Marco Polo and Susan Munro’s marriage

Marco Polo and Susan Munro’s marriage is at once an attachment, a refuge, and a practical arrangement shaped by the social penalties attached to Susan’s past as a singer in Park Street. Marco brings her to the hotel as his wife, leaves Calcutta so she can escape the city’s judgment, and later proposes a divorce when their circumstances change. Their relationship never receives a clearly documented legal ending: after Marco returns, no divorce petition can be found, and Susan has disappeared from his reach.

Meeting and Marriage

Marco encounters Susan when he enters a small Park Street restaurant for dinner, hoping for a respite from hotel work. She is singing there because Lisa, the regular singer, has broken her leg and is recovering. Susan explains that her chance to sing will end when Lisa’s doctor removes the cast. Marco feels for her, including because she has no parents, and is drawn to her despite recognizing that youth alone would not ordinarily have anchored a man adrift in hotel life. He nevertheless gives in to the attachment and takes Susan to the hotel as his wife.

The marriage grows out of an unequal combination of feeling and circumstance. For Marco, Susan becomes someone for whom he is willing to change the course of his life; the account figures that change as a ship finally letting down its anchor. For Susan, marriage alters how others can approach her. She later explains that being married protects her from unwanted advances, and that American military police keep officers from coming to her home. The same certificate that marks a personal bond therefore also has immediate value in the precarious working world she inhabits.

Leaving Calcutta and Returning

Marco takes a hotel-manager position in Rangoon because Susan’s history is widely known in Calcutta. He believes that the city will prevent her from succeeding socially, whereas elsewhere no one will know her past. The move makes their marriage a shared attempt at a new beginning: Marco’s work and Susan’s hopes keep them occupied, and for a time they do not have a bad life there. Marco works hard for the hotel, impressing foreign guests who are surprised to find such an establishment in Burma.

That relative stability ends when Japanese bombers arrive and Burma has to be evacuated. Back in Calcutta, the welcome Marco once received has vanished. Some people turn away because of his connections with Burma; others react to his Italian connections. His Greek passport helps avert possible imprisonment, while the Catholic priests who had changed his name had not changed his nationality. The pressures are not simply marital, but they alter the conditions in which the marriage has to survive.

Work, Protection, and Separation

Marco’s savings run out as Susan’s professional opportunities increase. Thousands of British and American soldiers fill Calcutta, seeking restaurants and music with their meals. Susan’s singing is in demand, while the fact of her marriage continues to serve as protection against unwanted attention. The relationship is consequently pulled between Marco’s objections and Susan’s need to sustain a livelihood. The account presents these pressures as part of the circumstances leading Marco, after a moment of despair on the Theatre Road terrace, to tell her the next morning that they should separate.

Susan initially resists. She argues that marriage shields her from undesirable men and that military police will keep officers away from her home. Marco’s proposal would therefore remove a form of security she considers essential to her work, even as he believes separation is necessary. Their disagreement is not a simple contest between affection and indifference: the certificate that binds them also protects Susan in a profession exposed to sexual scrutiny and social judgment.

They eventually settle on a divorce strategy designed to preserve Susan’s reputation and give Marco the outcome he wants. Susan is to bring the case, accusing him of flirting with other women. Because Marco would be away at his distant post and unable to take part, they expect the favorable judgment to be easier to obtain. Susan is not enthusiastic: the marriage certificate benefits her professionally. Before leaving, Marco asks her to do this for the love he has had for her. The plan thus treats a false accusation as a legal instrument, while revealing how both parties attempt to manage the reputational and practical consequences of ending the marriage.

An Unresolved Legal Ending

The arrangement does not produce a known resolution. After settling some matters in Calcutta, Marco returns to work and struggles to send money. Susan writes once to tell him that she has bought a new car; as his anxieties grow, the lawyer asks for more money, which Marco borrows and sends to Susan’s address. These details leave the marriage caught between separation in intention and an unfinished legal process: communication is scarce, money is hard to obtain, and the divorce remains something they are trying to accomplish rather than an established fact.

When Marco later returns to Calcutta and takes the vacant manager’s post at the Shahjahan Hotel, he asks after Susan and the divorce. The lawyer’s former partner refuses to give him information; the old lawyer has died and sold his share of the practice before leaving the world. Marco then checks at court and discovers that no divorce petition was filed in Susan’s name. Susan, once a conspicuous presence in wartime Calcutta, has vanished into the city, and Marco cannot establish what became of her or their proposed case. The marriage’s ending is therefore not a definitive judgment but an absence of records and contact. Its unresolved status gives the relationship a particular irony: Marco planned a carefully managed separation, yet the woman and the legal process both slip beyond his reach.