I had said that gave everything away. The other Gretas were leading this life along with me. Who knows what they had told you?

I was too weak with shock and shame to fight you, Nathan. I understood what you meant to do, and in some awful way I felt I deserved it, but who deserves death for what they have done? Who deserves to be pulled into a plague, not only to be infected, but to infect the child living inside me, to erase us both with one easy gesture that nobody would ever call murder?

But you stopped just short of the beds. The nurses turned with their blank masked faces to stare at us, hearing the struggle of a wife with her husband. You stopped and began to breathe heavily, then took a step backward, looking around you, turning, at last, to look at me. Now I know you did not really know what you were doing. It was the fever already at work.

“Oh God,” you whispered, your eyes wide in alarm. It was the first time I had seen it, the face I remembered, staring at me in that darkened clinic. You put your arm around me and rushed me back toward the door. “Oh God, let’s get out of here.”

B
ACK HOME
, I felt how hot with shame you were. Breathing heavily, sweating even in the chill of the winter evening. Flushed and tired and astounded at what you had nearly done. You were shaking with it. “I lost myself,” you whispered to me, “I lost myself, I’m sorry.” What did it even mean, to lose oneself? Who are we then? Shambling, empty creatures, for that one moment: out of time. But even then you could not do it. Not even in that misshapen form, in that misshapen age. Holding your face and sobbing, there in the hall. “I love you, Greta,” you said. So we had made it, almost. You had passed through the other side of hate.

I felt your grief that night you nearly tried to kill me, Nathan. I felt your hands, and heard what you said. Your skin was hot as red iron.

You took the guest bedroom for the night. I could not sleep, confused by that strange evening, and our strange lives together. And it was not even a few hours before I called Dr. Cerletti. You had thrown the sheets to the floor, and lay there burning with fever.

H
E SURVIVED, MY
husband. A few days later, I heard Dr. Cerletti at the door, and Millie’s voice as she answered. I felt the baby growing inside me, building in secret like the war machine of a walled city. Twenty procedures done, only four procedures after tonight. There were things I had to do. Before the other Gretas came. One particular action I knew only I could take. I found the bald doctor coming out of Nathan’s sickroom. “Your husband’s fever has broken. He will make it. You can see him now.”