Along the Infinite Sea

by Beatriz Williams

  “I have to admire your principles,” he said. “Most girls would carry on the affair anyway. But not Annabelle. She doesn’t sit around feeling sorry for herself. She doesn’t confront him and make a big stink. She just runs right off and marries the first man who asks her, a nice boring old German general who won’t ever break her heart.”

  “He’s not boring. He is the best man I know. And I make him happy. Every day, every morning I wake up and I know I’ve done the right thing.”

  Across the room, the waiter eyed us, arms crossed, resentful that we were taking up one of his best tables at the window with a glass of water and a cup of coffee. The baby was pressing against a nerve, making my right toes go numb. I shifted in my seat and opened my mouth to close the conversation.

  “I don’t know if I should tell you this or not,” Nick said.

  “Tell me what?”

  He set down the sugar spoon and ran his thumb around the rim of the cup. “Can I ask you a question? Who told you he was married?”

  “Lady Alice Penhallow. His old mistress. I met her at the Hôtel du Cap, after Stefan left.”

  “Ah. Good old Lady Alice. And she didn’t tell you that his wife had actually left him by then, had taken their daughter last March and gone off with some lover of hers, some neighbor, a childhood friend, as I understand it? That Stefan had gone home to give her the divorce she wanted, so that he could marry you, and that was when they caught him, crossing the border into Germany?”

  The air left the room. The swallowed water rose up in my throat. I gripped the edge of the table, but it didn’t help. “Excuse me,” I said to Nick Greenwald, and I rushed to the dirty staff toilet in the back, where I heaved up the water and what remained of my breakfast, and then I heaved up nothing at all, just dry yellow bile and nothing else.

  2.

  Lady Alice wasn’t at home, but my father was, still nursing his head from the night before. “Is something wrong, mignonne?” he asked, removing the ice pack from his head, and I said there was nothing wrong, I just had a question I needed to ask her.

  He fell back on the sofa and closed his eyes. He assured me he would have her telephone me when she returned.

  I went back downstairs to the waiting taxi. Nick Greenwald had offered to drive me home, but I refused. Actually, he had been quite kind. “It’s a damned thing,” he said, “an awful damned thing,” and I remembered my brother told me that Nick had had some sort of love affair, back home in the States, that had gone badly. It was hard to imagine any girl breaking Nick Greenwald’s heart, but Charles said Nick had been a wreck when they first met, drinking all night, taking women home from parties and discarding them afterward. There had been some legendary house party at a Loire chateau. Charles refused to disclose the details, and I had pieced together a few rumors that I thought could not possibly have been true. But that was the trouble about rumor, wasn’t it? You never knew what to believe. You never knew for certain if a man was a hero or a villain or an ordinary human being.

  But Charles had also said that Nick had returned from the house party a changed man: had sworn off drink (mostly) and women, and had singlehandedly rescued his family firm from the brink of bankruptcy. Again, that information might or might not have been true; all I knew was that Nick Greenwald couldn’t have been kinder as he found me a taxi outside the café and helped me inside with all my packages, which I would have forgotten if Nick hadn’t noticed them. He had rested his elbows on the edge of the door and gazed at me with compassion.

  “It’s a damned thing,” he said again.

  “Yes.”

  “What the hell do I say to Stefan?”

  I gripped his arm. “Please don’t tell him anything at all. Don’t say anything to anyone.”

  “Hell,” said Nick Greenwald. He lifted himself away from the taxi door and we pulled away from the curb, and the sight of his face, bruised and tender, stayed with me the rest of the afternoon, until Johann came home.

  3.

  During our wedding trip, Johann and I had spent a week on the Amalfi Coast, driving from village to village, and one evening, over dinner, Johann announced that he wanted to visit Pompeii the next day. I told him I wasn’t interested, and he agreed we should go to Positano instead, but as I lay in bed that night, locked inside the coil of Johann’s sleeping body, I thought about his disappointed face and his deep interest in military history and Roman civic organization, and when I woke up the next morning I told him that I had changed my mind, and if he wanted to visit Pompeii we should go.

