Along the Infinite Sea (33 page)

He smiles down at Susan. “That's sweet of you, kid, but Pepper's the one who knows the most about what's going on.”

“Pepper's going?”

“I'm going?” Pepper says.

Florian turns to her, eyebrows raised. “Aren't you?”

“No, no, no.” She gestures to her belly. “Pregnant lady. A cripple! I can't handle another all-night car ride. Take Susan instead. I'm sure she can see to your needs much better than I can.”

“I don't know about that,” Susan says modestly.

“Sure you can, honey. He seems like a simple enough man to me.”

“Pepper,” says Florian, “can we step outside for a moment?”

5.

They stop under the shade of a lemon tree, and Pepper turns to face Florian, crutches braced under her arms.

“Before you say a word, just consider for a moment. You can't possibly be thinking of keeping poor Sue-Sue at home while you whisk another woman off in your T-Bird.”

The astounded look again. “But there's nothing going on with the two of us. It's strictly platonic.”

“My God. Do you know nothing about women at all, Dommerich?”

“I know a lot about women.”

“So you say. But don't you know that dear Susan will spend the next week imagining us pulling off the road every five miles to have screaming fog-up-the-windows sex in the backseat?”

Florian's gaze drops down to her belly and back up again. “You're kidding, right?”

“My goodness. How flattering.”

“I'm not saying you're not attractive. Christ. I think I already made that clear. But—well, for one thing, the logistics—”

“Where there's a will there's a way.”

A slow shade of pink rises up Florian's neck and over his cheeks.

“Not that I've actually tried it,” Pepper admits. “But I do have an imagination.”

“Well, that's not the point. It's none of Susan's business who I'm sleeping with or not sleeping with.”

“Really? Because I get the feeling she wants it to be her business. And don't even try to tell me you're not aware of that little fact.”

He had the grace to look embarrassed. “Maybe so. But she also knows me better than that.”

“Does she?”

“Yes. I may be a lawyer, but I'm not a cad. Anyway, I've got other things on my mind. You're coming along because you're familiar with the car Mama's driving, you're familiar with her state of mind and all that, and you're just—well, you're just a little more—I don't know. Resourceful.”

“I think you underestimate Miss Willoughby.”

“She's not that kind of girl, that's all.”

Pepper curls her fingers around the handles of the crutches. “Oh? And what kind of girl is that, hmm?”

Florian holds up his hands. “I'm not going to let myself fall in that trap again, believe me. You're just two different women. Not bad or good. Just different. And if I need someone back me up while I track down my mother somewhere on the Georgia coast, someone I can count on, I want
your
type of woman.”

“And if you're going to get married and have pretty babies, you want her type?”

“What are you talking about? Who's getting married?”

Pepper puts her hand on Florian's arm, just above the elbow. A lemon branch, heavy with fruit, brushes her shoulder. “Look. Take my advice. Bring Susan with you, okay? She's stronger than you think. Besides, this way you really
can
pull off the road and have sex with her, if you feel the itch.”

“Actually, the thought didn't cross my mind.”

“Now it will.”

6.

From the grateful look on Susan's face, Pepper knows she did a Good Thing. She hopes God is taking note, assuming He hasn't given up on her long ago.

Susan hurries home to pack a few things (she says). Her family's house is about a quarter-mile down the road. That's how they met, Florian says, as they watch her car pull away in a puff of dust. They played in the ocean together as kids. The girl next door, says Pepper. Just like the movies.

She heads back to her room to rest, tosses her crutches in the corner, lies back on her neat bed, and watches the ceiling fan rotate above her. The baby, awakened by the stillness, begins to squirm inside her. You did a Good Thing, she tells herself, though she doesn't feel particularly good. She feels as if a hollow has opened up in her chest, occupying a space she didn't know existed. It interferes with the businesslike beat of her heart.

A few minutes later, there's a knock on the door. “It's me,” says Florian, through the crack.

“Haven't you left yet?”

“Are you decent?”

