“And if there’s anything else that you need help with, I want you to ask me. You can trust me to keep your confidence.”
His kindness was overwhelming me. I had not seen or felt such deep compassion in such a long time, nor could I remember extending it, not to this degree. The war had hardened me in the most subtle of ways and I was just now noticing it. The deception that Ralph and I had concocted suddenly felt repulsive and self-serving. “I’m so sorry . . . ,” I sputtered as the pooled tears began to trickle down my face. “I didn’t want to think about what I was doing, marrying Ralph like that. I knew it was wrong. I just . . . I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to apologize to me,” Hugh said quickly.
“But I feel like I do. I need to tell someone I’m sorry! I shouldn’t have married Ralph!”
Hugh studied me for a moment, and I couldn’t read his thoughts. “You said it was Ralph’s idea to get married?” he said a few seconds later. “That he talked you into it?”
“Yes, but—”
“Look. I think my brother might have had his own reasons for marrying you, apart from wanting to help you,” Hugh said. “I don’t see why he couldn’t have just paid your way and brought you out here as a friend. He didn’t have to marry you. It was a plan that worked for you both—he got to assert his independence over our mother and you got to come back to the States—but he didn’t have to marry you. That wasn’t the only way. Maybe he hadn’t thought it out clearly. I don’t know. In any case it’s done. So you’re going to need to make the best of it for now, unless you want to get the marriage annulled. I’ll help you do that, if that’s what you want.”
I could see very clearly that Hugh was neither demanding I seek an annulment nor suggesting it. He was letting me know I had options and that this was one of them. His kind eyes were looking into mine as he waited for my answer, and I felt for the second time since meeting Mariko that I had found a true friend, even though Hugh and I barely knew each other. Ralph had been a true friend, too, until his care for me got muddled with his own agenda.
I didn’t want the annulment, which would sever me from this family. Frances was as prickly as a pinecone, but I could see that she loved her children and wanted only good things for them. Irene had her faults, too, but she was fun to be with and she liked me. And I was already growing very attached to Pamela and Teddy. To annul my marriage was to air what I had done in public. It would shame me and also this family, and I found I did not want to hurt them.
Nor did I want to lose them.
“I don’t . . . I don’t want that,” I finally said, after many seconds of contemplation.
Hugh seemed a bit taken aback. My answer surprised him.
“It’s not about Ralph’s money,” I said quickly. “It’s . . . it’s that I don’t . . .”
“You don’t want to go back to Germany?” he said, trying to help me sort out my answer.
That was true; I didn’t want to go back to Germany. But that wasn’t the whole truth. “I don’t want to leave here,” I said. “I like it here. I mean, I like this family.”
This answer, too, seemed to surprise him.
“And I don’t want to hurt you all,” I continued, needing him to understand. “An annulment . . . it would . . . I wouldn’t want the family name to suffer for it. I could never do that. Not after having met all of you.”
Again, Hugh studied me for a long moment. “All right,” he finally said.
I nodded my thanks and swept away lingering tears with my fingertips. We were both quiet for several seconds as the words we had spoken to each other settled about us.
Then Hugh reached for Ralph’s book. “I need to ask you something. And I need you to be frank with me. Do you have any idea where Ralph intended to go?” Hugh looked concerned.
“I know he wanted to go back to Germany,” I replied. “And that he wanted to go east from there.”
“East? How far east?”
I shook my head. “He didn’t say.”
“What did he say he wanted to do?”
“Um. Take pictures.”
Hugh leaned forward in his seat. “Of what? What did he say he wanted to take pictures of?”
I couldn’t quite remember how Ralph had phrased it. “He . . . he wanted to take photographs of how the world was changing. He said he wanted to be part of it and that the camera doesn’t lie.”
“What kind of change was he talking about? Did he tell you?”
“Just that the war had left the world broken and now was the time to rebuild it but . . . but in a better way than before. Or something like that.”
Hugh said nothing else for a moment. “I’d like to hang on to this book, if that’s okay with you.”
“Of course.”
He stood, and a second later so did I.
“I meant what I said about letting me know if there’s anything else you need while Ralph is away,” Hugh said. “You’re part of the family now.”
I murmured my thanks and turned from him.
I went back to the casita, tired from the emotional rigors of the day, but I didn’t feel quite so alone anymore. I felt that with Hugh’s help I was at last on a path to somewhere. I didn’t mind that I didn’t know where. It was just so good to feel like I was moving forward again. I climbed into my empty bed and fell into a dreamless sleep.
* * *
? ? ?
Hugh was as good as his word. Within three days of our conversation in the study he’d hired a tutor to help me complete my high school education. He’d located a private institution that catered to students who didn’t attend a traditional classroom and whose parents had the money to pay for private instruction.
Frances also seemed highly in favor of this plan for me to earn my diploma, probably so I would embarrass her less. A high school dropout for a daughter-in-law was not someone she could introduce to her friends, but a daughter-in-law with an education was. The tutor, a man about my father’s age named Mr. Renville, came in the mornings after Pamela left for school. I had my classes with him in Hugh’s study.
Mr. Renville was impressed with how much I had been able to learn on my own at the little flat in Stuttgart. I was able to test out of English, foreign language, and literature. He and I concentrated mainly on the sciences and mathematics. By one p.m. each day we were done. Pamela was home by then and I usually spent the afternoons with the children. Irene would join us sometimes for excursions to parks and playgrounds and ice cream parlors. And occasionally, Frances would join us, too.
In the evenings, after the children were in bed, the four adults would listen to the radio or sometimes Irene, Hugh, and I would play a board game. Frances was always in the room with us, although she couldn’t be persuaded to join in on Monopoly or Parcheesi. Some nights I had homework. Math had always been a difficult subject for me, and Hugh was a natural at it, so he’d help me with algebraic equations that, to me, defied logic, and geometry questions that made my head spin.
Three postcards arrived from Ralph over the next month and a half, all of them from various parts of Germany. The last one, which arrived the last day of March, had been sent from a city called Fulda, very close to what was now the East German border. Ralph didn’t say much in his postcards, as there wasn’t much room to write, but he gave every indication that he wanted to continue east toward Berlin, which we all knew was in the Soviet-occupied zone, and this worried Hugh greatly. And because Hugh was worried, I was worried.
Hugh had not shared Ralph’s book with anyone else in the house. I didn’t think Frances or Irene knew the extent to which Ralph was leaning toward embracing communism; even I didn’t know then how far inclined he was. And I didn’t know how dangerous it was for him to think he could get across the border from West Germany into East. But Hugh didn’t say anything to alarm Frances or Irene or even me. He just asked if he could have the postcard from Fulda and I gave it to him.