Celine

by Peter Heller

  Grayson’s dock was at the south end of the beach and formed a boundary. At slack tide it was eight to ten feet off the water. Their father had always loved to dive from the deck, and though they had never all been to the island together, he promised in his letters to put each on his back and jump off. He told them it would be like parachuting without a parachute, which for some reason drove them crazy with anticipation. Mimi and Celine followed the sobs to the dock and found Bobby washed onto the beach like a shipwreck, her face covered in blood.

  She had dived right off the end, as she imagined her father dove. She had thrown herself off, unaware that Harry only dove at high tide and knew the bottom well enough to avoid the bigger rocks.

  Anyway, she didn’t really care if she died. Her father had made the big trip back from France and rather than making a beeline to Fishers to celebrate their reunion as she would have expected, he seemed to be looping right around them. Seemed to be sidestepping his own family. Why on earth would he maneuver to avoid them? It surpassed all understanding. Maybe he was angry with her, or hurt that she hadn’t written back promptly or often enough. Could that be it? Maybe in Paris, in something so serious as a world war, he had lost his taste for fatherhood. Maybe little girls were too trivial a thing anymore.

  The harder she tried to reconcile this behavior with the father she adored and had been missing, the more she felt uncertain that anything would continue to act as it should—her mother, for instance, or the sea, or stars, or the sun. And that made her angry. So. If he was not going to come back as promised and put her on his back and jump off Grayson’s dock, she would do it herself.

  That morning she had woken earlier than usual. It was barely light and the whip-poor-will was still lashing at the fog with her incessant call. Bobby had been crying. She knew she had because her pillow was wet. She put on her bathing suit instead of her shorts and climbed down so as not to chance meeting the housekeeper, Anna, who also got up very early. She ran down to the beach and across to the high dock and executed an impressive swan dive off the end. She skinned her arm on a boulder four feet beneath the surface and struck the side of her head. Very lucky that the rock was mostly covered in a thick mat of slippery seaweed. Still the crack sent lightning through her brain and she remembered a flash of a thought: “Ne pas s’évanouir! Do not pass out! You will drown!”

  Still, she was a very practical little girl and calm under all circumstances that had nothing to do with her father, and though she was out of her mind with grief and anger she really had not meant to kill herself. She struck the rock and lightning forked and all went black and then she found herself clawing for the surface where the fog was more luminous than the dark of the seabed, and she gulped water and air and choked and coughed and kept swimming until her feet scraped bottom and got cut on the barnacles and she somehow crawled onto the sand of their beach. She was choking and sobbing. She tried to get to her knees and threw up on the sand and lay back down. She curled up. She cried. Her father didn’t love her anymore. She had tried to prove that it didn’t really matter, that she could survive on her own, and evidently she couldn’t. She was a total failure. She sobbed. She couldn’t even cry because she kept choking. Where was she anyway? She hated America.

  Celine ran out of the fog and found her sister curled and bloody. With the flash of intuition she would come to rely on all her life, she understood the whole scene. She was precocious, too, in caring for fallen nestlings and stray cats, and she knew to put pressure on a bleeding wound. She did not panic. As soon as she saw her sister’s head she peeled off her shirt and pressed it against the cut that welled above Bobby’s left temple. “Même chose!” she said briskly to Mimi, who wanted only to be just like her big sister and who tugged off her own top, and Celine took the striped shirt and still holding pressure rolled it three times and wrapped it around Bobby’s head and tied it as tightly as she could.

  “Okay,” she said to Mimi in English. “Now run! Vite! Fetch Mummy!” Mimi ran back up the beach and vanished in the fog.

  Celine got off her knees and sat beside her crying sister and very gently lifted her head into her lap and stroked her bare shoulder. The fog moved in and out of itself slowly, and tiny waves lapped the sand. Peepers throbbed peacefully in the marsh, the foghorn moaned. Her sister cried quietly and trembled under her hand. Celine bent her head down as far as she could so that her hair hung in Bobby’s wet face and she murmured into her ear, “He still loves us. He does.”

