Along the Infinite Sea

Beatriz Williams's novel interweaves two love stories separated by three decades, connected by a rare 1936 Mercedes-Benz Special Roadster and the secrets it carries.

In the autumn of 1966, Pepper Schuyler, a pregnant former Senate aide, waits at a Palm Beach hotel to complete the private sale of the vintage Mercedes she discovered in her sister-in-law's Cape Cod shed and painstakingly restored. The three hundred thousand dollars from the sale is meant to fund her escape from the baby's father, a powerful married man. The buyer, a petite and elegant woman named Annabelle Dommerich, stuns Pepper by claiming intimate knowledge of the car: Twenty-eight years ago, Annabelle drove it across the German border and left a piece of her heart inside it. Annabelle invites Pepper to dinner and offers her shelter at her house in Cocoa Beach, insisting she once stood in Pepper's shoes. Despite her suspicions, Pepper accepts.

Over the drive north, Annabelle begins telling the story behind the car. In the summer of 1935, nineteen-year-old Annabelle de Créouville, daughter of an impoverished French prince and a deceased American heiress, lives at her father's villa on the Côte d'Azur, the southern coast of France. One night, her brother Charles drags her to the boathouse, where a man named Stefan has been shot in the thigh. Annabelle, trained as a nurse, treats the wound and pilots her father's launch to Stefan's yacht, the Isolde, moored offshore. She stays aboard for ten days, nursing him back to health. Stefan is a wealthy German Jew whose shooting was connected to his resistance against the Nazi regime.

Annabelle and Stefan fall deeply in love. They spend three passionate days at a villa near Monte Carlo, where Stefan gives her a rare Amati cello and reveals that the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, shot him. Before leaving for Germany to settle family affairs, Stefan installs Annabelle at the Hôtel du Cap and promises to return. But Stefan's former mistress, Lady Alice Penhallow, finds Annabelle and casually mentions Stefan's wife and son. Devastated, having sworn never to sleep with a married man because infidelity destroyed her own mother's marriage, Annabelle abandons the cello and flees to Paris.

In Paris, Annabelle throws herself into her music and begins a courtship with Johann von Kleist, the widowed German general she first met at her father's villa. Johann courts her with restrained devotion. When Annabelle discovers she is pregnant with Stefan's child, Johann proposes, offering to claim the baby as his own. They marry within a week, and Annabelle gives birth to a boy she names Florian. Months later, her friend Nick Greenwald, an American living in Paris, reveals the truth: Stefan was arrested by the Gestapo on the very day he crossed back into Germany to arrange a divorce from the wife who had already left him. He spent months in Dachau, a Nazi concentration camp. Lady Alice had either lied or withheld the fact that Stefan's marriage was already over. Annabelle realizes her marriage to Johann was built on a misunderstanding.

Back in 1966, Pepper settles into Annabelle's guest cottage, but Annabelle disappears on a mysterious trip. Nine days later, Annabelle's son Florian Dommerich, a lawyer from Washington, arrives looking for his missing mother and startles Pepper in the study late at night. In the scuffle, a statue drops on Pepper's foot, breaking it. Despite their rocky introduction, a wary attraction develops. Pepper discovers correspondence in Annabelle's desk with a private investigator tracking an unnamed person near the coast; the most recent letter references Cumberland Island, Georgia. She joins Florian and his neighbor Susan Willoughby for a road trip to find Annabelle.

In the 1930s, the estrangement between Annabelle and Johann deepens. He takes a new post in Berlin; she refuses to follow, repelled by the anti-Semitic atmosphere. Stefan, released from Dachau and now a fugitive, slips into Paris and appears at a farewell party for Nick Greenwald. He and Annabelle begin meeting daily in his hotel room, lying fully clothed on the bed without touching, sharing an intimacy Stefan calls worse than adultery. Charles, who belongs to an anti-Nazi resistance network, asks Annabelle to assess whether Johann might be recruited. Before she can act, Johann arrives unexpectedly, having resigned his post to save their marriage. Annabelle returns to him, and Stefan disappears.

In September 1938, Stefan's ex-wife Wilhelmine Himmelfarb visits Annabelle and reveals that Johann himself had Stefan arrested. Annabelle confronts Johann and leaves with Florian. She and Wilhelmine then execute a daring rescue: Annabelle visits Dachau posing as a general's wife, identifies Stefan among the prisoners, and slips him a capsule of weakened typhoid bacteria so he can be transferred to a hospital and smuggled out.

Stefan recovers at a lakeside house while Annabelle cares for him and their son. They resume their love and plan to escape to Italy. But on November 9, 1938, Kristallnacht, the night of coordinated Nazi attacks on Jewish communities across Germany, the border closes. Stefan insists on rescuing his daughter Else from Stuttgart. They arrive to find fire and shattered glass. Gestapo agents kill Wilhelmine and her husband Matthias. Annabelle escapes through the basement with the children, but Johann appears in uniform and takes them all into custody.

At dawn, Johann places the family in his black Mercedes. When a guard lunges at Stefan, Johann shoots the man dead, committing treason. He has realized that the Nazis' hatred of Jews means they would eventually kill Florian, whom he loves as his own son. Johann drives them to the French border, gives Annabelle the car keys, and lets them cross. In the morning, Stefan is gone: He has left to join the French Resistance, believing Johann is the better man to raise Florian.

In 1966, Florian, Susan, and Pepper travel to Saint Mary's, Georgia, the mainland port for Cumberland Island. While Florian and Susan take the ferry to search for Annabelle, the baby's father's brother corners Pepper at the hotel with adoption papers and threats to leak scandalous family secrets. Annabelle appears and interrupts the confrontation. The man forces Pepper into his car, but Annabelle races ahead in the Mercedes and blocks the road, freeing her.

From her hospital bed, Pepper learns what Annabelle found on the island. Annabelle tracked a man named Stefan Himmelfarb, who tends wild horses on Cumberland Island in solitude. She went to his house but lost her nerve when she saw through the window that he was dancing with a woman. Now she has decided to return, not to reclaim him, but to give back the Amati cello she played throughout her concert career. Florian visits Pepper with pink roses, confesses he has had feelings for her since Washington, and asks to see her regularly. She agrees.

In a final chapter told from Stefan's perspective, the woman Annabelle saw was Else, his daughter, who found him years ago and visits regularly. Stefan has kept faith with Annabelle for nearly three decades. When she knocks on his door, the awkwardness dissolves at the first touch, and they spend the night filling in the missing years. She brings back the Amati cello, the instrument behind every concert and recording of her career. Stefan opens the shutters to flood the room with sunrise and marvels that the universe, for all its cruelty, has brought them together at last.