As June melted into July, I began to wonder if perhaps Ralph had planned to stay in Eastern Europe all along, that he had never been planning to return, and that he hadn’t wired us for cash because he didn’t want money that he hadn’t earned from the sweat off his own back. I no longer missed his companionship now that I had Irene and the children and Hugh—and even Frances—for company, but I felt I deserved to be told that he was never going to come home.
I was feeling particularly annoyed with Ralph one afternoon in early July, a blistering-hot scorcher of a day. The kids were splashing about in the shallow end of the pool. Frances and Irene had gone to a tea at the club, and I had offered to watch the children. I was sitting at the pool’s edge with my legs dangling in the water, keeping an eye on Teddy especially, who couldn’t swim yet but who knew no fear. Two shadows appeared on the pavement beside me. I looked up and saw that Hugh was home early and Martha had come out to the patio with him. Hugh looked as pale as I had ever seen him.
“Martha will take over watching the children,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”
He didn’t wait for me to respond. He just turned for the house and began walking toward it.
“Oh. Okay, I’m coming,” I said, withdrawing my legs from the water. I grabbed a towel, dried them off as best I could, and slipped my slightly wet feet into sandals.
Martha didn’t look at me. “I’ve got the little ones,” she said. And she pulled up a deck chair close to the edge of the pool.
I followed Hugh into the house. He had already walked through the kitchen and was crossing the foyer into his study.
“Come in,” he said at the door. His face wore an unreadable expression.
My heart began to race. Something had happened. I knew it had to do with Ralph. He’d been found and had no desire to come home to me. That had to be it.
Hugh closed the door, took my hand, and led me to the chair I had sat in when I confessed to him who I really was. I sat down.
He took a seat on the edge of the sofa, so close to me our knees touched. But for several long seconds he just stared at his hands in his lap. When he looked up, his ocean blue eyes were misted. “He’s gone, Elise,” Hugh said, so tenderly. “Ralph’s gone.”
“What do you mean he’s gone?” My mind refused to play any other scenario than that Ralph wasn’t here—he was gone—which I already knew.
Hugh withdrew a telegram from his pants pocket and gave it to me with a shaking hand.
I had to read it three times for the truth to sink in.
Ralph had been shot trying to escape a Soviet prison in Poland.
He was dead.
33
I don’t think Hugh expected me to want to go with him to Germany to collect Ralph’s body after what had happened to me and my family. But I didn’t feel like I was the person I had been only half a year earlier—that broken, wounded soul the war had made of me. I wanted to see my parents; I wanted to be there for Ralph, too. And I wanted to prove to myself that I had forged a future after Mariko.
Germany was where she truly left me, and it was in Germany where I had boldly set out to find my way in life on my own. As I removed Mariko’s book from the suitcase so that I could pack for the trip, I sensed that I owed a debt of gratitude to both Mariko and Ralph, strange as that might have seemed. Both had befriended me at the loneliest times in my life—I would never again know times as lonely as those. Both had roused in me strength I did not know I had. Both saw me without any kind of mask or label, and each, in his or her own way, had loved me. Most important, both—Mariko, especially—had led me to Hugh.
When I lay in bed that first night after learning of Ralph’s death, I was still in shock, still in the haze that grief of any kind spins around you, still unsure of what the future held for me. But I knew one thing for certain. I had been growing steadily certain of it since the night of my birthday when Irene had wanted to go dancing.
I was falling in love with Hugh.
I wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about me, except that even before the telegram came, I would catch him staring at me and then he’d abruptly look away, as though embarrassed he’d been caught doing it. And then, after the telegram came, the glances in my direction were more frequent, and he did not tear his gaze away as fast.
In my soul I wanted to believe Hugh was remembering what it had been like to hold me in his arms and dance with me, and that he was likewise pondering the notion that the husband I did not love—his brother—was dead. I was not married anymore. I had been his sister-in-law, but now I was just his brother’s widow.
Perhaps he was also pondering the way I looked at him now. Perhaps he also wanted to believe that I, too, was remembering how it had been to have his arms around me.
Perhaps he was thinking, just like I was, that we were destined for each other.
But before I could give myself fully over to what my heart was telling me, I knew I had to bring Ralph home and lay him to rest.
We learned rather quickly that Ralph had been accused of espionage after sneaking his way into Poland and getting caught. That he had been believed a spy was a sad mistake that could not have been further from the truth. Ralph surely wished to show his support for what was happening in the East, but he was poking about in places he ought not to have been, with a camera and an American passport and recent military service. He came from wealth and privilege. It was much easier for his captors to believe he was a spy than a starry-eyed socialist wannabe trying to become a part of the great remaking of Eastern Europe by photographing it.
Because he was killed by prison guards upholding the law of the land—to which Ralph was subject the moment he set foot in Poland—there were no political repercussions. In fact, the State Department issued a statement disavowing any connection to Ralph Dove, making it clear he had acted independently of the United States government’s knowledge and outside its permission. Not only that, but Ralph was no one in the Communist Party that was gaining members in the United States then. He hadn’t even bothered to inquire of them. He’d had his own agenda after the war and wanted to pursue it where the communist movement had begun. All that is to say, his death was not a media event. It did not make the news wires; rebels were being shot every day in Eastern Europe. And while Frances grieved as only a mother could for her son, underneath her deep sorrow was a healthy layer of relief that no one would ever know the real reason Ralph had taken this trip. In the days ahead, when people would ask why Ralph had been in Europe, our answer was that he had gone to heal from the war and to take photographs, and that he had wandered unwittingly too far east and had not understood the danger he was in when he tried to escape the prison that had held him.
Hugh and I left three days after the telegram from the State Department arrived. In New York we boarded a plane that would take us to American-occupied Frankfurt, where Ralph’s body—transported by train from Poland—would be waiting for us. I had wired my parents when the news of Ralph’s death reached me, and I wired them again when I knew I would be in Germany for three days. Stuttgart was only a two-hour train ride from Frankfurt. I longed to see my parents, to embrace them and be embraced by them, and to show them I was all right. And, yes, I wanted them to meet Hugh.
During the first flight, Hugh and I did not speak much; we were both grieving in different ways. Hugh loved his brother even though they were very different. I had been able to tell from the photographs of their childhood, which Hugh and Irene had been looking at the day before we left, that theirs had been a happy family when the three of them were young. I could see in the pictures that Hugh, skinny and pale, was nevertheless included in the same activities as his brother and sister, though perhaps not to the same degree. The three of them rode horses together, played in the surf at the beach, attended one another’s birthday parties, and opened Christmas presents together, and all three had clearly loved their father.
Hugh had told me, as I looked at a photograph of the three children hanging on to Errol Dove and laughing, that Ralph had not always been so disdainful of the family wealth and the grandfather and father who had attained it. Nor had he been so scornful of their father’s aspirations for Ralph. It wasn’t until his teen years that Ralph started having issues about the family money and his father’s expectations. Errol Dove hadn’t demanded Ralph go to college and then come work for the company, Hugh told me. Their father simply knew a college education would broaden Ralph’s view of the world, which had become jaded somehow, and that a job at the company would keep him from a lazy life defined by nothing but a trust fund. For some reason, Ralph saw his father’s goals for him as a measuring rod for Errol Dove’s love and approval.
“That’s never what it was,” Hugh had said. “Father was a powerful man and commanded respect. But he never made his goals for us a condition of his love. Ralph just didn’t seem to believe that.”