We were quiet for a moment as I let the prospect of escape fully seep into me.
The jangle of the bells on the café’s front door roused me from my thoughts. There in the framed light of approaching twilight stood Papa. He’d arrived to take me home. I did not rise or rush from the table. Papa saw me sitting there, saw who I was sitting with. And for several seconds we just looked into each other’s eyes. Then I rose from my chair but stayed at the table, motioning for my father to close the distance between us. When he reached us, Ralph turned in his seat and then stood.
“Papa,” I said. “I’d like you to meet someone.”
26
The human brain, I have since read, is still ripening when we’re seventeen. It’s still growing, still forming thought patterns and avenues for arriving at logical conclusions, and it doesn’t stop maturing until we reach age twenty-five. If I had been closer to my twenty-fifth birthday than my eighteenth on the day Ralph proposed, I might have determined his plan to rescue me was absurd. There is only one reason to marry someone and this one wasn’t it.
But I was too flattened by what felt like Mariko’s death to consider that I could be making a mistake. When I saw my father standing there in the café, mere feet away from Ralph, my only thought was that a door had just been thrown wide open where before there had been a concrete wall. Good door, bad door, I didn’t think about that. It was a door, and I could step through if I wanted to, and no fences or barbed wire or bombs stood in my way.
I did not introduce Ralph to my father as my boyfriend or, God forbid, my fiancé, even though I was already thinking I would say yes to his idea. I was going to need my parents’ permission to actually go through with the marriage, so in those few seconds as Papa stood just inside the door, I reasoned that I had to begin sowing the seeds of gaining his approval. I truly had no idea if Papa would give it. It wasn’t hard to imagine him saying that under no circumstances would he give me his permission to marry Ralph and leave Germany. If that happened, I would have to then say the horrible words that the moment I turned eighteen, I would leave Germany and go to California to marry Ralph anyway. Is that really the way he wanted to say good-bye to me? I did not want to have that awful conversation. I would rather Papa believed I was in love with Ralph and that Ralph, who was a likeable, ordinary boy-next-door type of person—when he wasn’t talking politics and economics—would win him over.
My father had always been very proud that he had provided so well for Mommi and Max and me, and these past three years of deprivation had been demoralizing for him. I was counting on the notion that in the end, he would be glad that I was marrying into a family of means. But I still had my work cut out for me.
Ralph and Papa shook hands. Ralph said how very nice it was to meet my father. Ralph called him sir and was extremely polite, as I knew he would be.
Papa, speaking in English, was also courteous, but he was guarded. It was obvious that he knew that this was not some random American soldier I had just met that afternoon, but that Ralph was the same GI he had seen me sitting with several months before. My father kindly asked Ralph what he did for the army and he told my father he worked in supply.
“Well, it was very nice to have met you,” Papa said, and then he turned to me. “Shall we head home, then?”
“Yes. Of course.” I moved away from the table to clock out and grab my coat.
The two men were still standing at the table when I emerged from the back room, both of them looking at me with expressions I could clearly read. Ralph was wondering if by introducing him to my father I was saying yes. My father was wondering what kind of relationship I had with the young private who worked in supply.
I bid Ralph a cheerful good night without giving him any hint as to what I was thinking. He was just going to have to wait.
The café door closed behind us and I prepared for Papa’s deluge of questions. But my father was quiet for many long moments as we began walking home.
“Do you have feelings for that young man?” he finally said.
I was grateful that I didn’t have to lie. It was a perfectly worded question. “I do,” I said, relieved that I sounded convincing. My feelings for Ralph were not exactly the ones Papa was thinking I had, but I did feel great gratitude toward Ralph.
“And does he feel the same way? About you?” Papa asked.
“He does.”
Neither answer was a lie.
Papa was quiet again. “Is he a good man?” he asked, a few moments later.
“The best, Papa,” I said, looping my arm through his. “He’s not like the other American soldiers. He’s not like the ones you’re forever warning me about.”
Papa glanced at me. “How do you know he’s not?”
“Because he’s a gentleman.”
“So he hasn’t . . . you haven’t . . .” Even in the fading daylight I could see my father coloring slightly.
“No,” I said. “He’s not like the others. He’s a good man, Papa.”
My father sighed. “Where’s he from?”
“California.”
“And what does he want to do with his life?”
“He comes from a very wealthy family, but he wants to work. He wants to be a photographer.”
I didn’t add that he also wanted to travel the world solo, with a camera and a duffel bag.
“What does he know about you? About us? About why we’re here?”
I swallowed hard before answering. “I told him the truth, Papa. But he knows how important it is that all of that be kept secret. You can trust him.”
A long stretch of silence followed.
“Perhaps you should invite him to supper,” Papa finally said.
I leaned into my father, so grateful that this initial conversation between us had gone well. Now it was just a matter of my parents getting to know Ralph so that we could announce our desire to marry before he left in February, a mere three months away, and two months before I would turn eighteen. There was time enough for that, I reasoned, as we walked the rest of the way in comfortable silence: Papa with his thoughts of knowing his little girl had grown up, and me knowing I was one step closer to going home.
Wherever that was.
* * *
? ? ?
The next day I told Ralph I would marry him.
“Good,” he said, as though I’d made a smart business decision. I didn’t particularly want him to kiss me, but I wouldn’t have pushed him away, either. But he made no move to seal our engagement with a kiss.
“Let’s wait to tell my parents until December,” I said. “Maybe you can propose to me properly then. I want my parents to get to know you and trust you. I want Papa to give his permission willingly. I don’t want to leave on bad terms with him, okay?”
He nodded in easy agreement. “I think that should work. We can marry in January and leave in February.”
It amazed me how nonchalant Ralph was about our grand plan. He kept saying it was easy, as though ease made it simple. Ease just made the execution of the plan happen quickly, but there wasn’t anything simple about what we were doing that I could see. We were getting married. I was going to be his wife. He was going to take me home to California. I would be leaving Germany.
Ralph Dove would be my husband. At least for the foreseeable future.
Over the next two months, Ralph had supper with my family several times, and now that I was openly dating him, we didn’t have to hide our friendship. Papa even allowed Ralph to start walking me home from the café. Max liked Ralph very much because he was full of stories of life on the West Coast: of surfing at Malibu—hence the scar above his right eye—and of riding horseback in the San Gabriel Mountains, and of all the movie stars he had met because of his father’s connections to Hollywood. Clark Gable. Bette Davis. Rita Hayworth. Humphrey Bogart. Mommi liked him, too. Not just because he brought tins of ham and chocolate syrup. He was the epitome of politeness. She could also see, because she told me, that having Ralph in my life softened the loss of Mariko’s friendship and eased the sting of having letters that I’d nevertheless sent to Mariko after her marriage returned to me undeliverable.
There was only one evening in late November when I could tell that Ralph’s utopian view of the world concerned Papa. They’d begun to discuss the best way the broken world could remake itself, and Ralph started in on his odd notions. Papa identified them for what they were—communist ideals—and told Ralph he didn’t think socialism of that caliber would ever work in a world where selfish people lived.
“And selfish people are everywhere, son,” my father said. “Communist ideology will only work where people are truly good, all the time. I’ve never seen a world like that.”
They might have begun to argue about it, but Mommi came to the rescue with a cherry tart and coffee and the matter was dropped.