“Irene,” Frances said.
“He’s not rifling through her handbag, Mother. He just asked her a question.”
“I might have a mint or two,” I said to Teddy. “Perhaps after dinner you can have one?” I looked to Irene. She saluted me with her drink. I supposed that meant yes.
“You want to see the playroom?” Pamela said to me as she pushed wayward hairs out of her face. “That’s where our beds are. We have a giraffe. He’s not real. But he looks real.”
“Um.” I looked to Ralph, and he nodded. “Sure.”
I stood.
“I get the rocking horse!” Teddy said, and he dashed off ahead of us.
“I’m five,” Pamela said as we started to walk away. “How old are you?”
I tried to answer the child quietly. “I’m nearly eighteen.”
Behind me Irene sputtered as she laughed. Her glass must have been at her lips when she overheard me say this.
“God Almighty,” Frances said under her breath.
They’d heard me. I pretended I hadn’t heard them.
I walked out of the room with Pamela’s warm hand in mine.
29
When the children and I left the room, I knew the topic of discussion was going to be me. I couldn’t help wanting to hear what the family was going to say, and what Ralph was going to say back to them. I was glad that the playroom was the first room at the top of the stairs. I reasoned that if I stood near the threshold, perhaps I could hear the conversation in the salon. But Pamela wanted to show me everything, and everything was not near the door. I didn’t hear much at all until Frances raised her voice.
The family wasn’t talking about my tender age or why my father took his family to postwar Germany. They wanted to know why I had married Ralph. I moved closer to the door.
“For the love of God, Ralph!” Frances was saying. “Are you telling me you didn’t talk to a lawyer before you married her? You didn’t think to protect your assets?”
“It’s my money, isn’t it?” Ralph responded at nearly normal volume. I had to lean halfway out into the hall to hear him. “I can do with it what I want.”
“You asked her to sign nothing? She signed nothing!”
“That’s correct.”
Irene said something. So did Hugh. I couldn’t make out the words.
“Does she know how much you have?”
“She never asked how much I have, Mother. She’s not like you or Irene or even you, Hugh.”
“Hey!” Irene exclaimed.
“She’s not,” Ralph said. “The three of you need the family wealth. You’d be lost without it. You don’t know how to be happy without money, and to tell you the truth, I pity all three of you.”
“Keep your pity, Ralph.” This came from Hugh. “But Mother does deserve your respect. She’s only asking you these questions because she cares about you.”
“If we’re going to be respecting each other, then I demand the same for Elise,” Ralph replied. “Your accusation that she married me for my money is an insult. I can tell you right now she has more character than the four of us put together. She would never think something so demeaning of someone she’d met less than an hour ago.”
Teddy began to pound pegs on a little wooden bench and I couldn’t hear what anyone said next. I backed away from the door, my face aflame.
I hadn’t married Ralph for his money, and yet I had. I wasn’t in love with him, even though I’d imagined that maybe someday I could learn to be. And I wasn’t carrying his child—another reason two people decide to marry. The fact was, by marrying Ralph, I’d been provided a way out of Germany, a way out of a broken world without my best friend in it, a way to reinvent myself—all made possible because of his generosity. He didn’t care about his wealth. He didn’t care that when I divorced him, I would be entitled to a part of it.
Money didn’t matter to him like it apparently mattered to his mother and siblings. And if he hadn’t been able to prove before how different he was from them in this respect, he sure had shown them now by marrying me. He had done something grand for me, but I likewise had done something grand for him.
As Pamela pulled me down to the floor to play with her and her dolls, it became clear to me that Ralph’s desire to help me hadn’t been completely altruistic. Underneath his intense displeasure at how my family and I had been treated and his sympathy for me for the loss of Mariko, there was his long-seated desire to somehow piss on the family’s privilege, the family’s dynasty, the family’s expectations. He’d been able to do that by bringing home a new wife who was seventeen and who had nothing and who had signed no prenuptial agreement.
He’d gotten what he’d wanted, and now I was supposed to feel like I had, too. That was our arrangement. But instead, I sensed only a profound emptiness.
I missed my parents in that moment.
And Mariko.
I felt ashamed at what I had done and what the three of them would think of me if they knew the truth.
“Why are you crying?” Pamela said, her small voice pulling me back to the playroom. I hadn’t realized two tears were sliding down my cheeks.
I looked at the child, the one person in Ralph’s family who had been genuinely kind to me that day, and I decided I would be honest with her. I would always be honest with her. And Teddy, too.
I wiped away the wetness with my hand. “I’m just a little sad. I miss my mommy and daddy. And my best friend.”
Pamela studied my face. “Where are they?”
Teddy stopped pounding and looked at me, too. He was interested in my answer. These children had a father, and from the little I had picked up on, he was not here.
“My parents and brother are across the ocean in a place called Germany.”
“Where Uncle Ralph was.”
“Yes. Where Uncle Ralph was.”
Pamela frowned. “There are soldiers there. And bad people.”
Teddy walked over to us and sat down in my lap. He looked concerned. The children had obviously been told something about where their uncle Ralph had been and why.
“There were,” I said. “But the bad people aren’t there anymore.”
“Where’d they go?” Teddy asked.
“Some went to prison; some ran away. Some died.”
This seemed to satisfy them.
“Does your best friend live in Germany, too?” Pamela asked.
I shook my head. “Mariko lives far, far away in Japan.”
“Why don’t you go see her?”
The child’s face was alight with the simplicity of her suggestion, as though the antidote to my sadness was staring me right in the face.
“I wish I could. But her family won’t let me.”
“That’s mean,” Teddy said, and he lay back against my chest.
Pamela looked down at the doll in her hand and then handed it to me. It was a beautiful toy, with shining brunette hair. It was wearing a lemon yellow lace-trimmed pinafore and satin hair ribbons. “Want to play with Ginny?” Pamela said. “She’s my favorite. But you can play with her.”
I didn’t care then that I couldn’t hear the conversation downstairs. I didn’t want to hear it anymore.
* * *
? ? ?
Sometime later, the children were called downstairs to have their supper. I assumed that meant dinner was being served to all of us. But the children ate first, had their baths, and were put to bed.
Then the rest of the family ate. The housekeeper, Martha, who had left for the day, had made both meals before heading home. The adults ate pork medallions, asparagus spears in a béarnaise sauce, scalloped potatoes, and a tomato aspic.
The conversation around the table as we began eating seemed forced, as though the family had jointly come to no consensus about me while I had been playing with the children. Hugh continued to stare at me as though I were made of clear glass and he could see right into my soul. Irene warmed up to me during the meal, mainly because I told her I’d very much enjoyed playing with her children.
“You are most welcome to play with them anytime you want,” she said in return. “They drive me crazy half the time.”
“If you spent more time with them, they wouldn’t pounce on you when you go into their room,” Hugh said, not looking at his sister.
Irene laughed. “Says the bachelor with no children!”
“Don’t you two start,” Frances muttered as she refilled her wineglass for the third time.
Irene turned back to me. “I’m serious, love. You spend as much time with them as you want. They clearly adore you.”
“They are darling children,” I replied. “Very sweet and kind.”
Irene seemed to need reassurance that I wasn’t merely being polite. She raised an eyebrow. “Really?”
“Yes. I honestly did enjoy playing with them.”
“That’s because you’re just a child yourself,” Frances mumbled, thinking no one had heard her.
Ralph shook his head and then looked at me. “Don’t pay attention to her,” he whispered.
Hugh reached across the table and moved the wine bottle from Frances’s reach.
“Well,” Irene said, as if to recapture the second before Frances had spoken, “they don’t get that sweetness from their father or me; that’s for sure.”