Celine

by Peter Heller

  But it wasn’t for love that he was coming back to his old high school. Or not love only. It was to find his sibling. He knew that there were two male teachers who had taught both him and his mother. He’d start there.

  Hank was shy about showing up on campus when there was still a class of kids that knew him, so he avoided the hilltop cluster of clapboard buildings and went straight to the house of Bob and Libby Mills, on Lower Farm Road. It was a blustery day in late October, biting cold, and he walked across a small farmyard matted with wet maple leaves. He climbed the slate front steps of a tight red clapboard house and knocked. Bob was an unlikely suspect, for, like Pete, he was a coastal Mainer who spent too much time cutting firewood and in a canoe to trouble his life with the shallower pleasures of sin. He also seemed to have a wonderful marriage. They seemed, the two, to be real best friends. He remembered once splitting cordwood with the biology teacher and Bob telling how he and Libby had taken their honeymoon on the Allagash. It was a weeks-long canoe trip through the Maine woods, and at the time river runners were required to hire a registered Maine guide. Their man was Calvin C. Beal. One night they camped at the head of a small rapid and climbed the ridge behind. Big views north and east. Bob said, “Hey, Calvin, what is that mountain just there, with the rocky top?” “Owl Peak,” said Calvin. “And what about that far range there?” Calvin thought for a second and murmured, “Don’t know.” A few more considered seconds later, he said, “Nobody knows.”

  Bob said he and Libby had to have a coughing fit to keep from embarrassing the old guide. That was the kind of man Bob Mills was, the kind who fought every day to preserve other people’s dignity, not erode it, and so Hank did not think he would be the father, but he might know something. He knocked on the green door and waited on the stoop and when it opened there was a tall handsome woman, maybe thirty, wearing a flour-powdered apron and chopsticks stuck in her thick hair to keep it up. Hank almost stumbled back. There was something about the intelligence and curiosity in her dark eyes, something about the strong ridge of her nose, and her palpable kindness, that reminded him instantly of his mother. And she would be about the right age. But no, he must have sisters on the brain, because that would be impossible, ridiculously implausible at best, and so he stammered, “I…I was looking for Bob and Libby.”

  Broad smile. “Another acolyte? And former student? There seems to be a stream.”

  Even the lilt of her voice. No way. She saw his confusion, misread it. “Sorry!” she said. “How presumptuous. God. You probably have some other business I can’t imagine.” She put out a work-roughened hand that, he noticed, was stuck with bits of kneaded flour. He also noticed that he was in love. Which couldn’t be good. “Leah. Bob and Libby are on sabbatical in Sweden. Would you like to come in? I’m just making bread.” Of course she was. He stammered his thanks and turned to flee. Then it occurred to him: He stopped, turned back.

  “Are you a…a friend?”

  “Niece,” she said brightly. “I’m visiting from Blue Hill.” She smiled. “You don’t have to run away. I’m sorry for being such a prig.”

  Oh yes, he did—have to run away. Even the way she talked…he ran. Actually skidded on the wet leaves as he spun the car back up the road.

  So, was the start to his search auspicious or inauspicious? He wasn’t sure. He was rattled. It reminded him of those lines in “Journey of the Magi.” The wise kings come a long way to witness the divine birth and the one speaking says, There was a Birth, certainly…I had seen birth and death, / But had thought they were different…

  Next stop: The young art teacher he never quite liked. Young when Celine was at school, only twenty-five to her fifteen. Late fifties now. But one of those men who never gets over being twenty-something. Taut, tan face, wearing a silk scarf like the French—how ridiculous in Vermont—and a beret! Not like Celine who always looked as if she’d been born with it, but like a poseur of the first degree—and who fancied himself a New England nouveau impressionist, whatever that was. Hank found the man in his studio at the bottom of Putney Mountain. When he opened the door he looked at Hank with dawning recognition, and with a predator’s eyes, eyes that measured him immediately on a scale called What Can You Do for Me? How Can You Feed Me? Hank wanted badly to make this brief. He did not have a true investigator’s mettle. He said he was back just for the afternoon, he was at Dartmouth doing a family memoir on Putney, and if Mr. Surrey remembers, his mother had attended Putney, too—when Surrey was just beginning his career there, did he remember her? Could he tell Hank anything? If a shadow moved in the man’s eyes, Hank could not distinguish it from the other secrets there.

