Ralph and I were married by a local Bürgermeister on a Friday morning, the twenty-fourth of January, 1947. Oma came out on the train from Munich, bearing an ivory chiffon dress in a zippered garment bag. The dress had been Emilie’s. It was not a wedding dress, but it was a creamy shade of white, lace trimmed and beautiful. Oma had replaced the plain white buttons with pearl ones, and somehow she had found white satin pumps for me to wear.
She was happy for me, but sad, too, because I was her namesake, and the war that had brought us together had also torn us apart.
Our witnesses were Margaret Bloch and one of Ralph’s soldier friends. My parents, Max, and Oma watched us as we said our vows in German—Ralph had had to practice saying his—and signed the documents that sealed our vows.
Herr Bloch made us a wedding cake and we enjoyed it back at the café with a few more of Ralph’s friends and Major Brown. Ralph had one of his friends take pictures with the only camera he’d brought with him from the States. It wasn’t the expensive one he was going to see the world with, but it was good enough for our wedding day, considering we were the oddest of newlyweds.
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For our honeymoon, Ralph had reserved a room for two nights at a chalet in the Black Forest near a city called Calw, and we had a train to catch. When it was time for us to leave, I hugged my parents good-bye and thanked them for a wonderful day. It had been wonderful. If I had been in love, it would have been perfect.
On the train, Ralph and I sat across from each other and watched the winter landscape in bridal white zip past us. It was only a fifty-minute ride, but Ralph brought books for us to read and Mommi had packed us sandwiches. We didn’t talk about what we had just done. We read and ate and gazed out the window.
At the train station in Calw, Ralph got us a taxi to take us up to a lovely little hotel with cottages that looked like gingerbread houses dotting its property. The stone fireplace in the half-timbered chalet had been set with a fire that blazed cheerfully as we stepped inside and stomped snow from our shoes. Ralph had arranged for a fruit basket and a selection of bread and cheese and wine to be delivered.
We found a chess set in a cupboard, and after changing into more comfortable clothes, we sat on the floor by the fire, munched on cheese and apples, and sipped wine while we played the game.
I could almost fall in love with him, I was thinking. The wine and the fire and the cozy chalet were all combining to make me feel like it was possible. Perhaps we would learn to love each other like a husband and wife should. Maybe we would look back on this day, old and gray, and we’d laugh about it. Maybe our grandchildren would beg us to tell the story of how their grandma and grandpa had fallen in love after their wedding, not before.
The hour was late and Ralph began to put the chess pieces away. I looked up at him to see if he was also having thoughts like these. But when he was finished, he slapped the box shut, sat back on his knees, and said he’d take the sofa and I could have the feather bed.
I stared at him, and I felt my mouth drop open a little. He had clearly not been thinking the same thing.
My thoughts must have been clear on my face as I gaped at him because Ralph froze, looking surprised. And a little hurt.
“You weren’t thinking I’d gone to all this trouble to help you only to take advantage of you now?” he said.
I was stunned into silence for a few seconds. He had misinterpreted my response completely. “I . . . I didn’t . . . I don’t . . .” But I was at a true loss for words. Shame and embarrassment fell over me like a hot, heavy tarp.
“Did you really think I would ask that of you?”
“No. I mean, I didn’t know if maybe . . .” My words fell away.
“If maybe I was expecting sex from you?” He said the words like making love to me was the absolute farthest thing from his mind and always would be. I wanted to disappear into the wood paneling of that beautiful chalet.
“Is that really the kind of person you think I am, Elise?”
I couldn’t keep the tears from coming. They spilled from my eyes, stinging and salty.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” I muttered. But the truth was, he didn’t know what I’d been thinking, and I was too embarrassed to tell him.
Ralph seemed to soften at the sight of my tears. He moved to sit closer to me. “Hey,” he said, tipping my chin up with his hand so that I had to look at him.
“After all that has been taken from you, did you really think I would take that, too?”
I couldn’t answer him. I felt undesirable. Unwanted in the way that men want women.
“I will never treat you that way. Okay? Never. You’re my friend. If I want sex, I can get it, Elise. Understand? And you should never give yourself away to a man as payment for anything, okay?’
The tears kept coming. I had never been so mortified.
He reached into his pocket and handed me a handkerchief. When I didn’t reach for it, he began to blot the tears on my face with it.
“Don’t cry, Elise,” he said, gently now. “Please?”
Ralph drew me into his arms, the sweetest embrace, ironically like that of a new groom, and I laid my head against his chest.
“I don’t know who I am,” I whispered. To him, to myself—to God, too, if he was looking down on me in that moment.
“You’re going to find out,” he said confidently. “That is my gift to you.” He said it like he was Santa Claus, like it was the most benevolent thing he had ever done for anyone.
But I felt like I was standing alone on a vast plain where nothing was visible for miles except sky and dirt. I didn’t want to sleep on the feather bed by myself. I didn’t want to be alone in that barren solitude.
“Can we just sleep here by the fire?” I whispered in a shaking voice, afraid he would say no. “Just like this?”
He said nothing but grabbed the sofa pillows off the couch behind us and a soft fluffy blanket that lay across the back of it.
We stretched out, me on my side, staring into the flames, and he spooning my clothed body. He put an arm around me as if to keep me from falling, and that is how we spent our wedding night.
Ralph and I returned Sunday to Stuttgart. We rented a room close to the army base for the next ten days until Ralph left.
Then, three days after his departure, my parents and Max took me to the train station, where we said our good-byes.
“You will be happy, won’t you? You’ll be happy with Ralph?” Mommi asked as she hugged me tight.
“Yes, Mommi,” I whispered into her hair. I knew she needed to hear this to be able to let me go. She squeezed me and then stepped back.
“And you’ll write to us often?” she said, her words laced with a little sob that threatened to swallow her voice.
“I will,” I replied, feeling a tug of emotion in my own throat.
Papa enveloped me in his arms next. “I’ve always known you would want to go back to where you’re from,” he murmured. “I understand. I do. I’m sorry the Germany I knew is not the one you had to see. I want you to come back and visit and see if it’s different, with different people at the helm. Ja?”
“You won’t try to come back to America?” I said as I returned his embrace.
He didn’t answer verbally, but there was a shrug in his shoulders as he let go of me. “We’ll see,” he finally said, in that way parents say those two words when they have no ready intention of doing what you just asked of them. “So, you promise you’ll come back and visit us?”
I flicked away the tears of our farewell and nodded.
I turned then to Max, who was trying to pretend like he wasn’t on the verge of tears himself. I hugged him and I felt him stiffen a little, no doubt to attempt to remain strong and unimpassioned.
“Don’t forget who you are,” I whispered to him.
“I don’t know what that means,” he whispered back, and it made me laugh.
The laugh eased the pain of our parting and I stepped back from my brother with a smile on my face. “Just keep being Max,” I said.
“That won’t be hard,” he replied as he stepped back, too, obviously confident that he knew who he was. And maybe he did. Maybe of the four of us, I was the only one who didn’t know.
I stepped on the train and sat by the nearest window overlooking my family on the platform, and I blew them kisses and waved as the train bound for Bremerhaven started to pull away.
At that busy port, I would board a ship that would take me across oceans to New Jersey, to where my husband would be waiting for me. And from there, we’d journey together to California, and Los Angeles—to the city where Mariko had been born and that would now be the blank canvas for my life after war.
PART FOUR
27
San Francisco, 2010