“I'm never decent, or so they tell me.”

He opens the door. Pepper sits up.

“Are you sure you won't come?” he says, filling the doorway, framed by the growing blue twilight.

She shakes her head. “Third wheel.”

“You wouldn't be a third wheel. Anyway, what are you going to do? I can't let you stay here alone.”

“I won't steal anything, I promise. Throw any wild parties and drink up your liquor.”

“That's not what I meant.” He sits down carefully at the end of the bed, sinking the mattress, and stares down at his knitted hands. “You should go home to your folks.”

“Wouldn't that be a delightful Thanksgiving surprise! Pepper waddles in on her crutches, looking unnervingly like the turkey on the table. No, I'll wait just a bit longer. Like they used to do it, you know. Sending the shameful daughter off to Switzerland for a six-month walking holiday with a trusted female relative.”

“Except you don't have one of those around here.”

She snaps her fingers. “Oh, damn. Well, modern times.”

“This is stupid,” he says. “You should be with your family.”

“My family's not the same as yours, darling. We're better off without each other, in times of trial. Otherwise the arsenic bottle gets uncorked, and the police have to get involved.”

“Pepper,” he says, shaking his head.

“Off you go, now. I'll be all right. I have Clara to run for the doctor, if anything goes horribly wrong.” She reaches over and pushes his shoulder, because she can't resist, just once.

Florian lifts his large hand and places it over hers. “I'll telephone and let you know what we find out.”

“Do that thing.”

She slides her hand away. He climbs to his feet and scowls down at her. His waist is right at the level of her eyes: his trim stomach, his brown leather belt pinning the dungarees in place.

“Take care of that foot, all right? Use your crutches.”

“Would I never?”

And then his hand is cupping her chin, and she has to look down at his blurry wrist, because the two of them combined—his gaze and his touch—create way too much firepower for the hollow in her chest to contain.

“Off you go,” she says again, and the hand falls away.

He makes it to the door and stops. “Oh, hold on. This is for you.”

She looks up. He's holding out a small envelope between his fingers.

“What's that?”

“Letter for you. Clara sent it along.”

When she doesn't get up, when she doesn't even move, eyes frozen on the white rectangle in Florian's paw, heart frozen inside the black hollow, Florian shrugs and sets the envelope down on the lamp table near the door.

7.

Pepper's heart starts again, at a brisk hand gallop. But she's not the kind of girl who avoids bad news, is she? She's not the kind of girl who sits and stares for an hour at the Ominous Object, before she finally gathers up the strength to pick it up with trembling fingers.

Not Pepper.

She doesn't bother with the crutches. She hops ungracefully across the rug and snatches up the envelope. The light has faded fast, the way it does in November. She switches on the lamp and rips open the flap.

The handwriting. How could you possibly rage at the familiarity of someone's messy black handwriting? But she does. She wants to rip it to pieces. She reads it instead.

We need to talk. Forget the lawyers. I'm waiting on an airplane at the Melbourne Municipal Airport. Let's work this out together
.

It was unsigned. Of course.

Lawyers. What a hoot. If Captain Seersucker has a law degree, she's Marie Antoinette.

Pepper rips the note to pieces, and when she's done, and her heart is once more cold in her breast, shooting frozen blood all over the place, she finds her toothbrush and a clean dress and a change of underwear. She throws them in a linen laundry bag, tucks her pocketbook over her shoulders, grabs her crutches, and hobbles out the door of the guest cottage, through Annabelle's soft-scented courtyard and toward the driveway.

8.

They haven't left yet. Florian is putting Susan's bag in the trunk of the Thunderbird. Susan's in the passenger seat, touching up her lipstick.

“I've changed my mind!” Pepper says, tossing the laundry bag to Florian.

He grins, catches it handily, and closes the lid of the
trunk.

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

S
UN
T
ZU

GERMANY
•
1938

1.

