It would be the only kiss in public from him for many long weeks after we returned. After Ralph’s funeral, Hugh and I gave ourselves over to the responsibility and necessity of honest bereavement. Not only for ourselves, but for the family. I stayed in the casita—no one suggested I leave it—and Hugh would find ways to come see me when the rest of the house was dark and quiet. Sometimes in those stolen, intimate hours in the casita, Hugh needed to work through his sorrow at the loss of his brother; other times he only wanted to be with me, holding me, kissing me, loving me—and thinking of nothing else. It would never cease to amaze me, the size of Hugh’s heart and his capacity to care for people when his physical heart was so fragile. I believe this is what drew me to him, after the hate and prejudice and violence of the war—the striking caliber of his compassion. Hugh made me want to be a kinder person. Heaven knew the world needed more people like that. It still does.
Frances was surprisingly cordial to me as her own sorrow lessened and she began to slowly reenter her social life. She was still very sad that Ralph had been taken from her and even sadder that they had parted on sour terms, but she came to see me, I think, as the only vestige of her youngest son that was left to her.
On one rainy afternoon, four months after Ralph’s passing, I had brought in a flower arrangement of irises and stephanotis and placed it on the desk where Frances conducted all her correspondence.
She came to me later in the day, when I was in the casita, to thank me for them. She was wearing a suit of cobalt blue trimmed in cream. Sapphires gleamed on her earlobes and neck. She looked like royalty.
“I was happy to make it for you,” I said, after she had extended me her gratitude.
“You seem to have a knack for arranging flowers,” Frances said, and her tone suggested there was more to her words than just a compliment about my burgeoning floral skills.
“I like seeing people smile,” I said, wanting her to know I heard her.
She nodded, turned to leave, and then swung back around.
“I’m . . . I’m very glad you decided to stay on here, Elise. I know you could’ve secured your own place. If it were me, I would have. But I am glad you didn’t.”
“I’m glad, too. This family is very important to me.”
She regarded me for a moment, and then a thin curtain of tenderness seemed to fall across her. “Do you think you could find it in your heart to like me, Elise?” she said, and the question seemed to tug at her throat a bit, as though it had been hard for her to be vulnerable in front of me. Her question warmed me to my core.
“I already do like you, Frances. Very much,” I said.
Her features softened in a way that I would learn in time was very rare for Frances Dove. She looked on me with both relief and joy, for the briefest of moments. And then she squared her shoulders and told me that made her quite glad and perhaps I’d like to come in for tea and discuss my making the floral arrangements for the fund-raiser she was chairing later in the month. I would look back on that moment and remember it as the day I began to love her, this woman who would never cease to be my mother-in-law, who always said what was on her mind, who didn’t sugarcoat anything, and who had no time for nonsense.
In December, five months after Ralph’s death, I flew to Munich to spend the holidays with my family. Papa was very happy with his new job and my parents had moved into their own place after spending several weeks with Emilie and Lothar. Max was making new friends, something that had never been difficult for my brother, and he was already thinking about attending the university at Munich when he graduated from high school in three years. I had my suspicions before then that my parents and Max would indeed never return to the United States to live, but it was clear to me on this trip that this was true. Max was a German teenager who had been born in America, and my parents were Germans who had lived for a time in the States, had born two children there, but had returned to Germany to stay.
When I returned home, it wasn’t Higgins who met me at the airport. It was Hugh. When I saw him by the car, I found myself running to meet him and the New Year that swirled about him in the California sunshine.
34
As 1948 began, nothing had changed much for me on the outside. I was still living in the casita and still spending several hours a day—sometimes more—with Pamela and Teddy. I was still attending my flower-arranging class two afternoons a week, but now I was taking whatever I had made in class to a downtown nursing home and leaving the arrangements with residents who didn’t get visitors. It was the simplest act of kindness, requiring barely any effort on my part, but it was not hard to see the difference it made for those lonely people, who would spend their last day on earth in that place. I asked Hugh for permission to have a greenhouse and studio erected at the far end of the backyard so that I could grow more of my own flowers and have a place to make arrangements other than at class or in Martha’s kitchen. He was happy to oblige.
