Chapter 20 Greta
Greta
Greta woke with a start from a dream of helping her mother, who had been dead for fifty-one years, set the table at Innisfree
for Thanksgiving dinner. In the dream, her mother was instructing Greta how to fold the napkins into the shape of a turkey.
In reality, they’d never had Thanksgiving at Innisfree.
Dreams, Greta thought, aware of Tom breathing quietly in sleep beside her, unsettled to have seen her mother, to have her feel so
alive, so real, even though, in the dream, Greta had not been a child, but the age she was now—eighty-one. In the dream, her
mother had looked the same as she had when Greta was a child, so Greta had felt like a child, even as she was trying to keep her mother from finding out about Tom’s diagnosis and wondering if her mother
could help convince Lindy to cancel the fiftieth anniversary party. Her mother had died four years before Lindy was born.
“Darling, you have to pay attention,” her mother had said, in the dream, and maybe that, in combination with the feeling of
time all in a tangle, was what had woken Greta up.
The family she’d had when she was a child was all gone now. Her mother, her father, her three older brothers. Greta was the only survivor. Why was it so unnerving to wake up and realize that, when it had been the case for more than thirty-five years?
Her two oldest brothers, Cary and Will, had died in the war, more than sixty years ago. Cary (“Henry Carrington Ashworth,
if you please,” he would say with mock importance, but he had been named after their father, who went by Henry, so they always
called him Cary, which he ultimately liked because then girls crooned that he did resemble the movie star, and his friends and younger brothers took to calling him Grant, in jest) was a pilot in the Eighth
Air Force, shot down on the Schweinfurt raid in August 1943. Will was a navigator last seen bailing out of his B-29 over the
Pacific in 1944. Harrison had come home from serving as a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne but, honestly, had never been
the same. The boy who’d left adored his family; the man who came back barely acknowledged that any of it was left. He moved
to California, married a girl who’d danced in three Busby Berkeley films, fathered two sons, had little to do with Greta or
their parents, and died at fifty-three of lung cancer, having taken up smoking two packs a day while in the Army.
The last time Greta saw Cary and Will, she’d been just shy of thirteen years old. It was December 1941, and it was a time
in her life when she was nearly mute, after what had happened the previous summer at The Cove. None of her family seemed to
notice her odd change in demeanor, or at least they didn’t comment on it, not even when, shortly after the attack on Pearl
Harbor, she went with her parents to see all three of her brothers to the train. Will, twenty-two at the time, simply promised
her they’d win the war and be home in six months, as if he imagined her to be much younger and more gullible than she was.
Cary, twenty-three, pulled her aside, gave her five dollars—an exorbitant sum then—and told her to spend it all on ice cream
sodas, except to save a dime to buy him one when he got back. Harrison, twenty, was the only one who appeared to be upset
about leaving, unsure whether he’d return. Cary and Will seemed to think the entire thing was a grand adventure, but that
had been their general outlook on life, even before the war had come along.
“You have to pay attention.” What did her mother mean by that, in the dream? What was Greta missing?
She shifted, and Tom woke with a start, half sitting up in bed. In the moonlight, she saw he looked alarmed, and she tried
to soothe him.
“Betsy?” he said.
She didn’t know who that was.
“No,” she said, and though her heart had bolted like a zebra with a lion after it, she kept her voice calm. “I’m Greta.”
“Who?”
On his face was a mix of terror and bewilderment, and her eyes filled with tears. She touched his cheek softly. She had known
this would come, yet she hoped he was having a dream, too, and that when morning came, he would remember her again. “Go back
to sleep,” she whispered, and he lay back and closed his eyes like an obedient child, and she stayed slowly stroking his thin,
soft hair until he was asleep again.
Two hours later, on the deck with her coffee, watching the sunrise over the ocean in the cool of the morning—it was unclear to her whether she was in denial about Tom forgetting her, or simply at peace with a thing she’d known was coming—she realized: Each memory was a key being pressed.
Her mother, her father, her brothers. She could still hear their voices, see their faces.
She could picture her brothers banging in the door at Innisfree, coming in from tennis or sailing, shouting playfully at each other about some ball that had been out of bounds.
She could remember how she’d imagined they would always protect her, and her sense of betrayal when, long before they were actually gone, this turned out not to be true.
