Celine

by Peter Heller

  “Danette sent Gabriela off with a whole box. Almost like having her mother in an urn. The nudes, everything. These were the ones the adult Gabriela so carefully catalogued online. Many had been in shows in San Francisco and New York, but many hadn’t.”

  “Okay, so how does it bear? On his disappearance.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “But you have an idea. Don’t clam up on me now.”

  “Hmm,” Pete said. “Give me a minute. I’m still arranging it.”

  Arranging it in his mind like one of the office interiors he used to design. Celine bit off a shred of jerky and decided to give her husband a break.

  SEVEN

  The basin and range country of southern Wyoming is an acquired taste. Celine had not acquired it. She wrote to Hank in a letter a few days later, “The miles of rolling sage and rabbit brush, the surprising flecks of antelope like splashes of paint, red and white, the distant dry mountains and the incessant wind, they feel remote, untouchable somehow. They make me feel remote. They are like true mountains that have been drained of moisture and color, though I know people that go on and on about the subtle shades of that country. Almost like a compensation, an apology. Well. They make me tired. I never wanted to meet a landscape, or a person, more than halfway. If one is to dance one needs a dancing partner, don’t you think? Which made me think of Gabriela. I was getting the sense that, like these parched and far-off hills, she was withholding something.

  “That’s what I puzzled about as we drove through gritty, windbeaten Rawlins and stopped on the old main street at a Chinese restaurant across from a building painted entirely in jungle camo. Not kidding, can you believe it? The whole building. Welcome to the West. What I thought about as we folded our pancakes around the moo shu pork and sipped the scalding jasmine tea…”

  Celine often said it was the one drawback of working pro bono: When people put up good money for an investigation they had usually committed to their decision and rarely got cold feet. But if all they had invested was a phone call and a story, sometimes it was too easy to back out. It was true, though—money or no money, many of those who enlisted a PI weren’t fully prepared for what they would find. But Gabriela had insisted on paying and Celine never got the impression that she was in this search with anything but both feet.

  When Hank had found his mother’s letter in his mailbox he had put on a windbreaker and taken it with him for a walk around the lake. It was a cool fall evening, the clouds over the mountains burning with russets and purple shadows, and there were still a couple of snowy pelicans drifting slowly on the dark water like fat schooners. Hank loved how the huge white birds took on the hues of the sunset. They came every year to breed, and happily fished for crawdads and carp, and helped the lake’s visitors pretend they were on the coast.

  He carried the envelope to his favorite bench across from the little sanctuary island and opened it there. He and Celine still traded handwritten letters, a habit they began when he went away to Putney for high school. They had a bond, going to the same school, and more than once she wrote to him of secret spots none of his peers had known about, like the flat diving rock in Sawyer Brook. He remembered his joy when he went to his mailbox in the lobby of the dining-hall building and found one of her square envelopes. She did not write to him the way other parents wrote to their children—of commonplaces, weather, pets—she wrote of the problems confronting her in her current case, and he read the letters with the avidity some read detective novels. She often asked for his thoughts, and more than once his insights had led to a breakthrough. His roommate, Derek, insisted that he read those parts aloud so that they could ponder the puzzle, like young Watsons, while they lay in their bunks before sleep and a winter wind howled in the eaves of their cabin.

  He was not surprised that the sere landscape of eastern Wyoming was not to his mother’s taste. She’d be happier as they moved north and west into the mountains. She was a New Englander at heart, a shaded-brook and hardwoods gal. He remembered the almost vertiginous sense of exposure he had experienced when he first encountered the vast sky of Colorado. Whenever he came to a grove of big cottonwoods that reminded him a little of the broadleaf forest of Vermont he had felt relief. The Putney hills were in their blood.

  The summer after he graduated from high school, and was shocked by Baboo’s partial revelation, he returned to Putney almost every day in his mind. He closed his eyes and put himself back on the campus, back on the country lanes and paths he knew so well; back into the classrooms and barns, into the routines of chores and classes and sports, of meals and evening activities. He traveled in his imagination to the fields and art studios, the sugar house and blacksmith shop, and tried to fathom who the father of his brother or sister might have been. Might be. Two years later, while at college in New Hampshire, he drove the hour down to the school and took a tape recorder.

