The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells (20 page)

“I need to sleep.” It was the first thing he said when he walked in that door in 1918, returned from war, and what he said most evenings after dinner; the strong, scarred face would crinkle, his mouth would tighten, and I would see his mind retreat into itself like a snail into its shell. “I need to sleep,” he would state, and I would know then that I was not his companion but his wife, his nurse, and would lead him to the bedroom where he let me undress him while he stared at the photographs on the wall.

“I love you, Greta,” he would whisper in his half sleep. “I love you so much, Greta.” He repeated it so distinctly that I felt it was what he said every night in his foxhole, to calm himself before the booming curtain of sleep covered the world where his nightmares began.

He needed to sleep. And yet—it was a war within him. He murmured things in sleep that I could not recognize; perhaps it was not English. The least sound from the street would send him shouting. Sometimes I woke to find him staring at me, but not in the tender way of a lover in the morning. No, it was the way you would stare at a ghost.

I think his nights were more like mine than I imagined. He, too, traveled to another world. He, too, awakened elsewhere, perhaps with another woman at his side. Or else in a hospital cot, grabbing a few moments before he was called to surgery again. Or else in a trench, half of his body in rainwater, watching the fireworks of war. You could say that his was different; his was all in his mind. But what does that even mean? What in the world is not “all in your mind”?

And one night: I undressed for my new Nathan in our canopied bed, and as he buttoned up his pajamas, winked at me in my envelope chemise, there was a honeymoon feeling about it. Of course there was; so worn from war, he had not yet made love to me. I was shy as a bride, lying on the bed. I was lonely, and needed to be touched. A replacement for the soldier who had left, a version of him who longed to do nothing but be home with me and watch my awkward knitting. He took my hand a bit more passionately than my old Nathan, and touched me a bit more roughly, something fiery in his eye. Different. For just as my forties Nathan had differed from his eighties self, here again I was faced with someone who looked and smelled and smiled and kissed like my old love. But who was not really him. A new start. The man I knew best in the world—I took him in my arms for the first time.

W
E SAT AROUND
the living room card table, which was covered with white lace. There was my aunt Ruth, setting out the rows for solitaire, dressed in a violet silk gown sewn all over with trembling beads, her white bob falling into her eyes as she concentrated. There was Felix, across from her, in a gray suit and white shirt with a new collar. And there, in the corner, with a pipe in his mouth, all in deep blue, was Nathan. The silver-brown beard beginning to cover his scar; he was slowly becoming the Nathan I recognized from my world. White flowers were spread around the table with a glass vase in the middle—roses, foxgloves, other things I never learned the names of—and to Felix’s amusement I was trying to arrange them. There they were: each lost in another world. To war, to prison, to death. Sitting in the living room as winter sunlight came in brightly through each window, as Brahms played on the phonograph. There was “tea” in our cups, from Ruth’s supply of brandy.

“We’re not supposed to play Brahms,” Ruth said without looking up. “Especially being German. The
Times
said it ‘emboldens the spirit.’ I suppose the wrong spirit.”

Nathan cocked his head. “Well, I’m the returning soldier. And I like Brahms.”

Felix said, “I hear they’re burning Beethoven in the alleys!” then looked over at my husband. I knew he feared Nathan resented him for not fighting in the war.

Nathan said, Well, Beethoven, that’s a different matter . . .

Ruth suspended her game: “I went to a concert last week! A bunch of old krauts, stupidly playing German music. And a group of soldiers broke in and demanded they play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ Bravo for them.”

Did they play it? Nathan asked, and she said, Of course. They were Americans.

Here was my family, home again. Once again, I was tempted to reach over to Felix and grab him. Instead, I just watched his mustache twitch in his pink face, his eyebrows rise as he oversaw me snipping the stems of the white roses. “You’ve lost your touch, bubs,” he said, shaking his head. “The stem should be one-third longer than the vase.”

“What do you know about it?”

“That’s what Ingrid says. She’s interested in decorating. She says I decorate like a bachelor.”

Ruth’s eyes met mine quietly. I thought of the conversation we’d had, walking beneath
Washington Arch
.
He has a hard fate, dear. I don’t know how you can help a man like him
.

