Celine

by Peter Heller

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “may I have a receipt for breakfast.” Celine could see the restaurant copies skewered on a spindle by the register.

  “Didn’t I give you one?” sighed the waitress. “It’s been one of those mornings. My littlest kept me up all night with stomach pains.”

  “Is she eating enough fruit?” Celine said. She looked carefully at the girl’s face. Young forties, a bit too young. It was a habit to study all women who might have been born in 1948. Anyway, her bone structure was all wrong.

  “Come to think of it,” the woman said, “she eats zero fruit. If it’s not a Cocoa Puff or a chicken finger it’s a flying object.”

  “Well.”

  “Hold on, I’ll print you out another.”

  Celine leaned on the counter and slid a box of charity Life Savers to the edge on the waitress’s side and then nudged it over. It hit the floor with a clatter. “Oh!” the waitress cried. “Oh, terribly sorry!” Celine countered. The woman bent to gather up the candy packets and Celine leaned over again, twisted the spindle of receipts in her fingers until the top one was readable and quickly snapped three photos of it with her camera. While the woman was still crouched and showing her broad back, Celine calmly reviewed the pictures, frowned, and on second thought simply snagged the receipt off the skewer and put it in her jacket pocket.

  “There,” the waitress said cheerfully, setting the box back in its place. “If the day keeps going like this I’ll need a straitjacket by lunch.”

  “I found it,” Celine sang, brashly holding up the man’s ticket, and placing a thumb over the hole. “My bad.” She gave the girl her movie-star smile, overpaid for a box of stale Life Savers, and went out the door.

  Pa was impressed. “Why didn’t you just take a picture of it with your camera?” he asked as they approached the gate at the south entrance to Yellowstone. A short line of five cars was ahead of them.

  Celine sucked the candy in her mouth. “I did, but the color was terrible. And what if you dropped my camera in the cat dish?” Ouch. He had done that a month ago with his new mini Canon—out of his breast pocket and into Big Bob’s water dish. Big Bob weighed no less than thirty-two pounds. He was presently at the Cat Hotel in Red Hook, where he was a celebrity.

  “William Tanner,” Celine said, reading again the man’s breakfast receipt. “An alias if I ever heard one. Not a real name, not possibly. His generation are all named Jacob. We’ll have to do a search. Do you think Cooke City even has Internet?”

  Pete now understood that her bathrobe visit that morning, and the maternal stuff about the man tailing them not getting a good breakfast, was all about getting to a restaurant and obtaining his name. For the ten thousandth time he marveled at the wits of his wife. But then again, he thought, she probably was truly concerned about the young hunter’s caloric intake.

  FOURTEEN

  Celine had learned these skills looking for her own child. Hank had suspected it all his adult life, but was wary about ever asking his mother again. And then Aunt Bobby came home from the hospital with her brain tumor to die. What she told him before she passed was that Celine had always been the one to hold the family together. It was often the role of the middle child.

  “She always kept her wits about her,” Bobby said. The eldest sister lay comfortably in a hospital bed in the living room of their stone house outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where her husband, David, was the president of a large regional bank. Celine had gone to the store to get Bobby’s favorite ice cream, Rum Raisin, which was all she felt like eating. Hank had flown out from Denver to say goodbye to his aunt. They were close. His junior year of high school, when his mother was in a particularly rough place with her drinking, Hank had stayed with Bobby and his cousins for winter break and then half of the summer. His aunt was not sentimental, she had strict rules that she enforced fairly, and he had grown to appreciate the unspoken consistency of her love. Of the three sisters, he thought she was most like Baboo—in her self-discipline, in her reflexive rebellions at convention. She kept her hair short, right at the collar; and she had the strong Watkins nose and jawline, but her features seemed a little harder than her sisters’.

  Bobby was in no pain, not more than a headache, and she was lucid if exhausted. Always no-nonsense and practical, she now had a softness about her Hank had never seen. “Celine had to be strong, I guess,” she said. “I was usually off in my own world and she felt she needed to take care of Mimi. She practically raised her. During all of our growing up, nothing really could derail her except Papa leaving. And losing that child.”