  The next one to go to the hospital was Alfonse the gardener. Nobody liked him. The girls couldn’t understand why Gaga kept him on. He wore khaki coveralls that were stained with dirt and oil, and he coughed and spat, and he was mean. They said “Hello” and “Good Morning,” and he only scowled back. They spied on him sometimes from the dark shade under a stand of pines. They crept through the tall grass at the edge of the lawn like leopards. The light through the needled limbs broomed across their backs and they pretended they wore spots. They watched Alfonse pulling weeds. He yanked them out like he was mad at each one. There was a rumor that once he had had a wife and child, but that they had left, or died. The girls could see why they might have fled. Sometimes while they spied, he lifted his head and looked straight at them, his eyes narrow. Whoops. He also smoked a pipe when he was sitting alone in the shade of his toolshed in the afternoon. It stank. Sort of. He smoked and coughed and spat.

  A few days after Bobby’s accident, the sisters decided to go fishing. Another enticement their father had mentioned. They had hooks and sinkers and they needed worms. The three of them went into Alfonse’s shed looking for trowels to dig them up. They wrinkled their noses. The shed smelled of dirt and moss and maybe vanilla pipe tobacco. They had just found one rusty trowel when the doorway darkened with Alfonse’s bulky shadow. “What the hell,” he said. “You should ask me first.” They did not ask, they squeezed past him and bounded like startled deer and added his curse to their list of indictments. The next day Bobby said, “Let’s pull a prank—une farce—on the stupid man.” They were in the telephone closet off the pantry, under the stairs. There was a corkboard on the wall of the tiny room on which their grandparents had tacked important phone numbers. A half card of shiny thumbtacks lay on the shelf. Bobby picked it up and ordered, “Venez! Vite!” She still commanded allegiance despite the shaved patch on the side of her head and the twenty-three stitches.

  Alfonse had a small Harvester International tractor he used to mow the extensive lawns and to haul compost and straw. He parked it in a grove of maples in a simple lean-to at the lower end of the property. The girls walked the path as if they were going to the beach and veered off early and ran to the tractor shed. Bobby handed out the tacks—two each—like a resistance fighter handing out bullets. She asked Mimi if the coast were clear. Clear! Then she placed her tacks point-up on the tractor seat and nudged Celine. Celine made no decision but mimicked her older sister. Mimi did the same. Celine told Hank decades later that in the moment she set the tacks on the tractor seat she knew, or saw—she said it was just like seeing a night landscape in a flash of lightning—that the world was divided. “On one side is the good and just, on the other is the bad and cruel. That simple. I felt evil breathing on my neck and I went ahead. It was a charge, a thrill, like perhaps a shot of heroin is to some. I can imagine. I understood nothing about addiction, but I could feel that a person might seek that rush again. It was a great moral failure.”

  The next day the cook found Alfonse hanging from a beam beside his mute tractor.

  The third one to go to the hospital was Celine. At least she came back. Alfonse, of course, never did. The cook, Aggie, told the sisters one morning that Alfonse had indeed once had a wife and daughter and that they had died of tuberculosis. He had contracted it too but survived, though his lungs were weak, which was why he only smoked one pipe in the evening and was not in the army fighting the war. He had tried to enlist four times and they always discovered his frailty.

  Harry Watkins
, Celine’s father, had just now been at the breaking edge of the war. He had fled just before the Germans marched on Paris, had traded in his Hispano Suiza for a bicycle on the clogged roads, had pedaled up the shoulder of the highway carrying a large leather satchel of Morgan’s most important papers, and once out of Paris he had been hailed by a passing black Bentley sedan. “Harry Watkins, is that you? Get in! Get in!” It was the Spanish ambassador to France and he had Harry crouch on the floor of the rear compartment and they covered him with a travel rug and smuggled him across the border into Spain.

