Along the Infinite Sea (4 page)

“Isn't it marvelous?” says Mrs. Dommerich.

“It's beautiful.”

Mrs. Dommerich finds her pocketbook and takes out a cigarette. “We can share,” she says.

“I've already reached my limit.”

“If we share, it doesn't count. Halves don't count.”

Pepper takes the cigarette from her fingers and examines it.

Mrs. Dommerich settles back and stares through the windshield. “Do you know what I love most about the ocean? The way the water's all connected. The bits and pieces have different names, but really it's all one vast body of salt water, all the way around the earth. It's as if we're touching Europe, or Africa, or the Antarctic. If you close your eyes, you can feel it, like it's right there.”

Pepper hands back the cigarette. “That's true. But I don't like to close my eyes.”

“You've never made an act of faith?”

“No. I like to rely on myself.”

“So I see. But you know, sometimes it's not such a bad thing. An act of faith.”

Pepper snatches the cigarette and takes a drag. She blows the smoke back out into the night and says, “So what's your game?”

“My game?”

“Why are you here? Obviously you know a thing or two about me. Did
he
send you?”

“He?”

“You know who.”

“Oh. The father of your baby, you mean.”

“You tell me.”

Mrs. Dommerich lifts her hands to the steering wheel and taps her fingers against the lacquer. “No. Nobody sent me.”

Pepper tips the ash into the sand and hands back the cigarette.

“Do you believe me?” Mrs. Dommerich asks.

“I don't believe in anything, Mrs. Dommerich. Just myself. And my sisters, too, I guess, but they have their own problems. They don't need mine on top of it all.”

Mrs. Dommerich spreads out her hands to examine her palms. “Then let me help instead.”

Pepper laughs. “Oh, that's a good one. Very kind of you.”

“I mean it. Why not?”

“Why not? Because you don't even know me.”

“There's no law against helping strangers.”

“Well, I certainly don't know a damned thing about you, except that you're rich and your husband died last year, and you have children and love the ocean. And you drove this car across Germany thirty years ago—”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Twenty-eight. And even if that's all true, it's not much to go on.”

“Isn't it? Marriages have been made on less knowledge. Happy ones.”

That's an odd thing to say, Pepper thinks, and she hears the words echoing:
an act of faith.
Well, that explains it. Maybe Mrs. Dommerich is one of those sweet little fools who thinks the world is a pretty place to live, filled with nice people who love you, where everything turns out all right if you just smile and tap your heels together three times.

Or maybe it's all an act.

A little gust of salt wind comes off the ocean, and Pepper snuggles deeper into her cardigan. Mrs. Dommerich finishes the cigarette and smashes it out carefully into the ashtray, next to Pepper's stub from the
ride up. She reaches into the glove compartment and draws out a small thermos container. “Coffee?” she asks, unscrewing the cap.

“Where did you get coffee?”

“I had Jean-Louis fill it up for me before we left.”

Pepper takes the small plastic cup. The coffee is strong and still hot. They sit quietly, sipping and gazing, sharing the smell of the wide Atlantic. The ocean heaves and rushes before them, unseen except for the long white crests of the rollers, picked out by the moon.

Mrs. Dommerich asks: “If I were to guess who the father is, would I be right?”

“Probably.”

She nods. “I see.”

Pepper laughs again. “Isn't it hilarious? Who'd have thought a girl like me could be so stupid? It isn't as if I didn't have my eyes open. I mean, I knew all the rumors, I knew I might just be playing with a live grenade.”

“But you couldn't resist, could you?”

“The oldest story in the book.”

The baby stirs beneath Pepper's heart, stretching out a long limb to test the strength of her abdomen. She puts her hand over the movement, a gesture of pregnancy that used to annoy her, when it was someone else's baby.

Mrs. Dommerich speaks softly. “Because he was irresistible, wasn't he? He made you think there was no other woman in the world, that this thing you shared was more sacred than law.”

“Something like that.”

Mrs. Dommerich pours out the dregs of her coffee and wipes out the cup with a handkerchief. “I'm serious, you know. It's the real reason I wanted to speak to you. To help you, if I can.”

“You don't say.”

Mrs. Dommerich pauses. “You know, there are all kinds of heroes in the world, Miss Schuyler, though I know you don't believe in that, either. And you're a fine girl, underneath all that cynical bluster of
yours, and if this man wasn't what you hoped, I assure you there will be someone else who is.”

Pepper looks out at the ocean and thinks about how wrong she is. There will never be someone else; how could there be? There will be men, of course. Pepper's no saint. But there won't be someone else. The thing about Pepper, she never makes the same mistake twice.

She folds her arms atop her belly and says, “Don't hold your breath.”