  Hank was sure she had not seen the jolt that zinged through him. She was gazing out the window to the wide lawn that ran to the line of old maples and oaks that strung along the brook. What he’d noticed at the end: this reaching back. He’d seen it with Baboo and he’d seen it with Mimi. In the final slow dance with Death there were the long looks over his shoulder. Why wouldn’t there be? Hank was not a cunning person but he let a beat go by and said, “The child she had to give up at Putney?”

  “She told you? Good, I shouldn’t have mentioned it.” Hank didn’t answer. Her eyes were vague, and still on something beyond the summer stream. “It was afterward. After. She took a year off to have it. It was a Christmas baby. Same birthday as Mimi. Isn’t that strange?”

  “Nothing seems strange anymore.”

  She turned her head and her eyes found his and regained their focus. “Amen,” she said.

  Over the next few days Bobby told him the story: about Celine seeing the doctor, about Mrs. Hinton and Baboo and Admiral Bill, about Celine leaving school. And coming back. She wanted to tell it, needed to. It was as if Bobby were trying to lighten herself for the big trip across the water. She told it in the pieces she could tell when Celine was not in the room, which was often enough. The younger sister was often in Bobby’s back office, on the phone with doctors and hospice, or out picking up ice cream and medicine. Hank never got the sense that Bobby felt she was betraying her sister, but rather that she was bringing into relief the difficulty of the decisions Celine had had to make and the almost heroic stoicism with which she made them. At such a young age. But Hank knew as she told the story that Celine had been less stoic than true to her own ideal of protecting the vulnerable and blaming no one and burdening as few people as possible. In this there was true grace. Bobby repeated that her younger sister would never ever betray the identity of the father. Which made him think that this must have been someone vulnerable too. Had it been a teacher, say, exploiting a student, Celine would have given no quarter and forced him to take responsibility. Hank thought that his mother, like her own mother, had an infallible sense of what was right and what ought and ought not to be done. Leaving a predatory teacher free to victimize another young girl was definitely in the Ought Not To category.

  So as Hank spelled Celine and sat with Bobby in the elegant sitting room with the prints of hunters and hounds and the stone hearth with the unlit fire laid on brass dogs and the sashed windows open to the screens and the sounds of July crickets—as he sat and watched his aunt sleep, his imagination traveled again back to that Vermont ridge in early spring where he and his mother had both gone to school: patched snow over mud, the first shoots of brazen grass; the weathered clapboard houses needing paint, smell of wet earth and leaf rot—the students on the paths between buildings, one group stopping to talk to a teacher in a plaid wool coat who carries five books—Hank’s own mind scanning, scanning for the culprit. Who would it be? Who would Celine never betray? Someone also vulnerable and at risk, not necessarily young nor old, but essentially innocent, as she was. Would it be another student? Maybe. A teacher? Maybe. But if a teacher, that man would carry a frailty or tenderness that would not withstand exposure. He would need, for some reason, more protection than she did. Celine worked every morning on the farm and came back in the afternoons to care for a lamb. Could it be the older farmer who carried the sadness of a widower? The skinny local boy who ran the e
arly milking?

  Who, when she returned to school, did she now studiously avoid? Whose eyes met hers and flickered away as she navigated the flagstone walk between the library and the science building?

  Did the father of her child even know or suspect? Did he wonder at the sudden breaking off?

  In the end maybe all that mattered was that she carried the child and labored and gave birth and gave it up. Was it a boy or a girl? Did Hank have a brother or a sister?

  He had asked Bobby about the boating accident, too. She came alive at the memory. She pushed the button on the motorized bed and brought herself up. Her smile made her younger. The blood flowed to her cheeks.

  She said, “Do you remember when you were staying with us and you and Ted ran the canoe over the dam and nearly killed yourselves?”

