Along the Infinite Sea

by Beatriz Williams

  “May I come in?” she asks, and it seems he forgot that, too, the sound of her voice.

  Somehow, he steps back and opens the door, just wide enough.

  “Would you like some tea?” he asks.

  2.

  The next morning, it’s so much easier. He opens his eyes from a velvet sleep, and for a moment he thinks he’s in Monte Carlo, at the scorching end of August, and a tantalizing future still beckons outside his window. He can almost smell the lemon trees in the courtyard, and then he remembers it’s Annabelle’s skin. Her skin smells like lemons. What kind of miracle is that?

  The light is still gray and hushed through the shutters. Annabelle is deeply asleep. It seems to him that he’ll wake her if he stays in bed—wake her with the force of loving her—so he untangles her from his arms instead and slips downstairs to make coffee, the way she likes it.

  The teacups still sit on the kitchen table, half full, and the sight makes him smile. The way they talked awkwardly—How are you? Fine, fine. How do you like Cumberland Island? It is marvelous, except for the terrible heat in July—and took their tea in tiny nervous sips.

  The way Annabelle had crashed down her cup into the middle of another calcified sentence and said, Don’t look at me like that, and he had said, Like what? and she said, Like you want to kiss me.

  The way he had stared at her, hammering heart, thinking, God in heaven, what does she mean, can it be true, and then thinking, Of course it’s true, it’s Annabelle, Stefan, it’s your own fucking Annabelle walking in your front door three decades later, out of the clear blue sky, wanting you to break the ice and everything else, and you are just going to sit there with your cock in your hand while the clock ticks and the house groans and the minutes bleed irretrievably away, the dwindling minutes remaining to you both?

  The way she had risen from her chair like a princess and said, Unless you don’t want to kiss me, after all, and he said, But of course I want to kiss you, and she had given him a look both defiant and vulnerable and turned to climb the stairs, and he had thought how very like Annabelle this was, like no one else in the world.

  The way he had then run after her and hoisted her over his shoulder and taken her up the rest of the stairs before he could doubt himself. The way she had laughed and put her soft palms on his skin and kissed him, and somehow it had all worked perfectly, being inside Annabelle again, losing himself inside Annabelle, drenching himself in the purity of her heart, his skin inside her skin, her skin inside his, in a thoroughly imperfect way.

  The way it had worked again, even more perfectly imperfect, an hour later.

  And Annabelle was right, as always: the awkwardness dissolved at the first touch, poof, like magic. You know where you stand with a woman, when you have just made love to her after a long absence. She knows where she stands with you. You can go to sleep happy, listening to each other’s heartbeats, because you know her again and she knows you, because you are no longer strangers, and you will work everything out in the morning, over hot coffee and a good smoke.

  3.

  When he returns with the coffee, she’s awake, propped up against his pillow. Her breasts are heavier than before, darker at the tips, a woman’s breasts. Just looking at them makes his ribs hurt.

  She takes the coffee and sips. “So who’s the woman?”

  He’s busy lighting a cigarette, and nearly spits it out of his mouth. “What woman?”

  “The woman you were dancing with the other night. I saw you through the window.” She gives him a challenging look. “Does your heart beat for her, too?”

  He resumes lighting the cigarette, takes a good drag, and blows the smoke out slowly and with profound enjoyment. Then he crawls up the bed and starts kissing her breasts. “Yes, as a matter of fact. My heart beats for her, too. The two of you beauties, you are the great loves of my life.”

  She pushes his head away. “Bastard.”

  He’s laughing and kissing her. He’s so full of relief—that quicksilver in his chest last night, it turned out to be relief, of an elite and highly distilled grade—and so full of Annabelle. He takes the coffee from her hand and puts it on the bedside table. He sticks the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and grasps her two hands, so she will the hell stop hitting him with them. “That was Else,” he said. “Else visits me here.”

