Along the Infinite Sea

by Beatriz Williams

  10.

  I turned on my side to face Stefan’s gaunt profile. “What if I don’t go to Germany next month? What if we take Florian in the car with us and drive to Antibes for my father’s wedding?”

  Stefan’s hands were folded beneath his head. He stared up at the rotating shadows on the ceiling. “You are not to ask me these things, Annabelle. You are to say to me, Stefan, this is what I want, and I will do it. God forgive me. I will find a way to give you what you want.”

  11.

  “I can’t do it,” I said to Charles. “I can’t spy on Johann for you. It’s not honest.”

  We were walking along the Seine with Florian, poking into the bookstalls and perspiring. Charles stopped and turned to me. A book lay open in his hands. Proust.

  “But it’s not spying,” he said. “Not really.”

  “That’s not why it’s dishonest. It’s dishonest because I’ll have to pretend everything is normal. That I’m still in love with him, if I ever really was.”

  Charles looked shocked, standing there holding his open Proust. Florian darted around the corner of the bookstall, and I launched myself after him, losing my hat to the hot wind. He giggled and made me chase him, and when I caught him at last, I blew a raspberry into his tender throat and told him how much Mama loved him, how beautiful he was, how miraculously like his father.

  “Papa!” he exclaimed, and he threw his arms around my neck.

  12.

  It was the twenty-ninth of July, and Stefan and I faced each other atop his bed on the fourth floor of the Paris Ritz. Our shoes were off—it was too hot, I said, and it was silly to think that shoes made any difference—and I was tracing my finger down the scar on the side of Stefan’s face.

  “I think I’m ready to tell you something,” I said.

  He put his finger across my mouth.

  “Let’s not talk,” he said. “It is too hot to speak.”

  13.

  When I arrived home at the avenue Marceau an hour and a half later, I put my key into the lock and realized at once that something was different. A current of energy ran from lock to key to hand, as if someone had wired the door for electricity while I was out visiting Stefan at the Ritz.

  I turned the handle and opened the door, and there was a great peal of laughter from the drawing room, yes, a great peal of laughter from a delighted Florian, and an answering roar from deep in an enormous chest.

  14.

  The day my mother’s appendix burst, we were on Cape Cod, staying with her sister and my multitude of cousins. Mummy had complained of a sour stomach the night before, and my aunt, always intensely practical, always a little jealous of Mummy’s French title and perhaps a little smug that the expensive French marriage had ended exactly as she had predicted on their wedding day, told Mummy she had always been too soft, and to take an Alka-Seltzer and go to bed.

  The next morning, I awoke to a strange quiet in the house, as if every floorboard had lost its will to live. I looked across the still air to Charles’s bed, which lay empty and unmade, the sheets flung back in haste.

  I sat up, and the door cracked open. It was my cousin Franklin, golden-skinned and blue-eyed and white-toothed, a perfect American teenager. He was off to Harvard in the fall, and eventually he was supposed to be president. Charles hated him. He took cheap shots at football, Charles said.

  “Awake?” asked Franklin.

  “Why is the house so quiet?”

  He told me that the house was so quiet because everyone was at the hospital, and everyone was at the hospital because my mother had been taken there in the night, and now she was dead.

  Dead, I said.

  Dead, said Franklin. I’m sorry.

  I said it was a stupid joke, and Franklin said he was sorry but it wasn’t a joke. It was appendicitis. They had tried to operate, but it was too late.

  I sank back in my pillow and drew the blanket over my head. I said four Hail Marys, and when I finished the last one I knew it was true, that Mummy was gone, that I would always hate Franklin Hardcastle for saying he was sorry when he really wasn’t.

  Later, when the shock had worn off, I wondered how the floorboards had known. How the house had known something was wrong before I had.

  15.

  In the drawing room, Florian was riding on top of Johann’s back as if my husband were a horse in the Bois de Boulogne. Johann saw me first. He lifted his large head in mid-whinny and his face shed its delight.