  Hank grinned. Ted was Bobby’s third son and a good friend growing up. Hank was smiling but it still contracted his guts, the memory of being recycled again and again in the hydraulic below the weir, knowing he was going to die.

  “Remember how mad I got?”

  Hank nodded.

  “Well, you come by it honestly. I’m about to tell you another story about your mother. You know you guys destroyed your grandfather’s handmade canvas canoe.”

  “Sorry.” He reached out and held her thin hand.

  “You heard about me diving off the dock?” she said.

  “Everybody is eager to tell everyone else’s story.”

  A shadow crossed her face. “You heard about the gardener? Alfonse?”

  He nodded.

  “Oh boy.”

  He waited.

  “It was my idea,” she said. He nodded. “I have prayed and prayed about it. Not just what I did to the poor man but that I enlisted my little sisters in what is tantamount to murder.” She reached for her sippy cup and took a long suck of apple juice. He noticed that the cup trembled as she set it down. “You know, your mother and I were brought up to believe in Hell.”

  “Baboo told me that Gaga had her baptized Catholic. Which scandalized the Cheneys. Do you believe in it now?”

  “Certain Hells, definitely.” She turned to the window. On the lawn were three deer grazing as if they owned the place. The one buck was a spike, just a year old. When hunting season came he would not be a legal take. Reprieve.

  “I don’t think you murdered the man. It was a prank. At that point anything could have set him off. He had already relinquished any shred of happiness.”

  “Is that the point? Happiness?”

  Hank didn’t say anything because he didn’t know. She turned her face to him and said, “Sometimes now I think just making it through a day is the point. Practically a triumph, don’t you think? If you don’t melt down or kill anyone or just give up? If you happen to be kind, or help someone else, or create something beautiful, well, you’ve really done something to crow about.”

  He squeezed her hand. Bobby had been a fine-arts photographer and he thought some of her pictures were magnificent. There was a self-portrait reflected in the stainless shine of the back of a toaster oven—herself holding the camera of course—that he thought was one of the best portraits of an artist he had ever seen. Something about how the object tried to stretch and bend her figure—did bend it—and how beautiful and intent she was anyway. There was a metaphor there about what the imagination does to the world, and what the world does back to it, but he wasn’t sure what it was. She looked bemused at his laughter. “You will get a blue ribbon,” he said. “What an artist you are.”

  “I will meet the man,” she said. “I don’t have a doubt in the world. We can shish kebab our toes together.” She said it lightly and he knew she wasn’t joking.

  “Don’t you think,” Hank said at last, “that children get a certain dispensation? Limbo, wasn’t it? Green meadows and sadness.”

  “No,” she said. “Children always take the brunt.”

  Bobby asked for some tea, green tea, weak, in a real teacup, and joked about what life had come to when all you wanted was green tea. She had been a devotee of single malt scotch before she quit drinking and enjoyed an occasional cigar. Not a cheroot, either, but a robust Churchill or torpedo. Which men found slightly terrifying, also sexy. It was how she met David—smoking on the balcony of a wedding party. He had not been intimidated at all but approached her, leaned against the railing, and lit up his own Partagas. They smoked in silence for a couple of minutes, enjoying the surprising lacuna and relishing their smokes, when Bobby finally said, “Trade you.” And they swapped cigars and were married ten months later.

  Hank brought her the tea. Celine was out on her longest errand, which was grocery shopping for the next few days. She wouldn’t be back for a while.

  “You asked me about her sailing escapade?” Bobby said, setting down her cup.

  “Yes.”

  “It was the afternoon she found out—or maybe she intuited it, I’m not sure. But in any event she knew that Mummy’s marriage with Papa was truly over.”

  “Right.”

  “I won’t say she was impulsive. She was, we all were. Diving off the dock into shallow water was impulsive. Ha. With Celine, the mot juste might be intractable. She got an idea in her head and she was damn headstrong. But the ideas always had a certain, I don’t know—rigor. She didn’t just fly off. There was always a certain poetic logic to whatever your mother dreamed up.”