  It was the middle of November, and there were very few visitors. We pulled off the dusty road at nine o’clock and Johann pointed out the window and said, “There it is.” I followed his finger and saw a cluster of crumbling yellow buildings, looking exactly like every other decrepit Italian village, except for an absence of the familiar red-orange roof tiles, and I thought, My God, it’s just like Stefan said.

  We wandered for a few hours among the buildings and monuments, the perfect amphitheater and the paved streets. At one point I bent down and picked up a shard of ochre-colored pottery and said, “Look at this. Let’s take it back with us,” and Johann said no, we should leave it here where it fell, like a soldier in battle. He pointed out the expert grading of the streets, the drainage, the orderly layout of the buildings. We walked for some time, and after consulting a map Johann suggested we visit the Antiquarium, where many of the frescoes and the artifacts were displayed, along with some plaster casts of the victims. I said no, I didn’t want to see that at all, and Johann frowned in disappointment and looked back down at the map.

  All right, I said. Let’s go.

  The museum was crammed with shelves and displays, a superabundance of antique detritus. I walked past great glass cases in which mothers clutched their children, and merchants clutched their bags of treasure, and I averted my eyes. Johann made his way more slowly, studying the angles of death, the quality of the plaster. We turned a corner, and there before us was a case containing a dog on its back, contorted in agony, bearing a thick collar around its sternum. I put my fist to my mouth and turned away, sobbing, and Johann said, Annabelle, what’s wrong? and I said, It’s true, the poor dog, look at his face, the poor thing, he never knew.

  Johann patted my back and said, “Ah, don’t fret so, Annabelle. It’s just a plaster cast, not a real dog. Nothing to cry over.” After a moment, he took my hand and we moved on to inspect a collection of gold bracelets in the shape of coiled snakes.

  The pottery shard had traveled quietly that day in the pocket of my skirt, and I kept it now in the bottom of my drawer, beneath my underwear, where Johann would never dream of looking.

  4.

  I rose from the floor of the nursery, where I was inspecting fabric samples. I had brought the phonograph into the room, and the room was full of Puccini. “You’re home early,” I said to my husband.

  Johann walked to the phonograph and lifted the needle away. The music stopped in mid-phrase, with a tiny scratch. He caught my hands and helped me up just as I found my feet. “Yes, it was rather a trying day, and I decided that there was no point in being such an important man if I could not leave my work to others and join my bride when she is expecting our baby.”

  “Not for another ten weeks.”

  He bent down and kissed me. “It cannot be soon enough for me. Are these for the nursery?”

  “Yes. The curtains. What do you think?”

  “Make sure they are good and thick. A well-darkened room is necessary for good napping.”

  I looked again at the samples. “Oh, of course. I didn’t think of that.”

  “That’s why it’s useful to marry a man who has had children already. You see what a clever girl you are?”

  I sank back to my knees on the rug and picked up two swatches, one in each hand, and I hated them both. “Yes, a very clever girl.”

  Johann cr
ouched next to me. “Annabelle. Look at me.”

  I looked up.

  “You have been crying, haven’t you? Are you well?”

  “I’m quite well, it’s just these stupid swatches the draper gives me. None of them are right, and it will still take weeks to have them made, and the baby will be here soon, and I don’t know what to do—”

  He drew me against his woolen chest. “Shh. Calm down. It is nothing, Annabelle. It doesn’t matter, the color of the curtains. The baby will not even notice, I promise you.”

  The wool scratched my forehead. I heard Nick’s voice: I thought he was going to shoot himself.

