He told me his father’s company secured rights and funding for Hollywood movies. Hugh, who had gone to law school, had started out in the legal department. The business had been lucrative, especially when silent films transitioned to talking pictures. Errol Dove, who had been born into wealth, had made millions of his own during Hollywood’s golden era.
“I’m the black sheep,” Ralph had said with a smile. “I don’t care about the things my brother and sister and parents care about. Hugh wants to honor the family legacy—my father’s memory and all that—and Irene only cares about her own happiness. My mother sent me to Stanford to get a business degree, but I have no desire to work in the family business. I’ve always liked photography, but my father didn’t think I’d be good enough at it to make any money. Even though my brother, sister, and I all have trust funds left to us by our grandpa, my father’s father, Dad thought it was important that I make my own wealth even if I didn’t need it. He didn’t want me blowing through the trust fund and living a useless life. I think those were the words he used as he lay dying: as though photographers are useless people.”
He told me that at the end of his freshman year and without telling his mother, he had enlisted. He had a four-year commitment to the army that would end in February 1947. When he returned to America, he wasn’t going to go back to Stanford to finish an education he did not want.
“I’m not sure what I’m going to do,” he’d said, “but I’m going to buy a better camera than the one I’ve got and a duffel bag and figure it out.”
I liked this about Ralph, that he was committed to discovering his life’s purpose just like I was.
When I had learned as much about him as he knew about me, Ralph began to ask more pointed questions about how I ended up in Germany. Ralph was very interested in what befell my family, more interested than any other American I had yet met. But his interest seemed personal, springing from a concern for me, and nothing more sinister.
One mid-September afternoon he told me that if my father had been a rich man, we’d likely still be in the States. It was because we were not a wealthy family that we’d been treated the way we had been. I had no idea what he meant. Our social standing had had nothing to do with our situation, not that I could tell. But he kept pressing the issue, not to call me a liar, not by any means, but rather to educate me, to help me see something he thought I needed to see.
“How many rich people were in Crystal City with you?” he asked.
“I don’t know. None of us had anything but what we brought in our suitcases or bought with our fake money in the camp canteen.” I had told Ralph earlier that my father’s assets had been frozen, and so had everyone else’s. You couldn’t tell who had money at the camp and who didn’t.
“I can pretty much guarantee you if your father had wealth, he would’ve had power, and if he’d had power, he never would have been arrested,” Ralph said.
“I don’t think money had anything to do with it,” I countered, but with little conviction. I had never considered that money—or the lack of it—had played a part in what had happened to us.
“Of course it did,” Ralph replied easily. Confidently. “The rich have always been able to get what they want and do what they want. Money is power, Elise. It always has been.”
I had never heard such talk before. “How do you know all this?” I asked.
“Because I’m the son of a rich man. I know it because I have lived it and I’ve seen it. I saw it when I was able to avoid the draft. I saw it at the university I attended. And I see it when I talk to you and hear your story.”
I still wasn’t sure what he was getting at, but I felt in my bones it was surely something profound.
“Imagine how the world could be remade now that the great wars are all over and rebuilding is happening everywhere,” he went on. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if instead of the continuation of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, all people had the same opportunities? True democracy is a society that is cared for and led by its people, all the people—not just the ones with the money and the power, but everyone. That’s what a society led by its people is really like, right?”
“I guess so,” I said.
“It’s the working class that truly make things happen, even in America,” he said. “And the workingman isn’t valued. I fought in this war not just to stop Hitler and the Nazis, but to stop all people who want to oppress their fellow man. You may not like hearing it, but the United States isn’t a true democracy where all her people are fairly represented. It’s always the rich who get elected. How can they represent the poor man? The U.S. could be a true democracy, but it isn’t.”
My head was starting to spin. Ralph was making sense and yet he wasn’t.
“Are you saying you don’t love your country?” I asked.
“I’m saying we could do a much better job of governing our land. Look at your father, a hardworking chemist at an agricultural company. He was the one at that company making a difference, right? Not the rich owner in the carpeted office who doesn’t even know what the chemicals in his laboratory can do. Don’t you see if the man in the office who runs the company and the man in the laboratory who makes what the company sells and the man cleaning the laboratory at the end of the day are treated the same, given the same paycheck, everyone would be much happier? They all have the same goal—producing what farmers need to grow good crops, right? They all put in the same day’s work. But the man in the office probably gets ten times what your father gets, and the man pushing the broom gets maybe a fourth of your dad’s paycheck, if he’s lucky. How is that democratic? How is that fair?”
I could tell he had thought long and hard about what he was saying. I hadn’t thought about any of it. The books Papa had scrounged for me to study on my own didn’t include any textbooks on political science, and I’d been fine with that. Politics didn’t interest me. Literature, history, geography, biology—these were the subjects I liked. I felt ill equipped to answer Ralph’s question about fairness in democracy. What I did know was that Papa was an educated man. He deserved a good job that paid well.
“My father worked hard to become a chemist,” I ventured. “He went to a university for four years. It cost the family to send him there.”
“So you’re saying the man pushing the broom deserves less because he didn’t go to a university? What if he wanted to go to school but didn’t have the money? What if he was denied the opportunities your father was given?”
“But . . . but someone needs to push the broom,” I said. “Everyone can’t be the chemist.”
“Yes!” Ralph said happily, as though I was in complete agreement with him. “And consider this: What if the man pushing the broom loves making the laboratory clean? What if he’s happy pushing the broom? Why should he get so much less than the chemist? And why should the man in the office who can’t do what your father does and won’t do what the janitor does receive ten times the salary of the workers doing the work?”
“Well,” I said. “Because it’s his company?”
“So he gets to decide what people are worth, then? Does that seem fair to you?”
We had stopped in front of the ruins of what had surely been a lovely church. Shards of stained glass lay at our feet like slivers from a rainbow. This discussion with Ralph had exhausted me mentally. I could see his point, but somehow, I knew he was missing something. I didn’t know what it was. “I don’t think I know what fair is anymore,” I said, which was true enough even before we’d begun talking about the workingman.
Ralph placed my hand on his arm so that we could start walking back the way we’d come. My shift at the café would begin in fifteen minutes. “That’s because power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Lord Acton said that. No one should have absolute power, Elise. Look what happens when men struggle over it.” With his free hand he swept the view in front of us—a tableau of rubble and dust and ashes that was only very slowly being carted away and buried. “We should be living in community with each other, not competition.”
It sounded good, what he was telling me. But I had seen too much, lost too much, to believe the kind of world he was talking about was a possibility.
Still, his view that a better society was achievable was the most interesting thing I’d heard in a long while and made me feel hopeful that something good was just around the bend.
That feeling that something good was about to happen carried me through the rest of the month. For some reason, Ralph’s vision of a perfect world convinced me that I would at last hear from Mariko, that her letter was already on its way.