  He interviewed two teachers who had taught both him and his mother, and the retired farmer, now an old man, who lived over in Dummerston. He had a journalist’s instincts even then, and he conducted the interviews in a way that did not arouse suspicions of the real story. He told them he was working on a family memoir about Putney for a college writing project. And he did not tell his mother.

  Celine didn’t really relax until they turned up into the Sweetwater valley and the ranges on either side got close, and their flanks were dark with timber and the meadows were green. So were the irrigated fields of the ranches lying along the river, the neat white ranch houses peaking out from groves of boisterous cottonwoods. She opened her window and let the late-afternoon wind pour in and it smelled of alfalfa and wet fields and the river. They drove into Lander just as the sun was settling into the long escarpment of the Wind Rivers.

  Just three more latitudes north made a difference, here, at the end of September. The air pouring through the window was chilly with fall, and she could smell woodsmoke. The aspen were already turning on the higher ridges, slashing the shoulders of the mountains with ocher and gold. Glorious. This time of year. It was good to be out of the city now, good to be rolling, traveling, letting her losses toss in her wake. The cold currents would bring them around again, surely; probably tonight as she slept. And if she woke up to the strange silences of a new town and lay in the dark listening, she would welcome them home, and taste without bitterness the oddly sweet grief of missing those one loves. But now it was wonderful to forget for a few hours, to be traveling, to hear tires hum and thwop on cracks in the pavement, to come to a T in the road above a creek whose meadow was dotted with horses, roans and appaloosas, and smell smoke from the wood of trees that didn’t even grow in the East.

  Celine didn’t feel like cooking. Pa offered but she waved him off.

  “Let’s have ribs,” she said. “Isn’t that what they eat in Wyoming? And then let’s go find a pullout somewhere to make our new home. I feel a little like a hermit crab.”

  “Carrying his house on his back?”

  “We had one as a pet, you know. Mimi brought it home from Simmons Point one day in her glasses case. Mummy had a fit.”

  “You were all suckers for a stray.”

  “He was not at all a stray. I’m sure she plucked him from a very fine family where he’d been quite happy. It made me mad. Kind of a lesson for me in not offering help where it isn’t needed.”

  “Did you make her put him back?”

  “No. She was irrationally attached. At the end of the summer I abducted him and put him right back in the little tidal pool where she’d found him. I’d been with her that day. Anyway, over the summer he’d been quite spoiled. She dropped all manner of food into the pickle jar. One Friday night she brought him to the movies. She swore to me that he crawled to the edge of the jar and came half out of his shell and watched. Ginger Rogers. She swore on the Bible that he moved all his little legs like he wanted to dance. She said he was an Almond and wasn’t allowed to dance. I finally figured out that she meant Amish. I had learned about them from our na
nny and I’d been telling her about how they don’t have zippers, which she thought was hysterical. She changed Bennie’s saltwater twice a day. When it was clear that he was actually growing she found several empty snail shells and dropped them in. He inspected them and found them lacking. I told her that probably they couldn’t have holes. She thought he’d like to have windows in his new house. Finally she found a beautiful glossy symmetrical shell all covered in irregular black spots like a paint pony and with no pinholes. Bennie took one look and moved right in. Years and years later, as an adult, she told me she thought of that as one of her proudest moments. Isn’t that odd?”

  Pete half smiled. It was his way of giving vigorous applause. Finally he said, “I always thought of ribs as a Texas specialty. Or Louisiana. Though, come to think of it, Uncle Norwood could barbecue a wicked batch.”

  “Were you even listening? Of course you were.”

  “His son, Norwood Jr., kept a pet lobster one summer. That one didn’t end so well.”

  “Ha!” How could she have doubted him? Of all the things Pete Beveridge was very good at, listening was perhaps the best. “Maine ribs?” she said. “You know, Pete, I’ve been cutting you slack all afternoon.”