  As if her limbs have turned to butter. “Else?” she whispers.

  “Yes. Didn’t you get a good look, when you spied on the two of us through my window? She tracked me down a few years ago. I made her promise not to tell you.” He removes the cigarette and resumes kissing her. “Johann was still alive.”

  “I see.” She lies against his pillow without moving, accepting the kisses. “And when he died?”

  “I thought I would wait for you to come to me. I didn’t know if you wanted me, after everything. After so many years.”

  “Oh, Stefan. Don’t be stupid.” She moves finally, threading her hands in his hair.

  He stops kissing her then, just lies on her soft body with his lips in her neck, smelling her lemon smell, letting the shock settle in his bones, letting her skin become his skin. He is in bed with Annabelle, and it’s not a dream. He opened the door last night, and she was there, genuine hot cross Annabelle bun, warm and round in his arms.

  “I brought your cello,” she whispers.

  “My cello?”

  “The Amati you gave me. I played it everywhere for you. I played it in Carnegie Hall and the Boston Pops, I played it on every single recording I ever made. Did you hear any of them?”

  He wants to say Every one, but his lips won’t move.

  “So I thought I would bring it back to you. That was my excuse, that the instrument really belonged to you, and I was just playing it for you, all these years. That was how I worked up the courage to come here.”

  Holy shit, he is going to cry.

  “I mean, I couldn’t just walk through the front door and throw myself at you,” she adds, very reasonable, as if she hadn’t done just that in the kitchen last night, over two cups of anemic Lipton.

  So he starts to laugh instead, helpless gusts of laughter. He loses the cigarette in the pillows and has to go scrabbling for it, still laughing, shaking with goddamned unstoppable amusement, until at last he puts the cigarette in the ashtray and springs from the bed and opens up every single shutter over every single window, filling the room with a salmon-pink sunrise.

  She looks at him like he’s crazy. “What are you doing?”

  “I am admiring your breasts in the sunshine,” he says.

  “Oh.” She settles back in the pillows and spreads her arms. “If that’s all.”

  And that is one of the things he loves most about Annabelle, what has not changed about her in all these years: her joy. Like the first time he made love to her, on the cliffs at Antibes, the delight that seeped from her pores, the transparent love with which she drenched him, the wanton absence of any shame, even though she was a virgin who had been kissed only once. That was why he couldn’t resist her then, and he can’t resist her now. She turns his sorrow into joy.

  4.

  When he’s finished making love to her a third time—and it takes a while, make no mistake, he’s not the young man he was, not that she seems to mind the additional effort one bit—they lie boneless on the bed, drunk and sated as a pair of new lovers, surrounded by twenty-eight years of questions.

  He tells her about the war, and working for the French Resistance, the bullet in his chest that nearly brought him to a bad end. He shows her the scar. Thank God for penicillin, he says. He talks about wandering aimlessly through Europe after the war—the worst years, he says, because there was no purpose anymore, no friends left alive, nothing to do but despair over the six million lives he had failed to save—until he crashed into some sort of bottom (wasn’t that the phrase?) and moved to America. He says, I though
t I could at least be on the same continent as you, the same continent as our children. I could see what they were up to, what fine young people they were becoming. She says, in a breaking voice, You said our children, and he strokes her hair and says, Yes, I was their father and you are their mother, and you cannot possibly know how I left my heart on the floor of that barn for you to keep for me, how much my heart was in your hands.

  Then why did you do it? she says. Why did you leave us like that?

  Because I had no choice, my Annabelle. Because I had a profound debt to repay, a fucking world to save. Because he was the better man. Because he loved you so well.

