The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells (24 page)

But it was Alan I mourned for.

What is it, the missing of people? It kills, and kills, and kills us. We think back on a weekend at the beach, and cooking lobsters and splitting their shells, and making margaritas with lemons instead of limes and the car breaking down, walking all the way back down the sandy road to find a house with a phone, laughing and laughing in the drunken heat of the afternoon—a wonderful time, one of the best times!—and think, “Where are they all now, all my young friends?” Dead, of course; and the memory changes. It deepens and alters and grows happier and sadder all at once, but why should it? We were happy then, they were happy; shouldn’t the moment be set? Yet it is not; every moment is changeable. How strange, for the present to change the past! In just this way, I lived in these worlds knowing something like the future: a sense of how things could be. Isn’t this the time traveler’s curse? I did not see what was to come, but I saw the possibilities. And the pain of seeing life and happiness in people I knew to be dead in other times, it was like that sad sense of the past, when the glass warps how we perceive things. I could not ever be there with them, truly. Because I was both seeing them, and remembering them. Alan with his lawyer’s voice; Alan telling his donkey story. Alan in his business suit beside three phones; Alan in his swimsuit, carrying a screaming Felix into the sea; Alan in an urn. The possibilities. Is there any greater pain to know what could be, and yet be powerless to make it be?

Every day at six fifteen, the 33rd Street bridge
. I slipped away from home. I had to follow it, had to know.

I got out at Times Square and was thrown into a mass of sailors in their winter coats and whites, faces burned red from the Atlantic sun, walking tipsily either from a day of drinking or from so many months at sea. They shouted at every passing girl, and a few gave me long leering looks. I pulled my seal jacket around me and flashed my ring; it did no good; I suppose they had heard about married ladies. I suppose that they were right. I headed west and knew it was a poor decision as soon as I passed Eighth; I didn’t know what it was like in 1941, but in my time it was Hell’s Kitchen, built along the train tracks and full of derelicts, addicts, and whores. The streets smelled, unmistakably, of bread and sugar and ginger: a nearby cookie factory. I felt conspicuous in my jacket, my jewelry, my doctor’s wife’s hairdo and dress and shoes. In my old life, I would have taken a New York stride and held my head high. In 1919, I would have been hauled off the street. Here, I did not know what would become of me. But I hurried to the Thirties, to where a small iron bridge rose over the train tracks, then back to the avenues. I climbed the stairs to the top.

And here I stood, waiting. It was nearly six fifteen. I looked across the bridge—how did I not expect the obvious?

At first just the silhouette of cap and scarf against the lights, among the few others crossing the bridge or loitering there. But I knew instantly who it was. Head high and confident, arms wrapped around himself against the cold. Another world, another Leo. My child’s father, returned from the dead.

T
HERE
L
EO STOOD
, in a gabardine jacket and bright red scarf, the same shaved and polished face, smiling as widely as ever. As if simply existing was no great miracle. My heels made a clanging noise as I made my way to the middle of the bridge, hung with railroad lanterns that glowed in the wet air. Servicemen were gathered at the curved railing, a few wandering navy boys, and Leo. I stopped at a distance, watching his head move back and forth as he took in the scene around him. A hand went to his hair to smooth it down; I knew no gesture could ever tame it. I had gone and seen his fresh grave carved with the twenty-five years of his life. And yet, there he stood.

The soldiers were gathered nearby, making a great deal of noise, so he left his post and began to walk toward me; my pulse quickened immediately. He was still in shadow and then passed into the light and I saw the face I had last known in a coldwater flat, hung with clothes glowing like lanterns. Wide handsome face, his chin already blue with a new beard, large brown eyes, long lashes gold in the bridge lights. He walked on, and I saw in this world that he had no limp to hide, no dance when his lame leg tripped him.

He thrust his hands in his pockets and grinned, looking around him, and then he looked right at me.

He nodded, and walked on by.

Just that look: appraising, with the flutter of a smile, the way young men look at dozens of women every day. Just that look and nothing else. I watched him as he went by. So we were strangers in this world.

He took his place against the railing again, looking south as the soldiers bickered grandly from the other end of the bridge. Waiting for something, but not waiting for me. The boy who surely grew up here and not up north, a poor boy from Hell’s Kitchen. The Greta of 1918 must have learned his rituals, and knew he came here every night at six fifteen, as the others had, to witness something that had nothing to do with Mrs. Nathan Michelson.

I felt how much she missed him.

I
READ IN
her diary how their time in the cabin ended:

Greta and Leo had gone on a walk in the woods he knew so well, where he stopped and showed her where, hidden in the trees, a few boards were nailed to the trunk of an old bare oak—nothing more—the last remains of a hideout from his youth. He stood for a long time in memory before the scene. It was colder without the falling snow, and her fur did not warm her enough, but she bore it. It was, after all, the last day, and she would not turn back, knowing it would be their final walk together in that place. She thought Leo was lost in childhood; instead, she realized he must have been building up the will to ask her.

“Should I fight for you?”

She did not think about it more than an instant. Shivering in her fur, feeling the cold like an ice coat beneath her own coat, working its way up against her skin. She found herself saying, “No. Don’t fight for me.”