  “I’m supremely aware.”

  This was how they sparred. It was a call and response, a little like the cries red-tailed hawks screed across a valley to their mates: Are you there? Yes, I am here.

  They passed the Pronghorn Lodge and came down the hill onto Main Street, a straight mile-long prospect of mostly late nineteenth-century brick buildings with tall front windows and ornate front doors. They passed the Lander Grill and the Noble Hotel and two outdoor sport shops with tents and fleeced-up mannequins in the windows. They passed a Loaf ’N Jug and the Safeway and a gas station turned burger joint and two stores featuring Native American crafts. It was that time of day, or night, that happens only a few weeks a year at a certain hour in certain parts of the American West. The sun sets behind mountains but the cloudless sky that is more than cloudless, it is lens clear—clear as the clearest water—holds the light entirely, holds it in a bowl of pale blue as if reluctant to let it go. The light refines the edges of the ridges to something honed, and the muted colors of the pines on the slopes, the sage-roughened fields, the houses in the valley—the colors pulse with the pleasure of release, as if they know that within the hour they too will rest.

  Maybe Celine thought this way because she was exhausted. She was. It had been a long time since she had driven that far in a day. Main Street curved to the right and they passed the Double Ought Motel—which made them laugh as there were probably patrons doing things there they doubly ought not to do—and Celine abruptly threw the wheel over and executed a U-turn that startled Pa and squealed the tires.

  “Practice,” she smiled. “Twenty-seven miles per hour. Pretty good. Didn’t even think about rolling.” She grinned. “Never know when we might need one of those. I was thinking we ought to head back to the Lander Grill. They might not have ribs but I bet they serve a mean steak.”

  The summer of Bennie the hermit crab was their first full summer at Fishers Island. It was also the summer Celine discovered that fathers don’t always behave like fathers—that they might actually choose to be far away from their daughters.

  When she first came to this country she was seven. It was mid-May 1940. The Nazis were steadily marching toward Paris, and the season at Fishers Island would begin in a few weeks, and Baboo’s mother, Gaga, said yes, of course they could come early. Baboo and the girls’ father, Harry, were still very much together, and the plan was that he would hold down the bank’s office in Paris until things got very bad, and then he would come over and join them. If Baboo were to have planned their middle-of-the-night flight from Marseilles she could not have picked a better time. Over the course of their seven-year sojourn in France, they had been back to Baboo’s parents’ villa on Fishers Island twice, both times when Celine was too young to remember. Maybe she did remember. She had been four the last time, and she could, when she closed her eyes, recollect the sounds of seagulls, the rising laughter. She thought she could remember a smell of drying seaweed and ocean and the cold onslaught of waves. A wood balcony with a view of treetops and blue water. Her grandmother Gaga speaking to her in an accent she would later find out was touched with Spanish. That was all. The memories were somehow delicious. Somewhere in the background of all of it was her mother’s laughter, her grandmother’s delight chiming in just after, the two overlapping like waves. Now they were refugees, sort of, and they were returning home for good.

  What was perfect about the timing was that the three sisters spoke only French. Mimi was five and precocious, rattling away in a constant soft-spoken soliloquy on the world around her, Bobby was eleven and already willowy and tall for her age and terribly practical—and perhaps a better judge of adult character than even Celine would be—and Celine was Celine; at seven she was quiet and shy and kept her many impressions mostly to herself, humming as she drew figures of birds and horses, and usually only voluble when it came to the subject of animals. Silent Celine would turn into a nonstop, exuberant commentator, for instance, at the Paris Zoo. But. They only spoke French. And so having a summer with Gaga and Grandfather at Fishers would be the perfect acclimatization.

