Walter Cronkite narrated
The Twentieth Century
on television. Tiny puffs of smoke emerged from rolling valleys; troops marched; the Prudential Company’s impressive logo, the Rock of Gibraltar, announced its sponsorship, and my father watched, always leaning against a doorway, never sitting down, gleaning information about what he had been through. Winston Churchill’s great tomes proclaimed themselves boldly on the Danish Modern bookshelf he built in his basement workshop:
The Gathering Storm
,
Their Finest Hour
,
The Hinge of Fate
. By day, Danny and I writhed like movie soldiers beneath hibiscus bushes and hid behind sandboxes in our backyards, carrying machine guns and avoiding Germans. At night, when a tiny bedside light illuminated the fine, old well-polished bedstead with carefully turned down, smooth sheets at the house of my maternal grandparents, the War was in the shadows, sharp and deep, and on the lace-covered dresser where a picture of the two sons who had died in the war, Keith and Jerry, forever smiled, boys in overalls, holding between them a string of striped bass.
She went over it again and again, etching it into her mind, so she would not forget. They wanted to sweep everything from her with these drugs, but that was wrong. She had to remember.
She had to remember
everything
.
No one else did. But that was her fault too. No one else could.
Things were better now, she supposed, than they would have been otherwise, as if histories were shifting toward the more positive end of an unseen spectrum. The Palestinians had not been moved wholesale from their land, and had been paid well for the huge tracts where European Jews could settle in what was now Palestine-Israel. But she could also remember a war in 1967, when Israel took great swaths of land with weapons the U.S. had given them. Now, in this timestream, there were still disagreements, but the Middle East was not a festering powder keg.
The African Union, formed in 1964, elected and sent delegates to a Pan-African Congress, which seemed forever mired in bickering. This was not surprising, because the African population contained many more cultures and languages than Europe, but much progress had been made, progress being defined as decreasing territorial, cultural, and religious disputes, healing the injustices and exploitation caused by colonialism, and increasing health care and education. But that legacy was so strong that much of Africa was still mired in deadly civil wars, large-scale ethnic murders (the term “ethnic
cleansing
” disgusted Jill), disease, and subjugation of women and children.
Germany had not been divided, post-war, and the Soviet Union had not sucked the life out of countries around its border in rough approximation of Hitler’s original plan for Germany’s use of those same countries.
In the United States, in the wake of victory, Roosevelt had been able to pass a strong civil rights bill in 1946.
But—why? How had this happened?
How was it that she could remember a far different world? Why did she think that she had had a hand in creating
this
world?
It was easy to take their point of view: She was crazy.
The problem was that she knew she was not.
The roots of this timestream lay in whatever her mother, Bette Elegante, and her father, Sam Dance, had done during the 1940s, and she did not know what it was.
She only knew that whatever they had done had birthed, somehow, this slightly different, slightly better world, which slid a new history into her past. Had this world existed parallel with that other world, in which Roosevelt died in his fourth term, Truman had ordered the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Germany was divided, and John F. Kennedy was murdered? Or had she, with one, decisive, wild action, wrenched that old history onto a new track, one that neatly provided a past for everyone, except her, that was perfectly consistent?
Or was she, really, delusional? Maybe her mother had been a perfectly normal WAC, rather than a spy; her father a perfectly ordinary ordnance engineer, rather than someone who knew more than he could say.
If so, why did that old past insist on itself, cling to her, aggravate her, heap upon her such real sorrow and such real responsibility?
If her parents really were alive, somewhere or somewhen, why did they not help her?
It had something to do with the war. She knew nothing of her mother’s life during the war.
She returned to her journal. From the top, now.
I was born in 1950
…
Jill
WELCOME TO THE FUN HOUSE
April 5, St. Elizabeth’s Hospital
“Y
OU’RE ALWAYS ANGRY,”
said Jill to Elmore.
She had been in St. Elizabeth’s for a couple of weeks. She and Elmore were eating lunch in the cafeteria.