In the pasture nearest the tennis court, Johann was teaching Florian how to ride a pony, using a longe line and an enormous amount of patience. I sat on a picnic cloth, with Frieda and Alice and my new baby sister, and watched them circle under the hot sun. Frieda was giving little Margot her bottle. Above the waving grass, I could hear Johann's bass voice, giving out instructions in German, though I couldn't make out the words.

“Is it perfectly safe, do you think?” said Alice.

“The younger the better, Johann says.”

“Oh, yes,” Frieda said. “We all started when we were two. I think Frederick is more horse than boy, sometimes.”

“He looks as if he's enjoying it, at any rate.” Alice drew her knees up under her chin. She wasn't wearing a hat, and her blond hair, streaked by the persistent sunshine, was gathered into a chignon. She wore a dress of white eyelet and looked like a daisy. When Margot began to fuss, she turned her head and stretched out her long arm to tickle her
daughter's chin. “What's the matter, darling? Are you keen to be off riding horses, too?”

Frieda laughed and put the baby to her shoulder. “She just needs to burp, I think.”

Alice lay back on the cloth. “You're far better at this than I am, aren't you? Perhaps I should let you adopt her.”

“I like babies, that's all,” Frieda said.

I gazed across the hot meadow grass. Florian looked so grown-up in his riding clothes and leather boots. I could tell by the set of his shoulders that he was concentrating fiercely on Johann's words. He was always desperate to please his father.

His father.

And there it was, just like that: the knot of pain in my chest, which had become smaller and appeared less frequently as the months passed, but which never quite disappeared. I imagined it was a permanent condition, a chronic illness to be managed in the privacy of my own brain. It helped, perhaps, that I hadn't heard a single word from Stefan himself since we parted on that hot July day a year ago. He had walked out of the Paris Ritz and vanished. Not even Charles knew where he was, or maybe he wasn't telling me. A clean break, like an amputation. Eventually, you realized you could survive without all your limbs, that you could function and even thrive, because human beings were designed to take a battering. And though you weren't whole, you at least had a son. And though it sometimes seemed as if your heart had stopped beating, you at least knew that somewhere in the world, another heart was beating for you.

Margot burped daintily, and I shifted my gaze to my baby sister and marveled at the difference between her and Florian. Her delicate lips, her perfect tiny fingers. If I leaned in to smell her hair, I knew she would be puppy-sweet. How was it possible that my sturdy son, rising and falling in his stirrups as the pony moved to a trot, had been nursing at my breast only a year and a half ago? My baby was gone forever. I wouldn't get him back. I had this new Florian, this walking, talking,
pony-riding Florian, a swaggering miniature image of the man who had created him inside me. But my baby was gone.

“Are you all right, Mother?” asked Frieda. “You look a little ill.”

I rose to my feet and shook the crumbs from my dress. “I'm fine, darling. I think I'll just take a walk.”

2.

We sat down to lunch an hour or so later. The sunshine poured through the long French doors, and as I took my seat at the end of the table and picked up a glass of water, the housekeeper came up behind me and told me that a woman had been here to see me.

“Who?” I asked in surprise. I had no friends here in Germany, only a few neighboring acquaintances who didn't approve of me at all.

“She did not leave her name, Frau von Kleist, but she gave me this note for you and explained that it was urgent.”

Alice and my father were already in place, drinking their wine and talking animatedly about tennis. The smoke from their cigarettes drifted to the ceiling. The boys scraped back their chairs. Johann looked expectantly across the table, which was fragrant with a profusion of red roses I had cut just that morning

I tucked the note under my plate. “Thank you, Hilda.”

3.

For a house so large, Schloss Kleist offered little privacy. Actually, it wasn't the house itself, it was the inhabitants. You could not be called to the telephone without everyone wanting innocently to know who had called; you could not play tennis without at least a pair of spectators. It was easier at night, when I could retreat to my cozy rooms at the end of the east wing without some request bouncing my way every four
minutes. During the day, I could achieve a quiet moment only in the lavatory, which is exactly where I opened the note Hilda had delivered to me at lunch.