  Baboo hoped that by the time they hit their various grades at Brearley they would be fluent in English. They weren’t. Probably because all that summer they stuck mostly to one another. They had their own small beach below the house, and their grandparents and their mother often invited other families over to swim and picnic and so the girls got away with learning a few necessary phrases and yammering among themselves. When they all drove over to the club beach in the Packard and trekked across the sand with their baskets and towels—“like Lawrence in Arabia,” according to Baboo—the girls hung together. Bobby and Celine did, and Mimi ran after and lagged behind and rarely cried, and was so often covered head to toe in fine white sand she looked like a powdered doughnut. Not to say that they did not understand English, they did. They just refused, or did not know how, to speak it.

  During that summer Celine remembered that Baboo communicated with their father by regular mail, by telegram, and by the rare phone call, which he made, because of the disruptions caused by the war, from the American embassy in Paris. Harry had stayed behind. He was safeguarding Morgan’s interests in what was left of Europe and making preparations for his eventual flight. Celine remembered her mother bent over the rolltop desk in her room carefully writing letters to her husband. The room had a little balcony just big enough for two people to stand on, and it faced north toward the sound and the Connecticut shore, which could be seen over the trees if someone hoisted Celine. Through its screen door came the perpetual angelus of the bell buoy in the channel.

  Celine has an image of Baboo bent over the small desk composing her letter—her handwriting was perfect, Victorian: It unfurled itself across the pages in rulered lines of slants and loops where there had never been a ruler. The oversize capitals at the beginnings of paragraphs had the formality of chess pieces. The signature below “Your Ever Loving Wife,” Barbara, spun crisply through the Bs and twirled away through the last a with the self-discipline of a great waltzer—which she was—and the flourish beneath it had the surprising dash and speed of passion.

  Celine thought later that all love letters should look like that: that the recipient need not read the content but only glance at the hand to feel its impact. And then, in the middle of writing, her mother would stand and stretch, open and close her cramping fingers, and go out to the balcony for some air. Sometimes she seemed wrapped in fog, hazy, distant. Sometimes she pulsed like a firefly. Celine remembered.

  And then one afternoon while Celine was drawing egrets and crabs on her big artist’s pad on Baboo’s floor, her mother came briskly to the desk with a letter from Harry—Celine recognized the blue airmail envelope, heard the tinkle of her mother’s bracelets—and Baboo took up a silver
letter opener and sliced the top and drew out the single translucent sheet and began to read.

  She was bent over the rolltop and Celine saw her shoulders begin to quiver. A movement that spread down her arms and back the way a sudden strong wind moves through trees. And then her mother stood abruptly, keeping her back to her daughter, and made her way to the little balcony, weaving almost like a passenger moving on a deck in a rough sea, and stood under the sky, her hands gripping the wooden railing, as if she were holding on for dear life.

  Only for a minute. Celine saw her mother’s back stiffen. Expand with a great indrawn breath, saw her mother stand erect and breathe. Saw her hands come to her face, which was by then lifted to the blue waters of the sound, and wipe her cheeks with a gesture Celine would never forget and only saw from behind: Unhurried, decisive, Baboo moved both hands in sync from what must have been the corners of her eyes, or the bridge of her nose—moved them over her cheeks outward to her temples and then lifted them away and held them up palms outward toward the sea and spread her fingers. Held them there for a moment as if to dry. Like the wings of a seabird. And then she turned to her daughter and in a voice that was pitched a little higher than normal, said, “What are you drawing, Ciel? Birds again? How beautiful.”

  The contents of the letter were never discussed, but the ramifications became apparent over the next months. Baboo, if anything, became more attentive to the girls. She took them more often to the island’s beaches. They branched out from Gaga’s little strand and the familiar white sand of the club beach. They drove a few miles up island just past the big painted footprint in the road to the long stony stretch of Chocomount, which always had rougher waves and felt wilder, and had the most gorgeous thicket of thorny wild rose. They had to walk through it on the narrow path and Celine always lingered, inhaling the fragrance of the delicate flowers whose petals folded back in the sea wind. She picked the berrylike rose hips that she chewed and spat out. She liked to pretend it was betel nut and that she was an Indian woman on the way to the shore to gather snails. For Celine, the sight of the pale pink flowers and their sweet scent would for the rest of her life remind her of this time.