Along the Infinite Sea Read Online Free PDF

college.”
    â€œWell, I was there in the summer of 1937, when the Ritz was thecenter of the universe. Everybody was there.” She stands up and dusts off her dress. “Anyway. Come along, my dear.”
    â€œWait a second. What happened at the Ritz?”
    â€œLike I said, it’s ancient history. Water under the bridge.”
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œThere 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.”

Annabelle
    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 The charcoal lash of Biscay storms had been replaced by the azure sway of the Mediterranean; the ascetic nuns had been replaced by decadent Austrian dukes.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 adoredCharles. 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