The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells (27 page)

I found Nathan lying in the bed, propped up by pillows, his face white and clean, his breath still suffering slightly from the fading illness as, above him, the hired nurse put a comb to his greasy, sweated hair. It seemed to me he winced in pain at every movement of the comb, catching the coarse hair I knew so well. But he bore it like a dentist’s drill. Only when she was done did he turn and see me there in the doorway. And his eyes, which brightened suddenly, went from my face to my belly, where, unconsciously, I had begun to rest my hand.

I gestured to the nurse, who paused before departing, wiping the comb on her apron. I sat in the chair beside him and touched his hair. On the table: a glass of water, whose optical effect made its immersed spoon split in two.

“I heard you’re feeling better.”

He nodded, his eyes on my face. “You shouldn’t be here. I might still be contagious.”

“The doctor said you wouldn’t be.”

“What do doctors know?” He gave a broken expression. “Greta,” he said. “I’m so sorry. It was . . . the fever.”

I took his hand and he squeezed it hard. He said he loved me, lying pale and exhausted in the bed. He said it over and over and over.

“I love you, too, Nathan. I’ve loved you for so long.”

“So you’ll stay? You’ll be my wife. We’ll raise your . . . child.”

I held his gaze as firmly as I held his hand. “No,” I said, smiling sadly. “No, I can’t be your wife anymore.”

He looked at me as if the words I’d said were still perhaps a figment of his fever, like the slight ringing in his ears, or the shutters that opened and closed on parts of his vision, or his trembling hand, which I held very still. I sat and held his gaze and let him understand. The magic effect of sunlight on a passing carriage, reflecting around the room, across his face, so blank with shock. He began to cry, just as the other two Nathans had cried. He had not known, not expected this. I went and held him, his head against my chest.

“Something, there’s something I could say,” he said, trying to sit up. “That would turn this.”

“There’s nothing to say. Just rest.”

“Pretend I’ve said it, Greta.”

I kissed his forehead and stood up, flattening the starch of my black dress. “Nathan,” I asked. “Who am I to you?”

His exhausted face could make no sense of this, and he tried to sit up and failed.

“When you think about me,” I asked. “When you remember me after, who will I be to you?”

“You’re my wife, Greta.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I thought so.”

“I don’t understand. Who am I to you?”

I stood with my hand on the doorknob and saw the flush of emotion reddening his neck, a sign of his new health, and his new grief, which he would have to bear. “Nathan, I thought you knew. You were my first love.” And so I closed the door and told the nurse he needed rest, and walked down the hall to where the doctor waited with the jar.

W
HY IS IT
impossible to be a woman? Men will never understand, men who are always themselves, day after day, shouting opinions and drinking freely and flirting and whoring and weeping and being forgiven for it all. When has a woman ever been forgiven? Can you even imagine it? For I have seen the plane of being, and nowhere upon it is the woman tracing her life as she always dreamed of it. Always there are the boundaries, the rules, the questions—
wouldn’t you prefer to be back home, little lady?
—that break the spell of living. What a fantasy to live within that spell, the enchantment of speaking one’s mind, and doing one’s will, and waking in the bed of one’s choosing. I say this simply as a woman rattling the cage to be free. And what do I mean by free? Just to walk down the street. Just to buy a newspaper without a single eye deciding my place. A shrew, a wife, or a whore. Those seemed to be my choices. I ask any man reading this, how could you decide whether to be a villain, a worker, or a plaything? A man would refuse to choose; a man would have that right. But I had only three worlds to choose from, and which of them was happiness? All I wanted was love. A simple thing, a timeless thing. When men want love they sing for it, or smile for it, or pay for it. And what do women do? They choose. And their lives are struck like bronze medallions. So tell me, gentlemen, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman?

I
CAN SO EASILY IMAGINE THAT SCENE IN
1919:
MY HUSBAND
standing with his suitcase in the hall, staring at me across the long distance that separated us. I see myself at the bedroom door, all in hyacinth silk. The war scar white in his beard the only change in the face I knew so well, a face that in another scene of leaving had looked at me from a car window. In another world, it all might have gone differently. Pocket watch in his pocket, a crease of pain in the corner of each eye. Once again, the flash of light on his glasses might be the last I ever saw of him.

In another world, he would have tried to say the right thing. Even with love lying dead on the operating table, yet still the right thing might bring it back to life. But who has ever found the right thing to say? Who, in the history of love, has ever found it, and said it perfectly to the woman standing there? In another world, he might have come close. But my Nathan, in 1919, was too battle worn and proud to say he was sorry again. I imagine all he said was, “Good-bye.”

For I was not there, and can only imagine it. It was the midcentury Greta he said it to, who might have begged him to stay had she not loved a better version of that man. And I was in her life, the one who stood outside the door in 1942 at Patchin Place, with my son, weathering the cold in our hats and mittens, watching the iron gate for half an hour before—at last!—a shape in an army coat and duffel came and undid the latch and stepped into our little cobbled road and I let my son free to run to him. I watched the clean-shaven man drop the duffel and pick up the boy, shouting ridiculous nonsense before he turned to grin at me. You, Nathan, all over again. My husband home from war.

