Celine

by Peter Heller

  “My mother.” Her voice, faint out from under her hair.

  “Your mother, I see. I will let you talk to whomever you decide. I will not inform Mrs. Hinton.” He was talking about the headmistress. “I’ll leave that up to you,” he said, “in your own time. I suggest that you do it soon, though, as your, ah, symptoms, will become more apparent, and arrangements will have to be made. It depends—I mean—”

  “I know what you mean.”

  God only knew how she knew what he meant. She lifted her head and straightened her back and brought the fingers of both hands to her cheeks and gave one swipe outward, as if wiping away all further weakness, and blew a long sigh out of pursed lips and said, “Thank you, Doctor. I will never forget your kindness.”

  He smiled sadly and told her that he would help her with whatever decisions she made, and she put on her short wool jacket and walked straight to the library building and straight into the office of the headmistress and school founder, Carmelita Hinton.

  Mrs. Hinton liked the scrawny, shy girl who spoke perfect French when pressed and who drew and painted with a sensitivity that was truly rare. At an exhibition in the student gallery at the end of the fall term, Mrs. Hinton was struck by Celine’s compositions; she had an eye for the odd angle, the whimsical moment, and some pieces had the rare beauty that cannot be unwoven from a very subtle wit. It was as if Celine were trying her hardest to hide her true talent and failing, and Mrs. Hinton appreciated the instinctive modesty. But the headmistress also understood that the health and vigor of the community always came before the enabling of an individual and that sometimes terrible sacrifices had to be made. As soon as the child came through the door, she knew that life as this girl had come to understand it was about to be shattered. “Please,” she motioned to a heavy wood chair and stood and came around her desk and took the other flanking chair. She turned to face the girl.

  “Something has happened.”

  Celine had steeled herself and vowed not to asseverate or bargain. She admired the headmistress and would not disrespect her. She studied for a moment the general area where her womb would be, trying to locate the mystery of the life inside her and to draw from it some sense of proportion in the face of the judgments that were sure to be laid. She nodded to herself, took a deep breath for both of them, and met Mrs. Hinton’s eyes.

  “I will have to leave school, I’m sorry.”

  The headmistress raised an eyebrow. That may have been a first: stoically taking on the punishment before arraignment or trial. Mrs. Hinton realized with a certain sorrow that she now liked and admired this girl even more. She knew that Celine was happy at the school: not at first, but more and more so with every passing month. She could see the girl finding her place and flowering in her work and enjoying the society of two or three classmates, also artists and sensitive; one was a dancer, another an accomplished violinist. She had not noticed her suffering the attentions of any particular boy. Sexual intercourse between students was strictly forbidden and the punishment was immediate expulsion. It must be remembered that a coeducational boarding secondary school, where students of both sexes shared not only classes but also work and sports and camping trips, was at the time a novel and brave undertaking that required the clearest rules. Carmelita Hinton was a rare commanding officer: She was a humanitarian with a kind and generous heart as well as a fair and unwavering disciplinarian.

  “I see,” she said. “Can you tell me why?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Mrs. Hinton picked a pencil off the blotter and shaved the lead with a thumbnail.

  “You’re pregnant,” she said finally. The girl’s eyes widened with surprise, then instant fury.

  “Dr. Watt called you.”

  Mrs. Hinton shook her head. “No, he did not. Though he is required to do so. I have been doing this a long time. I knew the moment you walked through the door.” She reached a hand out to Celine who hesitated and took it. Mercifully, Mrs. Hinton gave it one reassuring squeeze and let it go. Celine thought it was like the handshake the captains of opposing sports teams give each other before a match, to show that it was nothing personal.

  “I will be very, very sorry to lose you. Do you wish to call your mother? I’ll ask Loreen to go out and fetch the mail and you can use the phone in her office. When you’re done you can tell your mother that I’ll be calling her this afternoon.”

  Celine did not quiver or cry once during the entire visit. She called Baboo who took the news with surprisingly brisk pragmatism, the kind you’d expect from a mother who had once run a household with seven servants and raised three daughters in the shadow of a Nazi invasion, and who was the lover of a married fleet admiral. Celine took great strength from her mother’s response and was immensely relieved. She understood for the first time in her young life what mothers were really made for. When Celine told her that Mrs. Hinton had expressed real disappointment in having to expel her, Baboo snapped.