  “I get that.”

  “This had something to do with Harry promising to take her sailing, but also the idea that one might be able to sail to another land where fathers and mothers stayed together always. She ran down to the beach and launched the catboat. You know she’d been taking lessons with this fabulously handsome Dutchman. We all thought he was.”

  Hank had poured himself a cup of her green tea, and he raised an eyebrow over the rim of the cup.

  “He was terribly serious. He hadn’t a clue. Why did your mother and I sometimes simply stare at Gustav like rabbits when we were supposed to be trimming the sail or coming about? He thought we were terrified.” She laughed, the hoarse constrained laugh Hank hadn’t heard in a while. “Well, of course we were! Terrified we might miss a single ripple of his countless muscles! Or that profile! Those hands! God. He had no idea. Which drove us even more wild. He got very stern when we spaced out. He thought we needed more backbone. ‘Sailing,’ he would say, ‘is serious business!’ That was his motto.”

  She took a long thirsty sip and managed to spill very little. “He was the most single-task person I’ve ever met. Wonderful—an absolute absence, completely, of any sense of humor. Made him very safe.” She smiled as if she regretted it.

  “Despite these distractions, Celine was a quick study. She sailed three times a week, and by the time of the accident she was mostly skippering and he was teaching her the finer points of tack and trim. Amazing for a seven-year-old, but then she was always surprisingly strong. She had just had a lesson and she ran down to the beach and managed to get the little boat into the water and the sail up. There was quite a blow on the sound. It was why Gustav had cut their lesson short. She headed northeast for open water and rounded Simmons Point and was making her way onto the wide Atlantic. Imagine. I wonder if she were planning to sail to Greenland.” Bobby shook her head. “Refractory, that’s the word. Eliot uses it about the camels.”

  Hank remembered again how erudite all three sisters were. Bobby had attended Vassar, like her mother, and majored in comparative literature. She dropped out when she married David. A lawn mower started up from the other side of the house, muffled, a comforting summer sound.

  “Of course she’d been pushing her luck from the outset. It’s a wonder she even got the sail up and the boat under control. She capsized. A rogue gust I think. She had the presence of mind to hold fast to the sheet. She hauled in on it and pulled herself back to the boat. She actually tried to right it the way Gustav had taught her, standing on the upwind chine and hauling back on the halyard—amazing. The grit. But she didn’t
have the weight or the strength. On a quieter day she might have managed it, nothing ever surprises me when it comes to your mother.”

  Bobby suddenly looked very sad, and Hank wondered if it was because she was feeling how much she’d soon miss her sister.

  She smiled. “If there hadn’t been the Round the Island Regatta that day, I am certain you wouldn’t exist. They came around the point while she was flailing with the mast. As luck would have it, the life jacket she was supposed to be wearing was clipped to the boat and it was bright orange. A Mae West from the war. I think they were the reason Admiral Bill would never go sailing with any of us in the years after: because he couldn’t look at that life jacket. It reminded him of all the sailors he’d left behind in the water.

  “In any event, though she was close to a mile off their course she unclipped the jacket and stood up on the wallowing hull using the halyard for balance, and she waved in the lead sloop. Heavens!

  “After the lead boat turned they must have all wondered what the hell had gotten into him, and then they must have seen her, too. At the time a rescue must have seemed more glamorous than winning the race. I wish so much I’d have seen it, the line of thirty-odd sloops and yawls and ketches falling off the wind in a graceful turn and running down on little sister. It wasn’t a class race, it was just for fun. It was Jib Rafferty in the lead. Very dashing, a redhead like all his clan. He literally scooped her up. Took one look at the skinny shivering girl, made her put on his itchy sweater, and said, ‘You are a Cheney, not a doubt in my mind. I know right where you belong.’ He had grown up with Baboo, after all. I guess we have a certain look. He towed the dinghy and dropped her off at the beach at Las Armas. The Rafferty place was just two docks south. They called the race and everybody anchored off and they had a party that afternoon and night that went down in island history.”