  So she tells him about the early years, how they waited in Monte Carlo until the boys arrived from England, until Margaret reached them with the girls; how she and Johann and all the children sailed to America in the Isolde, how they left the Mercedes in a shed at her aunt’s house in Cape Cod, so no one would connect the Dommerich brood with the Nazi general who committed subversion and treason and then disappeared. How she couldn’t bear him at first, because he wasn’t Stefan, and then gradually the shared parenthood brought them together—he was such a good father, she had to love him for that alone—and the shared secrets, too. And then Henrik started nursery school, and she wanted another baby so badly, she would have slept with Stalin if she had to. So we finally went to bed together, she says, and I got pregnant with the twins two seconds later, let that be a lesson. He laughs and says it was no more than she deserved, sleeping with someone else, and then she goes quiet and he knows what she’s thinking.

  He says, I came close a few times, I admit. I came damned close.

  But you never?

  No.

  Ever?

  (He sighs.)

  Not even once, Annabelle, though I thought sometimes it would kill me, I was so lonely.

  (There is a long silence, laden with awe.)

  Why not?

  Because we had a covenant, remember? And because you were raising the children for me, all the way across the ocean, and I had nothing else to give you in return. I had nothing but that.

  The wind is picking up again. A shutter bangs against the side of the house, because he forgot to latch it, in his haste to see the sunshine on Annabelle’s skin.

  He says, And there is another reason.

  What was that?

  Because there was a time when this fidelity was the only virtue I had left. The only vow I hadn’t broken.

  (She lies quietly in his arms, until he thinks that maybe she’s gone to sleep.)

  Then:

  Do you know what I think?

  What do you think, Annabelle? (And isn’t that the best part of all? Just saying her name aloud.)

  I think you’re just like your son.

  5.

  They watch the sun sink from the shelter of the porch, curled up in the old rocking chair Stefan repaired himself, covered by a thick plaid horse blanket. There’s a cold snap coming. It’s maybe even going to freeze tonight, he can smell it in the air. A good night to share a bed with the woman you love.

  “Two more questions,” he whispers in her hair.

  “What’s that?”

  “The first one. How did you find me?”

  She laughs. “It took months. I hired an investigator. I figured you would have a new name of some kind. I gave him a list of possibilities. And a couple of weeks ago he sent me an article about Cumberland Island, and a man named Stefan Himmelfarb who was caring for the wild horses who were injured or sick, and I knew it had to be you. I read that article and I could feel you behind the ink. But when I arrived at the hotel in Saint Mary’s, I lost my nerve.”

  “You, Annabelle?”

  “Yes, me. I’m not the nubile young maiden I once was, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “This is nonsense. You are still the most beautiful woman I have ever met, despite the immense crookedness of your toes.”

  She snorts her very practical American disbelief. “And besides, you had three decades to fall out of love with me and find some other woman to warm your heart.”

  “Don’t be stupid.” He tucks the blanket around her shoulder.

  “Well, that’s my answer, like it or not. So what’s your second question?”

  “In fact, since you ask, I have a great many questions, and we will have to spend long weeks answering them all. This may take until the new year at least. But the most important question is this.”

  He pauses, for effect. The sun drops another millimeter, just touching the tips of the marsh grass, illuminating the backs of the horses as they saunter habitually across the meadow to the lean-to he built with his own hands, and the hay he has just laid out for them, with Annabelle’s help.

  And wasn’t that almost as good as saying her name aloud? Sharing the evening chores, side by side, in the manner of a couple married for years. Maybe she will stay until the new year. Maybe she will stay all winter, and they will share this routine every night. He hardly dares to think about the spring. There is such a thing as too much joy, and the perils of tempting fate.

  “Well?” she says.

  He turns her face toward him and fixes her sternly.

  “What in the hell did the two of you do with my yacht?”

  Historical Note

  A few years ago, I came across a short article in the newspaper, concerning a vintage automobile—a rare 1936 Mercedes 540K Special Roadster—that had been discovered in a shed at an inn in Greenwich, Connecticut, where I then lived. According to the article, a German baroness had driven this extraordinary car around Europe in the years before the Second World War, having various affairs (including one with a Jewish Englishman) and generally making herself unpopular with the ruling party in Germany. Eventually, she fled to America with her Mercedes, and at the time of the car’s rediscovery in 1989, it hadn’t been touched in two decades. A cigarette stub still rested in the ashtray, stained with lipstick, and a single leather glove inhabited the glove compartment. Fully restored, the car sold at auction in 2012 for nearly twelve million dollars. I couldn’t resist.