Mrs. Dommerich laughs and gets out of the car. She stretches her arms up to the night sky, and the moon catches the glint in her wedding ring. “What a beautiful night, isn't it? Not too cool, after all. I can't bear the summers here, but it's just the thing to cheer me up in November.”

“What's wrong with November?”

Mrs. Dommerich doesn't answer. She goes around the front of the car and settles herself on the hood, tucking up her knees under her chin. After a moment, Pepper joins her, except that Pepper's belly sticks out too far for such a gamine little pose, so she removes her sandals, stretches her feet into the sand, and leans against the familiar warm hood instead.

“Are we just going to sit here forever?” Pepper asks.

Mrs. Dommerich wraps her arms around her legs and doesn't speak. Pepper wants to tap her head like an eggshell, to see what comes out. What's her story? Why the hell is she bothering with Pepper? Women don't usually bother with Pepper, and she doesn't blame them. Look what happens when you do. Pepper fertilizes her womb with your husband.

“Well?” Pepper says at last, because she's not the kind of girl who waits for you to pull yourself together. “What are you thinking about?”

Mrs. Dommerich starts, as if she's forgotten Pepper is there at all. “Oh, I'm sorry. Ancient history, really. Have you ever been to the Paris Ritz?”

Pepper toes the sand. “Once. We went to Europe one summer, when I was in college.”

“Well, I was there in the summer of 1937, when the Ritz was the
center of the universe. Everybody was there.” She stands up and dusts off her dress. “Anyway. Come along, my dear.”

“Wait a second. What happened at the Ritz?”

“Like I said, it's ancient history. Water under the bridge.”

“You were the one who brought it up.”

Mrs. Dommerich folds her arms and stares at the ocean. Pepper's toe describes a square in the sand and tops it off with a triangular roof. She tries to recall the Ritz, but the grand hotels of Europe had all looked alike after a while. Wasn't that a shame? All that effort and expense, and in a week or two they all blurred together.

Still, she remembers a bit. She remembers glamour and a glorious long bar, a place where Pepper could do business. What kind of business had sweet, elegant Mrs. Dommerich done there?

Just as Pepper gives up, just as she reaches downward to thread her sandals back over her toes, Mrs. Dommerich turns away from the ocean, and you'd think the moon had stuck in her eyes, they're so bright.

“There was this party there,” she says. “A going-away party at the Ritz for an American who was moving back to New York. It was the kind of night you never forget.”

ANTIBES
•
1935

1.

But long before the Ritz, there was the Côte d'Azur.

My father had used the last of Mummy's money to lease his usual villa for the summer, perched on a picturesque cliff between Antibes and Cannes, and such was the lingering glamor of his face and his title that everybody came. There were rich American artists and poor English aristocrats; there was exiled Italian royalty and ambitious French bourgeoisie. To his credit, my father didn't discriminate. He welcomed them all. He gave them crumbling rooms and moderately fresh linens, cheap food and good wine, and they kept on coming in their stylish waves, smoking cigarettes and getting drunk and sleeping with one another. Someone regularly had to be saved from drowning.

Altogether it was a fascinating summer for a young lady just out of a strict convent school in the grimmest possible northwest corner of Brittany. The charcoal lash of Biscay storms had been replaced by the azure sway of the Mediterranean; the ascetic nuns had been replaced by decadent Austrian dukes. And there was my brother, Charles. I adored
Charles. He was four years older and terribly dashing, and for a time, when I was young, I actually thought I would never, ever get married because nobody could be as handsome as my brother, because all other men fell short.

He invited his own guests, my brother, and a few of them were here tonight. In the way of older brothers, he didn't quite worship me the way I worshipped him. I might have been a pet lamb, straying in my woolly innocence through his fields, to be shooed gently away in case of wolves. They held their own court (literally: they gathered in the tennis courts at half past eleven in the morning for hot black coffee and muscular Turkish cigarettes) and swam in their own corner of the beach, down the treacherous cliff path: naked, of course. There were no women. Charles's retreat was run along strictly fraternal lines. If anyone fancied sex, he came back to the house and stalked one or another of my father's crimson-lipped professional beauties, so I learned to stay away from the so-called library and the terrace (favored hunting grounds) between the hours of two o'clock in the afternoon and midnight, though I observed their comings and goings the way other girls read gossip magazines.

Which is all a rather long way of explaining why I happened to be lying on the top of the garden wall, gazing quietly toward the lanterns and the female bodies in their shimmering dresses, the crisp drunk black-and-white gentlemen, on the moonless evening they brought the injured Jew to the house.

At half past ten, shortly before the Jew's arrival, I became aware of an immense heat taking shape in the air nearby. I waited for this body to carry on into the garden, or the scrubby sea lawn sloping toward the cliffs, but instead it lingered quietly, smelling of liquor and cigarettes. Without turning my head, I said, in English, “I'm sorry. Am I in your way?”