  “Johann,” I whispered. “I thought you were in Germany.”

  He reached behind his back and grasped Florian’s kicking legs, and he maneuvered the two of them until he was standing before me with Florian in his arms, clinging for dear life. His eyes were a clear and somber blue.

  “My wife,” he said, “my darling wife, I had to come. I have missed you so much.”

  I opened my mouth to reply, but the door from the hallway banged open and a ball of blondness hurtled into my arms. “Mother!” exclaimed Frieda, and I burst into tears instead.

  16.

  Johann asked me if I had eaten, and I said I had. He gave Florian to Frieda and said she must play with her brother while Papa talked with Mother. He had given me his handkerchief, and I was still cleaning myself up while he took my hand and led me into the bedroom and closed the door. He picked up my other hand and fell to his knees and kissed my fingers. “Mein Liebling, my treasure. My wife. Annabelle. I am so sorry.”

  I thought, This can’t be happening. I’m supposed to meet Stefan in an hour, I’m supposed to pack two suitcases—one for me and one for Florian—and meet Stefan on the eastern side of the Place Vendôme at four-thirty precisely, where he will be waiting in a hired automobile to drive us south to Antibes.

  I tugged my husband upward. “Johann, please. Get up. Don’t say that.”

  He moved his hands to the small of my back and pressed his mouth into my stomach. “Ah, your smell,” he said. “My God. I am holding you finally. I have been so sick, Annabelle, and I have been wrong. My son, I have missed him so much.”

  “He’s missed you, too,” I whispered. My hands went to his hair, because what else could I do? The short blond bristles were soft on my palms.

  “On my knees, Annabelle, I ask you to forgive me. Forgive your old husband, who became too stiff and proud and forgot what it is like to be twenty-one.”

  “There’s nothing to forgive, Johann. Please. Get up.”

  He rose and pressed me to his chest. “It was Frieda. She said to me, Father, you are moping, I have never seen you so unhappy. You must do something. And she said, Annabelle is not like Mama, you cannot make her something she is not. And I realized she was right. I have been an old fool with his young wife.”

  “Stop, Johann. You’re not old, you’re not a fool, it’s just—”

  “Annabelle, please.”

  I pushed him away. “Johann, I can’t. I have to think.”

  He picked up my hand and kissed it. “Listen to me. Listen to this one fact at least. I have told the Oberkommando in Berlin that I am resigning my post there and returning to Paris, in my old role if they will have me, and as a private citizen if they will not. I have withdrawn the children from their schools. This September, the boys will start at Charterhouse, my old school in England, and the girls will move here to Paris with us. She is so delighted, she would not stop talking on the train.”

  “But your career. They will ruin you. They’ll say you’re disloyal.”

  “I do not give a damn what they say.”

  “Oh, Johann.”

  He kissed my hand again. “If that is what you want, Annabelle. If I am not too late to win back your esteem.”

  I stared at my hand inside his, at the size of Johann’s fingers. I felt as if someone had attached a tube to my chest and drained away my vital fluids.

  “I cannot live any longer like thi
s,” said Johann. “I cannot live without my wife and my little son. I cannot go back to that. I will do whatever you want.”

  Through the door came the sound of Frieda’s laughter, and the scurry of Florian’s feet on the sleek parquet floors that smelled of beeswax.

  Johann said, “We need you, Annabelle.”

  In my head, I said four Hail Marys, and when I finished the last one I knew he was telling the truth.

  I slipped my hand from his. “I’m so hot and dusty, Johann. I need to take a bath.”

  17.

  The cars buzzed along the middle of the Place Vendôme and around its corners, but not one of them came to a stop along the eastern side. I checked my watch at four twenty-eight, and again at four twenty-nine, and very resolutely waited until four thirty-two before checking again. The sun burned the crown of my hat. My hands grew damp inside my white cotton gloves.

