Along the Infinite Sea by Williams Beatriz

Author:Williams, Beatriz [Williams, Beatriz]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-10-06T07:00:00+00:00

A. E. HOUSMAN

Annabelle

GERMANY • 1936

1.

It was three days before Christmas, and the girls and I had motored into Berlin to shop, leaving Florian at home with his father and brothers.

We traveled not in Johann’s black Mercedes, which we left in Paris, but in the massive Daimler Johann kept here in Germany, driven by a chauffeur in a field-gray uniform. The trip took two and a half hours along a highway of rich new asphalt, and Frieda did most of the talking.

“He has a new tooth coming in, the one on the right side,” she said. “Did you see it?”

“I didn’t need to see it. I’ve felt it the past few days,” I said, and I laughed to cover the ripping sound in my chest, because I hated leaving my son even for an hour, let alone for an entire day of shopping in Berlin. The Baroness von Kleist, she is such a devoted mother, they said in Paris, bewildered, where mothers of a certain class happily handed off the baby to the nursemaid after a friendly morning cuddle, but the truth was far more elemental than that, a chemical intensity of emotion that had begun its slow combustion about the third or fourth day after Florian’s birth, in some tranquil hour before dawn, when he was suckling at my breast and his eyes wandered up to mine in such a perfect representation of Stefan that I felt the universe move in my marrow, as if I had fastened all my ideas of the infinite upon a single black eyelash. The sensation might possibly be described in music or in mathematical equations or in geometric designs, but not in words.

Johann had been the one to suggest, two nights ago, that I leave Florian at home and go into Berlin for the day. We had converted a box room adjacent to our bedroom into a small nursery, and I was there in my dressing gown, nursing Florian inside a pink haze of bliss. I had looked up, bewildered, and said, “Go into Berlin? But what about the baby?”

“He will be looked after well. The housekeeper knows what to do. He has a father who adores him, and brothers who tolerate him without too much complaint.”

“But his milk!”

“We have some bottles. And he is eating now.” He knelt down next to the chair and touched my hand. “Annabelle, Liebling, you are a wonderful and devoted mother, but you must learn to leave him a little, too. He is six months old. The doctor says you should not even be nursing him still, or he will get a complex.”

“That’s nonsense. You and Lady Alice and your complexes. I know my son far better than old Périgault. Look at him, he’s perfectly healthy.”

“It is not a question of physical health. It is his attachment to you. We do not want our fine strapping son to become a mama’s boy, do we?”

Yes, we do, I thought passionately. I gazed down at Florian’s working mouth, his inquisitive dark eyes, and my arms ached around him.

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