  “You are not going anywhere young lady. She threw all of you boys and girls together and assured us that it was tout à fait bien. This mess is her responsibility more than yours and she will clean it up. Now please tell her to come to the phone. I will not be available later, I plan to be busy this afternoon.” Celine wanted to cry and laugh at the same time. With wonder at her mother’s moral authority. Well, she would certainly not shed tears in the presence of the headmistress, not after her mother’s display of regal sang-froid. She handed the phone to the one other truly strong woman she had ever known and waited for the fireworks.

  There weren’t any. Celine heard Mrs. Hinton say, “I see. I understand that you feel that way and I am sympathetic, I truly am, but that is our policy…Yes, yes, I understand…No. No, well…I would be happy to talk…No. Tomorrow afternoon? Well…I…Well. I see. Mrs. Watkins?…Yes…Okay, I look forward to it.”

  Did the ruddy-cheeked Carmelita Hinton look slightly pale when she hung up? Celine thought so. The headmistress rested the phone on the cradle and said, “Your mother is driving up to see us tomorrow.”

  On April 19, 1948, Barbara Cheney Watkins was driven from East Sixty-Eighth Street to Putney, Vermont, by William F. Halsey’s driver, and she was accompanied by the admiral. Admiral Bill may have thought that he was about to witness one last epic engagement. The man told Baboo more than once that his life’s greatest sorrow was having to sail away from sinking ships and leave his men drowning in the burning slicks and drifting in their Mae West lifejackets, terrified and abandoned while sharks circled. A horror that never ceased to haunt his dreams. And so he can be excused if he took Celine’s hand while her mother met with Mrs. Hinton, and walked with her slowly, in his suit, up a dirt road muddy with snowmelt and seemed to be thinking of distant things.

  Celine would never know what was said in Mrs. Hinton’s office, but Baboo emerged in her long sable coat that gleamed and ruffled in the cold April wind, and Celine could tell by her bearing that if she chose, she could return one day to the Putney School.

  Aside from Celine, the only one alive who knew this story was Hank, and it came to him in pieces. Celine told him some: how she had been expelled for one single day from the Putney School for fraternizing with a boy. The image he always had—and it may have been, of course, because he was her son, and the imagination of a son will only go so far when it comes to a mother—of “fraternizing” was her climbing trees with a fellow student. Birch trees, probably. He saw the two of them perched in a leafy canopy sharing a cigarette and a kiss. Certainly grounds for expulsion in the old days.

  Celine told him how the sentence had lasted only as long as it took for Baboo to drive up to the school and give Mrs. Hinton an earful. Hank loved that. To him, Baboo had always seemed august and he loved to imagine her words in that office: “My dear Headmistress Hinton, what did you think was going to happen when you threw a hundred hormone-addled adolescent boys together with a hundred unchaperoned young girls? On a farm? I’ve never heard of such a thing…” Baboo had the authority
of someone with immense personal discipline who adhered rigorously, unwaveringly, to how things ought to be done. She was also adored by her many grandchildren because it was clear to even the youngest that she had seen almost everything in her long life and understood how complicated and many layered people were, and it was obvious, above all, how much she loved them, an adoration beyond reckoning, and sometimes she could give the wink and tolerate a bit of foolishness because, Lord knows, she had been foolish enough at times.

  Baboo told Hank some of Celine’s story, inadvertently. She said something once after they both had had several cocktails and were sitting on her porch that overlooked the little marsh above her beach. It was right after he graduated from high school. Moths batted at the porch light and herons croaked from the cattails, and frogs boomed, and the tiny intermittent lanterns of the fireflies blinked. She said that she was glad he had had such a fun and easy time at Putney, because she had been terribly afraid after Celine took most of her sophomore year off that she would never graduate.

  Hank said, “She took most of the year off? She never told me that. Why?”

  Baboo rattled the ice in her vodka tonic. She glanced over quickly and pursed her lips. “Well, they tried to expel her.”