“That’s right.” He was sitting, right now, but sideways to the table, as if poised to jump and run. Elmore hardly ever sat down when he came, no matter where they were. He even stood in their joint therapy sessions, leading Jill to note that he seemed crazy too. She hoped that the therapist noticed.
Elmore shoveled potato salad into his mouth. His thin, pale face was set off by the perfect, expensive cut of his thin, pale hair. He took a bite of his hot dog. “Everything is falling apart.”
“And it’s my fault.” Jill said this not as an accusation, but as if it were a fact. She believed it to be true.
“You got it.” He wiped his hands on his napkin and threw it on the table. “I can’t handle all of this. Taking care of Stevie. Running the house. Scheduling employees at the bookshop, which we don’t need to keep. A lot of extra work for nothing. I paid the store’s insurance—it was almost overdue—and the utility bills, but I didn’t order anything. There are already too many books there. And God only knows how much the employees are stealing.”
“Right. Naturally, I hired a bunch of thieves.”
“You’re such a bleeding heart. Jane is a slacker—always late—”
“She’s taking care of her father.”
“Doesn’t matter. If we’re not open on time, we lose customers. I fired her.”
“What?”
He shrugged.
“You used to be a bleeding heart.”
He glared at her. His glasses were gray, like his eyes. His shirt and suit were immaculate, as usual, and tailored in Hong Kong. His face was no longer the face of the young man that she’d married—expressive, committed, kind. This face gave nothing away that the enemy could use—in court, in the office. Or, thought Jill, to his wife or his child.
“Why do you keep saying that?” He sounded genuinely irritated.
“Our newspaper—” she began, but stopped, remembering that she’d shown him one of his old editorials a few months ago and he’d just said, “I wrote this? I never believed this crap.”
Now, Elmore said, “It’s no wonder that Stevie is confused. You talk about things that never happened.”
“I need to see him. He needs to see me.”
“No. You only encourage him. Miss Sally—you remember his teacher’s name, don’t you?—says that now he’ll only answer to the name ‘Whens.’
Whens?
What kind of a name is that, Jill, for chrissakes? Is that what you call him?”
“I have the same problem as Miss Sally. He won’t answer to anything but Whens.”
“You could call me Winnie,” said Stevie-Whens, while helping his mother fold clothes. He picked out his own small jeans, shirts, and underwear and folded them with great concentration, his yellow fluff of hair illuminated by winter sunlight coming through the window, his glasses sliding down his nose.
“Don’t you have enough names?”
“Well, this would be like calling me Whens, except that people wouldn’t think it was so strange. Abbie calls me Whennie now, and it almost sounds like Winnie anyway. Winnie is a real name, like Winnie-the-Pooh.”
“Stevie is a real name too.”
“It’s a real name, but it’s not my real name.”
“I just don’t understand this Whens stuff.”
His surprised eyes were magnified by his glasses. “You don’t remember? You named me.”
“I named you Stephen Dance-Wentworth.”
“No, you were sleeping and I was sleeping with you because of a bad dream and I woke up because you were crying and yelling. So I tried to wake you up and you did wake up and you hugged me and said, ‘You are my Whens. You are all my Whens.’ Then you fell asleep and you weren’t crying. I like it. It just makes so much sense. You’re always saying When-You’re-Older. When-You’re-Bigger. Even though I’m almost five. I’m really just a lot of Whens.”
She laughed. “I never did that. You’re making it up.”
“No, I’m not,” he said, smoothing a striped T-shirt like a fussy store clerk. “And you know it.”
She didn’t say anything. She did know it
.
“
Jill? I’ve got to get back to work. Here’s a napkin. Stop crying. Wipe your face. Jeez. I bet you can’t even find your way back to your own room.” Then he was gone.
Eventually, an orderly helped her stand, took her back to her room, and gave her a pill.
* * *
“So why am I better than Hitler, again?”
It was May first. Jill was with her assigned therapist, Nancy.
Nancy’s sleek brown hair curved obediently around her face in a precise oval, and fell forward and back, each hair in perfect unison with the rest, as she bowed her head, looked at her watch, then raised her head and looked at Jill again. Jill found the precise movements of her hair fascinating.
