The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

by Andrew Sean Greer

  I was making my way through these thoughts, barely paying attention as I opened the second letter and read it through.

  “Ruth,” I whispered loudly, but did not manage to extract her from her conversation. “Ruth!”

  “Darling, yes.”

  “How long have I known Leo?”

  “I think a month or so. I started getting flowers sent to me around then. I knew they were meant for you.” She added that he had been seen in Patchin Place, staring up at my window. “I’m afraid to tell you,” Ruth said quietly as a gong was struck somewhere backstage. “That the boy’s rather attached.”

  “Is he my . . . ?”

  “Your sweetheart, is what I would say,” she said. “Your admirer. Nothing serious has happened yet.”

  I showed her the letter. The message was brief, and I managed to see the thrill in her eyes before the lights dropped and audience noise fell to a hush. She put her hand on mine and squeezed. Things had suddenly become more complicated than expected. First a loving husband with allusions to sorrow. And now this. Greta, it had begun.

  I will never forget the night you said you loved me . . .

  The theater now was dark as a forest. A piano began to play an antique waltz. In the twilight we could see the curtain opening on something square and white, and then, a moment later, the bedsheet glowed with the miraculous words The House of Mirth. It turned out I had completely misunderstood the performance we were seeing, and Leo’s role. It was not a play at all. It was a moving-picture show.

  Small footlights came up left and right, revealing two young people on stools: a kohl-eyed girl in even more old-fashioned dress than the crowd, and Leo, wearing a tight wool suit, bowler, and eye shadow. Both held megaphones, and Leo immediately lifted his and read the title aloud, along with the names of the performers, one of whom was a female Barrymore I had not heard of. Then the scene opened on a silent picture of a beautiful woman walking down a New York City street of brownstones, smiling at a sunny day. The girl in the bustle dress read the words that appeared on the screen: “Lily Bart had missed the three fifteen to Rhinebeck.” They were to read the title cards of this movie, while the piano changed tunes according to the action; the girl read the female parts, and Leo the male ones. At first I assumed it was a theatricalization of the moving picture, but after a long time I understood the real reason, and then I was ashamed. It was not for any theatrical purpose. It was because most of the audience could not read.

  A man appeared on the screen, a wry man in an ascot, and Leo read the card: “Oh, I’m not dangerous.” A few in the audience laughed. But I sat and looked at my young man with the painted mustache.

  So funny to sit and see a stranger and be told: “That’s your lover.” The one in the chair? No, on the stool, in the hat. Aha, thank you, Doctor. It seemed curious that another me loved that young man, staring boldly at me in the alley; in my aunt’s hall; five-foot-something of headstrong youth.

  I would do anything for you, the letter went on to say. So be kind to me.

  It took me a moment to realize that he saw me. Of course; unlike the theater, here the audience was lit by the glow of the film; he could see us almost as well as we could see him. Who knows how long I had been staring at him? Or he at me? But the moment caught us both out of character. Eyes locked in the white light of the projector, hiding nothing. So tell me: Who were we then?

  “WELL, WASN’T THAT fun!” Ruth said, rushing forward as Leo came out of the stage door. “They should do that with all books! Have you standing over my shoulder reading all the men’s parts would be so much more fun, don’t you think?”

  “As long as you pick a short book,” Leo replied, and as she cast me a look that said: I envy your youth, if I had your luck and your figure, I wouldn’t hesitate for an instant, life is too short, and he chuckled knowingly and shot me a look that said: See how well I fit into your life, see how nice I would be to have around, try me for a while. They chattered and flirted, and were all want, want, want. And all for a girl who wasn’t me.

  It was agreed that Leo should accompany us home, and on the way we discussed the book and the movie, which Ruth seemed to know by heart. I watched the pushcarts and barrels of pickles and schmaltz herring and men standing around. I felt people’s eyes on me, now in the darkness more than before. I wondered where my brother could be. Sitting with his fiancée? Waiting for me somewhere? At least I knew he was out of jail.

  “Excuse me,” I heard Leo say, interrupting my aunt’s flow of words. “I wanted to show you both something I thought you’d like.”