  “I know. And you stormed up there in a sable coat like Anna Karenina. Mom told me.”

  Baboo laughed. “I’m not sure Anna Karenina had a sable coat. It seems to me that that awful anemic husband of hers was very cheap, wasn’t he? Karenin? I will never forget the description of the blue veins in his pale hands.” She shuddered dramatically. Baboo always amazed him. She was Catholic in temperament and seemed to have read everything. He knew that she had attended Vassar for a year over the objections of her father, Charles Cheney, who felt that girls from good families should not attend college, and he knew that she left halfway through when she married Harry Watkins. She sipped her drink. “No, your mother had decisions to make and she was as obstinate as a camel.”

  That expression. Had she said “mule” it would have glided by unremarked like any hackneyed turn of phrase, but leading in a camel with his hump had the effect of inviting a certain association and he may have nearly jumped out of his seat. Somehow he saw the camel with its oddly swelling back and he saw young Celine standing beside it with her swelling belly and decisions to make. It was the first time he was certain that his mother had gotten pregnant, and this revelation was followed immediately by the certainty that she had taken time away from school because she had stubbornly decided to take her baby to term.

  Which meant that somewhere Hank had an older sibling.

  Baboo must have noticed his shock. She said, “Well, it must be time for dinner. I’m famished, aren’t you? Joan is probably baking the lamb chops to death again, I can smell sulfur.” She pushed back her wicker chair.

  “Baboo?”

  “Dear one?”

  “Were you just trying not to tell me that Mom was pregnant? Is that what ‘fraternizing’ means?”

  “Fraternizing means fraternizing. Now, would you take your drink to the table and try not to upset an old woman?” Discussion ended, case closed.

  The next spring, Celine drove up to visit him at Dartmouth. She drove the red VW bus. He loved her in the Beast, the elegant private eye in the hippie bus. She pulled up in front of his dorm, the engine roaring happily away with the signature bravado that was 80 percent bark, and she stepped down in a khaki jacket and jeans and he thought she looked like a movie star relaxing off-set. That first afternoon they drove across the river and up into the hills above Norwich, Vermont, and set up cans on a log against an embankment so they could shoot the .44 Magnum he had bought with money from his summer job at the cannery. He had bought it for bear protection. She popped in a stick of Juicy Fruit, which always helped her concentrate, and shot first and didn’t miss. She neatly flipped open the cylinder and ejected the brass onto the mat of old leaves. “We’ll pick it all up later. It’s nicely balanced. You should really get some ear protectors.”

  Now or never: “Mom, why do you reunite birth families? You’re an incredible investigator. Why not go after perps?”

  She jerked her hand over and flipped the cylinder home and handed him the gun, barrel away. “They may call this the Bear Minimum, but if it’s a grizzly I think you’d better hit him in the head.” She walked across the turnaround and set up the line of cans.

  “Why not perps?” Hank said. “I should think it’d be more of a rush.”

  “It’s not. I tried it once, and I thought it was sad.”

  “Sad?”

  “You don’t remember the case? It was the one I did for the FBI when I was just starting out.”

  “Vaguely. Do you want to shoot again?”

  “You go, I’ll coach you. Just a sec.” She went to the bus and came back with two packets of Mack’s foam earplugs. “Here. You might want to hear your child’s first utterance.” She screwed one into her right ear. “Like this, good”—raising her voice—“now take them out! I want to tell you a story.”

  He took the earplugs out and they sat on a moss-covered boulder. She took out her gum and stuck it behind her ear for later. It was a fifties bebop gesture Hank thought he had seen in a Gidget movie.