  Surrey sat Hank at a table covered in dried and spattered paint and made him tea. Predators, Hank thought, are usually lonely. The loneliness of the hunter. “Of course I remember her,” he said. “She was one of the most talented students I have ever had. Is she…” The man slid the bowl of sugar cubes to him and Hank registered the copper and leather bracelets, the two silver rings. The collared shirt whose top buttons were open one button too many. Well, vanity is not a crime.

  “Yes, she’s alive and well.”

  “Is she painting?”

  Hank bristled. He did not, he realized, want to talk about his mother with this man. He felt protective. Well. “She’s a sculptor. Very talented.” Hank thought he saw the man stiffen. Maybe with the knowledge that there was yet another competitor out there.

  “How wonderful. Now what would you like to know?”

  “I gather she was a very passionate art student. She has attributed that many times to your brilliant mentorship.” The man blinked, almost visibly puffed. Hank had inherited his mother’s social antennae and he knew how to hit home.

  “Well…” Surrey mumbled.

  “She has never had a more brilliant teacher ever, is what she said. In anything. Was she a serious student? Did she stay after class? Or take the evening activity?”

  “Oh, she did both, often.” The man’s guard was completely down, obliterated by one small volley of flattery. “Often she would even stay after the evening activity and I would have to remind her of In-Dorms. I mean, if she didn’t get back to her dorm by ten, there would be trouble with the dorm head.”

  “I remember,” Hank said.

  “Of course. But sometimes she would come back. She was that committed to her work. Amazing, really. She would check in with the dorm and then sneak back out. If she were very involved with a certain painting. More than once I caught her in the studio after In-Dorms, working God knows how late into the night. I never said anything, of course. Only another artist can know what a taskmaster the muse can be. Yes, she was quite special.” The man’s eyes did something that approached misting over, and Hank felt nauseous. Maybe the tea on an empty stomach.

  “Did you ever help her, I mean one artist to another, late at night? I mean as the only other person on campus who would truly understand the workings of creative brilliance?”

  “Yes, we understood that. We had that bond. I would help her sometimes, of course. Once or twice at night I would work beside her on my own canvas, to, you know, inspire her.”

  I bet, thought, Hank. Inspire or impregnate. Jesus. He hoped against hope.

  “Did she…I mean, do you think—you were such a force, brilliant, probably a genius artist in your own right—do you think she might have fallen in love with you?”

  The man touched his hair unconsciously, yes, it was still in place, still looked debonair, a bit messy, a bit bohemian. He seemed flustered, torn maybe between discretion and braggadocio. What a fool. “Well, who can say. Yes, maybe. She probably was. Probably was…” The man seemed lost in memory and Hank had to fight not to bolt the many-windowed room.

  “Did she…did she ever try to kiss you?”

  Surrey came out of his reverie, and his feline eyes refocused on Hank. As they did, he seemed to understand the snare he’d almost walked into, and who, actually, the boy in front of him was. He snapped back into his
former tautness.

  “How ridiculous,” he said curtly. “She was my student. Was there anything else?”

  Hank knew the door to further inquiry had been slammed shut and he was happy to leave. “No, thanks,” Hank said. “You’ve been super helpful. I’ll call if there’s anything else that occurs to me.”

  “Please do,” Surrey said dryly and showed him out.

  The third stop was the most unexpected and perhaps most helpful. He drove his ten-year-old Toyota truck down the back road to Dummerston and reveled in the windy sunshine and the leaves blowing out of the woods in gusts that stuck to the hood. He stopped one farm shy of the Aiken Farm, at a small farmhouse that had once been white and was now weathered to gray wood, whose pastures were once mowed and were now grown with milkweed and blackberry. The curtains were pulled in all the windows, but there was a long, low-slung old Lincoln in the yard and so he knocked. A very old man with a two-day white bristle opened the door. Clean flannel shirt tucked into high-belted khaki jeans. Rheumy blue eyes.

