April arrived and with it my eighteenth birthday. I didn’t want a party, as I had no friends and I didn’t want Dove family acquaintances attending one out of obligation or curiosity. But Pamela insisted we have balloons and a cake and pin the tail on the donkey. My parents had sent me a package the week before that Irene had set aside so that I wouldn’t be tempted to open it early. Inside was writing paper, German chocolates—which I shared with everyone—a hand-embroidered scarf, and a wristwatch that had been made years ago by Uncle Werner and that Oma wanted me to have. The gifts made me cry a little, but the presents from the Doves brought a smile back to me. Frances gave me a stunning pearl necklace, and there was a set of books from Hugh, a hat and matching gloves from Pamela and Teddy, and a bottle of Christian Dior perfume from Irene.
I waited all day for a package or postcard from Ralph, but it did not come. Irene was furious with her younger brother, and Frances was likewise immensely disappointed. Hugh was concerned that perhaps Ralph had put himself in a position where he couldn’t mail anything in time for my birthday, but he told me this privately. In any case, I was perhaps as touched by their concern as I might have been by a gift from Ralph himself.
After a lovely dinner of lamb with mint sauce, Irene pulled two cocktail dresses out of her closet—a baby blue off-the-shoulder chiffon for me and a strapless red sequined affair for her—and we went to one of her favorite nightclubs. She was sure that if I was wearing one of her gowns and a wedding ring that no one would think I wasn’t twenty-one.
“And if anyone gives you grief, we’re going to hop on a plane in all our finery and fly to New York, where the legal drinking age is eighteen!” she’d said as she made up my face with her cosmetics.
She somehow convinced Hugh to join us, which I was glad of, because Irene didn’t spend much time at our table. I sipped my one glass of champagne for an hour, watching Irene flit from one corner of the club to the other, bringing over friends to meet me. I declined the invitations from her friends to dance; it seemed wrong somehow to dance with other men now that I was married, even given how odd my marriage was.
“It’s your birthday!” Irene scolded me after I declined yet another young man. “Ralph isn’t here. He should be and he’s not. You should be dancing.” She turned to Hugh. “Dance with her, for God’s sake. It’s a slow song; you’re not likely to pass out on ‘Surrender.’”
Ralph had mentioned when I first met him that his brother, Hugh, had a heart condition that prevented him from serving in the military during the war, but this was the first time anyone else in the family had remotely alluded to it. It occurred to me that in the two and half months I’d lived with the Doves, I had never seen Hugh dash up the stairs or chase after the children or go for a run.
“Dance with her,” Irene said again. “It’s her birthday!”
Hugh turned to me and half sighed. “Would you like to dance, Elise?”
The thought of dancing with family didn’t seem wrong to me. “All right.”
He led me to the dance floor and then put his arm around my waist and drew me close. Hugh began to take us around the room in a slow, relaxed pattern that, had he been a complete stranger or casual acquaintance, would have been unremarkably easy to fall into. Papa had taught me to dance, ages ago. I knew how to follow the man’s lead and let the steps and music carry me away. But as we danced, Hugh’s nearness, his hand on mine, the sweet sounds of the orchestra—all of that was colliding with how kind he had been to me since I’d told him the truth. How much he’d helped me with my schooling. How good he was with Irene’s children. How much his opinion of me mattered. He was looking into my eyes and I was looking into his, and for a second, there was no music or dance floor or absent husband whom I did not love. There was only him and me and his hand on my waist and his body so close to mine I could smell the aftershave he had put on that morning and the hint of pipe tobacco on his suit coat from a previous evening.
His steps slowed as I stared at him and I could see in his gaze he was having equally perplexing thoughts about me. Impossible thoughts. Impossible, impossible. We stopped dancing.
“I think I’ve had too much champagne,” I said, my eyes never leaving his.
For a second he said and did nothing. It was as if he didn’t want to take me back to our table, off the dance floor, and back to the real world, where I was married to his brother.
* * *
? ? ?
Hugh and I wordlessly pretended what had passed between us while we danced on my birthday had not happened. What else could we do? I was married. Hugh was my brother-in-law. We lived in the same house, shared meals, sat together in the evenings with Irene and Frances, took our niece and nephew skating and to the movies and to puppet shows. It was easier to pretend we’d both had too much to drink that night and that life had returned to normal when we awoke the next day and the effects of the alcohol were gone.
Normal, except that as April eased into May, there were still no new postcards from Ralph. He had been gone far longer than he had originally thought he would be, and I wondered if he was running out of cash, but no messenger from Western Union had come to the house with a request from Ralph to wire him more. It was as though Ralph had disappeared. Frances began to worry then, too.
One Saturday afternoon after the mail had been delivered and there was yet again no word from her youngest son, Frances pressed me for more information about what Ralph had said his plan was for this trip. When I told her I knew nothing more than what I’d already shared, she accused me of lying. Hugh, who had been in his study, and who had heard Frances berating me, came into the living room, holding the book by Engels.
“I think it’s possible Ralph has gotten himself into a bind,” Hugh said. “I think it’s time we contact the State Department.”
“The government? Whatever for?” Frances said, not even looking at the book Hugh held.
“Because it might be that he’s in some kind of trouble,” Hugh replied, and he told her what Ralph had said to me—before and after we married—and what Friedrich Engels’s book was about.
“Engels was a writing partner of Marx,” Hugh said. “Karl Marx.”
Frances paled then. “My son is no communist,” she said, resentment thick in her voice that Hugh could suggest such a thing.
“Even so, he might be in trouble. Elise has heard nothing from him in two months. He told Elise he wanted to go east. Two months ago he was as far east in Germany as he could go without permission. You can’t just waltz into Eastern Europe now.”
“What are you saying?” Frances said, her voice now sounding more fearful than angry.
“I’m saying I want to contact someone in the State Department. I’m going to call on Monday.”
“He’s not a communist,” Frances said, regaining her composure. “And I won’t tolerate anyone saying to me or to anyone else that he is.”
“That’s not what I’m saying—,” Hugh began, but Frances turned on her heel and went upstairs, leaving Hugh and me alone in the room.
Did reading Friedrich Engels make someone a communist? What did make someone a communist? Was it something a person pledged to or believed or did? I didn’t know. I knew only that people could too quickly assume they knew everything about you when they really knew very little.
And yet, Ralph was missing. Something wasn’t right. I believed that now. Hugh held my gaze for only a moment before heading back to the study with Ralph’s book in his hand.
Several more weeks went by with no word from Ralph. The State Department had been sympathetic to our predicament, but they’d received no word from any Soviet-controlled countries that Ralph had been arrested or imprisoned or was seeking asylum. In the meantime, Pamela turned six and Teddy, four. Spring gave way to summer.
June arrived, warm and brilliantly sunny. Irene’s divorce came through. Walt, the children’s father, came by the house just once to see his children, and they sobbed when he left. He told them he’d see them again next summer.
By mid-June, I’d completed my course work and earned my high school diploma, which was delivered by courier along with a dozen white roses from Frances, Irene, and Hugh. With my schooling done, I was invited to join Frances at mahjong on Tuesdays and Irene on the tennis courts on Wednesdays, but I wasn’t drawn to either of those pursuits. I wanted to learn a skill of some kind so that I could do something that could bring happiness to other people somehow, like I had promised Ralph I would. I remembered how, long ago, I had tried to make the flowers grow at the cottage by the poultry barns. I liked how flowers brightened the world and made plain places beautiful. I signed up for a flower-arranging class at a nearby city college, and two afternoons a week I learned how to turn roses, daisies, and lilies into works of art.