“I beg your pardon. I did not wish to disturb you.” The English came without hesitation, a fluid intermingling of High German and British public schools, delivered in a thick bass voice.

I told him, without turning my head, that he hadn't. I knew how to kick away these unwanted advances from my father's accidental strays. (The nuns, remember.)

“Very good,” he said, but he didn't leave.

He occupied a massive hole in the darkness behind me, and that—combined with the massive voice, the hint of dialect—suggested that this man was Herr von Kleist, an army general and Junker baron who had arrived three days ago in a magnificent black Mercedes Roadster with a single steamer trunk and no female companion. How he knew my father, I couldn't say; not that prior acquaintance with the host was any requirement for staying at the Villa Vanilla. (That was my name for the house, in reference to the sandy-pale stone with which it was built.) I had spoken to him a few times, in the evenings before dinner. He always sat alone, holding a single small glass of liquor.

I rose to a sitting position and swung my feet down from the wall. “I'll leave you to yourself, then,” I said, and I prepared to jump down.

“No, please.” He waved his hand. “Do not stir yourself.”

“I was about to leave anyway.”

“No, you mistake me. I only came to see if you were well. I saw you steal out here and lie on the garden wall.” He gestured again. “I hope you are not unwell.”

“I'm quite well, thank you.”

“Then why are you here, alone?”

“Because I like to be alone.”

He nodded. “Yes, of course. This is what I thought about you, when you were playing your cello for us the other night.”

He was dressed in a precise white jacket and tie, making him seem even larger than he did by day, and unlike the other guests he had no cigarette with him, no glass of some cocktail or another to occupy his hands, though I smelled both in the air surrounding him. The moon was new, and I couldn't see his face, just the giant outline of him, the smudge of shadow against the night. But I detected a slight nervousness, a particle of anxiety lying between me and the sea. I'd seen many
things at the Villa Vanilla, but I hadn't seen nervousness, and it made me curious.

“Really? Why did you think that?”

“Because—” He stopped and switched to French. “Because you are different from the others here. You are too young and new. You shouldn't be here.”

“None of us should be here, really. It is a great scandal, isn't it?”

“But you particularly. Watching this.” Another gesture, this time at the terrace on the other side of the wall, and the shimmering figures inside it.

“Oh, I'm used to that.”

“I'm very sorry to hear that.”

“Why should you be sorry? You're a part of it, aren't you? You came here willingly, unlike me, who simply lives here and can't help it. I expect you know what goes on, and why. I expect you're here for your share.”

He hesitated. There was a flash of light from the house, or perhaps the driveway, and it lit the top of his head for an instant. He had an almost Scandinavian cast to him, this baron, so large and fair. (I pictured a Viking longboat invading some corner of Prussia, generations ago.) His hair was short and bristling and the palest possible shade of blond; his eyes were the color of Arctic sea ice. I thought he was about forty, as old as the world. “May I sit down?” he asked politely.

“Of course.”

I thought he would take the bench, but instead he placed his hands on the wall, about five feet down from me, and hoisted his big body atop as easily as if he were mounting a horse.

“How athletic of you,” I said.

“Yes. I believe firmly in the importance of physical fitness.”

“Of course you do. Did you have something important to tell me?”

He stared toward Africa. “No.”

Someone laughed on the terrace behind us, a high and curdling giggle cut short by the delicate smash of crystal. Neither of us moved.

Herr von Kleist sat still on the brink of the wall. I didn't know a man that large could have such perfect control over his limbs. “My friend the prince, your father, I saw him quite by chance last spring, at the embassy in Paris. He told me that I must come to his villa this summer, that I am in need of sunshine and
amitié
. I thought perhaps he was right. I am afraid, in my inexperience, I did not guess the meaning of his word
amitié
.”

“Your inexperience?” I said dubiously.

“I have never been to a place like this. Like the void left behind by an absence of imagination, which they are attempting, in their wretchedness and ignorance, to fill with vice.”

“Yes, you're right. I've just been thinking exactly the same thing.”

“My wife died eleven years ago.
That
is loss. That is a void left behind. But I try to fill that loss with something substantial, with work and the raising of our children.”

What on earth did you say to a thing like that? I ventured: “How many children do you have?”

“Four,” he said.

I waited for him to elaborate—age, sex, height, education, talents—but he did not. I stared down at the gossamer in my lap and said, “Where are they now?”

“With my sister. She was the one who insisted I go, and so I did. I regretted it the instant I walked through the door. There was a woman in the hall, a dark-haired woman, and she was smoking a cigarette and using the most unkempt language.”