  “Mr. Grey? Ed Grey?”

  “Eh-yuh.”

  “My name is Hank. I went to the Putney School, as did my mother. I am doing a project. I heard you were the farmer between ’42 and ’71—”

  “Seventy-two.”

  “I see—”

  “Bum leg why I didn’t go to the war. Tried nine times.”

  “I see—do you remember my mother, Celine Watkins?”

  The man tilted his head. Hank could almost see the name working through a nest of copper tubes, like in an old still. “I do,” said the man. Hank was taken aback. How many students had worked on the farm over the decades? Hank had to remind himself again that very few people ever forgot Celine Watkins, even, he was discovering, when she was just a child. “Coltish was how you’d call her. Legs went to her neck and there weren’t much between. Had a lamb if I recall correctly.”

  “Yes! Yes, she did!” Astonishing, the elephant memories of the very old.

  “She had a thing for that milk-house boy.”

  “Milk-house boy?”

  “The one that run the dairy those years. Not much older’n she was. Slip of a kid. Good worker. Real quiet.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Silas Cooper-Ellis. Shyest kid I ever met.”

  Hank gawped for words. “What happened to him?” he got out, finally. “Do you know?”

  “Killed in Korea. Second week. Saddest thing. Went to the funeral in Sandwich.”

  “New Hampshire?”

  “Yep. He lies there. That pretty cemetery looks to Chocorua. You know it?”

  “No, no I don’t. Thank you so much.”

  “Any time.” The retired farmer blinked reflexively at the sky over the woods across the road. “Snow,” he murmured. “Can taste it.” And he rubbed his eyes with his palm, as if trying to wipe away all the work still left to do before the real snows came.

  TWENTY

  The truck groaned on its springs and bucked their heads into the roof. Celine pushed the Toyota to the end of an unmaintained logging road. Chicksaw lived in a shithole. The “house” may have started as a single-wide but it had been chopped up more than once. And added to with logs and steel framing and plywood. A car windshield had been framed in for a picture window. The front door itself must have been salvaged from a school—it had a push-bar latch. They pulled into the dirt turnaround with their windows down and could hear loud yelping and howls. The door jerked open and Chicksaw stepped onto the pallet porch with a shotgun. A small beagle shot out of the gap and jumped down to the dirt and began to bay. The man spoke to it sharply and it hopped back up to his side and sat, tail thumping the porch.

  Chicksaw was tiny, maybe five foot three, with a long gray beard like an elf. Skinny. He was the most elfin man Celine had ever seen. They hadn’t meant to surprise him: They tapped the horn half a dozen times before they even got to the yard. He held the gun in one hand and shielded his eyes with the other. When Celine stepped out of the truck in her short Austrian felt jacket and beret, with her gold bracelets and almost every finger bejeweled with rings, his hand dropped and his face betrayed raw skepticism—as if this might be a practical joke. Or some Publishers Clearing House scam. Celine stepped carefully around dried mud cakes in her Italian calfskin boots and waved a hand at him like an old friend she’d spotted on the beach-club veranda. Pete got out a little stiffly and zipped up his barn coat and settled his tweed newsboy cap into its nest of tufts. Gave a straight-across Maine smile.

  Elbie Chicksaw had seen a lot of strange things step into clearings in Montana—once he had seen a bull moose with a goshawk perched on his rack, riding it like a mobile hunting platform—but this might take the cake. He set the shotgun against the doorframe and dug a pair of thick wire-rimmed grandpa glasses out of a breast pocket and looped them over one ear then the other and squinted. For a tracker his eyesight was terrible. He crossed his arms like a jinni and waited.

  When Celine and Pete got within fifteen feet of the man they stopped. “Helloo,” Celine called in her best Hail the Natives register. Elbie couldn’t take it anymore. He started to laugh. It erupted out of him and his little frame shook like one of the leaves in the aspen at the edge of the yard. “For fuck’s sake,” he managed to blurt in a voice like a truck dumping gravel. “Who the fuck are you?”