T
HERE ALMOST HAS
to be a heaven, so there can be a place where all things meet. Where time folds in, a lifted tablecloth after the meal, and gathers all the scattered crumbs of life. A son and a brother, a husband, all sitting by the coal fire while from another room comes the scent of Mrs. Green making split-pea soup, a smell so rich it is almost as if we are eating it. Nathan costumed in drab, creased and pinned and necktied with his glasses sitting a handbreadth above his smile. The sagging sign above him done in silver,
WELCOME HOME DADDY
, and his son misbehaving wildly, almost delirious with joy, his collar now firmly in his father’s grip, a wife amazed to see him alive again, no hatred anywhere, nothing but the grand relief of being home and shouldn’t there be a dog here with its head on his polished shoe? Shouldn’t there be a grandmother knitting scarves from reused yarn? Shouldn’t there be a white-frosted cake—oh there it is!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, TWINS
.

“Looks like it’s England for me, though that could change any minute,” Nathan was saying, one cheek glowing red from the warmth of the fireplace, the creases white around his eye. “Guess I’ll have to learn the language.” With a wink.

What a different man from the one I had left in 1919. He stroked his son’s fine hair and smiled and told us stories of bad food and bad behavior, the underfed Okie boys who showed up more Adam’s apple than soldier, and the funny old lady who sang to them from her fire escape as the soldiers stepped out of Grand Central. “Over There” was what she sang. As he talked, and petted Fee, he looked across the room and smiled at me and, as the poet said, that smile would make a stone love.

Felix, beside me, leaned over and whispered: “Happy birthday, Sis, I have something to show you.” He bent his head to the right. There, in those red hairs, only an expert could have picked out the weeds of white. He turned back and his mouth gaped in alarm. “Old! We’re getting old!” I told him that was nothing; my hairdresser had been plucking mine out for years, and I kept the smile on my face as it occurred to me that this Felix was changing, aging as I watched. The brother I remembered had never seen a wrinkle, never known a gray hair. This Felix, along with me, would have to grow old. How I wished I could stay to see it. For there were only four procedures left.

D
OWNSTAIRS, THE NEXT
day, making the beds after Cerletti had given me my procedure, I felt as if I was closing up a house for the summer, closing up a life. Everything was cycling one last time, three more shocks after this, which meant I would return to this world one more time before taking my final dose. I knew that each object I touched might be the last I would ever see of it. The people as well. But how do you say good-bye to someone who does not know it is good-bye, will never know? To stand with Mrs. Green and fold a quilt with her, approaching close enough to her at last to smell the nutmeg and cigarette in her hair, how could I tell her:
You were my only friend in this age
? To wonder, if I looked for her in my modern time, would I find her anywhere at all? Would she be back in Sweden, or France? Would she even be alive?

“Mrs. Green,” I said, turning to her as she picked up a pair of Fee’s knickers to mend, “what is your given name?”

She did not look up, but kept sewing her maidenly stitches, so small and perfect even without the use of the machine, which was being repaired. “Karin,” she replied.

“And what happened to your husband?”

The room waited for four, five, six stitches before she said, “I never had a husband, madam.” She looked up at me but nothing was furrowed or marked on her face at all. She simply added: “I found it easier to say so, long ago.”

I went through all the possible stories in my mind, as one does at moments like this, when a human being one has known breaks the bonds of expectation, expands almost infinitely beyond them, then contracts again into the small woman in the parlor, making stitches with a thread not quite the right color. We are so much more than we assume.

“I will still call you Mrs. Green, if you don’t mind.”

“As you wish, madam,” she said, nodding and going back to the knickers, adding only, and this time more quietly: “Yes. Thank you.” Then: “Your brother took Felix out to the toy store and your husband had to stop by the clinic. It might be a good time to take a lie-down.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you,” and I said it the second time as one double-ties a knot, to ensure that it will stay.

T
HAT NIGHT, HIS
last before he left for England, Nathan removed my cast. “You’re married to a doctor, after all,” he said. “And it’s time to come off.”

Sitting beside me, he began at my elbow: I felt the cold metal of the shears against my skin. The rasp of his gentle cutting was the only sound in the room. Only once did the shears grab at my skin, causing me to gasp, and he stopped, took my hand, and paused for a moment.

As I sat and watched him, and felt him with those shears so close to my tender skin, I wanted to ask,
How often do you think of her
? With his gaze so intent on his work, wiping bits of plaster from his cheek where they had stuck.
How often do you mistake someone on the street for her, and your heart starts pounding
? The silver circles the light made in his military hair. But must we always ask those things? Does it always bring us closer? Or was this itself the closeness: the prick of the shears, the careful adjustment, the tear of the plaster, the trust and concentration? There, haloed in the light, biting his lip and changing his position so as not to hurt me if he could avoid it. My blood beating so close to the sharp metal. Was this the marriage? To hold still, to do our best.

Only when he reached my thumb, and with a great crack was able to tear the whole thing loose, did he place my naked arm on a fresh towel and begin to clean it with a sponge. I flexed my fingers, amazed. As if it were not my arm at all. I looked up at my husband, who sat flushed and beaming at his work. “There,” he said. “As good as new.”

And on the walk we took, later, around the old neighborhood, something came into my head and I took his hand in my now unbroken one, thrilling at the freedom and lightness of my new arm. “Wait,” I said. “Come here. I want to see something.”