  “It was bank fraud,” she said. “A lot of money, really a lot. The man was from a good Hartford family—you remember the Brainards—and the bureau needed someone who could blend in and make some calls. Well, it took about twenty minutes. His aunt had a house next to Tauntie’s at Woodstock and they all played tennis together. She was so glad to hear from me. ‘Why on earth do you want to get in touch with Franklin after so long?’ the aunt said, a bit suspicious. I told her that I was embarrassed to ask, but that he was an old beau, one of those a girl never forgets—she twittered and said something like, ‘I have one or two of those, dear,’ and I said that I had been packing up my desk for a move to Newport and found his old dog tags from the Tenth and I thought I better return them, and did she have an address. I’d done my research. He’d been in the Tenth Mountain Division with your uncle George. ‘Oh, he’ll be thrilled,’ she said. ‘Best years of his life, I’m sure of it. To tell you the truth, he’s in a bit of a funk, a rough patch, I’m sure it’ll lift his spirits,’ and she gave me an address in Old Greenwich. So I felt like a shit to begin with.”

  His mother told him how she had not gotten her kit together yet for stakeouts and had to use a pair of opera glasses. Celine got in her old Volvo wagon and drove up to Connecticut and spied on the place from a hill—it was a fancy horse property with barns and white rail fencing—and she said she was proud of herself when a warbler landed on her shoulder. Finally Franklin emerged from the house. It was him all right, the felon and fugitive. Matched the photo in her dossier. He didn’t look like a hardened criminal, he looked like a rather sad man in early middle age wearing a light cotton Lacoste sweater, navy blue. He got into a Mercedes and she followed him through the genteel back roads of Greenwich. At some point he must have realized he was being followed because he goosed it and they had a “high-speed” chase through the well-kept countryside, Celine clinging to his taillights for all she was worth—“I must’ve nearly rolled that clunker three or four times”—until the man was just overcome with curiosity: Who the hell was that well-coiffed lady in the Volvo who could barely see over the steering wheel?

  “He pulled over and got out looking confused and perplexed and a little scared. I walked up to him and I said I was Marybell Hampson’s niece and I had been engaged by the FBI to bring him in and that what he was doing was simply wrong. ‘What you are doing is just wrong, Franklin. You need to make this right. It will be best for everyone. You’re a decent man and you need to behave with decency.’ ” Hank could just see petite Celine. The moral certainty she had inherited from her mother. The poor man didn’t stand a chance. She brought him in. She said, “Let’s take your car back to the house and you come with me to the City. We’ll have a good talk on the way.”

  He foll
owed her like a puppy and she drove him to the bank where they met the branch manager and several agents. “The way he looked at me when they put the cuffs on him. Like a beaten dog, Hank. I never want to see that expression again.” She breathed out a long sigh. “On second thought, let me have that gun.” She took it from him along with the six bullets he had in his hand and she thumbed them in swiftly without thought, her mind on something else, and she blew the six cans away in six of the fastest shots he had ever seen.

  It’s a wonderful thing to be in awe of one’s mother, but she had not put him off the scent. She seemed distracted by memory, maybe vulnerable, so he said, “Whoa. Nice. So no perps any more, but why birth families? I was thinking maybe once you had a baby—”

  She whirled around. Her breathing was labored, maybe from her incipient emphysema, maybe from emotion.

  “I’d like you to never mention that again. Okay?”

  “But if I had an older brother or a sister—”

  She compressed her lips and her breathing quickened. Her eyes were big and bright and they were wet and he shrunk from her pain. He nodded. “Okay, sure.”

  But it wasn’t really okay. For days, weeks, years he couldn’t put out of his mind the certainty that he had an older sibling. He got more of it later from his aunt Bobby right before she died, but that would not be for twenty-two more years.

  SIX

  A road trip frees the mind, revitalizes the spirit, and infuses the body with Dr Pepper and teriyaki jerky. That’s what Celine had always found, and what could be better? She and Pete drove around the hulk of Denver’s football stadium and pulled onto Interstate 25 and headed north. Celine drove. She was a very good driver. Pete had given up cars when he moved to New York City as a young man. His license had expired and he’d never renewed it. Pete liked to imagine his mind as the interior of a great house, one in a constant renewal of design, and he found that not driving somehow freed up a lot of mental square footage. They had a road atlas and gazetteers with detailed topographic maps for both Wyoming and Montana. These blood-red atlases were wonderful and indispensable as they showed every ridge and creek and old logging road. As they passed the Downtown Aquarium, Celine motioned to the sign and said, “Did you know that the aquarium was bought by a seafood restaurant chain?”