  A fitting, glamorous, and dashing end to the French chapter for this star hockey player from Williams, this legendary dancer. Harry was a man of action, not of words. When he got across to New York it was mid-July. He checked into the Yale Club, which was open to Williams men, and called his daughters. He was not calling his wife. What Baboo and Harry had to say to each other was written in an exchange of six letters, three each. Mimi answered the phone. She happened to be in the phone closet rifling through the umbrella stand in the corner looking for something she could turn into a parachute. Who knew what method she was devising for her own trip to the emergency room.

  “Papa!” she screamed. “Papa! Viens! Quand est-ce que tu viens?” Harry was not demonstrative, but he loved his daughters more, possibly, than anything in his world. That comes across in the letters to Baboo, which Celine finally read after her mother’s death. He and Baboo had swiftly come to terms. It was not only in their upbringing but also in the makeup of their temperaments that they would prefer death over making a scene. Whatever objections they each had to the final settlement—informally described in a few lines in their last letters—they swallowed. Baboo’s last inducement was to remind him of his duty to his children: I suppose you could come. We would all be together again one last time as a family. The girls, of course, would be beside themselves. They adore you; you are the brightest star in their firmament and I can only encourage you to do your upmost to maintain their affections and strengthen their love. I would not see them stunted. But I’m not sure, frankly, if I have the stamina, nor the necessary élan, to play the part. I fear it would all come crashing down in some horrible way that would scar everyone. And then there is the matter of where you would sleep.

  Now, on the phone, Harry asked Mimi if she had been swimming and she replied that oh, yes, she had, she had learned the crawl and could breathe to both sides and had won her race at the Hay Harbor Club. “J’ai gagné une médaille!” she crowed. He said he was very proud of her and that he loved her very much. “Please remember that,” he said.

  “Are either of your sisters nearby?” he asked.

  “Un moment—” He heard her scream for Bobby. He heard a muffled shout in response—he could picture his gangly eldest at the top of the stairs. “Papa!” Mimi cried back in answer. A beat, a shout, dropping in tone, then Mimi: “Papa…” A hesitation. “She said to tell you that she is indisposed.” Which was their code for using the bathroom.

  “How about Celine?” he managed to ask.

  “She is at the beach learning to sail with Gustav.”

  “Oh, good. Good. Well you tell them both how much I love them. Now I better hang up. I love you very very much. Remember when you breathe to keep your head down. Just turn it side to side as if it were on a pivot.”

  “Yes, I do! I do!” she said, hoping to keep him on a little longer. And the phone clicked off, and she heard the even note of the dial tone.

  Later, it would occur to her that certain dial tones and the flatlining of certain hearts sound almost the same.

  He did not call back. He did not talk to them for months, and then it was formal phone calls and meetings on birthdays, at Christmas. Only Baboo might have understood that the degree of his reticence masked the depth of his loss. He never did anything in his life halfway except for the upholding of his marriage vows, and he couldn’t figure out how to manage it. Also, he was a kinetic, physical person, not a man of conversation or verbal gestures. He had loved his daughters by doing things with them, and in a regimen of occasional weekend visits, he could never gather the momentum to make things go smoothly, or right. There was one attempt that November to take them all to the Central Park Zoo, which ended with long awkward silences and Bobby trying to feed her arm to the lions. He abdicated to Baboo. He probably felt it was less confusing for the girls, and less painful in the long run if they began their independence from their father earlier rather than later. He was probably also wrong.

  The morning of the call, Celine bounded out of the honeysuckle and bayberry bushes on the beach path to find out from an addled Mimi that their father had phoned from New York. Her younger sister was on the back lawn frowning down at a broken umbrella. Her face was swept alternately with excitement and confusion and fleeting sadness. Celine said she looked exactly like a windy hillside being swept by cloud shadows and sunlight. She knew her sister better than she knew her own reflection and instantly she panicked.

  “What? What?” she insisted. “Dis moi! Qu’est-ce que s’est passé?”

  “I don’t know,” Mimi said. “Papa called. He wanted to speak with you. I don’t know.” Mimi raised her eyes from the wrecked umbrella and met her sister’s gaze and burst into tears.

