The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells (21 page)

The tailor stood aside, and Felix walked past him, unbuttoning his cuffs, to a fitting room where I assumed measurements would be taken. Or whatever actually occurred; I nearly laughed. The men in the room shifted and ruffled their feathers in envy or desire, and two began to talk. But I smiled and shook my head to think again of Felix, of all people, participating in the dumb show. A fitting room, in Bloomingdale’s. And the skinny tailor—he wasn’t even my brother’s type!

As I left, I noticed a decoration I had not seen on exiting the elevator; it was hidden by a rack of coats that had now been rolled onto the floor. I thought I would let Felix have his fun—hadn’t I always?—and that the moment to confront him was later. I had a strange, romantic idea that perhaps I might put in motion. With Ruth’s help. Yes, a way to perfect this world. I made my way past the scarves and gloves and terrified men who now noticed me, like a policeman invading their private, shaded grove. I stood at the elevator, waiting. And looked at the screen, on which had been painted a spring scene: two enormous bumblebees, facing each other, perched on the same bright flower.

F
ELIX IS COMING HOME
,” A
LAN TOLD ME ON THE PHONE
that morning. “They’re releasing him on probation.”

“Oh my God, how did you do it?”

Even through the wire, I could hear his smile. “I pulled every string I could.”

The excitement in my voice had brought little Fee running down the hall; surely he thought any great news had to do with him. “Your uncle’s coming home!” I told him, and he jumped up and down.

Alan: “There’s still some red tape to get through. Tomorrow, maybe even today. I’ll bring him straight to you.”

“Thank you, Alan. Thank you.”

I hung up and lifted Fee into the air, kissing him as he laughed and laughed.

I had to distract myself from the anxiety of waiting for Felix, so I tended the house, and cooked the oatmeal and ironed the sheets. There were no further calls from Alan. I just watched Fee playing with his tin soldiers, and asking questions too hard to answer. That is how Mrs. Green and I found ourselves explaining to my son the concept of war.

It was like explaining the act of love, which lacks all internal logic except to those engaged, to whom logic is superfluous, because the only motivation is passion. The conversation was nonsense on my end and pure reason on his:

“There are bad guys, the Germans,” I said, “who are trying to take what isn’t theirs, and our country is trying to stop them and make them put it back.”

“The bad guys are Germans?” he asked without looking up from his soldiers, engaged in a battle that he refused to connect with the present one. “Are we the bad guys?”

I had to explain, with Mrs. Green’s assistance, that we were Americans, and were fighting on the side of America. The French shot the Russians with little explosions in his mouth (it was a Napoleonic set). Cease-fire. And then:

“Mrs. Green, are you a bad guy?”

This because she was not American. At which point Mrs. Green foolishly explained that Sweden was neutral, and did not care who won, at which point he burst into tears and asked, didn’t she want the good guys to win?

It was only later we inserted his father into the war, which surprisingly did not elicit an outburst, but merely made him nod like a god above the battle scene. I opened my mouth, beginning to explain about his uncle, but closed it in time. Mrs. Green gazed at me curiously. It was something we had never discussed. So we sat and watched Fee play with his soldiers, his father now among them.

L
ATER THAT DAY
, we were out on the street, my son and Mrs. Green and I, making our way through another version of my city at war. It was all I could think of to divert myself from the news about Felix; some part of me believed it still might not happen. We were on a mission for blackout curtains so that Fee could have his Christmas lights. You must picture us: me padded like a linebacker in a woolen dress that felt as if it had the clothes hanger attached, Mrs. Green in a big-bully coat, and poor Fee struggling along in his stiff woolen matched set. I found it hard to believe nobody stared at us. But we matched the street we walked on, everyone in their own costumes: firemen in overalls, shopgirls in trumpet-shaped tops and blue alligator pumps, Italian street vendors selling hot sweet potatoes, and of course boys and men everywhere in brand-new uniforms from the boxes, still unironed, making their way with big duffel bags toward a train away from home. Very little else about the city seemed to have changed since Pearl Harbor; I suppose I imagined everyone would stay inside, but that is impossible in Manhattan. Instead, you had to look for details: for instance the sign on pay phones:
WHEN YOU HEAR AN AIR-RAID WARNING, DO NOT USE THIS TELEPHONE
! and, down one alley beside a five-and-ten-cent store, a small bonfire of items “made in Japan.” In another time, they were burning records of Beethoven and Brahms. Around it goes.

The fabric store, in contrast to the street scene, showed every sign of panic. Every bolt of cloth that could possibly cover a window had been brought out and labeled at thirty-nine cents. Mrs. Green somehow knew exactly what to choose, which turned out, to my surprise, to be not black at all but plain gray coated-cotton cloth. She grabbed a bolt and threw it on the measuring table, where a plump girl with pinned-back black hair and too much makeup cut her yardage; I paid out of my silly Lucite-handled purse. We had to disentangle Fee from where a “giant witch spider,” as he put it, had ensnared him in her black lace web. I bought him a quarter yard and he wore it like a scarf. Mrs. Green seemed appalled. It was not until we were halfway home that the air-raid sirens began to sound.

