Along the Infinite Sea (24 page)

He places his hand to his chest and staggers backward, shutting the door as he goes.

PARIS
•
1936

1.

By the time I saw Nick Greenwald again, in the first week of March, the baby had grown quite large, and I had to dress carefully to disguise the size of my belly. I was glad I did. Nick took off his hat and reached for my hand, and his eyes ran up and down me as if to assess me for slaughter.

“Good morning, Frau von Kleist,” Nick said formally. “Thanks for agreeing to meet me here.”

“It's Annabelle, and I can't stay long. I have an appointment in half an hour.”

The appointment was manufactured, but my reluctance was not. I had told Johann in the morning, before he left for the embassy—since January, he had been working day and often night, something to do with treaty obligations—that I was going shopping for baby things today, and I hadn't lied. The evidence sat on the floor next to my chair: a small assortment of wrapped packages, and many more to be delivered to the apartment later in the afternoon. But I knew without asking that
my husband wouldn't be pleased at my meeting another man alone—he trusted me without reserve, he said again and again, but he did not trust other men around me—and so I hadn't asked. I had only agreed to meet with Nick because I was afraid of the consequences if I didn't: Nick showing up at the apartment, or, worse yet, Stefan himself.

For months now, I hadn't let the thought of Stefan intrude on my happiness. I had forced him away with an iron discipline. I was happy, I told myself: I felt fit and healthy as my pregnancy progressed; I had had a luxurious honeymoon, a husband who worshipped me daily, a beautiful Paris apartment, an affectionate stepdaughter. After a month in Italy, motoring about in Johann's magnificent Mercedes, we had traveled straight to Westphalia for Christmas, where Johann had introduced me to the staff of his estate as the new baroness, and the children had arrived home to celebrate the season. We had all gotten along well, though Frieda was the only one who sought me out, to play the cello together and to take walks on the bitter winter grounds. “You must give them time, of course,” said Johann. “They will learn to love you as I do.”

“Not
quite
as you do, I hope,” I had replied, because my new husband had spent those weeks in Italy like a penitent who has finally emerged from a long and grueling fast, far more interested in the feast he had married than the art and monuments surrounding us. But that was what a honeymoon was for, wasn't it? To seal man and wife together, before they faced the world again. When you made constant love to someone, you drove out everything and everyone else, until you almost forgot there
was
a world outside your union, full of messiness and complication and old lovers. All that physical intimacy made you feel as if you really
were
in love, you really
were
married forever.

Just that morning, I had opened my eyes to Johann's farewell kiss, and I had thought how handsome he was, how I couldn't imagine another face bending down to mine in the morning. And, of course, he wasn't handsome, not objectively. But at that moment, while the baby kicked softly in my belly, and the sheets smelled warmly of Johann, I loved his face too much to think him otherwise.

So as I stared down Nick Greenwald's lanky form across the grubby café table, I stiffened my chest against him and thought that he deserved that little lie about the appointment.

“I'll be brief, then,” said Nick, lighting a cigarette and signaling the waiter. His face was grim and his eyes, when they looked at me, were hard and resentful. “I just have a few questions for you, on behalf of a mutual friend.”

“I don't believe I owe you any answers.”

He raised his eyebrows. The waiter arrived, and Nick ordered coffee. He took a long drag of his cigarette, and when the waiter had passed out of earshot, he blew out the smoke and said, “I suppose you've heard he's out of prison now.”

“What?
Who?”

“Stefan.”

I couldn't breathe. The baby kicked against the wall of my stomach, and I put my hand on my side. “He's in prison?” I whispered.

“You didn't know?”

“No. I never heard a word from him, not since August.”

Nick sat back in his chair, and a little of the resentment left his eyes, which, in the watery March sunshine that percolated through the window next to us, proved to be a charming shade of hazel. “I don't understand. Your brother never told you?”

“I haven't seen Charles since he left town in November. He doesn't approve of my marriage.”

“It was a shock.”

“It shouldn't have been. My husband is a good man. He's loyal and faithful, and I love him.” I pushed hard on the word
faithful
, and my hand moved in a slow circle on my side, around the baby's protruding foot.

Nick's gaze dropped to my hand and back again. “So I see.”

“If you have any questions,” I said, “I wish you would ask them.”

“Why did you meet with me, if you're so in love with your husband?”

“Not because I felt I owed you any explanation.”

“Really? None at all? Not to
me
, I mean. I'm only here because Stefan asked me to see you.”

My palms were damp. I flattened them against my dress. “Did he?”

“Yes. He rang me up a week ago, from Frankfurt. They're not letting him out of the country, you know. They're following him everywhere.”

“I don't understand. Who's following him? Why was he in prison?”

His voice lowered. “The Gestapo, for God's sake. Don't tell me you don't know.”

“I know a little. Not very much. Is he all right?” My throat shook a little.

“Well, he was arrested as soon as he set foot in Germany, the twenty-ninth of August. He was put in the new camp at Dachau, near Munich. Have you heard of it?”

“No.”

“It took us months to figure out where he was, and then your brother went off to try to get him released. That was November. They finally let him out in February, banged up but alive, and your brother got him settled and came home to Paris, and that's when he found out, as you know, that you were married to von Kleist and expecting a baby already. And meanwhile Stefan was going crazy over there, he wanted to jump the border and find you, and when I told him the news over the telephone I thought he was going to shoot himself. He said there had to be some mistake. I said there wasn't.” Nick crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray, just as the waiter arrived with his coffee. He added a teaspoon of sugar and took a careful sip. I couldn't speak. I watched his lips. He put down the cup and said, “He seemed to think the baby might be his.”

“It isn't,” I said instantly. “I started meeting Johann as soon as I came to Paris. I was furious and I wanted to forget, and Johann—”

“Furious?” said Nick. “Furious with Stefan?”

“Yes, because he hadn't told me he was married. And I had always
sworn I would never go to bed with a married man, I would never do that to another woman, because of my mother. It killed my mother.”

Nick was staring at me, astonished. His hand lay still on his cup; his back was rigid against the chair. “Are you kidding me?” he said. “
That's
why you left?”

“Yes. And I happen to think it was a damned good reason. I wouldn't ever knowingly betray another woman. So I married Johann, and yes, we're having a baby together, and I am certain,
certain
, that I've done the right thing this time, and I'll be damned if I let you convince me otherwise.” I sat back, breathless, cradling the round ball of my belly, the fetus who was beating an irregular rhythm against my abdomen, unused to all this turmoil.

“All right,” Nick said. “Keep your voice down.”

I picked up my glass of water and drank it dry. Nick lit another cigarette and turned back his head to watch the smoke ebb upward into the stained ceiling. His fingers played with the sugar spoon, turning it this way and that in the cradle of his hand.

“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.