Along the Infinite Sea

by Beatriz Williams

  Mostly, I tried not to think of Johann at all.

  But Florian thought of him for me. Florian played happily and affectionately with Stefan, but he hadn’t forgotten the man who had once cradled his purple newborn body in a pair of thick palms. That afternoon, Stefan chopped wood while Florian and I carried the split logs across the dying grass to the woodshed, and Florian said in German, “Where is Papa?”

  “He’s back home, darling.”

  “When do we go home, too?”

  We set the wood into the pile and I fingered his hair. He was bundled in his warm coat—I had found a new, thicker one in the village—and his cheeks were pink. “Aren’t you happy here?”

  “I want Papa,” he said, and he started to cry.

  Stefan paused in his chopping and turned to look at us. I gathered Florian against my chest and picked up his hand to wave at Stefan, at Stefan’s jacket made of rusty wool, and asked Florian if he could count the number of logs Stefan had split with his ax. It was that easy, distracting Florian, because he was not quite two and a half years old, but when you are twenty-two years old and have lived with a certain man as your husband for three years, more or less, you cannot banish his memory so easily, even when you want to, even when you now sleep heavily beside the man who owns your heart and your blood and the marrow of your eternal bones. It takes strength to hate that husband, the relic of your former life, and when you fall asleep, your brain’s fortifications fall away.

  You realize, in horror, that there is a small but inevitable hole in your heart, a hole you never wanted but perhaps deserve. A man who is no longer your husband, and a child who will never be born.

  18.

  Stefan had stopped shaving his upper lip two weeks ago, and his mustache was now a sinister thing, dark and thick: longer than Hitler’s, but not by much.

  “What do you think?” he asked me, turning from the mirror, waggling his eyebrows.

  “I think it’s monstrous, but if it helps us across the border, I’ll worship it forever.”

  “Then let’s leave tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow.” I went to the library and read the calendar on the wall. “That would be the ninth of November. An auspicious date?”

  Stefan bent down to grasp Florian and hoist him on his shoulders. “What do you think, little man? Are you ready to sail away?”

  Florian squealed with pleasure and reached for the brass arms of the chandelier. “Sailboat!” he said.

  “Not quite.” I stretched to my tiptoes to kiss the dimple in his knee. “But I think you’ll like Stefan’s ship even more than a sailboat.”

  19.

  We woke up before sunrise the next morning, into a hard frost beneath a massive fall of leaves. Florian was still asleep. I washed in the bathtub while Stefan stood in a towel before the mirror and shaved carefully around his new mustache, dangling a cigarette from his lips. I parted the curtain and stepped from the tub and found my own towel, and when I glanced at the mirror I saw he was watching my reflection. I let the towel drop to the floor.

  “You are so perfect.” He wrapped his hands around my waist and examined the meeting of his thumbs. “You are so small and round and warm and full, all at once. Like the buns they make in England, at Easter.”

  “Hot cross buns.”

  “Yes, those. They always looked so delicious, when I saw them through the window of the bakery, making the glass fill with steam.”

  “Forbidden bread?”

  He laughed, and the sound was magnificent. “Yes, very much.”

  I put my arms around his neck. “And now you have a bun of your very own.”

  “My own delicious hot cross Annabelle bun, to be gobbled up each morning with hot coffee and a good smoke.”

  20.

  “You see?” I gasped, several minutes later. “It’s beautiful. The universe is so beautiful.”

  “Gott im Himmel, Annabelle bun. At this moment, the universe is whatever you say it is.”

  21.

  We packed up the old blue Opel Matthias had lent us and tucked a sleepy Florian between us on the front seat. I watched Stefan as he locked the door of the Himmelfarbs’ house and stepped back for a last look before tucking the key beneath an empty flowerpot.

  When he climbed inside the car and started the engine, I said, “We’ve been happy here, haven’t we? In spite of everything.”