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “It’s a secret,” he said, raising a roguish eyebrow. “My friend’s a gardener here.”

  I was going to ask “Where?” because I had lost my way (the streets seemed to have changed—or rather, not yet have changed) but realized we were standing just at the edge of Washington Square Park. My heart could have leaped like a fish from a bowl: I saw it as it used to be. No bright glare of lamps on the fountain; no gathered crowds of roller skaters, visiting youths, old hippies spending a chilly night. Only the old elms from which supposedly they used to hang criminals for public viewing. A startling thought: Someone alive remembered those days. And there was the arch, shockingly white, of course, cleaner by sixty-seven years, yet still the same pale open mouth on Fifth Avenue, and it took me a moment to realize it was missing one of its George Washington statues. I supposed some sculptor was still chiseling away at a deadline.

  Leo looked under a nearby white stone for a while. “Found it!” he said, smiling, and boldly took my hand, leading me to the east side of the arch. Ruth followed, lifting her skirts in the wet grass. I had never noticed before the little door cut into the stone there, or the tiny keyhole; it had never occurred to me the arch could be anything but solid marble. Leo slid the key in the lock and, with a satisfying creak, the door slid open to darkness. All we could see were the first steps of some stairs. A smile from Leo, full of daring:

  “Nobody comes up here. Nobody even knows it exists.”

  THREE GLASSES OF wine stood, now empty, on the stone ledge of the arch, beside Leo’s hat. He had apparently prepared; the glasses and a bottle of wine had been hidden in the staircase below. The lantern was out—“Too risky,” Leo whispered. “Last year some artists got the key for a party and there was hell to pay”—so for our visit we were treated to darkness, silence, and a view that was not my New York: gasworks billowing gilded steam, the black Hudson littered with a jeweler’s shop of boat lights, the few lamps flickering in servant attics north of us, the vagrant fires glowing south.

  Leo stood beside me, and Ruth had stationed herself farther away. I saw her, hands clutched together, looking out on the city, oddly silent.

  “Look,” Leo said, and she turned to where he pointed. “There’s the courthouse. And there’s Patchin Place.”

  You could more imagine it than see it, but there was in the darkness perhaps the gleam of the gates, just between the courthouse and the prison. The lamplight of our little alley.

  We stood looking without saying a word. In the darkness, I could feel the young man’s eyes on me.

  Suddenly I heard Ruth’s voice. “I heard a story,” she said. “About a Chinese sorcerer who wanted to live forever. So he cut his own heart out and put it in a box and hid it where no one would ever find it.” I looked over to see the light catching her jewelry. “Now where do you think he hid it?”

  From behind me, I heard Leo say, “I don’t know.”

  “Take a guess,” she said. “A castle with a dragon? A mountaintop?”

  “I’d hide it down a well,” I said.

  She laughed. “Yes. Something like that. In a flour sack. The least likely place some young hero would look for it.”

  “Very clever,” Leo said, closer to me now.

  Ruth’s voice grew quieter. “I wonder where New York has hidden its heart.”

  The silence of the park sat in the space she left there.


  “I wonder,” Leo said softly.

  I looked at him and he smiled broadly. Those eyes watching me so closely. He was indeed handsome.

  They talked for a while, the two of them, in hushed tones while I leaned out over the edge to see the city. Its flickering lights. I thought of that other Greta, who endured what I had endured—a straying husband—but who had not lost him. Her Nathan had returned, and stayed, but I understood her need for comfort. For someone, perhaps someone very young, who would remind her she was alive. A young actor, his eyebrow raised, so clearly in love. Why not? She had chosen lightning, after all, like me. Was it so impossible to choose passion as well?

  A rustle from Ruth: “I’m cold, I think my moment has come. Take your time, this is going to take a while in these skirts . . .”

  She made her way down through the trapdoor with a little laugh, into the small brick chamber below that no one in New York suspected. I looked at the lights one last time before turning to go.

  Leo touched my arm and began in an insistent whisper: “Greta—”

  “We should help Ruth—”

  “I need to ask you,” he said. “Who am I to you? When you think about me.”