But who on earth would say no? Who on earth would not long to be fought for? Is this not the very heart of human existence, to be worth fighting for, worth losing everything for? That was surely what Leo proposed. But no, she said. No, don’t fight for me. She horrified herself by saying it so plainly. But it was what she had to say, to save him from a deeper heartbreak. Now it was done. Now she would bear the pain for both of them, probably for always, and he would go and have a life without her.

“Don’t fight for me, Leo.”

He said nothing in response. He just turned his back on her and walked alone back to the cabin. It was quite cold.

A
MISTAKE, MADE
in another world. And here: It could be righted. There was so little time—only six procedures left—and here we all were: with me grasping for Felix, for Alan, before my world killed them again: another bringing Nathan once more into my life, to understand him, to have him in all worlds: and this one: She was trying to pull Leo back through the ether. Each of us: to fix the mistakes we’d made. To say the right words, do the right actions, before the porthole closed. For the first time it occurred to me: Perhaps the Greta from 1918 no longer wanted her world. She wanted one where the snow did not fall on Leo Barrow’s grave.

I thought of the clothes hanging in that apartment, how the light had made them glow. Like the lanterns of a pleasure garden, with dancing couples and music playing from a sleepy band. Here, it was the swaying railroad lamps and the pillar of steam rising from beside the bridge. The soldiers jostling for another swig from the bottle. The brick warehouses stacked around us so that we stood in a kind of cove, a hidden place. The place where boys might come with nothing else to do, and no money, making the best of what they found around them. The lights of midtown had been dimmed for weeks now, to hide Manhattan’s silhouette from German ships, and only the vague red glow of Times Square burned there like the embers of a fire.

A bell went off somewhere, and the soldiers began to group as if something was about to happen, but Leo just stood there. I watched as he pulled his collar around his throat. How well I knew those hands. How strange to think that they did not know me.

How many more times would I have it? The chance to meet someone anew, begin with everything I had done right and wrong, clear all mistakes and start fresh with life? This Leo had not met any other Greta. He was untouched; no electric hand had reached through the dimensions yet to grab him. This one was, for the moment, mine alone. Mine to greet for the first time, see smile for the first time. Sense, perhaps, something stirring inside him that even he was not aware of, as he could not possibly know he had loved me terribly before, and died, and been brought back to life to love me again.

I pictured how he would look if I approached him. An eyebrow raised, that smile making a dimple in his cheek. His voice so low for a young man:

“Good evening, ma’am, what’s your name?”

“I’m Greta Wells.”

A dark look in his eye. “Leo.”

There he stood. I took a few steps toward him, watching him from behind: stoop shouldered against the cold, hat jammed onto his head, patches on his elbows, eyes looking right and left. A sudden wind made all the lanterns swing in time and a soldier’s hat went off, with a shout, from his head and over the side of the bridge. Leo laughed.

There before me: the scarf unwound, the neck pink with warmth and bare to the wind. The soldiers laughing at the rail. Somewhere a key hidden under a rock. But which is worse: To start an affair, knowing how it will go? Or to walk away, knowing it could have been his great love, and leave to someone else a first crack at his heart, which would be broken now in another place, but broken all the same? He looked back at me and caught my eye. The light on his ear, the way it glowed with a child’s softness; everything was returning, could return. For her.
Should I fight for you
? Is there something worse in life than to make someone love you just because you need it, just because you can?

Then, from nowhere, he stood bolt upright. From the soldiers I heard a shout: “Here it comes!”

And from the depths of the train yard, lit by the shaded lights of the train itself, and by the moon, and every ambient light even on that dim night, great clouds of steam rose up like the arrival of a genie from a lamp, billowing soft and warm around us. He was laughing. I saw him as a boy, in the depths of the Depression, running from the sweet smell of the factory with his friends, cookies in their pockets stolen from the loading dock. I saw his childhood there on the streets, playing stickball in short pants, filing down to the public baths with a towel in one hand, a bar of soap in the other, singing “Over There!” with obscene lyrics in a chorus of boys, his jobs as a corner newspaper boy, or handing out playbills, which he would duly dump in the sewer and spend his working hours skinny-dipping in the trash-strewn Hudson. I saw again how close it was, his boyhood. Still on the horizon, where his adult life was so far away it frightened him. Leo as a boy, his features even more outsize, grown up here and not in that cabin up north, where life might have been easier. I saw all the boys charging up the stairs and waiting for this moment, just at sunset, when the old six fifteen came clanging by and they could jump up and down, crumbs in their mouths, and imagine—as the only freedom they knew, in days when nothing was theirs except what they invented—that they could walk on clouds of gold.

And that is where I left him.

I
T WAS A NEW YEAR
.

“Dr. Cerletti, how does it end?”

“What do you mean, Miss Wells?”

“Six procedures from now. When we finish, do we consider another round?”

“Your progress has been remarkable. There’s no reason for me to believe we’ll continue. In fact, I don’t think it would be wise. You’ll continue seeing Dr. Gilleo, of course.”

“But how does it end?”

“I don’t know what you mean. You’re yourself again. Or on your way.”