I still spent the evenings in the big house with Irene and Hugh and Frances. Irene had figured out pretty quickly that Hugh and I had feelings for each other, and rather than finding it absurd or scandalous, she was very happy for us and perhaps a little envious. We told Frances just before the anniversary of Ralph’s death that Hugh and I had fallen in love and were going to get married. Outwardly, she seemed neither pleased nor displeased by our announcement. Inwardly I think she was glad nothing was going to change. When we told Irene our news was official, she said with tears in her eyes that she was over-the-moon relieved I was marrying Hugh, because if I’d fallen in love with someone else, I wouldn’t be in her life anymore. More important, she said, was that I wouldn’t have been as much a part of the children’s lives anymore, and she couldn’t imagine that scenario.
“They love you too much,” she’d said.
I married Hugh at the Los Angeles County Courthouse on the fifth of June. Neither one of us wanted a big ceremony. We didn’t announce our engagement in the newspaper, and word of our vows didn’t make the social pages. Hugh wanted to take me somewhere in Europe for an extended honeymoon, like London or Paris, but the world was still recovering from the wounds of war. So instead we went to British Columbia and spent three weeks happily getting used to the idea that we were now husband and wife, not brother-in-law and sister-in-law.
From the start Hugh was the gentlest of lovers. Until him, I had not yet been with a man and had only my mother’s understated advice to go on. But in the end, it was not Mommi’s well-meaning advice that allowed me to discover the wonder and splendor of physical intimacy; it was my love for Hugh and his for me that guided our moments in bed; it was love that tutored me on how to be transparent and honest and open, love that gave me the confidence to be naked, in every sense of the word, and not run for cover. Love and desire coexist, but they are not the same thing. Love showed me that sex is about true oneness with another person more than it is a person’s one truest pleasure.
When we returned from our honeymoon, Hugh officially joined me in the casita. We certainly could have bought our own place, but the casita offered us plenty of privacy, and Frances, for all her rough edges, needed us near her. And Irene, on a desperate search for affirmation, needed not only our love for her, but help with the children. I didn’t mind. I adored our little hideaway in the casita. And I liked being needed.
In August, we flew to Munich to visit my family. Frances, Irene, and the children accompanied us. I loved seeing the two families—the Sontags and the Doves—toasting Hugh’s and my marriage. There in my parents’ new house, with every precious person in the room wishing for us a long and happy life, I could see that we’d all been on a search for the place where we belonged. Except for the children, all of us had been on a quest for home. It can be an elusive treasure, that place. The search had led us down difficult roads—some of which we’d been thrust onto, others we had willingly chosen. We’d made promises and struck deals. We’d walked, run, and sometimes crawled down those roads. But none of us had ever been truly alone as we traveled. There had been those who walked beside me throughout my journey to where I now stood, and those who had joined me along the way, and those—like Mariko and even Ralph—who were my companions only part of the time, just long enough to remind me what it was I was looking for and why.
Love, in its own way, had been creating a home for all of us as we searched for that place where we belonged. Love was home.
In 1949, Irene married again. Her new husband, Bradley, was a talent scout for Paramount and led the kind of glamorous and exciting lifestyle that Irene hungered for. He was polite and dashing but he did not want to raise Pamela and Teddy. So while Irene and Bradley lived only fifteen minutes away in their new place, the children spent most of their afternoons and weekends at the house with us.
Soon after Irene remarried, Frances decided she should have the casita and Hugh and I should be in the big house since we largely took care of the children when Irene didn’t have them. She also knew it would accommodate our growing social life, as we were starting to have couple friends over, with whom we played bridge and canasta and charades on the weekends.
It was when we were packing up my things in the casita that Hugh came across Mariko’s book, which I had placed high up on a shelf in the hallway linen closet.