“Probably Mrs. Henderson. She's desperately rich and miserable. An American. She sleeps with everybody, even the servants.”

“It grieves me to hear this.”

“I'm afraid it's true.”

“No, not that it's true. I do not give a damn—pardon, Mademoiselle—about Mrs. Henderson. It grieves me that you know this about her. That your family would allow you under the same roof as such a woman as that.”

“Oh, it's not as bad as that. My father doesn't allow me to mingle very much with his guests, except to entertain them with my cello after dinner. He doesn't know what to do with me at all, really, since I left Saint Cecilia's, and I'm too old for a governess.”

“He ought to send you to live with a relative.”

“I would run away. I'd return here.”

“Why? You will pardon my curiosity. Why, when you are not like them?”

“Why not? I'm like a scientist, studying bugs. I find them fascinating, even if I don't mean to turn into a mosquito myself.”

Herr von Kleist had placed his hands on his knees, and as large as his knees were, his hands dwarfed them. “Mosquitoes. Very good,” he said gravely. “Yes, this is exactly what I imagined about you, when I saw you lying on the garden wall just now, observing the mosquitoes.”

We had switched back into English at some point, I couldn't remember when.

I said, “Really, you shouldn't be here. You should go home to your children.”

He made another one of his sighs, weary of everything. “
You
are the one who should leave. There is not much hope for us, but you can still be saved. This is not the place for you.”

I jumped down from the wall and dusted the grit from my hands. “I'd say there's plenty of hope for you. You seem like a decent man. Anyway, this is the only place I know, other than the convent.”

“Then go back to your convent.”

I was about to laugh, and I realized he was serious. At least his voice was serious, and his eyes, which were sad and invisible in the darkness. “But I don't want to go back.”

“No, of course you do not. You want to live. You are how old?”

“Nineteen.”

He made a defeated noise and slid down from the wall. “You think I am ancient.”

“No, not at all,” I lied.

“I'm thirty-eight. But that does not matter.” He picked my hand from my side and kissed it. “It is you who matter.”

He was drunk, of course. I realized it now. He was one of those lucky fellows who held it perfectly, without slurring a single word, but he was drunk nonetheless. There was the slightest waver in his titanic frame as he stood before me, engulfing my fingers between his two leathery palms, and there was that waft of liquor I'd noticed from the beginning. Who could blame him? It took such an unlikely amount of moral resolve to remain sober at the Villa Vanilla.

When I didn't speak, he moved his heavy head in a single nod. “Yes. It is better this way. Nothing valuable is ever gained in haste.”

“Quite true,” someone said, but it wasn't me. It was my brother, Charles, coming up behind me like a cat in the night, and before either of us had time to reflect on the silent surprise of his appearance, he had pried my hand from the grasp of Herr von Kleist and begged the general's forgiveness.

An urgent matter had arisen, and he needed to borrow his sister for a moment.

2.

“Borrow me?” I jogged to keep up as my brother's long legs tore the scrubby grass between the garden and the cliffs. “Are you short for poker?”

“Of course not.” He yanked the cigarette stub from his mouth and tossed it on the ground, into a patch of gravel. “What the hell were you doing with that Nazi?”

“Nazi? He's a Nazi?”

“They're all Nazis now, aren't they? Pay attention, it's the cliff.”

I wasn't dressed for climbing. I gathered up my skirts in one hand.
We started down the path, over the lip of the cliff, and the sea crashed in my ears. I followed the flash of Charles's shoes just ahead. “What's the hurry?” I asked.

“Just be quiet.”

The last of the light from the house had dissolved, and I began to stumble in the absolute blackness of the night. I had only the faint ghostliness of Charles's white shirt—he had somehow shed his dinner jacket—to guide me, as it jerked and jumped about and nearly disappeared in the space before me. The toe of my slipper found a rock, and I staggered to the ground.

“What's the matter with you?” Charles said.

“I can't see.”

He swore and fumbled in his pockets, and a second later a match struck against the edge of a box and hissed to life. “My God,” I said, staring at Charles's face in the tiny yellow glow. “Is that blood?”

He touched his cheek. “Probably. Look around. Get your bearings.”

I looked down the slope of the cliff, the familiar path dissolving into the oily night. “Yes. All right.”

The match sizzled out against his fingers, and he dropped it into the rocks and took my hand. “Let's go. Try to keep quiet, will you?”

I knew exactly where I was now. I could picture each stone, each twist in the jagged path. Inside the grip of Charles's hand, my fingers tingled. Something was up, something extraordinary—so extraordinary, my brother was actually drawing me under the snug shelter of his confidence. Like when we were children, before Mummy died, before we returned to France and went our separate ways: me to the convent, my brother to the École Normale in Paris. That was when the curtain had come down. I was no longer his co-conspirator.