I felt Nathan approach me and found him leaning down to kiss me. Here: the familiar feel of whiskers on my cheek, now absent in both my other worlds. The familiar scent of my Nathan. “I need some sleep,” he whispered. “I’ll see you a bit later.” I asked if he needed anything, but he just kissed my cheek, touched my hair, and nodded to my family. As he turned, I saw his expression change; working his wounded jaw, frowning. Different, I reminded myself.

The only sound was the Brahms and my aunt placing a few cards down on the table. We heard the bedroom door shut. She glanced up and, this time, she and Felix shared a look. What had they talked about when I was not around? She said, “Does he still have nightmares?”

“Yes,” I said. “And headaches.”

Felix smiled at me as I cut a flower to his liking. “I’m glad he’s back. I know it’s been hard here without him.”

Ruth said, “New York is completely different with the boys home. It’s like a sudden spring. When the tulips jump up all at once, and you can’t think how you bore life without them.”

A glassy bell sound began to come from outside somewhere.

“Have you cheated yet?” Felix asked her, and she looked startled. “At your game?”

The bell kept ringing. “Ruth,” I said, “is that your telephone downstairs?”

“Oh yes! I never recognize it. I always think someone’s dropped a hammer down the stairs.” Ruth stood up. “I’ll be back, little ones. Don’t drink all the brandy. It has to last.” She came to kiss me, laughing. “It’s going to be all right,” she whispered. “You’ll see. I have faith.” And trailing clouds of netting, she was gone.

I turned back to red-haired Felix in his tight gray suit. It was Millie’s day off, and we were alone with Ruth’s booze in our cups, and his face was flushed with it and something on his mind. I leaned into the table, but pulled back; my breasts felt sore. I put a rose into the vase, followed by a long bell-like flower. Another rose, a fern.

“It must be nice to have Nathan home,” he said at last.

“He’s just getting used to things again. To me again. And I’m getting used to him.”

He sat with his hands on the table cluttered with stems and said, “I’m sorry, Greta,” and put his hand on mine. I sat and looked at his flushed face and the real sorrow in it.

“What do you mean?”

“I knew,” he said. “I heard. About your friend.”

The dusting of snow and fresh flowers on such a simple marker.

“How did you . . . ?” I began, and his eyes went to the door. I could not imagine Ruth telling my secrets so easily, but perhaps she had.

I pulled my hand away and went back to the flowers. “He died,” I said, trying not to cry.

“That’s what I’d heard. I just wanted you to know that I’m sorry. It must have broken your heart.”

Flower in my hand, I looked up and saw his plain serious face so pink against the bright new collar. Had I ever broken down in front of him? In some scene I missed, had 1918 Greta stumbled into his bachelor rooms and fallen on the floor, her silk skirts spread wide, and wept onto his knees over the death of her lover? Sobbed and sobbed while he stroked her hair and said nothing but
There now, there now
? It seemed entirely possible. It was no less than what he had done in the lonely years before Alan.

“I’m doing better,” I said, holding out the rose between us. “Dr. Cerletti is helping me.”

“I said some things to you at Ruth’s party,” he said, lifting his head as if he had rehearsed saying this. I assumed he meant the Armistice party, though God knows there might have been others I missed. “I was drunk and they were careless things to say. Now I feel awfully bad about it.” This seemed an almost miraculous change of character. Was it Leo’s death that caused such sympathy? Or something else, something he recognized deep in his own life? It seemed impossible, in this world, that a man like Felix could bear to look that closely at himself. He leaned forward, and I saw his eyes go to the rose, which shook in my hand, releasing a single petal to the table, before they came up to rest on mine: “Did he love you?”

But your brother isn’t like those men. He wants . . .

Why was he asking me this?

“I think he did.”

“I know how hard that must have been for him. Someone married.” He sat there stiffly, a sideways twist to his mouth, as he waited for my response. He looked so deeply sad, one would think it was his loss. How badly I wanted to grasp his hand and have it all out, as I had in 1941. But I could not find the right words for this world; it did not seem made for blunt conversation. I was not equipped for its rules and subtleties, and felt too tender to endure it if my brother turned in rage. So I said nothing. It was only after a long silence that he spoke, very quietly, looking at the table, saying, “If only we just loved who we’re supposed to love.”

