He nodded. “There is something inside.”
She lifted the lid to reveal a nest of blue velvet. Inside the folds was a ring. It was made of three delicate circles of wood, each intricately carved, all interlocking.
“I hope it fits you.” He came around the desk and took her hand. He tried the ring on the third finger of her right hand. It fit perfectly. She stared at it, then at him, unable to voice what was in her mind. In Poland, this was the wedding finger.
“Oh, Stefan . . .” Tears stung the corners of her eyes.
“Shhh.” He put his finger to his lips. “I know it’s not possible right now. But we make believe, yes?”
Later, when they made love, it was Stefan who cried.
Martha cradled his head in the crook of her shoulder, feeling the tears seep into her skin. She didn’t ask the reason. For him, there was so much to grieve, and he had allowed so little of it out up to now.
In the morning, waking up beside him, she lay for a few moments just looking at his sleeping face. Above the ruffle of blond hair, on the bedside table, she could see the photo of herself with Kitty and Delphine, taken on Christmas Day a year ago by Charlie. They were all smiling, their glasses raised in a toast. What would they have thought if, in that moment, they could have seen into the future? Kitty married and living in America, Delphine the adoptive mother of three children. And herself . . . She turned her gaze back to Stefan, whose eyelids fluttered momentarily in his sleep. A year ago, she’d thought she would never see him again. Like the feather she’d seen floating along the river the day he left her, he’d disappeared from view, entered choppy water, and been pulled under. But he had emerged, bedraggled but intact, farther downstream. There would be more turbulence ahead—that much was certain. But now they would face it together.
CHAPTER 31
The first months of the new year brought no new prospects for the DPs. Martha began to wonder if Major McMahon’s conviction that other countries would soon open their doors was nothing more than speculation.
At the end of February, a letter came from Kitty. She was now settled in New York. She’d gotten a job as a typist in an attorney’s office, and she had applied to study art at Columbia in the fall. She was still worried about her parents, who were trying desperately to get out of China. The letter said that the Communists were advancing ever closer to Shanghai. Anyone with money was getting out while they still could, but the price of a boat ticket was astronomical. Charlie’s parents were trying to work out a way to wire money to them.
Martha’s eye traveled down the page. She caught sight of a name that made her catch her breath. Arnie. Kitty had found him.
“We have all the New York telephone directories in the office,” the letter explained. “I found nine people called Radford with the initial A in the Manhattan one. I hope you won’t be cross with me—I just had to know if one of them was him. I worked my way through the list, pretending to be an old school friend of yours, newly arrived in New York. The seventh one I tried was Arnie. He called you a name I won’t repeat and said he had no idea where you were. Then he slammed the phone down.”
Martha stared at the address Kitty had written at the bottom of the page. Arnie was living in the Bowery. No wonder he hadn’t replied to any of the letters she’d sent to Williamsburg. She grabbed the pad of airmail paper from the desk drawer and started writing.
“Did you tell him that you’d met someone else?” Delphine asked when Martha told her all about it over their evening meal.
“No. I thought that if he knew that, he might refuse—out of spite.”
“What will you do if he agrees to a divorce? Could you do it from here?”
“I don’t know,” Martha replied. “Kitty might be able to help. Now that she’s working in an attorney’s office, she could probably find out. I might be able to hire someone to act for me, without me actually being there.”
Delphine nodded. “What did you say in the letter? Did you give some other reason why you wanted to break up?”
“I just said that I’d be returning to the US before the end of the year, and I wanted to be able to lead an independent life.” She glanced at her plate, digging her fork into what remained of the cabbage. “When I met Arnie, I thought that following him to New York would give me the confidence to make a new start. I guess I learned the hard way that marriage isn’t really the way to achieve independence.” She pushed the morsel of cabbage around her plate, her mind thousands of miles away, imagining Arnie in the kitchen of the apartment in Williamsburg, opening the letter, screwing it into a ball, throwing it across the room, then reaching for the bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Of course, he was no longer in that apartment. But it made no difference. Unless he had changed his whole way of life as well as his address, he was unlikely to react favorably to her letter. She was clinging to the hope that he had met someone else and wanted a divorce as much as she did.