It was written on a leaf of cheap notepaper, the kind you might pick up in a hotel or a train station. The words were English and neatly printed, as if the writer wanted to be sure I could read them properly.

I need your help. Wilhelmine. 23 Marktstrasse

I folded the paper and put it back into my pocket. Just before I opened the door, I remembered to flush the toilet and run the faucet, so I could pretend to wash my trembling hands.

4.

I found Johann upstairs in our bedroom, changing into his tennis clothes.

“Isn't it a little hot for tennis?” I said.

“Your father made me a challenge. One does not turn down a challenge from the father-in-law.” He reached for his shirt. His chest was pink and enormous, like a side of beef. “Will you come to watch?”

“Thank you, no. I thought I might motor into the village for a bit of shopping,” I said.

“Shopping?” He stopped and lifted his eyebrows. “But you do not like to shop.”

“I need to order a hat for the festival.”

“Have the milliner come to us. It is what Frieda would always do.”

“I'm not Frieda, remember?”

He set the shirt aside and smiled. “No. You are my beautiful Annabelle. I almost die to look at you.”

“Johann, stop.”

“Come here, beautiful Annabelle.” He snared me around the waist and slipped his hand inside the opening of my blouse.

“Johann! What's gotten into you?”

He kissed me, and when he lifted his face away, his eyes were soft. “The sunshine, I think. It is so good to have the sunshine again.”

5.

I waited until the tennis balls had actually launched into the air before I slipped into the garage and started up the Mercedes.

The village was a few miles away, down a meandering road that glared white in the sun. I had put the top down, and the draft pulled at my hat, smelling of ripe hops and sunshine. I concentrated on keeping the car steady, on breathing just the right amount of oxygen into my lungs: not too much, not too little.

Marktstrasse was almost deserted; everyone had done her shopping early and gone home to enjoy the summer afternoon. I pulled up in front of number 23—a small hotel I'd never noticed before—and a slim figure stepped out of the shadow of the eaves.

“Frau von Kleist?” she said.

She was pretty, I thought, in a cold wash of jealousy. She stood taller than I did, and her curling dark hair bobbed about her ears. She looked more modern than I had imagined. She wore no makeup, except for a bit of lipstick, and she didn't need to. Her silk blouse and wide trousers were well made and a little mannish, almost like a movie star's, suiting her the way Alice's deep V-necked dresses suited Alice. I could well imagine Wilhelmine as an elegant new bride in a hotel bed, making love to Stefan, making a daughter with Stefan.

“Wilhelmine,” I said. “I'm sorry, I don't know your last name.”

“It's Himmelfarb,” she said in perfect English. “May I get in?”

“Of course.”

She got in the passenger side and shut the door. “Let's drive somewhere, if you don't mind. I have already taken enough risk.”

I released the clutch and we set off down Marktstrasse in a little spurt of white gravel. She leaned her elbow on the door and turned her head to watch me, as if she was waiting for me to start the conversation.

So I did. “It's Stefan, isn't it? Something's happened to Stefan.”

She went on regarding me, without speaking.

“Tell me, please. At least tell me he's alive, for God's sake.”

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I was just trying to see if you were sincere.”

“What the hell does that mean? For God's sake, tell me what's happened!”

“He's alive,” she said, and my shoulders slumped. The car swerved to the edge of the road, and Wilhelmine gripped the edge of the doorframe and pressed her right foot into the floorboards. When I had righted the car, she said, “All right. So you don't know anything about it.”

“I haven't heard from Stefan in a year. Not since he walked out of the Paris Ritz last July.”

“Ah. Then I suppose you don't know he was taken by a pair of Gestapo agents as soon as he turned the corner into the rue Cambon to fetch his automobile, and he has been held like a dog in the Dachau camp ever since.”

I stuffed my hand into my mouth and swerved to the side of the road—this time deliberately—slamming the brake with my foot, until the Mercedes bumped to a stop alongside a weathered fence. The engine coughed and died. I opened the door just in time to vomit into the grass.