First, nobody really knew what to do. Most people kept going about their daily lives. One man, wearing a black triangular armband, stepped into the street and yelled, “I am your civilian air warden! Enter the nearest building and lie down!” at which people merely stared at his preposterous command and kept walking. A policeman managed to stop traffic, but could not convince the passengers of a bus that they all had to disembark immediately. Not a single passenger would leave his seat. Brandishing his gun, he yelled, “But I’m the police! I’m the police!” and finally walked away in despair, asking nobody in particular: “What am I supposed to do? Shoot the poor louses?” But by then we had already rushed into a store with a crowd of other ladies, burdened by shopping, and I held Fee against my coat like any animal mother with her young. I put my hand to his face and from his wet cheeks I knew that he was crying.

After a few minutes, the terrible noise stopped and I could hear my son’s loud sobbing. “Oh, baby,” I heard myself saying, stroking his head, “hush now, hush now.” I looked across the room and found some solace in another mother, consoling her own frightened son—no, it was a mirror, and just my unfamiliar self with Fee. We exchanged shocked stares with the tailor, and then, to add to the comedy, a young man emerged from the curtain wearing nothing but garters and boxers, saying, “Hey, are we supposed to lie down or something?”

“No,” said Mrs. Green. “We are simply meant to wait indoors until the all clear.”

He grinned. “Well, thanks, ma’am. So . . . can I go back in there?”

I heard her take a deep breath and then, to my surprise, she said, “No, not until the all clear.”

“All right then,” he said, smiling shyly, “if you ladies don’t mind.” He took a homburg from a shelf and placed it on his head, then crossed his arms and waited with the rest of us, nodding at each lady in turn. No one told him he was allowed to get dressed, especially not the stunned shopkeeper, who sat winding his watch. So we stood, we housewives with our bags of blackout cloth, and simply admired his form. Mrs. Green would not meet my eye. I wish she would have; I was so delighted to discover she had a sense of humor.

And then it came: three short bursts, repeated over and over. The young man tipped his hat to us, and the ladies all gathered their things, and I gathered Fee. There was a general bustle among the ladies that prevented us from leaving, as everyone expanded to grab bags and loosened shoes and gloves and coats scattered, somehow, everywhere, like autumn trees that have changed their minds, sticking every leaf back where it came from. I lingered a little, looking at Christmas tiepins for Nathan, knowing it was silly; he would be in uniform for years. What he needed was something to take blood out of khaki. And something to keep the horror out. “I need a bouquet,” Felix used to say to florists, “that says, ‘I will keep the sadness out.’ Can you do that?” And sometimes they could.

“H
ERE WE ARE
,” Mrs. Green said when we were home, hoisting her pile of fabric. “Wipe your feet, Fee.” Outside in Patchin Place, someone had not tied the cord properly to a flagpole, and it whipped in the wind, and even from our hallway we could hear its metal buckle dinging against the pole.

I heard my son shout, “Uncle X!” and rounded the corner, pulling off my coat, to see my brother sitting in the parlor with his lawyer: Alan Tandy, Esq., in a striped blue tie and a face flushed red by the fire. And my brother, in just a shirt and slacks, a cotton jacket. Probably the clothes he was picked up in. Turning to see me.

“Felix!” I said, running to him, my hat falling to the floor. “You’re free!”

He smiled at my embrace, but there was a change in him. Dark commas beneath his eyes. Thin and scared and quiet. I could not bear it. It is the case with twins; it feels unnatural for the image in the mirror to change without you.

“Greta,” he said. His eyes as dull as his cuff links.

“Merry Christmas, Greta,” Alan said, smiling.

“Thank God you’re out. Are you all right?” I turned to my son, who clung to his uncle. “Fee, go to your room for your nap. The adults are going to talk. Mrs. Green, would you . . . ?” She smiled, looking over the cast of characters, and shuffled my complaining son out of the room. Felix produced a cup for me. Alan rose to greet me properly, scratchy in his tweed suit. There were formal embraces and words. I wondered what to say, what to do, with these men, nervously holding their steaming cups, these men and their lives. I had a notion we should all just make a run for it.

“Thank you for visiting me, it was the only fun I had,” Felix said. Ding, ding went the flagpole.

“I never asked if they were feeding you,” I said.

He took a drag from a cigarette and rubbed his eyes with his other hand. “I suppose it’s unpatriotic to say that if it’s going to be bread and water, German bread would be preferable. They thought I was a spy.”

“You look terrible.”

He managed a smile with his eyes closed. “Thanks, Greta. It wasn’t torture. It was me and Italians and lots of krauts. Now they,
they
were spies. But Alan got me out.”

“We had a bit of luck,” Alan was saying. “And I’ve managed to get his record erased. I knew the police. I knew the judge.”

“Thank you,” I said gravely. The loud voice of the wind was battling with the windows.

Alan took a deep breath. He smoothed his short gray hair and said, “But we can’t erase his name in the paper.”

A look of fear from Felix again.

“You mean where you were found,” I said.

Ding, ding went the flagpole in the silence. The windowpanes shook violently. Not one of us moved from our places, looking, searching each other.

Alan broke the quiet: “We’ll think of something. Greta and I, we’ll take care of you.” He looked directly at Felix and I saw him put his other hand around his cup. Perhaps to stop himself from touching my brother, to comfort him. Surely he had done that already, on the way home from the prison. Gripping his hand under a coat where the driver could not see.

I heard Mrs. Green discreetly coughing in the hallway to let us know she had reentered. Their gaze flew apart, and very soon Alan was saying his good-byes, back to the cordial businessman I knew. I tried to picture what he might be like in 1919, in his waistcoat and tails and pocket watch. The door clicked closed.

“Ingrid is staying in Washington,” Felix told me, looking at the door. “With her father. It looks bad, that I was on a list. And what was in the paper.”