  Celine could not believe she missed the call. She charged into the house. Baboo was upstairs in her bedroom winding her magnificent dark hair before a triple mirror. Her hair had come from Gaga. Evidently she had known nothing about the call. The Thin Pink Line was already being drawn: Her daughters were beginning to search out an object of blame for the building absence of their father. But when Celine told her mother that she had missed her father’s phone call, Baboo’s face told enough of the story. The anger and grief there—worse: the confusion. Perhaps not for any other child of seven, but for Celine it spoke volumes.

  She tumbled down the stairs, clapped the screen door, and tore back down to the beach. The wind was up. Gustav, the sailing instructor, had gone back to Hay Harbor. The tiny catboat they had just used was pulled up on the beach and tied with cotton rope to a heavy driftwood log. Celine untied it and pushed the bow around, shoving it over the sand with all her strength and digging in with scrabbling feet like a rugby player in a scrum, and when it was pointed toward the water she went to the rope and put it over her shoulder and hauled it to the wet sand. The westerly wind was stiff and it blew her hair across her face. The green water of the shallows yielded quickly to serious dark blue, deep water, and out there the sound was choppy and the swell met the wind and raised whitecaps. She waited for a bigger wave to float the keelless boat and shoved again; then one more time on the next wave and the little boat was floating.

  She stood waist-deep, back to the small breakers, and was knocked by the waves as she yanked loose the ties that cinched the folded sail to the wooden boom, and she gave a great final push the way Gustav had showed her and leapt aboard the liberated dinghy. She picked up the varnished centerboard in both hands and knocked it down snug in its slot. The boat was rocking dangerously just at the edge of the little break and swinging sideways. She needed headway right now, so she made sure the sheet was free and hoisted the halyard and pushed away on the tiller with her hip, and it was just enough pressure to force the bow back into the swell. With the two of them sailing she had not realized how many things there were to do at once to launch her little boat. She had always hoisted the sail with the big Dutchman’s help and the weight of it surprised her, as well as the sudden living flapping of the canvas as it rose to the breeze. The boat had become a powerful living animal and it frightened her.

  But Celine was Celine. She had been working hard to learn to sail not just because she was drawn to open water and wildness and had always loved sea stories but because her father had promised to sail with her and she wanted badly to show him that she could skipper her own boat. The sail slapped and snapped violently, then fluttered as it rose, bellied an instant as the boom swung away, swung back, came taut and she cle
ated down the line fast like a pro and thought Sheet and tiller! and began stripping the slackline in fast while keeping the teak handle of the tiller away with her knee, and the sail caught and filled and the boom swung away and slammed hard against the sheet and the boat tipped up to starboard and lurched forward like a wild stallion released from a pen.

  In reflex she leaned back out of the shallow cockpit to counter and snugged the sheet down fast in the slot of the keeper and reached blindly for the tiller. She caught it and was surprised again at the living pressure against her palm as she forced the bow into the oncoming sea and leaned back. And was surprised at the loud slapping of the hull bounding against the chop, and the crash and lunge of spray as she hit a whitecap. She was doused and didn’t care. Still, she held the dinghy close to the wind. She tugged the sheet from the keeper and gripped it in her left hand. The little boat flew and pounded into the quartering swell. She was more terrified and more thrilled than she had ever been in her life, and she was heading for the open black water of the sound.

  Celine was far enough into the channel to make out Las Armas and Grayson’s dock and the line of other houses in their clearings on the low ridge, and see Simmons Point and beyond it the open Atlantic. She knew what she had to do to come about, to fall off the wind and slow and head back, but she couldn’t make herself go through the motions. She had clung to the mane of a runaway horse in Blois and it felt the same. Except she wanted this. Part of her did. To sail away from everything that had to do with her father leaving them. When the gust hit and threw the upwind gunwale to the sky and burned the sheet through her palm and launched her from the cockpit she cried his name.