Along the Infinite Sea (22 page)

PARIS
•
1935

1.

At first, I refused to believe that I was pregnant. It didn't seem possible; August was like another lifetime, an Annabelle who no longer existed. The antiseptic language of reproduction—
The average emission of the human male contains some three to four hundred million individual gametes
—had nothing to do with the breathless and beautiful act of intercourse with Stefan, the long heat-soaked hours in his arms.

I ignored the signs staunchly, inventing every possible excuse, until I could not. Until Alice caught me vomiting in the bathroom at the end of October and brought me a worn white washcloth from the linen cupboard, which she ran under the faucet and handed to me with a sigh of resignation. “I suppose it was inevitable, the two of you so young and virile,” she said. “Really, he ought to have known better. I'll ask around for a doctor. You will have to get it taken care of at once, of course, before poor von Kleist suspects anything.”

I straightened. “What do you mean?”

“My dear, he's not going to want to have an affair with a pregnant
woman. He's certainly not going to want to wait around until the child's born. And unless you've slept with him already, he won't possibly believe it's his.”

“No.” I sank down on the stool and put my face in my hands. The washcloth was cool and damp against my cheek. “I haven't slept with him.”

I hadn't even kissed him. I arrived every Tuesday morning for Frieda's lesson, and had lunch with Johann afterward, though we took no more tours of the apartment and he hurried back to the embassy after driving me home in the black Mercedes.

On Thursdays and Saturdays we went riding in the park. Johann called for me promptly at six, and I was back in my father's apartment by nine-thirty, soaking my worn muscles in a hot bath. The pattern had become so regular, I arranged my week around it. Twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, a large bouquet of flowers arrived from a fine Parisian florist. The blooms varied, but they were always fragrant and expensive. Alice and I would sit around the table and admire them as we drank our morning coffee. “I do hope he's getting his money's worth, then,” Alice said, a week ago, and when I told her that he wasn't, not even a sou, she laughed. “Trust you to find the only man in Paris who doesn't make his mistress earn her keep,” she said, shaking her head, and I didn't bother to argue that he wasn't keeping me at all. He sent flowers and gave me lunch and paid me a hundred francs a week for Frieda's lesson: that was all.

On the other hand, he demanded nothing of me except my conversation, and not very much of that. It wasn't that we didn't talk; he was just economical with words and ideas. We spent most of our time in a kind of easy and understanding silence, a relief after the frenetic energy of Alice.

“Well, then,” she said. “I'll see what I can do. You'll burn in hell, of course, but then won't we all?”

2.

A month before my mother died, we had an enormous row. I was eleven and old enough to know things. There had been a father-daughter tea at my school, and of course I had no father to go with me, and so I went with my uncle, the husband of my mother's sister, and sat awkwardly with him, drinking watery tea and eating stale cake, while the other girls laughed and talked with their genuine fathers, basking in their warm baths of paternal adoration. I came home and threw my hat against the wall in the parlor that smelled of lemon polish and damp wool. “It's
your
fault,
you
left him! Why did you leave my father? You were cruel to him so he found another woman.”

She had slipped her index finger in her book and closed the pages over it. Her face had gone a little pale. “You mustn't speak about things you don't understand, Annabelle.”

“I understand more than you think. You drove him to someone else, and then you left him, and now I don't have a father. I could be in France, I could be a princess, and instead I'm stuck
here
!” I pointed to the faded wallpaper, the shabby furniture, the tired knickknacks on the shelves, the battered radiator that banged in the corner. “And it's your fault!”

“You'll understand when you're older. It's not that simple.”

“When I'm grown up, I'm going to be a
good
wife. I'm going to lavish my husband with love so he'll never go to another woman. I'm going to make sure my children have a father.”

She replied in a quiet monotone that—at the time, so young—I had wrongly imagined was emotionless. “Darling, sometimes it doesn't matter how good you are, and how much you love your husband. There are some men who need more than that, who will never be happy with just one woman. I did what I thought was right for you.”