  “I think we have been happy here because of everything,” he said, and he backed the car out of the drive and onto the narrow and curving road toward Lake Konstanz.

  Pepper

  SAINT MARY’S • 1966

  1.

  The first ferry doesn’t leave until half past nine, and the fishing fleet is long gone. Not a boat in sight, for love or money. Florian’s ready to swim out to Cumberland, but Pepper convinces him he’s better off eating breakfast instead.

  “She’s fine,” Pepper says, over coffee and bacon.

  “How can you possibly know she’s fine? She’s gone missing!”

  “She’s not missing. We know exactly where she is.”

  “With a stranger.”

  “A stranger to us, maybe, but not to her. Because I don’t doubt for a second that she knows this person on Cumberland. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that they’re probably good friends.”

  He sets down his coffee cup and stares at his plate. “What makes you say that?”

  “An educated hunch. Putting two and two together.” She taps her nose. “The old female intuition.”

  “You don’t know anything about it.”

  “Maybe not. But I’ll bet you do, if you’re willing to admit it.”

  He looks up. “What the hell does that mean?”

  Now, Pepper’s always been a breakfast kind of girl, even when breakfast falls somewhere between lunch and dinner. She likes her coffee and her sun-bright orange juice, she likes her smoky rich bacon and her scrambled eggs, she likes her toast hot hot hot with butter on top, and maybe a little strawberry jam, too, and she likes all this even more now that she’s growing another human being on the strength of that feast. If she were in Pompeii, and the ash were raining down, she would still insist on wiping her yolks clean with the last of the toast before evacuating the city.

  But as she takes in Florian’s beleaguered face, his ravaged eyes and his jaw composed of honest right angles, she discovers that her stomach is already occupied by a pair of eager butterflies. She discovers that her heartbeat isn’t in need of a further dose of the hot black stuff. All she needs is more of what’s sitting across the table from her, turning to her in his hour of need, treating her not as an object of irresistible sexual allure—God knows she’s no longer that Pepper—but as a comrade.

  She sets down her fork and thinks about laying her hand on his. Then she does. She tries not to sound too throaty as she purrs: “You said something, back in the car, about being honest with each other.”

  “I’ve been nothing but honest with you.”

  “Well, then maybe you’re not being honest with yourself.”

  He frowns. She pats the hand.

  “Look, I’m not going to tell you what I think your mother’s doing on Cumberland Island, and why I think she’s in the best of hands. I want you to tell me what you think she’s doing. Tell me what you know, in your heartiest heart of hearts.”

  He stares at her slender hand on top of his thick brown paw, and then he finds her face. “Are you actually suggesting Mama’s having an affair?”

  “Not at present, maybe. But you’re a lawyer. Look at the evidence.” She ticks her fingers. “Mama drops a fortune on a sentimental car from her Germany days. Mama hires a gumshoe on the sly to track down a person or persons unknown. Mama gets news of said person and bolts off like a schoolgirl for a Beatles concert. It adds up to something, by anyone’s math. Even yours.”

  He shakes off he
r hand. “I can’t believe you’re even suggesting this.”

  “Tell me something. Was it ever hinted at any time, by either of them, that maybe someone left something valuable behind, back in Germany? Something that, once the faithful spouse is honorably buried, might possibly be reclaimed?”

  “What the hell gave you that kind of crazy idea?”

  Among her other skills, Pepper knows when to beat a strategic retreat. She withdraws to her coffee, which isn’t quite as strong as she likes it, but coffee is like doughnuts: even a bad batch is better than no batch at all. Susan’s still upstairs, fixing her hair after a long hot shower, probably finger-curling the way her mama taught her. Pepper knocked on the door fifteen minutes ago. You go on without me, Susan said absently. I’m just freshening up. Pepper shrugged and said, Suit yourself. Who was she to judge? A woman involved in the intricate choreography of getting her man: you didn’t second-guess her choice of steps. You let her be to get on with the dance. Pepper, now, she was ready to trot downstairs for breakfast after only a two-minute shower, a slathering of Pond’s, a swipe of lipstick and a ponytail, but Pepper wasn’t looking for a husband.