She could remember nocturnes and sonatas she hadn’t played in ten or twenty years and the lyrics to songs she hadn’t heard in twice that long.
She could see Lindy as a newborn baby at Mount Sinai, a little girl in pigtails and corduroy on the monkey bars in Central Park, a teen lining up for lobster at the SCPA.
She could see Tom the day she met him, at the stage door of the Chicago Theatre on a bitter winter night.
She could almost taste the cup of diner coffee he’d insisted on buying her that night, saying they had a mutual friend.
(They didn’t; he said later it was only her beauty that had made him so bold, that had made the lie feel requisite.
She decided later that the entire incident had been so decidedly out of character for him, a taciturn Midwesterner, that she could trust his love for her was irrefutable.)
Every memory was a key being pressed to hammer a note, forming phrases, movements, the entire sonata of a long life.
In Tom, the action was muted now. Perhaps the damper was on, some hammers were entirely stuck.
He could no longer hear the notes of his life. He could no longer appreciate the sonata. It had been written, yet now could
not be played.
Yes, she was taking the metaphor too far, and yet . . . Pay attention. Was this what her mother had been referring to? That Greta had to remember for both of them now? That Greta was the only
composer, the only artist, still at work on the life that had been theirs?
Was beauty still accessible if memory was gone?
The beauty of the moment, yes. It was as if she heard her mother’s voice.
She sipped her coffee. Dark roast—different than the diner coffee on the night she’d first sat across from Tom in that booth—and
the taste brought her back to this moment, the sunrise. To David, missing three days now.
David. Pay attention.
Poor Lindy.
What did Greta know about David? She remembered him as a teenager—that ridiculous stroganoff dinner when she’d worn her pearls and Tom had said afterward, “I’m afraid I don’t think he’s going anywhere, love.
” She remembered David as a struggling young man, then as a dutiful young husband, a new father.
Greta had been worried out of her head about Lindy marrying him, had lost more sleep over it than she could count, for almost a year.
But as soon as the children came along, he’d—well, Greta could only think of it as that he’d grown into his own height, almost visibly filling with a strength and resolve that hadn’t been evident before, just as Lindy had claimed he would.
(Greta still didn’t think Lindy could’ve known that outcome for sure; she still couldn’t believe Lindy had gambled like that with her entire future, her entire life.)
Yet. Having been for the last twenty-plus years a man who put his children first, where would David have gone now, less than
two weeks before his oldest daughter’s wedding?
Greta should tell Lindy about Innisfree; that David knew of her plans to sell it.
But she could not imagine hurting Lindy with such terrible news in the middle of everything else.
And: three days gone. Even Greta couldn’t believe that David would’ve avoided facing the music—facing Lindy and Greta and
the impending sale of Innisfree—for that long. For the first forty-eight hours or so, Greta had believed this might’ve been
what was keeping him away—but she didn’t believe it now.
No, she did not need to tell Lindy about Innisfree, she was convinced. Not quite yet. Not until after the wedding, like she
had planned.
It struck Greta then: Something really might’ve happened to David. What if he really wasn’t gone of his own accord?
And—she hated to realize this, too—even if she did not, could not, tell Lindy about Innisfree just yet, she needed to tell
Lindy about Tom. He had gotten worse over just the last few days—all the stress of so many people around, probably. Lindy
was definitely going to notice that the excuses of him being “busy” and “tired” were wearing thin, were patently untrue. Greta
felt it coming like a clock was counting down. Today? Probably—except that Lindy was going to Cranston today.
Tomorrow at the latest, perhaps.
Greta imagined, this morning after Lindy and the kids had gone, putting Tom in the Camry, driving him straight to Florida.
She would go without stopping. She would drive all day and night, as if Time itself was in pursuit.
She would never tell Lindy; she would protect Lindy from ever seeing her darling father this way: silenced, scrambled, vanishing.
She would protect Lindy from the pain of being unknown, unremembered.
Greta would simply drive and drive and drive, loving and remembering for herself and for Tom at once.
(Betsy? she thought suddenly, interrupting her own reverie. Who on earth was Betsy?)
But that didn’t matter, did it? Because Tom was hers, and she would drive him all the way to Florida, twenty-four hours straight,
and then she would pull into the elegant circle drive at Sunset Acres and say, “Help us. Please.”
But this was clearly a fantasy. Greta didn’t know how to say those words. Did she?