  Celine blinked. This man had clearly not been to finishing school, or maybe any school. He probably inverted his fork when he ate, if he used a fork at all. “The question seems a bit vulgar,” she said. “Maybe you’d like to reconsider your greeting.” Elbie took off the glasses he had just put on and cleaned them with the tail of his dirty flannel shirt. He blinked back.

  “Sorry. I meant to say, ‘Where the fuck did you all beam in from?’ You’re not going to give me shit now for ending a sentence with a preposition?”

  Ahh, Celine thought, a diamond in the rough. There seemed to be a lot of those in Wyoming and Montana. She cocked her head and studied the tracker with her squinty-eye-bird look. “Where’s the library at, asshole?” she murmured.

  Which set Elbie off into another fit. “Right! Right!” he breathed. “The Harvard upperclassman with argyle socks! Damn! Fuckin’ hell!”

  Celine tugged her wallet out of her front jean pocket and opened it to her license card. “Celine Watkins, private eye. This”—she motioned to Pete—“I mean he, is Pete, my Watson and my husband. Actually, I may be his Watson, but no one would know because he doesn’t say much.”

  Elbie widened his eyes at the new information and let another gust of laughter run through him. “Oh, God,” he breathed. He replaced his glasses and opened three old-school aluminum lawn chairs that were leaning against the indeterminate siding. “Sit,” he said. “You’ve clearly come a long fucking way. I’d invite you in but it’s Tuesday and the cleaning ladies are wreaking havoc.”

  They sat. Elbie broke some dry sticks from a stack on one end of his makeshift porch and piled them with some crumpled Red Lodge Advertisers into an oversize semitruck hubcap and lit the pyre. As the flames licked and rose he held his hands over them and rubbed them together. Fun, thought Celine. We can pretend we’re homeless right here on the porch. A little like pitching a tent in the backyard.

  He tapped a Camel unfiltered out of a hard pack and offered it around, then took it himself and lit it on a burning twig. He coughed once, hawked and spat, and said, “What can I do you?”

  She had to admit it was pleasant sitting around the fire in the shelter of the man’s porch with a few dry snowflakes blowing onto the planks. Chicksaw seemed to be pieced together like his shack, which was growing on her. The place looked haphazard, but on closer inspection everything seemed to have a function. The fifty-five-gallon drum at the east corner, for instance, which caught water from a guttered rainspout. The scrap-lumber framework on the other side of the porch, which she thought at first might be a lattice for vines but then realized was where he tacked out and stretched his hides. There was a beaver
hide under the eave, drying right now. She recognized the fur from one of Baboo’s stoles.

  The same for the man: If he’d been a quilt it would look at first glance very primitive, even crazy in its pattern. But study it a little closer and one might see some fine stitching and some very curious patches. Celine began almost immediately to revise her first assessment of his education. He had clearly been to some school somewhere. The closer she listened to his fitful outbursts, the more she thought: College. Yes, definitely. Then: English lit. Then: Northeast somewhere. Then: Ivy League, probably. Ending a brief discourse on the inevitability of corrupt law enforcement, he said, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” At one point he said that winter in Red Lodge was “colder than Winter frigging Carnival.” Finally, being Celine, she interrupted him and asked point-blank, in French, if he had studied comparative literature under Professor John Rassias at Dartmouth. Chicksaw’s cigarette fell from his mouth into the fire. Stopped him cold. It was either the precision of the question or the perfect, even beautiful French.

  “Ouais, ouais,” he said in the vernacular, on the inhale, like a true Frenchman. He smiled and pouted his lips and assumed a completely different persona. Pete said it was like watching a brown octopus pass over a bed of green coral and almost disappear. “C’était réellement un maître, ce professeur. Un vrai don du ciel pour éclairer la littérature française classique, Molière, Racine, Voltaire. Vraiment.” Deep sigh. “Requiescat in pace,” he added, shifting smoothly into Latin. Celine was surprised he didn’t cross himself. Damn. What a weird world. Wonderful, really.

  “What bothered you about the disappearance of Paul Lamont?” she asked abruptly, also in French.