6.

“It was a month or two before we realized he was actually missing,” Wilhelmine said, “and it was several more months before we found out
for certain where they had taken him. He is a very special prisoner, you know. They would not let me see him. I managed at last to get a message to him, and he sent a reply that he was fine, but I could hardly recognize the writing.”

“Oh, God,” I said, holding my fist to my mouth. I thought of my tranquil autumn and winter, settling Frieda into her school, resuming my cello studies, a recital Johann arranged at a music conservatory that was very well received. He said he was proud of me. Christmas in Paris, surrounded by my new family. A pile of decadent presents under the tree, including a breathtaking necklace of black pearls from Johann, which he fastened around my neck himself. Plenty of food and wine, plenty of music and warm fires. At night, Johann would hold me close to his chest, because a Paris apartment, however grand, is always drafty in winter; and as I drifted to sleep, safe and warm, I would say
Good night, Stefan
in my head, and wonder if he were keeping some woman warm in his own arms while she drifted to sleep.

Sometimes, when the bitterness ebbed in my heart, I even wished he were. I wished he did have a woman in his arms, because no one should lie alone in the middle of winter.

“That was in May,” said Wilhelmine. “The officials refused to tell us any more, only that he was being held indefinitely for crimes against the state. So I demanded to know what crimes, and after many weeks of letters and telephone calls, they at last sent me this.” She handed me a piece of paper, folded twice into a square.

I stared at the paper between my fingers. “You said
us
. Whom do you mean?”

“His family, of course. His parents cannot sleep for worry.”

“Of course.”

“I have not told my daughter. She loves him so much. She draws pictures of him and hangs them in her room.”

The tiny indentations of the typewriter were like Braille under my fingertips. The paper was crisp and thin and terribly official. I unfolded the page: not in the easy flips by which you opened the morning news,
but by brute force, the individual grasping of each leaf, requiring dogged concentration.

“As you see,” said Wilhelmine—I did not see, actually; I could not comprehend the German script before me—“this is an arrest order for one Stefan Silverman, for the crimes of murder and treason and various other infractions, according to evidence and sworn statements.”

“Murder,” I said. “Did he really commit murder?”

“Does it matter?”

“No.” My back rested against a fence post. Someone was mowing a field nearby; the drone of the engine floated along the motionless summer air. If I closed my eyes, I could smell the wholesome brown scent of newly cut hay. I said, “How did you know about me?”

Wilhelmine's arms were folded across her silk chest. Her breasts were small and lean, like the rest of her. I thought she wasn't wearing a brassiere. She was practical and stylish all at once; she was indomitable. “Do you have a cigarette? I left mine in my motorcar.”

I said I didn't.

She crossed one leg over the other. “I knew he had a mistress in Paris, a married woman, and he had gone to see her during the summer. So in May, after I got this arrest paper at last, I went to France. I went first to the Ritz, because he always saw his women there; it was such a great pleasure to him, to screw some beautiful woman in the bed of the Imperial Suite.” She paused. “I'm sorry, that was rather cruel, wasn't it? I have always said I would not be bitter. I did love him, you know. I still admire him very much. It is impossible not to admire such a man as that. He has such qualities.” She made a circle in the dust with the toe of her elegant shoe.

“Please go on,” I said.

“So I went to the Ritz, and at first Alfonse would not tell me anything, though I could see perfectly well that he knew all about you. I am old hands with Alfonse, you see. He prizes discretion above everything. I had gone there to murder my husband a few years ago, and Alfonse stood very firm, even though I was Stefan's lawful wife. He
would not let me disturb the bastard.” She laughed. “But this time I told him it was a matter of life and death, that their precious client had been arrested and thrown in a prison when he walked out of the hotel last July, and that he was now in great danger. So Alfonse gave me the note you left for Stefan.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and contemplated this. “But I only signed it
Annabelle
. There was no surname.”