Peter Heller - Celine

No one realizes the power or extent of the aristocracy in America; it exists and holds enormous sway despite the inroads of all the techy, sneaker-wearing New Money. Celine was born into it. Fourteen of the governors of the Plymouth Colony were her ancestors, and their families had continued to consolidate and expand their power for more than three centuries. They summered on Nantucket and Fishers and Islesboro, Maine; their sons and daughters attended Ivy League colleges and had careers with Big Banks and Big Oil and the International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve; and the most daring and radical of their children became artists and filmmakers or worked for the Nature Conservancy, and these were everyone’s favorite cousins and nieces and were endowed with a certain mystical reverence—they were not so much the black sheep of the family as special children who were indulged like the shamans of other cultures who only walk backward. Celine was one of these. Perhaps even farther afield than most. She was not exactly an outcast, but she had deliberately stepped out of the fold, and so she could see it with an outsider’s perspicuity.

It had begun with her mother, Barbara. She had done something unheard of in her society during the war: Soon after returning to New York from Paris just before its occupation, she had set in motion the divorce from her husband, Harry, who was the father of her three daughters. And then almost as soon as the Japanese surrendered, she had taken up with Fleet Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey Jr., the five-star admiral who had commanded the Pacific’s Third Fleet and is considered by some to be the greatest fighting admiral America has ever had. They became lovers while he was still married—horrors!—and though Halsey’s wife was committed for life into what was then called an insane asylum, he would never divorce her. He visited her once a month until his death.

Complicated. Her children called Barbara “Mummy,” but Hank and everyone else called her Baboo. WASPs have these names. Every year Baboo brought her three daughters to Fishers Island for a long summer season. Admiral Bill joined them. He was there, ostensibly, to visit his daughter who also had a house on the island, and he always kept a room at the club to keep up appearances, but everyone knew. Three and a half months, early June through the middle of September, and they repeated this sojourn for the next fourteen years, until his death. It was a longer stretch of summer than almost anyone else ever took, and it was because the island was a partial sanctuary, away from the more codified strictures of New York. On the island, in the summer, with the sound of waves heard through the screens of almost any house, and the weather sweeping in from the Atlantic with winds that flattened the dune grass and dusty miller, and thrashed the bayberry and squalled rain against the cedar shingles of the roofs, well. Certain allowances were made for the unpredictability of nature, both human and maritime, and people were generally more forgiving and relaxed. It didn’t hurt, either, that Baboo was almost universally adored. She had been the wild sister, the heavenly dancer, the legendary waltzer, the mischievous joker, the girl who had swum from Simmons Point to Ty Whitney’s dock, around the Race. Her father, Charles Cheney, had founded the Fishers Island Country Club for God’s sake. But. Well. Baboo’s domestic realignments were more than the idiosyncratic decisions of a well-bred young woman who had always been seen as warm-blooded. (Her mother, Mary Bell, was from California, after all, Santa Barbara, and had Spanish ancestry mixed with those flinty Scots.) Baboo’s decisions were more than peccadilloes; they were tectonic transgressions: She had initiated a divorce while her husband was still in Paris trying to safeguard Morgan Bank’s assets from the advancing Nazis. And then only five years later she took up with a professional soldier. Well, he was a five-star admiral, one of the towering commanders of the Pacific fleet, who stood beside General MacArthur on the USS Missouri at the Japanese surrender. Celine had the famous photo signed by Admiral Nimitz and the others. But Halsey was a bit rough-hewn and Not Our Class, Dear. NOCD, the mildly uttered and searing brand, always casually tossed off, one of the most vicious and eviscerating curses most people have never heard of. A final judgment of relative inferiority that no store of accomplishments or merit or even wealth can ever wipe away. Ludicrous. Halsey had the inborn class and dignity one would expect of a great commander, and he had more courage and native intelligence than almost any man alive.

Baboo was still invited to the parties and the clam bakes, still brought her famous fried chicken and deviled eggs to the beach picnics, was still held in certain awe: She was the scion of the family that had founded the club and had lived a life abroad that was so dazzling and glamorous not even Hollywood could have done it justice. She was still adored, but from a certain distance now, as one would a colorful fish behind glass. She continued to command the devotion of friends who would never forsake her—Ginnie Ackerman, Ty Whitney, Penny Williams. But a subtle coolness overtook her, an almost imperceptible shouldering to the colder outer edges of the inner circle in which she had grown up. No one on earth is better at death by a thousand slights than the WASP aristocracy of the East Coast. Or death by very gradual hypothermia. It can be delivered in the most nuanced tone of voice: the barest lift into the next octave when speaking of personal matters, of, say, the troubles of someone else’s family—most listeners wouldn’t notice it. But it means the loss of the most natural and intimate lower register, the one reserved for only the most trusted cohort. The omission—Oh dear, how could I have forgotten?—of an invitation to a daughter’s wedding in Delaware. It was, it could feel like, the most devastating fall from grace. A woman of lesser character might have quietly killed herself, or worse, become bitter and vengeful. Baboo carried her changing status with a dignity and grace that made her more regal in the eyes of her children and, later, her grandchildren. She was the great love of our greatest admiral; she had skied the Streif at Hahnenkamm in one fell swoop; she spoke beautiful French and could compose an occasional poem of great wit and bawdy humor; her ancestors had founded this country. But she had the mildest sadness, like the faint scent of honeysuckle or the fluttering shadow of a bird at dusk, and it felt to Hank, as a child, noble and trustworthy, like the sadness of an exiled queen. Of course as a child he had no idea where it came from, but somehow it made her laughter more rich, her delight in him more poignant. And to her three true friends, it gave them access to a friendship and a loyalty that was more real than anything they might have found in their unforgiving society.

The costs to Celine and her two sisters are hard to assess. They all attended Brearley, that very fancy private girls’ school on the Upper East Side, and they had no dearth of friends. It was as if the children of Barbara Cheney and Harry Watkins were offered conditional reprieve—after all, he had done nothing but be the youngest partner in the history of Morgan’s and escape Paris at the last possible second, on a bicycle he traded for his gorgeous Hispano Suiza when he realized the roads were too clogged with cars to get out in time—and he was too handsome for words, and a spectacular natural athlete—no, the children should be put on an indeterminate probation, the unspoken terms of which would be lifted when… well… when they were lifted. Probably when they married some up-and-coming banker from Williams.