  But. This man. This Florian. Bemused and angry and worried, the more so because he knew Pepper was probably right, and this pretty story he’d constructed around his parents’ marriage—true love and abiding faithfulness and unchecked adoration—was just a pretty story, after all. It always was. Pepper knows. You have the rush of falling in love, the chemical combustion of mutual attraction, Oh, he’s The One and We’ll never stray and Eternity isn’t long enough for us, praise God. And then there are babies and cracker crumbs left in the sheets, there is stomach flu and flatulence and hangovers, there is the way he always eats his peas by spearing them one by fucking one with the leftmost prong of his fork, there is the way she leaves smears of beige makeup all over the washcloths by the sink. There is the pretty young secretary at the office, there is the handsome new tennis pro at the club. And you find a way to smile and kiss and pretend everything is blissful, when in fact you’ve only learned the secret of mutual tolerance.

  “Sweetheart,” she says, as kindly as she can, “this doesn’t mean your parents don’t love each other. Mine do, in their way, against all odds and affairs. But your mother said something to me, while we were driving up from Palm Beach. She said—first of all—that she’d been in my position once, and everything turned out all right.”

  “What? Your position?” He looks in horror at the edge of the table, where the top of Pepper’s pregnant belly forms a ski jump into the butter.

  “She also said that she had left a piece of her heart behind.”

  Florian’s cheeks turn pale. He sets his fingers on the table and rises to his feet. “This is bullshit,” he says, and he walks straight out of the empty dining room, leaving behind a plate still criminally full of breakfast.

  And Pepper, who sighs and reaches across the salt to capture Florian’s bacon.

  2.

  She gives him twenty minutes. Twenty minutes should do the trick, right? Enough time to settle the angry red blood cells back in his veins, so he could see the cold blue light of reason.

  She finds him on the side of the porch facing the river. His hands are braced on the railing. She leans back next to his right forearm and crosses her hands demurely under her bump.

  “Ferry leaves in an hour. Are you sure you want to be on it?”

  “If only to prove you wrong.”

  “Frankly, you should be hoping I’m right.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because what’s the alternative? You want her to spend the night with a total stranger, possibly not at her own request?”

  He swears quietly.

  “You know what?” says Pepper. “It’s her life. You’re all grown up. Your father’s been dead for a year. Let her have some happiness, if this is what makes her happy. Let her go.”

  A blanket of clouds has unrolled overhead, while the three of them were cleaning and dressing and eating breakfast, and now it’s begun to drizzle. Pepper listens to the soft drum of the rain and tilts her head just enough that she can see the side of Florian’s grim head, the tension in his jaw.

  “You know, it doesn’t mean their marriage was a lie,” she says. “I asked Susan. She says they loved each other. It’s not the world shattering around you. She left a piece of her heart behind, not the whole thing.”

  “All my life,” he says, “I’ve wanted what they had. All my life. I mean, I won’t lie. I dated some girls, I had some fun. But all that time, I was waiting. That’s why I never asked you to dinner. I knew if I did, I was a goner. I was going to fall straight in love with you, and my odds weren’t great, were they? My odds weren’t great that you were going to fall in love right back. Settle down with one lucky guy.”

  “Don’t be so sure.”

  Florian’s body is still next to hers, and so close she can feel the flex of the tendons of his arms, the muscles of his waist. There is a competent trimness to him, as if he could change shoes and hike straight up the Appalachian Trail, all the way to Maine, and she wishes to God she could remember. Remember the moment they first met, in a Washington living room. Why can’t she remember? If only she could remember, if only she could locate that critical instant, maybe she could go back and change it. Move the pieces around, so the game ended differently.

  But then, poor Susan. Stuck with Billy Whatshisname.