I had stamped my foot on the threadbare rug and told her she was
wrong, that it was her fault. I would never do such an awful thing to my children. I would make sure they had a father who loved them.

Oh, Annabelle, she said.

I hate you, I shouted.

Then I had run up the stairs to my room and shut the door and put my head under the pillow, so I wouldn't hear her crying.

3.

The day after Alice discovered me in the bathroom, I went to the doctor, though not the one she recommended. I had no intention of seeing Alice's doctor. I had seen the women in the convent hospital who had tried to get rid of their babies. Some of them had died. Others had been so ravaged inside that it was a wonder they had lived. We had treated them, of course, but the nuns had told us afterward that these were the wages of sin, that God might forgive a woman for some things, but not for this. Stefan's child was my punishment for having loved Stefan without repenting, for having shared sexual passion with a married man.

I went instead to my father's doctor, a man named Périgault who looked nearly sixty and had gentle hands. He told me what I already knew, that I was going to have a baby at the end of May.

“Very well,” I said. “What do you recommend?”

Dr. Périgault drummed his fingers against the edge of the desk. His eyebrows made a ragged line along the top of his spectacles. “I recommend you find a husband, Mademoiselle de Créouville, with preference to the man who is the father of your baby.”

I stared at his gray hair, at the bushiness of his brows above the round wire frames of his eyeglasses, and I wondered if he had known my mother at all.

“What very helpful advice, Doctor,” I said. “But I'm afraid that isn't possible. The man is already married.”

4.

Lady Alice was waiting outside in Charles's old Renault. When she saw me, she dropped her cigarette on the pavement and reached across the seat to open the door. “Well? All sorted out?” she said.

“I'm pregnant, if that's what you mean.”

“And didn't the good doctor give you lots of lovely advice?”

I turned my head to the blur of striped awnings and said, after a moment, “I swore, when I was a child, that I would never raise my children without a father. I would never do what my mother did.”

“Darling, everyone's doing it these days. Well, not everybody. But it's not like thirty years ago, when your life would be ruined. Actually, it might make you a divine novelty, if you play your hand properly.”

“I don't want to be a divine novelty.”

“What do you want, then? To be some stupid respectable housewife in the
banlieues
, tending her flowers and her fat old husband?”

“It doesn't have to be so extreme.”

“Yes, it does. Nobody stays in love forever, and then you're just stuck together out of habit and inertia and bloody sniveling children. If you simply go on having passionate affairs, you never have to give it up. It's like being in love constantly, for ever and ever, only with different people.”

“Until you're old and nobody wants to sleep with you.”

She laughed and leaned her elbow on the doorframe. A delivery van reared up before us, and she wound around it, grinding what was left of the gears. “That will never happen to me,” she said. “I'll kill myself before I get old.”

“What a rosy picture you've painted for me. I can't wait to get started.”

“All I'm saying is that you're looking at this all wrong. There's no law that says you have to get married. So you're convinced you have a
propensity to sleep with philanders, because of your mother and father and all that. I'm sure my analyst would agree with you there. But don't weep about it. Every girl wants to, if she admits it. If she would let herself. They're heaps more fun, for one thing.”

“But then they leave you, or they sleep with someone else.”

“What's the matter with that? You simply find yourself a new one. They're not rare, I assure you.”

“Because it hurts,” I said. “It hurts like the devil.”

The signal changed again, and we charged forward. I clutched the side of the door until my knuckles turned white.

Lady Alice glanced at my face and nearly drove the Renault into a lamppost. She straightened the wheels and set the brake, oblivious to the horns sounding around us. “Why, you poor thing. Is it that bad?”

“Yes, by God. It
is
that bad. It is for me. It's horrible.”

She reached for my shoulders and drew me down into her scented lap, there by the curb, next to a shabby bar tabac and a florist putting out the last hardy blooms of the season. My tears stained her silk dress in large patches, but she never said a word about it, then or since.