“Felix—,” I began.

He stood up, smiling. “I have to go. Ingrid’s father is in town. He wants to get very, very drunk.”

I put down the rose and the scissors and stood up, as well, but he motioned for me to sit. Here it was, the moment to speak of things. “Felix!” I said.

“I’ll find you tomorrow,” he said, and kissed my cheek. He pulled back, drawing his jacket around him. He glanced at the fire, which had died to a glow. Before he left, he turned and said, all smiles, “I’m getting married in a month!”

I put the rose into the vase and caught my breath, finishing the arrangement as neatly as I could. Something glimpsed in him, something of the old Felix I knew. It was there. But I had not possessed the nerve to chase it. I had to find another chance.

You could follow him one night
.

B
LOOMINGDALE
’
S IN
1918 was full of postwar bounty, and the windows cried:
PARIS SAYS FLOWERS FOR HAPPINESS!
Girls in fresh white blouses smiled above sparkling counters, each with a penny in hand in case they found a thief among the browsing women; they were to tap on the glass to summon the store detective. High above them, a miniature gondola set rode by: baskets that salesgirls filled with money, sending them off on to the cashier’s cage for change; how glorious the things that are gone forever! Ladies in long black dresses approached with scents from France—“A salute to our soldiers, madam?” But I shook my head; my ears had been stoppered to their song. My business was three floors above, in men’s attire.

And there I was, as the elevator boy called out the floors: “Evening wear! Travel wear! Hats, gloves, and ribbons!” I had followed my brother from his home that night, to an evening visit to Bloomingdale’s. I had come in disguise: wrapped in mink, with a matching mink toque, from which flowed a honeycomb-patterned veil and, beneath it, my influenza mask. I was not the only person wearing one: The lift boy himself was masked as if for surgery; you could see the yellow mark where his chewing tobacco had stained it. “Men’s attire! Hats, cloaks, shoes, and sundries!” He pulled on his lever, undid the gate, and the doors opened onto that other world of men.

It did not sparkle or shine, like ladies’ below. It spread, in a dull light that mimicked an April sky: a field of wool and leather and oxblood and gray. Instead of our bright novelties, it was a show of subtle choices: a shawl collar, a notched collar, French cuffs, or plain cuffs. An unaided eye would not have noticed the differences. But I put myself behind a screen, examining the gloves laid out like a botanist’s display of leaves. For the men were the same as the clothes. Only a careful eye would notice. And there, among them, was my brother.

Like all the other shoppers that night, for some reason he wore evening clothes. He stood with his red mustache before a suited headless mannequin, about his size, with a careless smile on his face, his hands in his pockets. He removed his own jacket. Then, slowly, almost lovingly, he reached out to unbutton the dummy’s jacket, pausing just a moment, as if asking permission, before he lifted the coat from its shoulders. The dummy wore just his shirtsleeves as my brother put the jacket on himself. Then, again with that sweet smile, he reached up to take hold of the mannequin’s bow tie until the knot released and the ends fell on the dummy’s bare shirt. With one practiced finger he unbuttoned the collar. He could not see me; the screen was pierced mahogany. But I could see him, and the other men in the shop, who looked around seemingly aimlessly, picking up silk and percale and broadcloth as if considering the material. Only a careful eye would notice. That each one of them, though holding, for instance, a long white scarf up to the light to check the quality, had his eyes all the time on my brother, undressing his lover.

There was the sound of a tap; Felix’s head turned, and I noticed, for the first time, a young man at a counter, with a length of measuring tape around his neck. He was perhaps nineteen or twenty, clean shaven, with slick brown hair and a pink scar on his chin. Felix turned to study the tailor poised at his counter, while the latter, fastened suddenly to the ground, taking root in it like a plant, was contemplating with a look of amazement the jacketed form of my brother.

Again, I thought of what time would wash away. Like the gondola that brought the money back and forth, simply because no one considered the salesgirls bright enough for change. A ritual constructed carefully over the years, as desperately, lovingly made as those chapels carved from stone high in the Javanese cliffs. The feeling, not just of desire, but also hope, that lingered here. Not very long from now it would be gone—raided or dispersed or replaced—but for now, it suited the moment in which it was born. Simply because no one considered it possible to state the heart’s desire.