  “That’s all right,” she says, when he doesn’t reply. “You made the right decision. Susan’s a terrific girl. She’s crazy about you.”

  “I know that.”

  A car edges into view around the corner, a long flat hood, newish and bluish. It rolls to a stop on the opposite side of the road, parking just behind Florian’s Thunderbird. The chrome-tipped tailfins rise into the drizzle. The driver switches off the ignition but doesn’t get out.

  “So maybe I was an idiot,” Florian says. “Maybe you don’t worry about true fucking love, or a happy marriage with the nice house and the nice kids. Maybe you just ask the girl out to dinner.”

  “Unless it’s too late.” Pepper caresses the side of her belly and watches the blue car. “Unless the girl’s already got herself in too much trouble.”

  “Pepper,” he says warmly, and he lifts himself from the railing and turns to her, covering her hand, and for just the sweetest instant in the world there are no blue cars and no Susans and no missing mothers.

  But then there are.

  “Florian! There you are,” chirps an unnaturally cheerful Susan, beautifully coiffed and impeccably dressed for a dune-swept barrier island in November, pressed Levi’s and short rubber boots and a crisp white blouse unbuttoned all the way to there.

  Susan. Unmarried, unpregnant, unimpeachable.

  3.

  Pepper waits until the ferry is out of sight before she turns to the man on the bench. “I appreciate your patience,” she says.

  He puts his hands on his knees and rises slowly, as if he’s had a hard night of his own. Maybe he has. His cheeks are a little ruddy, his eyes heavy. “I wasn’t in the way, was I?”

  “Not at all. I don’t think they even knew you were there.”

  “Good, good.” He smiles. “It’s not so easy to be inconspicuous, with a face like mine.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. They have more important things to think about.” She gestures to the front door. “Shall we go inside? They’ve got a cozy little sitting room off the lobby. Just the thing for clandestine shenanigans, but well within screaming distance if you try any funny business.”

  “All right. Lead the way.”

  Pepper stops by the front desk on the way and asks for coffee. She could use a little something warm, to heat the chill in her blood at the sight of this man’s familiar face, his thick waving hair and his eyes that look as if someone has tugged the ends downward.
<
br />   So very like his big brother.

  Only not quite. A bit fresher, a bit round-cheeked still. Give him time, Pepper thinks, leading him into the parlor. Trying not to waddle.

  The room is old and charming, the fire crackling in the fireplace. Really, it’s a lovely little hotel, neat as a pin, polished to a mellow gleam. The smell of woodsmoke lies pleasantly over the beeswax and the nearby tide. He waits for her to sit first; he was raised that way. She chooses the extreme end of the sofa. He finds a nearby armchair and offers her a cigarette, which she refuses. No, she doesn’t mind if he smokes anyway.

  When the cigarette is lit, he tells her he’s glad she agreed to see him.

  “I didn’t have much choice, did I? You’ve cornered me, fair and square.”

  “That wasn’t my intention. We just wanted to talk with you.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have sent your goons to threaten me in a stairwell in Palm Beach.”

  “That was a mistake. That was the lawyer’s gig; we had no idea.”

  Pepper leans her elbow on the sofa arm, props her head on her hand, and thinks about this little word we. Two innocuous letters, so much stronger than I. That’s the trouble with this family of his, isn’t it? You’re never dealing with just one of them. You take on one, you take them all. You stood no chance against a front like that.

  “Well, the whole affair wasn’t what I’d call gentlemanly.”

  “Nor would I. But we—”

  But he’s interrupted by the coffee, which is carried on a tray with a plate of gingersnaps. The owner doesn’t seem to recognize him, or maybe she’s just being polite. The hotel is family run, seeping at the seams with the spirit of southern kinship. She pours them both coffee from an old silver pot and directs them to the cream and sugar. When she’s gone, Pepper reaches for the coffee and selects a gingersnap, the largest one.