5.

The next day was Saturday, and Johann picked me up as usual at six o'clock. By now, it was still quite dark at that hour, and chilly enough that I wore a thick scarf over my riding coat. The wind froze my cheeks. I stared silently ahead as the street unfolded in the glare of Johann's headlamps, and I thought, I'll have to tell him today. I can't go on pretending.

I would tell him when we stopped for his cigarette at the lower lake, and that would be that. This was the last time we would drive together like this, through the Paris dawn in his beautiful oil-black Mercedes, to the horses waiting at the Porte Dauphine.

We stopped at our usual spot, near the lower lake. The sky was just beginning to lighten. Johann lit his usual cigarette and said, “Is something wrong, my dear? You are quiet this morning.”

“I'm always quiet.” I watched him suck on the cigarette for a moment. His lips were thin, and when he smoked, they seemed to disappear altogether. I wondered what it would have been like if I had kissed him, if I had asked him to make love to me. I found myself regretting that I hadn't. I turned my head, until he existed only in the corner of my eye, and said, “I'm going to have a baby.”

He didn't reply at first. I don't think he even moved. He stared at the lapping water and flicked some ash into the grass, and after a moment he said, “I see.”

“It happened at the end of August, when everyone had left. I was lonely and innocent. A very stupid little affair. I never saw him afterward.”

He said, “Do you
want
to see this man again?”

“No. Never.” On the lake before me, a pair of swans glided free from the mist, white against the black shore. “I found out he was married.”

“I see,” he said again. He finished the cigarette and turned to me. His face was pale and stern. “You are in no condition to finish our usual ride, I think. Let us return to the car.”

We rode miserably back to the Porte Dauphine. Johann kept his mighty bay to a walk, a half length ahead of me, and I watched his upright back, the reddened plane of his jaw, and wondered if I would see them again. The trees thinned and the darkness lifted, revealing a heavy layer of autumn cloud that obscured the chimney pots of the emerging buildings. The air was damp and cold and smelled of smoke. When we reached the groom, Johann jumped off his horse and helped me dismount.

We had driven several minutes before I realized we were heading in the wrong direction. “I thought you were taking me home,” I said.

“I thought we might go to my apartment instead, where we can have breakfast and discuss what is to be done.”

“There is nothing to be done. I'm having a baby in the spring. I suppose my father won't turn me out; it's not as if he has any ground to stand on.”

Johann said nothing. The smell of exhaust, the movement of traffic was turning me a little sick. We arrived at the avenue Marceau, and Johann helped me out of the car and up the stairs to the louvered double doors on the second floor. We went to the study, and Johann asked the housekeeper for breakfast to be brought on a tray. He led me to the sofa and made me sit; he sat down next to me and picked up my hand and asked how I was feeling.

Numb, I thought.

“Well enough,” I said.

“You must take good care of yourself,” he said. “It is an important business, having a baby. There is a new life to be considered.”

“Yes.” I said the word without really meaning it, because I still hadn't translated this state of being—pregnancy—with a living baby. The one didn't seem to have anything to do with the other. I couldn't conceive that there was a human being growing inside me: my child, Stefan's child.

Johann patted my hand. “Good, good.”

“You're being very kind,” I said, looking down at our linked hands. “I don't deserve your kindness. The father—”

“Shhtt,” he said sharply. “You are not to speak this blackguard's name. You are not even to think it. From now on, as far as I am concerned, as far as you and the world are concerned, I am the father of this child.”

My head snapped up.
“You?”

“Yes, Annabelle.” He kissed my hand. “You are, I think, in need of a friend, a devoted friend. A husband.”

“Husband?” I said stupidly.

“Forgive me. I am not elegant with words, as some men are. I am not skilled at wooing. But I have wished for some time to marry you, Mademoiselle de Créouville, and I think perhaps the earlier this service is performed, the more convenient it will be.”