  The parting began again in my ribs. I took Johann’s lapels in my fists and forced Nick’s voice away. I forced away the image of Stefan on the telephone, fresh from the prison where they had sent him after he crossed the border into Germany on the twenty-ninth of August, listening to Nick Greenwald explain that Annabelle de Créouville was not waiting faithfully for him in Paris, but instead had married a Prussian baron and was pregnant with his child. I pictured Stefan’s shocked dark eyes, his gaunt face.

  “Annabelle,” Johann said gently. “You are distressed.”

  I looked up and thought, It’s not his fault, it’s my fault. What had Stefan said? We are in God’s hands now. I remembered feeling a warm glow when he said those words, because in my innocence I thought they meant that God had brought us together, that we were intended for each other, and God would solve all our difficulties and bring us together.

  But, as usual, I had misunderstood. It seemed God had not intended me for Stefan, after all. He had intended me for Johann von Kleist, who had lost so much in his thirty-eight years, and needed a fresh young wife to comfort him.

  The thing was done.

  There was a brief knock, and the nursery door burst open. It was Frieda, telling me that Lady Alice was on the telephone for me.

  5.

  “Darling, I had no idea,” Lady Alice said. “It’s not the sort of gossip that spreads easily. If she’d been somebody important, of course, I might have heard about it.”

  I glanced out the tiny round window into the courtyard. Johann hated the telephone, and we had only one in the apartment, relegated to a closet off the library. I wondered if she was telling the truth, and whether it mattered.

  “Anyway,” she went on blithely, “the fact remains, he never told you about her, or the daughter. That’s not fair play, is it?”

  “No.”

  “So it makes no difference, really.”

  “Yes, it does. If I’d known she’d left him, I might have waited for an explanation, at least.” I spoke in a hushed whisper.

  “But he still would have been caught at the border and thrown in prison, wouldn’t he? So there’s no telling how everything might have worked out. And think of poor Johann. Aren’t the two of you just appallingly happy these days?”

  “Yes, we’re very happy.”

  “So there’s no use thinking about it, is there? What’s done is done. You’re far better off with your lovely loyal old hound of a Prussian, the one you’re married to. Put the whole matter out of your head. I assure you, Stefan will have no trouble finding another pretty young thing to lick his wounds for him. And whatever else needs licking.”

  She made perfect sense. Stefan would surely be back to his old ways in no time, and I had faithful Johann and the baby, who needed me. There was only Nick Greenwald’s voice at the back of my head—I thought he was going to shoot himself, and sometimes He seemed to think the baby might be his—and Nick’s voice was easily silenced, if I concentrated hard enough, if I drowned it out with other things.

  “All right,” I said. “I suppose so, when you put it that way. I was just feeling low, and a little guilty.”

  She laughed right into the receiver, crackling the hairs of my ears. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, darling, don’t do that. Life is far too short to look back.”

  6.

  That night, Johann made respectable married love to me in our bed, turning me on my side and entering me from behind so the baby would not be crushed between us, a position we had adopted a month or two ago.

  When we had both caught our breath, he cupped his hand around my heavy womb and said, “Annabelle, I will be very busy in the next few days. I may have to go away.”

  “Where to?”

  “Perhaps to Berlin. Perhaps to a few other places.” He paused. “There is nothing to worry about.”

  “Should I be worried?”

  “I have just told you, there is nothing. But if I send word that you are to join me somewhere, to leave Paris at once, you will do so, won’t you?”

  “Why, Johann? What’s going on?”

  “You know I cannot say.”

  My heart thudded in its empty cavity. I thought, What if we go to Germany? Stefan is in Germany. I said, “You can’t even hint? Don’t you trust me?”

  “It isn’t a matter of trust, meine Frau. It is a matter of honor. But you will do as I ask, won’t you? You will come to me at once, if I send for you?”

  The baby stirred under his hand. I laid my fingers over his and said, “Can you feel him?”

  “Yes, of course. The tiny foot, right there. But you have not answered my question, Annabelle, Liebling.”

  “Yes, Johann,” I said, staring at the wall. “Of course I will come to you.”