“Jill? Hello? We have five minutes.”
“I’m glad that you don’t believe me.” Of course, Jill had only told Nancy anything because she knew she wouldn’t be believed. She hadn’t told anyone about the man she’d scared off by screaming.
His face, as he’d observed her, was deeply shadowed, but his SS uniform, Gestapo-gray, and the death’s head clearly affixed to the cap just above the visor, were unmistakable.
Her scream had at least brought the doctor, in minutes, and a big adjustment in her meds. She wasn’t at all sure if he had been real, or just a dream. It certainly wasn’t like her to scream. That bothered her almost as much as the memory of the man. She definitely wanted to put that embarrassing, scary moment behind her.
No, she wasn’t going to talk about that clear sign of deep insanity. They would just say she’d read too many books about the war, and she really did want to go home.
Nancy sighed. “Let’s look at the facts, Jill. You do have many symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Some people are able to hide extremely horrific events from themselves. This disorder doesn’t always stem from war. Originally, it was called ‘railroad spine.’ Victims of early train crashes reported strange psychological and physiological symptoms for years. Victims of sexual abuse, people who’ve been in some kind of accident—there can be many causes. People have the ability to tamp these events deep down into their subconscious, but the memory of them can emerge in sudden, startling ways. Or, they know that these things have happened—like a car wreck—and seem to resume normal life, but are psychologically damaged. You seem to fit some of the diagnosis criteria. The problem is, no one but you believes that another timestream”—Nancy smiled briefly—“existed before this one. Think about all the questions you have to answer, all the things you have to explain, in order to make that true. What happened to all those other lives, those people in the other timestream?”
“My point exactly.”
“You talked about Painting Woman, once.”
“What?”
“You used to draw. Paint.”
“No. I never have.” Not in this world. It was dangerous: What she drew came true. Suddenly, she agreed with everyone: She must have been absolutely nuts to mention this. It was nobody’s business but her own, as the old tune went.
“It might be a good idea to try it out again. It might help unite these disparate parts of your personality.”
“Fix my railroad spine.”
“Do you want to get better?”
“Of course,” she said, belatedly remembering that this woman had to sign off on her release. “I could try doing some art stuff. Sure. Take a drawing course or something.”
“From what I understood, you are rather beyond that.”
Damn. What had they given her, Sodium Pentothal?
Nancy changed the subject abruptly. She often did. “I’m glad you’re using makeup again.”
“My sister Megan put it on. I’m going back to work pretty soon. Whenever I’m ready, they told me. I still need to defend my dissertation.” Jill laughed. “Megan seemed to think that makeup would get me in the right frame of mind. Maybe it does. A mask.”
“You’ll be working at the World Bank, right?”
“Mmm-hmm. In charge of an international school project. You know what happens without me. Things fall apart.” Her mouth trembled and she grabbed a Kleenex.
“Just remember, Jill. You are just the manager of some people who work at the World Bank. You are not in charge of the entire world and all of time. And—let me ask you a question. You still haven’t told your brother and sister exactly why you’re here, right?”
“My husband committed me.”
“Don’t be obstinate. I know your husband committed you. But underlying all of this—your guilt, your disturbance, your actions—is one belief. You need to tell them what that is.”
“I don’t see how I can.”
Nancy looked at her deadpan with cool blue eyes. “What if it’s true? Mightn’t they suspect? Don’t they deserve to know? Shouldn’t you apologize?”
Jill got up to leave.
“Thirty seconds. Answer my question. Don’t they?”
Jill said, her hand splayed over her chest, “My heart is pounding very hard.” Then she fled down the hall.
She ran to one of the dayrooms, where catatonics shuffled about, two old men played checkers, and a young woman sang, quite beautifully, “The Yellow Rose of Texas” over and over and over again, accompanying herself on a well-worn piano. She did this every day, while Jill watched the
Golden Arrow of Breath
relaxation tape from the tape library, which she had memorized, finding she enjoyed this form of self-hypnosis and neurolinguistic programming.