  The city lights gave a softness to his features. His lips were slightly parted, his eyes worried. I could feel my face and chest getting warmer from his look, his touch. I thought of Nathan in 1941 and said, “Let’s not talk about this now—”

  His voice grew quieter, his eyes lowered. “I want to know. What’s the word you use in your mind?”

  “Don’t ask me now,” I said, trying not to look at those eyes. I understood her attraction. But what he wanted was not me; it was another version of me. “Later, ask me later.”

  “I mean, when you think, Oh, I’m going to meet Leo. He’s my . . . what?”

  “Don’t ask me this now, I’m . . .” I fell back on that old phrase: “I’m not myself.”

  “Who am I to you, Greta?” he asked.

  The darkness had drained all color, so we were in silent-movie tones, his face a mottled moth-wing gray. I could see him breathing as heavily as a machine with a load it was not built to carry; I could tell he had suffered quietly for long enough, had promised himself both that he would be quiet, not spoil the night, and that if he got me alone he would not be quiet, he would risk everything. In all my travels, in my anxieties, I had thought only about the troubles of my life. A brother resurrected, a husband returned, a child born, mystery after mystery darting around corners, things restored and taken away again; the whole horrible beautiful magic act of my life. I had not yet thought of this. That someone else’s life depended on me.

  “Leo,” I said. I found myself touching his cheek. He flinched; his whole cheek caught fire.

  I had not yet thought of this. That I had arrived in this era with a gun my other self had bought and cleaned and loaded for me and placed in my hand, the safety off. Twenty-five years old. Handsome, clever, those eyes. Who was he to me? I thought of the only kind thing I could say, the only thing I knew:

  “You’re my sweetheart.”

  He took the word as a suffering man takes medicine, hoping it will work.

  “You’re my sweetheart,” I repeated, and then he took me in his arms and quickly kissed me. I did not resist him.

  In a moment he pulled back and looked at me as if searching for the latch that would open me. Breathing hard, cheeks spotted with red, closing his eyes, and who knows what he saw there? I only know he held me away from him and opened his eyes.

  He nodded and said, “Ah. Your sweetheart.” It was almost enough. But not enough, I could tell. The medicine had not done its job. He released me, stepping away to the railing. “Let’s find your aunt, the steps are hard to manage.” He laughed at himself.

  “What is it?”

  His hand went to the trapdoor.

  “Isn’t that what I am to you?” I asked.

  “No, Greta,” he said, looking away, to the east where those steam clouds, lit by gaslight, rose like spirits into the night sky, up to stars I had never seen from light-crowded New York, and had to travel all the way to Saratoga, one summer, to view, looking up from a late walk with my mother and asking what the starry cloud was up there. And her saying: It’s the Milky Way, darling, it’s the galaxy we’re floating in, haven’t you seen it before? There it was, above us, as it would never be seen in the city again. Spectral, silvery, the backbone of night. It did not belong here; I did not belong here. This young man who was not mine, standing by the ledge with his back to me, thinking so hard about what I had asked him, waiting a long time before he took a breath and said, laughing a little: “Greta. You’re my first love.”

  FELIX CAME BY to visit, but wouldn’t tell me much about his encounter with the police, though I could tell it had shaken him. He stayed only briefly and sat at the window the entire time, smoking, staring at the birds. “I didn’t tell Ingrid about it,” he said. “I didn’t want her to worry. Just police mischief, but she’s so delicate. She’s such a good chance for me.” The autumn light caught his long freckled face and I wondered what to do with him. If I could even talk to him about his life. In a moment, he smiled the old smile I remembered and kissed me good-bye. “See you later, bubs. Don’t look so worried. The war has to end soon.”