  At four thirty-nine I crossed to the western side of the Place Vendôme and approached the front desk of the Hotel Ritz. I inquired whether Stefan Silverman had passed through the lobby, and the clerk, who must have recognized me, said that Monsieur Silverman had checked out of his room two hours ago.

  Thank you, I said. Was there any message for me?

  No, there was not.

  If he returns, will you please give him this note?

  (I handed the clerk a sealed envelope.)

  Of course, Madame, said the clerk. Would there be any reply?

  No, I said, I didn’t need any reply, and I walked out of the Paris Ritz and returned to the apartment on the avenue Marceau.

  18.

  “Have you had a good walk?” Johann said, rising from his desk. The chair scraped painfully against the floor. His face was pale and vulnerable in the faint afternoon sunlight.

  “Yes, thank you.” I hid my trembling hands in the folds of my skirt.

  The clock ticked behind me on the mantel. Johann gazed at my hair, eyes puckered fearfully, lips parted as if he wanted to ask me a question.

  He is so tall, I thought, so large and formidable. He commands an army. And he cannot ask me a question.

  “I will go and see the cook about dinner,” I said, and I turned and left the room.

  19.

  After dinner, I played the cello with Frieda, and when I went to the nursery to put Florian to bed, I found him curled up on the floor with Johann, who was reading him a story.

  “Time for bed,” I said.

  My husband hoisted a sleepy Florian onto his massive knee. “There we are, son. Your mama commands us to go to bed, and we must always obey Mama.”

  Johann carried him to his crib and laid him in the sheets. It’s too hot for blankets, I said, and Johann leaned down and kissed Florian’s forehead. He brushed back the dark curls and said Papa’s darling boy had grown, he was a little man now. Florian’s eyelids sagged at the familiar timbre of Johann’s voice.

  I turned off the light.

  20.

  In the beginning, when I had returned to Paris after Christmas, I had kept to my own side of the bed and left Johann’s side empty, the way the wives of some soldiers still laid a place at the table for the missing husband. After the disastrous April visit, however, I began to creep over the invisible line that separated his space and mine, inch by inch, until I lay sprawled every night in the center of the bed, like a defiant starfish.

  Now it was July, and my husband had returned to our home and asked for my forgiveness. He had fallen to his knees and reminded me that I was, after all, his wife. He had brought his young daughter who needed a mother, his big arms in which my son fit so securely.

  I slipped off my dressing gown and drew back the counterpane and raged at the white sheets. It’s a damned thing, Nick Greenwald said, shaking his head. The bathroom door opened behind me.

  “Annabelle,” said Johann.

  I closed my eyes.

  21.

  I waited while he fit a sheath awkwardly on himself. When he entered me, I held back the gasp in my throat and lay still beneath him. I will not feel this, I thought, but friction is friction and flesh is flesh, and my body was young and starved of love. We rocked together silently for long minutes, until my reluctant heels found the backs of his legs.

  What he did next astounded me. He rolled onto his back and brought me with him, so that I wobbled above his mountainous chest and sank down hard. He put his thick hands on my hips and ordered me in German to use him hard—I don’t think he knew the words in English—and as I rose and obediently fell he said more German words, admiring my waist and breasts and my snug little Muschi, lifting his hips to meet mine, and I thought in despair, closing my eyes, I’m sorry, Stefan, I’m so sorry, I can’t help it, I am going to come.

  Then I lay flat on the damp white mountain of Johann’s sternum and stared at the wall, while his hand traced the cavity of my spine. It is done, he said, we are man and wife again.

  Pepper

  COCOA BEACH • 1966

  1.

  Susan is creasing her very, very pretty forehead. “You’re saying nobody’s heard from her since last week?”

  “Seems so,” says Florian. “Pepper’s the last one to speak to her.”

  Pepper spreads her hands. “She didn’t say where she was going, I’m afraid, and I never had the chance to ask her.”

  “Oh, dear.” Susan gazes up at Florian’s face. “And she’s been acting so oddly since—well.”

  “Since Dad died.”