  He let out a sigh onto the top of my head. “Good. Because there is one thing I cannot bear, and that is the absence of my Annabelle. And of our little child, it is unthinkable.”

  “You should never worry about that. I’m yours now.”

  “Yes, I know that. I know your noble heart. It is what I prize most in you.” He kissed me tenderly. “I have always loved this part, when my wife is round and beautiful, and we lie here in our bed and wonder what our child will be like when he is born.”

  “Yes.” The tears fell silently into the pillow. “I love this, too.”

  7.

  At dawn the next morning, nineteen German infantry battalions entered the Rhineland, on the eastern border between France and Germany, in violation of some treaty, I forget which, made in the previous decade, which had guaranteed its permanent demilitarization.

  I learned all this from the housekeeper, because Johann had already left the apartment. For the next several days, I did not see my husband, who worked and slept at the German embassy, waiting for the French response. He later told me that if the French had mobilized, if the French had offered even a hint of military opposition, they would have had to retire at once, the defeat would have been total.

  But the French did not mobilize, and Johann returned home nine days later, after a further trip back to Berlin for debriefing, heavy-eyed and triumphant.

  When we were alone in our bedroom, he sank to his knees before me and lifted my dress to kiss my swollen skin. “Now our child will be born into a safe, strong Fatherland,” he said, “with nothing more to fear.”

  8.

  I went into labor twelve weeks later, on the ninth of June—first babies are always late, said Dr. Périgault, shaking his head as if the babies were somehow willfully to blame—and gave birth early the next morning to a boy, eight pounds thirteen ounces, bearing a shock of black hair and a pair of lungs like an army sergeant.

  “He has his mother’s coloring,” said the nurse, handing the army sergeant to his father for the first time, later that afternoon.

  “Thank God for that,” Johann replied. He looked into the baby’s squashed red face with the same rare rapture as he had regarded me on our wedding night, and touched his cheek with a most delicate finger. The squalls faded into gasps, and then silence.

  The nurse smiled beatifically. “Have you decided on a name?”

  “Yes,” I said, exhausted and entranced, from the nest of white pillows on my hospital bed. (His wife, Frieda, had
hemorrhaged to death at home before the doctor could arrive, and Johann refused to take any chances with me.) I watched Johann straighten the swaddling into a more expert tuck. The baby looked tiny and safe and quiet in his enormous arms, and the breath fell from my lungs.

  I turned my face to the nurse. “His name is Florian, for his grandfather.”

  Intermezzo

  June suns, you cannot store them

  To warm the winter’s cold

  A. E. HOUSMAN

  Annabelle

  GERMANY • 1936

  1.

  It was three days before Christmas, and the girls and I had motored into Berlin to shop, leaving Florian at home with his father and brothers.

  We traveled not in Johann’s black Mercedes, which we left in Paris, but in the massive Daimler Johann kept here in Germany, driven by a chauffeur in a field-gray uniform. The trip took two and a half hours along a highway of rich new asphalt, and Frieda did most of the talking.

  “He has a new tooth coming in, the one on the right side,” she said. “Did you see it?”

  “I didn’t need to see it. I’ve felt it the past few days,” I said, and I laughed to cover the ripping sound in my chest, because I hated leaving my son even for an hour, let alone for an entire day of shopping in Berlin. The Baroness von Kleist, she is such a devoted mother, they said in Paris, bewildered, where mothers of a certain class happily handed off the baby to the nursemaid after a friendly morning cuddle, but the truth was far more elemental than that, a chemical intensity of emotion that had begun its slow combustion about the third or fourth day after Florian’s birth, in some tranquil hour before dawn, when he was suckling at my breast and his eyes wandered up to mine in such a perfect representation of Stefan that I felt the universe move in my marrow, as if I had fastened all my ideas of the infinite upon a single black eyelash. The sensation might possibly be described in music or in mathematical equations or in geometric designs, but not in words.