  But I’m a writer of novels, not biographies, so I wanted to make up a story of my own and weave it into the overall narrative of my fictional Schuyler family, which now stretches over several books. I also felt I had something more to say about the journey—physical and moral—undertaken by the people of Europe between the two world wars, and the discovery of a rare 1936 Mercedes in a Cape Cod shed seemed like the perfect springboard into this world.

  Most of the characters in this book—and all of the principal ones—never existed in real life, no matter how vibrantly they live in my imagination. There was no Johann von Kleist in the German high command, and no Jewish nemesis by the name of Stefan Silverman. While the Himmelfarbs did not exist, nor did they die on the night of 9–10 November 1938, millions of German Jews were not so lucky. Kristallnacht saw the destruction of a thousand synagogues and seven thousand businesses; over thirty thousand were sent to camps like that at Dachau, and the number of dead and injured will never be known exactly. Despite the horror expressed in the foreign press in the days following the pogrom, the world—“weary of everything”—responded more or less as Stefan imagined it would. Only the quiet heroism of individual Germans emerged to redeem humanity that night.

  As a writer of historical fiction, however, I try to keep the history as my background, and my characters at the center of the stage. This novel isn’t intended as a textbook on Nazi Germany and the politics of prewar Europe; for those interested in learning more about this crucial year in Hitler’s consolidation of power, I highly recommend Giles MacDonogh’s engaging and exhaustive 1938: Hitler’s Gamble, to which I referred again and again.

  As for the identity of the father of Pepper’s baby, I have no comment.

  Acknowledgments

  The book you hold in your hands is not t
he original version of Along the Infinite Sea. Writing swiftly on a tight deadline, I tried to open the file one evening—the night before April Fool’s Day, ahem—and had no luck. Neither did the assembled geniuses at the Apple Store. I sent the file to Putnam, where it was referred to the ominously titled Forensics Department. The cadaver could not be dissected, and neither could any of the copies I had saved earlier.

  So I started over. I rewrote those first 250 pages—the writers among you will now proceed to throw up—and the story took an entirely different turn. Go figure. I could not, however, have decided exactly how the love triangle of Stefan, Johann, and Annabelle would play out without the emergency help of my immensely talented friend Karen White, who took my phone call and walked me through my very complicated plot until I realized what I had to do. In her own wonderful novels, Karen is an expert at moments of emotional impact, and I might not have had the courage for that final resolution on the German border without her clear vision and her assurance. I hope she enjoys reading the result.

  Beyond Karen and her creative assistance, I have many more wonderful people to thank for their help in putting the finished book into your hands. Alexandra Machinist, my irreplaceable literary agent, has held my hand and walked me through a fireworks year, and I am deeply grateful to her and to her hardworking colleagues at ICM for all their support. As for the talented and enthusiastic team at Putnam—my wonderful editor, Laura Perciasepe (whose name alone gives me joy); my publicist, Katie McKee; my whiz-girl marketing mavens, Lydia Hirt and Mary Stone; the ridiculously talented art department that delivers me cover after stunning cover; and a host of other superb professionals—I simply can’t say enough. You have taken me on a marvelous journey, and I can only hope it’s been as much fun for you as it’s been for me.

  I have so many people to thank in the book world—writers, bloggers, booksellers, readers—I can’t even begin to list them here, but you know who you are. Your bookish enthusiasm keeps me writing, even on those days when I’m in a muddle, and I thank you with all my heart for your kind words, your emails and tweets and Facebook posts, and your energetic company when we meet at book events.