  “She seemed all right to me,” says Pepper. “She spoke of him fondly, of course, but she wasn’t exactly grief-stricken. On the other hand, she had just dropped three hundred large on an old car, so—”

  Florian turns to her. “What did you say?”

  “The car. The car I sold her.”

  “Three hundred thousand dollars?”

  Pepper looks back and forth between the two of them. They’re sitting at the dining room table, Florian and Susan on one side and Pepper on the other, a pitcher of lemonade and an exquisite Meissen plate between them, piled high with macaroons. The sun has just begun to tilt through the French doors, and it forms a halo over Susan’s golden hair. “You didn’t know?”

  “What kind of car costs three hundred thousand dollars?” Susan says breathlessly. Her eyes are large and far too blue for Pepper’s taste.

  “A Mercedes. A 1936 Special Roadster. Only a few of them were ever built.”

  Florian chokes. “A what Mercedes?”

  “A very special Mercedes,” says Pepper. “In fact, the exact same one in which your mother fled Germany back in 1938. It turned up in my sister’s shed on Cape Cod, and I spent the summer restoring it.”

  Under Florian’s astounded gaze, she reaches for the pitcher of lemonade and refills her glass. The lemon slices bump lazily against the spout. No one has touched the macaroons. Pepper lifts one up and sniffs it. “Almond?” she says.

  “Coconut. Clara’s secret recipe. Did you just say it was the same car she and Dad drove out of Germany? The exact one?”

  Susan’s eyes are like a pair of awed wet cornflowers. “And you restored it? All by yourself?”

  “I had a little help,” Pepper says modestly.

  “But how did it end up in a shed on the Cape?”

  Pepper gestures with her cookie. “Now, that, you see, is the mystery. Maybe that’s what your mother is trying to find out. My God, these are the macaroons they serve in heaven.”

  Florian leans forward. “How do you know it’s the same car?”

  “Because she told me.”

  “How did she know?”

  “I think she’d recognize her own car, don’t you? And trust me, this isn’t the kind of car you’d mistake for another one. Every part is engineered and hand-fitted and caressed into place. It’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen.”

  Susan smiles at
Florian’s cheek. “It’s so romantic, don’t you think?”

  Pepper and Florian turn to her in tandem. “Romantic?”

  Jinx, Pepper thinks.

  “Why, that she’d spend all that money to buy back the car that carried her and her husband to their new life.” She aims the cornflowers at Florian, flutter flutter. “It’s beautiful, really.”

  He bolts to his feet.

  “I don’t care if it’s beautiful or not. My mother’s driven off in a three-hundred-thousand-dollar car without telling anyone where she’s gone, and I’d like to find her before the coroner does!”

  Susan’s alarmed. “The coroner!”

  “That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think?” says Pepper.

  Florian brings his knuckles to rest on the table. “You want to see dramatic? This is my mother we’re talking about!”

  “That’s true, the poor dear, but as the dead German said, what doesn’t kill a girl makes her stronger. She’s around somewhere, alive and kicking. Trust me.”

  “Somewhere is a damned big word, Schuyler. Considering we don’t even know where to start looking.”

  “Cape Cod?”

  “She did not drive to Cape Cod. Not in November.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Trust me, all right? She can’t stand the cold. She lives for sunshine.”

  “You see? We’ve narrowed it down already. Somewhere sunny in November, check.”

  “She had to have told you something. She had to have left some kind of clue.”

  “Well, she didn’t. I’ll show you the note. I’ve seen telegrams more verbose.”

  “Did she take a lot of luggage?”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t count, since I wasn’t even there when she left. Any more questions?”

  Florian sinks back in his chair and runs a hand through his hair. His eyes are puckered with worry, poor thing. What kind of mother is Annabelle Dommerich, to inspire such illogical concern for her welfare? Because motherhood doesn’t always end so well for the Schuylers. Motherhood usually goes splash headfirst into a vodka tonic, with lime. He says grimly, “We’ll just have to start calling hotels, I guess.”