  And it did. It was later that week that I heard the trumpets on the streets. I heard the crowds shouting, “It’s over!” and went out to see them hugging one another with joy. What a strange and magical scene to have been summoned for. I came home, where Millie handed me a folded note—Leo wanted to meet me at eight, under the arch—then informed me meekly that folks were gathering at my aunt’s. It was already packed with people when I went down there. Ragtime was playing somewhere—“C’mon and hear! C’mon and hear!”—competing with military marches playing somewhere else, and of course no conversation could be heard above the racket of talk and laughter. On the sofa, a dark-featured man in a toga sat speaking to a group of well-dressed girls gathered at his feet; as I passed by, he kissed each one on the forehead and they swooned. Around the corner, I did at last recognize my aunt, standing under a ridiculous lamp of Prometheus bringing fire to the mortals (the fire was an electric bulb), her jet-beaded back to me, shimmering like a fall of rain. In a moment she turned around and saw me. Her expression was a fireworks of joy. She shouted something at me I couldn’t hear. She shouted again. Only on the third try did I make out:

  “It’s happened! The war is ending just when you said it would!”

  “Did I?” It must have been that tattletale: 1941.

  “You said November eleventh. At the eleventh hour.”

  We think we have a rippling effect on life, and perhaps we do. But perhaps, at least for me, not on history itself. Not on the big events, the wars, elections, and diseases. How could I have thought so? Such a small person as I was in the world. Someone in this room, surely, would make it into books, be studied and written about. If they had traveled to other worlds, in other times, things might have shifted like an earthquake. Some people were like that. Aunt Ruth, perhaps. But not little red-haired Greta Wells.

  Aunt Ruth leaned in; I could smell she had been drinking something stronger than red wine. “My dear, you’re a prophetess.”

  I was that, at least. I wondered what else I could tell her, what could be of use to her or anyone I knew. That yes the war would end, but another one would start in barely twenty years—twenty years!—and this time there would be new horrors to contemplate? That her plague would end as well, and it, too, would be replaced in sixty years by something just as deadly? Why hadn’t some future Greta, some prophetess or angel, come to my time to tell us it would end, our own trouble, that the boys would stop dying by the thousands? That the world would care, and cure it? Instead of sneering at the bodies lined up for burial? Where was that woman? Why had I been chosen as the last, the final version of myself? Surely there was a better, wiser one who could show us all how it would end.

  The rec
orded music stopped and the raucous sound of voices rose at first, then broke, like a wave, into murmurs as a piano tune began to play nearby. I saw the long-haired bartender pounding stridently at the keys, and singing. What, I could not hear. Ruth leaned in close to me again, a new gleam in her eye and her lips parted to speak. Then all at once—a common sound of joy:

  Johnnie, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun . . .

  I could have wept. To see them all so drunk with wine and relief, that at last the horror had ended. That so many had died was unbearable. But no more would die. Out there in the mud, they were all saved.

  Take it on the run, on the run, on the run.

  Hear them calling, you and me,

  Every son of Liberty.

  The one who used to sell the bread, the one who groomed the dogs, the bartender, the waiter. All the ones gone off to war, surely to die as all the others had died; they were coming home! They were saved. The thought of them being saved. I had to turn away from Ruth. The sobs were uncontrollable, the shock I felt when I appeared on Halloween and saw the young men, the thought that others would come home. That it was over. The idea of a horror being over, how could they know that I understood? That I had never thought I’d see a day like this? The boys were saved.

  Over there, over there,

  Send the word, send the word over there,

  That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming,

  The drums rum-tumming everywhere.

  An old drunk man in a long Chinese robe was pounding his chest. Two young women embraced; surely they loved someone. These same soldiers would come home, never speaking of what they’d seen, and marry those girls and raise children, and they would send those children off to war again. With Germany, again. We would be here, again, in this parlor singing this same song. I stood there, in wonder, at the madness of it all.

  We’ll be over, we’re coming over.

  And we won’t come back till it’s over over there!

  IT WAS ONLY later that Felix arrived, and when I saw him laughing in his frock coat and holding his top hat, I felt my heart shaking inside me, ridiculously, like a dog left alone for days—”Felix!”—and he looked over at me curiously. He was flushed with wine already, from his chin up to his neatly combed hair, and he looked more fragile than ever. A white rose wilted in its buttonhole. I pulled him to me. But once I began to talk to him I saw I had misunderstood; he had not just arrived, he had been here for some time, hidden in the thicket of people, and was just now taking his leave. Felix said he was heading to some other party.